Drawing Dead (8 page)

“Yes,” Tracker said. “The Simbas. The tribe you described for those government people who hired me and Tiger.”

“You back to that voodoo stuff again?” Buddha scoffed.

“Every tribe has a name for what it fears,” the Indian answered, as if Buddha was actually seeking information. “Every tribe has a name for what it cannot explain. It has always been so.”

“I never met a bulletproof ghost, myself,” the pudgy sharpshooter said, holding his position. Unchanging ever since the presence Cross called “Simbas” had entered the gang's world.

“Me, either,” Cross said. “But I never met a ghost, so it's not something I ever tested.”

“That does not mean what you call a ‘ghost' has never met
you,
” Tracker said, his tone clearly communicating that he was done with the topic.

THE ROOM
went quiet.

Cross opened his left hand. A flame sprouted from his cupped palm; he lit the cigarette he was holding in his right from it. Nobody reacted. They had all seen this too many times to be impressed. Collectively, they assumed that if Cross wanted them to know how that trick worked he would have told them.

The gang leader took a long, deep drag, as if he was considering what he was about to say. Then:

“You remember the lunatic? The one who never left that…attic, or whatever you call what his parents had built for him?”

“They weren't trying to protect him,” Rhino said, bitterly, “just make him invisible. But after they were killed by that drunk driver, he had to use what he had, all by himself. And he was a genius, with plenty of money.”

“I don't—”

“It was a long time ago,” Cross told Tiger, as if that was all the explanation she'd need.

“His head was much too large for his neck to support,” Rhino continued. “He only had one complete arm; the other was like something that had been grafted on as an afterthought—the hand was the size of an infant's.”

“A thalidomide baby, that was our best guess,” Cross said. “There wasn't much we didn't know about him by the time it ended. Except…why us?”

“He tried to attack you?”

“Oh, he
did
attack us, Tiger. And he wasn't
just
a genius; he was an all-in, no-limit psychopath.”

“THE WHOLE
damn thing kept us peeling back layer after layer,” Cross told them. “It wasn't that long ago, but now it seems…far back, somehow.”

“You had this place, right?”

“We owned it,” the gang's leader answered the warrior-woman's question. “But all we had was the property, not the…not the way it's fixed up now.”

“So you were…?”

“Pretty much freelancing,” Cross said. “Just the three of us, at first. But once we brought Buddha in, that's when we realized that we couldn't hide. And, after that, Princess. Some of us could blend, but not
all
of us. We weren't going to separate, and we weren't going to link up with outsiders. So we put this place together. Makes us easy to find, but just about impossible to take out.”

“Just about?”

“The airspace is full of electronics now,” Buddha said. “We don't know if the rumors of the government testing drones in cityscape models are true, but it's a good guess.”

“What's a ‘cityscape'?”

“Actual cities, small-scaled,” he answered Tiger. “Built on desert ground, so no lives would be lost in the experiments.”

“What are the odds that we would all be in the same place at the same time?”

Cross plucked the “we” out of Tracker's question, deciding to save it for another time. “Long ones,” he said. “This place never closes. If it was some ‘storm the castle' scenario, we don't know any gang in Chicago that would risk it.”

“And we've got the tunnels!” Princess thundered. “Now we can
always
get out!”

“That's the idea,” the gang's leader said. “And”—holding up a flat palm to stop what he knew what was coming—“your dog could come, too.”

ONLY CROSS
and Tiger remained in the back room.

“You never did learn why this…why this strange man wanted to kill you?” she finally asked.

“We…spoke to him once,” Cross told her. “But it didn't seem as if he even knew us when we did. So it was nothing personal. Near as we could tell, all he wanted was to prove he could do what other people had failed at.”

“Maybe he was just crazy,” Tiger said, softly. “Being…crippled that bad, never going outside, no friends. And then his parents being killed. If someone told him
you
were responsible for that, well, that would do it, all right. But the way you talk about him, he's way too smart to have been suckered by some rumor.”

“He was,” Cross agreed. “Maybe he picked up on that ‘many tried, many died' thing, and he wanted to be special. Who knows? What we
do
know is, we can't ask him.”

