The third door was locked. Percy kicked it open, spinning onto the floor in the same movement. No prisoners! blasted through his brain as Ace moved past him, his mind screaming, Hate them all!
“Gone,” the dark assassin said, pointing at an open window. “Can’t be far.”
“Blondie would have a plan,” Percy said, grunting. “They ain’t running down no blind alley. Got to be a—”
Ace spotted a pair of tablets and stuffed them inside his duster as Percy disappeared out the window. Fool thinks I’m gonna hold the door for him? he thought, working the beeper. When the man whose name made professional life-takers shiver stepped out the club’s front door, the Escalade was just pulling in.
Seconds later, the Cadillac rolled off, its driver as unperturbed by the sound of approaching sirens as people on the next corner had been by the sounds of what they assumed was just another gunfight.
“WHERE THE hell is—?” the man in the passenger seat started to say.
“We did what we got paid to do, right?” the driver interrupted. “We got him over the damn border, right? Don’t be asking questions, bro—we don’t get paid extra for being stupid.”
Even as he spoke, a man in a different part of town answered a cell phone with “Go.”
“Job’s done.” Ace’s voice came over the phone Cross was holding. “But not finished. Clear?”
“Clear. Car coming.”
“Which car?”
“Same snake, new skin. You know where. Go!”
“AND THAT’S where I left it,” Ace told the crew, later.
“Maybe Percy was successful?” Tracker wondered out loud.
“The man has serious skills,” Ace conceded. “Not afraid of nothing, and don’t mind who he got to kill to prove it. But when it comes to those two, he’s a freight train with no track to run on. No way some little girl just jumps out a second-story window—Blondie and her, they had a plan in place. Plenty of time after they heard the first shots downstairs.”
“Blondie, I don’t think he’s much,” Tiger said. “But that Wanda…she wouldn’t operate without a Plan B.”
“So it was all for—?”
“Not so sure about that,” Ace said to Cross. “I got these.”
“Tablets?” Rhino squeaked, excitedly.
“Yeah. That don’t mean they’re—”
“You didn’t turn them on or anything?”
“Man, I wouldn’t touch those things.”
“Good,” the double-wide man who’d once been a tortured child said. I’ll come back for you, brother, echoed in his mind, as he calmly said, “I’ll need the robot room.”
THE CREW watched through the long viewing slit of triple-layered ballistic glass as Rhino’s shovel-sized hands delicately worked a pair of joysticks with the precision of a surgeon implanting a pacemaker.
The first tablet opened silently. And the second.
“No triggers there,” Buddha said, quietly.
“There wouldn’t be,” Tracker said. “Not if Wanda set them up. If they’re nothing but shaped charges, she’d want them to take out anyone who tried to access data.”
Another tap of the robot’s padded tip, and the first of the tablets came alive, its screen filling with icons.
Rhino fired up the second one. That one showed an out-of-focus haze.
“Camera-feed,” Cross said. “They were probably watching everything downstairs. Gave ’em plenty of time.”
Rhino ignored the speculations, gliding the robot’s point over the icons on the screen of the other tablet. Minutes passed, until a row of vertical boxes, white on a black background, came into view.
“Passworded,” the mammoth said. “Eight slots. It’ll be an alphanumeric. I’ll have to put a generator in there and let it hunt. Could take hours, even days.”
“But you can get in?” Cross asked.
“I think so. But I don’t know how far. It probably is set up like a beehive—resistance at every level before we get to the queen.”
“Yeah, that’d be Wanda,” the gang leader said. “But we got nothing else, brother. And if Percy finds them first, he’s not taking prisoners.”
BACK AT Red 71, Princess said, “Did you take anything else, Ace? From that room, I mean.”
“Nothing else there. Lucky that beastmaster didn’t look back,” the assassin said, grimly. “Percy saw me do it, I’d probably still be in that damn room.”
“Ace’s right,” Cross said. “He’d know how the G feels about ‘specimens.’ If he wasn’t in such a rush, he’d have searched the place, too.”
“For what?” Buddha sneered. “So they prove something in court? It’s not like they got secret identities or anything.”
