Drawing Dead

by Andrew Vachss

  “Let’s go,” Cross said.

  Buddha killed the engine by pushing a keypad sequence. “You remember the—?”

  “Yes,” Rhino assured him.

  THE TWO men walked to the only door visible on the windowless side of a large brick building.

  As they stepped inside, they saw So Long, standing with her arms at her sides. Her long, straight black hair had a deep sheen no colorist could duplicate. Everything else was green, from her silk sheath to her reptile-skinned high heels. Even her long nails had a freshly applied coat of emerald gel.

  That’s her color, all right, flashed in Cross’s mind. But he kept his mouth closed and his face expressionless.

  “Ace bought one of those houses,” Buddha said to his wife. No preamble was necessary: it had been So Long’s scheme to buy up five houses on the same block, all in various states of disrepair after their owners had walked away from mortgages. Because the houses stood between two gangs whose claimed territories ended several blocks to either side, police presence was minimal, at best.

  Stone takes a long time to decay, but neighborhoods don’t. After the gang’s urban renewal plan was put into action, the houses were rehabbed and sold, clearing a seven-figure score. So Long had handled all the transactions, washing the money through several LLCs, which disappeared before any capital gain would be declared.

  “Your idea, your friend buys one of the houses,” was So Long’s only response. “Your idea; less profit.”

  “Sure. Whatever. That house wasn’t bought in Ace’s name—hell, I don’t even know his name. But someone who wanted to smoke him out sent a hit man over to visit Sharyn.”

  “To kill? And you think…?” So Long’s voice hardened as she turned to Cross.

  “The plan was to sell five houses,” Cross said. “We agreed on everything, who paid what, all that. But Ace wanting one of the houses, that came as a surprise. And, yeah, before you say anything, surprised us, too.”

  “But when you told me, then I knew, yes? This killer, he did not succeed?”

  “No,” Buddha said. “But we know who put the whole thing in motion. The guy who wanted Ace out in the open.”

  “And no way to ask that one any questions now, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impossible to guess information like that.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So that leaves…that leaves me, you are saying?”

  “Yes,” Cross said.

  “Pekelo,” So Long spat. “The headman said he was…not sure of him, but Ace decided to buy that house after Pekelo was already in the paper chain.”

  “Headman?” Cross said. “You mean Old Greytooth, the man who owns this building? He’s not Lao.”

  “He is Hmong,” So Long said. “As am I.”

  “You were in Laos when I—”

  “I was a girl when you found me, husband,” So Long said to Buddha. “Just a girl, but a clever girl. Our people—Hmong, I mean—our people are all fighters. There is no choice. The mountains shield us, but they do not always feed us. Sometimes we are forced to venture down to lower ground. When all of Cambodia was nothing but death, a bargain was made with the Americans to fight on their side during that stupid war.

  “A bad bargain that turned out to be for us. But at the time, there was no choice. The Vietnamese—or their Russian masters—they would kill us once that war ended. The Americans could not win, but still they made us many promises. The only one they kept was to let us come here—America—to live. All this I was told. All this was over years before I was born. Born here. I returned to find my….It does not matter, not now.”

  “Hmongs don’t exactly blend in here, either,” Cross said, no emotion in his voice.

  “No,” she said, coldly. “We are not welcomed, because our skills, our traditional skills, they are of no value here. Only the ginseng harvesting, and that brings death. I tell you this: that name, ‘Pekelo,’ in Lao it means ‘stone.’ ”

  “That’s all you know?” Cross asked.

  “Oh, no,” So Long said. “Much, much more.” The room went quiet.

  Clearly, So Long was not going to volunteer whatever she meant by “much, much more,” yet no one spoke.

  Cross was replaying a piece of their past in his mind. “Headman” was the word So Long had used. Cambodian, not Lao. But maybe a Hmong. Maybe the same Hmong whose mortal enemy, a Chinese overlord named Chang, had been destroyed in a complex chain of events years ago.

