Everybody Pays (40 page)

Cross gave Doc a thousand-yard stare. Said nothing.

“So you leave her with me, figuring she needs medical rehab anyway, and, besides, you want her stashed where her father can’t find her . . . and maybe take her back without you getting paid in full.”

“You got paid,” Cross said flatly.

“I did. And she’s taking nourishment well, gaining weight, all that. She appears to have been subjected to . . . various forms of ugliness, but, given our knowledge of the Quitasol regime, not extensively so.”

“Funny,” Cross replied. “Seems like all the reports say she died in the attack on that . . . prison or whatever they call it.”

“Yeah. Funny. So the deal wasn’t that you bring her back at all, that’s what you’re saying? This wasn’t about her?”

Cross just watched Doc’s hands, silent and still within himself.

“But
that
doesn’t work either. No way you bring someone back without there being something in it for you. You figure it out by yourself before you even brought her here?

“Guessed.”

“Good guess. He didn’t want her rescued, he wanted her silenced. Anyone who’s done prison work would recognize the game. George Jackson tries to ‘escape’ with a ‘smuggled’ gun. And he gets smoked before he ever reaches the wall. Big surprise. But he sure stopped writing those books after that.”

Cross shrugged.

“So now you’re going to blackmail the same guy who paid you to kill her?”

“Doc, let’s just say, hypothetically, I knew what the fuck you were talking about, okay? And let’s just say the people with me, they saw it as a straight rescue. Maybe I thought they’d never pull off their end. But they did. And we got her now. I didn’t get paid for a homicide. I got paid for an extraction attempt. But when we found she didn’t want to go home to Daddy, we brought her here.”

“And if you think I’m going to turn her—”

“She’s not a girl, Doc. She’s a grown woman. Pretty tough too, for someone who never had to work. But if you turn her loose, he’s going to have her taken out, no question. And she doesn’t have what it takes to go underground.”

“I believe that’s her choice.”

“I believe we need to talk to her. Together.”

“Do we have it
confirmed
?” the immaculately dressed man asked the chauffeur.

“No. And we probably never will. The destruction of the prison was near-total. And we have no—repeat,
no
—assets on the ground there. The press statements are conflicting, depending on which side breaks through. They’re still fighting for control, but the President has made a run for it. He’s in Paraguay, about what you’d expect. Anyway, the rebels say they destroyed the prison and liberated their comrades and the American woman was executed by the guards during the assault. The government says the rebels bombed the prison and killed a bunch of people,
including
your daughter, but
they
claim the prison is still standing.”

“And this Cross, he says—?”

“Nothing. He says he wasn’t there. It was a job. He says he got it done. Sent an extraction team in, they did their best. No question
something
big happened down there.”

“I need to know.”

“Yes, sir. I understand. We will do everything in our power to . . .”

The immaculately dressed man got to his feet, turned his back on the speaker, and walked from the room.

“I could never talk about it before,” the woman said.

“You didn’t remember . . . ?” Cross asked gently.

“I never had a day I didn’t remember,” the woman said, voice sharp and focused. “This isn’t about ‘recovered memory’ or ‘flashbacks’ or anything else. Except him. And what he did. I couldn’t talk about it because I just . . . couldn’t, that’s all. It all seemed so . . . useless. My mother knew . . .”

“You told her?”

“No. I didn’t have to. She turned me over to him. Like a gift. She saw us. More than once. She always knew. But it wasn’t until I was . . . locked away. Until I knew I was going to die. Those pigs . . . they thought they were torturing me. Rape. I’d been raped since I was a little girl. I know what hurts. They couldn’t hurt me. But I knew enough to let them think they did.”

“And now . . . ?”

“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t go to Quitasol to help the revolutionary movement. I didn’t even know there
was
a revolutionary movement. All my friends go to Costa Rica for vacation. I wanted to go someplace different. Like discovering a new restaurant, I don’t know.”

“You say it doesn’t matter, but . . . ?”

“But I need to say it now. Let everyone know what kind of a ‘man’ he is. I can’t hurt him the way he hurt me, but I can hurt him. And I will.”

“Is your mother alive?” Cross asked.

“No. She died when I was seventeen.”

“Your father, he hasn’t remarried?”

“No. He has . . . girls still. Our housekeeper’s daughter, for one. But he would never get married again. He told me so himself. Why should he?”

“Yeah. Okay. I may have a way to fix this for you.”

“Nobody can fix—”

“You stay here. Get better. Talk to Doc.”

