THE OLD man’s white hair flowed down to his shoulders. He was sitting in a lotus position, smoking a pipe that looked to have been carved from bone.
“You were not expected,” he said.
“I didn’t want to say anything on the phone. And I knew I’d be recognized.”
“You have something for me, then?” the old man said, smiling a murderer’s grin. His gray teeth turned the gesture into an even more deadly grimace.
“I have Chang.”
“You are holding him?”
“No. Nobody will ever hold him. I have his life. He’s gone.”
“I heard nothing—”
“You will.”
“We did not retain such a service.”
“Consider it a gift. A gift from a friend.”
The old man immediately handed his pipe to Cross, who took a deep drag without hesitation before returning it.
THE NEXT day, Unit 3 assembled in the War Room. It was obvious that they had been discussing something for a long time: the place was littered with coffee cups and food wrappers. They all looked various degrees of disheveled, except for Tracker.
“You really think he’s worth it?” The blond man’s question was directed at the room, not at anyone in particular.
“I believe he … understands them,” Tracker said thoughtfully.
“He doesn’t care,” Wanda said. “He will regard it as any bounty hunter would. Only, this time, the ‘dead or alive’ is limited to ‘alive.’ ”
“Look,” the blond man snapped, “we don’t have time to keep arguing with each other. We’re still ‘Unit 3’ to the spooks, but the reality is, we’ve stepped over the line too many times already.…”
“You stepped over the line, Blondie,” Percy fired back. “And you took me and Wanda right along with you. One more mess like over in Indiana …”
As Percy spoke, everyone else in the room had a mental picture of him standing spread-legged on a ghetto rooftop, a surface-to-air missile launcher braced on one thick shoulder. He staggered slightly under the kick of the weapon. They saw the vapor trail of the rocket as it unexpectedly veered off-course, its heat-seeker attracted by a closer target. That turned out to be a small private jet, which disintegrated immediately on impact.
They also saw a newspaper headline:
TERRORIST ATTACK AT GARY AIRPORT!
“Things happen,” the blond man said, unruffled. “We know they use some kind of heat-seeker themselves. It only made sense to turn the tables.”
“I didn’t sign on to waste civilians,” Tiger said.
“Civilians? That plane was carrying a load of dope dealers, on their way back from Vegas. And if you don’t like us bringing Cross in, you can split. Take the Indian with you, too,” the blond man told her. “We’re on our own now. And we don’t have a hell of a lot of time, right, Wanda?”
Wanda checked her computer, nodded. “No. TRAP will figure out that we’ve been mobile-accessing its closed-level data. In fact,” she hypothesized, “it probably could have found us already, had we been Priority One.”
“And we’re not,” the blond said, “so what does that tell you?”
“What it always tells us,” Percy threw in. “We pull this off, the brass says all is forgiven. We don’t—we get erased.”
The blond got to his feet and started pacing. He turned to Wanda, apparently the one person with whom he had any sort of affinity. “Could we make it happen, what that man wants? Immunity for a future crime?”
Wanda worked over her keyboard. “Some places, yes. Detroit, Cleveland, too. And New York for sure. As for Chicago … you know how it works here.”
“That’ll have to do,” the blond said, to no one in particular. He had adopted this habit many years ago, relieving himself of the unwanted feeling that no one was listening.
“I MAKE it three-to-one it blows up,” Buddha said to the crew watching him manipulate a robot originally intended for disarming bombs. “Be just like that rodent to pay us off in plastique.”
Cross said nothing.
“Credit cards?” a thick-necked Hispanic youth mused aloud.
“Not plastic, fool,” a small, slender black youth wearing a pair of glasses with one orange lens snapped. “Plastique. Like dynamite, only you can shape it any way you want, like it was a piece of clay.”
“All of you, shut up, okay?” Condor hissed. “You know the rules: we get to watch so long as we watch quiet.”
All the watchers immediately fell silent. Theirs was a gang with no name. None was needed. No rival crew was going to claim the Badlands—the Cross crew was only a whispered rumor to most outlaws, but none wanted to test it.
