Drawing Dead (11 page)

Silence followed.

Cross knife-edged his hand, moved it parallel to the ground. Tracker shook his head—no motion sensors as far as he could see.

Several lights were on in the big house, glowing faintly yellow from behind drawn curtains. Cross made a steering motion with two hands. Tracker nodded agreement—the garage was their best approach. The two men walked the perimeter of the grounds until they were next to the garage, which was set up in an unusual configuration: a double door in between two singles.

Cross spread his legs and cupped his hands, interlocking the fingers. Tracker put one foot into the cup and drove up as Cross heaved with both hands. He caught the top of the fence and jackknifed over in one motion. Cross stayed where he was, a silenced semi-auto in his hand.

They waited a full two minutes. Nothing stirred.

Cross handed his pistol to Tracker through the fence. Then he climbed over the fence himself, not as smoothly as the Indian, or as quickly. Tracker led the way across the grounds, moving behind the big garage toward the house. He spotted a fieldstone patio, clean, bare of any furniture. Only a screen door stood between the two prowlers and the inside of the house.

Tracker looked a question at Cross, who shrugged in response. Then he hooked a finger through the door handle and tugged lightly. The door held. A pair of wire cutters materialized in Cross's hands. The screen door yielded without further resistance.

The men entered the house: Tracker first, then Cross, the silenced pistol back in his hand. The first floor was empty, unfurnished. On the second floor, they passed a staircase with a special elevator to carry a wheelchair. Whoever lived in that house wasn't some mere collector, or even a merchant—he was something more than that. Worse than that.

At the top of the next floor, Tracker signaled “Stop!” He held up his hand, cupped an ear, motioned Cross to step closer.

“I want protection,” a deep, metallic voice said. “Exactly as I was promised. Protection. Which means I can't stay here. I don't have mobility, but I have to move. Do you understand me? Out of the country. And it has to be now. Right now!”

Silence. Broken only by the sound of constricted breathing as the speaker listened to the other end of a phone call. Then:

“Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. You have the keys to the Audi—it's already rigged to transport me. Remember, it's only you two little worms on those tapes, not me. Whoever killed Holtstraf, they know. It feels like there's a Santería priestess somewhere in this. And those people, they're all insane.

“So I'm getting out. And you're coming with me—I've got enough cash so we can all get out of the country and live like kings. But it has to be now! Either you both show up here ready to go in ninety minutes…That's right, ninety minutes, no longer!

“Listen very closely: if you don't show, I've got other options. You don't, neither one of you. And if I have to use any of my other options, I'm going to be sending a little present to the FBI.”

The sound of a connection being severed. Harsh whistle-breathing. Wheels rolling. Refrigerator opening. Closing. Something poured into a glass.

Cross and Tracker exchanged nods, then slipped their stocking masks off before they stepped into the room where the voice had come from.

“Urghh…?” The speaker looked like a random assembly of body parts, with a mouth no bigger than most nostrils. But there was no mistaking the vertically linear–iris eyes of a born predator.

“Shut up,” Cross told him, his voice as calm and detached as a 911 operator's. “You got something we want. Here's the equation: You give it to us and we're gone. You don't, then you are.”

The creature pointed to a console with his one complete arm, a handless appendage that ended in a pointed, bony stub. When Cross nodded his understanding, the creature tapped some buttons:

“I don't…” came out of a muted speaker, in a human voice.

“One more time,” Cross said. “You got money stashed here. We want it. Now.”

More taps: “You must be…”

“Mistaken? We heard you call those two over here—you weren't lying about cash on hand. You didn't give them much time, so we don't have much time, either, understand? You remember what happened to your pal? Holtstraf, or whatever the hell he called himself? He didn't tell us what we wanted to know, so we pinned him to the wallpaper. We never waste time with torture. And you, you can always get more money—probably with just a couple of keystrokes. But you'd have to be alive to do it.”

A series of rapid key-taps. “How do I know you won't kill me anyway?” came out of the speaker, now in an eerily calm tone, two registers deeper than before. Tracker's eyes picked up a large knob on the console—
Voice adjuster, some form of harmonizer,
he thought.

“We were here to kill you, you'd already be dead. We're professionals. Just like you. You know there's always a cost of doing business, and we're only after hard cash. So…what's it gonna be?”

Rapid key-taps: “I'll show—”

“No. You'll tell us,” Cross interrupted, nodding at Tracker, who now held the silenced semi-auto leveled at the creature's protruding forehead, which bulged like a shelf over his eyes. “This is all about time now. You tell us, you live. You don't, you die. Your pals are on the way over right now. If you make us kill you, we get more time to look for the cash, see?”

