“You’re Cross?” the shortest man asked.
“What do you want?” a man with a bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand answered.
“Uh, Mr. Costanza has a problem he needs a little help with. He sent us to explain it to you, see if you were interested.”
“No,” the man with the tattooed hand said.
“Just like that.”
“Yeah. I know the name you dropped. Which is why you got back here at all. But nobody sends four men to deliver a message.”
“Mr. Costanza doesn’t go out much.”
“Safer that way.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m just saying, Mr. Costanza—well, you already know who he is—he wouldn’t go anywhere without us. But he thought it would show more respect if we all came, see?”
“No. He doesn’t want to talk on the phone, I get that. But I don’t make house calls.”
“How about some neutral—?”
“This is as neutral as it’s going to get. If you brought enough cash with you for my consultation fee, I’ll listen. If not, you all have a nice day.”
“How much is—?”
“Five. But for you, ten.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means you put ten grand on the table, we’ll listen,” Buddha answered.
“Yeah, I understand. But how come you doubled the price for us?”
“You didn’t make an appointment.”
“Mr. Costanza—”
“Should know better,” Buddha finished the other man’s sentence.
The shortest man didn’t want to return without any message for his boss, but all he’d collected so far was a series of clearly intentional insults. He quickly ran through his options, finally said:
“How about if we came here to make an appointment?”
“To meet with who?” Cross asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Us. I mean, the four of us.”
Cross took another drag of his cigarette, then said, “No.”
“But—”
“We aren’t going anywhere. But you are.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You’re going out. You’re not coming back. Costanza wants to meet with me, he leaves the up-front cash in the rusted-out semi that stands at the entrance to the Badlands.”
“Are you serious? The money wouldn’t last ten seconds out there.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“It ain’t your risk. I mean, if you go there to pick up your money and it’s not there, you’re gonna—what?—think Mr. Costanza never had it left there for you? That’s not right.”
“One, you’re not getting anything direct from Costanza. That’s not how it works. Whose crew you with? Dominic’s, maybe? Two, nobody will touch anything left in that semi’s trailer.”
“You’re sure?”
Cross took a last hit off his smoke and ground it out in an obsidian ashtray—a gift from a man who knew and honored his ancestors, to one who neither knew nor honored his own.
“Yeah. All I need is a video of the cash, counted out right there, put into the envelope, and then into the trailer.”
“You want us to make a movie out there?”
“I don’t care what you do, or how you do it. A lousy cell-phone camera would be enough to handle what I just said.”
“We’ll make sure Mr. Costanza gets your message.”
“Just make sure you get mine.”
“Which is?”
“Don’t come back.”
“YOU BREAK anything on him?” Cross asked Rhino.
“No. He’ll just have some bruises.”
“When the rest of them see those bruises, that’ll probably be the last time anyone ever takes that loudmouth’s word for anything,” Buddha said. “Nothing but gym muscles on his body, all the way to his tongue.”
“He’s not the one in charge,” Cross said.
“I know, boss. But he was probably in charge of those four. The video from the front—he was the first one to step up.”
“With his mouth, yeah. But it was the one in the blue outfit who got the job done. Costanza sent them over here, he’d use a buffer. None of those guys would be high enough. Doesn’t matter, I still know what it means.”
“What?” Rhino squeaked.
“Dominic’s tired of waiting for the old man to retire. But he can’t take him out without permission. And if he asks and doesn’t get it, he’s cooked. So he can’t be seen coming in here—there’d only be one reason for that.”
“He needs someone hit, how hard could that be?”
“Buddha, what he needs is a plan. It’s got to look like the old man got himself done over something that’s got nothing to do with politics.”
“Politics?”
“Their politics. Even the oldest guy still in the game knows that omertà crap is only for the movies. They don’t trust anyone. Why should they? Gotti was their god, but his closest pal rolled, didn’t he? You want a deal, you always have to rat up the chain. So, if Dominic wants to pay us, it means he wants the whole thing staged. Either we come up with something that looks private—another man’s wife, that kind of thing—or we let it be known that we did it.”
“Let it be known?”
“Sure. What if, say, the old man hired us to do something—maybe hijack a load of powder—and he didn’t pay us?”
“Only half of that works for me, boss. The Italians couldn’t care less about some drug gang being ripped off, sure. No permission needed for that. But who’s gonna believe that we put in any kind of work and didn’t get paid in front?”
“Paid the money, sure. But what about the quarter-slice we had coming to us after they moved the package? Their mob would believe we’d like that deal. We don’t traffic, that’s known. So a big piece of change plus twenty-five percent of what the old man netted from selling it back to the same people we took it from, we’d take that deal. But if we never saw the last part of the payment, we’d have to drop him, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s just an example. Lots of ways it could happen. But it can’t bounce back on Dominic; that’s the big thing.”
“I don’t want to do that,” Rhino said softly.
“That?”
“All these complicated things, all at the same time. All we could get would be more money.”
