Blackjack

by Andrew Vachss

  The multi-cam only had time to record that the monster’s head was shaved, and that he was wearing a banana-colored tank top. Then it went black.

  “WHAT THE hell was—?”

  “The man with the microphone, that’s the man we want,” the blond man said. “His name’s Cross. The man next to him is known only as ‘Ace.’ They’ve been partners since they came into hardball juvie on the same bus.”

  “ ‘Hardball juvie’ …?”

  “Illinois was the first state to differentiate between juvenile and adult offenders,” the blond man addressed his small audience somewhat pedantically. “It was still maintaining that façade at the time those two first met. That was an end-of-the-line stop for both of them—their crimes should have put them directly into adult corrections, and it was guaranteed their next ones would. And that there would be a next one.”

  “The shaved-head guy?”

  “Believe it or not, his name is ‘Princess.’ Off-the-charts insane. He dresses and speaks like a very gay man. Wears all kinds of makeup, minces his words … even flounces around waving his wrists. His delusion is that this will encourage others to attack him. In his deranged mind, he is not permitted to attack unless he can claim the other party ‘started it.’ ”

  As he spoke, the blond man pushed a button. A full-body photo of Princess appeared on the screen.

  “That’s him? Damn! Whatever he’s carrying in that monster shoulder holster—”

  “That’s a .600 Nitro Express,” Percy snapped out, his voice a mix of anger and awe. “A .600 Nitro Express pistol. Only one I’ve ever heard about, never mind seen. That maniac actually carries a sawed-off, over-under elephant gun? A load like that, it’d snap a man’s wrist like a toothpick.”

  “I’m no firearms expert,” Tracker said, deliberately ironic, “but do you have any idea why he would carry such a weapon?”

  “It goes with his outfit,” Tiger half-giggled. “Très chic, non?”

  Seeing Percy about to respond, the blond man cut him off with the universal “Halt!” signal, then said, “Three hundred and thirty pounds is our best guesstimate of his weight. All of it muscle.”

  “Why guesstimate?” Wanda asked.

  “He’s never been in custody,” the blond man answered. “We have various records on the others, but even those are spotty, if not outright fallacious.

  “The machine-gunner—he was not shown on camera—is called ‘Rhino.’ Originally sentenced to an institution for the severely retarded, he was repeatedly tortured until he became—literally—anaesthetic to pain. That’s when they went to the Thorazine handcuffs. By the time Cross and Ace were sentenced, he had already been in that same institution for a couple of years.”

  “But you said he was retarded.”

  “That’s what it said on the first admission papers, Wanda. But he wasn’t too retarded to assault staff every time the drugs wore off, so …”

  “So they locked him in that prison even though he never committed a crime?”

  “That is what happened, Tiger. It’s not our job to judge.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes! Besides, that was years ago. What we do know is that this Cross individual—remember, he was just a kid himself at the time—figured out a way to detox the monster. But nobody knew this until Cross—again, I am speaking literally—actually sawed through cell window bars with nothing but dental floss which had been braided, coated with glue, and then rolled in drain-cleaner crystals. It must have taken months of backbreaking work.

  “Then this ‘Rhino’ bent the bars, enabling Cross and Ace to escape. It was the belief of staff that Cross, a diagnosed sociopath, had simply used Rhino to achieve his own ends. However, somebody later broke him out of custody. No agency has gotten their hands on that monster since.”

  “Monster?” Tiger persisted.

  “See for yourself,” the blond man responded, flashing another photo on the monitor. “He’s almost seven feet tall and weighs nearly five hundred pounds. Again, those are only estimates—we don’t know his actual age, so we can’t know if he continued to grow after he escaped.

  “By ‘monster,’ I was referring only to his size, not his disposition. In fact, we don’t even know his actual name. The records of his prior institutional ‘care’ seem to have disappeared.”

  “I’ll just bet,” Tiger said. “Okay, that’s four men. Four men without one real name among them—is that what you’re telling us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah? Well, someone took that shot with the silencer.”

