Dead silence on the roof.
“I ain’t gonna ask again. Anytime you got a rat pack, you got someone in it wants to do some sex thing. Now, the thing about that, sex fiends ain’t reliable. You can’t trust them. Their word is no good. You get dropped, they be the first to roll. Now, which one was it?”
Nobody moved.
“I guess maybe it was all of you,” the blade-thin man said in a tone of deep regret. “Too bad.”
“It was Randall,” the stocky boy said. “He wanted to do the twins.”
“Motherfucker!” one of the boys hissed. He was a tall, well-muscled youth wearing a black-and-silver Raiders jacket.
“You Randall?” Ace asked.
“Yeah, man. But I was only playing. I ain’t gonna rape nobody.”
“That’s right,” Ace said, nodding at Rhino. The monster slid forward so quickly Randall had no chance to move. Rhino hooked him in the stomach with the same hand that held the Uzi. The boy grunted as he doubled over. The monster-man snatched him by his jacket and threw him off the roof.
One of the boys turned away, vomiting against the wall.
“You got paid,” Ace said. “Anything happen to the lady or the girls, nobody gonna die as easy as that punk just did.”
“He’s on the top of the list,” the white-coated intern said into the pay phone in the basement of the hospital.
“You’re sure.”
“No doubt about it. He gets the next one.”
“Kiss your student loan goodbye,” a voice told him.
A phone rang in the living room of a modest home in Merrillville, Indiana. It was snatched on the first ring by a pretty woman whose face showed hard lines of stress.
“Yes.”
“It’s time,” a voice said. “You remember where to meet?”
“Yes.”
The woman put down the phone. “Joanne, come in here,” she called.
A teenage girl walked into the living room, a paint-daubed artist’s smock covering her to her knees.
“What is it, Mom? Did they find . . . ?”
“Not yet, darling. I have to go out for a while. You watch your brother. And say a prayer, okay?”
The girl nodded. Stood patiently for her mother’s kiss.
The woman drove quickly to the parking lot of a local diner. She pulled into an empty slot in the back, started to roll down her window; before it was all the way down, she saw a man detach himself from a motorcycle and start toward her.
He approached, leaned against the car, his face hidden from her eyes.
“He’s on the top of the list,” the man said.
“I know. We waited so long.”
“You sure you want to go through with this? It’s expensive. And they could find a donor on their own. Maybe in a real short time.”
“He doesn’t have much time,” the woman said.
The man was so old that even his expensive cologne couldn’t mask the stench of the grave. A silk suit hung limply on his wasted frame. A two-carat blue-white-perfect solitaire flickered in the neon light from the bar, the ring sliding down his bony finger toward the knuckle as his palsied hand trembled. The black Lincoln stretch limo was parked in an alley behind the bar, the old man seated in the cavernous back seat. Bodyguards flanked the limo, standing outside. The chauffeur’s partition was closed.
The door opened and a man climbed inside, seated himself across from the living skeleton. One of the bodyguards closed the door behind him; it made a noise like a bank vault.
The two inhabitants of the back seat sat in silence, both waiting.
“You’re good,” the old man finally said, his voice a reedy imitation of a human’s. “You got patience. Respect. The old ways. Too bad you were never one of us.”
“There aren’t enough of you left,” the other man said.
“Yeah, that’s true. Less of us all the time. This . . . thing you got to do, it ain’t for me. Rocco, he couldn’t take me down. Too many buffers. The Accountant, he calls himself. Like he knows it all. He don’t know it all, see? The big thing he don’t know is that we know. The indictment is sealed, but we know what’s coming. He’s going to turn. Roll over like the cowardly dog he is, take a couple a years in a Level One, play some tennis, come out and start over. You got everything you need?”
“Rocco Bernardi. That’s all I need.”
“Then it’s done, Cross?”
“We got two things left, then it’s done.”
“Here’s one,” said the old man, handing over a thick envelope.
