Urban Renewal (4 page)

“Maybe both.”

“Been nice talking to you, So Long. Always a pleasure.”

“We negotiate, yes?”

“No.”

“Without me, you cannot do this, Cross. You don’t even know where the block is.”

“There’s all kinds of blocks like that. ’Specially on the South Side.”

“Maybe. But all the paperwork—”

“Lawyers are whores. Some cost more than others, that’s all.”

“You would not cheat my husband.”

“Is that a question?”

“No. But …”

“Save it, So Long. Buddha gets his piece of
our
piece. And you get a big piece of
that
, too.”

“More like all of it,” Buddha muttered, but not so quietly that it was inaudible in the back seat.

“Ha! Very nice. I take care of—”

“Enough, okay?” Cross interrupted. “Look, the only reason I’m even here is because Buddha asked me. We wouldn’t net five extra-large apiece, even if your numbers are right.”

“Maybe more.”

“You start a sentence with ‘maybe,’ anything you say after that is true.”

“What are you saying?”

“ ‘Maybe more’ is the same as ‘maybe less.’ ”

“You don’t like to gamble, Cross.”

“Buddha’s the gambler in our crew.”

“Huh!” Seeing that her pose of being grievously insulted wasn’t going to play, So Long went back to being herself. “Okay, here, then. You take a look. You decide we go ahead, you get a million off the top, I take half of what’s left.”

“That’s what I said. Which means you’re putting up the money to buy the properties. On this sure thing of yours.”

“Me? No. I thought—”

“Come on, So Long. Telling me
you
don’t like to gamble?”

The car was quiet for a long minute.

“Sure,” she finally surrendered.

No words were exchanged on the drive out to the suburb where Buddha and So Long shared an unmortgaged house. The deed was in So Long’s name.

“
CAN
’
T HURT
to take a look, boss,” Buddha said on the drive back.

“How’s it gonna help?”

“She wasn’t talking chump change.”

“She’s a gambler sometimes, brother. But she’s a thief
all
the time.”

“Of course she is. How’s that change anything?”

“The way she’s got it rigged, all the money would go through her. We’d never know how much she really scored, just what she turned over.”

“It’s a mil guaranteed, boss. And half of whatever’s on top. Sure, So Long’s gonna graft off that, but—”

“We don’t hold the trump, Buddha.”

“I’m not following.”

“That ‘my English not so good’ crap’s just a front. So Long’s
real
smart, Buddha. This wouldn’t be the first time she cheated us. We can’t do what we’d normally do, anyone else did that to us. And she knows it.”

Cross lit another cigarette. By the time he was finished with it, he’d spun the roulette wheel inside his head.

“Rhino?”

“If the houses haven’t been ravaged, it
would
be because no gang’s claimed that block, but they’re still close enough
so squatters couldn’t move in without passing through their turf.”

“Maybe worth it, then?”

“Not worth dying over. But if it’s surrounded and not occupied, it’s not claimed turf, either.”

“I get it. Okay, Buddha, let’s roll by.”

“
STREET LOOKS
decent. Could use some work, but it’s not all torn up. Hydrants are still in place. Probably some homeless sleeping in that lot, but no point in lighting it up just to see. This late, who cares? But we didn’t spot one whore, one dope slinger … and they work until it gets light, rain or shine. Nobody legit getting up for work this early.”

Cross didn’t mention that they’d only been a few minutes away from the block they were surveying when he’d told Buddha to roll by—they’d been heading in that direction from the moment they’d dropped So Long off.

“We can come back tomorrow night, boss. Better to have some cover if we want to look close, anyway.”

“Tracker could ghost it himself.”

“Probably could. The man don’t even cast a shadow. And he works a strange place better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Those feds who wanted their ‘specimen,’ they may have been off-the-hook loony, but they didn’t have no budget cap. So, hiring him and Tiger, you know they bought the best. But even if Tracker says it’s clean, we’d
still
need to hang close, just in case.”

“Sure. But … look, Buddha. Bottom line is the Law. We’re not going to be some Neighborhood Watch. If we can
send a message that’ll keep the gangs out, that’s one thing. But there’s only way to do that. And if some of them don’t survive the delivery, we can’t leave their bodies in the basement of one of the houses—that’d make them kind of hard to sell.”

“There’s other—”

“Sure. But you know how it works: clearing territory might be hard work, but it’s nothing compared to trying to
occupy
it.”

“This ain’t Afghanistan, boss.”

“Yeah. But it’s never enough to just kill rats; you have to make sure more don’t come back. And rats don’t get turned off by dead bodies.”