  “Our best guess was that was a man called Buddha. All we know about him is that he and Cross apparently met while serving in what is euphemistically called the ‘post-Vietnam’ era. His service records don’t indicate combat. Or anything else, for that matter. However, Military Intelligence informs us that the man is an expert shot, especially with handguns, a truly gifted driver, and a criminal to his core.”

  As the blond man spoke, the photo on the monitor showed a slumped-shouldered man with a vaguely Oriental cast to his dark, cold eyes.

  “We do know his wife is Korean. What she was doing somewhere around the Laos-Cambodian border is anybody’s guess. All we have for her is what we assume was a street name: ‘So Long Li.’ She is, however, reputed to be utterly absorbed in acquiring money, and quite skillful at doing so. Of the entire Cross gang, Buddha is the only one for whom we have an actual address—a freestanding house in the Uptown area. In his wife’s name, of course.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing is ‘wrong’ with that, Tiger. The point was simply to emphasize his wife’s obsession with materiality.”

  “And what’s this ‘post-Vietnam’ designation …?”

  “It’s the same for all of them, Wanda. Apparently, some sort of bargain was struck between the man we know as ‘Cross’ and one of the … agencies operating in the field at that time. All the records concerning Cross and Buddha have been death-wipe overwritten. How that came to include Ace—who never served in the military—is not information we have.”

  “Not the first time that trick was pulled,” Percy said. “Who cares about names, anyway? What I want to know is what that … whatever we just saw … what was that all about?”

  “The Cross gang was hired by person or persons unknown to shut down a dogfighting operation,” the blond man said, in the bored voice of a Mafia don taking the Fifth for the hundredth time.

  “And for that they slaughtered a couple dozen people?” Percy responded, a faint note of admiration seeping into his deep voice.

  “That’s how he came by his name.”

  “Huh?”

  “ ‘Cross.’ That’s not just the name he ‘enlisted’ under, it’s his reputation. He specializes in twofers, understand?”

  “Kills the guy who hires him to kill another guy?”

  “Nothing that simple, but that’s the idea. If he got paid to take out a couple of individuals inside that building by one person and put the dogfighting operation out of business by another, that would be more consistent with his reputation.”

  “The cops,” Percy asked, “didn’t they lean on the others? The ones who walked out, I mean.”

  “There were no survivors,” the blond man said, no trace of surprise in his voice. “The crowd that walked out walked into … something. They ended up exactly like the Canyon Killings, every one of them.”

  “Good,” Tiger snarled.

  “What are you, PETA on steroids?” Percy cracked.

  “Anytime you want to find out—”

  “Enough!” the blond man said, using his broken-record voice.

  “All this … stuff,” Wanda complained. “We have names like ‘Cross’ and ‘Buddha’ and ‘Rhino’ and ‘Ace’ and ‘Princess.’ That’s it? Speaking of which, do we at least have a real name for this ‘Princess’?”

  “Not even close,” the blond man told her. “All we know is that a crew Cross put together did some kind of
‘work’ in Central America. We don’t know who he did it for, but we do know two things: one, he lost a couple of men in that operation, and two, he brought Princess back with him.”

  “Lost a couple of men?” Tiger mused aloud.

  “Yeah, that’s another thing about this guy. He’s obsessed with revenge. You want to see the effects of real terrorism, just say his name around any of the local gang leaders. But if we don’t know the identities of the men he lost, we can’t know if he ever took care of whoever he held responsible.”

  “That’s a good rep to have,” Tiger said. “Makes anyone thinking of pulling a fast one think again.”

  “That’s not just his rep,” the blond man corrected her, “it’s part of a profile we commissioned. Outside his own crew, people are nothing but chess pieces to him. Like I said before, a sociopath.”

  “Right. And he’s still with the same men he partnered up with a million years ago?”

  “I’m not disagreeing. Any idiot would make that connection. I agree—that single fact contradicts the diagnosis. And we’ll confirm that with the doctor when the chance comes. We do know one thing which binds his crew completely. A question anyone who wants to join them has to answer. But it’s just a phrase, and we can’t translate it.”

