Drawing Dead (16 page)

“No,” McNamara said, his voice hardening. “Targets of opportunity. Remember, none of the
rape
victims were killed…if that's what you're asking about. The Department is sure that if they'd gotten threats, any of them, they would have reported them. If not to us, to their families.”

“But they were always—”

“In mixed neighborhoods, so what? The way this city is shifting its borders, you can't tell who's going to be living next to you when you wake up in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“What do you want to know something like that for, Cross? Nobody's looking at you for anything.”

“Somebody's always looking at us.” Rhino's low, rumbling voice joined the conversation. “It doesn't have to always be the police.”

“You guys haven't made a lot of friends, that's the truth.”

“Legitimate businessmen, they've always been pushed around by organized crime, Mac. Ever since Capone's day, you can't run even a bush-league—”

“If you guys are legitimate businessmen, I'm a liberal. And don't waste your breath on the Double-X, Cross. I admit even I don't know what
that's
all about.”

“I know you don't dip your beak, Mac. For all I know, you might be the only cop in Chicago who doesn't.”

“Now, that's profiling.” McNamara smiled. “You think all blue is—”

“Nah. But tell me you don't know about any shakedowns, never mind getting in bed with…”

“I'm not with Internal Affairs,” the cop said, the words coming out like he was spitting steel darts.

“Good thing you're not. You'd need twenty-four/seven protection, and even then you'd have to stay off high floors.”

“You want anything else?”

“No.”

“You got anything for me?”

“No.”

“Always a pleasure,” the cop said.

“WE'VE BEEN
looking at this all wrong,” Cross said on the drive back to Red 71.

“Just because we haven't made any connection—”

“No,” the gang leader said. “Because we
have.
I just missed it. Looking for a ham-and-cheese sandwich in a kosher restaurant.”

“Meaning, what, there's other restaurants?”

“Yeah,” Cross said, handing Rhino a burner cell. “We need everyone at the spot as soon as they can get there.”

“BUDDHA, YOU
remember that time when So Long was threatened by that gang of rapists?”

“I
already
gave up my share of the take on that one, boss. What else do you—?”

“We've been trying to connect it with Hemp's move on Ace.”

“It
wasn't
?” Tiger half-sneered. “It was the same move. Lure one of us out into the open and—”

“You just said it,” Cross cut her off. “Nobody's
that
patient. It was too long ago. But it doesn't link to that creature in the fancy house.”

“Huh? Boss, I thought—”

“So Long wasn't that one's idea, Buddha. The others, the three of them, they must have liked what they were doing. A lot. The person in that fancy house, we don't really know much about him. And we never will. But Rhino has a good read on him. It makes sense that he'd go nuts, being like he…was.”

“The best we can figure it, the…the man in that house, he
discovered
what those three were doing,” Rhino said. “And he dealt himself in. Probably by offering them a ton of money. That wouldn't mean anything to him; he had an unlimited supply.”

“So those three scumbags, they decided to get some more of their jollies on their own. Who gives a damn?”

“Only one person I can think of,” Cross answered.

“The timing's all wrong.”

“That's why I'm saying it.”

“Saying
what
?” Tiger snapped. “Stop code-talking, ‘boss.' The rest of us outsiders can't translate.”

“Remember when I was brought in on that government job? Where they tried to capture that…whatever it was?”

“We were there,” Tracker said, his tone more measured than usual. “Tiger and I both.”

“And there it is,” Cross told them all. “As far as Blondie and his pals were concerned, they recruited you. But you were on board with us way before they ever contacted you. And when they brought me in, you both played it like you'd never seen me before in your lives.”

Tracker nodded. Failure to deliver that “specimen” Cross had never collected may have been more costly than they had first thought. If a nameless blond man and an Asian cyber-expert called Wanda were still alive, it wasn't known to the Cross crew. The whereabouts of Percy—a human war machine who returned to an inert state when not on combat assignment, as though a switch had been thrown in his operating system—were unknown. The government wouldn't have held the rogue nature of the entire operation against him: Percy would always be a high-value asset.

“WHY GIVE
them any—?”

“Right. ‘Them.' Not ‘us.' Like Buddha's always bitching about, neither of you go back to the beginning, Tracker. I was the one who brought Buddha in. I ran across him in the same place I met Rhino—not locked up, but he might as well have been. And he had So Long with him, even that far back.

“You and Tiger, you're freelance, sure—but that just means you might take a job without bringing us in. And we might do likewise. But inside, we're all the same. We hate them all.”

“So do the Simbas,” Tracker said, deliberately shifting his eyes to Cross's face, seeing the confirmatory flash of the blue brand he expected. “That's more than any prove-in you could come up with, Cross.”

“How come you're so sure?”

“I can see their brand on you. Tiger can see it, too.”

“The little blue mark under his eye? It's blinking like a damn neon sign now, bro,” Ace said to his brother.

“And you, too, now? Princess?”

“Sure,” the muscle mass said. “I just thought it was some kind of trick tattoo.”

“Buddha?”

“Yeah,” the agate-eyed killer said. “I could see it. Before tonight, I mean. Thought you were testing another misdirect, like that bull's-eye on your hand.”

“There's only one of us who could have known where Ace's wife and kids lived. In that house, I mean.”

Buddha punched his cell phone.

“Go to Location Three.
Now!
”

The pudgy sharpshooter punched his phone again, as if he had a grudge against it. “Let's get this done,” he said, dead-voiced. “Me, you, Princess, and Rhino, one car. Either of you two have a ride out back?”

“No,” Tracker said. “Just a borrowed cab. Can't keep it long.”

“Driver doesn't know it's missing?”

“Not yet.”

“Me, either,” Tiger added. Then she turned to Cross: “But I've got one at Orchid Blue. You can pick up that stick thing you keep in my safe. And Tracker can leave the cab on the street.”