“What you was just doing was adding two, three hundred yards to the bet. Next thing, you’ll want it right through the spade in the center too. Look, Colonel,” Buddha said, sarcasm dripping from his voice, “you want to call it off, then just say so, all right? What we said, what we agreed to, it was real simple. I said my man could hit a playing card at a thousand yards. That’s all. You said, if I recall exactly, ‘Bullshit!’ Then you started going on about putting my money where my mouth is . . . or were you too pitiful-drunk to remember that?”
“Watch your mouth, mister, You’re on—”
“What? Sacred Aryan ground? Private property? Thin ice? Look, clown, it was a long drive up here to this fuckforsaken little ‘compound’ of yours. And we didn’t make the trip to pick up a few spare Nazi flags, you understand what I’m saying? My man is a pro. You probably wouldn’t understand that, you being a ‘patriot’ and all. So let me explain the way it works: you pay twenty-five grand, he’ll pop somebody. Reach out and touch ’em. Long-range. It’s called being a sniper. And maybe if you’d served anyplace but fucking Stateside you’d have heard of it. Now, what you said, you said you had twenty-five grand. And what we were gonna do, we were gonna set up this target. One thousand yards. One playing card. Got one right here,” Buddha said, patting his breast pocket. “I call my man out of the car. He gets one shot. He drills it, we take your money. He don’t, you take ours.”
The Colonel looked over his shoulder at the half-dozen assembled men. Then back at Buddha. “Maybe we could just take your money without any of this other stuff. How would that be?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Buddha said, stifling a yawn. “Tell you what . . . why don’t you use that GI Joe radio of yours on your belt, get in contact with your sentries, see how things are going on your fucking ‘perimeter’ first.”
The Colonel looked at Buddha carefully. Said “Watch him!” to his man, and thumbed the radio into life. “Alpha to Red Dog. Read me? Over.”
“They’re all sleeping,” a strange voice squeaked back through the radio. The Colonel’s mouth dropped.
“You better have the money,” Buddha said, stepping back a few feet. “Check your chest, chump.”
The Colonel’s prior military experience had been limited, but he understood the meaning of the red dot now cold-burning just over his heart.
“See, my man’s a lot less than a thousand yards off,” Buddha said. “So we got ourselves a new bet. Me, I bet you don’t have no twenty-five grand here. I bet you’re a fucking liar. I bet you figured it wouldn’t be much trouble to sucker some Fourteenth Amendment citizen like me out here, take my money, and . . . who knows what? You don’t know who Cross is, and you’re gonna overthrow the government? I don’t think you pitiful pieces of shit even know the difference between killers and murderers. You may have murdered a few people; that don’t make you killers. But, see, one of the people you murdered—you remember, that big-mouthed Jew you made an example of—he got some family. Now, that don’t mean nothing to us. But this family, they got money. And, like I told you, we’re professionals. So,” he said, pulling a .40-caliber Glock semi-auto from his jacket in a motion so casual as to seem magical to the watchers, “here’s your problem. You got me ‘covered.’ Only my man’s got your heart in his hands. And I got a few other men, already took out your dumbfuck guards. And I got this here piece on you, too. So what you gonna do, boys?” Buddha finished, addressing the assembled men. “Your ‘Colonel’ here, it’s his head we came for. He’s a dead man, no matter what. He stands there, his heart’s gonna go poof! soon as I give the word. He runs, I’m gonna put a few rounds in him, right up his spine. And the guys we got on the perimeter, they got this nice stuff. You don’t shoot it, you launch it, if you get what I’m saying. We got paid, understand? So what I want you to do, and I know this is fucking hard for you all, is just think for a minute. You really want to die? Because . . .”
The Colonel dropped, crumpling lifeless even before the ccccrack!! was audible. The men stood frozen.
“Well, damn. It’s already too late, huh? Now, let’s all play Army, okay? Every motherfucker wants to live, put his hand up.”
Each man raised his hand like a kid in a classroom. Buddha sighed: “Both hands, you fucking morons.”
