“Sure,” the behemoth answered his own question. “But this was even worse. To know that the same people who…created you, they wouldn’t even admit you existed? That’s this ‘emotional abuse’ thing, all right. Weaponized emotional abuse.”
“You’re talking about…what? Your parents?”
“I guess I am. I must be. To them, I must have been like some form of…him. I mean, I never knew what they knew. I never knew if I had brothers and sisters. If I had—”
“You found family, Rhino. Maybe I’m nothing to be all that proud of, but I’ve been your brother ever since—”
“I know,” the mammoth said. “And I couldn’t have a better one, Cross. You think I don’t know what everyone thought? That you’d played me into helping you escape from that prison? But when you said, ‘I’ll be back for you, brother,’ those words, they kept me alive.
“You’re nothing to be proud of? That’s not true. You did something nobody else ever did in my whole life. It wasn’t just that you kept your word, or even that you rescued me. You showed me how to…”
Cross felt the tiny brand below his eye burning again, but now it was intermittent, not steady. Slow-pulsing. Suddenly his mind made a connection. Back to his first “interview” in the government capture-van.
“That’s why you took Princess,” the urban mercenary said. “He was—”
“Yes,” Rhino said, quietly. “He was me. He didn’t want to be in that combat cage any more than I wanted to be in that wheelchair. We were both strapped in. I couldn’t leave him….”
“I get it,” the gang boss said. Thinking: That’s the way it really works. You pay your debts when they come due. You keep your promises. A promise, it’s the same as a threat—a rep that you always keep your word, that’s the only way anyone ever takes your threats seriously.
“Buddha said there were five votes before. But it’s really just the three of us, isn’t it?” Rhino said, very softly. “We’re family, all of us. I know that. But…Ace, he’s got Sharyn and his children; Buddha, he’s got So Long.
“Sure, I know. And they’re always fighting. But imagine if those two weren’t together. Now it’s like they…mesh. If it wasn’t for that, if they were operating on their own…”
The man with the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his hand went quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “You’re right. They don’t have limits—there’s nothing either of them wouldn’t do. So Long’s got money—but she’s a grafter in her heart, so she keeps on scheming and stealing. The same way Buddha’s a shooter. He wasn’t with us, he’d still be working merc jobs, somewhere. They each…I don’t know how to put it, exactly. It’s like they found a reason to live besides themselves.”
Rhino made a snorting sound: “To hear Buddha talk, the only reason he’s not divorced is that So Long would end up with all his money. But remember when that Circle of Skulls gang had her targeted, how he went crazy?”
“Yeah, he did. But he never thought we wouldn’t back his play, not for a second. You and me, anyway. Princess, he’d do whatever you did, so it comes out the same. Tracker, he’s the same as we are…but he’s got his own tribe. Tiger, too.”
Cross lit a cigarette. Took a drag. Closed his eyes. Realized the pulsating brand had gone quiet. “There’s just one difference, Rhino. Just one, between us and those two. One difference, but it’s too far apart for either side to bridge.”
Rhino said nothing, waiting.
“That difference…it’s…it’s the tribes. Their tribes. Their tribes were there before they were—they were born into them. But not us. There was nothing for us to be born into. We had to make our own.
“They call us a gang, and we know who the OGs are, like Buddha is always saying. But what if we’re not a gang? What if we’re the first members of a tribe?”
“Tribes were created by geography,” the huge man responded. “Climate, actually. Africans are a different race from Scandinavians. That’s all evolution is: successful adaptation to climate.”
“But weren’t we all born into the same climate, too, Rhino? Ace killed the man who was beating his mother. I don’t know if she was some low-rent whore or a woman who did what she had to do to get food on the table…but Ace, he loved her. You don’t know who your mother even was. Or your father. Or anything else, really. So maybe we weren’t born in the same place, but we grew up in the same place. Forget that Tigris-Euphrates stuff: for the three of us, for me, you, and Ace, the Cradle of Civilization was behind bars.
