Blackjack

by Andrew Vachss

  Tiger’s expression changed, but she watched closely to see if she was being played with. And finally decided she was not. She uncrossed her arms, leaned a bit forward.

  “That’s okay,” she smiled, “I don’t like him, either.”

  The blond man remained profoundly uninterested in all this—he was well accustomed to people not finding him likable.

  “Sorry for the demonstration,” he told Cross, “but we didn’t have time to approach you through the usual channels.”

  “You want to hire me, then?”

  “That’s exactly what we want.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to show you rather than tell you. That means a drive to our HQ, but it’ll be easier that way. Quicker, too.”

  Cross shrugged, flashing back to the cold truth of what Tracker had told him: if these people wanted him dead, he’d have stopped breathing some time ago.

  But that possibility cut both ways. Now that he had the satchel he carried inside a closed space, he knew his crew was safe, no matter how this ended. If things went wrong, he wouldn’t be leaving even a scrap of DNA behind.

  “Call it up,” the blond said into the microphone.

  BACK IN the War Room. Everybody was there, including Percy. He doesn’t get out much, unless there’s something requiring combat skills. Or kills.

  The blond man made the introductions. Nobody shook hands.

  “Why him?” Cross asked Tracker, jerking his thumb at the blond man.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s personal for you,” Cross said. “Not for him.”

  Wanda didn’t speak, just threw a couple of keystrokes at her type pad.

  Tracker tapped his heart as the large monitor flashed on an Indian hunting party returning to camp, finding those they left behind hanging upside down, bleeding out, stripped of bone matter.

  Cross nodded his understanding.

  “Why not ask me, too?” Tiger half-snarled. As if in compliance, Wanda hit more keys.

  “They took out three of my sisters,” Tiger whispered as the monitor showed three women, all armed to the teeth, standing in a back-to-back-to-back triangle in some sort of tunnel. Their faces reflected both calmness and rage—warriors facing certain death, determined not to go easily. Or alone.

  Cross lit a cigarette. Wanda’s face showed disapproval. Cross didn’t look nervous, didn’t look bored, didn’t look impatient.

  Finally, the blond man broke the silence. “We know what you are, Mr. Cross. And we have a job for you.”

  “You don’t have a clue about what I am, pal. All you know is what I do.”

  “Meaning …?”

  “I don’t know what you do, and I don’t give a damn. But I know what you are.”

  A grin flashed across Tiger’s face. Even Percy nodded his head in agreement.

  “We didn’t bring you here to play word games,” the blond said.

  “You don’t know me. Maybe you know some of the things I’ve done. Or I’m supposed to have done. Whatever, you don’t know much more than rumors. You don’t want to play word games, you can stop talking in code anytime you want. Just get down to it. What do you want done?”

  “The job—”

  “Not the job, the price. Say the figure for me to get something done. Or the threats if I don’t, whatever you deal in.”

  “Neither. How about you just tell us whether you’ve ever seen anything like this before?” The blond tossed some photographs on the table in front of Cross.

  A number of corpses, hanging upside down as one might hang a slaughtered steer to drain its fluids. The blurred background was a thatched hut of some kind, suggesting only an equatorial climate.

  “Yeah,” Cross said, bringing a look of surprise to the blond’s face.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Africa. We came back from patrol, found the whole sweeper team hung up, exactly like that.”

  “What did you think it was?”

  “What did I think it was? We all knew what it was. A message from the Simbas. That’s the way they did things over there: kill your enemy and leave his head on a stake. Discourages anyone else from hanging around.”

  “Did it work on you?”

  “Sure,” Cross replied, surprising the blond once again.

  “Then look at these.…” The blond tossed more pictures on top of the originals. All same-signature corpses, but the settings were vastly different. A penthouse apartment, a hunting lodge, an abandoned warehouse. No individual bodies, all multiple kills.

  “They all look alike,” Cross said, neglecting to mention that he had viewed an exactly similar scene only a short while ago.

  “Those scenes are not—”

  “Not the scenes.”

