“So he’s KOS?” a tall, skinny black youth asked.
“No! Are you crazy? I’m just saying, Cross, he always gets word out to us. So we know he’s coming. See that little lamp over there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I see it, but so what? Damn thing don’t work, anyway.”
“Someone’s always in this room,” Condor said, patiently. “Not sleeping, on guard. They see that light go on, they pass word down the line.”
“So how’s this Buddha guy gonna fool us if we see him coming?”
Condor took a deep breath, then let it out slow. A demonstration that he was being really patient. “Buddha never gets out of the car, okay? He’s the driver. So, if that Shark Car pulls up and Buddha does get out, something’s wrong.”
“And we do … what, then?”
“We don’t do nothing,” Condor snapped at the new member. “We wait. But we don’t move. We don’t talk. We don’t make a sound. If Buddha’s got something to say to us, he’ll find a way to say it.”
TRACKER SLID into the room behind Buddha, as soundless as a shadow flowing into a corner.
“There’s nothing out there, boss,” Buddha said. “Not on either side. Few baby-bangers, Latino to the north, Afro to the south. They’re not moving on each other, so they don’t need a pass-through.”
“Neutral turf?”
“Nah. They ain’t even that far advanced. Can’t even throw their sign at a passing car without getting their fingers tangled.”
“That all they threw?” Ace said.
“Yep.”
“Maybe they didn’t pick up on you,” Cross said. “It’s hard to see our machine at night, specially with all the streetlights busted.”
“Could be they saw it coming. Even heard it. But it ain’t got that right sound. That old-school rumble-coming one,” Ace said.
“They are not coming for one another,” Tracker said.
“How do you know that?” Tiger asked him, genuinely interested.
“We had to go several blocks past the one we … care about before there was even a sign of them. On both sides. That means it’s not a neutral zone—it’s like when two tribes are separated by a river too wide for them to see across. They may know an enemy is somewhere on the other side, but they have no way to get across. And if they try and fail, the river itself becomes their enemy.”
“YOU TELL So Long yet?” Cross asked Buddha when they were alone.
“Tell her what?”
“That one of the houses is already sold. You’ve had a couple of hours. Tiger’s still playing around on the damn stage, and we’ve got to get her home.”
“Oh. Well, about that …”
“About what?”
“Well, So Long, she says the plan wasn’t to take cash. She figured on making more out of the mortgages, I guess. You know, both ends.”
“Yeah. And …?”
“And she don’t trust you, brother. The way she scans it, you put up the cash ’cause you already have other buyers lined up. For more gelt, see?”
“No, I don’t see. The plan was to off-load each house for five, maybe a little more. She was supposed to take care of all of that. We just cut down her task. Squeezing extra points off the mortgages, that would be greedy and stupid. So Long’s only half of that. We couldn’t let her do it, anyway. Not with Ace’s family moving into one of them.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Buddha, come on, brother. You think I trust her?”
“No.”
“You think she thinks I trust her?”
“Oh, hell, no.”
“She was going to jack us on five sales. We just cut her down to four. That’s what she sees happening.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“She told us the deal. We took it. The deal was to buy the whole package for three-fifty and sell for a minimum of two point five, total. I didn’t change that deal. And she’s not gonna do it, either.”
“What do we want one of those houses for? We already got—”
“I already told you. We don’t want it. Ace wants it. And he’s already put down the cash.”
“Pretty risky,” Buddha mused aloud.
“Buying the house?”
“Marking the house. Over where he was cribbed, wasn’t a banger in this whole town insane enough to knock on that door. Word is out. Way out. Been that way since … a long, long time, boss.”
“That crib’s in the projects. What’s left of them, anyway. This house, it’s in a nice neighborhood.”
“That block? Since when?”
“Since we started our own Urban Renewal project.”
“Which we did when we made the deal, right?”
“Right.”
“So Long’s never going to stop giving me grief on this.”
“Oh, that’s just the way girls play.” Tiger’s voice, coming a fraction ahead of her body as she glided into the room. If she was wearing a costume, it was invisible.
“You want to get dressed, so we can roll?” Cross snapped.
“You’re no fun. You want me to get dressed, Buddha?”
“Hell, yes! If I have to look at you for another ten seconds, So Long’s gonna know.”
A WEEK passed before the crew met at Red 71.
“You want to get the place all fixed up before Sharyn and your kids move in? Or …?”
“You ever live with a woman, Cross? In your whole life?” Tiger said, hands on hips.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Sharyn’s going to have her own taste. And she doesn’t want to be running around like a lunatic checking on workmen, either. I’ll give you ten-to-one she wants to get in the new place first, and get to the decorating later.”
“Buddha could probably fit them all in one trip.”
“How many you talking about?” Buddha asked Ace.
“Got two in college, three in the house. So, five, total.”
“How does your wife plus three equal five?”
“You forget me, bro?”
“Yeah. Okay. Sure, that’d work. And—what?—you get the Maori Maulers to do the moving.”
“Too many trips,” Ace vetoed.
“So we get a big van, what’s the problem?”
