Blackjack

by Andrew Vachss

  “Yeah, there’s no racial piece in this,” Cross agreed. “Look at the Gypsies. Like the ones they tried to drive out of France. Had them standing in line for Hitler’s ovens, too.”

  Tiger’s “uh-huh” was more growl than speech.

  “And you don’t have to be Roma to be a gypsy, do you?” Cross finished.

  As Tracker silently nodded agreement, Tiger looked over at Cross, thoughtfully. “Right,” she agreed, her voice so soft it was almost a purr.

  “ARE YOU guys the whole team?” Cross asked.

  “What team?” Tiger responded warily.

  “Whatever Blondie’s in charge of. There’s five of you that I met. All I’m asking: are there any more?”

  Tracker and Tiger exchanged looks. Tracker shrugged his shoulders in a “Why not?” gesture.

  “The op is multi-national,” Tiger told Cross. “We’re Unit 3. I don’t know how many teams are working this, but I can tell you this much for sure: there’s no place where the killers we’re looking for haven’t made an appearance.”

  In her mind’s eye, Tiger reviewed footage she’d been shown of other units. Some seemed racially homogenous, others were overtly mixed, but it would take an expert eye to discern between the Japanese, Korean, Thai, Laos, Vietnamese, and Chinese that formed one group. Assembling a team from those nationalities had never been accomplished—their traditional posture toward one another has historically ranged from simmering hostility to outright warfare.

  It was the same for a black crew. A closer look would reveal members ranging from Africa to the West Indies. A Latino unit had Mexican, Cuban, and Central and South American members—the latter still another example that flew in the face of any attitudes known to the authorities. Or the underworld.

  “Who’s the boss?” Cross asked.

  “TRAP,” Tiger said, glancing at his blindfolded face. “It isn’t a person, it’s a program. A computer program. We all feed to a central database, and instructions come back.”

  Tiger’s mind viewed a super-computer, encircled by a waist-high band on which terminals sat. Behind each terminal an operator was incessantly inputting, examining, then inputting again and again.

  “A computer …” Cross snorted. “Computers don’t understand hunter-killer teams.”

  “It was TRAP that told us to bring you into this,” Tiger answered. “Computers don’t have to understand, they just have to process. They’re no better than the data they feed on. And, sometimes, human ‘understanding’ would just get in the way.”

  As she wheeled the van around a long, sweeping corner, it became apparent that they were back in that part of the city where Cross was at home. Tracker leaned forward and unsnapped the blindfold.

  CROSS BLINKED his eyes a couple of times. Once sight-oriented, he said, “Drop me anywhere.”

  The van pulled to the curb. Cross jumped down and slipped into the shadows, penetrating deeper and deeper until he became one himself.

  “He knows the old ways,” Tracker said to Tiger.

  “He knows some new ones, too,” Tiger replied as the van pulled off. She flicked a switch to pop a rectangular gauge into life. The activated screen was blank. “See? We lost thermal on him the minute he put on that long coat.”

  CROSS EMERGED from an alley. The Shark Car was waiting, idling soundlessly. Its back door popped open. Cross stepped in. The car moved off.

  “You got them, Buddha?”

  “Knew where to meet you, didn’t I, boss?”

  “I had the transmitter on me—in the heel of my boot. But they’ll probably sweep that van, find the little unit I left behind.”

  Buddha pushed a button. What looked like a navigation screen opened on the dashboard. A moving red dot was plainly visible. “Maybe so,” he said. “But they haven’t done it yet.”

  “Then Rhino has them locked on, too. I guess that’s all we can do for one night.”

  “You really think they might go for that free-pass deal, boss?”

  “It’s probably not their call. But that doesn’t matter. They’ll say so, anyway.”

  “YOU GOT the package?”

  “In the trunk, boss. Right next to the RPGs.”

