Drawing Dead (21 page)

THE GANG
leader's summation was blunt.

“Whatever he told the AI, that ended it. There's no way for another player to enter the competition. It's over.”

The silence lengthened, as if waiting for darkness to emerge.

“The AI is gone. It did its job. Or at least it computed that it did.”

“I
get
it, okay?” Buddha snapped. “I screwed up. But that's done, and there's no way to fix it. We'll never get to question those other ones now.”

“They wouldn't have known the answers.” Cross shut off the faucet. “The only one who could have told us anything, that…whatever it was Tracker and I found…we didn't have time to listen. And we wouldn't have known what questions to ask, anyway.”

“We have to work with what we know.”

“No, brother,” Cross answered Rhino. “We have to work with what
he
knew. He might have been smart enough to create that AI, but it couldn't hold more than he poured in.”

“You all can stop,” Tiger said, stepping out of the darkness and tossing her mane. “I wasn't there before, but me, now,
I'm
in.”

Cross was very still for several seconds. Then he said, “To get off on rape tapes, you have to be a certain kind of maggot. That's the only requirement.”

He took a deep hit off his cigarette. “But to
find
people who actually want those tapes, not so easy. And to find a whole damn
market
for that product, that's much harder yet. You'd have to be inside…inside
them,
I'm saying. It's not like a kiddie-porn ring. Not that hard to find one of those. Hell, find a
lot
of them, you want to—that's just computer forensics.

“But
this
guy, the one in that house, he was a different species. He had to find a market. Not a network: all individuals—they probably didn't even know each other. And he also had to find a gang who wouldn't want to just watch those tapes—they'd want to
make
them. Plus, he had to do all that without ever leaving his house.”

“Prison.”

“Huh?” Tiger suddenly erupted. “You said he was working out of his house.”

“No,” Rhino told the Amazon, the squeak re-entering his voice. “Where he was, it wasn't
his
anything. He couldn't leave. Ever.”

“If he was smart enough to—”

“He couldn't leave his own body,” Rhino said, more softly, but no less despairing. “The longer he stayed trapped in it, the less he could move under his own power, even if the door was wide open.”

“I was there, remember?” Cross spoke to Rhino, his voice pitched at the same volume as the behemoth's, but the thread running through it lacked even a trace element of Rhino's empathy for the man they all thought of as some kind of creature. “And whatever in hell that thing was, however he got where we found him, he was
some
kind of genius, right?”

“So what?” Buddha said, still defensive. “The only thing we know for sure about him is that he's gone. And he's not coming back.”

“Neither is the guy you just killed. But there's one difference between them. And that's the one we have to focus on.”

CROSS OPENED
his left hand and lit another cigarette.

“You know those clowns who do ‘threat assessments' for people with enough money to make them walk around scared? That's a nice racket, but we're not customers.”

“What are you saying?” Tiger snapped, irritated.

“We know there's a threat out there, we
take
it out,” Buddha snapped back. “You got a thousand cockroaches in your house, what's the point of killing nine hundred of them?”

“I'm glad you said that, brother,” the gang leader said, not even a touch of sarcasm tainting his speech. “Because now we've got to talk to So Long.”

“WE NEED
your list,” Cross told Buddha's wife. “The whole list.”

“Why? This ‘list' you call it, not valuable? You want something that is valuable, it is only good manners to—”

“No bargaining, So Long. Just give it to him, okay?” Buddha said, his voice empty of anything but words.

“Now
you
give orders?”

“This isn't about that,” the pudgy killer said. “There's no choice.”

“Always a choice.”

“For you, only two,” Cross said, his voice as quiet and uninflected as when he first spoke.

So Long looked at the man sitting in one of a matched set of armchairs.
Always the same,
she thought to herself.
Cross. This is a man with no blood in him.
Aloud she said, “You come to
my
house, to—what?—give me orders, like this is some restaurant, maybe?”

Cross didn't respond.

“Well?” she said, turning to her husband.

“So Long, you remember when Cross got us out of that jungle? Saved our lives?”

“Saved
your
life. You told this man, if he wanted to take you back, I have to come, too, yes?”

“Sure. That makes me a bad guy now?”

“You? No, husband. Not you. But to…him, I was baggage. Extra baggage. And now he gives you that same choice, yes?”

“No,” Buddha said, in a voice his wife rarely heard. “There's something out there. We don't know if it's
still
out there, but it was trying for a kill. We've got it narrowed down to maybe just two targets—Cross and…a guy you don't know.”

“Yes?”

“That note you got. It was from some degenerate freaks. And they would have done what they threatened to do, only now they won't be doing anything like that. They won't be doing anything, ever. The man I had stay with you one time?”

“Black man. True gentleman. Like that giant. Very fine manners. Very respectful. Not like him,” she said, tilting her head slightly toward the man with the bull's-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand.

“They don't know you,” Cross said pointedly.

“Huh! Very nice. But I told you already: Pekelo.”

“He's not here.”

“Another of your riddles? Better to do business. Like always, yes?”

“Pekelo told a killer where to find Ace's wife, So Long. And that killer came over to the house—the house you did all the paperwork on—to kill her. Following orders. Not because his boss needed her dead—he wanted to drive Ace insane, rage him to stepping into a trap. Then kill
him
.”

“How is this—?”

“Listen,” Buddha said, his tone so softly penetrating that even So Long shrank back in her chair. “The first target wasn't Ace's wife, it was
my
wife. You, So Long. And it worked. The trap, I mean. Only not like they thought it would. That Circle of Skulls gang, it's gone. Every one of them. It didn't have to be that way, but I lost it. They were dead before we could ask them any questions. And that's on me.”

“They wouldn't have known the answers,” Cross said, hearing the bitterness of self-blame in Buddha's voice. “But we all worked on this. Every single one of us. Because our brother's
wife
was under threat. No other reason—he's one of us, and that was enough.

“That was all we had, to start with—that threat to rape you, So Long. And Buddha didn't make the first strike; he didn't even know about it. This drug boss, he was going to panic Ace out into the open, but he didn't live long enough to make it happen.

“That one is gone. His gang is gone. Pekelo was playing a game; that's what he thought. If someone had to die for him to win, that was okay—no problem for him. You gave him the information he needed to win the game. Now he's done, too. He won't be playing any more games.

“There were only two targets. Me and…this other guy. At least, that's what we thought. Now we're not so sure. And we have to
be
sure, understand?”

“You were a target, So Long,” Buddha said. “That brought us
all
in. If Cross had refused to take you when we left that damn jungle, I would have stayed—I wouldn't have left you—that's true. But this is different. Don't make me—”