“You know where I ran across Buddha. So Long, she was, I don’t know exactly, more like a girl than a grown woman. But a hard girl. She’d’ve had to be to survive in that hell.
“I don’t know how it happened, but by the time I ran across Buddha, she and him, they were already together. He didn’t tell me right away—she was back in one of those foul caves, and Buddha was…watching out for her. She was safe in there, but she couldn’t have stayed there, not without food and water.
“See, brother? Different cages, but the same bars. Down south, where you grabbed Princess? Just as we were pulling out, one of the guards called out to me. He was really torn up, pieces of him leaking out. So much pain he could hardly speak. He asked me to put him down. The thing that really stuck with me was that he spoke English—not even an accent.
“I saw you already had Princess over your shoulder, so we made a deal, real quick. The guard, he tells me what I want to know; I give him what he wants. I picked up his pistol—it was only a couple of feet away from his hand, but he couldn’t reach it—and said I’d hand it back to him, told him he could make his own decision. Treated him like a man, showed respect.
“So he spit out answers. He said Princess was captured when he was just a kid. He was a little kid, but he was in the jungle by himself. And he almost tore his way out of the nets before they could get him chained.”
“I think that must be true,” Rhino said, soberly. “He doesn’t remember much, just being snatched up by some army. They started training him for cage fighting as far back as he can go in his head. I never really asked him…what difference would it make now?—but…”
“What?”
“What about you? Do you know who your—?”
“Yeah,” the icy man said, closing the subject forever.
TIGER SUDDENLY slid into the back of the office.
The best Cross could manage was “Really?”
“Princess, you know how he—”
“Aren’t they amazing?” the massively muscled child half-shouted. “Tiger didn’t want them. I mean, she did want them, I know she did. Maybe they don’t go right with her outfit now, but they’re so beautiful….”
Even Rhino was transfixed by the thigh-high boots the Amazon was wearing in place of her usual spike heels.
“Are those real alligator?”
“Albino alligator!” Princess boomed, excitedly pointing to the red, blue, green, and colorless glittering stones covering the boots. “And those’re all real, too.”
“You didn’t find anything like that on Michigan Avenue.”
“Don’t be silly!” the Amazon admonished Cross. “Princess took me to this little shop. In the back of some gray-stone building in Andersonville. The guys there—”
“It was a surprise!”
“It was to me, no doubt.”
“Oh, they’ve been ready for months,” Princess said proudly. “I got your shoe size from—”
“Oh, honey, you can’t tell a woman’s size from her shoes. The more expensive they are, the more the people who make them will lie about them.”
“But you’d never lie, Tiger.”
“Not to you, sweetheart. But I’m not talking about some salesgirl lying; I’m talking about the shoes.”
“What?” Rhino interjected. The absurdity of shoe leather’s participating in fraud was causing an overload inside his logic-driven mind.
“Ah, don’t any of you know anything about women?” the Amazon said, parking herself on a c
orner of Cross’s desk. “Look, girls don’t want to admit they have big feet, ever. So, the best places, they’ll call a size eight a six and a half when they’re putting the shoes together.”
“Why would they care?” Princess asked, sincerely.
“It’s just…vanity. But it’s men who make them that way. You think it’s easy walking around in high heels all day, like women have to do for business? I don’t care if she’s an executive or a waitress, flats are out. And the higher the heel, the harder it is on your whole body.”
“But you always—”
“Baby, I’m different. My spikes are spikes. Watch!” The Amazon grabbed one of the shoes she’d obviously taken off to put on the boots—lipstick-red four-inchers with black soles—and snapped the heel off in one smooth motion. Her hand flashed. A block of wood next to Rhino suddenly sported a new decoration—a deeply driven steel shaft.
“Wow!”
“I practice all the time, honey. I don’t want to run out of ammo,” she told Princess, patting the two slim throwing-daggers she wore strapped to one muscular thigh. “And I hate guns; they’re so noisy.”
