Urban Renewal (26 page)

“
YOU COULD
probably just blow the whole place up,” said a man whose white-on-white shirt was in keeping with his suit and shoes—tasteful, and virtually screaming “custom-made.”

“You’re paying for a body. One body. You want to make sure none of the old man’s regime come after you, that’s a lot more money than we’ve been talking about.”

“Yeah. I get it. And you just got your money. So now I’m going back to what I was doing. That girl with the stripes
in her hair, me and her’s gonna take a trip back to the VIP Room.”

CROSS DISAPPEARED
through the door behind his triangular table. He emerged in the club’s backroom “office.”

“We already have the old man’s money locked in. And Costanza’s. Half this job’s already as good as done—Costanza’s never coming out of the VIP Room. The others, you got their routine down?”

“Yeah, boss. Only thing is, Tracker’s gotta drive, not me. This works the way it’s supposed to, it’s gotta be all OTC nines. Tracker’s better than me at long distance, but this’s gotta look like some stupid banger’s drive-by—the old man always walks down the same alley before he goes into their place, through the back way.”

“A drive-by in an alley?”

“Yep. No reason it can’t be done, we use the right car.”

“Which you have?” Cross said, knowing that Buddha would go to great lengths to avoid letting anyone but himself behind the wheel of the Shark Car.

“Right outside. The thing’s a slug, but it can run on the batteries only—won’t make a sound. Finally found some good use for that green crap.”

“How much time—?”

“We leave now, maybe a two-hour cushion.”

“Do it,” Cross said.

“
YOU GOT
the most perfect ass I’ve ever seen in my life,” Costanza said to Tiger. “But I’ll get around to that later. First, you gotta do me right, understand?”

“Oh, baby, I’m gonna do you
perfect
,” Tiger purred, licking her lips as she dropped to her knees in front of the man with deadly ambitions.

THE MORNING
news—courtesy of the online issue of the
Trib
—was all about a “drive-by gone wrong.” Apparently, the head of the Chicago syndicate—the word “Mafia” was no longer used without “allegedly” crowding it practically off the page, and the night editor frowned on any waste of screen space—had been killed by a group of young black males driving a 1990s-era white Oldsmobile Cutlass with oversized rims. Four men had been hit, three fatally.

Later issues made reference to the “apparent assassination” of Costanza, and the “shotgun murder” of his “under-boss,” a man known to the authorities as Dominic Tedesco. Several other as-yet-unidentified individuals were also murder victims, three of them taken out with a bomb planted under their car.

… screamed the headlines the next day. The police said everything was “under investigation,” but all the reporting sources made it clear that the description provided by the sole survivor of the drive-by was not being taken seriously.

If the mob wanted to bring back the good old days, it
wasn’t exactly a police priority—not a single citizen had come under fire.

“They’re too busy blasting each other to come anywhere near our zone,” Cross told the crew. “Time for Phase Two.”

“
YOU STILL
down with this all the way, Hector?” Cross said to a man behind the wheel of an egg-yolk-yellow ’54 Buick Century coupe that had a fortune invested in slam-to-the-weeds airbags and a sound system mounted in the trunk that could cause permanent auditory damage at fifty feet. The man was a short, thick-chested Mexican with a Zapata mustache and streaks of gray in his neatly combed jet-black hair.

“There is no choice,” the man replied. “We have our lives invested in our houses.”

Cross knew those two houses had been acquired by a lifetime of the only work available for Hector, his wife, their three sons and two daughters, and, someday soon, the many grandchildren they all seemed to be racing to produce. Both houses were typical Chicago two-flats, one purchased many years ago, the other fairly recently. Hector and his wife had patiently waited for their next-door neighbors to default on a mortgage they never could afford, and watched from behind their bedroom curtains as the family had simply walked away from the place when their frantic phone calls to the “bank” had gone straight to an answering service. The difference between “Press One” and any other recorded option was nonexistent. They all came out the same way: “Pay up!”