“They probably do,” Tiger said, thoughtfully. “They have to be holed up somewhere. There’s plenty of legit places they could rent, and just as many off the books, too. But they’d have to look different. Blondie would just need a decent dye job and a padded jacket. Wanda could put her hair in pigtails, throw a couple of colored streaks into the other part, slam on some makeup, and turn herself into a college girl.”
“How would that help us? It’s like those dumbass ‘profiles’ you read about every time a serial killer’s on the loose. Give you everything you want to know about him—white male, lives in his mother’s basement, blah-blah—except where you can find him. You see the news reports? ‘Gang-related,’ of course. Only thing they know for sure is that all ten of the killers were black.”
Feeling Tiger’s nails on the side of his neck, Cross realized Princess might be feeling ignored. “Why’d you ask?” the gang leader said.
“Sweetie!” the armor-muscled child blurted out. “If we had something they touched, like a tissue or something, Sweetie could probably sniff them out.”
Buddha rolled his eyes, but the flash from Cross’s left palm stopped him from speaking.
“That might work,” Cross said, as if considering a proposition. “But there’s no way for us to try it. If we went back, the cops might try and grab Sweetie.”
Mollified, Princess lapsed into silence.
“I don’t like doing nothing,” Tiger said, stomping her foot like a defiant child.
“We are doing something,” Tracker said.
“I’m with Tiger,” Buddha piped up again.
“No, you’re not,” the Amazon replied.
HOURS PASSED.
“You and Tracker, you spent the most time with them,” Cross said to Tiger. “Maybe we’re going at this all wrong. If Percy’s chasing them, they got no friends, not anymore. So why come back to Chicago? Taking us out—even all of us—that wouldn’t square them with the G.”
“Boss, maybe they can see it, too?”
“You mean—?” Cross suddenly stopped speaking as the tiny blue symbol burned harshly.
“They cannot,” Tracker said, his tone clearly indicating that he was simply stating a fact.
“What makes you such an expert?” Tiger snapped at him. “My tribe existed long before yours was formed. If anyone would know—”
“I am not stating tribal knowledge,” Tracker said, patiently. “This is deduction only. I feel the truth of deduction, but logic isn’t spiritual.”
“Hey! How about the both of you speak English, okay?”
Tracker and Tiger both shifted position to look directly at Buddha. They internally reconfirmed their ongoing agreement not to waste insults on a man immune to such.
“If those who originally hired us to collect a specimen—not the blond one and the Asian; the agency who paid their salaries—if that agency had any indication that Cross could be…touched by what they sought, they would have acted upon that information by now,” Tracker said. “He didn’t have that…mark, or brand, or whatever you call it; he didn’t get it until…well, we don’t know, exactly. But it was after that thing they all trapped down in that prison basement escaped.”
“And you think, because we all can see it, a surveillance camera could as well?” Tiger ask
ed.
“Why not?” Buddha demanded. “We didn’t all get to see it at the same time. I mean, it wasn’t visible right away.”
“Not to you,” Tiger said, disdainfully.
“Fine.” Buddha shrugged off her scorn. “And so what? If it came to some of us slower than others, why couldn’t it reach the G, eventually?”
“They have not abandoned surveillance,” Tracker said.
“There’s a better reason,” Cross spoke. “We know for sure from what Ace just told us. Percy’s hunting Blondie and Wanda, not me. The G’s made up its mind: either this…thing doesn’t exist at all, or they’re gonna need another ten years to come up with a new plan.
“Probably the first—we’re about to have an election, remember? Even if they keep most of that agency, whatever it is, even if they keep on the same personnel, you think they want to report that something from…who knows where…has been watching them?”
“Percy?” Tiger snapped. “He’s a thug, not a thinker. Whatever they tell him to do, it’s no different from pushing a speed-dial button.”
“Okay,” Cross agreed. “And that means there’s nothing personal in what he’s doing. Hunting those two, that’s an assignment. But none of this explains why Hemp gave that order in the first place.”
“That Lao told us.”