  “What, then?”

  “The bodies of the losers.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘victims’?”

  “Fighters aren’t victims. These are all some kind of battle sites. And a C-note to a dime says it wasn’t civilians who got taken out.”

  “They …?”

  “I told you before. The Simbas.”

  “Wanda …?” The blond man turned to her. She was busily tapping away at the computer keyboard with one hand, clicking a silver pen against her teeth with the other. “Simbas … Got it. None ever captured alive. Some of the intel says they’re a myth. Not really a tribe at all. There’s no hard—”

  “A myth?” Tracker interrupted, surprising everyone on the team. “Like the so-called Seminoles in Florida? They set up base in the Everglades, down where Stonewall Jackson wouldn’t go after them. So they had to call Cherokees who refused to walk the Trail of Tears by something other than their true name. It was Jackson who named them Seminoles—that way, he could tell the government that all the Cherokees were accounted for. Same as those Vietnam body-counts.

  “You know what my favorite song is,” Tracker continued, his voice heavy with a dull-thudding backdrop of ancient hate. “It’s called ‘Cherokee Nation.’ Naturally, a bunch of white men got to sing it. Even named themselves after the white man’s heroes: ‘Paul Revere and The Raiders.’

  “We were here before Columbus,” Tracker said, his tone making it clear that he was not inviting a response. “Maybe the Cherokee word for ‘blanket’ should be ‘smallpox,’ too.”

  “That does fit the Simbas,” Wanda said, gently breaking into the silence that followed.

  “Yeah?” Percy asked. “How’s that make any sense?”

  “Start from here,” Wanda recited, reading from her scrolling screen. “Allegedly, the Simbas are the only known tribe of mixed Africans.…”

  “Black and white?” Percy asked, now genuinely curious.

  “No, tribal-mixed. That almost never happens. And, when it does, it’s usually a war-rape. But with Simbas, they eventually accumulated sufficiently to form their own tribe.

  “Ample reports of this phenomenon from the Congo over the past sixty years. Yoruba with Hausa, Watusi with Pygmy, Kikuyu with Bantu. And so on. Some of them were allegedly part of the Mau Mau, but that wasn’t so much a tribe as a movement. All the database shows is a thematic legend.”

  “A what?” the blond spat out, looking annoyed.

  “Thematic legend,” Wanda answered, more annoyed at the interruption. “One that retains its characteristics regardless of jurisdiction.

  “Essentially, this one was that, originally, the Simbas were freedom-fighters who had to flee to the bush when the invaders had them outgunned,” Wanda said, with a quick glance at Tracker. “The term ‘invaders’ probably originally meant ‘colonialists,’ but its usage has changed over time—probably because of mercenary raids on specific targets.” She turned in her chair, looked meaningfully at Cross, and returned to her narrative:

  “The Simbas were classic hit-and-run guerrillas. They can be distinguished from the modern version easily enough. Unlike, say, the FARC in Colombia or the Shining Path in Peru, or the Maoists in Tibet, th
ey—”

  “We don’t need to know what they’re not,” the blond man said, fussily impatient.

  Wanda continued as if no one had spoken. “They do not recruit, they permit no looting, rape is punishable by death, and there is no enforced membership. Their minimal requirement—and this is only a rough translation—is that a prospective member must bring a ‘hard’ part of their enemy as an offering.”

  She ran her right hand over her hair, as if to smooth it down. “Even the deranged creatures created by that so-called witch doctor Joseph Kony—the Lord’s Resistance Army—even those kidnapped and drug-crazed children fear the Simbas.

  “Their trademark never varies. It … well, you’ve seen the pictures.”

  “I wonder …” the blond mused. “Could that be the link?”

  “Africa?” Tiger asked.

  “Why not? They had to start somewhere. Maybe they started killing for what they thought was a good enough reason and just got to like it. That does happen.”

  “Yes. I have seen it myself,” Tracker said, coldly eyeing the blond.