The gang’s members came in all sizes and shapes, all colors and creeds. All they shared were survival skills so finely honed that they were able to permanently reside in an area nobody in his right mind would even enter.
Years ago, a daredevil graffiti artist had accepted a challenge to plant his tag on a semi-trailer that had been stripped of its axles. Now completely coated with a solid layer of rust, the trailer stood only about a hundred feet past the twin piles of crookedly stacked junkyard cars that marked the border to the Badlands.
The tagger knew if he managed to pull off that stunt he’d immediately be crowned as the King of Graffiti throughout the city—a stake worth playing for.
The tagger picked broad daylight for his move, knowing that the darkness which usually cloaked his work would not be his friend on this mission. Besides, maybe only some of the rumors were true—whoever heard of a gang that got up before noon?
It was just before ten in the morning when the tagger stepped behind the pillars of junked cars and advanced on the semi. He carried only two cans of spray paint: one for lettering, the other for outlining. He had no need of any of his usual equipment—there would be no climbing involved in this exploit. He didn’t even carry his prized notebook—he could spray his personal tag with his eyes closed.
The assembled watchers on the other side of the border never agreed on what happened next—a cloud of metallic rusty dirt rose like a curtain between their eyes and the doomed tagger. But there was no argument that the body of the tagger came flying at them in a long, high arc, as if it had been launched from a catapult.
The rule was as simple as the skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison: you didn’t enter the Badlands unless you planned to stay. You might join the gang—provided you proved in according to whatever requirements were current—or you might just have created your own gravestone.
THE NO-NAME gang watched as Buddha deftly moved the controls of the robot, sending it across obstacle after obstacle.
“You picked a good spot,” Cross said to Condor. The young man visibly swelled with pride at the praise. He deftly snatched the rubber-banded roll of bills Cross tossed in his direction, and immediately threw it over his shoulder to a Samoan youth whose bulk belied his speed.
The robot reached the silver case. Its long arms tapped their way to the single latch, and popped it open.
Silence descended.
“Go,” Cross said.
Condor raced across to the case, picked it up with both hands so he wouldn’t have to shut it, and ran back to where Cross was waiting.
Cross dropped to one knee and methodically played a flex wand with a tiny fiber-optic light at its tip over the contents.
“It didn’t blow up,” Condor said, unnecessarily.
“You never celebrate a kill until you make sure the body’s not breathing,” Cross said, softly.
Condor nodded. It wasn’t a lesson he would forget. If the Badlands had ever built an idol to worship, it would have looked like Cross.
“Thirteen bars,” Cross finally said.
“Looks like Chang was throwing us a bonus,” Buddha said, surprised.
“Or setting us up for one,” Cross answered. “Maybe he was just staging a scene. There’s always a next time.”
“Not for Chang, there won’t be,” Buddha replied.
THE CREW arrived back at Red 71, entering by different paths. They were all inside the poolroom when three men approached. Bowing deeply, they handed Cross a carved wooden stick wrapped in black silk.
Cross returned their bow, after which the three men turned sharply and walked out of the poolroom.
“What’s that?” Princess demanded to know.
“A message,” Cross told him. “From the head of the gray-tooth crew.”
“What message?”
Cross twirled the stick slowly in his hands. “Buddha?”
“Got me, boss.”
Rhino took the stick from Cross and disappeared behind the beaded curtain.
BUDDHA HAD dropped three hundred dollars to Princess at the pool table before Rhino returned.
“Some of the symbols are Cambodian, I think,” he said. “Nothing matched exactly, but pretty close.”
“And …” Cross prompted.
“It says either that our enemies are now his enemies … or that we can redeem the stick for a body. Payable anytime, and it can be any body we want.”
“Now, there’s a man with class,” Buddha said, answering an unasked question.
THE SHARK Car slid into the darkness of a parking lot and spun so that it came to rest with its nose facing out. The view through its windshield was once a large housing project. Its low-rise section had already been converted into expensive condos, but the high-rise buildings were still listed as “slated for demolition.”
This being Chicago, “slated” could mean years. In the interim, one of the high-rise buildings had been converted into a major drug supermarket.