“Maybe it was only Ace he—?”

“Look, what kicked this off, that whole Circle of Skulls deal, we thought that
was
about us. We thought we were his targets, and everything else was all a setup for the finale.”

“So what did you—?”

“I'll tell you,” Cross said. “Paint you a picture, even.”

In the front office of what had been a thriving gas station before the economic blight, a boy barely into his teens clicked off the mate to the watcher's communicator and turned to a group of young people. The bright-blue Mohawk standing straight up on his shaved head was his badge of leadership.

“Johnny Eyes says someone's coming. He said it was some big grayish thing, blacked-out windows, couldn't tell the make. Has to be…them.”

“We don't say their names, G-boy,” the leader said. “You're new, so listen: What Johnny Eyes picked up on, that's the Shark Car. Means the Cross crew is rolling. Those guys are very, very bad news. But not for us, you following me? In this country, they're the lions, we're the jackals. We take what they leave, whatever it is. Could be money, could be a body, could be a message. Could be all of those in one bundle. This piece of Chicago, it's not called the Badlands for nothing. And it's ours. That rusted-out semi I showed you when you first came in? That's the toll booth. Anything comes through that way, even their car, that's our business. Comes in any other way, it's not.”

Buddha's short, pudgy form slid out, his undefined shape a perfect match for the car's paint. He lounged next to the door for several minutes, listening. Satisfied, he pushed against the wall with his palm, waited for a greenish glow, and descended into a tunnel. Moving confidently in the darkness, he spotted a tiny red light at the end of the hall. Drawing a deep, silent breath, he walked toward it.

A quick climb up an unlighted steel staircase brought him into the back of Red 71. A shadowy man was seated in the corner, his lower jaw illuminated by the light from a single candle.

“Thanks for coming, boss,” the pudgy man said.

“You said it was important, Buddha. And you wanted it private.”

“It's So Long,” the pudgy man said, drawing another deep breath. “Here. Look at this.”

He handed over a single sheet of commercial-grade typing paper. The shadow-shrouded man tilted the sheet so he could read by the faint light:

YELLOW WHORE

YOU HAVE ONE WEEK TO GET OUT

THEN WE COME FOR YOU

“What's this at the bottom?” he asked, his finger touching a circle made from skull symbols.

“That's their mark. The name is just what it says: The Circle of Skulls.”

“Means…what?”

“Rapes. Gang rapes. They've been linked to a half-dozen of them, all over the city. First the warning, then they make their move. One of the women went crazy behind it—she's still in the hospital.”

“A race thing?”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess so. None of the victims was white, except for one. And she was Jewish, living with a black guy around Edgewater. So maybe it's one of those….”

“No,” Cross said. Not theorizing, stating a fact: “It's some kind of cover.”

Buddha did not question the conclusion—he knew the other man had an ability to decode messages others wouldn't even recognize as messages.

“Cross, come on. You know what I want. Same as you'd want if you had…”

“I don't have, Buddha. And you know the deal. This thing, it's not crew business. They're not after us.”

“They're after my wife!”

“I understand. I understand now, okay? But that doesn't make it crew business. You know the pact: only way we're going in on something is if we get paid, or if we're under fire. This thing you showed me, it doesn't fit.”

“Just like that, huh? If it was Ace's—”

“Don't push that button, Buddha. We brought you in on my word, nothing else. The others, they all…”

“I know. I'm just…Look: all I want, I want to ask the others if anyone wants to volunteer.”

“Sure. Who would you ask first, Princess? You tell that maniac they ‘started it,' he's in. That pulls Rhino right along; he doesn't trust Princess not to get himself killed. That's half the damn crew right there. Then, the way you figure, I look for Ace to ride shotgun. That way we're all in. All of us, all in. Not gonna happen.”

“Cross, you're my brother. Ever since that…jungle, right?”

“Yes. But you know the score. We talked it over, before you came in with us. No more fighting other people's battles.”

