Urban Renewal

by Andrew Vachss

  “Now, me and Rhino—”

  “Will you wait a damn second?”

  “It’s okay, Princess,” Rhino assured the ridiculously overmuscled child, reaching a serving-platter-sized hand from the back seat to pat his shoulder. “We’ll do it just like we practiced. But Buddha has to turn the car around first.”

  Buddha wheeled the Shark Car in a half-circle so it was facing out. He tapped one of the four parallel lines made up of different colored LED panels. A very faint hiss accompanied the trunk as it slid open a couple of inches. Only then did the two men get out.

  Rhino grasped the handles protruding from a seven-foot-wide roll of CarbonSkin, pulled it free, raised it above his head, and snapped his wrists. The CarbonSkin—a carbon fiber product converted to a clothlike material—unfurled across the top of the car. Princess caught it at the front and gently lowered it into position.

  “Damn!” Buddha said, impressed despite his natural tendency to belittle anything concerning his beloved street beast. “It’s gone.”

  “The CarbonSkin is a light-eater,” Rhino explained. “At night, even if you hit it with a flashlight, it would look like a shadow.”

  “But what happens if I have to blast out of here?”

  “There’s a tear panel right here,” Rhino said, tapping gently. “The car will go through it like an ice pick through tissue paper. And, no, it won’t harm the finish.”

  “How many of these have we got?”

  “A couple, just in case. But if you’re not in a hurry, Princess and I can lift this one up high enough for you to back right in again.”

  “THAT MUCH?” Cross spoke into a burner cell, taken from the anti-magnetic locker in which several dozen such use-it-and-lose-it tools were stored.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to come to—?”

  “No. Just this side of the border.”

  “One hour.”

  “Yes,” said the one cop in all of Cook County who was guaranteed to lock you up if you offered him a bribe. The cop clicked off his phone—a heavy chromed job retrieved from a dope dealer’s ornate SUV—and tossed it out the window of his white Crown Vic, the most unmistakable “unmarked” in the city.

  THE SHARK CAR pulled up to the rusted-out semi-trailer resting on its axles that marked the entrance to the Badlands, then spun into a bootlegger’s turn, leaving it facing any incoming traffic.

  “How in hell can they do that?” whispered a kid whose Afro-Asian blood mix had guaranteed he’d never be adopted, despite the promises of the group home’s social worker.

  Another prisoner—which is how all the residents of that place thought of themselves—had told him where to find the Badlands, sealing a pact that they’d make the jump together.

  But when the time to make a run for it came, the kid had found himself alone. Not for the first time. He decided not to wait for a bus he knew was never coming, and he’d been a permanent resident of the No-Name Crew ever since.

  “That’s Buddha,” Condor said, using the voice of an experienced pro schooling an amateur. An amateur who’d already shown he had the guts, but was way short of the smarts he’d need to be a real asset. “He can make that monster car of theirs dance, A.B.”

  “I never saw anything like that, even in the movies.”

  “You’re never gonna, either, little brother.”

  “I shouldn’t ask?”

  “Sure. You can always ask. That’s the only way you learn. But that’s listen and learn, understand?”

  “No arguing, you’re saying?”

  “Right. Look, remember when Dino asked you where your name—‘A.B.,’ I’m talking about—where that came from?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you told him, right? You’re Asian, and you’re Black. So that would be ‘A.B.’ all by itself. But it’s also two things the AB inside the Walls hate, so it’s like a spit on them, too. Anybody ask you any more questions about your name after that?”

  “No.”

  “Because …?”

  “Because they don’t know how it is in there.”

  “ ‘They’ is right. ‘They’ ain’t me, see my point?”

  Both teens immediately stopped talking as they heard another car approach. When the Crown Vic came into view, A.B. said, “That’s a—”

  “Not here it isn’t,” Condor corrected him, in an even lower whisper.

  “Then what the—?”

  “What did I just tell you?”

  MCNAMARA SLID out of the Crown Vic as smoothly as water flowing, the movement barely visible even to the watching teens.

  The Shark Car’s passenger door hissed as Cross stepped out. As he walked around to the front, McNamara said, “Buddha.”

  “Mac” was the driver’s only response.

  Both Cross and McNamara walked a short distance in the direction of the semi. As if by mutual consent, they stopped so they were close enough to one another for a side-mouthed whispered conversation.

  “Your new dancer, she works for the feds.”

  “What?”

  “You hard of hearing now? They popped her for moving weight almost four years ago. Been running her ever since. She’s given them just enough to keep herself on the street and out of Wit Sec, but somebody high up is pulling the strings on this. They got bigger game in mind.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just me, or—?”

  “They figure, cut off the head, the snake dies.”

  “So now we’re a CCE?”

  “Yep. Continuing Criminal Enterprise—that’s RICO to the max. But that’s not her assignment. Ever since someone—more like something—turned the MCC into a slaughterhouse, they’ve been looking at you.”

  “They always—”

  “Looking hard, okay?”

  “I have to connect the dots on this?”

  “No. Whoever’s running her told your new dancer that if she got some serious info on you, she could walk. And keep walking. But if she didn’t, she was going Inside. Looking at twenty-plus.”