The creature's pointed arm tapped rapidly: “In a suitcase. An alligator suitcase. In the master bedroom. On the next floor up. In the closet. Once you see I'm not lying, then maybe we could…”

“Take a look,” Cross said. The Indian handed the pistol back to him and vanished.

The creature reached toward the console.

Cross held a finger to his lips, keeping the pistol carefully trained on its target.

The Indian came down the stairs, the suitcase in his hand. He placed it across the creature's lap.

“You open it,” Cross said, standing back a few feet.

The creature popped the hinges with the protruding bony stub of his arm. Inside was cash. Carefully banded and shrink-wrapped. The bills showing were all hundreds. Cross thumbed open a box cutter and slit one package. Bills tumbled out. He held one up to the light, rubbed it hard between thumb and forefinger. Satisfied, he turned to the creature.

“Where's the rest of it?”

“There's three-quarters of a million dollars there!” the man in the wheelchair tapped out on the console. “That's all I have in—”

Cross aimed the silenced pistol and shot…whatever it was…between its unblinking eyes. Watched the huge head loll on the useless body. The shot made a soft, wet splatting sound.

“Ready?”

By way of response, Tracker hefted the suitcase. Cross hit the cellular phone. “Now” was all he said.

The two men went out the way they had entered.

This time, Cross was first over the fence. The suitcase wouldn't fit between the bars—Tracker needed both hands to swing it back and forth until he built up sufficient momentum, then heaved it over the top. By the time they reached the street, they could hear the heavily muffled tremors of a rapidly approaching vehicle.

The Shark Car pulled in, its trunk open and flapping in the night air.

Tracker threw the suitcase inside, slammed the trunk shut. Rhino jumped out, landing with a lightness that belied his weight. He dropped to his knees, the Uzi up and searching for targets. He was the last man back inside; then the Shark Car took off.

“You think those other two freaks are on their way?” Tracker asked Cross.

“Can't tell. Doesn't matter; they're sure as hell not calling the cops.”

Everyone in the car heard it at the same time—the scream of tortured tires. Something was coming. Coming fast.

“Stay smooth,” Cross cautioned. “It could be Law, could be a drunk driver, could be rich kids….Everybody easy, now.”

As the Shark Car entered a long sweeping left-hand curve, another car charged toward them. A white Audi Q7. Buddha suddenly stomped the gas, wrenching the wheel to the left and jerking the handbrake. The Shark Car fishtailed into a perfect bootlegger's turn as the Audi came past.

Buddha had his night-beaded pistol out, resting the barrel on his forearm over the windowsill. A string of killer bees popped out, stitching a neat row across the other car's windshield.

The Audi almost rolled, then righted itself just before it smashed head-on into a parked car. The impact was magnified by metal-on-metal shrieks into a suburban night long accustomed to silence.

Lights flashed on in houses. The Shark Car skidded to a stop. “Box it out!” Cross yelled.

Rhino and Princess rolled out of their separate back doors. Rhino took up his position with the Uzi, guarding the flank, as Princess rushed to the other car, waving his Nitro Express pistol. Cross wrenched a shotgun from under the dash and charged the wrecked car. He fired both barrels simultaneously, whirled, and ran in the same motion. The gas tank of the Audi exploded into a throbbing fireball.

That explosion was a kid's cap gun compared with the rocket-launch blast taking the top off the house where a dead thing had spent his life. Accounts varied, but the Fire Marshal's office later reported the structure had been ripped by what they called a “staged series” of shocks. Blocks of C-4 had apparently been placed on the top floor and threaded downward. When triggered, the charged substance had worked its way down, only to be met in the middle by an equally powerful force climbing its way up.

As sirens ripped the night, the Shark Car purred smoothly along, putting distance in the bank.

“What was in those shells?” Tracker asked.

“White phosphorus,” Cross told him. “Instant fire. The cops'll be along any minute….”

“I'm sorry, boss,” Buddha said, no trace of regret in his voice. “I thought of what they were gonna do to So Long and I just…”

“You know the rules,” Cross said quietly.

For several slug-slow seconds, the car was quiet. Even Princess kept still, as if waiting for something he wasn't sure would actually make an appearance.

“You know what?” Buddha broke the silence. “My share, so what? It was worth every dime. Not like I'd see most of it, anyway—that wife of mine could squeeze a nickel until it spit up quarters.”

“ALL THAT
was years ago,” Cross told Tiger. “And that…thing…it's not like he could come back from where we sent him.”

“Then…why this business with Hemp and Ace? And where does Mural Girl come in?”

“I don't know.”

“None of it makes any sense.”

“It makes sense to someone,” Cross said softly. “And one is all it takes.”