“Watch the news,” Cross said, stepping out of the limo into the night.
A phone buzzed in the guard booth at the gates to a mini-mansion in the lush suburb of Winnetka.
“Front gate, Tony speaking,” a smartly uniformed man answered.
“Have Ricardo bring the Mercedes around to the front.”
“Yes, sir,” Tony answered, nodding over to another uniformed man next to him in the booth. “Right away.”
The other man took a holster and cartridge belt from a hook, strapped it on, walked across the manicured, floodlit lawn to a four-car garage. He pressed a transmitter on his belt and the garage door rose. The interior was as brightly lit as an operating room. The man opened the door of a black Mercedes SL 600 coupe, its flanks gleaming as if polished with oil. He started the car, sat patiently, listening to the muted purr of power. Then he slowly backed out to the circular driveway in front of a white brick two-story house. He climbed out of the driver’s seat, leaving the door open.
A man came down the steps to the car, moving with an air of moderate caution. He was dressed in a conservative midnight-blue suit. His brilliant white-on-white shirt set off a red-and-blue tie in a tiny diamond pattern that rippled in the glare of the floodlights.
“Everything okay?” the man asked.
“All quiet, Mr. Bernardi,” the guard said, touching his cap with two fingers. He maintained his position even as the Mercedes shot off, firing a barrage of marble chips from the driveway at his ankles.
The Mercedes turned the corner, heading for downtown Chicago. Bernardi punched a single button on the cellular phone in the console between the bucket seats and lit a cigarette while the phone rang through the speaker system.
“Hello . . . ?”
“It’s me. I’m on my way.”
“Oh, good, honey. I was wondering when—”
“Don’t wonder, bitch. That’s not your job. I’ll be there in an hour, tops.”
“I’ll be waiting, honey. I—”
He broke the connection.
As the Mercedes turned onto a winding stretch of road, a young woman in a wheelchair watched from a darkened room lit only by the sickly amber glow of a computer screen. She lifted a pair of infrared night glasses to her eyes, touched the zoom, zeroed in on the license plate: ACCT 1.
The young woman dropped the night glasses to her lap, wheeled herself over to the computer. A few keystrokes accessed a modem.
what? the screen said in response.
Her fingers tapped the keys. rolling appeared on her screen. She hit another key and the screen went blank.
In an office on a high floor of the Sears Tower, a man turned from another computer screen and picked up a telephone.
In an after-hours joint on the South Side, Ace felt a vibration in his shirt pocket. He took out his beeper, glanced at the liquid-crystal display. The blade-thin killer walked through the club into a back room where a man was watching television. He turned from the screen at Ace’s approach, waiting. When Ace nodded, he got up and walked out the back door.
A city ambulance was cruising the Dan Ryan Expressway. A round-faced Hispanic woman was driving, her hair spilling out from under her cap. A lanky white man with a prominent Adam’s apple was in the passenger seat. Their radio was quiet. A brrr-ing sound filled the cab. The lanky man took a mobile phone from his shirt pocket, flipped it open. He didn’t speak.
“Alert,” the phone said into his ear.
> The lanky man nodded at his partner.
“Tell Bruno that he has a deal,” the man in the Mercedes was saying into his cellular phone.
The door to the truck bay of an abandoned warehouse slid up. A car slid out into the night—an anonymous smog-gray sedan, custom-assembled from several different makes, unidentifiable. It squatted on extra-wide tires, its bulletproof windows tinted dark blue. The car’s license plates were made from two legitimate half-plates welded together. Its undercarriage was sheathed in a bellypan of steel. The car weighed almost three tons.
A pudgy man was at the wheel, guiding the massive vehicle delicately with his fingertips.
“I got him on the scanner,” Cross said from the passenger seat. “Probably the federales do too, the chump.”
The pudgy man said nothing, piloting the shark car through the warehouse district on the Near South Side, heading toward the Loop.
Cross pulled a cellular phone from a shoulder holster, hit a number.