“Problem is, they got to go up and down a lot of stairs, a lot of times.”
“Who’s gonna bother those guys?”
“Some fool,” Ace said, as if that explained everything any reasonable person could ask.
“Me, too!” Princess jumped up. “I can carry a lot of stuff.”
“All right,” said Rhino, before Princess could start pleading.
“I’d better go, too,” Tiger said.
“You? What for?”
Tiger regarded Ace for a long moment before she said, “To make sure none of these ham-fisted males drop anything, or scratch it up, or …”
“I get it,” Ace said, holding up his hands in an “I give up!” gesture. “And I thank you for it.”
“Plus, I’ve got a real fine antenna for fools,” Tiger acknowledged Ace’s gesture.
“Damn, girl. I just bet you do!”
“ALL BUT one of the houses already got buyers,” Buddha said. “All they need is a mortgage commitment, and So Long’s got that part wrapped.”
Everyone looked up. No one was all that interested.
“And the other’s going to closing.”
Seeing the flat facial expressions, Buddha realized the next move was his. Only Buddha never made a next move.
“So what’s our next move, chief?” he asked Cross.
“Yellow to Orange.”
“Like those dumbass ‘terrorist’ alerts?”
“Yep. Once we turn the baby gang’s turf into a Red Zone, the curtain’ll drop into place. And stay there.”
“EXACTLY AS I tell you, yes?”
“You were right, no question,” Cross answered So Long. “You caught East Garfield Park on the come. Now all kinds of people are talking investment schemes in th
e same neighborhood.”
“The real estate people are very stupid. And very impatient, too. They say everything is location. But location, that means nothing. You know why? Because men are always the same, no matter where they ‘locate.’ They are always, how you say, ‘measuring,’ maybe? Who has the biggest—”
“Yeah?” Cross said, clearly not interested, speaking even as his mind replayed a movie. An old movie, always carrying the same message:
Muñoz held his already bloodied machete in both hands. He watched Cross approach, breathed deeply, and flung the machete into the wooden floor, where it quivered as if in its own death throes.
“You always wanted to know, didn’t you, Cross? Any coward can fight with weapons. Only a real man fights with nothing more than his own hands. And now we see, yes?” Muñoz snarled, as his entire body flowed into a hand-combat crouch.
“No,” Cross answered, pulling the trigger of his .45. The heavy slug took Muñoz in the stomach, knocking him to his knees.
Standing over Muñoz, who was writhing on the floor in horrific pain but still clawing at his sworn enemy with his hands, Cross carefully emptied the magazine of his .45 into the dying man’s skull.
“YOU KNOW what I mean, Cross. Only the words they use change. Like they are using different rulers.”
“Sure,” he answered, hoping his one-word responses would eventually give So Long the message. He exchanged a quick glance with Buddha, who shrugged his shoulders in a “Lots of luck!” gesture.
“Men come in off the ore boats, they go to a bar and boast about all the girls they had on the other side of the lake. Makes them big, see? And men from places where they wear suits to work, they always want to know who has the biggest FICO score.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The money …”
“We had a deal, So Long.”
“Yes. Good deal for you, right?”
“How’s that matter?”
“Matters to me because we could do this again. Maybe many times. But, first, you have to make that block safe. Like you promised,” she reminded the man who never negotiated.
“It’s coming,” Buddha said, stepping in before Cross said something wrong. When it comes to So Long, the boss writes the checks, but I’m the one who has to make good on them.
“Soon?”
“Drop me off at the next corner,” Cross told Buddha.
“WHY CAN’T I play, too?”
“We need a gang, Tiger. An anonymous gang. You … stand out too much.”
“A fight’s a fight.”
“There isn’t going to be a fight. We’re building a firebreak, that’s all.”
“So you want a bunch of guys who look like you?”
“Meaning …?”
“Nobody remembers your face, Cross. They remember a tattoo on your hand. Which you change anytime you want. I don’t know how you got that tiny little blue thing that shows up here,” she said, tapping a long fingernail on the orbital bone under the urban mercenary’s right eye, “or how you make it show up and then go away, but it’s the same kind of trick.”
“I still don’t see—”
“An ‘anonymous’ gang? With Ace and Tracker and Buddha? What are you going to call it, the Deadly Diversity?”
“Nobody’s going to see—”
“Rhino’s too big to forget. And nobody forgets Princess.”
“Don’t worry about it. I got a plan.”
“Some plan. The only part I’ve heard so far is no women allowed.”
“You’re giving me a headache, Tiger.”
“Now, that I could fix,” she said, standing up and holding out her hand.
“HERE’S THE thing,” Cross told Rhino. “We never figured on Ace wanting one of the damn houses.”
“We?”
“What’s that mean?”
“You just said it yourself, Cross. If Ace hadn’t wanted one of the houses for his family, we weren’t going to do anything, were we?”
“You mean besides some street sweeping?”
“Yes. That was the deal you made with Buddha’s wife.”