  “Well?” Wanda said, tapping the side of her keyboard with her fingernails to indicate her impatience.

  “Here it is: ‘Do you hate them? Do you hate them all?’ ”

  “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “There are hundreds of pages of guesses. But that’s all they are—guesses.”

  “Bunch of psychos,” Percy dismissed the “info” with his usual gift for analysis.

  “Could be,” the blond agreed. “But our Mr. Cross has got one thing going for him that has always worked as a convincer.”

  “Which is …?”

  “He doesn’t care if he lives or dies. And it seems as though everybody in this city’s underground knows it.”

  THE MAN called Cross got up and walked through a beaded curtain made up of ball bearings. He entered a back room, three other men behind him. His handprint unlocked a thick door. A blinking orange light alerted him that calls had been made from the pay phones in the poolroom since the system had last been checked.

  Buddha tapped the “playback” key. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the tape.

  Less than a minute later, he said: “It’s what we thought, boss. Reporting to Chang. Only surprise was the guy speaking Mandarin. You’d think Cantonese, coming from those boys. Must be Hong Kong, not mainland.”

  “You know what to do,” Cross said.

  Buddha pulled a throw-away cell phone from his field jacket, punched in a number, and had a brief conversation in a language none of the others understood.

  “I just told the gray-tooth headman that Chang was working for the federales, boss. He said to tell you his ‘gratitude’ was on its way.”

  “Chang was going, anyway. Bringing in those MS-13 boys was a mistake. Thinking he could control them, that made it a fatal one.”

  “You got that right,” Buddha agreed. “That MS-13 crew’s crazy enough to do any damn thing, but crazy don’t beat crafty, and those Cambos are some seriously evil plotters.”

  “They had to be.”

  “To stay alive when Pol Pot was running that slaughterhouse? Amen to that.”

  “Yeah,” Cross said, without much interest. “Time for me to move out, get this rolling.”

  AS THE others were re-entering the poolroom, Cross climbed a flight of stairs taking him out of the basement, opened a back door, and exited into the street.

  Twenty steps later, he slid into an alley, walking behind an overflowing Dumpster which concealed a metal door. Then he began to climb a long flight of pebble-pocked steel steps.

  At the first landing, he pulled out a pocket flash, illuminating a shelf. He took a small bottle off the shelf and sprayed a mist over his right hand. He then took a clean handkerchief and wiped the back of that hand, using only moderate force. The lightning-bolt scar disappeared.

  Cross then removed a pre-moistened sheet of fibrous cloth from a slotted box and carefully draped it over his right hand. With his left, he ran a small hair dryer over the sheet for a few seconds. When the sheet was pulled away, the familiar bull’s-eye tattoo was back in place.

  He then exchanged his leather jacket and T-shirt for an expensively cut charcoal alpaca suit, complete with a stylishly retro fedora. The same alligator boots he had worn when speaking with the woman in the poolroom remained in place. Almost as an afterthought, he spit out the wads of spirit gum that had deformed his facial features while he had been inside the poolroom.

  A quick glance in the polished-metal mirror satisfied him. He then resumed his climb.

  CROSS STEPPED out onto the rooftop, stopped to check a connected series of wooden boxes with an exit trap and air holes cut for entry-exit, noting it was empty. He didn’t bother to add seed to the empty bins—if the mated pair of kestrels were both out, they weren’t on a pleasure cruise. But he did refill the water trough, using bottled spring water.

  By the time he returned to the alley, a big sedan was waiting.

  “You know” was all Cross said to Buddha.

  THE CITY-CAMO car moved slowly through an alley. When it came to a full stop, Cross jumped out.

  The back staircase of an anonymous building took Cross all the way to the roof. There, he draped a wood plank across the gap to move to the next building. When he reached the other side, he elevated the plank before shoving it effortlessly back across. The Teflon-coated edges of both rooftops had been tested and retested a hundred times. The only difficulty encountered had come when Princess demanded a turn. Rhino protested, Buddha encouraged him. Cross settled it: “If it’ll hold his weight, it’ll hold mine, right?”

