Drawing Dead (42 page)

“A message to Wanda as well?” Tracker asked.

“I don't think so. Can't see where they'd do her any good even if she could read them. But she
had
to see them. How do I know?” said the man who led the most feared crew in a city of gangs. “Wanda wouldn't have been with Blondie in the first place unless she was convinced that the Simbas were more than a myth or a legend. For all we know, she was never with the G—could have been pure freelance. Even Blondie could have been. ‘Private contractor' is the right label for him—he was too superior to take orders, but he'd take jobs. Especially ones that challenged him. No better way to up your quote.”

“Not Percy,” Tiger said.

“No way,” Ace agreed. “You don't get that kind of…loyalty, I guess you'd call it—not from somebody who's there for the money.”

“We work for money,” Buddha said, very quietly. “We take money to do jobs. We don't fly a flag, we don't salute. But…”

“We're mercenaries,” Cross finished. “But not the kind anyone's used to. We're not loyal to whoever pays us—we don't feel anything for them, and we'd turn on them in a second if we saw a better score that way. But the difference between us and other mercs
is
loyalty. That's loyalty to each other. No one's seen it before, so no one's ready for it when it shows.”

“There's plenty of tight units,” Buddha said. “Worked in a couple of them myself. Guys you could trust.”

“So why did you quit?” Tiger said, archly.

“When we ran across So Long…”

“Somebody died,” Tiger said, her tone clearly communicating that she wasn't speculating. “Maybe more than one. That ‘tight unit' you were with, a couple of them had different ideas. Different from yours.”

“They didn't turn on me,” Buddha said, hollow-voiced. “I turned on them.”

“They must've been bad people,” Princess said, forcefully.

“So was I,” Buddha said. “This whole ‘loyalty' thing, how far do you think it goes?”

“It went far enough for you to put your body between gunfire and Princess,” Rhino said, so gravely that the squeak disappeared from his voice. “When Muñoz kidnapped him to get us to—”

“That was…”

When nobody finished his sentence for him, Buddha passed up the opportunity to finish it himself.

THE BLACK-MASKED
Akita had completed two full circles of the room, checking each individual like a bomb-detecting dog, before Cross spoke.

“Rhino, you got to the end of that game?”

“Yes. But even with getting past all the coding barriers, if I hadn't known who designed it, I wouldn't have.”

“Meaning…”

“Meaning, this game, a little guy in a plumber's outfit is supposed to climb up this building structure. Actually, just the skeleton of one, like a kid's Erector Set. He's supposed to rescue this damsel-in-distress from a giant gorilla. For the actual game—
Donkey Kong
—there must be a way to win….Otherwise, it wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. Like
Pac-Man.
It's difficult, but you
can
win.

“I couldn't envision Wanda going to all that trouble just to construct what any
gamer
could win. So, instead of trying to work my way across the grid to reach the top, I spun through the options first. Wanda had added one of her own. A cutting torch. If you picked
that
up, you could topple the whole thing.”

“That wouldn't rescue the girl,” Tiger said.

“The object wasn't to rescue the girl,” Rhino told her. “Not the way Wanda put it together. The object was to bring it all down. When it crashed, the screen cleared, and there was a schematic displayed. You could follow every step. Step
by
step. It was the most complex branch-out I've ever seen.”

“When would she have—?”

“There is no way to tell,” Rhino answered Cross. “She could have been working on it for a long time, not activating it until she needed to.”

“Activate what?” Buddha said, almost absently.

“The whole chain,” the twice-normal-size man said. “She…she knows something about how it feels to be nothing. Like that man caged on the top floors of that house.”

“She was in contact with
him
?”

“She was in love with him,” Rhino said. “They were connected in a way only people like them could even understand.”

“He was a psycho,” Buddha said, as if that covered everything.

“They were
all
there. That thalidomide baby, Holtstraf and his two pals, Pekelo, Wanda…”

“So…the back-channel site?”

“Yes,” Rhino answered Cross. “Wanda and that imprisoned man, they found each other there. They put the rape-tape plan together, from the very beginning. They didn't know Pekelo, but they knew
someone
would have enough information about you to try and win all that money.”

“Pekelo did say it came from the Cloud….”