  “Come on,” Cross said, in a tone somewhere between tired and bored. “Started in Africa, huh? Wasn’t that what you government idiots were saying about AIDS? I mean, before everyone found out it was a lab experiment gone wrong in Haiti?”

  “We have confirmed signature kills all over the globe,” Wanda answered, looking straight at Cross. “I don’t see how it would be possible for unacclimated Africans to strike in the Arctic Circle. Do you?”

  “Maybe they evolved,” Cross said. “Same way we all did, right? Humans, I mean. Some seeds grew in the sun, some in the ice. Or we started in the Cradle, like a lot of scientists think. Places get too crowded, people move on. Especially when they get a lot of encouragement. When’s the first confirmed kill?”

  “It is difficult to determine with any degree of accuracy,” Wanda acknowledged. “We have references to similar multiple slaughters throughout history. Cave paintings of Neanderthals looking up at hanging corpses, looking puzzled, as if the killings weren’t their work. Egyptian pharaohs left what could be records of something similar, unearthed by tomb robbers. Hannibal kept a journal on his way over the Alps. And there are a number of references in futhark—”

  “What?”

  “Scandinavian runes—probably dating back to early Viking times,” she said to the blond man, now seriously annoyed at the interruption of her report. “The references go as far back as we can go. But, with so many other myths and legends disproven, it’s impossible to tell for sure. No way to come up with authenticated facts.”

  “So those so-called Seminoles could be … they could be from the same root?” Tiger wondered aloud.

  “Of course,” Wanda replied.

  Tracker was silent.

  “Junkyard dogs,” Cross finally said. “They’ve probably formed into their own species by now.” He looked up at the blond man: “I still don’t know what you want from me.”

  “A specimen,” the blond man answered, in the same tone he would use to order room service.

  CROSS SCANNED the blond as he would a snake he’d never seen before. He couldn’t identify the snake, but some deeply rooted instinct warned him that it was poisonous.

  “I don’t do that kind of work,” he said.

  “Yes, you do. We don’t have time for games. You’re a man for hire. And the job doesn’t matter if the money’s right—we’ve seen your résumé.”

  At a nod from the blond man, the large screen started running a “Greatest Hits”-type trailer: Cross moving stealthily behind a young man wearing a ski mask who was aiming a recurve bow armed with a barbed arrow at a giraffe in a zoo enclosure; Cross and another man—short, squat, implacable, casually holding a butcher knife—speaking to a man handcuffed to a desk; Cross in an Amazon jungle, walking point at the head of a small squad.…

  “That’s supposed to tell you … what, exactly? All that proves my point. I’m a problem-solver, not a hit man,” Cross said. “A guy like you wouldn’t know the difference, but”—turning to the Indian—“I thought some of you would.”

  “I know the difference.” Tracker spoke quietly. “It is also what I do. As Wanda just said, even these ‘Simbas’ appear to have rules governing what they are permitted to do. But this isn’t a contract kill we’re talking about. It’s … it’s another war.”

  “If it is, you’re no draftee.”

  “No. As you said, for me, it is personal. For Tiger, too. Wanda and Percy, they’re just lifers.”

  “Tribalism,” Cross said quietly. “The curse of Africa. Spread until it became the curse of humans.”

  “Never mind the philosophy,” the blond man told him. “You in or out?”

  “What’s ‘in’ mean, pal? What’s the objective here?”

  “A specimen, remember. Not a dead body … a live one. There has to be a way to … deal with them, but we need to study one of them to find out how. No negotiations. You can name your price. But this job is purely COD.”

  CROSS SAT, thinking it over. Replaying in his head all the assignments he’d undertaken over the years.

  Not a hit man—who am I kidding? he thought to himself, keeping his face a show-nothing mask.

  “Why me?” he finally asked.

  “Believe it or not,” the blond man told him, “what we want is your mind, not your combat skills. You have unique … experiences that our superiors believe would be invaluable.”

  “Two choices: either actually say something, or drive me home, pal.”