“Uh-huh,” was all Cross said.
Tiger flashed her eyes in response. With the Amazon, every facial expression was an invitation or a threat: you took your guess…and proceeded at your own risk.
“You know what those cost?” Princess erupted, clearly not about to be shoved off-topic by practicalities like self-defense or intentional homicide.
Cross shrugged. Not “Who cares?” but “Who could guess?”
“Nothing! They wouldn’t take a penny! Ask Tiger.”
“True enough,” she verified. “They said it took almost three months just to make them. ‘Your gift to her; our gift to you,’ that guy with the thick glasses said.”
Cross nodded. It made sense now. Princess was a legendary figure in the gay community. Once he discovered that wearing makeup would make some nasty humans brave, it became his trademark. Some knew, and always greeted the huge child with a fake-friendly wave. Others…well, Ace probably put it best when he said, “Some fools gonna stay fools, ’cause they ain’t gonna live long enough to be nothing else.”
But Tiger wouldn’t be put off the scent. “These fit perfectly, baby. How could you…? I mean, we’ve been shopping plenty of times, but you heard what I just said about shoe sizes, right?”
“Oh, pul-leeze,” Princess said, in unconscious imitation of the staff at the leather-crafting shop where he’d gone to order the custom boots for the Amazon. “They asked me, how did I know? I told them I wasn’t sure…and they told me to bring them one of Tiger’s shoes. One she wore, I mean. I told them I couldn’t make the surprise work if I had to ask her for one.”
His shaved head rotated slowly on his neck as he turned to Tiger. “So…remember when we went to that place where they always have shoes you like? I carried the packages out. When you were paying the parking guy, I copied down everything from one of the new pairs. What it said on the box and all. Just like they said.”
“You are one smart cookie,” Tiger said.
Princess blushed.
RHINO CAUGHT the hand gesture from Cross.
“You’re going out, right?” he said to Princess.
“Me and Tiger” was the answer. “But first I got to change clothes. There’s this club Tiger said she’d—”
“I guess tonight’s as good as any other,” the Amazon agreed. “I’ve got to change first myself. And we are not going in that insane truck of yours!”
“But Sweetie could get all cramped in the back of your car. I mean, he was in there for a long time when we picked up your boots. It’s not—”
“Oh, Sweetie can come in with us.”
“Into a club?”
“Into this club.”
“Well…”
“What, honey? Everyone will love him, I promise.”
“Can he wear his party chain?”
“Why not?”
“Hear that, Sweetie? You’re gonna represent. Isn’t that great?”
Whether the black-masked Akita understood he would finally get to wear the heavy rope of 22-karat gold that once adorned the neck of a gangstah drug merchant who had grossly overestimated the loyalty of his personal posse was doubtful…but Princess certainly believed he did. After all, Sweetie had been present when that posse leader still had a head.
“I UNDERSTAND why you waited for an organic opening to call us together,” Tracker said. “So now you have Princess away. And, as you said, this creature had never tried to attack Princess, even when he was alive. Tiger was not…known to him.”
“He’s not back from the dead,” Cross said. “Whoever’s trying to get us out in the open now, it’s not him. But it all connects to him, somehow. All we know is that someone tried to get Ace to move on Hemp.”
“By spooking him,” Rhino said, very softly. “The same way that…thing spooked Buddha years ago, even though he didn’t mean to. And with Ace, it worked. We just got lucky.”
“Lucky? We had Hemp tracked from the—”
“Yes, I know,” the mammoth whispered. “But Ace was going off the rails. He doesn’t do research—he’d just start shooting until he ran out of targets. And in that neighborhood…”
“Okay. Let’s say that’s what would have happened. It didn’t happen, though. And it doesn’t explain why Ace got targeted.”
“There is a tribal name for the descendants of those who did not survive a battle,” Tracker said. When he added nothing to his words, Cross looked over at him:
“Which is—?”
