Everybody Pays (31 page)

“He’s been around plenty of Latinos. He never copped an attitude, never showed any—”

“He’s a kid, Cross. A giant kid. But he’s not a moron. He knows the people who snatched him, they’re not the same as anyone who speaks Spanish, all right? Remember how he was in that cage? Always trying to get his opponent to join forces with him, make a break for it? How he’d never hit first, the other one always had to start it? He was famous for it. That’s why he dresses like that. Other people have to start it. And he
wants
them to.”

“Fal and Ace are real steady hands,” Cross said. “But if Princess decides to . . .”

Rhino shrugged his huge shoulders. “What do you want me to tell you? He . . . might. I’ll talk to him, do the best I can. But with Princess, there’s a lot of little tripwires in his head. And if someone stumbles over one of them . . .”

“Sure I can fly one, Boss,” Buddha said, confidently. “Planes are like cars. You can drive one, you can drive another.”

“You won’t get much practice time in,” Cross warned him. “And we’re not buying it either—just renting it.”

“What kinda crazy . . . ?”

“Think about it for a damn minute. It would cost us more than our whole budget just to buy it. They take the chance you won’t come back, but you sure as hell can’t just run away with it . . . They’re all flyboys—they’d spot it if it showed up anywhere in the world. Remember who we’d be renting it from. Besides, they have to make all those mods I told you about.”

“Sure. But if I’m gonna take out
both
targets I need the cannons
and
the bombs.”

“You can keep them. And the full rocket pod—that’s the part we got to modify, remember? But we have to lose the Sidewinders.”

“Chief, if I encounter any hostiles up there, I don’t have no air-to-air, I’m just a sitting duck.”

“The entire attack radius of that thing is less than a hundred miles, Buddha. That’s the way they’re made. You pop up, take out target one, spin around, target two, eject the pod and drop, scoop the others, and scream back across the border. They’ll never even know you were there. And the Quitasol Air Force, they don’t know anything about combat. Hell, way I got it, they don’t have one single pilot. All they do is send up one of those foreign ‘instructors’ to strafe civilians every once in a while.”

“But . . .”

“There is no fucking room for the air-to-airs, Buddha. Not if we’re gonna evac four people. We have to lose weight up front to pick up behind. No choice. No chance. In or out?”

“Boss . . .”

Cross was silent, his eyes focused somewhere past Buddha.
Through
me, Buddha thought. And finally said: “I’m in.”

“Why?” Cross asked Ace, the two of them sitting alone in the back room of Red 71.

“The money.”

“You make money here.”

“I do that. I earned my name. Ace. But you know what, brother? I’m the original Ghetto Blaster. You understand what I’m saying? Sure, I get paid. But I work local. Close to home. Ten large, that would be a nice price for one job. And now . . . you got plenty of those little baby gangsta wannabe motherfucking punks take someone out for nothing, just to ‘blood in,’ see? I ain’t no long-distance man like Fal. I got to be close. I’m good, no question. But you know what
that
means, where we come from. Good as my last one. That’s all. Here’s what I got for all these years: I got a little crib, don’t have to live in no Project again, ever. Got a nice ride. Case money, a few K deep, that’s all. A piece of”—the handsome black man waved his hand as if to encompass his surroundings—“this. I
also
got kids I got to feed. I don’t mean just food either. I got plans for my kids. College, the whole thing. They don’t know what I do, and they ain’t
gonna
know. I don’t even let them go to school in they neighborhoods. So, bottom line, I got a big nut to cover. And I do cover it, but I got to hustle. You know my business. You can’t be jumping at any job they throw your way, can’t be too eager. One slip and I’m in Stateville for fucking ever. Death Row or on the yard, don’t make no difference. I wouldn’t be coming out.”

“We’d—”

“That’s it, right there,” Ace said gently. “You’d come for me, that happened. Don’t say you wouldn’t, brother. Save that trick for someone who wasn’t there with you from jump. Yeah. We’ve been back-to-back since we first locked together. You’d
try,
right? Juice it or blast it, you’d try and spring me. Everyone would, except that little bastard Buddha. You think I don’t know that, you must think I’m stupid. Or maybe you think I’m stupid ’cause I
do.
I don’t care. So you know what? If you all do this, I got to do it too. ’Cause if you have to leave Chicago, the whole crew, then you’re taking my back away from me.”

“You can’t count on—”

“—what? I know what I can count on. And if I’m wrong, I pay what it costs. That’s the way the world works, right, brother? Besides, my share, we make this work, I’m done. I can walk away. No more of this life. I’ll have enough, I play it right, to last me until my kids are old enough to visit me in some nursing home.”

