Blackjack

by Andrew Vachss

“That, I haven’t figured yet,” the man called Cross acknowledged. He lit another cigarette, took a deep drag, and placed it in the ashtray. “There’s a new girl working—she goes on soon. I’ll be back to the joint in an hour or so.”

  SIX HOURS later. An elderly man was semi-reclining behind the battered steel counter standing at the basement entrance to the Red 71 poolroom. He was watching a small black-and-white TV from under a green eyeshade.

  A tall, handsome Latino entered, dressed in a full-drape pink mohair jacket over a silky black shirt. He tapped on the counter with the underside of a heavy gold ring. After a long minute, the elderly man swiveled around to have a look.

  “What?” he said, his voice a model of neutrality.

  “I got a message for Cross,” the Latino replied.

  “Who?” the elderly man asked, a puzzled look on his face.

  “Cross. You know. El jefe.”

  “I don’t speak no Italian.”

  “Hey, old man, I don’t have time for your little jokes—you just give this to him,” the Latino said, sliding a folded square of white paper across the counter.

  The elderly man made no move to pick it up. He readjusted his eyeshade and turned his attention back to the TV. The Latino waited and waited, but the elderly man never moved. Angrily, the Latino spun on his heel and walked out.

  CROSS UNFOLDED the square of white paper in the back room. He looked at the writing for a minute, shaking his head.

  “Buddha, take a look at this.”

  The handwritten note was on heavy, watermarked paper. The script was flowery, ostentatiously serifed, obviously written with a calligraphic fountain pen.

  We have el maricón. We know he is one of yours. We also know he did not join your team; he was taken. We know where you stole him from. We tell you this so that you understand. We know everything, from the beginning.

  El maricón is now our property. If you wish to purchase him, for a fair price, you must call 29-504-456-5588 tonight before midnight.

  If you do not call, the next delivery will be a piece of our property, the work of our macheteros.

  “They got Princess,” Cross said, his voice barely audible.

  “It don’t sound like they know what they’re doing, whoever they are,” Buddha reflected. “I mean, Princess plays the role and all, but that’s just to get into fights—he’s about as gay as a damn tomcat on Viagra.”

  “If it’s the people I think it was, they do. I saw the light was on,” Cross said, nodding his head in the direction of a red bulb hanging from an exposed wire. “So Rhino took off. Maybe he’ll be able to tell us something when he comes back.”

  “What do you think they want, boss?”

  “Money or blood,” Cross answered, closing his eyes. “There’s nothing else people like them could want.”

  “HE JUST rode around,” Rhino reported an hour later. “Fancy car. Red Ferrari—I couldn’t have lost him if I tried. But all he did was drive. Finally, he pulled into an underground garage, a high-rise on the lakefront. No way to tell if he lives there—the garage was open to the public, too.”

  “How come you came back?”

  “Tracker’s on him now. I reached out on the cellular while I was still rolling. You were right to pull him away from those government guys. Tracker, he’s one of us, no question.”

  “The guy in the Ferrari had a cell, too,” Cross said. “See this note? The number they want me to call, that’s a sat phone. Looks like it started in Honduras, but it could be bounced from anywhere by now.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s SOP, follow anyone who comes in here asking for me, right? You were already gone by the time I even saw the note. Maybe Tracker will come up with something.”

  “I find that fancy-boy, he’ll tell us where Princess is,” the giant muttered.

  “If the guy who wrote the note was who I think he was, this guy in the Ferrari, he was just an errand boy.”

  “Who do you think was behind this? Who’d want to snatch Princess?” Rhino said, genuinely puzzled.

  “It smells like Muñoz,” Cross answered, lighting a cigarette. “And Muñoz always smells bad.”

  TEN O’CLOCK that same night. Cross and Rhino stepped out on the darkened roof of the Red 71 building. They did a rapid circuit of the roof, ignoring the large wooden box with its several round openings. Satisfied, Cross took a heavy-looking hand phone from his pocket, punched in a number.

  “Yes?” A voice in Latin-flavored English.

  “Calling before midnight,” Cross said.

