Blackjack (2 page)

CELIA REARRANGED
her lips into a fetching pout. This wasn’t the first such lecture she’d endured, and she had known what a trophy wife’s role was years before she’d signed her first pre-nup. Not her fault if
this
Master of the Universe believed her story about how the “traumatic ectopic pregnancy” she had endured in her early teens had left her permanently scarred, both internally and emotionally. When she had tearfully disclosed her secret, the hunter had feigned some degree of sympathy. But he could hardly keep the self-satisfied smirk off his face when she explained that those endless surgeries had finally resulted in a complete hysterectomy—she could never give him children.

His lawyers had repeatedly warned that even the most ironclad of pre-nups would not protect him financially were
he to father a child. With that possibility removed—“damage capped,” as his lawyers phrased it—the man acquired a new possession. A
safe
new possession, allowing him to happily discard his supply of condoms.

A vasectomy had been out of the question. His seed was too valuable to destroy. It would continue the line of superior beings long after his death—arrangements had already been made, and paid in full.

The possibility that Celia would cheat on him—thus exposing him to a sexually transmitted disease—was nonexistent. He did not overtly restrict her movements, but those who were paid to shadow her around the clock had never reported misconduct of any kind, much less a sexual encounter.

And they were well aware of the penalty for touching what did not belong to them.

So the hunter knew everything about Celia—what she did, who she did it with, where she did it. The mansion was fully wired for audio and video, all phone lines were set to record both incoming and outgoing, and she shopped only with credit cards, so all purchases could be monitored. And even if Celia somehow managed to build a secret supply of cash, she could not have bought a throw-away cell phone without his shadow employees noticing.

Of course, some activities could not be
completely
monitored. Her monthly visit to the gynecologist to check the internal scarring never took long—and keeping the wife of this man waiting was out of the question.

Her physician understood her state of mind, and always had a pre-filled prescription on hand. Celia’s fear of uterine cancer from what she always called “that butchering” required moderate daily doses of Somaso, a mild anti-anxiety drug.

The contents of those prescription bottles did not match
their labels. Celia’s only actual anxiety was that she might forget her daily dose of Implan, the most powerful fertility drug on the market.

Celia’s owner was blissfully unaware of this monumental bait-and-switch. But if Celia’s plan worked out, he’d know soon enough.

The doctor had warned her about the dangers of the new drug. Hypocritical little twit, glad enough to take the stack of hundred-dollar bills Celia handed over each time, but still wanting to protect himself from malpractice lawsuits in case the child was born defective in any way.
As if!
Celia sneered internally. The fool apparently didn’t know that providing care for a congenitally defective child not only was extremely expensive, but, properly handled, could turn into a lifelong and
very
substantial annuity.

The high-priced lawyer Celia had consulted before the marriage had not charged her for the advice, or for providing the name of a physician willing to risk anything for money to feed his own addiction. No record of her visit to either man existed.

The man with the rifle was no different from so many others Celia had known, but there was a core-deep meanness about him that set her perfect teeth on edge. That cruelty surfaced when he affectionately called her “Cee” in front of company.
Only
in front of company, making sure they all knew that “Cee” was really “C.” And what that single letter stood for. As if she needed still another reminder that she was a possession, and where her only value resided.

Despite her best efforts at disguising it, Celia had the feral intelligence of any successful predator. Hardly a genius on any IQ scale perhaps, but crafty enough to understand that a narrow mind could also be a focused one. So she was careful not to overdo her interest every time the man she had married explained how the world
really
works.

Again.

“And the biggest trophy of all is a killer,” he droned on. “When you kill a killer, all his kills belong to you. That’s what makes the world go around, Celia. Numbers.
Big
numbers.”

Celia felt the man’s words throbbing between her legs. She always had an instantly intimate response to big numbers. Not to the concept, to the reality.

Numbers can turn into money, and money can forge a sword that can cut with either edge. After all, aren’t those of
her
tribe measured? Aren’t
their
numbers constantly monitored and compared? And, when acquired, do not such measurements enhance those of the man who owns them?

Anyone can learn to shoot relatively well. Anyone can learn to recognize targets. But only the most skillful hunters come to truly
know
their prey.

A PRESENCE
darker than the shadow between the two natives moved, a tiny dot writhing with life. But although raised from birth to know every sight, sound, and smell of the savannah, the natives sensed no change in their immediate environment.

Over a mile away, a lone acacia tree stood, its roots reaching deep into the parched soil. It might be a trick of the blazing sun, but an indistinct blur seemed to move within the acacia’s trunk, as though the tree itself were widening. A pair of tiny crossbows poked carefully out of the blur, as if mocking the hunter’s camouflaged rifle barrel.

If the natives had been able to tune in to the blob of shadow between them, they would have heard the words “big numbers,” repeated in an ancient version of their own language. Translated, those words would form a single command:

“Hit.”

Instantly, the eye of the hunter and the sternum of his purchased yet predatory wife were simultaneously and soundlessly penetrated by trident-shaped arrows.