  A master strategist, Chang used his contacts to confirm there was a bounty on Viktor, a Russian boss who was trafficking in bear claws, routed from Kamchatka to Japan.

  Chang had hired Cross to put a halt to Viktor’s trade arrangements. The crafty old man envisioned a war by which he would profit regardless of its outcome.

  And Chang had paid off, in gold, just after learning that Viktor’s entire gang was literally ripped apart by…something not yet known. Within minutes of that transaction, Chang’s own headquarters had been hit by several RPG rounds.

  Cross got word to an ancient Cambodian headman that the destruction of his mortal enemy—Chang—was a gift. A gesture of respect, for which no payment was expected.

  Later, a package had been delivered to Red 71. An elaborately carved ebony stick, whose characters Rhino laboriously translated: “We can redeem this for a body. Payable anytime. And it can be any body we want.”

  “YOU KNOW Old Greytooth?” Cross finally broke the silence.

  “Yes” was all So Long said.

  “And he would know this Pekelo? And wouldn’t trust him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you speak to him? And tell him that Pekelo is the body we want?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to. You go in one of those doors…we wouldn’t know which one. Just hand Old Greytooth this stick,” Cross told her, proffering the item retrieved from Tiger’s safe. “Tell him that it is a message from his friend Cross—the stick will prove that to him. The message is: ‘Pekelo is the body we want.’ But tell him we need that body alive—there are some questions he may know the answer to, and we want to ask him those questions.”

  “I will do that.”

  “BOSS…?”

  “Buddha, what more do you want? I don’t think for a second So Long was in on any plot to hit Ace.”

  “You don’t much act like it.”

  “Just leave it, okay? You want it straight, here it is: I know So Long’s a thief. I know all thieves are gamblers—risk versus gain, right? So Long’s smart. Real smart. And no matter what she might be offered to sell us out, she wouldn’t like the odds.”

  “I don’t see a guy like Hemp dealing with those freakish people, anyway,” Tiger added. “They couldn’t even get close enough to him to pitch a deal, no matter what it was.”

  “And whoever hired Hemp—this could not have been his own idea—they now know the result of that error,” Tracker said, supporting Tiger’s position. Or reassuring Buddha…although why he would do so was knowledge he kept to himself.

  “Somebody wanted Hemp dead, you’re saying?”

  “No,” Cross cut into Buddha’s question. “Be easier to just dust him. But how would they get Hemp to put out a hit on Ace? The man’s not insane.”

  “Then you explain it,” Tiger challenged. “We know the contract was to kill Sharyn—at the least, kill Sharyn, maybe her children, too—just to bring Ace out into the open.”

  “Had to be Hemp’s own idea,” Cross said. “It’s the only thing that adds up. Nobody’d have to pay Hemp for Ace’s body, not if Hemp believed somebody had already paid Ace for his.”

  AS IF by mutual agreement, the whole gang went silent.

  “It wouldn’t be a hard sell,” Tiger finally said. “Plenty of drug gangs in this town. Street-level slingers kill each other over who gets what corner all the time, so why wouldn’t one of the kingpins want to take all the corners?”

  “For Hemp to listen to a warning th
at Ace had him targeted, it would have to come from someone he trusted.”

  “Tracker would be right,” Cross said. “But this isn’t some old-school crime family—those guys don’t trust themselves. Word about a contract? Sure. But who’d know for sure Ace had that contract?”

  More silence, this time one of agreement.

  “Still, Tiger’s just saying what happened. No argument about that. But what if it wasn’t Ace who Hemp was afraid of? Maybe Hemp wasn’t afraid of any of us? Or even all of us? What if he was the one getting paid?”

  “There isn’t enough money—?”

  “Not money, Buddha. Remember that girl? The one whose father kept telling her he was safe forever—that ‘statute of limitations’ thing?”

