Drawing Dead (6 page)

“Princess is,” Tiger snapped. “He hasn't got one evil molecule anywhere in that scary body of his. He's like a huge child—”

“I said ‘by law,' ” Tracker interrupted. “Princess has no bad
motives,
but many things he has done would be crimes if judged by a jury. Rhino is no different. Had Cross not protected him when they were both very young, I don't know what would have happened in his life, but if he'd had a choice,
any
choice, his would not be the life of an outlaw.

“Ace kills for money. Buddha has no moral compass. Still, I feel that, somewhere back in their early lives, each was sent down a path from which no retreat was possible.”

“Ace stabbed a man who was beating his mother,” Cross said. “If he'd had a
real
lawyer, the jury would've given him a medal instead of a jolt Inside. And Rhino should never have been
near
a prison. Buddha, all I can say is, the second I met him, I knew he was one of us.”

Tracker nodded. “Only you are different, Cross.”

“Me? What's that mean?”

“Of all of us, including myself and Tiger, you are the only one who is a true criminal.”

The room went silent.

A long minute passed.

Tiger's hard-edged, sultry voice broke the quiet. “You can't be born a criminal.”

“This is true,” Tracker agreed, speaking as if only he and Tiger were in the room. “But Cross is…an enigma. He could have done many things with his life. He is extraordinarily intelligent, a master tactician, the finest strategist I have ever met. But all of these gifts are in the realm of crime. I don't know why he was first imprisoned, but—”

“It doesn't matter,” Cross interrupted. “It was a long time ago.”

THE MAN
with the bull's-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand ground out his cigarette after the third drag.

“This whole thing smells bad to me,” he said. “Hemp
had
to know what would happen if he took out Ace's woman. That means he was trying to draw Ace out into the open. And there's no upside to that move.”

“Ace does not have your…coldness inside himself,” Tracker spoke. “He is an assassin, so not a man ruled by emotion. But if his woman, the mother of his children…”

“I still can't see it,” Cross said quietly. “There's no way it makes sense. And nobody to ask about it.”

Tiger slid off the desk and pointed a long fingernail at her wristwatch. The large digital display was flickering. “We may have somebody we hadn't thought of,” she said. “We need a big monitor and some cords with heavyweight USBs on one end.”

“Get Rhino,” Cross said to Tracker.

As the Indian walked through the curtain of black ball bearings without seeming to disturb them, Cross turned to Tiger.

“What?”

“Mural Girl was working yesterday,” she said, again tapping her heavy wristwatch. “The camera's still in place. Maybe the footage…”

The wall had once been whitewashed, but time had faded it to a shade of ecru that seemed to blanket certain parts of Chicago…parts known to be don't-go-there dangerous. The DVD that Tiger was playing showed all kinds of ghetto artistry. Not tagging, more like murals. Mostly portraits and scenes.

“Martin Luther King on the same wall as H. Rap Brown—haven't seen those two together before. Look to you like the same artist did them both?”

“It was the same artist,” Tiger told Cross. “No secret about it. We talked to her ourselves. She said it was a ‘spectrum mural.' Nobody bothered her while she was working.”

“Who was watching her back?”

“Nobody, is what she said. She's not affiliated, and she wasn't flying colors.”

“A mural like that one…a lot of work.”

“Took her a little more than two months, working every day.”

“Neighborhood girl?”

“You could say it like that,” the Amazon answered. “Let's add it up. This girl—and she's a pretty girl, mind you—works on that mural every day. Nobody bothers her. Nobody even…I don't know, it's like she's got protection everybody knows about, but it can't be that. Rhino ran her through our system. No hits—she's not with anyone.

“Now, here's the thing. Ace said there was a gunfight right across from the mural one night. Not late at night, when it was only just getting dark. None of the bangers got hit, but a little child took one in the back as she was running for cover. Died in the street, waiting for transport to a hospital.

“Just as Ace was coming back, first light, he sees a pair of playing cards on that wall. Huge ones, covering the whole mural. Two cards: ace of clubs, jack of hearts.”

“Painted over what that girl was—?”

“No. That's just it. It was kind of like a hologram. Ace said he could see right through it.”

“The pretty girl, the painter, she show up later?”