“How close?” he asked.
“He’s on the Drive,” a voice came back. “Maybe ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”
Cross reholstered the phone.
“He’s going to his girlfriend’s, Buddha. He’ll have a couple of boys out front. It has to be on the turn-in, okay?”
“Sure, chief,” the pudgy man said.
The Mercedes stayed well within the speed limit, its driver talking on his phone, making deals. In his head, making plans. The sleek black car turned off Lake Shore Drive, heading to the Gold Coast apartment where his mistress waited.
“He’s about two klicks away now, Buddha. Stay sharp.”
The pudgy man made no acknowledgment.
Cross hit a number on the cellular phone. In the cab of the ambulance, the lanky man didn’t speak; just listened:
“Going down,” a voice said.
“Hit it!” the lanky man told the driver. As she stepped on the gas, he picked up his radio.
“We’re taking a break. Out of service for a personal. Fifteen minutes; acknowledge.”
“You’re clear,” came back the dispatcher’s voice.
“Let’s try the Gold Coast, partner,” he said to the Hispanic woman. “There’s a little Vietnamese joint over there I want to try.”
“Remind you of old times?” The woman smiled.
The Mercedes turned the corner as the anonymous gray shark car moved in from a side street.
“You got him?” Cross asked.
“Locked,” Buddha said, focusing.
“It’s harvest time,” Cross said, adjusting his shoulder belt.
As the Mercedes slowed down for the corner, the shark car took it broadside, knocking the black coupe into a line of parked vehicles at the curb. Cross slid from the car, looking dazed, his hands empty. Bernardi emerged from the Mercedes, unhurt. And angry. As Cross approached, Bernardi’s fists were balled, his face a mottled pattern of red and white.
“You stupid hillbilly sonofabitch! Look at my car.”
“I’m . . . sorry, man,” Cross muttered. “Look, I got insurance. Really. See . . .”
Cross reached into the pocket of his coat. The sneer vanished from Bernardi’s face as the silenced handgun came up. The first shot took away the bridge of his nose. Cross walked over, cranked off two more rounds into the man’s head. The shark car was off the block before the doorman at the fancy building had finished dialing 911.
The city ambulance was first on the scene.
“We’re coming in, got one down.”
“Trauma team?”
“No way—he’s gone. But his license said he’s an organ donor. May not be too late—all head wounds. We’ve got him all iced down—maybe they can do something.”
“You’re clear to fly, come on.”
“ETA about two minutes.”
The ambulance piled into the hospital lot. The body was wheeled out on a stretcher, rushed into OR. Then the surgeons went to work.
The phone rang in the woman’s home in Merrillville.
“Mrs. Layne?”
“Yes.”
“Please come right away. A casualty just arrived, too late to save him. But he was an organ donor, and his heart’s in perfect condition. We’ve done the blood-typing, and it appears to be an ideal match. We’ve already started surgery.”
“It’s a miracle!” the woman said.
for Rex Miller
PIGEON DROP
“What?” The speaker’s voice was hard-cored . . . but its edges were brittle.
“Put Carlos on.”
“Who wants him?”
“This whole conversation’s not going past forty-five seconds, pal. You want to spend it playing games?”
A muttered curse cushioned the sound of a palm slapped over the receiver.
“Where, when, and how much?” Carlos didn’t bother with the preliminaries—he knew his voice would be recognized instantly. And he knew the man he was speaking to would do as he promised—hang up when the trace-time had run.
“Tonight, oh two hundred hours. The Paradise Motel on Twenty-fifth,” the man answered. “Go around to the service entrance in the back—where the supply trucks pull in. Two fifty. Small bills, no sequence, no chemicals, and no bang in the suitcase.”
“Be reasonable, hombre. It is almost two p.m. now. Twelve hours, it is not very much. And that is a bad neighborhood you picked. I need more time.”
“Come alone, Carlos.”