Even more patience was required when the house was listed as “in foreclosure,” but lenders were no longer willing
to write the bogus loans that had collapsed the real-estate market … not without the government guarantees that had enabled them to take such “risks.”

But Hector had known where to call if he wanted to borrow cash. And that he was obligating himself beyond the lien on the second house if he did. As he told his gathered family: “There is no choice.”

“It’s just a scouting mission,” Cross now told him. “We need to see how they react to showing the flag.”

“There will be no shooting?”

“Not unless they fancy a slow-moving target.”

“But you do not think so, yes?”

“I do not think so,” Cross agreed, making no reference to the back seat, where Tracker and Buddha watched from their respective windows.

The low-rider rumbled past the blocks, Mexicali hip-hop accenting ground-pounding from the uncorked mufflers.

“Showing,” Buddha said.

“Got ’em.”

Five seconds later, Tracker whispered, “Showing
only
,” as another member of the mini-gang lifted his unbuttoned denim shirt to display the butt of a pistol in his waistband.

“¡Haga fila!”
Buddha shouted out his window. “Get in line!” he translated for Tracker’s benefit. “It’s what you say when somebody threatens you—kind of telling them that you hear that kind of bullshit all the time. Spanish? Sure. But not Puerto Rican—Central American, like you’d hear in one of the spots where MS-13 is dug in deep.”

“Another run?” Hector asked when they were well past the target blocks, approaching his own neighborhood. “I promised I would return this car in three hours.”

“No, this was plenty. We want them aware they’re being checked out. And confuse them, too. That’s why Buddha yelled what he did: MS-13 don’t do drive-bys, the Latin Kings don’t speak south-of-the-border Spanish, and there’s no real low-rider culture out here … not yet. We need to move them back, but they’re not going to try going into claimed turf. And now, on their own turf, they don’t have any idea who’s
staking
a claim.”

“They are like toothpaste in a tube, now, Cross. So where
could
they go?”

“Away,” is all Cross said. And all the result he wanted.

“
HAD TO
snap off a couple,” Ace reported to the assembled crew. “The bangers around here, they don’t shoot like they do in L.A.”

“What difference?” Buddha asked, genuinely curious.

“West Coast gang boys, they roll past a rival block, they just start blazing. Not looking to take anyone out—although they
will
do that if there’s anyone who doesn’t know enough to get down—just showing that they got heart. What
they
call heart, anyway.

“But on
my
side of town, they don’t play that. They patrol, okay? Work the borders. Another gang flashes colors, they shoot. And that’s to kill, not some spray job.”

“So it doesn’t matter,” Cross explained. “Whichever gang took fire, all they’d really know is it was some
other
gang.”

“They will be more alert,” Tracker said.

“Alert for what? We’re not going in any gang car, not on either side of
those
blocks, right?”

When no one responded, Cross handed out white sweatshirts and black hoods with computer-generated admixtures of astrological symbols stencil-sprayed between the eyeholes.

“Hey, I didn’t get one! I get one, too, don’t I?” Princess demanded.

“Just me, Tracker, and Buddha on the Latin side; Ace and whoever he wants to use on the other.”

“I got just the right boys,” Ace confirmed.

“Why can’t I go, too?” Princess demanded again.

“I can’t go, either,” Rhino told him. “We’re both too big. That’s something people might remember.”

“So what’s your excuse for me?” Tiger said, hands on hips.

“Same one,” Cross told her. “Only you’re a different kind of big.”

“Very nice.”

“It is,” Cross said, without a trace of sarcasm in his voice. “And, Princess, we’ve got a
special
job for you.”

“I bet,” the huge man-child sulked.

“You and Sweetie,” Cross added.

“Really?”

“Swear to Satan.”

“You hear that, Sweetie,” the hyper-muscled man said, dropping to one knee so he would speak directly into the dog’s ear.

The Akita made a chesty sound.

“See?” Princess said to Tiger. “He understands words, just like I told you.”