Urban Renewal (18 page)

Or maybe it was Taylor picking up on Tiger’s scent—it hadn’t come off, even in a half-hour steamy shower.

Whatever!
Arabella baby-talked inside her head.
Deal with it: The “battered woman” you thought you were playing, “saving” her—sure, saving her for yourself—all the time, she was really playing you. Using you to get inside the Double-X, so she could spy on the Cross crew. You don’t owe this whore a damn thing
.

The two women approached, holding hands, but were forced to separate in order to walk around Rhino’s bulk. They had only taken a single step past him when they felt something like a giant crab’s claw on the back of their necks. A claw that vise-gripped right through the flesh to the spinal column.

Before either could make a sound, their heads were slammed together hard enough to fracture both skulls into fragments.

Rhino released his hold, the women slumped to the floor, and Cross, Buddha, Tracker, and Tiger entered the area.

“Make sure Princess doesn’t come back here,” Cross told Rhino. It was a reminder, not an order—he didn’t have to tell the massive creature how an emotional reaction was the last thing they needed right then.

Cross picked up Arabella’s lifeless body; Tracker did the same with Taylor’s. Tiger opened the passenger-side door of Arabella’s little Mercedes. Taylor was bigger, so she got the passenger seat. Then Arabella was carefully placed on her lap before the seat belt strapped them both in.

Without another word, Tiger started the engine. Cross and Tracker went out the back door and into the waiting Shark Car. Cross took the passenger seat, Tracker the back.

This seating pattern had nothing to do with status—the rule was always to distribute their shooters to cover both sides, and only Buddha and Tracker truly qualified.

The Shark Car shadowed the Mercedes as it left the enclosed lot and headed toward the Badlands.

“Three-to-one that dyke gets stopped,” Buddha complained.

“She’s not driving fast,” Cross said mildly.

“Man, any cop that
sees
her is gonna find some excuse to stop her—the way she’s built, she could stop a damn clock. And with that hair …”

“Relax, brother. Tiger’s been on jobs with us before. You ever see her not hold up her end?”

“Good one, boss.”

“Cut it out, Buddha. Tiger knows this is business.”

“Anyone behind the wheel can make a mistake.”

“That would mean you could lose control of this car, then?” Tracker spoke from the back seat.

“Very nice,” Buddha said. Whether he was addressing
Tracker’s comment or admiring the short-barreled rifle Tracker had just unveiled wasn’t clear.

Tracker touched a button, and his side window zipped down noiselessly.

“Acquired,” he announced.

Neither man in the front seat said anything, their eyes riveted to the little Mercedes, now buzzing toward the outer edge of the Badlands like a bluebottle fly in pursuit of food.

The Shark Car kept pace, leaving enough room to maneuver should that become necessary.

Tiger went past the semi-trailer, caught the winking red dot out of the corner of her left eye, and kept going until she spotted another light. She pulled to a smooth stop in the middle of what had once been a paved street. Then she unsnapped the seat belt and, in a single motion, pulled Arabella behind the wheel and backed herself out of the little car.

Tiger moved into the passenger seat of the Shark Car as it emptied out; Buddha covered his side with his pistol; Tracker swung his scope in tightly controlled loops. Cross moved close enough to the “fence” to catch the whisper: “You move, you die,” Condor warned his crew. “When they get gone, then we do, too.”

Cross carried a FedEx box in both gloved hands. He placed it very carefully on the dashboard of the Mercedes and walked back to the Shark Car.

“Thirty seconds,” he said as he covered the ground.

“Go!” Condor hissed at the nearest members of his gang, knowing the order would be passed along faster than anyone could run.

Just before the sound of the blast traveled several blocks
of wavelength and went audible, the azure Mercedes became a red-and-yellow fireball.

Metal, glass, wood, plastic, flesh, and bone all were reduced to the same color, that white-gray ash every crematorium worker knows by sight.

“Dust
that
for prints, chumps,” Buddha said, smiling in what any street-level denizen would recognize as the “Step off or die!” advertisement of a man who didn’t necessarily
like
killing … but didn’t
mind
it, either.

ANOTHER WEEK
passed before Buddha brought up what he knew would be a touchy subject. Looking around the table in the backroom office of the Double-X, he threw out a tentative probe.

“Boss, So Long says, if we don’t get started on that rehab soon, we’re gonna miss out on some real scores.”

“This pie’s gonna be sliced pretty thin as it is,” Cross said sourly.

“Is that right?”

“Leave it, Buddha. Me, Rhino, Princess, Ace, Tracker, Tiger … Even if we pry another four hundred extra-large out of So Long, that’s, what, two K for each of us?”

“Those houses, they don’t need much work at all. Not to sell them, anyway.”

“What does that mean?” Tracker asked.

“It means whoever buys those houses is going to have to put in a lot of work on their own. Inside work, I mean.”

“You’re an expert on contracting now?”

“I’ve done enough contracts to be,” Tiger said, flashing her teeth in a sugary snarl.

“It would be fair to sell the houses pretty much as they are, provided the life-support systems are all in good working order,” Rhino said, his high-pitched squeak not diminishing the seriousness of his manner.

“So Long says she can get just about anyone a mortgage.”

“Probably can,” Cross said. “But if we sell to people who can’t make the payments, we’re going to end up trashing the block.”