“I’m not crazy about another war myself,” Buddha added.
“There’s not going to be any war,” Cross assured both men. “By the way, where’s Princess?”
“He said he was going to do something with Tiger.”
“Shopping.”
“Probably,” Rhino said, shrugging his shoulders. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Then where’s that dog?” Buddha asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“Sweetie? He goes everywhere with Princess.”
“What are they gonna do, leave him in the car while they go into stores and stuff?”
“What’s your problem, Buddha?”
“Me? I got no problem. I was just curious, is all.”
“Princess trains him all the time. That is one exceptionally intelligent animal. I looked up some stuff for Princess, and Sweetie was learning it pretty much as fast as I handed it over. If Princess tells him to stay in the car, that’s what he’ll do.”
“Tiger lets him in the back of her car, that’s her business,” Cross said.
“Ah, she’d do anything that—”
“Walk soft,” Cross cut him off, tuning into Rhino’s frequency as he had from the very beginning, when they were both way too young to vote … all the way back to when Rhino weighed less than three hundred pounds.
“All I—”
“Buddha, use your head just once, okay? Can you think of a better way to keep your car from being stolen if you had to leave it in some parking garage for hours?”
“Now, that’s the damn truth,” the pudgy man said, clearly not offended. “Some of those parking-gar
age guys, they like to play with the cars. Check them out for money in the glove box, even play stunt driver, they get the chance. Tiger wouldn’t even have to lock it. Just roll down the back windows, probably nobody’d even park next to it.”
Cross could feel Rhino’s temperature drop. The giant was a highly intelligent man, but his protectiveness about Princess sometimes overcame logic. Even knowing that Buddha had once saved the cage fighter’s life wouldn’t necessarily register if the Shark Car’s driver let his barbed tongue cut too deep.
In the silence, all three heard the back door open.
PRINCESS ANNOUNCED his presence with, “Wait till you see what we got!” Even his prodigious strength was barely enough to carry the pile of boxes, ranging in size from micro to massive.
“You didn’t get anything for yourself?” Cross asked Tiger, picturing a tall, wasp-waisted woman with tiger-striped hair and a body completely covered in white spandex prancing into a Michigan Avenue ultra-emporium with an outrageously muscled man who sported a turquoise tank top over fuchsia parachute pants. The man’s eyeliner was midnight blue, his shaved head gleamed from a fresh application of moisturizer, and his makeup looked like the work of a professional. Tiger’s black spike heels had orange soles; Princess somehow managed to make steel-toed combat boots work with his outfit.
“Of course I did. But Princess wouldn’t let me—”
“That’s good manners, right, Rhino?” the bodybuilder said. “Like you said: open the door for a lady, don’t let her carry her own packages, same thing, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Rhino squeaked.
“Damn!” Buddha said, impressed in spite of himself. “The two of you could out-spend So Long with one credit card tied behind your backs.”
“Hey! These were all bargains,” Tiger defended herself.
“Yeah? What was the total?”
“How would I know? It’s not like I’m expecting a credit-card statement.”
“Princess, you didn’t use one of those cards we keep here, did you?”
“I wouldn’t do that, Rhino. I know what those are for. I just gave the ladies cash.”
“Ladies?”
“The ones who waited on us. Well, on Tiger, mostly—she picked all this out.”
“How much did you—?”
“I still have money left,” Princess interrupted, already on the defensive.
“Sure,” Rhino said, dialing his voice to calm-down mode. “Don’t worry about it.”
“And you know what else? I got Tiger a present. A surprise. I was saving it for your birthday,” Princess told the Amazon. “But I didn’t know exactly when that was, and … okay, well, anyway, here it is,” he said, handing over a substantial-looking package wrapped so tightly in blazing blue fiber that it would take a skillful hand with a box cutter to open it.
Tiger looked at the package, then took it in both hands. “This is just beautiful, baby. I hate to even cut into it.”
“Oh, that’s all right. Buddha has a lot of it. For wrapping up the car when he wants to change colors.”
“You used my …” Buddha’s voice trailed off as he realized he was talking to himself.
“Open it! Open it!”
Tiger pulled one of her throwing daggers, gently worked the point under one corner, and slowly peeled the “skin” from the box. Then she carefully removed a heavy carton, opened that, moved aside a wadding of bubble wrap, and found the biggest semi-auto she’d ever seen. The five-pound pistol was a glistening gold color … and the entire barrel was done in tiger stripes.
“It’s—”
“It’s a goddamn Desert Eagle,” Buddha said, holding his head as if a migraine were imminent. “Fifty-caliber, seven-round magazine … probably glows in the dark.”
“That’s titanium gold,” Princess crowed. “They just got them in.”
“Where’s she supposed to carry that … thing?” Buddha asked sarcastically. “No way Tiger’s gonna wear a shoulder harness. By the time she got past those—”
“I love it,” Tiger told Princess, eyeing Buddha like a vulture watching a carcass, the sooner or later in her gaze unmistakable. “It’s like this … sculpture. I can keep it on the wall, in my living room.” Even in her spiked boots, she had to tug on Princess’s hand to pull him down close enough for her to plant a smacky kiss on his cheek.
