Drawing Dead

DRAWING DEAD

Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youths exclusively. His many books include the Burke series, the Aftershock trilogy, the Cross series, numerous stand-alone novels, and three collections of short stories. His novels have been translated into twenty languages, his shorter works have been adapted to graphic novel format and stage plays, and his articles have appeared in
Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy,
and
The New York Times,
among other publications. He divides his time between his native New York City and the Pacific Northwest.

www.vachss.com

Flood

Strega

Blue Belle

Hard Candy

Blossom

Sacrifice

Down in the Zero

Footsteps of the Hawk

False Allegations

Safe House

Choice of Evil

Dead and Gone

Pain Management

Only Child

Down Here

Mask Market

Terminal

Another Life

Aftershock

Shockwave

SignWave

Blackjack

Urban Renewal

Drawing Dead

Shella

The Getaway Man

Two Trains Running

Haiku

The Weight

That's How I Roll

A Bomb Built in Hell

Born Bad

Everybody Pays

Mortal Lock

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, APRIL 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Vachss

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vachss, Andrew H.

Drawing dead / by Andrew Vachss.

pages ; cm

I. Title.

PS3572.A33D73 2016 813'.54—dc23 2015030355

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101970294

eBook ISBN 9781101970300

Cover design by Evan Gaffney Design

Cover photograph of graffiti © Nordic Photos/Superstock

Book design by Joy O'Meara, adapted for ebook

www.weeklylizard.com

v4.1

ep

for…

T.T.

who beat the odds to death

IF THE MEN
known as Cross, Ace, and Rhino had other names, no one in Gangland had heard them. So no informant ever spoke them.

Buddha, by contrast, routinely used enough names to fill a small hard drive.

Tiger was infamous for a number of things—her outrageous figure and thick mane of gold and black stripes only a small portion of that list. Tracker presumably had a name, but the only one he answered to was tribal, and that appeared on no birth certificate.

Both were freelancers who had worked with the Cross crew many times, including a “down south” job that cost Rhino the tip of one finger and added a teenage death-match veteran who came to be called Princess.

All this preceded an off-the-books government unit tasked with capturing a “specimen” of some entity that could apparently kill without leaving a trace of its own presence…although the skull and spine torn from the bodies of the victims had become its terrifying signature.

If being imperiously questioned by the slender, ice-eyed blond man seated in a captain's chair at the front of a rolling motor home made him nervous, the unremarkable man wearing a grayish urban duster gave no sign. Cross was good at waiting.

To the blond man's left was a large console controlled by a young Asian woman, displaying various screen inserts as she manipulated a joystick. To his right sat a slab-faced man whose oversized chest easily accommodated a pair of shoulder holsters. Behind Cross, the two operatives who had brought him in: an expressionless Indian and a voluptuous Amazon with a long tiger-striped mane.

“You've seen this kind of thing before?” the blond demanded as the console popped up images of stylized slaughter. “Where?”

“Africa. We came back from patrol, found the whole sweeper team hung up, exactly like that.”

“What did you think it was?”

“By then, we all knew what it was. A message from the Simbas. That's the way they did things over there: kill your enemy, then heads on stakes. Discourages anyone else from coming around.”

“Did it work on you?”

“Sure,” Cross replied, surprising the blond man.

“Then look at these….”

More images. All same-signature corpses, but the settings were vastly different. A penthouse apartment, a hunting lodge, an abandoned warehouse. No individual bodies, all multiple kills.

“They look alike,” Cross said, neglecting to mention that he had viewed an exactly similar scene only a short while ago. In Chicago.

“Those scenes are not—”

“Not the scenes—the bodies of the losers.”

“Don't you mean ‘victims'?”

“Fighters aren't victims. These are all some kind of battle sites. And a C-note to a dime says it wasn't civilians who got taken out.”

“By…?”

“I told you. The Simbas.”

