Blackjack

by Andrew Vachss

  “Banner, your guys took the whole first wave of hits—which was why we had it down to Nyati’s crew—but you’re not who we want, either. You might just be cold enough to sacrifice a few of your own crew if they were worthless to you—especially if they were working both sides; I already admitted that’s what we’d do, right? But you don’t have what you’d need to make this kind of bloodbath.”

  The Chief fired up his pipe, taking his time about it, emphasizing who was ultimately in charge. Then he launched into his prepared speech:

  “Like I said, I’m being straight with you. With you all, and all at the same time. Why? Because I don’t want any garbage floating around the rumor mill. This way, if one man lies about what went on here today, the other two can call him on it.

  “But this next part’s even more important: I don’t want anyone to think one of you is holding more cards than the other. I know there’s no such thing as equality—not in here, not out in the World. You can say ‘gangs’ or you can say ‘countries,’ no real difference. But one side’s always got the edge, and I can’t have convicts believing any gang has got more firepower than I can call up.”

  The three gang leaders stood erect, arms folded in front of their chests, nothing showing on their faces. They knew the fact that they weren’t cuffed had been no gesture of respect—it was the warden’s naked display of power.

  “I don’t care who started it, or why. But if there’s any more damn killing of any kind, this whole place goes on lockdown,” the Chief said, the very lack of inflection in his voice underscoring that this was no idle threat; it was a guarantee.

  The Chief hand-gestured the three men to come closer to his desk. The guards parted to clear a space for them, then closed in behind. On either side of the Chief’s desk, the guard had been smoothly replaced by a man in a balaclava, holding a pistol in two hands, elbows braced against each body-armored chest.

  Both men’s eyes had that soft, wet look any convict knew. If any of the gang bosses so much as leaned in the Chief’s direction, all three were chopped meat.

  “Now, listen, and listen good,” the Chief told them, his voice both quiet and hard. “I didn’t say what I’m about to say, understand? Nobody here is ever going to say I did. The cameras are on, but that’s just in case any of you want to play kamikaze. You never heard straighter talk from my side of the fence, and you never will.

  “Okay, listen up. You think we don’t know about the dope coming in? Or the gambling, the loan-sharking, the pimping? Any of the rackets your crews run? You think we haven’t broken the codes in your letters? Listened in on your three-way calls? You don’t think we’ve got informers all over the place?

  “But have we keep-locked any of you? No. Any other joint in the country, you’d all be in black-hole Ad Seg. In fact,” he said, pausing a little to let his words sink in, “you’ve all been wondering when we’re going to get around to that.

  “Well, we were never going to. We’ve been letting you guys run your own rackets for a long time, haven’t we? You think we don’t know which officers are on your payrolls? There’s things you can’t use your own mules for—we know all about that. And the cell phones, too.

  “But you couldn’t stand prosperity, could you? You had to go and break the contract. Some of your guys have done some nasty stuff. Okay, we know there’s always going to be a certain amount of killing inside a place like this. It happens. But not the way it’s happening now.”

  The Chief puffed on his pipe a couple of times before he spoke again.

  “That contract between us didn’t have to be signed for everyone to know what was on the paper. You get a whole lot of … privileges, let’s call them, and I get a nice, quiet joint. Not so quiet that it would make anyone watching suspicious, but under control. I lose that, you lose it all.

  “We know you’ve got some of the tunnel system mapped. After lights-out, you’ve been doing whatever you want down there. Every crew’s got its own section, and nobody’s been stupid enough to make us carry a body upstairs to the blocks.

  “So listen close. We’ve got enough space in the blackout rooms for all of you—not just the shot-callers, all of you. This is a federal institution, remember? So if space gets tight we can always use a little bus therapy to fix the problem.

  “We can keep this whole place on lockdown for as long as it takes to break every racket, wreck every system, destroy every network—all the things you’ve invested years to build up.

  “And if you make us go that far, we can even make a few bodies ourselves.

  “By tomorrow, we’ll have double staffing in place. Every new man is going to be on loan from a cell-extraction team—and you know who gets recruited for that kind of work.

  “You ever try to live on one meal a day? Especially when you’re afraid to breathe too deep with all the gas floating around?

  “And that’s just the beginning. The public is not going to do a damn thing for you. There isn’t going to be any media sympathy. No little Web site is going to ‘report’ to the outside. Cyber-troops can’t do anything but post a bunch of silly crap anyway. Nobody’s going to take them seriously.

  “Why do you think we don’t care about the cell phones? Even that piece of garbage Manson got his hands on one. Once it hit the papers, they had to take it away from that sick little freak. But nobody bothered yours, did they? Ever wonder why?

  “That’s all about to end unless this stops. So—anybody got anything they want to say?”

  “It’s not us,” Nyati jumped in first. “When we thought this maniac was just snuffing Caucs, we didn’t give a damn. But now that he did some of us, we want him as bad as you do.”

  “It wasn’t any of my guys, either,” Banner said. “Hell, how could we get a man into the nigger wing anyway? You got the cameras, so you know it wasn’t us.”

