Blackjack (32 page)

“The guy in the Ferrari had a cell, too,” Cross said. “See this note? The number they want me to call, that’s a sat phone. Looks like it started in Honduras, but it could be bounced from anywhere by now.”

“I didn’t know—”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s SOP, follow anyone who comes
in here asking for me, right? You were already gone by the time I even saw the note. Maybe Tracker will come up with something.”

“I find that fancy-boy, he’ll tell us where Princess is,” the giant muttered.

“If the guy who wrote the note was who I think he was, this guy in the Ferrari, he was just an errand boy.”

“Who do you think was behind this? Who’d want to snatch
Princess?
” Rhino said, genuinely puzzled.

“It smells like Muñoz,” Cross answered, lighting a cigarette. “And Muñoz always smells bad.”

TEN O’CLOCK
that same night. Cross and Rhino stepped out on the darkened roof of the Red 71 building. They did a rapid circuit of the roof, ignoring the large wooden box with its several round openings. Satisfied, Cross took a heavy-looking hand phone from his pocket, punched in a number.

“Yes?” A voice in Latin-flavored English.

“Calling before midnight,” Cross said.

“We have a package. And we think, maybe you like to trade us something for it?”

“I’m listening.”

“A job. That’s all. One job. You do it, you get your package back.”

“Still listening.”

“Not on this phone—you know better. Land line.”

“Say it.”

“There is a phone booth. Just off Lake Shore. You know where Michigan Avenue takes that big curve? Across the Drive, on the other side, there’s a phone booth. It has a big red circle painted on the side. Tomorrow morning, at first light. You be there—you’ll hear from us then,” the Spanish-accented
voice said, breaking the connection on the last word.

Cross looked at Rhino. “It’s Muñoz all right,” he said. “We should have thrown that
basura
in for free the last time.”

IT WAS
4:45 a.m. The city-camo’ed, blotchy gray-and-black sedan known as the “Shark Car” throughout the Badlands swept along Michigan Avenue, Buddha at the wheel.

Cross spotted the open-air phone booth marked with the promised red circle. Standing a few feet away was a black man in his late teens, dressed in the latest gangsta chic—gleaming gold high-tops on his feet, an L.A. Dodgers cap on his head, the brim turned to the side. He was walking in tiny circles, constantly glancing down to consult a beeper in his hand. Two members of his posse lounged nearby, leaning against a black Escalade with bright-blue rims.

Cross exited the Shark Car and starting walking toward the phone booth.

“Yo! Don’t even think about it,” the gangsta-garbed man snarled. “That there is
my
phone. Go find yourself another one, whitey—I got business.”

Cross turned as if to walk away, and pulled a black semi-auto pistol from his coat in the same motion. “Me, too,” he said quietly, holding the pistol aimed at the man’s stomach.

The leader glanced over at his crew, but their hands were already high in the air. Buddha stood across from them, the three forming an isosceles triangle. It wasn’t the tiny Sig Sauer P238 in his hand which had riveted the other two men; it was the laser dot Buddha was languidly playing across their chests.

“No disrespect,” Cross told the leader, almost eerily calm. “Like you said, it’s your phone. I’m waiting on this
one
important call, okay? Soon as it’s over, you get your phone back, permanent. And you never see us again. Okay?”

“Yeah, all right, man,” the leader said, his eye on the pistol.

“Only thing, I need privacy for my call, understand?”

“Yeah. Yeah, man. Don’t get crazy. We just jet, all right?”

“I’d appreciate that,” Cross said.

The leader backed away toward the Escalade. He climbed into the back seat, keeping his hands in plain sight. The other two jumped into the front. The big SUV took off, scattering gravel.

Any thoughts its occupants might have of turning around vanished when each side mirror of their SUV popped its glass, as if a pebble had been thrown up from the gravel by the huge tires. A soundless pebble.

Cross stood next to the phone booth, again visually reconfirming the large red circle spray-painted on its side. He picked up the phone, tossed in three quarters, listened for a dial tone to verify the line worked, and quickly replaced the receiver.

