“I don’t…” came out of a muted speaker, in a human voice.
“One more time,” Cross said. “You got money stashed here. We want it. Now.”
More taps: “You must be…”
“Mistaken? We heard you call those two over here—you weren’t lying about cash on hand. You didn’t give them much time, so we don’t have much time, either, understand? You remember what happened to your pal? Holtstraf, or whatever the hell he called himself? He didn’t tell us what we wanted to know, so we pinned him to the wallpaper. We never waste time with torture. And you, you can always get more money—probably with just a couple of keystrokes. But you’d have to be alive to do it.”
A series of rapid key-taps. “How do I know you won’t kill me anyway?” came out of the speaker, now in an eerily calm tone, two registers deeper than before. Tracker’s eyes picked up a large knob on the console—Voice adjuster, some form of harmonizer, he thought.
“We were here to kill you, you’d already be dead. We’re professionals. Just like you. You know there’s always a cost of doing business, and we’re only after hard cash. So…what’s it gonna be?”
Rapid key-taps: “I’ll show—”
“No. You’ll tell us,” Cross interrupted, nodding at Tracker, who now held the silenced semi-auto leveled at the creature’s protruding forehead, which bulged like a shelf over his eyes. “This is all about time now. You tell us, you live. You don’t, you die. Your pals are on the way over right now. If you make us kill you, we get more time to look for the cash, see?”
The creature’s pointed arm tapped rapidly: “In a suitcase. An alligator suitcase. In the master bedroom. On the next floor up. In the closet. Once you see I’m not lying, then maybe we could…”
“Take a look,” Cross said. The Indian handed the pistol back to him and vanished.
The creature reached toward the console.
Cross held a finger to his lips, keeping the pistol carefully trained on its target.
The Indian came down the stairs, the suitcase in his hand. He placed it across the creature’s lap.
“You open it,” Cross said, standing back a few feet.
The creature popped the hinges with the protruding bony stub of his arm. Inside was cash. Carefully banded and shrink-wrapped. The bills showing were all hundreds. Cross thumbed open a box cutter and slit one package. Bills tumbled out. He held one up to the light, rubbed it hard between thumb and forefinger. Satisfied, he turned to the creature.
“Where’s the rest of it?”
“There’s three-quarters of a million dollars there!” the man in the wheelchair tapped out on the console. “That’s all I have in—”
Cross aimed the silenced pistol and shot…whatever it was…between its unblinking eyes. Watched the huge head loll on the useless body. The shot made a soft, wet splatting sound.
“Ready?”
By way of response, Tracker hefted the suitcase. Cross hit the cellular phone. “Now” was all he said.
The two men went out the way they had entered.
This time, Cross was first over the fence. The suitcase wouldn’t fit between the bars—Tracker needed both hands to swing it back and forth until he built up sufficient momentum, then heaved it over the top. By the time they reached the street, they could hear the heavily muffled tremors of a rapidly approaching vehicle.
The Shark Car pulled in, its trunk open and flapping in the night air.
Tracker threw the suitcase inside, slammed the trunk shut. Rhino jumped out, landing with a lightness that belied his weight. He dropped to his knees, the Uzi up and searching for targets. He was the last man back inside; then the Shark Car took off.
“You think those other two freaks are on their way?” Tracker asked Cross.
“Can’t tell. Doesn’t matter; they’re sure as hell not calling the cops.”
Everyone in the car heard it at the same time—the scream of tortured tires. Something was coming. Coming fast.
“Stay smooth,” Cross cautioned. “It could be Law, could be a drunk driver, could be rich kids….Everybody easy, now.”
As the Shark Car entered a long sweeping left-hand curve, another car charged toward them. A white Audi Q7. Buddha suddenly stomped the gas, wrenching the wheel to the left and jerking the handbrake. The Shark Car fishtailed into a perfect bootlegger’s turn as the Audi came past.
Buddha had his night-beaded pistol out, resting the barrel on his forearm over the windowsill. A string of killer bees popped out, stitching a neat row across the other car’s windshield.
The Audi almost rolled, then righted itself just before it smashed head-on into a parked car. The impact was magnified by metal-on-metal shrieks into a suburban night long accustomed to silence.
Lights flashed on in houses. The Shark Car skidded to a stop. “Box it out!” Cross yelled.
Rhino and Princess rolled out of their separate back doors. Rhino took up his position with the Uzi, guarding the flank, as Princess rushed to the other car, waving his Nitro Express pistol. Cross wrenched a shotgun from under the dash and charged the wrecked car. He fired both barrels simultaneously, whirled, and ran in the same motion. The gas tank of the Audi exploded into a throbbing fireball.
That explosion was a kid’s cap gun compared with the rocket-launch blast taking the top off the house where a dead thing had spent his life. Accounts varied, but the Fire Marshal’s office later reported the structure had been ripped by what they called a “staged series” of shocks. Blocks of C-4 had apparently been placed on the top floor and threaded downward. When triggered, the charged substance had worked its way down, only to be met in the middle by an equally powerful force climbing its way up.
As sirens ripped the night, the Shark Car purred smoothly along, putting distance in the bank.