  “We have a package. And we think, maybe you like to trade us something for it?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “A job. That’s all. One job. You do it, you get your package back.”

  “Still listening.”

  “Not on this phone—you know better. Land line.”

  “Say it.”

  “There is a phone booth. Just off Lake Shore. You know where Michigan Avenue takes that big curve? Across the Drive, on the other side, there’s a phone booth. It has a big red circle painted on the side. Tomorrow morning, at first light. You be there—you’ll hear from us then,” the Spanish-accented voice said, breaking the connection on the last word.

  Cross looked at Rhino. “It’s Muñoz all right,” he said. “We should have thrown that basura in for free the last time.”

  IT WAS 4:45 a.m. The city-camo’ed, blotchy gray-and-black sedan known as the “Shark Car” throughout the Badlands swept along Michigan Avenue, Buddha at the wheel.

  Cross spotted the open-air phone booth marked with the promised red circle. Standing a few feet away was a black man in his late teens, dressed in the latest gangsta chic—gleaming gold high-tops on his feet, an L.A. Dodgers cap on his head, the brim turned to the side. He was walking in tiny circles, constantly glancing down to consult a beeper in his hand. Two members of his posse lounged nearby, leaning against a black Escalade with bright-blue rims.

  Cross exited the Shark Car and starting walking toward the phone booth.

  “Yo! Don’t even think about it,” the gangsta-garbed man snarled. “That there is my phone. Go find yourself another one, whitey—I got business.”

  Cross turned as if to walk away, and pulled a black semi-auto pistol from his coat in the same motion. “Me, too,” he said quietly, holding the pistol aimed at the man’s stomach.

  The leader glanced over at his crew, but their hands were already high in the air. Buddha stood across from them, the three forming an isosceles triangle. It wasn’t the tiny Sig Sauer P238 in his hand which had riveted the other two men; it was the laser dot Buddha was languidly playing across their chests.

  “No disrespect,” Cross told the leader, almost eerily calm. “Like you said, it’s your phone. I’m waiting on this one important call, okay? Soon as it’s over, you get your phone back, permanent. And you never see us again. Okay?”

  “Yeah, all right, man,” the leader said, his eye on the pistol.

  “Only thing, I need privacy for my call, understand?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, man. Don’t get crazy. We just jet, all right?”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Cross said.

  The leader backed away toward the Escalade. He climbed into the back seat, keeping his hands in plain sight. The other two jumped into the front. The big SUV took off, scattering gravel.

  Any thoughts its occupants might have of turning around vanished when each side mirror of their SUV popped its glass, as if a pebble had been thrown up from the gravel by the huge tires. A soundless pebble.

  Cross stood next to the phone booth, again visually reconfirming the large red circle spray-painted on its side. He picked up the phone, tossed in three quarters, listened for a dial tone to verify the line worked, and quickly replaced the receiver.

  He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag.

  Traffic was still sporadic. The partygoers were all off the street, and the commuters still hadn’t made their app
earance. Cross took a third pull on his cigarette, then snapped it away.

  The sky began to lighten. Cross and Buddha didn’t speak, didn’t move from their spots. Their pistols were no longer in sight. Only their eyes were active, working in the overlapping full-circle sweeps they had learned together many years before.

  A LUSTROUS gray-white pigeon swooped down and perched atop the phone booth. Cross eyeballed the bird closely. It was markedly different from the winged rats that so thoroughly populated the city. This one had the same characteristically small head, short neck, and plump body, but its bearing was almost regal. And it was groomed to the max, every feather in place.

  Cross nodded to himself as he spotted the tiny cylinder anchored to one of the pigeon’s legs. He approached cautiously, even though the pigeon showed no signs of spooking. Cross reached up and stroked the bird before pulling it gently against his chest. He opened the cylinder, extracted a small roll of paper. The pigeon fluttered its wings once, hopping back onto the phone booth.

  Cross unfurled the paper, his eyes focusing in on the tiny, precise writing.