“I knew you’d like it!” the monster crowed. “See, I can shop, too!”
“Is it okay if we get back to business?” Buddha said, his voice a model of politeness. Which deceived no one in the room except the happy giant.
“WE’LL WORK it the way we always do,” Cross told the others, now including Tracker, who had entered soundlessly. He was crouched next to the Akita, whispering in some language none of the others recognized. The Akita responded by lying down. Tracker scratched the beast behind one ear. Princess glowed with pride—all his hard work spent on socializing with Sweetie was clearly on display.
“We get paid by both of them? How are we going to sell that one, boss?”
“I’ll handle the conversations. We need two shooters, which we’ve got, one distraction”—nodding his head in Tiger’s direction—“and maybe some muscle … I’m not sure about that part, yet.”
“Who am I supposed to distract?” Tiger said, midway between happy at being included and annoyed with her assigned role.
“Costanza. At the Double-X.”
“You want me to dance every night until he shows up? You must be out of your—”
“We’ll know when he’s coming.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Give it a rest, okay?”
Tiger sat down on the crate that the ever-gentlemanly Rhino had quickly dusted off for her. She crossed her legs and did her best to look slightly insulted. On Tiger, it looked more like a threat. Especially as she made a point of rewrapping the Velcro holster that held a pair of narrow throwing daggers around her muscular right thigh.
“Costanza can’t be seen coming here. And he never knows who’s watching—all those guys eat paranoia for breakfast. But he’ll come to the Double-X. Maybe alone, maybe with one or two of his crew leaders. That’s why I guessed that the ones we just talked to are in Dominic’s crew—he’s the closest to Costanza.”
“That’s when I—?”
“That’s only if he doesn’t come alone.”
“Just lay it out, boss,” Buddha said. “None of us are getting it so far.”
“If you all can just be quiet for a few minutes, I will.”
“YOU ARE certain?” a soberly dressed man in his sixties asked. His voice was just above a whisper, despite the total sweep for bugs performed every twelve hours by well-paid experts. In addition, noise-cancellation software was permanently programmed into the track which ran in an endless loop through the Bose CD player, placed between the two men on a face-level shelf.
“There are no other men that size in Chicago. Maybe in the world. And he talked in that squeaky voice he’s supposed to have. And the tapes he gave me, I had our people look at them—they’re not faked.”
“How did he find you?”
“That I don’t know. My gumare lives way out in Oak Park. No way anyone could have followed me, not in this city. I’ve been visiting her for a long time. Nobody knows, I’m sure.”
“So …?”
“So it’s three-something in the morning. I’m walking to my car—not my car, the one I borrowed, just in case the feds are tracking my plates—when this … thing snatches me from behind. Grabs the back of my neck like it was a suitcase handle and throws me into a car. The car takes off like it was some kind of moving cloud—I couldn’t hear the engine, and it didn’t even bounce driving over those lousy streets around there.”
“That is their car.”
“Whose car?”
“Never mind. What happened next?”
“I never even thought about reaching for my hardware. Hell, I think bullets would have bounced off that monster, anyway.
Then some guy in the front seat says he wants to make sure something gets to you, and I was the only man for that job. He hands me this package. The car comes to a stop. The back door opens by itself. He says, ‘Out,’ and you know the rest.”
“You acted correctly. There are no options with those people.”
“I don’t know who—”
“Describe what you did after you returned to this place,” the soberly dressed man instructed his underling. “Step-by-step.”
“I came in downstairs. I took the package to the back. I had one of the guys cut it open. Carefully. For all I knew, it was a bomb or something, and I wasn’t going to just hand it to you because some weirdos told me to—I don’t answer to them.
“But inside was just these tapes. DVDs, I mean. I watched them, one by one, in the same order they were numbered. Okay, first I see four of Dominic’s crew going into some building that looks like a concrete block. It’s in a junkyard, and there’s ‘71’ spray-painted on it in red. Then they’re talking to some old man behind a desk. Now they’re in some room, talking to a guy with a big bull’s-eye tattoo on—”
“The back of his right hand.”
“Yeah! And they’re saying that Costanza wants to meet with this guy about a job. Then it goes black. Next, it shows one of them—I don’t know their names; they’re not made guys, not if they’re still in Dominic’s crew—putting money into an envelope, and then putting the envelope itself inside some abandoned trailer. From a semi, but I couldn’t see if there was a cab in front of it. That’s it, except for the note.”
“Yes. A very polite note: ‘It is better to prevent a problem than to fix one.’ ”
“So Costanza’s got to go?”
“Not yet. First, I have to speak with the man who wrote this note.”
“You know who he is?”
“Yes. He is a man you can hire, a man with a crew of his own.”
“Hire for what?”
“Anything,” the older man said.
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