“Enemy,” the Indian said, gravely. “This is why no war ever ends.”
“Tell that to the—”
“Who?” Tracker cut off the gang’s leader mid-sentence. “It doesn’t matter what words you use, the answer will be the same. The Japanese, did we end all their thoughts of vengeance with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It is true, we do business with them on a colossal scale. But why do they celebrate every time a survivor of that war appears out of a cave in the islands? A hero, such a man. He never surrendered. A samurai to his core. Worthy of his nation’s greatest respect.”
“Not a samurai,” Rhino argued. “For a soldier, his master would be the Emperor. And it was Hirohito himself who signed the surrender papers.”
“And never stood trial for war crimes,” Cross added.
“Ah, you confuse facts with truth,” Tracker said, almost sadly. “Did you miss the tone of my voice when I said ‘we’ had won that war? Do you not understand that your tribe and mine were never one? We…all of us who once walked this country before you ‘discovered’ it…we were not brought into a partnership; we barely survived attempted genocide.
“And ours was a culture more accustomed to war than any of yours. The Vikings were a warrior culture, but they fought wars of conquest. Genghis Khan, the Crusades—go back as far as you like, they are the same.
“But not us. We call ourselves ‘the People’ now. Now, when it is too late. Before any man with white skin took a single step onto what is now America, we fought wars…wars among ourselves. Not for conquest—nomads care nothing for property. We fought as tribes.
“Was that better? No, it was not. And look at the price we paid for that embedded insanity! Why should an Apache hate a Comanche? Why would a Hutu hate a Tutsi?”
Tracker paused, as if waiting for an answer. Or a challenge. When neither came, he continued: “In this country, people of color are all ranked below those without color. Black people will say this is because they were brought here as slaves. But who captured those slaves? No European ever entered the deep jungle and dragged out captives. The human cargo was already imprisoned, awaiting the arrival of the men with…with whatever the Africans on their western coast valued.
“This was acceptable. It was acceptable because, in Africa, color meant nothing, but tribe meant everything. Is that not the message of your brand, Cross?”
As if in response, the tiny blue symbol un
der Cross’s right eye burned. “But only I can see it. And Tiger, too. It is not visible to you, is it, Rhino? Even in this darkness, you see nothing.”
“I don’t,” the mammoth said. “Even when Cross told me where to look, I saw nothing.”
“Tiger and I, we are tribal. You are not. Nor is Buddha. Nor Ace.”
“A family is a smaller unit than a tribe. Than any tribe.”
“You call yourselves family,” Tracker said, holding up his hand to cut off any response. “And because you do, you are. I accept this. But there is more to know.”
“The Simbas,” Cross said. “Like when we were first hired—”
“I was part of that team,” Tracker reminded the other two men, “although my connection to you was not something those government people needed to know. Tiger felt the same. Neither of us have what the world would call a ‘family.’ Both of us come from what the world would call a ‘tribe.’
“And that is a tribal brand on you, Cross. It was not your birthright—it came to you in that prison basement.”
“Then…”
“The brand is a message for me. And for Tiger. We both have lineage. Long lineage. An ancestral trail that could be followed back to its original seed. Neither of us have renounced our own…but neither of us have ever been put to the choice.”
“You would be with us?”
“Am I not?” Tracker answered Rhino. “Have I not been, ever since…?”
“Tiger, too?”
“Surely, you know this, Cross. Whatever your…feelings for her, or hers for you, can there be a doubt that she would step between Princess and any threat? Even one coming from her own people?”
“You’re saying…?”
“I am saying the truth, Cross. You call Ace your brother, and brothers are what you have been to one another. Rhino was your choice. Princess was his. It goes on, does it not? Say I am not your brother.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Tiger is not your sister. She could not be. Your code would never allow this, I understand. Not for the same reason you exclude Buddha’s woman, but no less the truth. Whoever…whatever placed its brand on you, it will come to all of us. From family comes tribe.”
Drawing Dead Page 9