“What was in those shells?” Tracker asked.
“White phosphorus,” Cross told him. “Instant fire. The cops’ll be along any minute….”
“I’m sorry, boss,” Buddha said, no trace of regret in his voice. “I thought of what they were gonna do to So Long and I just…”
“You know the rules,” Cross said quietly.
For several slug-slow seconds, the car was quiet. Even Princess kept still, as if waiting for something he wasn’t sure would actually make an appearance.
“You know what?” Buddha broke the silence. “My share, so what? It was worth every dime. Not like I’d see most of it, anyway—that wife of mine could squeeze a nickel until it spit up quarters.”
“ALL THAT was years ago,” Cross told Tiger. “And that…thing…it’s not like he could come back from where we sent him.”
“Then…why this business with Hemp and Ace? And where does Mural Girl come in?”
“I don’t know.”
“None of it makes any sense.”
“It makes sense to someone,” Cross said softly. “And one is all it takes.”
“IT’S BURNING bright now,” the Amazon whispered.
“I know. I can feel it. But I’m just…sitting here. Not even…not even thinking. So whatever it is, it’s not warning me off. Or pushing me harder. It…”
“It…what? Doesn’t make sense?” Tiger filled in the blank end of the gang leader’s sentence, her voice still at whisper volume despite the sarcasm.
Cross opened his left hand and lit a cigarette from the flame.
Three drags and out.
“The only person I ever knew who was…”
Another cigarette. On the second drag, the tiny blue brand was throbbing. On the third and last, it flickered.
“Tiger, I got a problem. One only you can take care of.”
“I already knew that.”
“Stop playing around. I’m serious.”
“And you think I’m not—?” The deadly beauty cut her own words in midstream. “What do you need?”
“I need to talk to Rhino. Talk to him alone. There’s only one way to keep Princess out of the conversation.”
“Keep yo
ur eye on what you’re missing,” she said, throwing an exaggerated wiggle at the man behind the sawhorsed desk as she hip-slapped her way through the ball-bearing curtain.
LESS THAN a minute later, she stepped back through the curtain, this time courteously held open by Rhino.
“Anything else?” she asked Cross.
“No.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit around looking beautiful when I could be having fun,” she purred. “Princess, want to go shopping? Just you and me?”
“And we can take—?”
“Sweetie? Of course,” she told the mass of muscle. “We wouldn’t leave him behind, would we?”
“No! You hear that, Sweetie? We’re going with Tiger! I need some new—”
“Whatever you need, Cross will pay for it,” she said, cutting him off. Turning to the gang leader: “Right?”
Cross nodded expressionlessly.
“Come on, honey. This place is gloomy enough without listening to him. I once asked Cross if he knew any jokes. You know what he said?”
“Nothing?” Princess guessed.
“That’d be about right,” Tiger said over her shoulder as she walked past the desk, Princess and his homicidal hound following close behind.
“WHY ALL this?” Rhino asked.
“Because I just figured something out. And it was nothing I’d want Princess to hear.”
“I already knew that last part.”
“Yeah,” Cross said, lighting another smoke. “I know you did. But there’s something I don’t know.” Another pull on his cigarette briefly lit his shadowy face. “Why did you go back?”
“Back?”
“As soon as you looked over those photos of him we Minoxed, I could see it in your face. You went back to the house where that thing lived. Years ago. Long after the Circle of Skulls was done.”
“How could you know that?” Rhino said.
“Because I know you. We go back together as far as you can probably remember. You couldn’t leave it where we did. What if whoever gave birth to you had treated you the same as him? Would you have…I don’t know….Would your life have turned out the same?”
“Yes. I had to know,” the behemoth admitted. “I don’t remember much. About being a little kid. I know I was…I was intelligent. I was big, but not anything like I am now, not when I was first locked up. So why would they have just…thrown me away? His parents didn’t. They did everything for him they possibly could, but…he still turned out too vicious to leave alive.”
“You’re saying what? He was born bad?”
“I don’t believe that. I never believed that. You don’t, either, Cross. None of us do. That’s why we’ve got a right to hate them.”
“Hate them all.”
“Yes,” the huge man agreed, again cosigning the prove-in for the Cross crew. “We’re criminals, but not like…not like they are. Even Buddha, he’d never hurt someone just for…entertainment.”
“You went back to see if you could find anything that would…?”
“Actually, I never went back to that house—not really—just drove by once. How could I search that place? I knew the little bit that was left of it would be wrapped in yellow tape for weeks. And probably watched for months after that. That…thing, he wouldn’t be there. Even if he had been, somehow…even if he had answered any question I asked, how would I know if he was telling the truth?”
“What did you do, then?”
“I went back over his life. At least, that was the plan. It wasn’t that long ago—every public record from that era is databased. So I just walked into them—all that ‘security’ is a joke. Even for the places where they keep stuff that’s supposedly not for public viewing.”
“So what did you—?”
“He never existed,” Rhino said, his squeaky voice coming out like the rumble of a diesel’s exhaust pipes, as it always did when he spoke very quietly. “His parents, there was no child born to their marriage.”
