Drawing Dead

by Andrew Vachss

  “Diamonds? You mean those are real?”

  “No, Buddha,” Rhino said patiently. “The inlays are diamond-shaped, always in a contrasting color, usually a pearly white. Players use them to calculate angles. They must be precisely set, just as the slate bed is. Variations in a particular table would give an advantage to anyone who knew them.”

  “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “Most poolrooms have the tables too close together, in order to squeeze an extra table or so on the available floor space. But in, say, a tournament, this would not be the case. You wouldn’t want players getting in each other’s way.”

  “So you had it fixed?”

  “There was no ‘fix.’ Our tables are about thirty inches high. Even with the extra space we added, it’s not enough for Sweetie to get a running start. He had to—”

  “He was like a goddamn helicopter,” Buddha interrupted. “Just took off and kind of…floated over the whole thing.”

  Rhino’s patience was never tested by interruptions. He continued at the measured pace of an engineering professor explaining a concept to a vaguely attentive class. “Roughly, a parabolic arc of less than three feet at its peak is required. It’s simple physics.”

  “We started him on two feet,” Princess said proudly. “Once Sweetie got the idea, we added an inch every few weeks. His back legs, they’re like steel springs.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a good hustle, but you can only use it once. It’s not like you and Princess could pick up a pool table and carry it around with you.”

  “We could, too!” Princess insisted. “Me and Rhino, we carried all the new tables in through the back. If we wanted…”

  “Ah” was all the Amazon said.

  “Boss…”

  “We’re not going into business with this, Buddha,” Cross said, his tone clearly communicating that the subject was closed.

  “Sure. I wasn’t gonna say anything about that. I just wanted to know why that little blue mark is back again.”

  “I see it, too,” Rhino said. “Princess and I both.”

  “Ace?”

  “Same for me, brother.”

  Cross drew in a deep breath through his nose, held it for a count of sixty, then slowly exhaled. “Only this time, I can’t feel it. So something’s happening,” he finally said. “Changing. But nothing is adding up.

  “I thought it was some kind of warning. I could feel it—that’s what made me look in the first place. But now you see it when it flashes, but I don’t feel a damn thing.”

  “THAT’S WHERE it all started,” Cross said, recapping. “No reason I should have gotten out of that basement alive—whatever it was had to know I’d put the whole capture-trap in place.

  “And ever since, I’ve had this little…brand thing under my eye. When I can feel it, it’s always some kind of warning. So, whatever put it there, it’s still got some use for me.

  “Remember when Blondie was running down all the info they had collected? First, those government morons thought some serial killer was responsible. You know, all those ‘profiles’ they had worked up? But the load of slime who confessed to the Canyon Killings out in California blew the covers off that—he was just playing the Henry Lee Lucas game.”

  “A professional case-clearer,” Tiger said. “That’s what this clinical psychologist told them. And he was right.”

  “Lucas was the model,” Rhino added. “And the same tune’s been on the fake hit parade ever since. Turns a lot of ‘Unsolved’ into ‘Closed.’ ”

  “It’s a damn TV show,” Buddha spat out. “You know, where the cops get to stand over some grave and tell the camera how they made a promise to the dead kid’s parents. It’s a good deal for everyone,” he sneered. “The maggot’s already been sentenced for a killing that was actually his—so he’s either on Death Row or doing Life Without—it don’t cost him nothing to confess to a few dozen more. Even that Ottis Toole—now, there’s a guy with a name that fits; his mother couldn’t spell ‘Otis’ and he was a tool from that day on—picked up the trick, right from Lucas himself. Toole for sure: the IQ of an imbecile for openers, with his brain fried from Sterno on top of that.”

  “What makes you so sure of that, Buddha?”

  “Rhino, come on! Man dies of cirrhosis of the liver before he’s fifty? As long as he kept confessing, they kept him oiled.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” the gang’s leader said. “What difference does some damn guess make? There’s things we know. What I told Blondie about the Simbas, that was all words carried on the wind. The whisper was that they were supposed to be a tribal mix. And in Africa, that just doesn’t happen. At least, no one had ever heard of it. When whites invaded Africa, maybe that intensified the tribal separations, but it was always that way.”