Weapons hit the ground as hands went into the air.
“Good. Now . . . you have that twenty-five around here or not?”
“No,” one of the men said. “It was . . . like you said. We thought you . . .”
“Sure. You were gonna see my money, then kill me and the shooter I brought along, right? If you lames are the master race, my money’s on the mud people. All right, we got two problems here. One for you, one for us. My problem is, you guys are like . . . witnesses, you know. And witnesses are bad for business. Your problem is to convince me why we shouldn’t just My Lai all you motherfuckers right now.”
“Nobody’ll know,” the biggest one said. “We can bury him right here. Just say he went underground. Nobody’s going to ask any questions.”
“Well, you see, they might. So I got this idea. You got any shovels?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Start digging.”
Three hours later, a man emerged from the woods. Princess. In full makeup, his perfume overcoming even the stench of fear that hung like a murky cloud around the assembled clot of men. “Take it,” Buddha told him. Princess unslung a Japanese katana from behind his shoulder, picked up the dead body by the belt with one hand, and draped it across a tree stump, poking it with his foot until the angle was satisfactory, then brought the sword down in a two-handed strike that severed the head cleanly. One of the watching men retched. Buddha pulled a heavy dark-green plastic bag from his jacket and unsnapped it so it was full-size. Princess unceremoniously dumped the head inside. Buddha pulled the yellow drawstrings tight. “Okay, there’s our proof. Now throw the body in there.”
The men did it, none of them looking down. Buddha watched patiently as they poured quicklime over the headless corpse and shoveled the dirt back.
“You can dig him up. Be a lot of work, but you could do it. But the forensics, they’d be real bad, you did something that stupid. So I figure your best bet is, leave him there. ‘Course, you could go to the cops, tell them what happened here. Probably not a good idea, but you all use your best judgment. Revenge is for amateurs. And amateurs don’t go up against pros. So, I was you, I’d go back to preparing for the Fourth Reich and forget this ever happened. Appoint yourselves a new Führer or whatever. But I see any one of you again, anywhere at all, you’re dead. And don’t think we couldn’t find you in jail, either. Nice doing business with you.”
It was hours after the intruders vanished before the first of the broken men moved.
“Look at that faggot. Christ! First time I ever seen one of them cruising on fucking skates,” the young man dressed in a black alpaca suit over a white silk turtleneck said to another dressed in the same exact outfit. Both were powerfully built, with razor-cut short black hair. At twenty yards, they could be mistaken for twins. They lounged against the side of a glistening black Cadillac limo parked just off the grass at the lakefront.
“Got some damn body on him,” the other said. “You gotta give him that. Motherfucker’s ripped to pieces.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t go for that.” The speaker caught a look from his opposite number. “Hey! I mean I don’t go for that look, understand what I’m saying. You can lift for strength or you can lift for looks. Me, I lift for strength. But you see them at the gym all the time.”
“See who?”
“Homos. Let me tell you, I think most of those bodybuilders are like that. I wish they wouldn’t let them in there at all—who knows what they look at in the shower. They give me the creeps.”
“You got a problem, Monty?”
“Problem? I don’t got no fucking ‘problem.’ What I got is same as you got—a job. And that’s what we’re doing, right?”
“Sure. At least I
am.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means that freakish-looking guy with all the muscles, he’s gone by us three times already.”
“So? Like I said, he’s cruising. Showing off.”
“Maybe. This job of ours—what you think it is?”
“We’re bodyguards,” Monty said proudly. “We protect the man.”
“What we are is bullet-catchers,” the other man said flatly. “That’s why they always want ’em big. We ain’t bar bouncers, okay? It’s not about flexing muscle. Our job, we get between trouble and the man.”
“Yeah? The way I figure it, we get paid to stop trouble. That’s what this is for,” he said, touching his suit just over the heart.
“You talking about your balls or your piece, pal? Because, you know what, neither of them is any good without the brains.”
