The cars watched each other like pit dogs preparing to fight. The Corvette’s headlights were shrouded; the sedan’s amber running lights were on.
A man exited the anonymous car and walked toward the Corvette. He was carrying a scuffed brown leather suitcase.
The door to the Corvette opened. Another man stepped out, a bundle wrapped in a pale-blue blanket held in one arm.
“Cross,” the man with the blanket said.
“Time to test,” Cross replied.
“You think this ain’t a real baby?” Carlos asked. “Look.” He gently pulled the blanket away from where it was tucked. “See for yourself.”
“That’s not the test,” Cross said. “All I see is a baby. Could be any baby, right? All you see is a suitcase. You open it, it looks like your powder—but how are you going to know for sure?”
“I got—”
“Yeah, you got the stuff to test it with, I know. But it could take you a few minutes, do all that. And you have to go into your car to do it too, right?”
“Of course. Do you think I can—?”
“Don’t get excited,” Cross said softly. “We’re both worried the other’s pulling a switch, right? The old pigeon drop. An envelope stuffed full of money right there on the sidewalk. The mark spots it same time as the hustlers. They open it together, check it out. It’s stuffed with cash. Big bills. No ID. Finders keepers, right? Only thing is, you gotta wait thirty days, see if anyone claims it, that’s the law. And maybe there’s a reward, who knows? Now, the mark don’t trust the hustlers—and the hustlers act like they don’t trust the mark. So they finally decide to let the mark hold the envelope, but he first has to go to his bank, take out a couple of thousand, and give it to the hustlers for ‘security.’ The mark figures, what can he lose? Or maybe he’s planning to just vanish with the cash. Doesn’t matter. When he gets to a safe place and opens the envelope, he finds it’s full of blank paper.”
“I know how it works,” Carlos said impatiently. “So how do we do this without one of us leaving?”
“We exchange packages,” Cross told him. “I take the kid. A short ride. Make sure I got the real thing. You take the powder, sit in your car, make sure you got the real thing too. Fair enough?”
“How do I know you won’t just disappear? Leave me with a whole suitcase full of cut?”
“I’ll stay right here. I’ll put the baby in the car, turn around, and wait right here. You still got my money, right? I haven’t asked you for it. Make sure your powder’s good, then pay me, how’s that?”
“The baby is my trump card, hombre. Not the money. How about I give you the money and I keep the baby while I check the powder?”
“No good. You can check the powder yourself. See if the test tube turns blue. I can’t check the baby with no chemicals. And I got paid for the baby.”
“Right, I give up the baby, go back to my car. Let’s say the powder’s good. Probably is good—I know your crew doesn’t deal—what else could you do with it but sell it back to me? So I check it out, come back to give you your money, get out of the car—and you smoke me right here. You called this spot—you probably got people all around.”
“Sure,” Cross told him softly. “But if that’s all I wanted, your cash and the powder, I could’ve done it already.” He put the suitcase on the ground. Instantly, a red dot bloomed on Carlos’ white leather jacket, right over his heart. “Laser sight,” Cross said. “Anytime I wanted, see? That’s not what this is about. Lorgano didn’t hire me to hit you—he just wants the baby back.”
“The baby? He don’t care nothing about the baby. He is no kind of man. That is his own child, his own son. And all I wanted was what he owes us. What does he do? He hires you. What could you be paid for a job like this? Not the money he owes us. Much less. He is a clever man, I give him that. This way, he cannot lose. You get the baby back, he’s a little lighter in the pocket, but he still has my product and he has not paid for it. If you fail, what has he lost?”
“The baby—”
“Don’t insult me,” Carlos said. “You know I never return the baby without all the money. And you know Lorgano will not pay all the money—that’s why he hires you. So you hijack another of my shipments, go for the discount.”
“Nobody got hurt,” Cross said.
“Sure. Everyone knows your crew. I don’t have no rookies working for me. They seen your people—you didn’t make no secret of it. Like you could disguise Rhino and Princess anyway—Christ! They got the drop on my people. What was they gonna do then, shoot it out? And now I not only don’t get my money for the first shipment, I have to pay you for the second one.”
