Drawing Dead (25 page)

“Sure. What you're saying is, besides the ones I—”

“Buddha, will you
drop
it? No one's blaming you for blasting that car. I finished them off myself, remember? Those guys, they were flunkies. We could've questioned them for days, they still wouldn't have had anything to tell us. We had all the time in the world to talk to that piece of work Old Greytooth delivered to us. And
he
was dry, okay? But if there's any chance Mural Girl knows something, we can't pass it up.”

Buddha lit a smoke, took one deep drag, and snapped it into the darkness before he nodded his head toward where the Shark Car sat waiting.

“First light, we want to already
be
there, right?”

TIGER'S ONE-PIECE
spandex outfit was a city-camo match for the Shark Car's skin, and pulled almost as tight.

When the back door popped open, she slid inside.

“Hey!” she said softly when she realized the seat was empty. “What am I, a passenger?”

Cross turned his head to face her. “You're the only one getting out. We're your cover, just in case some stranger gets stupid.”

“I don't need any cover. Nobody ever bothers Mural Girl.”

“You're not Mural Girl.”

“Oh, I
know
that,” Tiger whispered, taking in a deep breath to emphasize the difference. “Anyway, in this outfit, nobody's even going to notice me.”

“Sure, they won't,” Cross said, without a hint of sarcasm. “You couldn't have capped your hair?”

“Not unless I cut it real short first. And who'd want that?”

“You could shave your head, it wouldn't make any difference,” Cross said, already riding the tide. “Nobody watching you climb a ladder would ever forget
that.
”

“Ah, you're so cute when you're trying to be a player.”

THE SHARK CAR
passed through areas of the city where people who might be awake at that time of night could never be sure exactly what they'd just seen.

Not an unusual situation for most of the watchers: those on their way to work auto-blurred their eyes whenever they saw something the police might question them about later. Curiosity had long since been deleted from their senses. They moved stolidly forward, one foot in front of the other, walking a treadmill that discharged meager paychecks, a health plan that covered everything but illness, and a pension that made them pray Social Security would survive federal plundering long enough for them to collect it.

“CAN I
ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Cross told Tiger, his tone clearly communicating that she should not mistake his affirmative for anything more than “ask.”

“Princess…”

“Princess what?”

“I love him, you know that. But…this has been just
killing
me for a long time. I would never ask Rhino why he dragged Princess along on the way back from that job down south. I can tell it's not something he'd want to talk about. Not to me, anyway. But I know he—Princess, I mean—he was some kind of…‘cage fighter,' right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what
is
that? I mean, it couldn't be a sport or anything. Princess doesn't
like
fighting. All he ever wants to do is make friends. He never even gets mad. Not unless—”

“Not unless someone ‘starts it,' I know.”

“Well, if you're a fighter—I don't care what you call it; ‘cage fighter,' that could mean anything—if that's the way you make your living, you don't have to
like
it, I guess. But I can't see Princess doing it. Not at all. That's just not him.”

“You know how old he is?”

“No. I mean, who could tell? He
acts
like a kid. A sweet kid. But he's been with the crew a good while, and—”

“We don't know how old he is, either. Rhino taught him English. All Princess can
remember
is fighting. From the time he was a baby, some kind of fighting. Rhino says he was probably abandoned by his mother. Or sold. But he must have gotten away somehow. When the soldiers found him, they knew he was worth money. You know why? Even when they had him netted, he fought like a wild animal. Scared them, serious.

“They brought him to
el jefe
—
el rey,
more likely. That's when he got trained for fighting. Once he was ready, they put him into one of the cages. Very simple deal: the one who kills the other one gets to walk out.

“Princess always tried to make friends with the other guy. That never worked, but he kept on trying. For
years,
this was. He got so damn good at fighting, he figured out he could cripple the other guy bad enough so that he couldn't move—that way, he wouldn't have to kill anyone.

“But he's not stupid. The first time he heard the gunshot behind him, he knew the other guy was going to end up dead, one way or the other. One time, he told Rhino, he just refused to fight. Just stood there. But that didn't work, either—he'd do that, the other guy would always attack.”

“That must have driven him crazy.”

“He's not crazy, he's…damaged. When he thinks someone else ‘started it,' he's going to start breaking bones. How's he supposed to know any better? In his mind, once he's in a fight, he wins or he dies. If that makes him crazy, it makes us
all
crazy, right?”

“But…”

“But what?”

“I know about that degenerate who got harpooned to a wall. Everyone in Chicago knew about it. That was you delivering a message, I get that. But how could you convince Princess that this guy ‘started' anything?”

“We told him that the guy was a buncher.”

“A what?”

“Guy who goes around to the animal shelters, adopts as many dogs as he can. Then he sells them to the people who need live dogs for their pits to practice on.”

“If Princess thought anyone was getting puppies ripped to shreds…”

“Yeah.”

“So you used him,” Tiger said, her husky voice suddenly just short of a feral snarl.

“Don't be stupid. That sack of waste was already dead. All Princess did was pin him to that wall. So he had nothing to do with bunching dogs, so what? He was part of that gang that was raping women, and making tapes of it for sale. You think Princess wouldn't consider that ‘starting it'?”

“But, Princess, he's just a—”

“He's a maniac,” Buddha cut in. “So what? He's one of us. It took me a while to understand that. And, yeah, he gets on my nerves sometimes, but—”

“Chop it, Buddha,” Cross said. Just in time.

“Was it a real cage?” Tiger asked, as if Buddha hadn't said a word. “I mean, with bars and all?”

“Sometimes it was. Sometimes it was down in a pit they made with a backhoe. And when the big shot wanted to show off, they'd make the cage real small, and use a crane to hoist it into the air. That way, the kingpins and their women could all sit up high above the rest of the crowd and have a perfect view.”

“I never even
heard
—”

“The narco-reyes didn't invent it—you can thank the Japanese for that. There's a breed of dog over there. Tosas, they call them. Only the Emperor was allowed to own such dogs, going back hundreds of years. But no emperor could really control all the territory, so it was the Shoguns who did most of the breeding.

“Those dogs are
huge.
Three, four times the size of any pit bull. In those little cages, they'd lock up right away. The dog who died, so did his trainer. The dog who won—even if he died later on from his wounds—
his
trainer would get some big reward.

“I heard they still do it. Not like before. No emperor, not in public. But yakuza obyans put on those same kind of fights, even today.”

“Too bad we couldn't have tested those A-bombs on
them,
” Tiger said, grimly.

“Yeah. Well, that's the thing about bombs—they don't cherry-pick.”