  WE ARE PROFESSIONALS, LIKE YOU. A MEETING MUST BE MADE SAFE FOR US BOTH. WE WILL NOT COME TO YOUR PLACE, AND YOU DO NOT KNOW WHERE WE ARE. WE WILL MEET AT NOON TOMORROW ON STATE STREET, AT THE OUTDOOR BISTRO CALLED NOSTRUM’S. YOU KNOW WHERE IT IS, WE ARE SURE. IF YOU ARE COMING, YOU MUST COME ALONE. WRITE YOUR DECISION ON THIS PAPER. IT WILL BE RETURNED TO US.

  Cross took a felt-tipped pen from his jacket, scrawled the single word “sí” on the bottom of the note, and replaced the paper inside the pigeon’s courier pouch. The bird preened itself for a few seconds and then took off, climbing higher and higher into the morning sky with powerful thrusts of its wings.

  LATE THAT night, the crew was gathered in the basement of Red 71.

  “You did the recon?” Cross asked Buddha.

  “Yeah. And I don’t like it, boss. The tables are all outside, pretty spread out. It’s only set back maybe ten, fifteen feet from the sidewalk. All wrong for a drive-by: too much foot traffic, and half of those yuppies must have cell-phone cameras. Wrong neighborhood. Too upscale—cops’d be all over it in seconds. But, even with all that, if they wanted to give it a try, you’d never see it coming.”

  Cross turned to the giant standing against the wall, watching. “Rhino?”

  “The rooftop across the street’s even worse. Anyone could get up there easy enough. But there’s more than one way to do that, and we couldn’t cover every spot.”

  Cross drew a series of intersecting lines on the pad in front of him, eyes down. He took two final drags from his cigarette before he stubbed it out.

  “What it comes down to is, who’s gonna make the meet for their side? If it’s Muñoz himself, he’s got to know we can blow him away if he tries anything. Even if he nailed me, he’d be a dead man a few seconds later. But if it’s some flunky, Muñoz wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him. For all we know, Muñoz could be over the border, giving his orders from there.”

  “So …?” Buddha queried.

  “So this. Rhino, you take the roof across the street. Take it early. Anyone else shows up after you, just leave them there. We get Ace to work the sidewalk. They won’t make him for our crew—he wasn’t on the bust-out down in their territory. Buddha, you get us a cab from someplace, all right? Park it if you can find a spot, cruise it if you can’t. Short loops, okay?”

  “But what if they—?”

  “Doesn’t matter, so long as we move before they do. I’m gonna roll up just at noon, like they said. If I spot Muñoz at the table, I go ahead and sit down. So, if you don’t see me take a seat, that means it’s me they want. Rhino already has the target locked on, so he takes out whoever’s at the table in place of Muñoz.

  “I’ll handle anyone coming toward me. Ace will have my six. And Buddha can spray a lot of lead from the cab, if it turns out we need cover fire.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re on the roof, too,” Cross told Tracker. “But on the roof of Nostrum’s, so you’ll be shooting straight down.”

  “You think it really could be like that, boss? Personal?” Buddha asks.

  “Anyone else, I’d say no. But with Muñoz, it could be,” Cross replied. “He talks professional, but he always was unstable.”

  THE NEXT day, Cross emerged from the underground train station on State Street at 11:56 a.m., and headed east. It was already 11:59 when he first spotted Nostrum’s, and a few seconds before noon when he saw a man he recognized, sitting at a table by himself. Cross kept his eyes only on that man as he approached, hands empty at his sides.

  He sat down across from a copper-complected man who wore his thick hair pulled straight back, tied in a braided ponytail.

  “Cross,” the man said, not offering to shake hands. He wasn’t engaging in any welcoming ceremony, merely stating a fact.

  “Muñoz.”

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” a voice interrupted their stare-down. “My name is Lance. I’ll be serving you today. Our house specials today are a baby-spinach salad with a mild vinaigrette dressing, together with—”

  “That will be perfect,” Muñoz said, his English laced with a regal touch of Castilian. “Bring us each one of those. But first … you have Ron Rico?”

  “Yes, we do,” the waiter replied. “But if I could perhaps suggest—”

  “Bring me a double,” Muñoz cut him off again. “And for my friend here …”

  “Water,” Cross said.