  “Okay. We might as well clean up the bear-claw thing. Chang’s expecting a visit—his spot’s right above that Chinese restaurant. The building is only two stories. He’s got all kinds of protection on the first floor, and the upstairs windows overlook the street, so their lookout will see us the second we show—they all know this car.”

  “So they see it. So what? You’d come by to pick up your money in person, right? Besides, I’ll be ready to launch ten seconds after you hit the street.”

  “Yeah. We really got no choice. Chang thinks we did the job on Viktor. Maybe there’s all kinds of questions about how those Russians got splattered, but nobody doubts they’re gone. All of them. That’s gonna make him nervous. Chang’s the kind of guy who hates loose ends. That’s why I have to just walk in. Coming to pick up my money, that is what he’d expect. So seeing me might calm him down some. And we don’t need him calm for long.”

  “I HAVE your payment, Cross. In that silver case, over to my right. But, before you pick it up, would you indulge an old man by answering a question?”

  “Depends on the question, Chang.”

  “Ah. You are a man who never changes, Cross. Very well. There is no question but that you have earned your fee. But one question remains unanswered: how did you do it?”

  “That I can’t tell you.”

  “And why would that be so?”

  “Trade secret.”

  “To be sure. But do not friends sometimes share their secrets?”

  “They might. But we’re not friends. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have my payment—payment I already earned, remember—sitting between those two gunmen of yours.”

  “I have insulted you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I apologize. Perhaps we are not yet friends.” The old man snapped his finger. One of the men who had been guarding the silver case picked it up and brought it over to Cross. He placed it on the floor, and then returned to his post. “But friendship between us, that remains a possibility?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent. Perhaps you would like to open the case?”

  “Why would I disrespect you, Chang? You are a man of your word, as am I. That was what we both respected when we reached our bargain. This is something we share. So I leave as I came, with promises kept on both sides.”

  “I understand,” Chang said. He moved his head a fraction of an inch. Cross returned the gesture, bowing more deeply, but never below the range of his eyes.

  Then he picked up the silver case and walked out of the room.

  STANDING BEFORE the passenger-side door of the Shark Car, Cross spoke very softly. “This case weighs more than the other one.”

  “If it’s a trick, it’s the last one he’ll ever pull,” Buddha’s whisper came from under the car. By the time Cross had his door opened, the first RPG launched.

  The second floor exploded in a burst of flame. The next two rounds hit the restaurant below. The fourth went back to what was left of the second floor.

  Buddha slid into the driver’s seat. The Shark Car disappeared, paying no more attention to the sirens that tore the night air than did the men in their death-throes inside the building.

  “Where’s the RPG tubes?”

  “I left them behind, boss. Take too long to pull ’em out, stick them back in the trunk. But they’ve all got timers. Three minutes from launch, each one’s going to turn into metal dust.”

  “Timers …” Cross said, looking down at the silver case he was holding in his lap.

  “Toss it?”

  “There’s supposed to be about three hundred K in here, Buddha.”

  THE SQUAT little man’s touch on the steering wheel was as delicate and skilled as that of a concert pianist. The Shark Car ripped through the city, heading for the Badlands. When it crossed the barrie
r and slid to a stop, Cross jumped out, yelling “Condor!”

  A teenage boy with a blue Mohawk haircut popped up, bending his body around the roll of razor wire that topped a chain-link fence in the pose that had earned him his name.

  “See this?” Cross held up the silver case. “I’m going to lob it over. You take it and put it someplace nobody’s going to stumble over. Then get away from it as fast as you can. Don’t come back to wherever you stash it until I show up again—it could be a bomb, with a timer on it. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cross held the case in both hands, swung it back and forth to build momentum, and released his hold on his last forward swing. Condor caught it in both hands and took off, running through the darkness as if he had infra-red eyesight.

  The Shark Car pulled away.

  THE OLD man’s white hair flowed down to his shoulders. He was sitting in a lotus position, smoking a pipe that looked to have been carved from bone.

