Drawing Dead (13 page)

“No. And what would they get out of it, anyway? Remember, those kind of people, they need children for more than just their image—the line has to continue, too. Probably how that…thing was created in the first place.”

“Fertility drugs?” Rhino speculated.

“My money would be on inbreeding, brother. That maternal line, I'd put serious money on some of those girls' fathers being their grandfathers, too. Plenty of ancient dynasties were—
Damn!
”

“What?”

“My…face. That thing they put there, that little blue symbol, it's gotten hot before, but this time it felt like a damn plasma cutter.”

“Do you think…?”

“I don't know what to think. It'd all be guesses, anyway.”

“I WONDER
if they knew.”

“Knew what, brother?” Cross asked Rhino. The searing pain below his right eye was gone, but the tiny blue symbol still throbbed as if alive.

“Knew how much it…how much it hurts, to be just…erased. To have a child and not admit he even exists. I used to think about that. They hurt me. In the institutions, I mean. You know about a lot of that, Cross. But what you couldn't know was how the people who gave birth to me, how
they
could hurt me. More than any torture. And they
had
to know.”

“But if—”

“I don't mean they had to actually
witness
anything. But…you know how everyone's talking about ‘emotional abuse' now, like it's some new discovery? How many boys did you meet when you were first locked up who thought their middle name was ‘Stupid'?

“Sure,” the behemoth answered his own question. “But this was even worse. To know that the same people who…created you, they wouldn't even admit you existed? That's this ‘emotional abuse' thing, all right. Weaponized emotional abuse.”

“You're talking about…what?
Your
parents?”

“I guess I am. I must be. To them, I must have been like some form of…him. I mean, I never knew what
they
knew. I never knew if I had brothers and sisters. If I had—”

“You
found
family, Rhino. Maybe I'm nothing to be all that proud of, but I've been your brother ever since—”

“I know,” the mammoth said. “And I couldn't have a better one, Cross. You think I don't know what everyone thought? That you'd played me into helping you escape from that prison? But when you said, ‘I'll be back for you, brother,' those words, they kept me alive.

“You're nothing to be proud of? That's not true. You did something nobody else ever did in my whole life. It wasn't just that you kept your word, or even that you rescued me. You showed me how to…”

Cross felt the tiny brand below his eye burning again, but now it was intermittent, not steady. Slow-pulsing. Suddenly his mind made a connection. Back to his first “interview” in the government capture-van.

“
That's
why you took Princess,” the urban mercenary said. “He was—”

“Yes,” Rhino said, quietly. “He was
me.
He didn't want to be in that combat cage any more than I wanted to be in that wheelchair. We were both strapped in. I couldn't leave him….”

“I get it,” the gang boss said. Thinking:
That's the way it really works. You pay your debts when they come due. You keep your promises. A promise, it's the same as a threat—a rep that you always keep your word, that's the only way anyone ever takes your threats seriously.

“Buddha said there were five votes before. But it's really just the three of us, isn't it?” Rhino said, very softly. “We're family, all of us. I know that. But…Ace, he's got Sharyn and his children; Buddha, he's got So Long.

“Sure, I know. And they're always fighting. But imagine if those two
weren't
together. Now it's like they…mesh. If it wasn't for that, if they were operating on their own…”

The man with the bull's-eye tattoo on the back of his hand went quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “You're right. They don't have limits—there's nothing either of them wouldn't do. So Long's
got
money—but she's a grafter in her heart, so she keeps on scheming and stealing. The same way Buddha's a shooter. He wasn't with us, he'd still be working merc jobs, somewhere. They each…I don't know how to put it, exactly. It's like they found a reason to live besides themselves.”

Rhino made a snorting sound: “To hear Buddha talk, the only reason he's not divorced is that So Long would end up with all his money. But remember when that Circle of Skulls gang had her targeted, how he went crazy?”

“Yeah, he did. But he never thought we wouldn't back his play, not for a second. You and me, anyway. Princess, he'd do whatever you did, so it comes out the same. Tracker, he's the same as we are…but he's got his own tribe. Tiger, too.”