He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag.

Traffic was still sporadic. The partygoers were all off the street, and the commuters still hadn’t made their appearance. Cross took a third pull on his cigarette, then snapped it away.

The sky began to lighten. Cross and Buddha didn’t speak, didn’t move from their spots. Their pistols were no longer in sight. Only their eyes were active, working in the overlapping full-circle sweeps they had learned together many years before.

A LUSTROUS
gray-white pigeon swooped down and perched atop the phone booth. Cross eyeballed the bird
closely. It was markedly different from the winged rats that so thoroughly populated the city. This one had the same characteristically small head, short neck, and plump body, but its bearing was almost regal. And it was groomed to the max, every feather in place.

Cross nodded to himself as he spotted the tiny cylinder anchored to one of the pigeon’s legs. He approached cautiously, even though the pigeon showed no signs of spooking. Cross reached up and stroked the bird before pulling it gently against his chest. He opened the cylinder, extracted a small roll of paper. The pigeon fluttered its wings once, hopping back onto the phone booth.

Cross unfurled the paper, his eyes focusing in on the tiny, precise writing.

Cross took a felt-tipped pen from his jacket, scrawled the single word
“sí”
on the bottom of the note, and replaced the paper inside the pigeon’s courier pouch. The bird preened itself for a few seconds and then took off, climbing higher and higher into the morning sky with powerful thrusts of its wings.

LATE THAT
night, the crew was gathered in the basement of Red 71.

“You did the recon?” Cross asked Buddha.

“Yeah. And I don’t like it, boss. The tables are all outside, pretty spread out. It’s only set back maybe ten, fifteen feet from the sidewalk. All wrong for a drive-by: too much foot traffic, and half of those yuppies must have cell-phone cameras. Wrong neighborhood. Too upscale—cops’d be
all
over it in seconds. But, even with all that, if they wanted to give it a try, you’d never see it coming.”

Cross turned to the giant standing against the wall, watching. “Rhino?”

“The rooftop across the street’s even worse. Anyone could get up there easy enough. But there’s more than one way to do that, and we couldn’t cover every spot.”

Cross drew a series of intersecting lines on the pad in front of him, eyes down. He took two final drags from his cigarette before he stubbed it out.

“What it comes down to is, who’s gonna make the meet for their side? If it’s Muñoz himself, he’s got to know we can blow him away if he tries anything. Even if he nailed me, he’d be a dead man a few seconds later. But if it’s some flunky, Muñoz wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him. For all we know, Muñoz could be over the border, giving his orders from there.”

“So …?” Buddha queried.

“So this. Rhino,
you
take the roof across the street. Take it
early
. Anyone else shows up after you, just leave them there. We get Ace to work the sidewalk. They won’t make him for our crew—he wasn’t on the bust-out down in their territory. Buddha, you get us a cab from someplace, all right? Park it if you can find a spot, cruise it if you can’t. Short loops, okay?”

“But what if they—?”

“Doesn’t matter, so long as we move before they do. I’m
gonna roll up just at noon, like they said. If I spot Muñoz at the table, I go ahead and sit down. So, if you
don’t
see me take a seat, that means it’s me they want. Rhino already has the target locked on, so he takes out whoever’s at the table in place of Muñoz.

“I’ll handle anyone coming toward me. Ace will have my six. And Buddha can spray a lot of lead from the cab, if it turns out we need cover fire.”

“And me?”

“You’re on the roof, too,” Cross told Tracker. “But on the roof of Nostrum’s, so you’ll be shooting straight down.”

“You think it really could be like that, boss? Personal?” Buddha asks.

“Anyone else, I’d say no. But with Muñoz, it could be,” Cross replied. “He talks professional, but he always was unstable.”

THE NEXT
day, Cross emerged from the underground train station on State Street at 11:56 a.m., and headed east. It was already 11:59 when he first spotted Nostrum’s, and a few seconds before noon when he saw a man he recognized, sitting at a table by himself. Cross kept his eyes only on that man as he approached, hands empty at his sides.