The arrival of the Shark Car was immediately noticed by the gang assembled at the entrance to the high-rise.
“Don’t those fools know they got to come over here, they want to make a buy?” a black teenager with long dreads sneered. “What they think, we gonna send over some bitch on roller skates?”
“Zip it, boy,” a far more experienced gangster ordered. He was immediately obeyed. After all, wasn’t he twenty-six years old, with nine of those years spent in various lockdowns, a known killer who had embraced the “don’t mind dying” credo well over a decade ago and lived it since? In a world where the road ahead forks just once—the jailhouse or the graveyard—he qualified as a tribal elder.
“You know them?” another youth asked the leader.
“Yeah, I know them. You better know them, too.”
“Why would I—?”
The speaker stopped mid-sentence, awestruck. His eyes were riveted to a man climbing out of the back seat of the Shark Car. He was looking at a creature from another world: a man whose body was so outrageously muscled that it looked like a comic-book creation. The creature’s head was shaven. Despite the evening chill, he wore only a Day-Glo lilac tank top over a blousy pair of baby-blue parachute pants. A diamond bracelet flashed on one wrist; a watch with a huge luminescent face graced the other.
But none of that shocked the youth as much as the creature’s face. He wore conspicuous rouge on his cheeks and a liberal supply of eyeliner, and his mouth was slathered with pink lip gloss. A long earring dangled from his right ear.
“That … can’t be.”
“Oh yeah, it can,” the elder said. “You looking at Princess himself, boy. The real thing.”
“Princess?”
“That’s his name, fool.”
“He’s a—?”
“Don’t fall for the costume,” the elder warned, now addressing an ever-gathering crowd. “All you got to know about that man over there is that he is a stone beast. Stronger than a team of oxen, and crazier than a flock of loons. Totally in-sane. He dresses up like that so he can get people to jump him.”
“What?”
“Like I said, crazy to the max. The only screws he don’t got loose, they entirely missing. Understand? To that maniac, the other guy has to start it. Otherwise, he don’t do nothing.
“Listen close, now. That … thing over there, you can even call him out of his name, he still won’t make a move. But if you move on him, you as good as gone. That man so strong he could kill a refrigerator.”
The leader looked around carefully. Then he directly addressed the younger man. “You think I’m blowing smoke, you think a man looks like that can’t tear you apart, just walk over and bitch-slap him.”
“Bitch-slap him with this,” another young man boasted, pulling a 9mm semi-auto from his belt. “What he gonna do then?”
“Put that away, fool! You show steel to those guys and they make you a corpse. Guaranteed.”
“What guys?”
“That’s the Cross crew in that car, youngblood. Or some of them, anyway. Trust me on this—your dinky little nine wouldn’t make a dent in that car, not even in the glass. And whoever’s in that car, they packing heavy enough to level this whole damn building behind us.”
“Damn!”
“Damn is right, bro. They been around since forever. You ever hear of the guy they call the Ace of Spades, over on the South Side?”
“The hit man? The one who walks around with a sawed-off around his neck?”
“Himself. He’s an OG of that crew. Him and this white dude, Cross. Word is, they hooked up Inside. Same place I did time in myself,” he added, with an undertone of pride. “They been together ever since.”
“He’s in that car?”
“How would I tell? Look through that black glass? I’m trying to school you and all you do is ask me dumb-ass questions. Listen! Just learn this much and you be fine: you don’t want no part of nobody you ever see in that car. Case closed.”
“So what they doing—?”
“Fine,” the elder says, in the resigned voice of a man having to prove the obvious. “Just stay here. I mean, don’t move, you hear me?”
With that, he walked toward the Shark Car, hands held in plain sight. Held open and extended from his sides.
THE OTHER gang members watched as their leader approached the driver’s side of the Shark Car. The window must have been down, because they saw him carefully place both hands on the sill.
No sound reached their ears.
Their leader backed away from the Shark Car, then moved toward his gang, hands back in the classic “I’m no threat to you” position.
“They got business here” was all the leader told his crew.
“They didn’t pay no tolls.”