  Ortega shrugged his shoulders expressively. “We are in the middle,” he said. “Like always. And the killer has taken some of ours as well. Would we seek revenge? There is no choice—if we cannot protect our own, we are nothing. But we do not believe it was any prisoner doing all this.”

  “Nobody knows nothing, that’s the way you want to play it?” the Chief said. “About what I expected. The problem is, I don’t think you’re playing. I truly believe you don’t know one damn thing about what’s been going down. But if I have to ask you again, and you still don’t know the answer, I will.”

  CROSS AND Tiger were inside one of the Visiting Room bathrooms. They stood derma-close, speaking at a level well below whispering.

  “It’s time to tell me the truth,” Cross said. “All of it. Whoever’s doing whatever’s happening in here, it’s not something I ever dealt with.”

  Tiger took a breath, then told Cross everything her team knew in one continuous rush, careful to separate provable fact from legend, myth, and rumor, but not leaving anything out.

  Cross listened closely, taking it all in. Then he whispered back: “This … thing, it’s not new. Been around since forever, like you said. Signature kills, but all over the globe, so it can’t be any single one of … whatever the hell they are.

  “No pictures. No forensics. And no survivor testimony, either. When they hit, whoever’s around that they don’t kill, those people never see anything. No game—they actually don’t see anything.

  “But I already might know something, something you might want to throw into those computers of yours. There was a three-man kill in here just a little while ago. All in the same crew. All blacks, all sitting together. One of them, guy named Camden, he wasn’t touched. But he didn’t see anything. And, you know what? I believe that.

  “What a sucker you all turned me into, huh? None of you have ever managed to even see one of them, never mind kill one for the autopsy table. And I’m supposed to capture one alive?”

  “That’s what Blondie wants,” Tiger corrected him. “He thinks interrogation is the only way we’ll ever find out whoever they are. And why they’re doing what they do.”


  “You trust him?”

  “Get real. We all know his backup plan is not leaving witnesses. But he’s the only way Tracker and I could get a shot at the vengeance we swore. We’re outsiders … like you.”

  “Didn’t you say there’s a rumor that a couple of them did get killed?”

  “Yeah, but, like I also said, we don’t have any idea if it’s true. There was a report out of Africa, claimed two of them took an anti-tank round dead-center, blew them into little pieces. But, whoever they are, they always come for their dead, and they come fast. All we have is that one radio transmission. By the time a team got to the spot, it was nothing but fried earth.”

  “What else?”

  “They’re hunters, that’s all we really know. And they only seem to hunt hunters, if that makes any sense.”

  “Maybe it does. But I’m damned if I know what kind of sense it could make.”

  “I know. It’s not like anyone was hunting them. All we can figure is that this is like what would have happened if some UFO dropped down and rescued the Roman gladiators. But it rescued them too late—the gladiators had too much blood in their mouths to spit it out, use a toothbrush, and start over again as regular people.

  “It’s not like they took a vote and decided fighting was more fun than farming. It’s like they were … transformed into something. And killing, that’s just … that’s just what they do, you know?”

  “You sound like you don’t hate them.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Then, if they just do it because that’s what they are, why are you and Tracker going after them?”

  “Because that’s what we do,” Tiger said.

  Cross lit a cigarette. “They really came to the right place this time, huh? They want human-hunters, this joint’s full of them.”

  “I know. We figure that’s why they hit that serial-killer freak.…”

  “Yeah …” Cross mused. Then snapped his fingers. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s been a couple of their kills in here. On the surface, they look the same as all the others. But on two of them, they let someone go, let them just walk away, like that Camden guy I told you about. They gave the same kind of pass to some white kid, too.”

  “Oh, both of them got interrogated, trust me,” Tiger says. “Blondie pulled them right out of this place. But they don’t even remember being where it happened, never mind seeing anything. And that squares with other stuff we have. Like doing their number on a whole safari, but letting the natives go. Still, even that much, it’s only talk.”

  “The stuff in here wasn’t talk,” Cross told her. “That white kid was about to be raped. Camden, the black guy, I’m not sure what the deal with him was, but the grapevine says he’s innocent, shouldn’t even be here in the first place. And his charge was rape. How could this … thing tell if a man was innocent?”

  “Maybe they can smell it or something,” Tiger guessed. “Maybe that’s why dogs can smell them, I don’t know. But whatever they are, they’re not animals. At least not any animal anyone’s heard of. It’s like they kill for some reason, only we don’t know what that could be. Maybe it’s a … game or something, like that big-bucks consultant told us. And if all they count are the hardest targets, what’s harder than humans?”

  “Yeah,” Cross thought aloud. “But if a killer’s kills belong to whoever kills him, maybe the goal was to get the highest body count.”

  “So killing a serial killer—?”

  “You’re sure it’s set up with Nyati?” Cross cut her off. He knew that, even with greasing the guards, surveillance was extra-high, and the warning knock on the door was going to come soon.

  “Yes. But confirm over the transmitter first.”

  “Sure. But tell your team there isn’t a whole lot of time left. Whoever they are, whatever they are, they’ve been going through this joint like pigs on pie.”