“So?”

“So that’s how this wonderful opportunity showed up in the first place. If we want to rob a bank, the time to do it is
before
they empty the vault.”

“Speak English, brother,” Ace said.

“Banks give mortgage money to people who they know damn well are right on the margin. Then they sell those loans the same day. Instead of risking, say, five hundred thou at seven percent, they take one point off the top and leave someone else holding the bag. It’s harder to do than it once was—you know, that ‘mortgage crisis’ thing that still has the government printing money? It’s not like Zimbabwe here, at least not yet. But I feel sorry for any chump who thinks he’s going to live off his Social Security check.”

“Tie it together.”

“If we do like Rhino says, we’re cutting the profit down so damn far we’d be better off with fire insurance.”

“So Long could probably—”

“Paper fraud’s not our game,” Cross said flatly. “That leaves a trail. Always does.”

“Then what’s our move?”

“Let’s get an inspector, let him check those life-support systems Rhino was talking about. If they’re solid, then we
can move them quick—lots of people are pretty handy with tools. But that still leaves us with those thin slices. And it doesn’t do a damn thing about the
real
work we have to put in.”

“What, the gang thing? If any of them try and—”

“We can’t leave bodies in the street, Buddha. And we can’t stay around and
patrol
the damn block, either.”

“Then why did we take this deal in the first place?” Tiger said.

“Where’s this ‘we’ stuff coming from?” Buddha snapped at her. “It wasn’t your decision, you just hired on.”

“I hired on for a
piece
, right? So I guess that made it my decision, too.”

“Ice it,” Cross said, knowing from experience how quickly Tiger could escalate. She had a temper, Buddha didn’t; but either was capable of taking out the other. Like a drag race between equally matched cars—whoever got off first was going to win.

Tiger tried to cross her arms over her chest, but that was physically impossible. Buddha didn’t bother looking daggers at a woman who needed little excuse to
throw
hers.

“Let me think this over for a little bit,” Cross said. “Rhino, I need you and Ace for this idea I’m starting to get. So hang back, okay?”

“What am
I
supposed to do while you’re having your little meeting,” Tiger said, indignantly, “go work the pole?”

“You would be a
great
dancer, Tiger,” Princess assured her. “You’re so beautiful.”

“You’re not wrong about that, honey.”

Princess beamed at the genuine affection he heard in her voice.

“What about us?” Buddha said, nodding at Tracker.

“You’re going to the block, both of you. We’re going to need to know who’s doing business, and how close. If there’s a buffer zone, we need to know that, too.”

Without a word, Tracker stood up. Buddha followed his example, moving with a deliberate lack of speed.

“Come on, Tiger!” Princess said excitedly. “We’ve gotta get you an outfit.”

“Princess—”

“And you can meet my puppy, too.”

Tiger shrugged her shoulders, shot Cross a death-ray look, and followed the huge child out of the room.

AS SOON
as the others had cleared out, Cross turned to the two men he had known since they were locked down together as juveniles.

“It comes down to this,” he said. “If it’s gangs that want to play turf war, there’s no way we can hold that block. But if they’re doing business that’s too heavy for street-side, there could be a way.”

“Tax,” Ace said.

Cross nodded.

Rhino looked a question at the two of them.

“We could shake them down,” Cross explained. “I’ve been thinking about this, and it doesn’t add up. There’s gangs on each side of that area, but none of them move in? There’s only one thing that could mean.”

Rhino’s face showed he still wasn’t following.

“The real businessmen aren’t gang boys, they’re mob
guys. Which means gambling. And everything that goes along with it. Bookmaking, numbers, loan-sharking, and whores anyplace they’ve got a casino or two. You know what I mean: looks like a low-rent dive on the outside, but it’s all Vegas on the inside.”

“Expansion wouldn’t do them any good,” Rhino squeaked, showing that he understood where this was going. “It would just spread them thin. But they’re used to collecting tax, not paying it. So, if we make it hard for them to work unless they pay
us
, we could maybe negotiate some kind of deal.”

“If we want them to stay where they are, we can’t let them see what
we
want,” Ace added.

“Yeah,” Cross said. “It’s just about that simple.”

“There’s black gangs on one side, Latinos on the other,” the assassin who always checked for a pulse answered. “And you think the Outfit is cutting a few blocks out of each side? So that ‘buffer’ thing, it wasn’t an accident?”

“The way I heard it from Mac—and the guy
he
heard it from was … reliable—in New York, the mob kept rolling in Harlem at least up to the end of Vietnam. They had a joint on Pleasant Avenue—some name, huh? What’s important is this: Plenty of gangs in Harlem, right? They all knew what was going on, but none of them ever did anything about it. Never even
tried
to.”

“Like a peace treaty?”

“Sort of,” Cross answered Rhino. “But it was more about the pad than anything else. They were paying the cops, so any gang moving on them would be a suicide mission. And the gangs—black on one side, Spanish on the other, just like here—they were too busy fighting each other to really give a damn if some old white guys wanted to run a candy store.
Some of the candy the Italians kept there got so old it was rotting right on the shelves.”

“Nothing like that around here,” Ace said.

“You sure, brother? When the city took down the high-rises, they fractured the gangs, just like they wanted. Only thing is, they didn’t break them, they just broke them
up
.”

Rhino gestured a request for more information.