Blackjack (7 page)

Suddenly, two men climbed into the pit area. One was white, thoroughly unremarkable in appearance except for a prominent lightning-bolt scar on his right hand; the other
was black, with a triangular face defined by high cheekbones. He was immaculately and expensively dressed, his all-black outfit topped with a matching Zorro hat.

A moviegoer might mistake the black man for a pimp, except that, instead of gold around his neck, he wore a
very
sawed-off shotgun on a leather thong.

Before anyone could react to the intrusion, the black man swung the scattergun up and fired both barrels. The headless announcer’s body slumped to the floor as the black man calmly broke his shotgun, flicked his wrist to eject both spent shells, and reloaded both barrels using the same hand.

The stunned silence was broken when several men in the audience reached for weapons.

A high-pitched squeak—
“No!”
—momentarily froze those movements as a bunched group of spectators was torn apart by machine-gun fire.

The momentary freeze turned permanent. Some in the audience held their hands away from their bodies in a clear signal of surrender. Others just stared, stunned and immobile.

A large object sailed through the air and landed inside the pit. The camera moved in closer, showing that the object was a human body. Or, more accurately, was
once
a human body.

The unremarkable man picked up the handheld microphone in his right hand and said, “May I have your attention, please?”

If this was his idea of a joke, no trace of it appeared on his face, or in his voice.

“Thank you. Now, please listen carefully. These are your choices: You may get up and leave this place peacefully, or you may stay. Those who choose to stay will not be given a second opportunity to leave. Anyone
not
moving when I stop speaking will never move again.”

One of the dog handlers cupped his hands and called out:
“Okay, man. Whatever you say. We’re out of here. Just give us a minute to grab up our dogs, okay?”

A red blotch suddenly blooming on the handler’s forehead was the answer. Unlike the other gunfire, this kill-shot had been silent.

“Nobody takes
anything
,” the unremarkable man said, in the same dry, flat voice.

The black squiggle Tiger had pointed out moved along with the crowd. The multi-cam unit’s sound system was not delicate enough to pick up the single word, this time in English:

“Hit.”

Everyone still alive stood up. Players and spectators filed out, moving slowly, every hand held open and away from the body it was attached to.

As the camera focused on the exit door, the voice of something close to human roared: “You started it!”

The camera caught only a brief view of what looked like a human leviathan, moving inexorably as it tore through the dog handlers as the dogs would have torn into each other, ripping off body parts as easily as if dismantling cardboard.

The multi-cam only had time to record that the monster’s head was shaved, and that he was wearing a banana-colored tank top. Then it went black.

“
WHAT THE
hell
was—?”

“The man with the microphone, that’s the man we want,” the blond man said. “His name’s Cross. The man next to him is known only as ‘Ace.’ They’ve been partners since they came into hardball juvie on the same bus.”

“ ‘Hardball juvie’ …?”

“Illinois was the first state to differentiate between juvenile
and adult offenders,” the blond man addressed his small audience somewhat pedantically. “It was still maintaining that façade at the time those two first met. That was an end-of-the-line stop for both of them—their crimes
should
have put them directly into adult corrections, and it was guaranteed their next ones would. And that there
would
be a next one.”

“The shaved-head guy?”

“Believe it or not, his name is ‘Princess.’ Off-the-charts insane. He dresses and speaks like a
very
gay man. Wears all kinds of makeup, minces his words … even flounces around waving his wrists. His delusion is that this will encourage others to attack him. In his deranged mind, he is not permitted to attack unless he can claim the other party ‘started it.’ ”

As he spoke, the blond man pushed a button. A full-body photo of Princess appeared on the screen.

“
That’s
him? Damn! Whatever he’s carrying in that monster shoulder holster—”

“That’s a .600 Nitro Express,” Percy snapped out, his voice a mix of anger and awe. “A .600 Nitro Express
pistol
. Only one I’ve ever heard about, never mind seen. That maniac actually carries a sawed-off, over-under elephant gun? A load like that, it’d snap a man’s wrist like a toothpick.”

“I’m no firearms expert,” Tracker said, deliberately ironic, “but do you have any idea why he would carry such a weapon?”

“It goes with his outfit,” Tiger half-giggled.
“Très chic, non?”

Seeing Percy about to respond, the blond man cut him off with the universal “Halt!” signal, then said, “Three hundred and thirty pounds is our best guesstimate of his weight. All of it muscle.”

“Why guesstimate?” Wanda asked.

“He’s never been in custody,” the blond man answered.
“We have various records on the others, but even those are spotty, if not outright fallacious.

“The machine-gunner—he was not shown on camera—is called ‘Rhino.’ Originally sentenced to an institution for the severely retarded, he was repeatedly tortured until he became—literally—anaesthetic to pain. That’s when they went to the Thorazine handcuffs. By the time Cross and Ace were sentenced, he had already been in that same institution for a couple of years.”

“But you said he was retarded.”

“That’s what it said on the first admission papers, Wanda. But he wasn’t too retarded to assault staff every time the drugs wore off, so …”

“So they locked him in that prison even though he never committed a crime?”

“That
is
what happened, Tiger. It’s not our job to judge.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes! Besides, that was
years
ago. What we do know is that this Cross individual—remember, he was just a kid himself at the time—figured out a way to detox the monster. But nobody knew this until Cross—again, I am speaking literally—actually sawed through cell window bars with nothing but dental floss which had been braided, coated with glue, and then rolled in drain-cleaner crystals. It must have taken months of backbreaking work.