“Yep. And went right back to work. The cards, they were gone. Like they'd never been there at all.”

“Ace doesn't see things. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, wouldn't touch drugs.”

“I know that.”

“So that's why you mounted the camera?”

“Right.”

“And…?”

“See for yourself,” Tiger said, softly. “It's just about to come up.”

The screen was still filled with the mural when a pair of playing cards materialized over it, just as Ace had described to Tiger. This time, it was the ace of hearts and the jack of spades.

“Stayed like that for almost ten minutes,” Tiger said. “Then it just…disappeared.”

“Same time?”

“Yeah. Like it was filling in the crack between night and dawn.”

“Got a date on that thing?”

“Of course.”

“You checked, right? So…anything happen that night?”

“Anything…?”

“Come on, Tiger. You know what I mean: violent deaths?”

“Not in that neighborhood.”

“But…?”

“You remember that puny little ‘Führer'? The one that ended up with a long sentence for plotting to kill the judge who sentenced him?”

“Sure. But that was—”

“Few years ago, I know. Anyway, he put together some ‘followers.' He's locked in PC, but that Facebook page his ‘storm troopers' put together claimed he was secretly running the AB from Inside. He went from a terrified little twit to shot-caller for the heavy hitters. Magical, huh? Only that was pure Facebook baloney. Still, somebody didn't like it much.”

“He got—?”

“Not him. That little group of play-Nazis. The ones that put up that Facebook post. They had a storefront. And I mean ‘had'…past tense.”

“Bomb?”

“Nope. Five people—two female, three male, none of them over twenty-five—all got shot in the head. What the papers love to call ‘execution style.' The shooters sprayed ‘AB' over everything in there—walls, computers, posters.”

“What happened to the Facebook page?”

“Nothing, Rhino says. But it hasn't been updated since that night.”

“So where's the connection?”

“I don't know, okay
]
”

“Sssshhh, girl. There's nothing to get worked up about.”

“Really?” Tiger said, reflexively touching the knives in her holster. “I'll buy that. I'll buy it the minute you explain how Ace's calling card changed color. How did the ace of spades turn into the ace of hearts?”

Cross felt the spot below his eye burn, as if in answer to the warrior-woman's question.

THE MONITOR
showed a blended-race woman dressed in a orange jumpsuit with
DOC
·
ILLINOIS
black-stenciled across the back. She was standing on an adjustable-length ladder that widened out to form a platform above the top rung.

The woman was facing a freshly whitewashed stucco wall, dipping a variety of paintbrushes into an assortment of small cans, working steadily but unhurriedly. If keeping her back to an empty lot in “claimed” gang territory concerned her, she gave no sign.

The mural was a thick ribbon of varying shades of purple, from pale lavender to a murky violet to a near-black plum, the ribbon itself flowing from ground level toward the top, the reverse of a river's path down a mountainside. Within it were a series of portraits, men and women, all different races represented. Some were instantly recognizable, some not.

“Who's that?” Cross asked, tapping his finger on the monitor's image of a sharp-featured young white man.

“Wesley Everest,” Rhino answered immediately. “An icon to the Wobblies. Served in World War I, lynched in Centralia, Washington, in 1919. The IWW still has a Chicago office.”

“This one's loaded with faces like that. What's the—?”

“Some are symbolic,” Rhino said. “The police officer, see the ‘BOSS' on his helmet? That was the old Bureau of Special Services, the Red Squad of the forties reactivated during the sixties to deal with the Weathermen and other anti-Vietnam activists. But see the looping arrow? It circles from that pile of black boulders back around to Fred Hampton. And—”

“Who—?”

“Fred Hampton was the leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago. A very small group, nowhere near the size of the street gangs. But the Panthers were a serious threat to them, anyway.”

“How?”

“The gangs always flew under the banner of community service. Some even got federal grants to run literacy programs, things like that. But they used most of the money to buy drugs and guns. The Panthers were actually trying to
do
those things: Breakfast for Children, GED programs…

“And guns, sure—that was kind of a trademark with them, the way they first got started. But not to protect dope-slinging turf. The contrast could not be missed. It didn't matter what the newspapers said; people who actually lived in the places they were writing about, they could see for themselves.”