“That was before I had everything checked out. Turns out that the only buffer we’d ever need for that, it’s already in place. The block So Long targeted, it was never disputed turf. Nobody’s moving on it from either side, east or west. And now that the block is filling up, the real estate people are selling a lot of stuff nearby. The people moving in now, they wouldn’t know gang territory from their Michelin Guides, so that’s one neighborhood that is going to change. No way yuppies are gonna live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have some special name. You know, like ‘Andersonville’ or ‘Bucktown.’ If it wasn’t for Ace’s family, we wouldn’t have to do a thing.”
“So we’d be screwing So Long?”
“Somebody should.”
“Cross, you’re never going to be a good role model.”
“I’ll get over it, brother. In the meantime, let’s get this ‘gang’ of ours put together.”
“IT WAS Tiger who put me on the right track,” Cross told the crew. “No way we could look like a gang, any kind of gang.”
“So what we supposed to do?” Ace said. “Walk around in sheets and hoods?”
“Yep.”
“What?!”
“You say ‘sheets and hoods,’ what’s that mean? Klansmen, right? This isn’t about race relations in Chicago, it’s about us all looking the same. Only way to do that is under some white sheets, see?”
“I’m not being no kind of—”
“It’s a disguise,” Rhino said, his squeaky voice penetrating the fog.
“Camouflage,” Tracker added.
“And now there’s no reason why I can’t—” Tiger began, before Cross held up his hand for silence.
“We’re not going to be Klansmen. That wouldn’t be scary enough for what we want. Plus, it might encourage some of those Aryan idiots to try a copycat move. That’s the last thing we need. We’re not looking for any kind of racial nonsense—what we want is terror, not territory.”
“That sounds good, boss. So we’re supposed to be—what? Arabs?”
“Come on, Buddha. You think I don’t have a plan? How’s this work for you? Remember that Zodiac Killer out on the West Coast years ago? They never caught him, right?”
“Whoever he was, he’s probably under the ground by now.”
“Sure,” Cross acknowledged. “Doesn’t matter. What made him so terrifying was that he was a random shooter. A psycho who couldn’t stand people having sex in front of him. Like that ‘Son of Sam’ maniac. That’s what terrorism is—you don’t know what’s coming, but you’re sure it’s coming back.”
“Terrorists, they hit anywhere. Maybe within a certain city or whatever. But who ever heard of terrorists who only work certain blocks?”
“What’s your point?” Cross replied to Tiger.
“You’re going to just roam around Chicago and blast people? I don’t think so.”
“We could find plenty of legit targets a few streets over.”
“Some people need killing,” Ace said.
“But we won’t have to go that far,” Cross said. “We just have to make a few dents on either side.”
“So we are going to wear sheets?”
“No. Just hoods. Like this,” Cross said, pulling out a crude drawing of a man in a white shirt, worn long and outside his pants. The man was wearing a black hood, with a white quasi-astrological sign on the forehead.
“That looks like Sweetie!” Princess was excited, but whether pleased or enraged was hard to tell.
“Sweetie is a purebred Akita,” Tracker said quietly. “But not from Japan. Only American Akitas have a black head on a white body.”
“I don’t care where he’s from,” Princess said, his voice close to breaking. “The black portion is called a ‘mask,’ ”
Tracker continued. “So it is as though your dog was sending us a message … a technique we had not considered.”
“
Yeah!” Princess exclaimed, the trace of sadness instantly erased, replaced by his back-to-normal voice of childlike enthusiasm.
If Cross was bothered by the implication that he got his plan from a dog, it didn’t show on his face.
“I DON’T like this much, boss,” Buddha complained.
“What now?”
“We got the best car for this kind of work there ever was. But now we’re all wedged into this … stupid thing.”
“It’s an Escalade, brother. Plenty of room.”
“It’s a stolen damn Escalade. So no way the owner isn’t going to report it stolen. Even with the switched plates …”
“It’s not stolen until he says it is. And he’ll never know. We just borrowed it from the Valet Parking lot. Tiger’s going to make sure the owner doesn’t leave the club before two in the morning.”
“Yeah, there’s a good choice. She’s likely to make sure the sap doesn’t leave the club at all.”
“Buddha,” Cross said, his voice only lightly tinged with impatience, “we can’t use the Shark Car. It’s too valuable to risk. This way, we have all kinds of options if the wheels come off.”
“What? Just pile out and make a run for it?”
“It’s less than half a dozen blocks, brother. You can run that far. And who’s going to chase us?”
“I still say—”
“One more block,” Tracker warned, taking up his position by the rear passenger window.
Buddha downshifted, stomped the gas pedal to the floor, then slipped the shift lever into neutral as he removed his foot from the gas and killed the headlights. Despite his protests, he had prepared the drive-by car for its mission: tires pumped up to fifty PSI to decrease rolling resistance, with a quick coat of dull matte “dust” sprayed over the wheels, and the brake lights disconnected.
The claret Escalade coasted soundlessly into the next block. It was virtually invisible—all the streetlights had long since been disabled by the moronic random gunfire of the mini-gang that believed this was a way of showing face. An absolute requirement for all genuine gangstahs such as themselves.
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