Blackjack (15 page)

With that, he walked toward the Shark Car, hands held in plain sight. Held open and extended from his sides.

THE OTHER
gang members watched as their leader approached the driver’s side of the Shark Car. The window must have been down, because they saw him carefully place both hands on the sill.

No sound reached their ears.

Their leader backed away from the Shark Car, then moved toward his gang, hands back in the classic “I’m no threat to you” position.

“They got business here” was all the leader told his crew.

“They didn’t pay no tolls.”

“You making me
real
tired, young boy,” the leader said. “
Tolls?
They wanted, they could’ve cut us all down like
this
”—snapping his fingers—“only they wouldn’t even make
that
much noise doing it.”

“We got—”

“Some chumps have
got
to learn the hard way. Listen! The hard way with those guys is you stop breathing. I can’t let you make those kind of mistakes. They didn’t pay no tolls to park in our place, right? And that’s what we all about, right? Money. Am I telling the truth?”

“That’s my
name
,” the teenager with the pistol said.

The leader reached in his shirt pocket and extracted a
playing card: the king of clubs. He showed the card to all the young men standing close to him.

“King. That means ‘ruler.’ And that’s us. Never mind that
Amor de Rey
crap from the PRs—they at least got enough sense to stay over by Humboldt Park, where they belong.

“Now, you say you all about the Benjamins, right? Okay, Big Money, I got this deal for you. I’m gonna walk a few feet away … just over to there, see? I’m gonna stand by myself and hold out this very same card in my hand. You ain’t gonna
hear
nothing, but the guy I spoke to—Buddha, that’s their driver,
and
the best man with a pistol in Chi-town—he’s gonna put a round right through the middle of this here card.

“He misses, everyone who gets down gets paid. He misses bad enough to hit me, that’s my problem.”

“Everybody gets paid … what?”

“Whatever they put up,” the leader told the growing crowd, taking off his jacket and spreading it on the ground. “You said it yourself—nobody plays for free. Not here, not nowhere.”

THE LEADER
walked about twenty paces to his right, then stopped. Bills poured into the lining of his jacket, as more and more of the watchers jumped to get in on the action.

The clump of young men watched as their leader held up the playing card, face out: first to his left shoulder so all could see, then at the extended end of his right hand.

Three seconds passed in dead silence. None of the watching crowd heard a sound, but suddenly they saw the playing card fluttering into the night air.

The leader who had been holding the card never noticed a clump of pulsating shadow at his feet. Nor did he hear the
word “Nah” in a dialect he would have recognized as his own had his ears been able to pick up an outside-human-range harmonic.

He retrieved the card from the concrete ground, looked at it with satisfaction, and carried it over to the waiting crowd.

The king of clubs had been center-punched by some kind of projectile, clearly displaying what all recognized as the characteristic pucker of a bullet wound.

“Never saw one that small,” one of the young men said, careful to keep his voice on a note of wonderment, avoiding any hint of challenge.

“That’s a NATO round,” the leader told him, confidently. “Like a .22, but much faster. They for rifles, but Buddha’s got his carry-piece chambered for them.”

“Man can shoot like that, he don’t need no big slug,” one of the teenagers said, trying for a sage tone of voice. “Put a slug in your eye, you
are
gonna die.”

The leader slapped the young man’s upturned palm, acknowledging the correctness of his observation.

“Cost you all some cash,” he said, glancing down at the mountain of greenbacks piled up on the inside lining of his jacket, “but that’s
all
it cost. And now you know—you ever see that car, see it
anywhere
, you don’t run, you stand still.
Real
still. If it’s you they want, you dead no matter what you do. But if it’s someone else, reaching for your protection could get you good and dead. You get in their way, you never get to stay. Feel me? Feel me
now?
”

The crowd all murmured some form of assent.

“Pick up
my
money,” the leader ordered one of his flock. “I get it from you later.”