The pudgy man hung his head, his voice laced with something more powerful than sadness. “Cross…”

“Go home,” the shadowy man said. “Stay with So Long. Let me get some eyes and ears out there. Who knows? People go to this much trouble, maybe there's some real money in this.”

On the roof of Red 71, Cross approached a large box constructed of weathered wood; it appeared to be pieces of wind-deposited scraps.

As Cross neared the box, a distinctive “killy-killy-killy” shrilled, sounding a warning. A kestrel suddenly popped its head out of the box, fixing Cross with an implacably fearless gaze.

Cross pulled a heavy leather gauntlet onto his right hand and held out a strip of still-bloody raw meat with his left. The kestrel glared briefly, then swooped the short distance to the upheld hand. The mini-falcon perched on the gauntlet, tearing at the piece of meat suspended in Cross's fingers, briefly fluttering its blue-gray wings. The male, then—Cross could never tell them apart until he saw their undersides.

The kestrel shrilled again, and his mate raised her head out of the box. As the female swooped toward Cross to take the rest of the dripping meat, the male snapped his wings once and was gone. Cross knew he would be soaring far above the city, riding the vectors, hovering.

Cross held the female high above his head. She flicked her rust-colored wings once, as though she wanted to join her mate, but then she banked and returned to the nesting box. Standing guard while her mate went to bring more food to the hatchlings.

Cross knew the babies were there—he had built the nesting box himself. But despite the many hours he had invested in working with the birds, he never considered approaching their shelter any closer. The kestrels were only inches high but were capable of extreme speed on a dive, hitting prey with fisted talons turned into blunt-tipped crossbow bolts.

Downstairs, the gang boss sat in a tiny corner room on the second floor. The single window was covered with X-braced strips of plywood, allowing only a sliver of daylight to penetrate. Cross removed a brick from the side wall, reached behind it, and used the leverage to take out two more. Then he extracted a flat box of blood-red lacquered wood. Inside was a single sheet of rice paper, hand-pulled.

The box also contained a stylus made of ivory with a fluted tip of gold and a tiny stone jar with an inset top. Cross shook the jar next to his ear, then replaced it, satisfied. He touched the rough surface of the paper with his fingertips, staring at its blankness. Finally, he replaced the calligraphy instruments, closed the box, and took up a thick notebook with a black leather cover.

He opened the notebook and turned the pages slowly. Each page held only a few lines of writing. The script wasn't elaborate, but it was clear and knife-edged.

Cross lit a cigarette, watched as the smoke rose toward the boarded-up window. He took two more drags before he stubbed it out in an inverted hubcap he used as an ashtray. Then he picked up a black felt-tip marker with a fine point and drew some experimental slashes and intersecting lines on a blank page of the notebook.

He closed his eyes. It was another forty-five minutes before Cross used the felt-tip pen to write.

He stared at the new line for several minutes, breathing so quietly through his nose that the sound was inaudible. If a later inspection proved the new line worthy of the stylus, it would be added.

Finally, he closed the notebook. After replacing everything inside the flat lacquered box, he returned the brick to its home.

“You really think McNamara's going to give up police intel?”

“Why not?” Cross answered. “This gang, no matter what their endgame is, they're still rapists. Nothing Mac hates more than a skinner…unless it's a whole pack of them.”

“Here he comes, right on time,” Rhino said, pointing his finger at a solitary figure just entering the running track on a suburban high-school field. The tip of that finger was missing; the second-knuckle stub looked like the polished aluminum case for an individual cigar.

Past midnight, the field was deserted. The two men waited in the black pool in front of an empty grandstand. As the jogging figure approached, Cross stepped forward, hands at his sides, open.

“Appreciate you coming,” he said.

“I was going to put in some laps anyway,” the jogger said, slowing to a full stop with the smoothness of a man in sync with his body. He was about six feet, muscular, sandy-haired, his face distinguished only by the often broken nose of a prizefighter.

Without preamble, Cross asked, “You know anything about a gang calls itself the Circle of Skulls?”

“What's your interest?” the detective asked. The honey-Irish lilt—one of the many tools that earned him the title “King of the Confession Coaxers”—notably absent from his voice.