“It wasn't So Long's fault,” Rhino assured Buddha. “Pekelo won only because he was first. Sooner or later, another scrap of information would float up. Pekelo knew about Ace's house. Someone else might have followed Princess one night. Or maybe a woman from Orchid Blue…

“It doesn't matter. They—Wanda and that captured man—they knew, with that much money up for grabs, they couldn't lose.
They
weren't gambling. One way or the other, we would all die.

“There's no way to tell when that plan was hatched, but those two were communicating—online, I mean—they were communicating with each other for
years.
Remember that phone call? From Thalidomide Man to the two still left in that rape-tape thing? He couldn't possibly have believed there was any safe harbor for him anywhere in the world. What he wanted was for them to take him to someplace where Wanda would be waiting.
That
was always the plan, for them to be together.

“But Wanda was already on the run when we…finished that thalidomide man. That's not your fault, either, Buddha. We could have questioned those two you shot for years—they couldn't tell us what they never knew. Maybe they—Wanda and the man in that house, I'm saying—maybe they had some kind of emergency signal….”

“So there never
was
any damn AI program?” Cross cut in. “When Wanda reached out and he wasn't there,
she
checked the camera-feed he had installed. After that, it was Wanda running things. We'd killed her demented dream—her and Thalidomide Man, together for real. So what's left for her except revenge?”

“Yes,” Rhino said gravely. “If those two rapists had managed to pick up the man in that house, he would have directed them to where Wanda was hiding. After that, it would be just the two of them left. But
we
took the man she was waiting for…and by then she knew Percy was after her, too. Her and the blond man. They only stayed together because—”

“Because Blondie had some skills Wanda didn't,” Cross concluded. “If she'd managed to get together with that psycho who set this up
with
her, Blondie'd be on his own. Only question was when they'd remove him. And however they did it, he'd never see it coming.

“But now, with her…I don't know what to call whatever Wanda and Thalidomide Man had between them…she's down to her last card,” Cross said.

“Boss…”

“What?”

“Maybe she doesn't
have
a last card. For all we know, Percy took them both out. Her and Blondie, I mean. We'd never know, would we? I mean, it's not like he's gonna report to
us,
right?”

“Percy could not take Wanda,” Tracker said.

Everyone went quiet until Rhino tuned to Tracker's frequency. “You watched her. For a long time, at close quarters. The blond man wouldn't have watched
you.
Nothing to do with trust. You were just as you said: A hired hand. A long-distance killer. Wanda was inside all her computers. Even Tiger couldn't fully…distract her.

“But this seems to be a circle, with each open end moving toward intersection. I believe you must be right about Wanda. No matter what, she would not place all her chips at risk. So, even if Percy were to find her—”

“Damn!” Cross interrupted. “
There's
that AI program we thought was running. It'd still work, just like we thought it could. But Thalidomide Man didn't create it,
Wanda
did. So, if she doesn't check in when she's supposed to, the program's going to activate again. The only question is, what will it do?”

“I DON'T
know,
man.” The voice coming through the speaker of Ace's relay belonged to the head of one of the West Side's most feared gangs.

“Easy, my brother. Just be calm. Tell me what happened; I'll take it from there.”

“We're slow-walking to our ride. Just representing. Showing the flag, you know?”

Ace said nothing—the equivalent of “Get on with it!”

“This man—this
white
man—he steps out of the car. Looks like something out of one of those movies, you know, like a little group of white men drop into some African country, rescue the pretty bitch—a couple of hundred niggers have to die to make that happen, so what?

“Anyway, before we get over, like, how this mofo get inside
our
car?—ain't nobody crazy enough to do that, not with all the security we got around the spot—before we even
see
all the bodies scattered around, this guy, he says, ‘I got a message for Ace.' Just like that. ‘I got a message for Ace. I only need
one
man to deliver it.'

“We all got
that
message. All except for that fool Heavy. You know who I—?”

“Just talk,” Ace said.

“Heavy goes for his piece. The white man's gun—I never seen one like it before—it makes this little noise, and Heavy's double-dead. ‘You still got five left,' this white man says, but we don't say nothing. Then he says, ‘Tell Ace she's still out there.
Just
her.' And then he gets back in our car.
Our
car, man. He gets in and just drives away.