“THIS IS a strange place,” the soberly dressed man said, looking out the side window of his personal car, a black BMW 7 Series, the long-wheelbase model. His most trusted lieutenant was in the front passenger seat, the wheelman was a high-ranker who normally wouldn’t be playing limo-driver, but he never questioned the instructions he’d been given, considering who delivered them.
“Every place is strange if you don’t know it,” Cross replied from his position behind the driver.
“True. But why here?”
“So you can see the film wasn’t faked. There’s the semi-trailer, just ahead.”
“You are the one called ‘Cross,’ ” the older man said, pointedly looking at the tattoo on the back of the other’s hand. “You work for money. How do you make money showing me that I have been betrayed? Why give me such a warning? How do you profit from this?”
“The pest control guy who comes to your house every month tells you there’s rats in your cellar. You’re not sure how they got in there, but you know how rats breed. So you tell him …?”
“To exterminate them, yes. But this is something I can—”
“Handle yourself? Maybe. But you couldn’t stop until you got all the way up to Costanza. Why call for a sit-down over that? And how could you be sure he wouldn’t get tipped?”
“How can I be sure that you have not gone to some elaborate ruse to get me out here? Costanza does not have my position—which I have known for some time he wants for himself—but he has money.”
“If Costanza paid me to do that job, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Hey, pal! That’s Don Citelli himself you’re talking to. You think you could—?”
The older man made a gesture to silence his lieutenant.
“You are correct. I would not be here. But not in the sense you mean. I would not be here unless I believed you wanted to talk, as you said on the phone. You may be armed. Or perhaps not. But the agreement was that I could pick you up at any place I chose. And that you would get in my car. So I am here. Not only because I believe you want to be paid, but because you have analyzed the opportunity Costanza’s men brought to you.”
“And because I can do something you can’t.”
“Yes?”
“I can take out Costanza in such a way that it would never be connected to you.”
“How?”
“Trade secret.”
“I should trust you, then?”
“Why would you not? You’ve asked around. Or maybe you already knew that if I take money for a job, that job gets done. Always.”
“How much money are you talking about, here?”
Cross held up one finger.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I’m always serious. How many times do you buy something that comes with a lifetime warranty?”
“You have an … unusual way of putting things. But that is far too much money for—”
“For total pest control. And don’t waste any more of your time. If you don’t want to pay the price, just say so, and we’re done.”
“You are a man who shows respect. I know you smoke. Yet when you step into another man’s car, your nose tells you that no smoking is done in it. You could ask if I minded, but you don’t do that. Instead, you don’t smoke.”
“This isn’t a movie,” Cross said, his voice devoid of inflection. “Say ‘yes’ or say ‘no,’ and I’ll respect your decision. Either way.”
“Half before, half after.”
“I can live with that. But you sure you can?”
“What?”
“You take the deal, then Costanza’s going to go. You won’t know where, or how. But it will look like a personal thing, not business. If you’re okay with anyone connected to you walking around with five hundred large, that’s up to you. But anyone you trust that much, you sure you want to risk someone keeping an eye on him? Anyone seen with me, right after your enemy gets himself killed, that could make suspicious people certain their suspicions were justified.”
“Would you mind stepping out of the car for just a few moments? You can smoke your cigarette, and I can confer with my people.”
Cross responded by opening his door, stepping out, and closing it very gently—he knew that the BMW’s door would finish the job on its own. He walked around the front of the car, giving all inside a view of him through the windshield as he strolled across the chopped-up concrete. Then he leaned back against a short stretch of chain link and lit a cigarette.
“We’re here,” a voice whispered behind him.
“You get better all the time,” Cross said, dragging on his cigarette so that even someone watching closely would not see his lips move. “I caught a tiny little movement—gold flash, maybe?—but nobody would even guess this place was occupied.”
“That was Rico. New guy. Last time he’ll ever wear that stupid chain.”
“Just explain that I saw it, Condor. No more, got it?”
“Got it.”
Cross had just snapped his still-burning cigarette away after the third drag when the front passenger window slid down.
“Okay, come on back,” the lieutenant said.
In the back seat, the older man said, “You are as people say. My … friend in the front seat, he talks as if he is giving you orders, but you take no offense. Others might.”
“Uh-huh,” Cross said, his mind flashing on So Long’s world-view of all men doing some kind of “measuring.”
“We will have your money, all your money, tomorrow, before noon. Where should it be—?”
“You tell me. I’ll take it from there.”
“YOU COULD probably just blow the whole place up,” said a man whose white-on-white shirt was in keeping with his suit and shoes—tasteful, and virtually screaming “custom-made.”
“You’re paying for a body. One body. You want to make sure none of the old man’s regime come after you, that’s a lot more money than we’ve been talking about.”
“Yeah. I get it. And you just got your money. So now I’m going back to what I was doing. That girl with the stripes in her hair, me and her’s gonna take a trip back to the VIP Room.”
CROSS DISAPPEARED through the door behind his triangular table. He emerged in the club’s backroom “office.”