“That happens sometimes.” Cross shrugged.
“You know what this cost me, hombre? You think putting a woman inside his house to steal the baby was cheap? I had to go through Victor himself to set it up. A hundred grand just for that, for the plan and the woman. Another two and a half for you, tonight. This is a business. Business is supposed to make a profit. I never should have dealt with that slime Lorgano—he has no honor.”
“Here’s the way we’ll do it,” Cross said, unperturbed. “Give me the kid. Take the suitcase. Get in your car. Drive off, anywhere you want. Look through it, check it out, do whatever you need to do. When you know it’s pure, come back here with my money.”
“This is the real baby,” Carlos said. “And, you know what, I believe you got the real powder there too. So why should I come back with your cash?”
“You shouldn’t have snatched the baby,” Cross said quietly. “You’re right—he don’t give a damn about the kid. Only his wife does, and she don’t count. He was trying for a discount, just like you said. He didn’t set specs on how I should get the kid back, probably thought he was buying a hit for what he paid me. What you should have done, you should have snatched him. Then you’d find out where your product is—and his money too.”
“Bueno! You tell me all this now. Besides, there’s no way we get close enough to snatch him. It would be a suicide run. And my crew, it is all familia, you understand? Not soldiers I can just throw into the jungle, don’t give a rat’s ass if they come back. You remember how that was, Cross?”
“I remember,” Cross said. “We don’t work for that country anymore, you and me. Go look at your powder. Come back with my money. And then I’ll solve your problem for you.”
“How you do that, hombre?”
“While you’re checking out that powder, make a call. Call Victor. And ask him where he found the woman to put inside Lorgano’s house.”
Carlos nodded, as if thinking it through for himself. “Okay, I get it—this was you from the beginning, right? So what? No way you get another girl next to him—he’ll never go for that twice.”
“In a couple of minutes,” Cross said, soft-voiced, “you’ll have the powder. Me, I’ll have the baby. I’m not going into his compound. He could decide the best way to clean the slate is to whack me soon as he has the kid. I’m going to show the baby to his wife, not to him. And then I’m going to hold the baby. So Lorgano, he’ll have to meet me somewhere. Someplace open—like right here, understand?”
“Sí. How much?”
“He’s got, what, three million of your money? Plus whatever this all cost you. What’s it worth to get your hands on him?”
“You tell me, hombre.”
“You already owe me a quarter-mil, right? Double it, and he’s yours. COD.”
“It sounds good, Cross. Too good. In fact, it does not sound like you at all. Lorgano, he will know who set him up. And they still have plenty of firepower.”
“Yeah, I know. His crew, it’s not like yours. They’re all mercs. They work for the money. They wouldn’t do anything just for revenge. It would just be Lorgano.”
“So? As soon as we let him go, he could just hire some new . . .”
“You remember a kid named Juan? He was with your crew, wasn’t he? Until he got smoked doing a delivery. You lost that shipment too, right?”
“Yes, Juanito was my sister’s oldest son. But that was—”
“That was Lorgano,” Cross said. “He had the kid hit. Another shipment he didn’t pay for.”
Carlos’ face shifted imperceptibly, then went stony. He handed the baby to Cross. “It’s a contract,” he said. “COD.”
for Ralph Compton Pino
TWO-WAY RADIO
The florid-faced man stared intently at the small aluminum cube. It sat pure and pristine on the mottled green surface of a crude desk fashioned from an old wood door laid carelessly across a pair of sawhorses. “You’re sure it’ll work?” he asked, eyeing it warily. He made no move to reach out and touch it.
“It’s a half-pound of pure C4,” the shadowy man on the other side of the desk assured him. “There’ll be nothing left of the car. Guaranteed.”
“I got to be sure,” the florid-faced man said. “Myra’s a vicious damn bitch. I won’t get more than one chance.”
“You won’t need more than one.”
