Urban Renewal (17 page)

“
EVEN LOW-GRADE
morons would know they couldn’t plant someone inside our crew. Or a bug inside Red 71. So
the closest they could hope to get would be a dancer inside the Double-X. What they want is a better look at us—who’s on our team, how we operate. People like them, they’re always looking for a handle … so they can twist it.”

“The feds?” Buddha asked, his slightly slanted eyes narrowing. “You think they’re still after that … whatever the hell it was?”

“If
it’s
not going to stop, why would they?” Rhino said, his tone as reasonable as his statement.

“It will never stop.” Tracker spoke for the first time that night. “I hired on with that federal team for my own reasons. They needed my skills—that is what they said. But now I know what they really needed was a man with a direct connection to what they were hunting.”

“That’s why you went back to freelancing?”

“No. I left them because they lied. They wanted a specimen, they said. Because that … thing was a threat to our race. As you said, Cross: the
human
race. But it came to us that it was a threat to only that part of our race that we ourselves see as the enemy. They … it … I don’t know: it is not a friend to us. But not an enemy, either.”

“And that’s why they wanted
me
in,” added the man who had lived up to his name “twice over,” unaware that he was lightly brushing his fingers across a tiny scar on his right cheekbone, just below the eye. An undecipherable mark too small to see in the mirror, it only glowed when it burned.

That symbol had been branded on his face as he and the first mixed-race army ever assembled inside a federal jail had battled together against … something. For most of the fighters, it had been a battle to the death.

Cross never questioned anything he knew would prove to
be beyond his understanding. But that very knowledge—that some things were beyond human understanding—allowed him to trust what others would call his “instincts.” So he hadn’t wasted any mind-time on why he had been spared by that … entity.

Something had been running amok inside a federal lockup, killing at will, never leaving a trace other than eviscerated bodies. But that was only the latest series of known attacks. The same method, and the same grisly calling card, had been documented all over the globe, going back at least as long as any records had survived. All the way back to cave paintings.

The government wasn’t looking for a way to protect others—what it wanted was this supreme weapon for itself. Certain they could replicate anything they could study, the government-sponsored team had hired Cross to capture a “specimen.” Their offer went far beyond money. Or threats. It was the promise of a Get Out of Jail Free card for his crew that had finally persuaded the master plotter to sign on.

It had been Cross’s plan that resulted in a mob of prisoners ranging from white supremacists to black nationalists attacking an unseen enemy in the darkened basement where condemned men had once been led to their death. That gas chamber had been abandoned years ago, but its triple layer of protection against the leakage of the cyanide fumes was still intact.

The plan worked. A piece of whatever had been killing at will had been trapped inside the chamber. But even a capsule sealed so tightly that gas could not escape proved incapable of holding whatever had been locked inside it.

You can’t kill “kill,”
Cross thought then.

And now.

So he didn’t make any attempt to learn why that tiny blue brand burned at different times—he couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. And he had come to trust it.

“Yes,” Tracker said. “They knew a lot of information about you that they didn’t share with me. But it wasn’t you they wanted. Just as it wasn’t me.”

“Yeah,” Buddha sneered. “We’re just a pack of hired guns. Not like those holy government guys, serving their ‘higher cause.’ ”

“It is not that simple,” Tracker said. “After those who hired us did not succeed, they were … banished. Tiger and I, we were never part of them, so we simply got paid … and dismissed. They won’t be using us again. But Percy, you remember him?”

Cross just nodded. That human war machine would never leave the no-uniform army he’d enlisted in for the duration … a volunteer for a life sentence that guaranteed he would never die of old age. But Percy was not one of “them,” the core to the question Cross had asked Rhino back when they were still kids. Just kids, consigned to the hellhole where the system buried its own creations:

Do you hate them? Do you hate them
all
?

“I don’t know where Percy went,” Tracker went on. “But Tiger, she walked as I did.”

“You think they know about … everything?” Buddha asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tracker replied. “But whatever they learned, they still know. It’s in their system forever.” The Indian took a deep, stabilizing breath, then summed it up: “Evil always casts its own shadow. It never occurred to them that the shadow they were seeking was their own.”

“So what do they want with us now?” Cross asked the Indian. “We wouldn’t take a job like that ever again. And if they wanted to erase us, how hard could that have been?”

“They don’t want any of us to disappear,” Tiger said. “We live where they can’t even visit, so we’re their only source of information.”

“They want to
turn
us? Make us into a crew of CIs?”

“What else?” the Amazon answered.

“Confidential informants,” Buddha mused out loud. “Only way you get on that payroll is if you can infiltrate. Or if you always
were
inside—like those CIA guys who handed stuff over to the highest bidder.”

“There’s another way,” Cross said, very softly. “The cops—the detectives, anyway—they’ve all got CIs, too. But they don’t pay them, not with money. It’s more like a trade: they pass on a two-bit collar and just look the other way. So they might leave a dealer on the street, and the dealer feeds them whatever he picks up. Sometimes, it’s just penny-ante stuff, but it’s always got to be bigger than what the cop’s letting slide.