“Then this ‘Rhino’
bent
the bars, enabling Cross and Ace to escape. It was the belief of staff that Cross, a diagnosed sociopath, had simply used Rhino to achieve his own ends. However,
somebody
later broke him out of custody. No agency has gotten their hands on that monster since.”

“Monster?” Tiger persisted.

“See for yourself,” the blond man responded, flashing another photo on the monitor. “He’s almost seven feet tall and weighs nearly five hundred pounds. Again, those are
only estimates—we don’t know his actual age, so we can’t know if he continued to grow after he escaped.

“By ‘monster,’ I was referring only to his size, not his disposition. In fact, we don’t even know his actual name. The records of his prior institutional ‘care’ seem to have disappeared.”

“I’ll just bet,” Tiger said. “Okay, that’s four men. Four men without one real name among them—is that what you’re telling us?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah? Well,
someone
took that shot with the silencer.”

“Our best guess was that was a man called Buddha. All we know about him is that he and Cross apparently met while serving in what is euphemistically called the ‘post-Vietnam’ era. His service records don’t indicate combat. Or anything else, for that matter. However, Military Intelligence informs us that the man is an expert shot, especially with handguns, a truly gifted driver, and a criminal to his core.”

As the blond man spoke, the photo on the monitor showed a slumped-shouldered man with a vaguely Oriental cast to his dark, cold eyes.

“We
do
know his wife is Korean. What she was doing somewhere around the Laos-Cambodian border is anybody’s guess. All we have for her is what we assume was a street name: ‘So Long Li.’ She is, however, reputed to be utterly absorbed in acquiring money, and quite skillful at doing so. Of the entire Cross gang, Buddha is the only one for whom we have an actual address—a freestanding house in the Uptown area. In his wife’s name, of course.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing is ‘wrong’ with that, Tiger. The point was simply to emphasize his wife’s obsession with materiality.”

“And what’s this ‘post-Vietnam’ designation …?”

“It’s the same for
all
of them, Wanda. Apparently, some
sort of bargain was struck between the man we know as ‘Cross’ and one of the … agencies operating in the field at that time. All the records concerning Cross and Buddha have been death-wipe overwritten. How that came to include Ace—who never served in the military—is not information we have.”

“Not the first time
that
trick was pulled,” Percy said. “Who cares about names, anyway? What I want to know is what that … whatever we just saw … what was
that
all about?”

“The Cross gang was hired by person or persons unknown to shut down a dogfighting operation,” the blond man said, in the bored voice of a Mafia don taking the Fifth for the hundredth time.

“And for that they slaughtered a couple dozen people?” Percy responded, a faint note of admiration seeping into his deep voice.

“That’s how he came by his name.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Cross.’ That’s not just the name he ‘enlisted’ under, it’s his reputation. He specializes in twofers, understand?”

“Kills the guy who hires him to kill another guy?”

“Nothing that simple, but that’s the idea. If he got paid to take out a couple of
individuals
inside that building by one person
and
put the dogfighting operation out of business by another, that would be more consistent with his reputation.”

“The cops,” Percy asked, “didn’t they lean on the others? The ones who walked out, I mean.”

“There were no survivors,” the blond man said, no trace of surprise in his voice. “The crowd that walked out walked into … something. They ended up exactly like the Canyon Killings, every one of them.”

“Good,” Tiger snarled.

“What are you, PETA on steroids?” Percy cracked.

“Anytime you want to find out—”

“Enough!” the blond man said, using his broken-record voice.

“All this … stuff,” Wanda complained. “We have names like ‘Cross’ and ‘Buddha’ and ‘Rhino’ and ‘Ace’ and ‘Princess.’ That’s it? Speaking of which, do we at least have a real name for this ‘Princess’?”

“Not even close,” the blond man told her. “All we know is that a crew Cross put together did some kind of ‘work’ in Central America. We don’t know who he did it for, but we do know two things: one, he lost a couple of men in that operation, and two, he brought Princess back with him.”

“Lost a couple of men?” Tiger mused aloud.

“Yeah, that’s another thing about this guy. He’s
obsessed
with revenge. You want to see the effects of
real
terrorism, just say his name around any of the local gang leaders. But if we don’t know the identities of the men he lost, we can’t know if he ever took care of whoever he held responsible.”

“That’s a good rep to have,” Tiger said. “Makes anyone thinking of pulling a fast one think again.”

“That’s not just his rep,” the blond man corrected her, “it’s part of a profile we commissioned. Outside his own crew, people are nothing but chess pieces to him. Like I said before, a sociopath.”

“Right. And he’s
still
with the same men he partnered up with a million years ago?”

“I’m not disagreeing. Any idiot would make that connection. I agree—that single fact contradicts the diagnosis. And we’ll confirm that with the doctor when the chance comes. We do know one thing which binds his crew completely. A question anyone who wants to join them has to answer. But it’s just a phrase, and we can’t translate it.”

“Well?” Wanda said, tapping the side of her keyboard with her fingernails to indicate her impatience.

“Here it is: ‘Do you hate them? Do you hate them
all
?’ ”

“Who’s ‘them’?”

“There are hundreds of pages of guesses. But that’s all they are—guesses.”

“Bunch of psychos,” Percy dismissed the “info” with his usual gift for analysis.

“Could be,” the blond agreed. “But our Mr. Cross has got one thing going for him that has always worked as a convincer.”

“Which is …?”

“He doesn’t care if he lives or dies. And it seems as though everybody in this city’s underground knows it.”