Urban Renewal (14 page)

BUDDHA DROPPED
Tracker off, leaving just himself, Ace, and Cross in the car.

“If she gets hit outside her place, no way the cops don’t toss her apartment,” Buddha said.

“Probably divide all that punk’s stuff up between themselves, too,” Ace said, more to voice his opinion of police ethics than with any actual hope there would be nothing left that traced back to the “player,” whom nobody but his mother would miss.

“Tracker said it was just one of those cheap condo-conversions. No doorman, no security, no cameras.”

“So we can get in and—what?—carry all his stuff away?”

Cross just shook his head at Buddha’s sarcasm.

“Come on, boss. He’s probably got some kind of record, and even if we took every single thing of his, there’d still be his prints, his DNA.…”

“Man, you in
love
with that big-bang stuff, huh?” Ace said.

“The right tool for the job, that’s the rule,” Buddha defended himself. Lamely.

“What we need is a fire,” Cross said.

“
And
a homicide? Yeah, no way the cops ever make
that
connection.”

“You guys want to let it go?”

“Damn!” Ace snapped. “You know we can’t do that.”

“So …”

The car was quiet for several minutes.

“If she was
in
the place when the fire started, and she couldn’t get out …”

“The whole building? We can’t—”

“Tracker said it was really a bunch of two-flats, in the shape of a horseshoe. And she’s got one of the end units.”

“Still. Pretty hard to contain a fire that tight,” Ace said.

“No reason to,” Buddha answered. “So Long says that most of the people who bought into those crappy condos
would
love
it if they burned down. Some of them have already walked away. The others, even if they’re
not
upside down on their mortgage, they’d have their units insured for way more than they’re worth.”

RONNI CLIMBED
wearily out of her leased Camry. Another miserable night. She still hadn’t heard a word from Jean-Baptiste. And …

Her thoughts were cut short by the neatly dressed white man. And anything she was about to say stuck in her throat when the man said, “Jean-Baptiste wanted me to come by and give you something,” as he took a small, neatly wrapped box from his coat pocket. “But you have to promise you won’t open it until later—he wants to be there himself, to watch you do it.”

Oh God! That’s the right-size box for a ring
, Ronni thought. Her mind was still swimming as the man accompanied her to her second-floor unit. He placed the little box on the night table next to the cordless phone, and turned to leave.

Ronni followed him, so she could close the door after he left. Suddenly the man whirled and drove a fist deep into Ronni’s abdomen, taking the breath from her lungs.

When she came around, she was seated, handcuffed to a chair, and gagged with duct tape carefully circled around a thick pad of gauze.

Another man was there, too. A short man with dark hair and dead eyes. He tied off a vein in her left arm, and smoothly injected a go-home shot of damn-near-pure heroin. As soon as she slumped, he began to create a series of injection tracks,
not only in both arms, but even between her toes, using a needle designed to create scarring. The police autopsy would note the track marks as “aged.”

The two men removed the duct tape and handcuffs, gently placing Ronni under the bedspread, her head on a scented pillow.

“The people downstairs gonna be leaving for work in a few minutes.”

“I know,” Cross said. “And it’ll be light soon, too.” He lit a cigarette from the pack he found in Ronni’s handbag. Then he spilled an entire can of Roach-Murder so that the trail ran from the half-kitchen to the bed. Leaving the can where it had been, under the sink, Cross distributed the contents of three more throughout the closet, leaving the door open. Those cans went into a black plastic bag.

As the two men slipped away, the flame trail had already begun.

“Let the marshals look for some ‘accelerant’ now,” Buddha said as they drove away. “Ace was right—this one’s gonna be written up as just another dope fiend who fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand.”

“Yeah,” the man in the passenger seat said. “Accidents don’t make decisions—they just happen.”

THE SHARK CAR
slowly crawled the length of the block. Guided only by its running lights, mufflers on maximum choke, it was a barely discernible presence.

“Black on one side, Latin on the other,” Ace said.

“But not
one
gang, either side?” Cross asked, in the manner
of a man who wanted to make very sure a jury-rigged “bridge” of slatted timber would hold his weight.

“Not even close, brother. The blacks all the same tribe, but what they know, they don’t show. Fools no different than they was back in the day—all about colors they wearing, not the color they
are
.”

“Latinos even worse,” Buddha added. “Even if all the PRs could get it together, they’re out of luck now that MS-13 is supposed to be setting up shop. Those locos get their supply straight from the Zetas. And La Eme is sticking a toe in the water, too. Now, that’s just business—so why get into a no-win war with the Norteños when they could just roll west?”

“So this block is, what, like some kind of neutral turf?”

