Blackjack: A Cross Novel Part 13

"But I can wash it, and it won't come off?"

"It will never come off. You will be buried with that tattoo still in place, Cross. It is the ink that I created that makes this possible. In three months, or perhaps a little less, all color will disappear. The tattoo will forever be transparent-all that will remain visible will be your own skin underneath."

CROSS SAT in a modern dentist's chair. A black woman in a white coat leaned over his open mouth. She was wearing transparent latex gloves and an opaque face mask. "All finished," she said.

"I can chew on this? Bite down and everything?"

"It's a tooth. It will work like a tooth. When you want it out, you torque your jaw all the way to the side, just as I showed you. Then press your little finger right at the base of the back molar, and it will pop right out, still intact."

"Thanks, Doc."

"Don't thank me. What I just did was for my brother. Flowers on his grave. Our family's debt is paid now, yes?"

"Yes."

"Then don't come back here, Mr. Cross. For anything."

CROSS SAT at a workbench, carefully threading a wire around a thin channel cut into the outside rim of the heel of a rubber-soled shoe. Finished, he began to slowly tamp the thin rubber strip he had razored out back into place. He reattached the heel, holding it up for inspection. Still not satisfied, he added a coat of what looked like black polish, and set the shoes aside to dry.

Hours later, he was in a coffee shop, standing in line. Ahead of him was a young woman who was wearing a dress-for-success outfit, carrying a soft leather briefcase. He handed her a sheaf of envelopes. The return address of the expensively engraved envelopes was that of a law firm. Stamped in red on each one, in block capital letters, was: CONFIDENTIAL LEGAL MAIL.

"You understand what to do?" he asked the woman.

"As soon as I get a cell, tier, and wing number, I send one of these every other day."

"The letters are already written. All you have to do is ..."

"Make sure they come from our office postage meter," she finished for him, a bored look on her face. "You've already explained it a dozen times."

"You get paid by the hour," Cross reminded her. Then he courteously stepped out of the line, allowing the impatient teenager behind him to be the next one served.

LATE THAT night found Cross talking to an older man with a vaguely Inca cast to his features. They were in a warehouse past the edge of the industrial district, and they were not alone. The place was full of armed men, all with clearly Central American faces.

A regular moviegoer would immediately conclude that this was some sort of guerrilla group. Cross held up a butane lighter, a cheap plastic job.

"They let you carry these things inside?" he asked.

"Si! When you are a pre-trial detainee, you have certain rights. A prisoner in America has more rights than an honest campesino in my country."

"Yeah, fine, Ramon. You sure this'll work?"

"Ask la policia, hombre."

THE NEXT afternoon, Cross was seated in the back of a triple-black Jeep, its multi-coat paint gleaming as if polished with oil. A posse car extreme, it shrieked "Dope dealer!" from its blinged-out twenty-four-inch rims to its 18-karat neon trim.

The man next to Cross was older, more substantial-looking than the two young wolves who occupied the front seats. He was talking on a cellular phone, but limiting his responses to monosyllables. He put the phone down, turned to Cross: "It's just like you said-he's working right out of the Community Center. And his partner's a social worker. d.a.m.n it! They worked it perfect. We rolled right up on them, sat there, and watched. They never even noticed us, but we didn't see anything, either. So they got to run their foul game on our children."

The speaker leaned forward to speak to the driver: "Rozzy, swing back up through the edge of where Robert Taylor used to be. Target's located, under surveillance. He's street-side now. If he moves inside, I'll get word. And motor smooth, little brother. We don't want him to catch our scent."

As the Jeep cruised through the community, back-mounted woofers and tweeters blasting, the man leaned his face close to Cross and whispered, "We could do this part ourselves, you know."

Cross came back with "It's been a long time between wars, Butch."

"Between? Ain't no 'between' for us, brother. Don't matter if the canopy's green or concrete, it's still a jungle. Leave one war, you just come home to another."

Cross extended a fist. The other man touched it, lightly.

"We trying, man," he said. "But it's a slow go, trying to take back what you never had in the first place."

"That's why you can't take a chance on hosing down the area, Butch. The guys you got now, they're organizers, not shooters. All they know is spray-and-pray. Too much chance of wasting a civilian by accident. And way too many people around here know you by face. Where's that leave your program? You know the rule: you always play it the way you planned it."

Butch nodded a reluctant agreement.

"Stealth," he barked. Immediately, the Jeep went silent. No music. Windows closed. Neon trim blinked off. Air-powered sacks over each wheel well puffed out a cloud of black dust, temporarily coating the rims to visually reduce their size.