“We already have the old man’s money locked in. And Costanza’s. Half this job’s already as good as done—Costanza’s never coming out of the VIP Room. The others, you got their routine down?”
“Yeah, boss. Only thing is, Tracker’s gotta drive, not me. This works the way it’s supposed to, it’s gotta be all OTC nines. Tracker’s better than me at long distance, but this’s gotta look like some stupid banger’s drive-by—the old man always walks down the same alley before he goes into their place, through the back way.”
“A drive-by in an alley?”
“Yep. No reason it can’t be done, we use the right car.”
“Which you have?” Cross said, knowing that Buddha would go to great lengths to avoid letting anyone but himself behind the wheel of the Shark Car.
“Right outside. The thing’s a slug, but it can run on the batteries only—won’t make a sound. Finally found some good use for that green crap.”
“How much time—?”
“We leave now, maybe a two-hour cushion.”
“Do it,” Cross said.
“YOU GOT the most perfect ass I’ve ever seen in my life,” Costanza said to Tiger. “But I’ll get around to that later. First, you gotta do me right, understand?”
“Oh, baby, I’m gonna do you perfect,” Tiger purred, licking her lips as she dropped to her knees in front of the man with deadly ambitions.
THE MORNING news—courtesy of the online issue of the Trib—was all about a “drive-by gone wrong.” Apparently, the head of the Chicago syndicate—the word “Mafia” was no longer used without “allegedly” crowding it practically off the page, and the night editor frowned on any waste of screen space—had been killed by a group of young black males driving a 1990s-
era white Oldsmobile Cutlass with oversized rims. Four men had been hit, three fatally.
Later issues made reference to the “apparent assassination” of Costanza, and the “shotgun murder” of his “under-boss,” a man known to the authorities as Dominic Tedesco. Several other as-yet-unidentified individuals were also murder victims, three of them taken out with a bomb planted under their car.
GANG WAR BACK IN CHICAGO!
… screamed the headlines the next day. The police said everything was “under investigation,” but all the reporting sources made it clear that the description provided by the sole survivor of the drive-by was not being taken seriously.
If the mob wanted to bring back the good old days, it wasn’t exactly a police priority—not a single citizen had come under fire.
“They’re too busy blasting each other to come anywhere near our zone,” Cross told the crew. “Time for Phase Two.”
“YOU STILL down with this all the way, Hector?” Cross said to a man behind the wheel of an egg-yolk-yellow ’54 Buick Century coupe that had a fortune invested in slam-to-the-weeds airbags and a sound system mounted in the trunk that could cause permanent auditory damage at fifty feet. The man was a short, thick-chested Mexican with a Zapata mustache and streaks of gray in his neatly combed jet-black hair.
“There is no choice,” the man replied. “We have our lives invested in our houses.”
Cross knew those two houses had been acquired by a lifetime of the only work available for Hector, his wife, their three sons and two daughters, and, someday soon, the many grandchildren they all seemed to be racing to produce. Both houses were typical Chicago two-flats, one purchased many years ago, the other fairly recently. Hector and his wife had patiently waited for their next-door neighbors to default on a mortgage they never could afford, and watched from behind their bedroom curtains as the family had simply walked away from the place when their frantic phone calls to the “bank” had gone straight to an answering service. The difference between “Press One” and any other recorded option was nonexistent. They all came out the same way: “Pay up!”
Even more patience was required when the house was listed as “in foreclosure,” but lenders were no longer willing to write the bogus loans that had collapsed the real-estate market … not without the government guarantees that had enabled them to take such “risks.”
But Hector had known where to call if he wanted to borrow cash. And that he was obligating himself beyond the lien on the second house if he did. As he told his gathered family: “There is no choice.”
“It’s just a scouting mission,” Cross now told him. “We need to see how they react to showing the flag.”
“There will be no shooting?”
“Not unless they fancy a slow-moving target.”
“But you do not think so, yes?”
“I do not think so,” Cross agreed, making no reference to the back seat, where Tracker and Buddha watched from their respective windows.
The low-rider rumbled past the blocks, Mexicali hip-hop accenting ground-pounding from the uncorked mufflers.
“Showing,” Buddha said.
“Got ’em.”
Five seconds later, Tracker whispered, “Showing only,” as another member of the mini-gang lifted his unbuttoned denim shirt to display the butt of a pistol in his waistband.
“¡Haga fila!” Buddha shouted out his window. “Get in line!” he translated for Tracker’s benefit. “It’s what you say when somebody threatens you—kind of telling them that you hear that kind of bullshit all the time. Spanish? Sure. But not Puerto Rican—Central American, like you’d hear in one of the spots where MS-13 is dug in deep.”
“Another run?” Hector asked when they were well past the target blocks, approaching his own neighborhood. “I promised I would return this car in three hours.”
“No, this was plenty. We want them aware they’re being checked out. And confuse them, too. That’s why Buddha yelled what he did: MS-13 don’t do drive-bys, the Latin Kings don’t speak south-of-the-border Spanish, and there’s no real low-rider culture out here … not yet. We need to move them back, but they’re not going to try going into claimed turf. And now, on their own turf, they don’t have any idea who’s staking a claim.”