Cross lit a cigarette. Took a drag. Closed his eyes. Realized the pulsating brand had gone quiet. “There's just one difference, Rhino. Just one, between us and those two. One difference, but it's too far apart for either side to bridge.”

Rhino said nothing, waiting.

“That difference…it's…it's the tribes.
Their
tribes. Their tribes were there before they were—they were born into them. But not us. There was nothing for us to be born into. We had to make our own.

“They call us a gang, and we know who the OGs are, like Buddha is always saying. But what if we're not a gang? What if we're the first members of a tribe?”

“Tribes were created by geography,” the huge man responded. “Climate, actually. Africans are a different race from Scandinavians. That's all evolution is: successful adaptation to climate.”

“But weren't
we
all born into the same climate, too, Rhino? Ace killed the man who was beating his mother. I don't know if she was some low-rent whore or a woman who did what she had to do to get food on the table…but Ace, he loved her. You don't know who your mother even
was.
Or your father. Or anything else, really. So maybe we weren't
born
in the same place, but we grew up in the same place. Forget that Tigris-Euphrates stuff: for the three of us, for me, you, and Ace, the Cradle of Civilization was behind bars.

“You know where I ran across Buddha. So Long, she was, I don't know exactly, more like a girl than a grown woman. But a
hard
girl. She'd've had to be to survive in that hell.

“I don't know how it happened, but by the time I ran across Buddha, she and him, they were already together. He didn't tell me right away—she was back in one of those foul caves, and Buddha was…watching out for her. She was safe in there, but she couldn't have
stayed
there, not without food and water.

“See, brother? Different cages, but the same bars. Down south, where you grabbed Princess? Just as we were pulling out, one of the guards called out to me. He was really torn up, pieces of him leaking out. So much pain he could hardly speak. He asked me to put him down. The thing that really stuck with me was that he spoke English—not even an accent.

“I saw you already had Princess over your shoulder, so we made a deal, real quick. The guard, he tells me what I want to know; I give him what he wants. I picked up his pistol—it was only a couple of feet away from his hand, but he couldn't reach it—and said I'd hand it back to him, told him he could make his own decision. Treated him like a
man,
showed respect.

“So he spit out answers. He said Princess was captured when he was just a kid. He was a
little
kid, but he was in the jungle by himself. And he almost tore his way out of the nets before they could get him chained.”

“I think that must be true,” Rhino said, soberly. “He doesn't remember much, just being snatched up by some army. They started training him for cage fighting as far back as he can go in his head. I never really asked him…what difference would it make now?—but…”

“What?”

“What about you? Do you know who your—?”

“Yeah,” the icy man said, closing the subject forever.

TIGER SUDDENLY
slid into the back of the office.

The best Cross could manage was “Really?”

“Princess, you know how he—”

“Aren't they
amazing
?” the massively muscled child half-shouted. “Tiger didn't want them. I mean, she
did
want them, I know she did. Maybe they don't go right with her outfit
now,
but they're so beautiful….”

Even Rhino was transfixed by the thigh-high boots the Amazon was wearing in place of her usual spike heels.

“Are those real alligator?”

“
Albino
alligator!” Princess boomed, excitedly pointing to the red, blue, green, and colorless glittering stones covering the boots. “And those're all real, too.”

“You didn't find anything like that on Michigan Avenue.”

“Don't be silly!” the Amazon admonished Cross. “Princess took me to this little shop. In the back of some gray-stone building in Andersonville. The guys there—”

“It was a
surprise
!”

“It was to
me,
no doubt.”

“Oh, they've been ready for months,” Princess said proudly. “I got your shoe size from—”

“Oh, honey, you can't tell a woman's size from her shoes. The more expensive they are, the more the people who make them will lie about them.”

“But you'd never lie, Tiger.”

“Not to
you,
sweetheart. But I'm not talking about some salesgirl lying; I'm talking about the shoes.”

“What?” Rhino interjected. The absurdity of shoe leather's participating in fraud was causing an overload inside his logic-driven mind.

“Ah, don't any of you know
anything
about women?” the Amazon said, parking herself on a corner of Cross's desk. “Look, girls don't want to admit they have big feet, ever. So, the best places, they'll call a size eight a six and a half when they're putting the shoes together.”