“You making me real tired, young boy,” the leader said. “Tolls? They wanted, they could’ve cut us all down like this”—snapping his fingers—“only they wouldn’t even make that much noise doing it.”
“We got—”
“Some chumps have got to learn the hard way. Listen! The hard way with those guys is you stop breathing. I can’t let you make those kind of mistakes. They didn’t pay no tolls to park in our place, right? And that’s what we all about, right? Money. Am I telling the truth?”
“That’s my name,” the teenager with the pistol said.
The leader reached in his shirt pocket and extracted a playing card: the king of clubs. He showed the card to all the young men standing close to him.
“King. That means ‘ruler.’ And that’s us. Never mind that Amor de Rey crap from the PRs—they at least got enough sense to stay over by Humboldt Park, where they belong.
“Now, you say you all about the Benjamins, right? Okay, Big Money, I got this deal for you. I’m gonna walk a few feet away … just over to there, see? I’m gonna stand by myself and hold out this very same card in my hand. You ain’t gonna hear nothing, but the guy I spoke to—Buddha, that’s their driver, and the best man with a pistol in Chi-town—he’s gonna put a round right through the middle of this here card.
“He misses, everyone who gets down gets paid. He misses bad enough to hit me, that’s my problem.”
“Everybody gets paid … what?”
“Whatever they put up,” the leader told the growing crowd, taking off his jacket and spreading it on the ground. “You said it yourself—nobody plays for free. Not here, not nowhere.”
THE LEADER walked about twenty paces to his right, then stopped. Bills poured into the lining of his jacket, as more and more of the watchers jumped to get in on the action.
The clump of young men watched as their leader held up the playing card, face out: first to his left shoulder so all could see, then at the extended end of his right hand.
Three seconds passed in dead silence. None of the watching crowd heard a sound, but suddenly they saw the playing card fluttering into the night air.
The leader who had been holding the card never noticed a clump of pulsating shadow at his feet. Nor did he hear the word “Nah” in a dialect he would have recognized as his own had his ears been able to pick up an outside-human-range harmonic.
He retrieved the card from the concrete ground, looked at it with satisfaction, and carried it over to the waiting crowd.
The king of clubs had been center-punched by some kind of projectile, clearly displaying what all recognized as the characteristic pucker of a bullet wound.
“Never saw one that small,” one of the young men said, careful to keep his voice on a note of wonderment, avoiding any hint of challenge.
“That’s a NATO round,” the leader told him, confidently. “Like a .22, but much faster. They for rifles, but Buddha’s got his carry-piece chambered for them.”
“Man can shoot like that, he don’t need no big slug,” one of the teenagers said, trying for a sage tone of voice. “Put a slug in your eye, you are gonna die.”
The leader slapped the young man’s upturned palm, acknowledging the correctness of his observation.
“Cost you all some cash,” he said, glancing down at the mountain of greenbacks piled up on the inside lining of his jacket, “but that’s all it cost. And now you know—you ever see that car, see it anywhere, you don’t run, you stand still. Real still. If it’s you they want, you dead no matter what you do. But if it’s someone else, reaching for your protection could get you good and dead. You get in their way, you never get to stay. Feel me? Feel me now?”
The crowd all murmured some form of assent.
“Pick up my money,” the leader ordered one of his flock. “I get it from you later.”
With that, he walked over to the crumbling ruins of what had once been the entranceway to the building which now housed only drug merchants. Leaning his back against this support, he massaged his right wrist with his left thumb, as if to shake the muscle memory of how close Buddha’s silent bullet had come.
When he stopped rubbing, the still-pristine king of clubs hidden in the sleeve of his Chicago Bulls sweatshirt was fully dissolved into an unidentifiable dark smear.
MINUTES LATER, a shouted “Five-O!” rang out from behind the leader’s crew as an “unmarked” pulled in next to the Shark Car.
“Chill!” the elder commanded. “This ain’t nothing about us. Not with that Shark Car sitting there.”
A man got out of the front seat of the unmarked-but-obvious police car. He walked toward the back as the rear door of the Shark Car opened and another man stepped out.