  “Look around you, Mr. Cross. Tracker got his name from his work. Percy’s been in more wars than I’ve had birthdays. And Tiger … well, she’s earned her name. Between our financial resources and the commitment of our volunteers, we have more than enough manpower.”

  Tiger raised an eyebrow at this last word, but didn’t deign to speak.

  “Okay, you’ll pay the freight, but only COD. Fair enough. But it’s not only money I work for. How high do you guys reach?”

  The blond man made a gesture which instantly translated to: “All the way to the top.”

  “Yeah? Can you fix me up with a Get Out of Jail Free card?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just what it sounds like: immunity from prosecution. The feds do it all the time. They do it for rats; why not for … contract employees?”

  The blond man exchanged a look with Wanda. “We could probably handle that. Give us the details.”

  “Details?”

  “When the crime was committed, who was involved, that kind of thing.”

  “It hasn’t been committed yet.”

  “What? That doesn’t make any—”

  “My crew are all tightrope-walkers. You can’t make too many passes without taking a fall. Sooner or later, that happens—maybe to one of us; maybe to us all. So that’s what I want: the next fall, on the house.”

  Another look between the blond man and Wanda. Finally, the blond said, “We’ll have to check on that.”

  “I can wait,” Cross told him. He slid a slip of paper across the table. “These people’ll know how to reach me. Or you can track me down yourselves, in case you want to show off your toys again.”

  “Tiger and Tracker will take you back,” the blond man said as the Indian slid behind Cross, a black blindfold in his hands.

  ALMOST DAWN. A limo-sized four-door sedan made its way through the city. It moved purposefully, a shark attracted by the electrical pulses of potential prey.

  The comparison is valid. This is the infamous “Shark Car,” known and feared throughout the Badlands. A three-ton armored beast, all-wheel drive with adjustable power distribution, independent suspension all around, air bags under each wheel. The power plant was a totally reworked mega-monster engine: a thirteen-plus-liter Hemi, with two separate shots of nitrous oxide always available. Its city-camo paint was a shaded, blotched gray-black, rarely noticed except by those who knew what they were actually viewing.

  The
high-tech van was on the move as well. Tiger was behind the wheel, Cross next to her in the front seat, the blindfold still over his eyes. Tracker was riding behind them, a short-barreled, night-scoped rifle across his lap.

  The van moved placidly through constantly changing neighborhoods. Multi-levels yielded sharp contrasts as antiseptically wealthy sections became festering-sore slums. The lines of demarcation weren’t always so clearly marked, especially in newly gentrified areas. Desolate poverty ran through the near-deserted night streets as randomly as the broken veins in a wino’s nose.

  “What you said before. About tribalism. Was that just playing games with that government stooge?” Tracker asked.

  Smoking a cigarette with the black blindfold still in place, Cross looked like a man facing the firing squad. He answered without turning around.

  “You tell me. Doesn’t this feel like one tribe’s doing all the killings? They got their own way of doing things, their own gods to worship.…”

  “But how could one tribe …?”

  “You wouldn’t have said what you did about Seminoles unless you’ve got Cherokee blood yourself,” Cross answered.

  “I do.”

  “But you’re not exactly a Cherokee, right?”

  “I just said—”

  “You’re a Chickasaw,” Cross interrupted, speaking as if simply stating a fact. “Which means your ancestors didn’t sow crops. Didn’t do a lot of hunting, either. So they had to keep on the move.”

  “Speak clearly,” Tracker said, his voice just a shade off threat.

  “Okay. How’s this? Your ancestors got what they needed from other tribes. And not by trading. They took what they needed.”

  “That was the truth,” Tracker finished. “Yes. I see what you speak of now. The Simbas—”

  “Tribes wander,” Tiger interrupted, speaking aloud what she had been thinking ever since Cross used the word “Simbas.”

  Cross nodded a silent affirmative.

  “Some tribes don’t even have a homeland,” Tiger rolled on. “Nomads. They just pitch their tents wherever they are. Like the Mongols. Or those Chickasaws.”