  “Here? You mean, in America?” Tiger asked.

  “How many black gangs on the South Side?” Ace half-snapped at her. “Or the West? Too many to count, growing all the time. When they get too big, they split into sets. Next, they turn on each other. Who wins those wars? Same with the Latinos. How many Mexican gangs on the East Coast? How many Puerto Rican crews on the West? Sure. But it don’t make no difference—they all go the same way, no matter where they are.”

  “Chinese, too,” Buddha cosigned. “They been having all-outs between themselves in New York for—what?—damn near fifty years.”

  “Sure,” Cross said, quietly. “Africa, you could almost understand it. That continent, it’s always been fertile territory—first it was slaves, now it’s gold, diamonds, oil. The only time an African country is ‘politically stable’ is when the dictator is such a degenerate that he kills people for entertainment.

  “But it wasn’t until the same signature kills all got connected that they started talking about this ‘entity’ thing—the G may not be good for much, but they’re great at making charts. What we heard called ‘Simbas’ in the Congo, they were called ‘Natt Krigere’ in Scandinavia.”

  “What does that mean?” Tiger asked, frankly curious.

  “In Norwegian, it means ‘Night Warriors.’ You go far enough north and half the year you don’t see the sun at all. But they still found the same kill-signature in places where every single native was as white as people get. And the language, that’s the big clue.”

  “Why?” Tiger asked, not so gently. Standing with both hands free, as if she wanted to close the distance between this unknown entity and the twin throwing daggers strapped to her muscular right thigh.

  “I’m no historian,” Cross said tonelessly, “but I always read a lot—I had the time to do it. We know there were a lot of Finnish collaborators in World War II. You want Norwegian, just look up ‘Quisling’—the Nazis put him in charge, and he was convicted of being a war criminal. You know where he was executed? Oslo.

  “Why there? Well, the Norwegian people never made any deals. They just gathered their forces and rolled up north. For them, ‘north’ means above the Arctic Circle. Then they told the Germans to come and get some. Which didn’t happen.

  “Now, that was strange, right? Where’s the access to oil? Right off their coast, yeah? And they don’t come much whiter than Norwegian. But even the German generals weren’t dumb enough to swallow that Master Race crap—Hitler looked about as Nordic as Malcolm X.

  “The Norwegians, they didn’t trust the Holy Church any more than they did the Swiss government. They didn’t need to join some Crusade to reach the Pearly Gates—dying in battle, that was their guaranteed ticket to Valhalla.

  “Now even the AB is under fire from the Odinists inside the walls—Vikings are as feared warriors as the Mau Mau ever were. And they’ve been around a lot longer.”

  “Maybe I can’t follow that. Not all of it, anyway,” Tiger spoke softly. “But I think I know where we can find out some more of it.”

  “Where?” Tracker asked.

  “Mural Girl,” the Amazon answered. “But we’d have to actually make contact this time. That camera we set up, i
t never holds an image for long. And all it ever shows is some kind of…explanation, maybe? I don’t know. But maybe she does.”

  “TWO RIDES,” Cross ordered. “Buddha, me, Tiger, and Tracker in the Shark Car. Rhino, Princess, and Ace in the backup.”

  “Why can’t—?”

  “There isn’t room, Princess.”

  “There is, too! Plenty of times we all—”

  “Don’t you want Sweetie to come along?” Cross said, ending any discussion. Explaining the tactical reasoning intuitively understood by Ace and Rhino to the muscle-massed child would have taken hours. “Mural Girl works in daylight. It’s already getting dark, so tomorrow we move. First light.”

  “Let me ask her,” Tiger said.

  “Ask who?”

  “Mural Girl,” she told Cross. “First light, like you just said. But let me do the talking, okay?”