A few minutes later, the Jeep slid to a stop. Cross got out, wearing an Old-School 8 Ball leather jacket. Bright yellow-orange with a black collar, with a red "8" on the back, it had an elaborate design constructed of separate pieces of leather. The varsity-jacket sleeves had a matching 8 Ball leather patch on each side. Decades ago, these jackets sold for over a thousand dollars, and wearing one out in public was reserved for those who never walked unarmed.

In an era when teens were routinely jacked for their Air Jordans, some of those 8 Ball jackets ended up being worn by those who proudly sported the bullet-hole price-of-possession. Failure to "Give it up!" had cost a number of young men their lives.

Today, such jackets are "collectibles." Which means they never leave their cedar closets.

As the Jeep pulled away, Cross walked purposefully up the street, in the opposite direction.

Ahead of him was a tall black man with spiky hair. He had his hand on the shoulder of a darker-skinned black child: a little girl, perhaps eight years old. Her even younger brother stood next to her, holding her hand. Their tiny figures were dwarfed by the tall man leading them.

Most of Cross's face was obscured by the bill of a low-riding yellow leather baseball cap. And what was visible was wildly distorted-the jaw was exaggerated and widened, the tip of the nose extended almost three inches, and hooked to such an extreme that it covered his mouth.

Cross closed to within a half-block from the target, who was still leading the children he had been grooming for months.

The Jeep circled the block and returned to its original drop-off position.

Inside the Jeep, the man in the back reached into a compartment and pulled out a rectangular object. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and said "Go!" very softly, as he slid into position near the window.

The rectangular object turned out to be a video cam. The man holding it muttered, "You like to make movies, dog meat? Good. You about to star in your very own snuff film."

By the time the target sensed his presence, Cross was only a few feet away. The target looked up just in time to see Cross slide a silenced semi-auto from inside his jacket.

The tall man froze. He never saw the Jeep lurking across the street.

The children ran away, still holding hands. They could not have known the danger the tall man was to them, but they were raised on how to react whenever they caught sight of a gun.

Without changing expression, Cross pumped four rounds into the tall man's chest.

A few random bystanders dove for cover, quite purposefully not looking. Whatever was happening, it had nothing to do with them. If the cops asked them, the shooter was wearing a green overcoat. Or maybe it was a red flannel s.h.i.+rt. And he was either Puerto Rican or Chinese, they couldn't be exactly sure.

Cross reached down, pulled the tall man's head up by his collar, held the pistol to his temple, and blew away the opposite side of his face.

Butch had been filming throughout. He made sure to close in on that last bit, as if a director was whispering "Zoom!" into a cameraman's earpiece.

Cross opened one gloved hand and dropped the silenced pistol on the body. The camera shut off as Cross sprinted for the Jeep.

The street was as quiet as the grave it had become.

LESS THAN an hour later, Cross was inside an office, seated across from the man who had been in the back seat of the Jeep. "You'll get word to them, Butch? Let them know I can be trusted?"

The man gave Cross a level look, pointing at a video monitor in one corner. The snuff film was running on a continuous loop.

"On my life," he said, tapping his chest twice with a closed fist.

CROSS AND Tiger were seated across from each other in a suite at the Four Seasons on Delaware Street, the remnants of their dinner on a white linen tablecloth in one corner. The curtains had been opened to a panoramic view of Lake Michigan.

Tiger was wearing a stylish black dress, low-cut, but not dramatically so. A string of black pearls followed the neckline. Her nail polish was high-gloss black, matching her eyeliner.

Cross was smoking a cigarette, pacing, his tie loosened.

"You got it?" he asked Tiger.

"Yep."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

Cross took a deep drag of his cigarette, eyeing Tiger over his shoulder. "I'm going in tomorrow," he told her.

"So?" Tiger replied.

"So how do you feel about last requests?"

"Well ... I do have a position on the topic. But it's hard to explain. Better let me just show you."

VIEWED FROM the back door of a large courtroom, the judge's bench was centered, set significantly higher than the proceedings below. To his right, sitting behind a "security cage," were several rows of recently arrested individuals, all awaiting arraignment, male and female prisoners separated from one another by a thick steel plate.

Armed guards strutted everywhere, a prominent presence. Their union held the presiding judge in high regard-his ceaseless media demands for better judicial protection had played a major role in their per-courtroom allotment, allowing many the joys of an overtime-bloated retirement.

Two long tables stood in front of the judge's bench stacked with case files running parallel. The left one accommodated a cadre of a.s.sistant U.S. Attorneys-or "AUSAs," as they preferred to be called. They were generally more conservatively dressed than their counterparts on the right-side bench. The Federal Defender lawyers considered the more liberal sartorial standards of their office to be a job benefit. One of the few.