With that, he walked over to the crumbling ruins of what had once been the entranceway to the building which now housed only drug merchants. Leaning his back against this support, he massaged his right wrist with his left thumb, as
if to shake the muscle memory of how close Buddha’s silent bullet had come.

When he stopped rubbing, the still-pristine king of clubs hidden in the sleeve of his Chicago Bulls sweatshirt was fully dissolved into an unidentifiable dark smear.

MINUTES LATER
, a shouted “Five-O!” rang out from behind the leader’s crew as an “unmarked” pulled in next to the Shark Car.

“Chill!” the elder commanded. “This ain’t nothing about us. Not with that Shark Car sitting there.”

A man got out of the front seat of the unmarked-but-obvious police car. He walked toward the back as the rear door of the Shark Car opened and another man stepped out.

Detective Mike McNamara, the legendary confession-coaxer of Cook County, and the man-for-hire known as Cross spoke to each other, too softly for anyone to hear, shielded from view by Princess’s bulk.

The hyper-muscled man in the outrageous makeup began to juggle three baseball-sized objects. He handled them so expertly that it was clear this was an old act for him. Not so for the drug-dealing gang, which watched in utter fascination, now completely distracted.

Cross and McNamara returned to their respective cars.

The unmarked pulled out.

The man called Princess caught one of the balls he was juggling in his right hand, flicked his wrist, and lobbed it in a long arc, high over the heads of the youthful gangsters. He instantly repeated the move twice more, so that all the balls were simultaneously airborne.

They were still floating in the night air as Princess dove into the Shark Car, which barked its tires once and was gone.

Several of the gang were still reaching for their guns when the first grenade hit, tearing chunks out of the upper-story bricks behind them.

“
YOU
HAD
to do that?” Cross said, his voice suggesting that he had said the same words many times before.

“I was just having fun,” Princess said, sulking. “Buddha had fun, and you didn’t say anything to him.”

“Never mind,” a high-pitched, squeaky voice came from the back seat, soothing the hyper-muscled man. That same voice was then directed at Cross, with just a touch of annoyance. “You know how easily he—”

“I know, Rhino,” Cross said, addressing a huge dark mass taking up virtually every inch of the back seat that Princess wasn’t using.

“Why don’t you just buy him a damn Xbox or something?” Buddha growled.

“What’s an Xbox?” Princess asked excitedly.

“Thanks a lot, Buddha,” the dark mass squeaked sarcastically. “Maybe your wife could give me some shopping tips. Like where to pick up a bargain, you know.”

“Hey! That was low, man.”

“Enough already,” Cross snapped, calling a temporary truce in what he knew to be an endless war.

JUST BEFORE
daybreak, the Shark Car backed into what was once a garage.

The gang elder’s arm emerged from the shadows, a paper bag in his hand.

“Almost twenty G’s,” he said, very quietly.

“My share.”

“I still don’t see why you can’t be more righteous about that, brother. I mean, I got to set up the whole scene for us to cash, am I telling the truth?”

“No,” Buddha told him. “You passed on
that
chance. I offered you, right? Just hold your hand steady and I’ll do it for real. You know I can—you were there when I did it with Horton’s cigarette a few years ago.”

“A man died behind that.”

“ ‘Behind that’ was right. He wanted to stand behind Horton, make sure the game wasn’t fixed. Not my fault.”

“I ain’t saying it was. Just saying
like
it was, man. A man should get paid for the risks he takes. I mean, Horton, he
didn’t
get hit, but the boy
still
ain’t right.”

“I already gave you the chance to split the take. Standing offer. Next time, just hold up the card and I’ll put a hole in it. Now,
that
would be fifty-fifty. But you wanted to play it safe. Think of it like buying insurance.”

“What I need insurance for if you never miss?”

“Calms your nerves,” Buddha said. “Ask Horton. But anytime you want to cancel the policy …”

Five seconds of silence gave Buddha the answer he expected. The Shark Car slid away from the empty garage bay as silently as its namesake.