“You mean the cops went back in and—”
“No. Not a wipe job. It’s a good thing you took those pictures of him—it’s the only proof that he was real. I don’t know what kind of system he had rigged, but I guess he needed to rearm the safety switches to keep it functioning. Push a button every day, maybe.
“We’ll never know. But the whole top of that house blew off. Straight up, like a rocket. It only rose maybe fifty yards, and then it disintegrated. Something like that, Homeland Security would trump every other agency, and they’ve got the best forensic tools in the world. But none of that would matter. Whatever was still there was as close to atomized as that glass from the Twin Towers.”
“That had to be one of those ‘options’ he was telling the freaks who made the gang-rape tapes he had.”
“Probably the only one. He could never survive outside that one environment, the one that was built for him. No way, no matter what he was.”
“So how did you find out anything?”
“It was those pictures of him. Something like that, how could you hide it? But no matter where I searched, there were no deletions, no gaps. No place to start, so I couldn’t move forward.
“I found the records of his parents easy enough, and with those I could go back as far as I wanted. Married a little late, but nowhere near late enough to explain…him. The father was just turning thirty, his wife was a couple of years younger. If they’d tried to have a child, some fertility treatments, maybe…But there was nothing like that. And nothing to show anything went wrong with a birth, either.”
“But how could you make something—whatever he was—how could you make him disappear? What about the hospital admission record?”
“That was what got wiped. All I could learn was just that. Whatever he was, he never was. Never born, never lived, never died.”
“You’re saying…”
“The father was a whiz kid. Scholarships right through his M.B.A. All the best schools. Not a blue-blood: he had to earn his way. The mother, now, she was born to the manor. The one her father had inherited from his father. All the way back—DAR throughout the maternal line. At first I thought, okay, his father had the brains, his mother had the contacts, how could you mix a better formula for success?”
“He was a stockbroker?”
“Better. Capital management. He was good at it. Fast-tracked to upper echelons, other investment banks always looking to poach him. By the time he died, he was probably worth a few hundred million. Money like that, it can buy…”
“Anything that’s for sale. And everything is.”
“Yes. The parents, they had a will. If they ‘perished in a common disaster,’ the money would be split among the only two children anyone thought they had. But they still left plenty to…him. That piece went into some kind of blind trust. Multilayered, all offshore. Plus the house. So all that…all that thing they left behind had to do when he wanted something…or someone…paid, was to press a button.”
“That doesn’t sound like they were…I don’t know, cruel to him.”
“You mean, like, beat him, or starved him, or…?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s worse things than that,” said the mammoth who had been chained to a wheelchair when the mega-tranquilizers started to lose their hold over a monster who seemed to feed on them. “They never acknowledged him. I don’t know what kind of pre-birth screenings they had back then—they weren’t fashionable, the way they are now. So they probably didn’t really have any way of knowing. Not until they saw him. But then they’d know. Right at that moment, they’d know.”
“They wouldn’t be the only ones,” Cross said. “The doctor, the hospital, the—”
“All for sale. And they had the money. I learned something else. Even stillborn births are recorded.”
“Just another record they could make disappear?”
“Yes. But the mother, after that pregnancy, she was too delicate to take another risk. Or maybe they made up some other story—we’ll never know.
What we know is that they adopted two children. Newborns. A boy and a girl, less than two years apart. They grew up and slipped into that same river their parents rafted on. I doubt they even knew who…what was living just above their heads. That house, it was big enough to keep him isolated. All they had to do was seal off the top floors.”
“Why didn’t his parents just—?”
“Kill him? Way too much risk. People like that, they know, if they reach out to our world for a job, they’re setting themselves up for permanent blackmail. In their world, they were safe. Any of the doctors, they’d be risking their own licenses if the truth came out. The hospital? It was a small, private place. Funded by a foundation. I don’t have to say more, do I?”
“No. And what would they get out of it, anyway? Remember, those kind of people, they need children for more than just their image—the line has to continue, too. Probably how that…thing was created in the first place.”
“Fertility drugs?” Rhino speculated.
“My money would be on inbreeding, brother. That maternal line, I’d put serious money on some of those girls’ fathers being their grandfathers, too. Plenty of ancient dynasties were— Damn!”
“What?”
“My…face. That thing they put there, that little blue symbol, it’s gotten hot before, but this time it felt like a damn plasma cutter.”
“Do you think…?”
“I don’t know what to think. It’d all be guesses, anyway.”
“I WONDER if they knew.”
“Knew what, brother?” Cross asked Rhino. The searing pain below his right eye was gone, but the tiny blue symbol still throbbed as if alive.
“Knew how much it…how much it hurts, to be just…erased. To have a child and not admit he even exists. I used to think about that. They hurt me. In the institutions, I mean. You know about a lot of that, Cross. But what you couldn’t know was how the people who gave birth to me, how they could hurt me. More than any torture. And they had to know.”
“But if—”
“I don’t mean they had to actually witness anything. But…you know how everyone’s talking about ‘emotional abuse’ now, like it’s some new discovery? How many boys did you meet when you were first locked up who thought their middle name was ‘Stupid’?
Drawing Dead Page 8