“They are like toothpaste in a tube, now, Cross. So where could they go?”
“Away,” is all Cross said. And all the result he wanted.
“HAD TO snap off a couple,” Ace reported to the assembled crew. “The bangers around here, they don’t shoot like they do in L.A.”
“What difference?” Buddha asked, genuinely curious.
“West Coast gang boys, they roll past a rival block, they just start blazing. Not looking to take anyone out—although they will do that if there’s anyone who doesn’t know enough to get down—just showing that they got heart. What they call heart, anyway.
“But on my side of town, they don’t play that. They patrol, okay? Work the borders. Another gang flashes colors, they shoot. And that’s to kill, not some spray job.”
“So it doesn’t matter,” Cross explained. “Whichever gang took fire, all they’d really know is it was some other gang.”
“They will be more alert,” Tracker said.
“Alert for what? We’re not going in any gang car, not on either side of those blocks, right?”
When no one responded, Cross handed out white sweatshirts and black hoods with computer-generated admixtures of astrological symbols stencil-sprayed between the eyeholes.
“Hey, I didn’t get one! I get one, too, don’t I?” Princess demanded.
“Just me, Tracker, and Buddha on the Latin side; Ace and whoever he wants to use on the other.”
“I got just the right boys,” Ace confirmed.
“Why can’t I go, too?” Princess demanded again.
“I can’t go, either,” Rhino told him. “We’re both too big. That’s something people might remember.”
“So what’s your excuse for me?” Tiger said, hands on hips.
“Same one,” Cross told her. “Only you’re a different kind of big.”
“Very nice.”
“It is,” Cross said, without a trace of sarcasm in his voice. “And, Princess, we’ve got a special job for you.”
“I bet,” the huge man-child sulked.
“You and Sweetie,” Cross added.
“Really?”
“Swear to Satan.”
“You hear that, Sweetie,” the hyper-muscled man said, dropping to one knee so he would speak directly into the dog’s ear.
The Akita made a chesty sound.
“See?” Princess said to Tiger. “He understands words, just like I told you.”
“I guess he does, baby.”
“You’re not thinking of—?”
“When Princess and Sweetie go, you go, too,” Cross silenced Rhino.
“Want me to put on an apron, make sure the place is nice and clean when the men come home from work?” Tiger snapped.
“You’re supposed to be in on that part, too,” Cross answered. “But if you want to put on an apron when we get back …”
“You are a pig. You might even be King of the Pigs.”
“Being honest doesn’t make me a pig.”
“That’s true—you’ve got plenty of other qualifications,” Tiger said, maintaining the distance between them in the presence of others, as she always did.
“YOU GONNA need a car?” Buddha said to Ace.
“I could use one, but only if you put it together. Otherwise, it’s easier to just snatch one over my side of town.”
“We’ll build both cars,” Cross said. “We want them to look the same, like they were part of a fleet.”
“Matching outfits,” Tiger said to Princess. “See how much fun we’re missing!”
Before Cross could again start explaining that Princess would be needed for the final stage of his plan, the Amazon stuck her tongue out at him, grabbed Princess’s arm, and walked them both out of the ro
om, the Akita at their heels.
THE PROPRIETOR of the junkyard lived in his place of business. The deep-backed booth at the front gate had a bathroom, a cot, four mismatched sets of wooden chests of drawers, a large flat-screen, and a full rack of DVDs.
When he saw the Shark Car pull in just after dark, the proprietor purposefully went back to scanning his magazine—a combination of nude, nearly nude, and provocatively dressed young women, all handling some kind of firearm.
An hour later, Cross entered the booth.
“Taking two Town Cars. And we need a few hours in your shop.”
The proprietor silently handed over a set of keys. The man with the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his hand frightened him in a way he couldn’t explain, even to himself. What’s the problem? he asked himself … not for the first time. He pays cash, never argues about the price, and he’s been taking stuff out of here for years, with none of it ever bouncing back on me. He’s even polite about it. But I heard stuff about him.…
“GOT TOWED away because they weren’t worth fixing,” Buddha said, walking an inspection tour around the two cars. “It’s not even worth swapping other engines and transmissions. This one could use a brake job, and both of them have no-tread tires and lousy shocks.”
“We don’t need them for more than—”
“They don’t run, boss. We could borrow a couple from Oscar’s garage. Black Town Cars are all he uses for that fleet of his.”
“You mean take them?”
“From the back of the lot, sure. It’s not like there’s any night watchman to worry about.”
“There’s dogs.”
“So we mist ’em, big deal.”
“We only have a few hours, Buddha.”
“No problemo, jefe.”
Rhino caught Cross’s eye, nodded his agreement.
“SAME SETUP as always,” Buddha said, as he passed the glowing sign:
ALL-STAR LIMOS THE CARS OF THE STARS!
“Oscar tries to keep them all on the road, but there wouldn’t be enough calls this time of year. Weather’s too nice, and prom season’s over. We won’t even need the mist, we do this right. The back is nothing but old chain link with some half-ass concertina running around the top. And those cameras are just sorry fakes.”
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