“You don't want to know.”

McNamara moved closer to Cross, who opened his left hand, then lit a cigarette from the flame that appeared. “We know there's at least three of them,” he said quietly. “Only reason they haven't already gone down is the damn federales. Once they start this ‘hate crime' crap, the paperwork gets more important than the investigation. You know how it works—they have to get the press conference set before they make their move.”

“And that's soon?”

“Maybe. Maybe not so soon. There's another problem.”

“What?”

“This gang, they're a collection of freaks. The three we ID'ed for sure, they met down in Kankakee.”

“The loony bin?”

“Yeah. All on violent sex beefs, all from good families…families with good money, anyway. All went NGI, best lawyers, expert witnesses….Maybe money changed hands, too. They opted for bench trials, so no jury heard what they did, and the press only got the broad strokes. When they got out—and those kind always get out—they got together and started this Circle of Skulls thing.”

“But you know those NGIs were just a slick lawyer's game. So you could drop them anytime you wanted, right? They gotta be on some kind of parole hold….”

“Probably. But once they put on that NGI jacket, it's a Get Out of Jail Free card, you understand? Can't bust them for Association—after all, they have to attend ‘group.' Besides, there's something else…something that hasn't made the papers. All of the victims told us they were attacked by two men. And they also said there was another man there. A man with a video cam.”

“They were taping that
]
”

“Looks like it,” McNamara said, his face set in hard lines, locking eyes with Cross. “That wouldn't be anything special, not today. Punks are always working their cell-phone cameras when they gang-stomp some poor bastard—they have it on their Facebook page before the victim gets to the ER. Dimwits like them save us a lot of trouble. But this was a real camera, full-size. Like they were shooting a movie. We got a reflected snap from a store camera—my son says it's an old Bolex.”

“Your…?”

“NYU Film School,” the veteran cop said, half disgusted with himself for saying too much, half full of pride at his boy's achievements.

“They under surveillance?”

“In Cook County? Can you see the department green-lighting a twenty-four/seven on three different guys? Not RICO material, so no ‘asset forfeiture'? No cash to snatch, no chance it happens.”

“Give me the locates,” Cross said, snapping away his cigarette after the third drag. “We always wanted to be Neighborhood Watch. You won't even have to give us those toy badges you guys hand out.”

A double-sized man holding a canvas carryall tapped lightly on the inlaid mahogany door of a suburban house.

The door opened. Buddha stood just inside, a shoulder holster prominent against his white T-shirt. His pudgy appearance had been discarded with his trademark field jacket.

“Cross says to meet him at the spot, right away.”

“I can't leave my—”

“I'm supposed to stay here,” the huge man said, stepping across the threshold as if he had answered any possible objection.

An Asian woman with long black hair and chisel-point makeup entered the living room. “What is—?” she began, then stopped abruptly when she saw the mammoth form of the man talking to her husband.

“It's okay, honey,” Buddha assured her. “This is one of my business partners. Rhino, meet So Long.”

The huge man bowed deeply. A brief smile creased the woman's face as she clasped her hands and bowed her head in return.

“Welcome to our home,” she said, graciously.

“I am honored,” Rhino replied, so gently that the usual squeak of his voice was inaudible.

“Baby, I have to go out for a bit. Business, okay? Rhino's gonna stay here…here with you…until I'm back.”

“As you wish,” the woman said, bowing again.

Buddha's face flushed. “Don't pull that geisha crap on me, So Long. You know I said I'd take care of this. Just let me do it, all right?”

The woman stepped past Rhino to stand next to Buddha. Her facial expression didn't change: “Be careful, husband,” she whispered.

The Shark Car entered a narrow alley and glided to a stop.

It was late afternoon, but the sun had long since given up penetrating the unchanging darkness of buildings built so close to each other they might as well have been attached.

“You stay here,” Cross said.

“Look, boss. That's a nasty place—and they're not gonna like strangers just walking in. 'Specially ones that look like you. What's gonna happen if there's trouble? How about if I just—?”

“Stay here,” Cross repeated, as if saying it for the first time.