  Played the player, Cross thought to himself. And got him killed in the same move.

  “But she hasn’t gotten enough yet?”

  “Hasn’t got a damn thing. Remember, we’re not talking about crimes, not really. They could take you down anytime if that’s all they wanted. And there’s not exactly a lot of places to plant a wire on her when she’s working.”

  “But if I was to see her outside …?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And she was to thank me for something … even something I didn’t have anything to do with …?”

  “Bingo.”

  “That’s a hard game, bingo. Lots of numbers to cover. Lots of cards, and lots of people playing. Besides, there’s people I did work for—not in this country—that they wouldn’t want to come out.”

  “You know a lawyer named Temestra?”

  “Enough to know he knows some people.”

  “Yeah. About three years back, I got some maggot to confess to ‘inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor.’ ”

  “Nothing new for you.”

  “This is: the appellate court overturned the case. Said I had been ‘overzealous.’ You know what that sounds like.”

  “Sure.”

  “It wasn’t anything like that. What I did was allow the scumbag to smoke in a no-smoking building.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no smoking allowed in the lockup. Especially not in the interviewing rooms. I could see the guy was climbing walls, and he hadn’t lawyered up, so I just asked him if he’d like a smoke.”

  “And Temestra took on that guy’s case? And that’s what the appellate courts threw it out on?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Could he have afforded a lawyer of Temestra’s weight?”

  “Not in a hundred years.”

  “So he had something they wanted. And he’d want more than just some cash in return.”

  “That’d be my guess.”
<
br />   “Nice talking to you,” Cross said, stepping back.

  The teens—by then, at least twenty of them were scattered behind the fence—watched as the cop climbed back in his car. As soon as he left, Condor called out, in a barely audible voice, “Buddha?”

  “What?” the man behind the wheel of the Shark Car answered.

  “Can I show my crew the card trick?”

  “I only play for cash, kid.”

  “Just this once?” Condor half-pleaded.

  “Do it,” Cross said as he climbed in the passenger seat. “Give Condor some face—he’s earned it.”

  “Ace of hearts,” Buddha called out.

  Less than two minutes passed before the setup was complete. Condor had placed a playing card in an open slot in the chain link, the heart symbol facing the Shark Car. And Buddha had smoothly assembled the perfect-tolerance .177-caliber single-shot pistol, its tiny night-beaded front barrel buried inside the heavy baffling that acted as the bedding material.

  “Nobody being stupid?” he called out.

  “Not a chance,” Condor assured him, stepping up to the chain link so the playing card was about four feet to his left. “Everyone get off the side. Nobody behind the card. The shot’s gonna carry, understand?”

  No sound was heard, but the playing card flew off its perch, fluttering like a broken-winged bird.

  “Dead center!” came a muffled call out of the darkness.

  “When I tell you I know something, it means I know something.” Condor, reasserting his authority, his voice still low but on full-carry.

  The Shark Car glided off, as smoothly and deadly as its namesake.

  ARABELLA ANSWERED the sequence of taps on the door to her apartment by blindly throwing it open. She knew that Cross wouldn’t need a key to bypass the downstairs security camera, and that her towel-wrapped body wouldn’t distract him.

  But the woman who strode into the apartment was something else. In every sense of that term. Her height was exaggerated by blue stiletto heels, but her body needed no exaggeration, especially since it was wrapped in a single piece of same-shade blue spandex. But even the pair of throwing knives strapped to one muscular thigh didn’t draw Arabella’s eye from the Amazon’s thick mane of orange and black stripes.

  Tiger! ran through Arabella’s mind. So this is her, for real. She dismissed the rumors that all the stories about her were just that … stories.

  Tiger snapped her hip, slamming the door closed behind her.

  “Your roommate won’t be back for a while,” she said, smiling.

  “How … how do you know that?”

  “Those FBI debriefings, they take a lot of time.”

  “She said she was—”

  “Stop it, you silly little brat. She said her name was ‘Taylor,’ too. And her man had been beating on her so bad she just had to get away.”

  “She was lying?”

  “You just get into town, or what?”

  “But even Cross—”

  “Was what? Fooled? Then what am I doing here?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “You know a lot of things, but you’re good at keeping your eyes closed, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying. I never thought … I mean, when I came to the Double-X, I was running myself. That was almost three years ago. I heard word that if there was any safe place in Chicago for a stripper, that was it.”

  “Uh-huh. And you heard it in the Orchid Blue, right?”

  “Well … I guess so.”

  Tiger stepped to Arabella, snatched the towel off her still-damp body, and said, “You weren’t running from any man.”

  “So?” Arabella snapped back. “How is it your business who I—?”

  “Sit!” Tiger snapped at her, pointing to a leather couch.

  Without knowing exactly why, Arabella did as she’d been told.

  “Now, listen, because I’m only going to say this once. You can’t be all sugar and spice unless you get paid. And it doesn’t have to be in money.”

  “What—?”

  “Shut your mouth,” Tiger interrupted. “Unless you want it slapped. Or even if you do.”

  Arabella crossed her legs and threw the woman standing over her a little pout, running her tongue over the lower lip.