“Wanda…?” The blond man turned to the Asian woman. She was already busily tapping away at the computer keyboard with one hand, clicking a silver pen against her teeth with the other.

“Simbas…Got it. None ever captured alive. Some of the intel says they're a myth. Not really a tribe at all. There's no—”

“A myth?” the Indian interrupted, surprising everyone else on the team. “Like those so-called Seminoles in Florida? They set up base in the Everglades, down where Stonewall Jackson wouldn't go after them. Bad propaganda—so the government started calling Cherokees who refused to walk the Trail of Tears by something other than their true name. It was Jackson who named them Seminoles—that way, he could tell the government that all the Cherokees were accounted for. Same as those Vietnam body counts.”

Ignoring a sharp glance from the blond man, the Indian continued, his tone making it clear that he was not inviting a response. “We were here before Columbus,” he said coldly. “Maybe the Cherokee word for ‘blanket' should be ‘smallpox,' too.”

“That does fit the Simbas,” the woman at the console said, gently breaking into the silence that followed.

“Yeah?” the heavyset man with the shoulder holsters rasped. “How's that make any sense, Wanda?”

“Start from here, Percy,” the Asian recited, tapping her scrolling screen. “Allegedly, the Simbas are the only known tribe of mixed Africans….”

“Black and white?” he asked, now genuinely curious.

“No, tribal-mixed. That almost never happens. And, when it does, it's usually a war-rape. But with Simbas, they eventually accumulated enough people to form their own tribe. Ample reports of this phenomenon from the Congo over the past sixty years. Yoruba with Hausa, Watusi with Pygmy, Kikuyu with Bantu. And so on. Some of them were allegedly part of the Mau Mau, but that wasn't so much a tribe as a movement. All the database shows is a thematic legend.”

“A what?” the blond man spat out, annoyed at the lecture.

“Thematic legend,” Wanda snapped back, more annoyed at the interruption. “One that retains its characteristics regardless of jurisdiction. Essentially, this one was that, originally, the Simbas were freedom-fighters who had to flee to the bush when the invaders had them outgunned.” A quick glance at the Indian. “Tracker would know this: that term probably originally meant ‘colonialists,' but its usage has changed over time—perhaps because of mercenary raids on specific targets.” She turned in her chair, looked meaningfully at the man being questioned, then returned to her narrative: “The Simbas were classic hit-and-run guerrillas. They can be distinguished from the modern version easily enough. Unlike, say, the FARC in Colombia or the Shining Path in Peru, or the Maoists in Tibet, they—”

“We don't need to know what they're not,” the blond man said, now fussily impatient.

Wanda continued as if no one had spoken. “They do not recruit, they permit no looting, rape is punishable by death, and there is no enforced membership. Their minimal requirement—and this is only a rough translation—is that a prospective member must bring a ‘hard' part of their enemy as an offering.”

She ran her right hand over her hair, as if to smooth it down. “Even the deranged creatures created by that witch doctor Joseph Kony—the Lord's Resistance Army—even those kidnapped and drug-crazed children fear the Simbas.” She turned to look at the man they had brought in for questioning: “Their trademark never varies. It…Well, you've seen the pictures.”

“I wonder…” the blond mused. “Could that be the link?”

“Africa?” the Amazon asked.

“Why not? They had to start somewhere. Maybe they started killing for what they thought was a good enough reason and just got to like it. That does happen.”

“Yes. I have seen it myself,” the Indian said, coldly eyeing the blond.

“Come on,” Cross said, in a tone somewhere between tired and bored. “Started in Africa, huh? Wasn't that what you government clowns were saying about AIDS? I mean, before everyone found out it was a lab experiment gone wrong in Haiti?”

“We have confirmed signature kills all over the globe,” Wanda answered, looking straight at the mercenary. “I don't see how it would be possible for unacclimated Africans to strike in the Arctic Circle. Do you?”