  “You were not expected,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to say anything on the phone. And I knew I’d be recognized.”

  “You have something for me, then?” the old man said, smiling a murderer’s grin. His gray teeth turned the gesture into an even more deadly grimace.

  “I have Chang.”

  “You are holding him?”

  “No. Nobody will ever hold him. I have his life. He’s gone.”

  “I heard nothing—”

  “You will.”

  “We did not retain such a service.”

  “Consider it a gift. A gift from a friend.”

  The old man immediately handed his pipe to Cross, who took a deep drag without hesitation before returning it.

  THE NEXT day, Unit 3 assembled in the War Room. It was obvious that they had been discussing something for a long time: the place was littered with coffee cups and food wrappers. They all looked various degrees of disheveled, except for Tracker.

  “You really think he’s worth it?” The blond man’s question was directed at the room, not at anyone in particular.

  “I believe he … understands them,” Tracker said thoughtfully.

  “He doesn’t care,” Wanda said. “He will regard it as any bounty hunter would. Only, this time, the ‘dead or alive’ is limited to ‘alive.’ ”

  “Look,” the blond man snapped, “we don’t have time to keep arguing with each other. We’re still ‘Unit 3’ to the spooks, but the reality is, we’ve stepped over the line too many times already.…”

  “You stepped over the line, Blondie,” Percy fired back. “And you took me and Wanda right along with you. One more mess like over in Indiana …”

  As Percy spoke, everyone else in the room had a mental picture of him standing spread-legged on a ghetto rooftop, a surface-to-air missile launcher braced on one thick shoulder. He staggered slightly under the kick of the weapon. They saw the vapor trail of the rocket as it unexpectedly veered off-course, its heat-seeker attracted by a closer target. That turned out to be a small private jet, which disintegrated immediately on impact.

  They also saw a newspaper headline:

  TERRORIST ATTACK AT GARY AIRPORT!

  “Things happen,” the blond man said, unruffled. “We know they use some kind of heat-seeker themselves. It only made sense to turn the tables.”

  “I didn’t sign on to waste civilians,” Tiger said.

  “Civilians? That plane was carrying a load of dope dealers, on their way back from Vegas. And if you don’t like us bringing Cross in, you can split. Take the Indian with you, too,” the blond man told her. “We’re on our own now. And we don’t have a hell of a lot of time, right, Wanda?”

  Wanda checked her computer, nodded. “No. TRAP will figure out that we’ve been mobile-accessing its closed-level data. In fact,” she hypothesized, “it probably could have found us already, had we been Priority One.”

  “And we’re not,” the blond said, “so what does that tell you?”

  “What it always tells us,” Percy threw in. “We pull this off, the brass says all is forgiven. We don’t—we get erased.”

  The blond got to his feet and started pacing. He turned to Wanda, apparently the one person with whom he had any sort of affinity. “Could we make it happen, what that man wants? Immunity for a future crime?”

  Wanda worked over her keyboard. “Some places, yes. Detroit, Cleveland, too. And New York for sure. As for Chicago … you know how it works here.”

  “That’ll have to do,” the blond said, to no one in particular. He had adopted this habit many years ago, relieving himself of the unwanted feeling that no one was listening.

  “I MAKE it three-to-one it blows up,” Buddha said to the crew watching him manipulate a robot originally intended for disarming bombs. “Be just like that rodent to pay us off in plastique.”

  Cross said nothing.

  “Credit cards?” a thick-necked Hispanic youth mused aloud.

  “Not plastic, fool,” a small, slender black youth wearing a pair of glasses with one orange lens snapped. “Plastique. Like dynamite, only you can shape it any way you want, like it was a piece of clay.”

  “All of you, shut up, okay?” Condor hissed. “You know the rules: we get to watch so long as we watch quiet.”

  All the watchers immediately fell silent. Theirs was a gang with no name. None was needed. No rival crew was going to claim the Badlands—the Cross crew was only a whispered rumor to most outlaws, but none wanted to test it.