“I’m not worried about it being traced back to me. Running a porno business, it isn’t like it used to be. The Mob wants to control everything now, even little operators like me and Myra. The cops, they’ll figure we didn’t pay off and . . .”
“Sure,” the shadowy man said, not interested.
“Cross. I been hearing about you for years. I didn’t even know you was real until I reached out. They say you never miss.”
The shadowy man lit a cigarette, not responding.
“Is that right?” the florid-faced man asked, a slightly more insistent tone in his reedy voice. “That you never miss?”
“You know anybody saying different?”
“No. I didn’t mean . . . ah, never mind. How does it work?”
“Right now, it’s as harmless as a paperweight,” the shadowy man said, reaching out for the aluminum cube. A bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his hand gleamed faintly in the dim light. The man called Cross tossed the aluminum cube into the air, caught it on the way down. “The receiver’s inside. All you need is the transmitter,” he said, taking a black plastic box about the size of a pack of cigarettes from inside his coat. He held the transmitter up so the florid-faced man could see it.
“Yeah,” the man said, wiping his brow with a white handkerchief. “It doesn’t matter where I put it?”
“No. Trunk of the car’s fine. Or under the dash. In the back seat. Inside a package. The whole car’s going anyway. Just be sure you’re at least a block or so away—there’s going to be shrapnel.”
“That’s no problem. We got our . . . studio out on a farm. Almost a hundred acres. It’ll go off when she’s still on the property. But . . .”
“What?”
“This is like a radio thing, right? How do I know some idiot with a cordless phone won’t set it off while I’m driving out to the place?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Cross said. “This is a two-way radio. See these buttons? The green one arms it, the red one sets it off. Unless you press the green button, it can’t be activated.”
“I guess that’s it, then,” the florid-faced man said, pocketing the aluminum cube and the transmitter and getting to his feet.
“Give me the money,” Cross said quietly.
It was almost forty-five minutes before the cellular phone rang. Cross picked it up without speaking.
“He just turned onto the dirt road,” a woman’s voice said. “I can see his car from the attic.”
From his pocket, Cross took the twin to the transmitter he had given the florid-faced man. He pushed the green button. “Bring the money tomorrow,” he said. And pushed the red button.
for Molly and Brenna
NOVELLA
EVERYBODY PAYS
“Fong swears he’s a snakehead, boss,” the pudgy man said. The small back room was filled to capacity, but his voice was aimed only at the man seated behind a makeshift desk—a wooden door placed over a pair of sawhorses.
The man behind the desk took the third drag of his cigarette and snubbed it out in an inverted hubcap already filled to the brim with butts, exposing the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand. He was so still within himself that the movement seemed ghostlike.
“What’s a snakehead?” one of the other men asked. He was so grotesquely overmuscled that he looked like a comic-book figure. His shaved head and the miniature wrecking ball dangling on a chain from one ear didn’t detract from the image. His voice was that of a fascinated child.
“A smuggler, Princess,” a man in the farthest corner of the room answered. That man was so enormous he appeared to be part of the wall itself, dwarfing even the massive bodybuilder by several inches and a hundred pounds. His voice was a high-pitched squeak, the result of drain cleaner forced down his throat when he was a teenager. “Only they smuggle people, not stuff, understand?”
“You mean like Mexicans across the border?”
“Yes,” the huge man said, approvingly.
“I did good, right, Rhino?” the bodybuilder asked.
“It was very smart of you to figure that out,” the huge man said, his tone indicating he’d doled out enough praise for one conversation.
“That ain’t no cargo worth hijacking,” a razor-thin black man in an ankle-length leather coat spoke up. “What’s all this bullshit about, Cross?”
The man behind the desk closed his eyes. “I don’t know what it’s about,” he said softly. “Buddha brought it in—it’s on him to say where the money is.”
The slim black man turned to the pudgy man. “Well?”