“Which is what you got, right?”
“What I got is that I’m in charge here,” the other man said. “And if that faggot skates by here again, we’re gonna have a talk with him.”
A dusty blue Chicago Department of Public Works pickup truck pulled up about fifty yards away. The driver was wearing a green baseball cap. Two men took their time climbing out of the truck’s bed. They took even longer to pull on harness apparatus that carried small gasoline engines to power leaf-blowers.
“Your tax dollars at work.” The other man laughed. “Look at that: You got your basic nigger and your basic Uptown Indian, which is a nigger with red skin. But they get these soft jobs, taking their time, making good money. All that civil-service crap, we pay for it.”
“Maybe they’re on work release from the County.”
“No way. Then there’d be a guard with them. And there’d be more than two.”
“Man, you don’t miss much.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Monty. In our business, you can’t miss much, okay?”
The two men with the leaf-blowers pulled the cords on the gasoline engines strapped to their backs. The machines roared into life. They then began to amble slowly in a vague pincer movement, blowing fallen leaves into a pile. One of them had a stiff leg, forcing him to limp.
“Here they come,” the other man said to Monty, nodding his head toward two elderly men walking together as if on an outing from an old-age home.
“Should we—?”
“No. We stay right here. Whatever Don Moranelli is saying, it’s not for us to hear. Just get the engine started so it’s nice and—”
One of the leaf-blowing men shrugged out of the harness and dropped to the ground, ripping a rifle loose from its Velcro mount against his thigh. He wrapped the rifle’s sling around his forearm, propped himself on one elbow, and spread his legs so that his body formed a Y. The other leaf-blower turned toward the two approaching old men and aimed the tube of his machine at them—a gush of fire erupted, engulfing both men instantly. One of the bodyguards was already running toward them when it happened; the other pulled his pistol and dropped to one knee. The prone rifleman fired twice. One each.
The shark car slid to a stop, its rear doors popping open. The workers and the truck driver all ran for it. The loudest sound was the roar of the abandoned leaf-blowers. Until the truck exploded with such force that it left a crater as a monument to its destruction. The two old men were microscopic particles. The two bodyguards were perfectly preserved. For the autopsy.
Nobody saw anything.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Cross told the woman seated across from him. They were separated by wire mesh.
“You think my hair grew in stripes naturally?” the woman chuckled. “They’re not big on beauty aids in here.”
“No. You’re a lot . . . thinner.”
“Why don’t I take that as a compliment?”
“Cut it out, Tiger. You doing the time hard?”
“No. But it’s like my hair. I can’t get the vitamin supplements I need. Or access to the workout machines. The feds seem to think it’s only the male prisoners who deserve that kind of stuff. So I have to make do, that’s all.”
“Anybody—?”
“Bothering me? You’ve been Inside. You get tested. It wasn’t much. Nothing in here is much. My biggest problem is staying out of the middle, you know? I’m not going to get in anyone’s car. They know that now. If I want a girlfriend, I can have my choice. But nobody’s going to choose me.”
“Okay. You got money on the books?”
“No. Going to leave me some?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wondering why I never told you, right?”
“Yes.”
“But that isn’t why you’re here, right?”
“Right.”
“Same old motormouth Cross.” She smiled. “I know what it says on my papers, but that’s a load of crap. It was out west. Some working girls got together, decided they didn’t need pimps to be working them like mules and keeping all their cash. Sure, some of them, they’re in the life because they got all kinds of . . . whatever, it doesn’t matter. But the prostie pro, she just wants the coin. And what they were paying the pimps for, supposedly, was protection. Except that they weren’t getting protection. So they opened up a little joint. On their own. I came on to cover it. Percentage deal. There were a few rough spots, but we finally got it running nice. Then this creep comes in, wants to turn a hard one, understand? Nobody wanted to play. I told him, move it on out—there’s plenty of dungeons in town, they’ll give you anything you want to buy. He goes into the usual ‘fucking cunt’ rap and I figure he’s all done. But then he pulls a piece and tells everyone to face the wall. I heard the handcuffs and I thought I knew what was coming next. I spun off the wall and dropped him before he could crank one off. And then we find out he’s a federal marshal. A kinky, sick, pervert of a federal marshal, but . . . Anyway, the lawyer I got, he made a deal. I keep quiet about what really happened, his widow gets a line-of-duty pension. And he’s got three kids. That’s nice, I tell him. But I’m not sitting for a murder beef when it was self-defense. My lawyer, he points out that the whores I was bodyguarding, they weren’t exactly my sisters, and their stories were already pretty much what the government wanted. They could take a hooker’s walkaway on the pross stuff . . . or accessory to murder, if they didn’t play nice. Rolling over—now, that was something they were already used to. I didn’t have a chance.