“Sure he did, Buddha. But he was playing the game—he didn’t invent it. If the G wanted us dead, they’d just send in the troops. Percy’s not the only asset they have.”
“Boss, look—”
“Shut up,” Tiger hissed at him. “It’s blinking now. Can you feel it?” she asked Cross.
“No. Not like before. Look, we can’t read whatever their messages are supposed to be. Mural Girl, she might know something, but even if she does, she’s not gonna tell us anything more than she already has. We got a ton of information, but it’s like a bunch of dots on a wall. We can take guesses, but it’s just more dots—nothing connects.”
“It does now,” Rhino squeaked, stepping inside the room, one of the tablets almost completely covered by his closed hand.
“THIS ISN’T what you’d expect,” Rhino said, the squeak barely present in his voice. “It was set up like an old-school video game. Donkey Kong,” the mammoth said, shaking his head in wonderment.
“I don’t like that one,” Princess said. “It’s no fun. That big gorilla on top, he’d never want to be friends.”
“You know, there’s some people like that, too,” Rhino said gently. “But this wasn’t a puzzle. More of a…taunt, I guess. Every little node held a coding test. If you passed the test—I don’t mean if you knew some password, more like a skills test—if you got through one node, there’d be another. It didn’t get…trickier as you went along. It was more like—”
“Ninja Warrior!” Princess interrupted. “That’s not a game; it’s real. But the players, they don’t fight each other. Like one of those…obstacle courses, right?”
“Exactly like that,” Rhino said, giving Princess a look that told the hyper-muscled man that it was time to stay quiet. “No antagonism involved. No ‘Hah! You lose!’ kind of pop-ups. But there was some kind of perverted sense of humor in the whole thing. If you could work your way past…past every obstacle, just like Princess said, you ‘qualified’ for that Donkey Kong game.”
“This is difficult to follow,” Tracker said. “Are you saying what is on that tablet is some qualifying test?”
“Yes.”
“As in the military, then? You have to prove many things about yourself besides the ability to shoot before you would be admitted to their sniper training?”
“Maybe. I don’t know what kind of mind would build this,” Rhino said, gesturing with the tablet held between thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “But it might have a message of its own.”
“That this is all some game?” Tiger said. “That would be exactly like that Wanda bitch. For her, it probably is a game.”
“You’re saying she doesn’t want us all dead?” Cross asked, firing another cigarette as he spoke.
“The blond man, he is a coyote,” Tracker said. “Not a transporter,” he added quickly, as he saw Buddha start to interrupt, “a trickster. But he has many more layers than any shape-shifter. He is as cold-blooded as a Gila monster, but his venom is not for hunting. Or even for self-defense. It is as if both merged inside him. His blood is venom. There is no shortage of places where this quality would make him valuable. And with that woman to help, they could have departed for such places long ago.”
“He’s hanging around just for revenge?”
“He would not understand that concept,” Tracker answered Cross. “He would not seek insight into his own motives. He would never question himself. But it would not be possible for him to…fail. Were he to fail…fail at anything he undertook…he would not be losing a game, or a contest. Or even a war. He would lose himself.”
“You know this…?”
“From watching. Listening. Breathing the same air. For a long time. I was there first. Before Tiger, I mean. And she is very sensitive. But, for Tiger, ‘sensitive’ is a double-edged blade. One with no handle.”
Tiger took a breath. But this time, the breath was shallow. Cross watched her right hand. The slim pair of daggers strapped to her thigh did have handles. Tracker went very still.
Sweetie launched across the room, airborne from the first thrust of his hindquarters. And landed in Tiger’s lap.
“He doesn’t want you to get mad,” Princess said, walking over to the Amazon. “Me, neither.”
“I wasn’t mad, honey.”
“Yes, you were. Sweetie could tell.”
“I give it off that much?” she asked Cross.
“Tracker hit one of your spots, that’s all.”
“My spots?”
“Tigers have stripes,” Princess said, now standing between Tiger and the rest of the room.
“Princess, easy, okay? Tiger’s not mad”—looking meaningfully at the warrior-woman, catching the slight nod of her head—“she just wants me to explain what I was talking about.”