“I can’t find out something like that, man. It would be in the safe. Or in one of the files. I wouldn’t even know where to look.”

“You don’t have to look, bro,” Ace assured the young black man in the pin-striped suit. “All we need to do is get inside. And you, you work late all the time, right?”

“It’s expected of new associates. But I wouldn’t be the only—”

“All you got to do is tap this here cell phone when the coast is clear, babe. We got a couple of boys, come in there like ghosts. Man never know we touched his stuff, you got my word.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You like your mother living like she do? Your baby sister?”

“They’re not going to be there much longer. I’m saving every dime and—”

“And you owe about a million bucks on your student loan. But that ain’t what I’m saying, man. And you know it. You from where I from. And you know what it mean, a Rajaz honcho say he gonna brand your sister.”

“I—”

“And you know who I am too. You know I make that stop if I want, right? You a lawyer. That’s nice. When I was a kid, I stabbed a man beating on my momma. He died. So they put me in prison. I figured out how things work. You, you ain’t figured it out. You know the law. I know what’s true.”

“I’m not promising . . .”

“Just tap the green button,” Ace told him, handing over a mini–cell phone. “It’s all you need to do.”

“Why must
I
do this?” the Asian woman demanded of Buddha, her otherwise pretty face marred by an expression of intense hostility that had, after years of steady visitation, been granted permanent residence. She stalked in small, horseshoe-shaped movements in front of the hapless Buddha, who was half sprawled, half sitting on the plastic-covered sofa in the living room of a small house in a modest Chicago suburb.

“You’re the one that talked to Fong. About the job, right, So Long?”

“Yes,” she hissed at him. “So my ‘reward’ for trying to help you all earn some money is to risk my life?”

“Your life? Come on! Fong isn’t gonna—”

“Not Fong, you fool. Fong is an intermediary. Perhaps you understand the term. The one who tried to set that trap for all of you—
that
is the one I would have to fear. And not just me, Buddha. We have children here, in case you have forgotten.”

“So Long, give me a break. I didn’t forget nothing. But Cross says—”

“Ah,
Cross.
Of
course.
How could I fail to heed the voice of the oracle? Let me see if I understand this. Cross, he is your business partner. I am your wife, and the mother of your children. And yet it is Cross who determines my safety?”

“We get a cut,” Buddha said hopefully.

“A cut? You mean your usual ‘equal share’?”

“Sure.”

“Yes, and you believe
that
to be fair as well? I am not a member of your . . . organization, am I?”

You spend the fucking money like you are,
Buddha thought to him self, wisely not letting such thoughts past his lips. “No, honey. But, remember, this whole job, it started out as your idea, right?”

“My idea? Don’t be ridiculous. I merely passed along an opportunity that Fong—”

“Fong knows if he comes to you he’s coming to us.”

“How is that so?”

“So Long, that’s enough, all right? You telling me this snakehead thought
you
were going to bodyguard his cargo?”

“You say that because I am a woman?”

This riposte was wasted on Buddha. Too many years of seeing Tiger in action had disabused him of the notion that there was a gender difference in combat. But he recognized the
non sequitur
for what it was: So Long was getting winded—now was the time to pounce. “Cross says, we don’t do this, we can’t run the Double X out in the open like we do. Cut the profits
way
down, people think they can move on us like that.”

“But it didn’t—”

“That ain’t the point,” Buddha told her, emphatic now. “He
tried.
You know what the vulture packs say about Cross’s crew: ‘Many tried, many died.’ It cost us a hundred grand a
week
just to keep a presence at all the operations while we were gone,” he said, stroking So Long’s only known G-spot. “We can’t pay protection. We’d have to be pulling jobs all the time just to break even. That ain’t the way it works. We got enough money now. From what we just . . . did. But it’s only enough if we plow it over, scrape some of it off, turn it legit. Not just the Double X, we got to buy a couple of parking lots, some vacant land, maybe some rental units, stuff like that. This guy—what’s his name, anyway?”

“Liu-yang.”

“Yeah. We know two things: One, he
is
a smuggler, and two, the feds must have agreed to give him a pass in exchange for setting us up. So what we need to do, we need to show him that it’s all flipped now. See, when the feds came to him, they was telling him, ‘Cross’ crew, they ain’t got no license to drive no more,’ understand?”

“Yes,” she snapped, impatient now.

“So that’s why we can’t dust him. He’s gotta be alive.
Stay
alive. So he can spread the word.”