  The new building’s roof housed an electrical shack. Cross stepped inside. He moved down a flight of stairs to a hallway, where he rang for an elevator marked “Freight.”

  The elevator car came up, driven by a short, squat Hispanic with a Zapata mustache. Cross got on. The car descended all the way to the basement. Both men got out. The Hispanic looked through a periscope device for a long minute.

  “Clear,” he told Cross.

  Cross stepped around the other man, exchanged a fist-pound for the other’s “Viva la Raza!”; the man’s cynical expression as he pocketed the tightly rolled bills clearly demonstrated that the political-solidarity verbiage had been pure sarcasm.

  Neither man was as unseen as either of them believed. Inside what looked like an oversized van sat the blond man and another individual, the latter wearing a white lab coat and trifocal glasses.

  The blond man was seated in a captain’s chair in the rear, watching the other one peer at a console.

  “You got him?” the blond asked.

  “Locked on. No place he can go now. He can change his clothes, but he can’t change his thermal image. Look.…” One of the round monitors flickered. On the screen, the image was the fluid outline of a man, with different areas of his body marked in different colors.

  “Is this what … they … use?” the blond asked.

  “Far as we can tell, yes. They’ve got some form of heat-seeker, that’s for sure. But it can differentiate better than anything we’ve ever seen. The technology was so superior that we don’t have anything to compare it to. Are you following me?”

  “I believe.…”

  “Just in case you’re not, I’ll spell it out: they can see us, but we can’t see … whatever they are. Which is about as bad as it gets. But we’ve just added something to our bag of tricks. With these new instruments, we can pick up when they’re watching.”

  “Watching us, you mean?”

  “No,” the white-coated man said. “We’re nowhere near that stage. We can pick up a signal that says their system is activated, but that’s all we can do. We don’t know who it’s locked on to, just when it’s gone operational. And then only when it’s
within our sweep area.”

  Tiger moved just enough to announce her presence. She nodded in a gesture the blond man understood all too well: unlike Percy, Tiger relied on more than just her eyesight. But her basic premise was the same—if she could sense it, she could kill it.

  AS THE team reassembled in the War Room, they continued to track Cross making his way through the underground network of the city: from abandoned tunnels to subbase-ments of office buildings and finally to an apparently empty shack standing at the end of a shipping pier. The pier itself hadn’t been used in years—Cross carefully picked his way across the rotting timbers.

  “You know what I can’t understand?” the blond man said to Wanda, forcing her to look up from a thick sheaf of computer printouts she had in her lap.

  “What is it this time?” Wanda responded, her voice tinted with the waspish superiority she could not always restrain.

  The blond ignored her attitude—human emotions were of no great interest to him.

  “We’ve got locates on them all over the world. Whatever the hell they are, they don’t give a damn about climate.”

  “So?”

  “So look at this pattern. We have a series of kills near the Arctic Circle. Polar-bear hunters. Poachers, as it turns out. Same in Kenya.”

  “Polar bears in Kenya?” Tiger asked, just short of giggling. “That’s your pattern?”

  “Poachers, you stupid slut. In Kenya, they were after rhino horn.”

  Tiger leaned forward, one fist clenched, her thumb pressing down on the topmost finger. She felt the light touch of the Indian’s hand on her arm. Tracker shook his head—not an order, one comrade cautioning another that the time to strike had not yet arrived. Tiger nodded, unclenched her fist, and sat back, crossing her long legs.

  “And in Brazil,” the blond continued, oblivious to how close he had just come to serious injury, “the same damn thing, only this time the victims had been chasing some kind of rare parrot.”

  Sensing he finally had everyone’s attention, the blond looked up. “I know. That’s the first thing we thought, some band of crazed environmentalists. Especially with the last one. I mean, it was in their sacred damn rain forest—that’s holy ground to those twits.”