A sad-sounding sigh . . . of reluctant acquiescence. “Ah, you too, Cross.”
Cross hit the off switch on the cellular phone, thinking it was typical of an amateur to make sure he got the other guy’s name on the tape. In case the federales were listening.
If he’d had a sense of humor, Cross would have chuckled at that. Amateurs never got it. And the easiest kind of amateurs were those who thought being a pro at one thing gave them the same status at another—like a dentist doing his own taxes. Carlos was near the top of a dope-smuggling pyramid, but he didn’t know how to play this game.
Otherwise, he would have known: when you’re in a war zone, it’s never the name that matters—it’s the address.
And Cross was already at the address. From his vantage point in the ground-floor room, he had a clear view of the service entrance in the back.
“You are really so sure he will do it?” A woman’s voice, coming from the darkness in the back of the small, narrow room.
“Which? Bring the baby or bring the money?”
“The baby. What do I care about your money? You already got plenty of money. My husband’s money, yes? Why did you not just make the trade, like you told us you would?”
“Carlos knows me,” Cross patiently told the woman. “Thinks he knows me, anyway. He took your baby to make you pay, right? What your husband owed him?”
“I do not know my husband’s business,” the woman’s voice said.
“Sure,” Cross replied, nothing in his voice. “Anyway, Carlos knows the risk I took to hijack his shipment. He knows I have to get paid. I’m charging him maybe a tenth of what it’s worth. Plus the baby. That would make sense to him. If I traded a couple of million dollars’ worth of pure for the baby, he wouldn’t like the math. You can’t be paying me that much—that’s the way he’d figure it.”
“How could he know how much we would pay for our own baby? I would pay anything to—”
“Yeah, you might. But your husband, he must have drawn the line somewhere short of that.”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“Yeah, you do. This was always about money. You don’t know your husband’s business—sure, whatever you say. You think maybe he’s selling used cars, that’s what pays for that mansion you live in? All those servants? Fancy cars? Jewelry? Your husband, he’s not so slick, figuring Carlos for just another smuggler. Telling him the powder was no good—that he wouldn’t pay.”
“I don’t know any——”
“I guess your husband figured he had enough horsepower in case C
arlos squawked. That joint you live in, it’s pretty well protected. Your husband had it all covered—except for the nanny you hired a few months ago.”
“Ah, Carmelita. Puta! I thought he hired her for his . . . pleasure. Bringing her into my own home, right in front of my eyes. But I could do nothing. You don’t understand how—”
“It makes no difference to me,” Cross said. “It wasn’t about sex anyway. You found that out, didn’t you?”
“You weren’t there. You don’t know what she—”
“I know what she did. She took your baby. Right under your nose. You were so busy watching to make sure she didn’t get it on with your husband that you let down your guard as soon as he was out of the house. Pretty smooth, wasn’t it? FedEx guy comes to the front door with a package. Carmelita goes to answer it, has the baby in her arms. You’re not paying any attention—”
“I wasn’t even downstairs. I was in the—”
“Whatever,” Cross cut her off. “She hands the baby to the phony FedEx guy and he walks right off with him, right past the guards, the baby in his pouch. By the time you wake up . . .”
“From that poison she put in my coffee!”
“Yeah. I guess it would have been harder for her to knock you out if you hadn’t used her as your personal maid as well as the baby’s nurse.”
“I was—”
“—trying to humiliate her. You couldn’t get her fired, but you sure could break her chops. Just like Carlos figured you would. He’s been ahead of you all since the beginning.”
“You know everything, don’t you?” the woman said, venom-laced bitterness in her voice.
“I know the same as you do,” the man called Cross said to her. “Only difference is, I don’t close my eyes to it.”
The black Corvette pulled into the drive-up area behind the motel at 1:58 a.m. It sat idling, no sign of life visible inside.
Less than a minute later, a smog-colored four-door sedan of no particular make entered the same area, aimed windshield-to-windshield at the black coupe.
Everybody Pays Page 20