Urban Renewal (36 page)

“
SO WE
’
RE DONE.
”

“Unless you want to keep paying those punks to keep an empty apartment safe?”

“Come on!”

“And they’re not like most over that side of town, are they?”

“Meaning …?”

“They see you coming, they don’t run, they step to you.”

“True.”

“So, the way I see it, you owe them one more payoff.”

“They always come all together, bro. Four of them.”

“You drive—they know your car, right? Let Tracker and Buddha do the rest. We don’t need any noise when we finish this.”

“I won’t even leave my—” Ace stopped, startled at the playing card he’d just pulled from his shirt pocket. He turned the card in Cross’s direction.

“What the hell is this?”

“It’s an ace.”

“Yeah. Supposed to be
my
ace. So how’d it get turned into the ace of hearts?”

“Got me.” Cross shrugged, feeling the near-invisible blue brand burn against his right cheekbone.

“I don’t like it,” Ace said, very softly. “You don’t think that those …?”

“That’s not the question, brother. You’re thinking, could … whatever was here before … could it come back, yeah? Me, I’m wondering, did it ever leave?”

“You’re not wondering,” Tiger said.

All eyes turned toward the Amazon, but she was done talking.

TWO NIGHTS
later.

“I want to show you something,” Tiger said to Cross. The two of them were alone in the back of Red 71.

“I wish you would.”

“Stop it! I’m not playing now. You know what a relay camera is?”

“Picks up whatever it sees, and passes it over to a storage box. That way you can keep it running twenty-four/seven. The top security companies use them, so they’re not overwriting their own data.”

“Not exactly a bodega cam.”

“No. Those have to keep their tapes ninety days. If there’s nothing on them, they just hit the ‘Restart’ button. They aren’t exactly high-def to begin with, and after they’re on the third or fourth overwrite, whatever they pick up is just a jumble of black and white. Cops hate them.”

“Why?”

“Because they end up looking for some dark-faced man in a black hoodie—guy could be anything from Greek to African, and even
that’s
useless if the stickup artist pulled a bandanna over his face. There’s no scale, so they can’t even narrow down the guy’s height. But the local TV stations will run the tapes—you know, that ‘Have you seen this man?’
crap—and when the cops don’t find the guy, people think they’re not doing their job. There’s tapes of two-bit ‘gangsters’ jumping over counters, pistol-whipping some poor bastard. Looks ugly. And it is, I guess. Still, those tapes, they’re really not much to go on.

“But you know those nature shows? Where they set up a relay camera and just let it run, sometimes for weeks, or even months?”

“Sure.”

“You know how they make them real small now? The lenses not much bigger than the eraser on a pencil—you can plant them just about anywhere.”

“Tiger, what’s with all this? You got something you want to tell me, spit it out.”

Tiger ran both hands through her thick, striped hair, stretching like the big cat she was named for. Cross recognized the gesture. Not an attention-attracting move; it was a sign that the Amazon was in warrior mode, measuring the enemy’s strength, computing the odds.

Cross lit a cigarette, saying nothing.

He was already stubbing it out when Tiger said, “We found something.”

“We?”

“Me and Tracker. Remember, we were on the team that brought you in to get a specimen of …”

“Yeah. But I didn’t pull it off.”

“You sure?” Tiger said, very softly. She planted one haunch on the edge of the man-for-hire’s desk, a solid cypress plank that was balanced between a pair of wrought-iron sawhorses, and extended a long talon to tap Cross’s face just below his right eye. “Up close, I can see it.”

“That blue thing?”

“No. That only happens when … Well, I’m not sure what sets it off, but you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. I can feel when it burns. But I don’t know what … activates it.”

“It just looks like a tiny scar now. Nobody’d ever see it unless they were looking for it.”

“I still don’t see where you’re going.”

“Be patient,” Tiger said, a smile flashing across her lips so quickly that Cross couldn’t be sure it had ever been there.

“I am,” Cross said, pointedly.

“There’s a wall over on the South Side. The whole side of a building. Pretty much all that’s left of that building, actually. Ace showed it to us. It’s kind of a mural for graffiti artists. No gang tags. So nothing to
over
tag.”

“Okay. So …?”

“So what Ace told us was there
used
to be tags. All Vice Lords, but different sets, you know?”

“Sure. That’s more West Coast crap—every few blocks, there’s something like another division of the same army. Gangs get so big, they start to subdivide. Supposedly started in Compton, but you can’t trust the wire on that. So you got Crips breaking into smaller units—48th Street Crips, like that. But here, even that’s not enough. Gangster Disciples may be the father, but it’s got a whole lot of sons: Maniac Gangster Disciples, like that.”

“Right. But Ace showed us this wall. Like he wanted us to verify what he saw. Only it wasn’t there.”

“Slow down, girl. Ace brought you over to show you something, but there was nothing to show?”

“Yeah. And Ace, he’s the last guy on the planet to start seeing ghosts. That’s where we got the idea for the camera.”

“Just show me,” Cross said.

THE WALL
had once been whitewashed, but time had faded it to a shade of ecru that seemed to blanket certain parts of Chicago. Parts known to be don’t-go-there dangerous.