“And if I let it ride without a squawk, I’d get manslaughter—sixty to one eighty. That’s months, honey. Even on a max-out, I’m gone in seven, eight years. Or I could take my chances with a jury. With my priors, and all those girls playing parrot for the feds . . . ah, it was no contest.” She leaned forward, using her elbows to create the deep cleavage inmate wardrobe didn’t otherwise permit. “Now tell me . . . why are you here?”
“We got an offer,” Cross said quietly. “A job. Down south. Understand?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a bad job. We passed. But Uncle said we had to take it or take off. I’m . . . deciding. Anyway, they said, if we took the job, they’d spring you. Provided you went in on it.”
“What’s that mean, spring—?”
“Means you die in here, Tiger. On paper. You don’t go over the wall, you walk out the gate. And disappear.”
“Sounds too good to be—”
“Sure. That ‘on paper’ thing would probably turn out to be true enough, this job they’re talking about.”
“So why would you—?”
“We’re going to do it or we’re not. If we do it, you want in? Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“If we don’t do it, we’re leaving.”
“America?”
“Whatever you want to call it. Doesn’t matter. It’s not our country. Never was. Not for any of us. Except for Fal. And they took it from him, from his people. If we go, we’re going to close everything down. Buddha’ll stay. He’s got the papers on everything, all legit. And nobody’d want his baggage anyway.”
“You
mean So Long?”
“Yeah. And his kids. Fal, he’ll stay too. He’s not with us anyway. Ace won’t leave either. He mostly works alone. And he’s got a woman too—she’s not a pro. It’d just be me, Rhino, and Princess. And you, if you want.”
“Spell it out.”
“If we go, we’re not leaving them a lot to look at. We’ll all be wanted anyway. This place doesn’t look like much,” Cross said, glancing around. “You could finish out your time here, walk out clean. Or you could throw in with us. . . .”
“And maybe die anyway.”
“Sure.”
“You still don’t care, do you, Cross?”
“About what?”
“Whether you live or you die.”
“No.”
Tiger looked over each shoulder, slowly and deliberately. Breathed deeply. She took Cross’s right hand, turned it over in hers, smiling when she saw the bull’s-eye tattoo was gone. Then she leaned close and whispered: “I think I’d like to leave. No matter which way it has to be.”
“I’ll let you know,” Cross replied, getting to his feet.
“I’m listening,” Cross said to the short, stocky man seated across from him. The man’s face was a Central American mixture. Indian of some kind? Mayan? Impossible to tell. Impossible to read, too. Cross decided on Mayan in his mind, matching a face he could see with a name he knew was meaningless, filing it for the future.
“What is it my people receive for what you want?” the man asked, his English clear and unaccented, only the phrasing revealing it was not his native language.
“We’re . . . deciding,” Cross replied. “Maybe—and I’m not promising this—maybe they get some help with what they’re doing.”
“What help could you—?”
“La Casa de Dolor. How many of your people are there now?”
“Ah. It is la americana you want.”
Cross said nothing.
“Your reputation is known to us,” the Mayan said. “You are mercenaries. Without politics. If you were paid to rescue this woman, you believe it would benefit our cause? And that we should assist you in some way because of this?”
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