“It’s just return on investment. And if the potential return is big enough, a cop might let damn near
anything
slide. You know, something that gets him a promotion if the case is major—like nabbing a serial killer, or busting a prostitution ring with big-name clients—anything that gets the cop’s name in the papers.”

“Mac doesn’t want his name in the papers,” Buddha said. “And he’s probably got more info coming his way than he can handle. But there’s that one thing, that one card he always holds: you give Mac some info, you know he won’t give
you
up.”

“So they want to place this ‘Taylor’ whore inside,” Tiger snarled. “And they use that dumb little cutie to vouch her in. Yeah, that
is
how they’d do it.”

“She doesn’t know anything,” Cross said.

“Taylor? Or the little blonde?”

“Neither one. They come here, they dance, they get paid.”

“Wrong,” Tiger said, coldly.

When nobody responded, Tiger continued: “They weren’t after information. What they wanted was leverage.”

“What leverage?”

“I don’t know. But Taylor, she was a probe, no doubt about that.”

Cross felt the near-invisible brand burn again.

“What did you tell her? Arabella, I mean.”

“Just what you said to tell her.”

“So she’s expecting Taylor to end up inside the charred wreck of her precious little car? And for another crisped-out skeleton that would match her own to be found there, too?”

“Yep.”

“And Arabella, she’s not going to run? She’s ready to leave everything behind and end up in Alaska?”

“Absolutely,” Tiger said, showing her brilliant white teeth in what didn’t resemble a smile. “I think she even expects me to come visit her every once in a while.”

Cross looked at his cheap, generic watch—the one that kept better time than any Rolex. “We’ve still got an hour before they’re supposed to show.”

“
ARABELLA EXPECTS
what, exactly?” Buddha asked Tiger.

“The same thing I told you the
last
two times you asked me.”

“She really thinks we’re gonna X-ray her, find a skeleton to match, put a driver in her car, and then blast it someplace far from here after she bails out?”

“Yep.”

“All before her shift’s over?”

“Like I said.”

“We don’t want to buy her play,” Cross said. “She’s a long way from stupid. The bug you planted isn’t giving us anything but their blah-blah before they go to work, that’s true. But if you know somebody’s listening, you can keep them from learning anything.”

“That’s why Ace isn’t here,” Buddha said. “He’s over there. Just outside.”

“
SO WE
’
RE
down to two plays, and we got about half an hour to pick one,” Cross said, holding up a cell phone to show the crew how the choice would be communicated.

“Put me down for Ace doing a double,” Buddha said. “Couple of strippers dealing on the side. Didn’t pay off, so the suppliers hired a hit man. He blows them both away, plants a quarter-key and a few grand around—anyplace that looks good, crib or car. Happens every day.”

“Where’s Princess?” Cross suddenly asked.

“He’s out back. Playing with that psycho dog.”

“Why do you have to be so nasty, Buddha?” Rhino suddenly squeaked. “They’re … connected. Princess was
caged, so he could fight while people watched. And Sweetie was caged because some people did some bad things to him, too.”

“I stand corrected,” the man with black-agate eyes said. “They’re
both
psychos, okay?”

The gray jumpsuit that covered the mass that was Rhino twitched slightly. Unnoticeable, unless you were watching for it. Cross was. And Tiger was a step ahead of him.

“At least neither of them’s on a leash,” she sneered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Buddha demanded.

“Ask your wife, sucker.”

“Enough!” Cross said, without raising his voice. “I’m not exposing Ace like that unless there’s
no
choice. And it’s not the best way to cauterize this wound, anyway.”

“So …?” Buddha asked.

“So—we need somebody who can fit inside that little car, for openers.”

“I am a
very
flexible girl,” Tiger said, raising her right leg back over her shoulder and tapping the wall behind her with the toe of one shoe.

“And I’ll have you covered,” Buddha said, unable to take his eyes off Tiger’s pose, which she apparently planned on maintaining for a while.

“Tell K-2 you’re switching places with him for tonight,” Cross said to Rhino.

“I don’t want to—”

“How else, brother? We can’t be sure what’ll be left, and the last thing we need is for some eager beaver to find bullet holes in the skulls.”

“It must be done,” Tracker added. “And even my knife could leave a mark.…”

Rhino nodded his assent, his normally placid face now overlaid with an ineffable remorse.

“
WHERE
’
S K-2?
”
Arabella asked, when she saw Rhino standing in the spot always occupied by the Maori.
This is the last time I’m going to think K-2’s gigantic
, she thought, trying an experimental little pout without a lot of hope that it would have any effect. Normally a lot more bouncy and confident, Arabella had been feeling just a bit off center for hours. Maybe it was Taylor copping an attitude when Arabella said they didn’t have time to play—being late for work wasn’t an option.