The kills were soundless and without impact. Man and wife never changed position, as if frozen in place by death.

The natives understood patience to be a vital part of their jobs. But after more than three hours of uncharacteristic silence from the sniper’s perch above them, they dared to sneak a look at where the hunter had been perched.

What they saw was enough for them to exchange a single glance, drop lightly to the ground, untie their sacks of provisions, strap on their rifles, and start walking.

It would take weeks for them to reach their home, and surviving such a trek was anything but guaranteed. But driving the Land Rover back themselves would create too great a mystery, and they knew exactly how such mysteries are always solved.

The long march would give them plenty of time to agree upon a story. A logical, possible story, not the impossibility of what they had actually observed.

Among their tribe, to be perceived as insane was a death sentence. Neither man spoke of the two playing cards protruding from the chest pocket of the hunter’s safari jacket: the ace of clubs and the jack of spades.

Neither ever would.

IN A
part of town closed to all but those who would be regarded as outsiders anywhere else, a tall, slender Latino lounged against a freshly whitewashed wall. His pose was highly stylized, practiced in private years prior to any display in public. Years in which he had no access
to
the public.

The Latino spread his duster-length black coat like
raven’s wings. Behind him was gang-turf graffiti, elaborately spray-painted, transforming the wall into a billboard. One with a very clear message.

The graffiti was pristine. That it had not been over-tagged was a bold proclamation that the wall stood within undisputed territory.

The Latino slouched to enable his arm to more comfortably encircle the bulging waist of an obviously pregnant
chola
 … a lovely young girl, only a year past the elaborate
quinceañera
for which her parents had saved since her birth. If they had been unhappy at her choice of a date for such a special event, they never gave the slightest sign. There were many reasons for this.

The girl’s long dark hair set off a Madonna’s face, aglow with impending motherhood. The man’s cowboy hat had been custom-made from skins of the Gila monster. It both shielded his eyes and veiled their message. His long duster was casually draped over a candy-orange silk shirt buttoned only at the throat, the better to display a single heavy-linked gold chain.

Soon a diamond would be added to that chain—the baby his woman was expecting would be his first.

A candy-orange ’64 Impala stood arrogantly at the curb. A two-door hardtop with rectangular black panels inset on the hood, roof and trunk, each intricately over-painted in a delicate white floral pattern, the quintessential low-rider was fully dropped to the limit of its air-bag suspension.

The Latino’s pose was a perfect, albeit unconscious, imitation of the Great White Hunter’s. Whatever he surveyed, he owned.

Under the hat’s brim, his eyes swept the street, relentless as a prison searchlight. He registered the approach of three young men, but kept his face expressionless.

One of the trio had covered his head with a candy-orange
do-rag. Another sported long black hair tied behind him in a ponytail and held in place by a headband, also displaying the gang’s color. The third was a heavily muscled individual in a candy-orange wife-beater T-shirt. His head was freshly shaven, glistening in the sun.

Let other gangs fly multi-colors,
Los Peligrosos
needed only one to distinguish itself. Various tattoos marked them as well, obedient to the decades-old tradition of “ink to link.”

To wear the gang’s color without its name permanently etched in one’s body would have been unthinkable. Flying gang colors might be prohibited inside the prisons which awaited them all and disgorged some, but they would carry their skin-branding to the grave. Although they never spoke it aloud, all knew that their life offered only one final alternative to incarceration—a ceremonious burial.

The tall man took a long, ostentatious toke from the cigarillo-blunt in his left hand. He did not offer a hit to his woman—she was pregnant, how would that look? As he patted the
chola
’s bulging belly, his left hand brushed the outline of a semi-automatic pistol in his coat pocket. Touching his future with each hand, not knowing which would come first: birth or death.

The crew formed a rough circle, standing so that they could listen to their leader and watch the street at the same time.

Time passed, as it does in such places.

“You want to roll, you got to pay the toll,” the tall man schooled the youth with the shaved head. “These streets test a man. You know this when you coming up, just making your first little baby-move. Me, now, I passed that test. I can
make
a life”—he bends, quickly and gracefully at the waist, to plant a showy kiss on his girl’s belly—“and I can
take
a life. You hear me,
ese?
”

“Always hear you,
jefe
.”

“I don’t mind dying. That’s what it takes, you want to be out here every day, walking with your head high,
sí?
”

“Dying comes quick out here,” the youth wearing the headband solemnly intoned.

“So?” the tall man immediately challenged. “To die quickly, that is
nothing
. A sheep can be slaughtered, but a sheep cannot kill. So, when it dies, it is always a quick death.

“Only when you go Inside do you face that
final
test of a man. Inside, that is dying
slow
. Every day, dying. The days pass; nothing changes. The only thing that happens fast is when it comes time to stick a pig.

“But Inside, even a blade will not always mean death. I have seen men survive
thirty
stab wounds—in prison, that’s the one thing the infirmary is good for. If you don’t get wheeled in DOA, you probably live.