  The gang’s members came in all sizes and shapes, all colors and creeds. All they shared were survival skills so finely honed that they were able to permanently reside in an area nobody in his right mind would even enter.

  Years ago, a daredevil graffiti artist had accepted a challenge to plant his tag on a semi-trailer that had been stripped of its axles. Now completely coated with a solid layer of rust, the trailer stood only about a hundred feet past the twin piles of crookedly stacked junkyard cars that marked the border to the Badlands.

  The tagger knew if he managed to pull off that stunt he’d immediately be crowned as the King of Graffiti throughout the city—a stake worth playing for.

  The tagger picked broad daylight for his move, knowing that the darkness which usually cloaked his work would not be his friend on this mission. Besides, maybe only some of the rumors were true—whoever heard of a gang that got up before noon?

  It was just before ten in the morning when the tagger stepped behind the pillars of junked cars and advanced on the semi. He carried only two cans of spray paint: one for lettering, the other for outlining. He had no need of any of his usual equipment—there would be no climbing involved in this exploit. He didn’t even carry his prized notebook—he could spray his personal tag with his eyes closed.

  The assembled watchers on the other side of the border never agreed on what happened next—a cloud of metallic rusty dirt rose like a curtain between their eyes and the doomed tagger. But there was no argument that the body of the tagger came flying at them in a long, high arc, as if it had been launched from a catapult.

  The rule was as simple as the skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison: you didn’t enter the Badlands unless you planned to stay. You might join the gang—provided you proved in according to whatever requirements were current—or you might just have created your own gravestone.

  THE NO-NAME gang watched as Buddha deftly moved the controls of the robot, sending it across obstacle after obstacle.

  “You picked a good spot,” Cross said to Condor. The young man visibly swelled with pride at the praise. He deftly snatched the rubber-banded roll of bills Cross tossed in his direction, and immediately threw it over his shoulder to a Samoan youth whose bulk belied his speed.

  The robot reached the silver case. Its long arms tapped their way to the single latch, and popped it open.

  Silence descended.

  “Go,” Cross said.

  Condor raced across to the case, picked it up with both hands so he wouldn’t hav
e to shut it, and ran back to where Cross was waiting.

  Cross dropped to one knee and methodically played a flex wand with a tiny fiber-optic light at its tip over the contents.

  “It didn’t blow up,” Condor said, unnecessarily.

  “You never celebrate a kill until you make sure the body’s not breathing,” Cross said, softly.

  Condor nodded. It wasn’t a lesson he would forget. If the Badlands had ever built an idol to worship, it would have looked like Cross.

  “Thirteen bars,” Cross finally said.

  “Looks like Chang was throwing us a bonus,” Buddha said, surprised.

  “Or setting us up for one,” Cross answered. “Maybe he was just staging a scene. There’s always a next time.”

  “Not for Chang, there won’t be,” Buddha replied.

  THE CREW arrived back at Red 71, entering by different paths. They were all inside the poolroom when three men approached. Bowing deeply, they handed Cross a carved wooden stick wrapped in black silk.

  Cross returned their bow, after which the three men turned sharply and walked out of the poolroom.

  “What’s that?” Princess demanded to know.

  “A message,” Cross told him. “From the head of the gray-tooth crew.”

  “What message?”

  Cross twirled the stick slowly in his hands. “Buddha?”

  “Got me, boss.”

  Rhino took the stick from Cross and disappeared behind the beaded curtain.

  BUDDHA HAD dropped three hundred dollars to Princess at the pool table before Rhino returned.

  “Some of the symbols are Cambodian, I think,” he said. “Nothing matched exactly, but pretty close.”

  “And …” Cross prompted.

  “It says either that our enemies are now his enemies … or that we can redeem the stick for a body. Payable anytime, and it can be any body we want.”

  “Now, there’s a man with class,” Buddha said, answering an unasked question.