Detective Mike McNamara, the legendary confession-coaxer of Cook County, and the man-for-hire known as Cross spoke to each other, too softly for anyone to hear, shielded from view by Princess’s bulk.
The hyper-muscled man in the outrageous makeup began to juggle three baseball-sized objects. He handled them so expertly that it was clear this was an old act for him. Not so for the drug-dealing gang, which watched in utter fascination, now completely distracted.
Cross and McNamara returned to their respective cars.
The unmarked pulled out.
The man called Princess caught one of the balls he was juggling in his right hand, flicked his wrist, and lobbed it in a long arc, high over the heads of the youthful gangsters. He instantly repeated the move twice more, so that all the balls were simultaneously airborne.
They were still floating in the night air as Princess dove into the Shark Car, which barked its tires once and was gone.
Several of the gang were still reaching for their guns when the first grenade hit, tearing chunks out of the upper-story bricks behind them.
“YOU HAD to do that?” Cross said, his voice suggesting that he had said the same words many times before.
“I was just having fun,” Princess said, sulking. “Buddha had fun, and you didn’t say anything to him.”
“Never mind,” a high-pitched, squeaky voice came from the back seat, soothing the hyper-muscled man. That same voice was then directed at Cross, with just a touch of annoyance. “You know how easily he—”
“I know, Rhino,” Cross said, addressing a huge dark mass taking up virtually every inch of the back seat that Princess wasn’t using.
“Why don’t you just buy him a damn Xbox or something?” Buddha growled.
“What’s an Xbox?” Princess asked excitedly.
“Thanks a lot, Buddha,” the dark mass squeaked sarcastically. “Maybe your wife could give me some shopping tips. Like where to pick up a bargain, you know.”
“Hey! That was low, man.”
“Enough already,” Cross snapped, calling a temporary truce in what he knew to be an endless war.
JUST BEFORE daybreak, the Shark Car backed into what was once a garage.
The gang elder’s arm emerged from the shadows, a paper bag in his hand.
“Almost twenty G’s,” he said, very quietly.
“My share.”
“I still don’t see why you can’t be more righteous about that, brother. I mean, I got to set up the whole scene for us to cash, am I telling the truth?”
“No,” Buddha told him. “You passed on that chance. I offered you, right? Just hold your hand steady and I’ll do it for real. You know I can—you were there when I did it with Horton’s cigarette a few years ago.”
“A man died behind that.”
“ ‘Behind that’ was right. He wanted to stand behind Horton, make sure the game wasn’t fixed. Not my fault.”
“I ain’t saying it was. Just saying like it was, man. A man should get paid for the risks he takes. I mean, Horton, he didn’t get hit, but the boy still ain’t right.”
“I already gave you the chance to split the take. Standing offer. Next time, just hold up the card and I’ll put a hole in it. Now, that would be fifty-fifty. But you wanted to play it safe. Think of it like buying insurance.”
“What I need insurance for if you never miss?”
“Calms your nerves,” Buddha said. “Ask Horton. But anytime you want to cancel the policy …”
Five seconds of silence gave Buddha the answer he expected. The Shark Car slid away from the empty garage bay as silently as its namesake.
CROSS SAT in a working-class living room, facing a man and his wife. On the mantelpiece was a large color photo of a young boy and his dog.
“I still can’t believe they would do that. Our own government,” the man said. He was in his early thirties, a man who had worked hard at hard jobs all his life. “I fought for them in the desert. I did everything they asked, every damn time. And now I’m a cop. I spend every night riding around in parts of Chicago that people shouldn’t even have to live in. If I’m not an American, who the hell is?”
His wife leaned against him, as if the touch of her body would give him emotional support. She was a short, red-haired woman, a couple of years younger than her husband. Years ago, his high-school sweetheart. Once, she would have been called pretty, but recent events had aged her.
“It won’t bring our Bobby back, Bill. It wouldn’t change anything.…”
“Yeah, it would. You know it would, Ginger. He has to pay for what he did. I just can’t believe our own government is protecting a creature like him.”