“Didn’t look like anyone’s claiming the block. No tags. Or worse, overtags. No slot doors, either. So any crack dealers working that street in daylight, they’re small-time slingers. They’ll just move on—they’re used to it.”

“Let’s see tomorrow, okay?”

BOTH MEN
were silent for the next several minutes—in hostile territory, speech is a luxury no soldier enjoys for long. Once clear, Buddha asked: “The spot?”

Cross glanced at his watch, a rubber-strapped black disk that popped alive only when tapped on its face.

“It’s not even four. Let’s see if Condor has anything for us.”

Buddha leaned the Shark Car gently around a corner and turned toward the Badlands—unoccupied acreage that various developers had tried to purchase over the years, only to
learn that it was city-owned. And condemned. Apparently, some obscure ordinance prevented the city of Chicago from selling land once used as a toxic-waste dump unless it was first brought “up to EPA standards.”

Since that last phrase was not defined, every attempt to purchase had gotten lost in the bureaucratic maze. More knowledgeable developers had sought to untangle that snarl with the one lubricant that had never failed them in the past. But, no matter how much money they threw at the machinery, it stayed stuck.

Several years ago, the Russian mob had hired Chicago’s premier fixer to unblock the path. But the Russians’ boss, Viktor, heeded the note attached to a razor-tipped arrow embedded in the back wall of their storefront headquarters. It came right on the heels of the silenced rifle shot which had punched an opening in the black glass.

The note’s message was as clear as its delivery method, each Cyrillic character etched in a harsh calligraphy: “Tomorrow, call your lawyer.”

That lawyer’s unsolved homicide remained a mystery. Still, the Russians had only been deterred, not defeated. They were a tight organization, ruthless and patient. There was no shortage of ways to earn good money in Chicago.

And elsewhere. Some Japanese oyabuns believed that freshly removed bear claws would grant an elongated life span to their possessor, and had the cash to pay what such prizes were worth. Viktor had many contacts on the Kamchatka Peninsula. “Harvesting” bears was not difficult, and smuggling the claws into close-by Japan even easier.

The Japanese underworld’s voracious appetite for animal parts, from powdered rhino horn to intact tiger testicles, was
no secret. In Africa, the risk of taking rhino horn was worth the potential profit to some. In China, there was no risk involved—tigers were bred in captivity as a “conservation” project … and some males had to be neutered when judged to be inferior specimens.

The Chinese government had no objection to the sale of tiger parts, as long as the proper “taxes” on such transactions were paid. After all, this was nothing but the sale of a manufactured product. But the Russian government considered bears to be their sacred national symbol, and trafficking in bear parts was a capital offense.

A fatal synergy resulted. First, the controller of all Chinese crime in Chicago, an old man named Chang, accepted a contract from a nonexistent government agency to deliver Cross—dead or alive—to a certain address. Chang asked no questions—it was an unspoken part of the contract that the government would remain uninterested in any of his local operations, and that alone made the reason for the promised COD irrelevant.

A master strategist, Chang used his contacts in Russia to confirm the bounty on Viktor, then immediately hired Cross to put a halt to Viktor’s trade arrangements. The crafty old man envisioned a war by which he would profit regardless of its outcome.

Chang had paid off, in gold, just after learning that Viktor’s entire gang was literally ripped apart by … something not yet known. Within minutes of that exchange, Chang’s own headquarters had been hit by several RPG rounds.

Cross got word to an ancient Cambodian headman that the destruction of his mortal enemy—Chang—was a gift. A gesture of respect, for which no payment was expected.

Later, a gift was delivered to Red 71, the crew’s known headquarters. An elaborately carved ebony stick, whose characters Rhino laboriously translated: “We can redeem this for a body. Payable anytime. And it can be any body we want.”

The failure to deliver Cross caused the disappearance of two members of the “government” team that had reached out for Chang. If a nameless blond man and an Asian cyber-expert called Wanda were still alive, it wasn’t known to the Cross crew. The whereabouts of Percy—a human war machine who returned to an inert state as though someone had thrown a switch in his brain when he was not on combat assignment—were unknown. But he would always be a high-value asset to whatever part of the government had sent Cross after a “specimen” he had never collected.

Two members of the team the blond man and Wanda had assembled had been freelancers: Tracker, a Chickasaw who had no purpose other than to carry on the work of his ancestors, and Tiger, whose own tribe was either mystery or myth.

Neither had disappeared. Tracker signed on after a lengthy prove-in period. He had no interest in money, but considered the Cross crew to be the logical descendants of his own people … people who did not hunt, gather, or farm.

Tiger worked jobs. “I do out-call, you know,” had been her parting words to Cross. But only when the objective suited her. Her loyalty would always be to her sisters.