  “We have San Pellegrino, and also a new—”

  “Water,” Cross repeated.

  The waiter flounced off. “I hate them,” Muñoz spat out.

  “Who?”

  “You know what I mean. Los maricones. You must know. After all, one of your own crew—”

  “Princess. Yeah. He went along nice and easy?” Cross asked, his face still an unreadable blank.

  “Dios mío, no!” Muñoz smiled, showing off a very expensive set of teeth. “That is one hard man, no matter that he is not really a man at all. First, he pulls out a pistol the size of a small house. The noise … like a cannon. It blew up one of our cars like a mortar strike!

  “And then he killed two of my best men. With his bare hands! I held an Uzi on him, but he only laughed. If Lupe had not shot him, we would still be—”

  “You shot him?” Cross asked, suddenly very soft-voiced.

  “With a tranquilizer dart, amigo. Like you would use on a mad dog. It was loaded with enough juice to drop a gorilla. But even with the dart still in him, he continued to fight. I wonder how such a magnificent warrior—”

  “What do you want?” Cross interrupted, no impatience in his voice.

  “I already told you, hombre. I want you to do a job for us. Then you get your merchandise back.”

  “I don’t read minds.”

  “You see this?” Muñoz asked, as he slid a tiny microchip across the marble tabletop.

  Cross didn’t touch the chip. “So?”

  “So this is what we need,” Muñoz answered. “Watch closely.” He grasped the chip with the thumb and forefinger of each hand and pulled it apart, revealing one male and one female coupling. “We have this one,” he said, holding up the male piece. “The other one, the mate, that is in the hands of another.”

  “Who?”

  “Right to the point, yes? Justo lo suficiente. You know Humberto Gonzales? He works out of a bunch of connected apartments on the West Side.”

  Cross shook his head.

  “No matter. We will tell you where he is, and you will take our property from him.”

  “How can you be sure—?”

  “It is always with him, Cross. Always on his person. There was no one he could trust with it. But we have very good sources inside his organization. We know exactly where to look. It is in his right arm.”

  “In his arm?”

  “On his right arm, right here,” Muñoz said, patting his right biceps to illustrate. “He has a big tattoo.
Of a dancing girl. Very pretty. The chip is somewhere under that tattoo. Implanted. A fine piece of surgery. So. We need his arm. You bring it to us, your job is done. That very instant, we return your … friend.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? Why do you say this?”

  “What am I supposed to do, Muñoz? Pack the arm in dry ice and send it FedEx? You wouldn’t give me a delivery address. And I’m sure not meeting you to hand it over in person.

  “So here’s how it’s gonna happen,” Cross continued. “Send that pigeon of yours—the chip would fit in his carry-pouch easy enough if it’s the same size as that one there,” Cross finished, pointing at the microchip lying on the tabletop.

  “Bueno! That is a good plan, hombre. As soon as our bird is home, we will release your man … or whatever he is.”

  “What’s on the chip?”

  “That is not your business, my friend.”

  “Then get somebody else to do it.”

  “I do not think you understand.…”

  “I understand just fine. I don’t think you do. Things have changed around here since nine/eleven. There’s jobs I don’t take. Now, what’s on the chip?”

  Muñoz stroked his chin. Cross lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. A long minute passed, during which Cross took two more drags and stubbed out his cigarette.

  The waiter approached with a pair of glasses on a tray. “Here you are, gentlemen. Your salads will be along in a few minutes.”

  Muñoz waved him away, leaning forward so his eyes were locked on Cross. “You speak español, yes?”

  “Poquito.”

  “You know the word favela?”

  “No.”

  “It is Portuguese. A language half shared. It means ‘slum,’ but not as you Americans speak of such places. I was born in a favela. In the hills just outside of Rio, built on land used to bury toxic waste, right next to a huge dump site for garbage. A mountain of people, one tiny shack of tin and wood on top of another. Just to get water would take a whole day.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “A favela makes your prisons look like palaces. There are three ways out. I do not play football—what you call ‘soccer’—and I cannot sing.”