“Look, Ace, it’s just a job, all right? I don’t know anything more about it. This guy, he says he’s bringing in some people; he wants cover, in case someone tipped the INS. That’s what he told So Long. I asked Fong, and Fong said, yeah, the guy’s a snakehead all right. Does it all the time. But he always worked the coast before. This time he told So Long he’s bringing them over from Canada on one of those ore barges.”
“Across Lake Michigan?” Ace sneered.
“That’s what he said,” Buddha replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“And he’s offering . . . what?” Rhino asked.
“A hundred. Half up front, half when the cargo’s gone.”
“You speak any Chinese?” Cross asked Buddha.
“Boss, there ain’t no such thing as ‘Chinese.’ Jesus. They got about a million different dialects, depending on where they’re from. I mean, I can get by a little, maybe, but . . .”
“It stinks,” Cross said. “How much could each of the people he brings over be worth?”
“Thirty, even forty,” Buddha told him. “So Long says they’d have to work it off here, but their people’d still have to front a nice piece of it before they took off, too. All their relatives chip in. If the snakehead’s got a full boat, it could be a few dozen head, that’d be huge, chief. A big score.”
“I’m sure So Long knows what’s she’s talking about,” Cross said mildly. “Your wife—”
“So Long knows money,” Buddha said defensively. “You gotta give her that much.”
“Fuck, even I give her that much,” Ace acknowledged.
Rhino grunted assent.
“I’m not saying she’s not right about what the cargo’s worth,” Cross said, voice still soft and mild. “But it’s not worth that to us, right?”
“No, chief. Just the—”
“Yeah,” Cross interrupted. “Just the thing to make us believe that it would be worth a hundred large for cover fire.”
“You don’t think—?”
“One,” Cross said, holding up a finger, “a hundred grand isn’t enough to get us in a firefight with the feds. Two, if we go for it, somebody’s going to know where all of us are at the same time.”
“Why would this snakehead want to ambush us?” Buddha asked.
“Who knows? Who even knows if it’s him that wants to do it? Plenty do, right? Maybe he’s worried some other tiger crew is looking to hijack hi
s cargo. Or maybe some of the people he brought across didn’t make it one time, and somebody wants payback. Maybe, maybe, maybe . . . Too many ‘maybe’s for us.”
“So we pass?” Buddha asked, an undercurrent of disappointment in his tone. The shrewish So Long, his wife of many carping years, wouldn’t be happy at a missed opportunity for cash.
“Buddha, ask him for the drop-off point. Tell him we need at least seventy-two hours to get dug in. See if he’ll go for that.”
“But boss, he probably don’t even know. I mean, they’ll be in radio contact with the barge, right? They’ll have to send a smaller boat out, offload the cargo. No way they’re gonna bring an ore barge right up to Lake Shore Drive, come on!”
“So how would he get this cover fire he says he wants to buy?”
“Oh. Yeah, well, he explained that to So Long. See, all he needs is a phone number. Cell phone. When he knows exactly where they’re coming in, he calls and we can come to the drop point.”
“It’s an ambush,” Cross said flatly. “Now we need to find out who’s setting it up. Tell So Long to tell this snakehead he’s got himself a deal.”
“Are you sure?” the immaculately dressed man demanded imperiously from the back of the discreetly dark, long-wheelbase Rolls-Royce.
“These are the precise directions I was given, sir,” the chauffeur replied.
“I pay good money for . . . Oh, never mind. Just . . . go ahead.”
“Yes, sir.”
A few more turns and the limo was facing a prairie. A prairie populated with junk beneath even the lowest scavenger’s contempt: skeletons of abandoned cars, rotted furniture beyond salvage, broken chunks of concrete, rusting razor wire, pieces of discarded appliances. The sweep of the car’s headlights reflected tiny dots of light at various points in the rubble. Pairs of dots, the chauffeur noted.
A six-story building stood alone some distance back from the street, the sole survivor of what had been a connected string of flats. The other buildings had long since fallen to a builder’s wrecking ball. Bankruptcy had canceled the plans for “developing” an area even the most optimistic yuppie pioneer would refuse to visit in broad daylight, much less inhabit.
Everybody Pays Page 21