“Maybe they evolved,” Cross said. “Same way we all did, right? Humans, I mean. Some seeds grew in the sun, some in the ice. Or we all started in the Cradle, like a lot of scientists think. Places get too crowded, people move on. Especially when they get a lot of encouragement. When's the first confirmed kill?”

“That is difficult to determine with any degree of accuracy,” Wanda acknowledged. “We have references to similar multiple slaughters throughout history. Cave paintings of Neanderthals staring up at hanging corpses, looking puzzled, as if the killings weren't their work. Egyptian pharaohs left what could be records of something similar, unearthed by tomb robbers. Hannibal kept a journal on his way over the Alps. And there are a number of references in futhark—”

“What?”

“Scandinavian runes—probably dating back to early Viking times,” she said to the blond man, now seriously irritated at still another interruption of her report. “The references go as far back as we can reach. But, with so many other myths and legends disproven, it's impossible to tell for sure. No way to come up with authenticated facts.”

“So those ‘Seminoles'…they could be from the same root?” the Amazon wondered aloud.

“Of course,” Wanda replied.

The motor home went silent.

“Junkyard dogs,” Cross finally said. “By now, they've probably formed into their own species.”

“THIS IS
the place. You sure?”

“You askin' what I'm sure of?
Me?
You looking at a professional here, youngblood. I been putting in this kinda work before you stole your first candy bar, and I'm still doing it. Not to prove I got the heart for it, that part's been done. Now I get paid.

“A pro, he can't make but one mistake. This business, you make a mistake, you
out
of business. And on that paper is the address the boss said. I wrote it down. See for yourself—it's right here on this little paper…the one you gonna be putting a match to while I'm inside.”

“It don't look right to me.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It looks just like a regular house. You'd think—”

“What? That a hit man don't have to live someplace? He'd just float around in the air, waiting to pounce? Live in a different place every night? You watch too many of those movies.”

“Listen! Can't you hear it?”

“You really making me tired, boy. I don't hear nothing but—”

“Kids! Playing in the yard, right behind that same house there.”

“So?”

“It just don't seem…I don't know…I mean, kids?”

“You a
long
way from being a pro, boy. That's why it's you driving the car. That's why it's you gonna be
waiting
in the car while I go up, knock on the front door, or push the bell, or whatever. You watch me 'stead of those stupid movies, you might learn something.

“I'm dressed for the part. Got my sample case and everything. One of Hemp's specials….See his mark, right on the flap? Bitch opens the door, sees a man selling…whatever—it don't matter what. I push her inside. Not with my hands, just keep stepping forward until she steps back. I kick the door closed behind me, put a couple in her head before she can make a sound. And what I got in this here case, it won't make a sound, either.

“See how it works? In and out, less than a minute. I ease on back to the car—no running, moving slow—and you drive
away.
Some nosy bitch, got nothing else to do all day but look out her window, she writes down the plate—so what? This ride, it's gone inside an hour. The crusher don't just swallow the plates, it takes
everything.
So we don't gotta worry about fingerprints, or fibers, or DNA…any of that
CSI
crap.”

“What if one of those kids comes in? Like, to get a soda or something?”

“What I got in this sample case is what I'm selling, okay? It's got a ten-round clip, plus one in the chamber. The boss said no witnesses. Anyone inside, it's a blackout call. You got a problem with that?”

“Me? No. I got no problem. But…you see the way that house is set up? There's no way for kids to get to the backyard without trampling all those flowers out front. So there's got to be a
back
door, right?”

“All them kinda houses got back doors. So what?”

“So see that driveway? You could just walk up the driveway, and that back door, it'll be
open.
So the kids can come in and out. You know, like kids do?”

“Yeah, I know. Thing is, you
don't.
They'd see me and—”

“They wouldn't see
you.
See a man in a suit, wearing a hat. They remember the man had dreads showing, even better—that wig you're wearing goes into the crusher same as everything else we got on, right?