Behind the attorneys' tables were row upon row of spectator seats, mostly occupied by friends and relatives of those about to be arraigned. However, the front-most benches were guarded on each side by stanchion-mounted signs: FOR ATTORNEYS ONLY. There, privately retained counsel patiently awaited the appearance of their individual clients.

The interior decorator's a.s.signment for the courtroom seemed to have been "grim and depressing." The huge room was designed for the ma.s.s processing of humans through a recycling system unknown to environmental activists. One far more toxic than anything in a landfill.

An ostentatiously dressed pimp stood in a far corner of the room, rapping urgently to a bored-looking lawyer. "Don't even go there, Weissberg-that routine went out with Jack Johnson. I wasn't even in the car they drove, and it's not registered to me, anyway. I'd let them stupid b.i.t.c.hes stay inside a couple a days, teach 'em how good they got it out here, but how am I gonna pay the fine if they don't keep bringing me my money?"

Clearly, the question was rhetorical. Cash flashed in the pimp's hand, and quickly disappeared into the lawyer's briefcase.

An old-before-her-time Latino woman was talking to a long-haired Federal Defense lawyer, her young daughter at her side. "Javier is a good boy, mister. Those other boys, they ..." The lawyer nodded, mumbled something about "the system," and turned away.

A well-dressed, portly gray-haired lawyer was ma.s.saging a male-and-female couple into a near-hypnotic state, patting the woman's arm rea.s.suringly. "I am quite confident that the court will release Harvey on reasonable bail. However, you must understand, if you don't get him into some sort of a program ..."

One of the lawyers in the front row was reading a newspaper. A bold-type headline screamed: EX-CONVICT ARRESTED IN D.C. RACE KILLING!.

"We never stopped looking," Detective Jonas Pinkette of the Federal Bias Homicide Squad was quoted as saying. "We knew he was still out there, somewhere."

As a bailiff led three accused illegal aliens away from the bench, the court officer called the next case: "Timothy Arden!"

Cross was led from the pen toward the area between the two parallel benches. A young black man with a sharply etched haircut detached himself from the pool and walked up to meet him, as the court officer recited his hundreds-of-times-a-night, rote-memorized announcement: "No appearance of counsel having been filed on behalf of the defendant, counsel from the Criminal Justice Administration Panel is hereby a.s.signed."

The judge looked down from the bench. Way down.

"Mr. Arden, do you understand what the court officer said? Are you expecting your own attorney?"

"No."

"Mr. Rogers will be representing you for these proceedings, then."

"Him?" Cross said, jerking his head sideways at the black man.

"That's correct," the judge replied.

"No n.i.g.g.e.r's gonna represent me," Cross snarled.

The judge's face flushed, but Rogers didn't seem overly surprised-it wasn't the first time he'd heard such statements.

"Are you saying you waive counsel for arraignment, sir?" the judge snapped at Cross.

"I'm saying I'm not having no n.i.g.g.e.r for a lawyer. Why can't I at least have a Jew?"

"Very well," the judge interrupted, smugly. "Defendant waives counsel, and will proceed pro se. You may step down, Mr. Rogers."

Turning to face Cross, the judge said, "Now, Mr. Arden, you are charged with a number of crimes, including Murder in the First Degree, on a warrant issued out of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., dated ... 1983. I see this warrant has been outstanding for some time. As I'm sure you've guessed, the District of Columbia has requested your extradition. If you consent, you will be transported back there to stand trial."

"And if I don't?"

"You will be held here, pending a hearing on your return."

"Good. What about bail?"

"What about it, Mr. Arden?" the judge sneered, doing his best Law and Order impersonation as he held up his hand to tell the AUSA that no words from him were necessary. "Defendant is remanded. Take him away."

THE BUS chronic recidivists call "Number 13"-twelve jurors, one judge, half a chance-was intentionally distinctive: dark blue, with broad white stripes running from end to end and across the roof as well. Printed within those stripes, to remind the public what cargo the bus carried: FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS.

Most of the pa.s.sengers needed no reminder of their status. Earlier that morning, they had shuffled their way to the bus under the wary eyes of shotgun-toting guards. Once inside, they could look out through windows barred with thick steel mesh. A cage stood between them and the driver. Each man was individually handcuffed and leg-chained to his seat.

As the bus pulled away, Tracker lay p.r.o.ne on a nearby rooftop, adjusting his body to adapt to the urban environment as naturally as he would in the mountains. Having attained maximum invisibility, he put a small monocular to his eye. As Cross pa.s.sed through that lens, he whispered "Loaded" into the mouthpiece of the soot-colored headset he wore.

A shadow shape-s.h.i.+fted at the word, repeating it in Chickasaw, the language of that small tribe of Cherokees who neither farmed nor hunted. Translated it would be ...

"Stay."