“Worthless turf,” Ace corrected. “There’s no shortage of spots to sling dope in this town, so who needs
this
block, all full of civilians like it is? And if any pimp put his girls out here, the first condom some housewife spot in the street, you
know
the mayor’s phone gonna be ringing off the hook.”

“And that’s
taxpayers
calling,” Buddha echoed. “Which means voters. Which means trouble.”

“You think So Long’s play would work?”

“Why not?”

“Man wasn’t asking you, bro,” Ace said to Buddha. “You not exactly what us colored folk likes to call ‘unprejudiced,’ you see where I’m going?”

“She fronts the money,” Cross said to Ace. “Every dime. And even with that army of crooks she calls brokers and lawyers, there’s no way to record a deed in this city without leaving a trail.”

“True.”

“And she can’t even cut the price she says a buyer paid—nobody’s going to be buying for cash in this neighborhood, so there’ll be recorded mortgage liens on everything.”

“So what’s the problem, then?”

“We know where to find people for just about anything in Chicago, right?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah? You know where we could find an honest contractor?”

“
YOU SAID
I could have a dog!” Princess said petulantly.

“A dog, sure. But that … thing is insane,” Cross answered, tilting his head in the direction of a huge white Akita with a black head who was doing his best to rip his way through the bars of a heavy-gauge steel cage.

“You want him, he’s yours. No charge,” said the outlaw who specialized in training attack dogs for those who were always expecting unexpected visitors. “Some security-guard company had him. He tore three of them up. He’s probably been shot with tranquilizer guns more than all the psychos running around inside Kankakee put together.”

“And you took him why, then?”

“Well,
look
at him. That’s damn near a hundred and forty pounds of muscle. He’s faster than a cobra, too. Problem is, he’s ten times as mean.”

“He’s beautiful,” Princess said.

The trainer said nothing. He hadn’t stayed alive all these years by opening his mouth. Despite four grand juries, each of which had granted him full immunity, not a word of actual
testimony had ever passed his lips. And he’d seen Princess walk over to one of his assistant trainers who’d just hit a Doberman with a “control stick.” A few seconds later, the assistant trainer was out of breath. Not from running, from the punctured lung, already pooling with the blood that would soon choke him to death.

“He started it!” was all the maniac with the pansy paint had said. The trainer didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he wasn’t about to ask. That was one of his specialties, not asking. The unremarkable-looking man who occasionally visited always brought a big supply of bone meal with him. “A donation” was what he called it.

“Rhino …”

“Just go and
talk
to him, Princess. Don’t touch him. Don’t go in the cage. Just talk to him and—”

“See if he wants to be friends, right?”

“Right.”

The bodybuilder’s arms were so overmuscled that he couldn’t walk without holding his biceps away from his body, giving him a rolling gait that didn’t affect his balance. The closer he came to the caged Akita, the quieter the dog got.

Princess squatted down so his face was right against the chain link, level with that of the dog’s, who was now on all fours.

“¿Quiere usted ser mi amigo?”
Princess asked. As he had asked every man put against him in that cage in Central America years ago, ever since he’d been captured as a child. The snare was supposed to hold a jaguar, but the boy had almost torn his way free by the time the rifle-bearing killers reached the scene. They weren’t certain exactly what kind of feral beast they had snared, but they immediately realized
it was worth more money than any taxidermist’s creation would be.

Princess had endured what followed. Finally declared
“¡Listo! ¡Listo perfecto!”
by the sadists who were “training” him—anything to avoid actual combat with their own creation—Princess was thrown into the cage while still a boy.

But Princess never wanted to fight—he wanted only to be friends. That wasn’t an option in a world where the only law was Inevitability. So, when the other fighter—fully aware of the rewards of victory and the price of defeat—would launch into an attack, Princess would overcome his disappointment long enough to fracture a skull, or snap a spine … whatever it took to make the fighting stop.

“He started it!” began as his internal cue to create instant mayhem. Later, it became his war cry. Still later, his explanation. The only thing that remained constant throughout all those years was the final result.

Princess didn’t like what he called “mean people.” Captured as a child, trained by bloodlust savages, he still had a child’s innocence. That changed forever one night. He had been riding next to Buddha and seen a gang of thugs attack a couple who had left a gay bar and went down the wrong street hand in hand. Princess relentlessly questioned the crew’s driver, repeating, “But
why
, Buddha?”

Once he understood what Buddha had been telling him—that those men had been attacked simply because they were homosexuals—Princess asked, “But how could they tell? That gang, I mean?”

Buddha patiently explained that the gang needed some visual cues, the more outrageous the better.

From then on, Princess out-flamed Little Richard. It didn’t always work, but quite a number of gay-bashing gangs had overlooked the man’s obvious size and power under the instantly erased assumption that “fags won’t fight.”