  “ONE QUESTION?”

  “Worth what?” the Chicago detective said into what he called his “CI phone.”

  “Can’t tell until I get an answer,” the gang boss said in response.

  “Gonna spook the paying customers if they see an unmarked parked at your joint?”

  “Might. Only they won’t see it. Just pull up to the gate—you’ll be met.”

  “IT WOULD be you,” the detective said, later that night.

  “You know a better driver?” Buddha said. “Besides, I’m the only one that could fit in this seat.”

  “Rhino isn’t the only—”

  “Yeah, he is. You’d want Princess driving your car?”

  “I was thinking about—”

  “Don’t waste your time, Mac. We won’t pretend to know what you know, but, trust me, it ain’t as much as you think it is.”

  “Trust you?” the detective retorted, as he slid out from behind the wheel of his unmarked. “I’ve taken a few hits to the head over the years, but never that hard. I got the odometer memorized, so don’t even think about—”

  “It’s not going more than a couple of hundred yards,” Buddha promised.

  CROSS MATERIALIZED next to McNamara while the cop’s unmarked was still moving slowly away.

  “Only one question, Mac,” he said, firing a cigarette from the flame in his left palm. “No reason for us to go further than that dark spot over there.”

  “Then you could have met me.”

  “I don’t know what’s in your car. What I got is for you, not some audio pickup the cop shop installed.”

  “They’d never—”

  “Sure. You don’t trust Buddha, but you trust them, right?”

  “One question, you said. Get to it.”

  “The Rejuvenator.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “This is: You sure he’s dead?”

  “He was a…Ah, pick your own words. ‘Narcissistic psychopath’ is pretty much what the department shrinks decided on.”

  “Not you, huh?”

  “What difference? ‘The Rejuvenator’? Fine. You know how it works: once the damn media gives any of these dirtbags their own special name, they never drop it. ‘Son of Sam.’ ‘Hillside Strangler’—like that. Only reason Speck didn’t get one is because he was nabbed too quick.”

  “This time, though, there was some reason….”

  “Sure. He copied every serial killer’s work, like those guys who copy Rembrandts. They know their ‘creation’ is just gonna end up in some collector’s private gallery, so they always leave some little hint that it was their work. Same with this freak; he couldn’t resist leaving a tiny piece of himself at the crime scene. That ® brand. Cute, huh? That’s the symbol for ‘registered trademark,’ so he was doubling down on his bragging.”

  “I know. He got all the usual props for a serial killer: fan mail to the Internet, like that. Even book-and-movie deals, only he never got to sit in a cell and read them. My question’s still the same: You sure he’s dead?”

  “The man who left those ® brands on all those kills? Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Then you’re sure the man you beat to death was the Rejuvenator? None of those ‘true crime’ writers scored an interview with you. None of the TV shows, either.”

  “I didn’t beat anyone to death,” McNamara said, unconsciously dropping his voice into the toneless recital he always used when speaking with Internal Affairs. “I followed him to where he was holed up. When I saw him coming down the stairs, I drew my service weapon and told him he was under arrest. He kicked the gun out of my hand—I guess he’d been some kind of martial artist—and came at me all in the same move. I defended myself.”

  “You didn’t have a search warrant.”

  “I never entered his place. He was still on the staircase when—”

  “You didn’t have an arrest warrant.”

  “No time to get one. I was—”

  “—acting on a tip from a CI that the man you’d been looking for—the one who wrote all those notes, like ‘Heirens Is Innocent,’ and mailed them to the papers—he was on his way back to his hideout, right? Pretty good CI…even gave you the address.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You don’t even know who the CI is—all he ever does is call, always from a different number.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s the way it usually works.”

  “And the phone you kept for those calls—the one you paid for out of your own pocket—it got smashed so bad during the fight that even the SIM card was destroyed. So all the IAD investigators could recover was an under-a-minute call to your phone. Made from a burner cell—bounced off five towers within a half-mile. So there was a call, but whatever was said, only you know.”