The DVD that Tiger was playing showed all kinds of ghetto artistry. Not tagging, more like murals. Mostly portraits and scenes.

“Martin Luther King on the same wall as H. Rap Brown—haven’t seen those two together before. Look like the same artist did them both to you?”

“It was the same artist,” Tiger said. “No secret about it. We talked to her ourselves. She said it was a ‘spectrum mural.’ Nobody bothered her while she was working.”

“Who was watching her back?”

“Nobody, is what she said. She’s not affiliated, and she wasn’t flying colors while she worked.”

“That’s a
lot
of work.”

“Took her a little more than two months, working every day.”

“Neighborhood girl?”

“Born and raised. But she’s not an artist, she’s an architect.”

“So she could be earning some real coin.…”

“Yes. Only she worked on that mural every day—I mean
every
day—and she didn’t have a night job.”

“Somebody was paying her bills?”

“I guess so. But she was living alone. By choice. I thought she was about twenty-two—but she’s damn near forty. Long-distance biker—bicycle, I’m saying, no motor—and she’s spent a
lot
of time in a dojo. Girl’s got legs of steel.”

“Black girl?”

“Mixed, I think. Not just her skin shade, her hair.”

“You get Rhino to run her?”

“All checks out. This girl—Antoinette—she’s all about off-the-grid stuff. Her building, where she lives, it looks like about what you’d expect in that neighborhood. But there’s a solar collector of some kind on the roof. Rhino said she
owns
the building, but there’s no account with any utility. No bills for electricity, gas, phone, Internet—nothing. He was impressed … and you know what it takes to impress
that
man.”

“What? He wants to put one of those solar things on top of Red 71?”

“Ask
him
.”

“Tiger …”

“Tracker said you were very still inside yourself. He said he never knew a white man to be like that. How about you just relax for another few minutes, let me tell this my way, all right?”

Cross lit another cigarette.

“Okay,” the Amazon said. “Let’s add it up. This girl—and she’s a
pretty
girl—works on that mural every day. Nobody bothers her. Nobody even … I don’t know, it’s like she’s got protection everybody knows about, but it can’t be that. Like I said, she’s not
with
anyone.

“Now, here’s the thing. Ace said there was a gunfight right across from the mural one night. Not late at night, just when it was getting dark. None of the bangers got hit, but a little girl took one in the back of the head as she was running for cover.

“Just as Ace was coming back, first light, he sees a pair
of playing cards on that wall.
Huge
ones, covering the whole mural. Two cards: ace of clubs, jack of hearts.”

“Painted over what that girl was—?”

“
No
. That’s just it. It was kind of like a hologram. Ace said he could see right through it.”

“The girl—this Antoinette—she show up later?”

“Yep. And went right back to work. The cards, they were gone. Like they’d never been there at all.”

“Ace doesn’t see things. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, wouldn’t touch drugs.”

“I know that.”

“So that’s why you mounted the camera?”

“Right.”

“And …?”

“See for yourself,” Tiger said, softly. “It’s just about to come up.”

The screen was still filled with the mural when a pair of playing cards materialized over it, just as Ace had described to Tiger. This time, it was the ace of hearts and the jack of spades.

“Stayed just like that for almost ten minutes,” Tiger said. “Then it just … disappeared.”

“Same time?”

“Yeah. Like it was filling in the crack between night and dawn.”

“Got a date on that thing?”

“Of course.”

“Anything happen that night?”

“Anything …?”

“Violent deaths.”

“Not in that neighborhood.”

“But …?”

“You remember that puny little ‘Führer’? The one that ended up with a long sentence for plotting to kill the judge who sentenced him? The original sentence was nothing to start with, but he turned it into an all-the-way with
that
move.”

“Yeah. But that was—”

“Few years ago, I know. But he put together some ‘followers.’ He’s locked in PC, but that Web site what’s left of his ‘storm troopers’ put together claimed he was secretly running the AB from Inside. He went from a terrified little twit to shot caller. Magical, huh? Only that was pure Internet baloney. Still,
somebody
didn’t like it much.”

“He got—?”

“Not him. That little group of play-Nazis. The ones that put up that Web site. They had a storefront. And I mean
had
.”

“Bomb?”

“Nope. Five people—two female, three male, none of them over twenty-five—all got shot in the head. What the papers love to call ‘execution style.’ The shooters sprayed ‘AB’ over everything in there—walls, computers, posters. They got so carried away, they even sprayed all over Hitler’s picture.”

“What happened to the Web site?”

“Nothing, Rhino says. But it hasn’t been updated since that night.”

“So where’s the connection?”

“I don’t know, okay!”

“Sssshhh, girl. There’s nothing to get worked up about.”

“Really?” Tiger said, reflexively touching the knives in
her holster. “I’ll buy that. I’ll buy it the minute you explain how Ace’s calling card changed color. How did the ace of spades turn into the ace of hearts?”

Cross felt the spot below his eye burn, as if in answer to the warrior-woman’s question.

Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youths exclusively. His many books include the Burke novels, the Cross series, the Aftershock series, and three collections of short stories. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in
Parade
,
Antaeus
,
Esquire
,
Playboy
, and
The New York Times
, among other publications. He divides his time between his native New York City and the Pacific Northwest.