  NIGHT FOUND Cross lying on his bunk, eyes closed, the earplug from his institutional radio inserted. Not an uncommon sight: a lot of cons used their radios as noise-blockers to let them sleep.

  Behind his eyelids, Cross watched the limousine carrying the toadish man drive away. And saw the explosion that followed. His mind was working the logic string, doing the death-math.

  Maybe they were there. Right in the middle of the blast. If that’s true, we can’t kill them no matter what we use. You can’t kill “kill.” But if they can get … splattered, maybe they have to reassemble before they can work again.

  Cross nodded, as if something he suspected had just been verified. He pulled the earplug free and got to his feet. Silently, he twisted the heel off one shoe and removed the wire inside, working in complete darkness.

  At the wire’s end was a tiny bulb. A closer look would have revealed that the wire itself was divided into several sections, each one no more than a few inches long.

  Cross wrapped individual pieces of wire around the base and top of each of the bars in his cell window. He then connected the ends of all the wires into the one anchored by the bulb. He squeezed the bulb and stepped back. A faint hissing sound accompanied the just-released acid as it ran through the hollow wires into the bars.

  Less than a minute later, Cross pulled the still-smoking sections of bars away from his cell window. He opened a carton of cigarettes and removed packages of dental floss braided into a thick strand. From the heel of his other shoe, he removed a center-weighted, tri-barbed plastic hook, folded flat. Released from the pressure that had kept it folded, the hook opened fully.

  Cross tied one end of the braided floss around his waist, and looped the other around the chain holding his bunk to the wall. Then he reached out the window, supported himself with one hand, and used the other to fling the weighted hook up over his head. It took four attempts before he could feel the hook lock solidly into place.

  His next step was to put on his shoes. Pulling at the side of each sole exposed another, much thinner one underneath. Those undersoles were coated with a sticky compound. Climbing gear, originally developed to give second-story men an edge, it had later been perfected by Buddha, to keep the crew ahead in the permanent arms race always running through the underworld.

  Cross worked his way up, planting each sole securely, moving without haste. The rooftop was various shades of black: from the shadow-pools just past the rooftop to the faint glow from the surrounding lights, and the occasional penumbra from the bright swathe cut by tower searchlights.

  Cross saw three figures, standing as if they had been waiting for him. He approached with deliberation, hands held away from his body in the universally understood gesture.

  Two black men stepped forward. One carried a heavy shank, the other a much heavier lead pipe.

  Cross put his hands up, stood still for their thorough search.

  “Clean,” one said.

  Nyati stepped forward. “Take off your shirt,” he said. “I want to see something for myself.”

  Cross obeyed. He didn’t move as Nyati used a pencil flash to zero in on the tattoo. “Yeah. It’s exactly like Butch described it.”

  Together the two men walked into a pool of total blackness, leaving the other two standing guard.

  Nyati faced Cross. “I told Butch I’d meet with you. One time. There ain’t gonna be no more, so say everything you got to say.”

  “These killings, easy enough to say they’re all about color, but we both know that’s not what’s going on.”

  “We do, huh?”

  “You know damn well I’m telling the truth. The UBG hasn’t got anybody who can walk through walls, and neither does the Brotherhood. It’s not lobos, either. There’s a hunter loose in this joint, and he’s working the place like a wolf turned loose in a corral of sheep. A concrete corral, with chained-up sheep.”

  “You know who he is?”

  “I don’t even know what he is … but he’s not one of us.”

  “He’s not white?”

  “
He’s not human. Not anymore, anyway. He’s a trophy-taker, and his tribe is keeping score. Under their system, you kill a killer, you get credit for all his kills.”

  “I’d say you was crazy,” Nyati replied, “except I saw some of the bodies myself. What the hell they want with spines and skulls anyway?”

  “I don’t know. It’s their mark, the one they always leave behind. Like fang-and-claw marks you see in the jungle. A signature kill.”

  “How you figure on stopping something like that? Specially in here, with no guns?”

  “Guns wouldn’t do it. If there’s a way, it’s gotta be slice, not shoot. But maybe there is a way. I say ‘maybe’ because the odds don’t look good. But to even give us that much of a chance, you gotta work with me.”

  “I only work with my own kind.”

  “Look, I’m not doing the ‘some of my best friends are black’ number, and there’s no time for that cred crap anyway. If Butch hadn’t gotten word to you, why would you be up on this roof right now?

  “All you need to know—I guess I should say believe—is that, in this war, I am your own kind. Long as that … thing’s around here, the human race is the only race that counts.

  “It’s always some kind of ‘us against them,’ right? Black against white, outlaws against citizens. But there’s one thing I learned a long time ago—no warrior is stronger than War. Until whatever that thing is goes down, we’re all the same color, just different shades.”

  “So what are those people—”

  “That’s just it. They’re not ‘people’ at all. So when I say it’s us against them, that’s just what I mean.”

  Cross pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Without offering a smoke to Nyati, he fired it up, cupping the end with both hands.

  “You know why I’m here,” he said. “And I know you got that word from people you trust. So do whatever you have to do, talk it over with whoever you need to. Make a decision, and get word to me.”