“You don’t have any training for this kind of thing, Ace. No experience.”

“You think a jungle’s different ’cause it be green instead of concrete? I may not know what kind of motherfucking snakes and all they got down there. But I know this. Know it for sure. Anyone can die. And I can make them dead. What else I need to know?”

“You’d be with Princess and Fal. If Princess loses it, you know what that means. Fal could fade into the brush. He’d have a chance. You can’t carjack a ride out, brother. If the wheels come off, you’re done.”

“Been that way since we first locked together. Nothing changes. We ain’t about change. We about not
being
changed. I’m down.”

“It’s not enough,” Cross told the chauffeur.

“Seven and a half million? In fucking
gold
? And
that’s
not enough, that’s what you’re telling me?”

Cross regarded the agent with a calmness the other man had only seen once before. In Tibet. Radiating from a man so ancient as to have defied the laws of nature with the mere fact of his continued life. But that man, he was a mystic. A man of such pure peace that he changed the warlike spirits of the conquerors. Or so it was said.

“What I’m telling you,” Cross said, “is that we’re not the fucking A-Team, okay? We have a deal. We do this job. We get paid. And part of that pay is, you go away. And you stay away. You don’t come back playing the same tune. We do this, and you leave us be. In Chicago. Together. Like we are now.”

“You expect the federal government to issue a license to—”

“I expect the federal government to do what it always does—look out for itself.”

“Which means . . . what?”

Cross wiped his forehead, the bull’s-eye tattoo clear in the dim light. “You ever wonder how come we—our crew, I mean—how come we never hooked up with any of those psycho groups? You know, the Nazis or the skinheads or the militia or the Klan or whatever else you got. There’s plenty of money there, if you know where to look.”

“Uh, for one thing, seems like you might have a few . . . ineligibles, right? Ace, Falcon, even Buddha—they wouldn’t pass the DNA test.”

“So you’re saying they wouldn’t want us, right?”

“Right.”

“But if I walked in there alone. Or even with Princess and Rhino—Princess without his costumes—what then?”

“Well . . . sure. Hell, thank God they
don’t
have anyone like—”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Cross said softly. “
Trying
to tell you, anyway, if you’ll just listen a little bit. If we do this, we’re going to try and do it right. Which means, come back alive and get the other half of our money. And spend it too. So, I was trying to think to myself, how can we be sure you won’t come back again someday? Maybe another little job Uncle wants done. And the same thing: We don’t do it, you bust us up, just like you’re gonna do this time. What could we do to keep you from doing that?”

“You have my—”

Cross laughed. It sounded like a heavy foot stepping on dry twigs. “I don’t want your ‘word,’ pal. It isn’t worth anything. See, I know you. You don’t know me, but I know you. I seen your kind before. You’re a patriot. You don’t give a good goddamn who’s in the White House, it’s America you serve, huh?”

“That’s right.”

Good. So here’s what I want you to tell your . . . people, or whatever you call them. We take this job, and we get back . . . or some of us get back, whatever . . . and you come to us again with this same squeeze, you know what happens?”

“What?” the agent asked, his tone just this side of a challenge.

“We’re gonna kick it off,” Cross said, his voice bloodless. “Race war. We’ve got stuff stashed all over the country. And we know how to do it. And you
know
we know. We’re not a bunch of handjob geeks reading little red books. We’re professionals. And we got black covered as well as white. We start it off, it’s gonna make Oklahoma City look like a cherry bomb in a mailbox. And we know the right notes to leave; the right calls to make to the media; the right idiots to step up and make noise. They always had the scenario, but they never had the skills. They don’t have the technology, and they don’t have the brains to use it if they could get it. They give interviews. You fuck with us again, we’re all going to be little play-Nazis for a couple of weeks. And when we’re done, it’s gonna take Uncle years to put out the flames.”

“You’re . . . insane.”

“Sure. A stone psychopath. Check my records.”

“You’d burn down a whole country just to—?”

“Survive? Be left the fuck alone? Oh yes. I fucking
promise
you. It’s not
our
country. Never was. We’re better off in wartime anyway, you don’t let us live in peace. So go tell your pals that. Tell them the truth. Get your shrinks to do one of their little ‘profiles,’ ask
them
if they may think we’ll do it.

“
That’s
what I want. Besides the money. Never to see you or anyone like you ever again in life. Fair enough?”

“We were never going to . . .”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”