  “That’s the way it happened. And that’s what was in their report. Although how you’d know about that…”

  “Come on, Mac—databases get hacked all the time. Those boys always talk about their ‘exploits’—all you have to do is listen. But it’s still the one question.”

  “How would it help me, like you said it might.”

  “ ‘Might’ is what I said. If you’ve still got copycat crimes unsolved, and this ‘Rejuvenator’ guy is definitely dead, I’ve got something for you.”

  “No copycats for years. And definitely not one sending love notes to the papers.”

  “So the one you were looking for once, he’s dead. And you’d know, because you killed him yourself.”

  “I defended myself,” the hard-core cop said, nothing in his voice but relentlessness.

  “Must’ve been a hell out of a fight, the way the guy got his neck broken, ribs driven into his lungs, too. And—”

  “You got a point you want to make?”

  “Not anymore, I don’t,” Cross said.

  “SHE’S THE one who’s gonna be doing all the talking, so what do you need me for?”

  “Drive the car, Buddha. Like you always do.”

  “You’re keeping the others back, right? Whatever this…thing is, you know what it can do. So you’re keeping them out of range.”

  “Whatever this thing is, it’s got a longer range than any distance we could run to.”

  “So why aren’t we all going?”

  “You know damn well we can’t all fit in the car. Even if we could, any of the others get out, it’s gonna attract attention. We don’t need any cell-phone video on some idiot’s Facebook page.”

  “Tiger’s the only one who’s gonna go over to that ladder. Why can’t she just drive over there by herself?”

  “Tiger’s not working with a cold back.”

  “Then the more the—”

  “Buddha, what the hell’s wrong with you? We need the car to slip in quiet. And maybe get out fast, things go wrong. Sure, I could drive this beast, but not like you can. I can’t shoot like you, either. But I can cover one side, launch a message out of one of the tubes, if I have to do that. This makes sense, brother. It’s the right play, the right tactic….”

  “Boss, ever since…Hell, I don’t even remember exactly when it started, but…I’m ju
st spooked, I guess. We don’t know—”

  “We don’t and we won’t. Not unless Mural Girl knows something, and right now she’s the best bet we have.”

  “Why should she talk to us?”

  “I don’t know why. But Tiger’s right—if there’s anything Mural Girl wants to say, Tiger’s the one she’ll say it to. Look, I don’t like it, either, okay?” Cross said, feeling the tiny brand below his eye suddenly flare—one flash-burn and then it was gone. “But I don’t think we could do anything about the Simbas, even if it is them. This is just to make sure that this AI stuff is legit. It doesn’t feel like anything they’d bother with, but we’ve gotta make sure—dead sure, brother—that whatever we blew up inside that creature’s house doesn’t have any friends left.”

  “Sure. What you’re saying is, besides the ones I—”

  “Buddha, will you drop it? No one’s blaming you for blasting that car. I finished them off myself, remember? Those guys, they were flunkies. We could’ve questioned them for days, they still wouldn’t have had anything to tell us. We had all the time in the world to talk to that piece of work Old Greytooth delivered to us. And he was dry, okay? But if there’s any chance Mural Girl knows something, we can’t pass it up.”

  Buddha lit a smoke, took one deep drag, and snapped it into the darkness before he nodded his head toward where the Shark Car sat waiting.

  “First light, we want to already be there, right?”

  TIGER’S ONE-PIECE spandex outfit was a city-camo match for the Shark Car’s skin, and pulled almost as tight.

  When the back door popped open, she slid inside.

  “Hey!” she said softly when she realized the seat was empty. “What am I, a passenger?”

  Cross turned his head to face her. “You’re the only one getting out. We’re your cover, just in case some stranger gets stupid.”

  “I don’t need any cover. Nobody ever bothers Mural Girl.”

  “You’re not Mural Girl.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Tiger whispered, taking in a deep breath to emphasize the difference. “Anyway, in this outfit, nobody’s even going to notice me.”