  “You can tell when a girl’s a true bi. And you already found out that this Taylor’s not, haven’t you? I know she’ll do whatever you think she should be doing, but her heart’s not in it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Arabella shook her head, as clear a “no” as she could manage without speaking.

  “You thought—what?—she’d come around?”

  Arabella answered the question the same way she had the last one.

  “But she’s kind of trapped, yeah? I mean, all her stuff’s in some storage unit—it wouldn’t fit in a little place like this. A one-bedroom, right?”

  Arabella nodded again, but this time in the affirmative.

  “One bedroom, one bed. And she even made the first move.”

  Another nod.

  “You stupid little twit. Now the federales know everything about you. Where you live, where you work, the taxes you never paid, the nose candy you keep for special occasions, whose numbers are in your phone …”

  Tears welled in Arabella’s big eyes.

  “Poor baby,” Tiger sneered. “All you wanted was to be a friend to some helpless girl whose man was beating on her, and this is the thanks you get.”

  “What should I—?”

  “You must have wanted that,” Tiger said, as the sound of her slap was still echoing. “When I want you to speak, I’ll tell you.”

  Arabella clasped her hands, looked down at her own freshly shaved triangle, and didn’t make another sound.

  “She played you like a piano. In your case, that would be a baby grand. No matter what you do now, she’s going to keep that pipeline open. You kick her out, the next knock on your door will be men with badges. You can wiggle and jiggle all you want, they’re still going to take you in. Anything happens to her, you’re going to be on the hook for it. There’s only one way out.”

  “What?” Arabella said, risking another slap. Or inviting one.

  “You’re going to die.”

  “No! I wouldn’t ever—”

  “You’re a disgrace to lipstick lesbians everywhere, you know that? You’re not really going to die, you little fool. But she is. In your cute little Mercedes. It’s going to be blown up. All they’ll find inside is what’s left of two burned-out bodies. They can play CSI until their eyes fall out, but the skeletons are going to match. Yours and hers. Size, age, all that.”

  “When is this—?”

  “She’ll be back here by around five. You’re both working the eight-to-four tonight. Just get in your car and drive over to the joint. Park where you always park. After that, you’re gone.”

  “Gone to where? I don’t have any—”

  “The ‘where’ is Alaska. And you’ll go back to being a redhead. With a surgical scar from when they took your appendix out.”

  “They’re going to cut me?”

  “It’s called plastic surgery,” Tiger told her. “The very best. When they’re done, you’ll look like you’re sixteen, even up close. You get a good ninety days to heal up, make sure everything’s just right. Then you get fifty grand. Not a penny more. Plus, transportation to Alaska. You spend three years working there, you’ll be rich. You want to come back then, that’s fine—nobody’s going to be looking for you.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Don’t I have any—?”

  “Other choices? Sure, you can decide if I leave now, or take you back to that bedroom first and show you a few tricks.”

  “EVEN LOW-GRADE morons would know they couldn’t plant someone inside our crew. Or a bug inside Red 71. So the closest they could hope to get would be a dancer inside the Double-X. What they want is a better look at us—who’s on our team, how we operate. People like them, they’re
always looking for a handle … so they can twist it.”

  “The feds?” Buddha asked, his slightly slanted eyes narrowing. “You think they’re still after that … whatever the hell it was?”

  “If it’s not going to stop, why would they?” Rhino said, his tone as reasonable as his statement.

  “It will never stop.” Tracker spoke for the first time that night. “I hired on with that federal team for my own reasons. They needed my skills—that is what they said. But now I know what they really needed was a man with a direct connection to what they were hunting.”

  “That’s why you went back to freelancing?”

  “No. I left them because they lied. They wanted a specimen, they said. Because that … thing was a threat to our race. As you said, Cross: the human race. But it came to us that it was a threat to only that part of our race that we ourselves see as the enemy. They … it … I don’t know: it is not a friend to us. But not an enemy, either.”

  “And that’s why they wanted me in,” added the man who had lived up to his name “twice over,” unaware that he was lightly brushing his fingers across a tiny scar on his right cheekbone, just below the eye. An undecipherable mark too small to see in the mirror, it only glowed when it burned.

  That symbol had been branded on his face as he and the first mixed-race army ever assembled inside a federal jail had battled together against … something. For most of the fighters, it had been a battle to the death.

  Cross never questioned anything he knew would prove to be beyond his understanding. But that very knowledge—that some things were beyond human understanding—allowed him to trust what others would call his “instincts.” So he hadn’t wasted any mind-time on why he had been spared by that … entity.

  Something had been running amok inside a federal lockup, killing at will, never leaving a trace other than eviscerated bodies. But that was only the latest series of known attacks. The same method, and the same grisly calling card, had been documented all over the globe, going back at least as long as any records had survived. All the way back to cave paintings.

  The government wasn’t looking for a way to protect others—what it wanted was this supreme weapon for itself. Certain they could replicate anything they could study, the government-sponsored team had hired Cross to capture a “specimen.” Their offer went far beyond money. Or threats. It was the promise of a Get Out of Jail Free card for his crew that had finally persuaded the master plotter to sign on.