Drawing Dead (34 page)

“SLOW IT
now. Next left. Sit there and wait. We'll be out soon enough.”

“I'll be here.”

“Don't play hero on us, Condor. You're not carrying…?”

“Just my blade.”

“Toss it back here.”

A rustle of movement, a glove-muffled sound. Then Cross said, “Kid, I thought you knew better. This thing, it's way over regulation.”

“I thought, if—”

“Being a
leader,
that takes more than just heart, Condor. You've already been on the run for, what, years? And nobody's looking for you. But if you get popped, your prints are gonna fall. We can deal with that, like I told you. But a new charge? That'd be dumb.”

“I…I know.”

“Forget it. It never happened. Now, slide in right ahead of that white Crown Vic, and—”

“That's an undercover car.”

“That's an
empty
car. Understand?”

Without waiting for a response, Cross pushed open the still-wedged back door of the No-Chance Gaming Parlor.

CONDOR SETTLED
down to wait, using the panoramic mirror he held in one hand to eye-sweep the block in all directions.

It wasn't long before the back doors of the Scion opened, then closed soundlessly.

“Go,” Cross said, pulling another phone from the coveralls he wore. “Nice and smooth.”

“THERE CAN'T
be a
trace
of this thing left,” Condor told his crew as he climbed out of the Scion. “But no boom and no fire. Take it apart, then—”

“We got this,” a tall, muscle-and-bone young man said.

“Counting on you, M.Z.,” Condor said. “On
all
of you.”

“Did they really take you with?”

“Don't know what you're talking about, 'Zeus. And
you
don't, neither.”

“Just sayin'. I mean, you came back alone….”

“I never left,” Condor spoke over his shoulder as he walked off into the deeper darkness.

“WHERE'S JOHNNY EYES?”
Condor asked, pointing at two of his crew with forked fingers.

“Crow's Nest,” answered a girl with two tears tattooed under her left eye, using her hands to speak.

Condor gestured “Send him down.” And then made a “sit down” motion, which he knew would be interpreted as “Take his place until he gets back.”

The girl left without a sound. This wasn't some kind of submissive gesture—Q.T. had been left profoundly deaf from the last beating her mother's boyfriend had dished out, before calling the police. His story was he had kicked her out for “whoring to buy drugs” but she'd broken back in—“with that big knife, the one right on the floor there—probably to kill both of us.”

The police had taken the girl's silent response to their questioning as defiance, ignoring the blood already flowing down the side of her face. Unceremoniously dumped into a holding facility, she was eventually transferred to an institution for “juvenile incorrigibles,” where she earned her second tear by pressing her thumb so deeply into the eyeball of a “heavyweight” that she would have faced an attempted-murder charge if she hadn't gone over the concertina wire that same night, following a crudely drawn diagram to the Badlands one of the other girls had given her.

This is the last time,
Condor promised himself.
It's like Cross is always saying: if you want to be the boss, you can't use your people; you have to make sure they get what
they
can use. I don't know if Maria could possibly take another one in, but, first thing tomorrow…

“NOTHING DOING,
chief.” Johnny Eyes interrupted Condor's reverie. “Not since that rolling boxcar came back in.”

“Bounce this over to them: ‘Boxcar back in the house, full empty.' ”

“On my way,” Johnny Eyes said, making it clear he knew who “them” was, and what he had to do.

As Q.T. came down the steel ladder, Condor was already handing out more assignments:

“We got anyone working outside tonight?”

“Donnie and the new guy,” an Asian kid said, consulting a tablet.

“You can get word to them?”

The Asian kid worked hard to keep a “Du-uh!” expression off his face and nodded once.

“I need a looks-like-them-all ride. Keyed correct. By tomorrow, sunrise.”

The Asian kid was already tapping at his tablet.