“Really?” Cross said, pointing at a small TV monitor he had brought with him. He pressed a button, and tape started to roll. The patched-together montage was a review of the only known facts:
Their son had been kidnapped. The child’s body was found ten days later, carelessly dumped behind an abandoned factory which had outsourced all its production. The unmistakable marks of torture on the child’s naked body turned the autopsy shots into the worst kind of kiddie porn.
“Profilers” had contributed such a generalized portrait that it would fit at least 10 percent of the city’s population. The local police had checked the Sex Offender Registry and found numerous individuals they wanted to talk to … but more than half weren’t at the addresses they had supplied.
What the monitor did not show was a detective standing before a uniformed patrolman. The detective would have been called handsome by anyone who failed to notice his ice-cold eyes. Even if his hands had not been scarred, even if his nose had not obviously been broken and reset several times, the detective’s body-balance would have revealed him as a skilled martial artist to any true practitioner.
Nor did the monitor show that same detective later speaking across a table to a gentle-looking, well-dressed man. Or the detective smiling a cobra’s grin, speaking with a faint Irish brogue as he told the man across from him, “Well, you know how the game is played. You should know by now. The more you put on this stack”—his hand touched a single piece of paper to his left—“the more we can take off this one.” The stack of paper to the detective’s right was about half a ream thick.
What the monitor did show was headline after headline, as members of an international ring trafficking in children—live and on film—were exposed, imprisoned, and, in one case, shot and killed when attempting to grab the arresting officer’s weapon. Internal Affairs had cleared the officer after a thirty-minute investigation.
“You know what that slime got in exchange for informing on a whole bunch of others just like himself?” the man said to Cross. “Ten years. And, for a bonus, he won’t even have to serve it in Protective Custody. The feds changed his name and got him plastic surgery. He’s doing time, but in what they call a Level One prison. He couldn’t be in a safer place—nobody wants to be sent away from that country club to a real prison.”
An old Labrador retriever limped into the living room. “Good boy, Duke,” the man crooned softly, patting the dog’s silky head.
“He still grieves for Bobby,” the woman said. “He still waits for him to come home from school. Every day.”
“No. He knows, Ginger,” the man said to her. “Hell, he took a bullet trying to protect him, didn’t he?”
The man’s mind saw only what he had been told by brother officers. As the kidnapper tried to haul the boy into a car, the Lab sprang at him, tearing at the abductor’s flesh before a bullet made him drop the bite. Wounded but undeterred, the Lab crawled after the fleeing car, not stopping until he collapsed from loss of blood.
“If it wasn’t for that dog, we wouldn’t have had a thing to go on,” one CSI team member said to another as the Lab was being loaded into an ambulance.
“Duke had that filthy … Huh! I was going to say ‘animal,’ but that’s not right. Not fair. How could I even think something like that when Duke’s an animal? I don’t know what to call a … thing like him, but Duke not only had a piece of his sleeve, he had his DNA all over his teeth. And it still took them over three weeks—”
“Bobby was … gone right away, honey,” his wife said, patting her husband’s hand. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Matters to me,” her husband managed to say before the tears came.
A cheek muscle jumped in Cross’s otherwise flat face. Something was clicking inside his criminal mind, but he wasn’t sure what it was … yet.
He patiently waited for the husband to regain his composure.
“That maggot’s safe,” the husband finally said to Cross. “I’m sorry we wasted your time. I don’t even know why McNamara gave me a number for you. But everyone on the force knows Mike Mac’s the best cop there is. And that he knows those … kind of people. But even he doesn’t know what name the feds gave Bobby’s killer. Or where they’ve got him stashed.
“Besides, how could you get to him in a prison like that? Stateville, sure—you can get a man done for a couple of cell phones. But in a luxury palace where they’ll kick you all the way down to Supermax if you screw up …”
The man got to his feet and offered his hand for Cross to shake. “I don’t expect you to pull it off. I get that. Mike Mac told me the deal: no promises. But if you ever do find out who he is now, just tell me. Get me a mug shot. I’ll wait. After all, it’s only ten years.”
His laugh was bitter enough to make acid taste like honey.
“You won’t have to,” Cross told him.
“Won’t have to … what?”
“Wait,” Cross said, turning to leave.