  Buddha closed his eyes and watched the film spool inside his mind. Like it was yesterday:

  Cross watched the woman descend the stairs to the basement poolroom, thinking, Who would tell a girl like her about Red 71? The bank-security mirror the old man with the even older green eyeshade kept just inside the door showed her clearly, standing as if she didn’t know what to do next. All in black, she was—but dressed for mourning, not for style.

  Finally, she threaded her way through the maze of tables, a dark, slender wraith not even drawing a glance from the men playing their various games. Cross was too far away for her to have spotted what she had been told to look for—the bull’s-eye tattoo on his right hand—but she walked to the far corner as if guided by a signal.

  The black pillbox hat with its matching half-veil did nothing to conceal her features. Or that she was anemia-pale under the mesh.

  “Mr….Cross?”

  “Sit down” was all the answer she got. The woman took the only empty chair at the small table, pulled off her black gloves, and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. Cross extended his left hand, opened it, and flame flickered out. If the woman was surprised, she gave no sign.

  Two men detached themselves from the wall and racked the balls, starting a game. Even though their combined bulk would have concealed a reclining elephant, that wasn’t what caused everyone in the basement to keep looking in some other direction. Any other direction.

  Cross lit a cigarette of his own. Said nothing.

  It took the woman two more cigarettes to realize that she wasn’t going to be asked any questions.

  When she spoke, it was in a chemotherapy voice, juiceless and resigned. “You have to make him stop. He’s never going to stop.”

  Not a battered wife, Cross thought. Otherwise, why come here? If she knew enough to find this place, she knew about the Double-X. So those widow’s weeds aren’t to cover scars.

  “Just tell me,” he said.

  “I can pay. Whatever it costs, I can get it.”

  “This part, it’s the down payment.”

  “I thought…”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “And you don’t trust me.”

  Silence was answer enough. She lit another cigarette with the glowing butt of her last one.

  “I could still lie to you,” she said. As if she knew all about lying.

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  “Are you going to strap me into a lie detector?”

  “I am one,” Cross told her, holding her eyes so she’d understand, get down to it.

  “My…stepfather,” she finally said, the last word sliding from her mouth like a venomous snake crawling from under a rock.

  “What about him?”

  “He…had me. When I was a baby. When I was a girl. When I was a teenager. Now I’m away. But I’ll never be free from him. I’ll never have a boyfriend, never have a husband. I’ll never have a baby—he burned me inside.”

  “There’s people for that. Therapists…”

  Her eyes were twin corpses. “I’m not talking about my mind. He burned me with a soldering iron. Right after I had my first period. He put it inside me and pushed the switch.”

  Cross waited for more. When it didn’t come, he said: “What do you want?”

  “I went to the police,” she said. “They told me I was too late. Too much time had passed since the last time he…had me. The statute of limitations, they said. He can’t be prosecuted. So I went to a lawyer. He has money. I thought, if I could sue him, take his money, it would take his power. But the lawyer told me I was too late even for that.”

  “So…?”

  “The prosecutor, he was very kind. He told me I couldn’t even get an Order of Protection. You can only get one if there’s an ongoing criminal case. Or if there had been a conviction, and it was part of the sentence. But he said if he…my stepfather…ever bothered me again, they’d lock him up. He said they know about him. From other things—he wouldn’t tell me what.”

  “Would that be enough? Taking his power?”

  “Enough?” she said, as if the question were absurd. “Taking his life, that wouldn’t be enough. But if he could lose his power, if he could be in prison, that would…I don’t know, give me a chance, maybe. To be free.”

  A bodyguard wouldn’t help this one. Her enemy’s already inside her gates, Cross thought. And she’s right about a therapist—nothing they can do when a cutter’s already hit a vein. We know this guy, works with every kind of crazy you can think of, but he goes partners with his clients, says that’s the only way. They team up to fight what’s already inside. She’s not here looking for a partner; she wants to hire a gun. The scanner didn’t pick up anything electronic on her, but she still has to say it out loud.

  “So what do you think we could do?”

  “Hurt him,” she whispered.