“That is so true, sweetheart,” she said to Princess. “I’m not mad. Not at all. Nobody’s going to hurt me. And I’m not going to hurt anyone. Okay?”
“I…”
“Princess, baby, you know I’d never lie to you.”
“I know. I was just…”
“You and Sweetie, both. Sure. He’s a very smart dog. Maybe the smartest dog in the whole world.”
“You hear that?” Princess asked the Akita, scooping him up in both arms and carrying him away like the animal was a piece of spun glass. “I knew it! You’re a…genius or something. Didn’t I tell you, Rhino?”
“You did,” the patient giant confirmed.
“I am still waiting—”
“Your spots,” Cross cut her off. “I meant a trigger point. Everybody has them—some are just buried deeply, that’s all.”
“I trained for years before I ever—”
“It doesn’t matter. You trained to fight. That’s a test you’ve never failed. Tracker has it in him. How he got his name. That gift. He wouldn’t need his eyes to follow a trail.”
“I wouldn’t need mine, either. So he picked up on me thinking Blondie is slime, so what? I could tell Tracker thought the same. That blond…thing, he had no respect for either of us—we were the hired help. Remember back in that rolling office the G had, when Tracker offered to share tobacco with you? You knew what that meant. Not Blondie. That wasn’t something he’d understand. Or care about if he did.”
“That’s him, sure.”
“But all I did was despise him, right? What good is that? Tracker, he was studying him. That’s what you’re really saying, isn’t it?”
“No,” Cross said.
Minutes passed. Tiger blinked first. “So what are you saying?”
“Tracker respected your gifts. Wanda was outside anything he’d ever encountered. But you were probing for a way into her. Tra
cker could…feel that. So he left you to your work and went about his. Okay now?”
Tiger looked over at Tracker, caught the Indian’s confirmatory nod, and settled back inside herself, shifting her body to tell Rhino she wouldn’t be interrupting him again.
“Your wife’s analysis was correct,” Rhino said, clearly referring to Buddha. The pudgy man with adjustable scopes behind his unblinking eyes said nothing, waiting for whatever else was to come. “I only brought back one of the tablets—the other one made a little snapping sound when I tried to get into it,” Rhino went on. “Probably the bellows mechanism—it discharged a spurt of some yellowish gas. Anyone opening it without protection would gasp at the sound or the sight. Either way, it would be his last gasp.”
“What’s that got to do with—?”
“So Long connected all of this to that No-Chance Gaming Parlor. It was full of those who believe themselves capable of winning any online game, and telling them they had no chance of winning would only entice them to prove themselves. Every gambler is sure the next spin of the wheel will land on his number. But if the wrong tablet were to be opened—they are identical in appearance—the wheel would land on zero. There was, indeed, ‘no chance.’
“So the first obstacle would be random. But even if the coded tablet were opened first, the second one would be opened at some point. Maybe in the belief that there would be some work-around to the first one stored on it. Or even a key to the coding. So, while it appears that the odds were fifty-fifty, they were actually nonexistent—any gamer would lose.”
“That Wanda is one evil bitch,” Buddha said.
“Amen, brother!” Ace echoed.
“We expected them both to be looking for revenge,” Cross said. “But that was off—Blondie wouldn’t care, and Wanda wouldn’t come to us.”
“That is her,” Tiger agreed. “But if she gave us a way to find her…”
“She didn’t,” Rhino said. “This was her own version of Mural Girl’s wall. A way to transmit messages. Messages only we could understand.”
“You think she knew—?”
“Oh, hell, yes,” Cross said, blowing twin jets of smoke from his nose as he spoke. “I don’t know whatever she had going with Blondie. Maybe nothing. Maybe it was her own game, and only the G could get her access to all that equipment she wanted. Maybe Blondie was just part of a package she put up with. But it was a camera we used to pick up those playing-card messages from Mural Girl’s wall, right? Not our own eyes, so there couldn’t have been anything special you’d need to see them.”
Drawing Dead Page 21