  “You expect us to take that kind of risk, for how much, exactly?”

  “I meant him. He’d pay anything. He has a record,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “The prosecutor didn’t have to tell me; I already knew. For rape. Before he married my mother. A long time ago. My mother didn’t find out about it until much later. He was the one who told me first. When I was just a little girl, he told me. He had raped a girl and he went to prison for it. He told me he’d never rape a stranger again. He hated prison—it was full of animals. ‘Savages,’ he called them,” she said, her voice too acidic to be mistaken for sarcasm. “That’s why he married my mother. So he could do what he does and never go to prison again.”

  “He has money? Where would it come from?”

  “He’s like some kind of…gangster, I think. He’d talk real hard on the phone sometimes. And other times, he’d grovel. Crawl on his knees to whoever was on the other end of the line. I heard him doing that once, and he caught me at it. As soon as he was off the phone, he hurt me very ugly that night.”

  Cross lit another smoke, watching her. “You want this bad?”

  “It’s all I want,” she said. “Everything I want.”

  “What now?” the hard-faced cop asked, his tone making it clear even his deeply respected patience wasn’t endless.

  “You know a sex-crimes prosecutor? Guy named Wainwright?” Cross said, naming the man in the DA’s office the girl had said was so understanding.

  “He’s good stuff,” McNamara said. “Young guy, but you can tell he’s not in the DA’s office to learn how to be a defense attorney. He’s on our side; every cop in the county tries to get their dicey cases to him. I’ll put it so you can understand, Cross: he doesn’t give a damn about his conviction rate. See what I’m saying? He doesn’t expect us to bring in videotapes of some slimeball committing the crime, with a signed confession for the cherry on top. And he’s not giving away the courthouse just to get a plea.”

  “Doesn’t even want to be the DA himself, huh?”

  “Nope. He’s a soldier. Like us. Us cops, I mean.”

  “ ‘Us,’ huh? You guys are no more all alike than this guy is with his job.”

  “That’s right. But the only guys using all the juice they have to get him on a case, they are.”

  The target lived alone.

  In a nice house in
the suburbs. Neighbors on both sides, but there was a high fence all around the property. Solid cedar, brass-braced, with a cast-iron hasp. It wouldn’t keep out an amateur.

  A hard, slanting rain wasn’t doing much to break the summer heat as Cross rang the bell just before midnight. No dog barked. He didn’t expect any, not after a week of watching and waiting.

  Suddenly the door was thrown open. Standing there, a big man, paunchy, hair combed to one side exaggerating the baldness he was trying to conceal. Wearing a white T-shirt over baggy black dress pants, barefoot.

  Cross politely asked the man’s name, holding his wallet open so the man could see the police shield. The man looked at it closely, eyes narrowing.

  “You don’t mind waiting outside, Detective? Just long enough for me to call the precinct, make sure you’re who you say you are?”

  “No, sir,” Cross said, watching the man’s expression change as he felt the pistol barrel jammed into his spine.

  Cross stepped inside, pushing the man back gently with the palm of his hand. He tilted his fedora back on his head, quickly pulling the brim down again as the man’s eyes flashed to the Chang B tong tattoo across his forehead. He gestured for the man to turn around.

  Buddha, his face covered with a dark stocking mask, showed the target a short-barreled .357 magnum, holding it close enough for him to see the copper-tipped rounds in the cylinder.

  “Let’s go into your study,” Cross said.

  They walked the target down the carpeted hallway in a sandwich, took him over to his glass-topped desk, told him to sit down, make himself comfortable.

  “You know who I am?” the man asked, unperturbed.

  Cross put his fingers to his lips, made a ssshing gesture.

  “Look, you want money? I got…”

  Buddha ground the tip of the pistol barrel deep into the man’s ear. The man let out a yelp; then he was quiet.

  Cross opened the satchel Buddha handed him, taking out one item at a time, very slowly, as if he were a salesman displaying his wares.

  A pair of handcuffs.

  A hypodermic syringe.