Everybody Pays (21 page)

“What they call you, man?” he asked the leader.

“Dice.”

“Dice. You just rolled craps, boy. You know my name?”

“Yeah. I mean . . . yes.”

“Say it,” the thin man whispered.

“Ace.”

“You know how I come by that name, boy? You hear about me when you was telling stories in the dorms downstate?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell it.”

“They calls you Ace ’cause you the Ace of Spades.”

“Yeah, that’s about right. You know what I do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The ace of spades, that’s the death card, right? Me, I make people dead. That’s how I make my living. I’m a contract man, understand? I take the money; I take a life, see?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, listen. Listen real good. Listen the best you ever did in your lousy little life. That woman you was tracking, Clara? Well, somebody paid me money—
good
money, boy. They paid me this money, told me make sure nothing happens to that woman.
Noth-ing.
Same for her girls, the twins. Same for her apartment. Understand? Now, you boys, you got the bangers on the run ’round here, don’t you? You king of this hill. That’s okay. You do what you do. But now I got a job for you. You want to work for me?”

“Yes,
sir
!”

“That’s good. That’s real good. Now, here’s the job. You watch the lady. The way you
been
watching the lady. You watch them twins too. And the crib. Anybody acts like they trouble, you
take them out.
You understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I been watching you boys. You got potential. You do this right, there’s work for you.
Hard
work, understand? Hard work pays hard cash. You got the heart to do it? Not smoke some poor sucker in a drive-by—walk up to the man, put the piece in his face, and make him dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You want to learn?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, then pay attention. First thing, you get the money up front, understand?” The blade-thin man’s left hand went into a deep pocket. It came out with a thick wad of bills, wrapped in rubber bands. “This is four thousand dollars. One thousand apiece. For doing what I told you. A contract, understand?”

He put his left hand forward, almost in the stocky boy’s face. “Take it and we got a deal. That’s your word. That’s your life.”

The stocky boy took the money.

“Now I’m gonna give you something else. Something even more valuable than the green. Which one of you wanted to rape the girls?”

Dead silence on the roof.

“I ain’t gonna ask again. Anytime you got a rat pack, you got someone in it wants to do some sex thing. Now, the thing about that, sex fiends ain’t reliable. You can’t trust them. Their word is no good. You get dropped, they be the first to roll. Now, which one was it?”

Nobody moved.

“I guess maybe it was all of you,” the blade-thin man said in a tone of deep regret. “Too bad.”

“It was Randall,” the stocky boy said. “He wanted to do the twins.”

“Motherfucker!” one of the boys hissed. He was a tall, well-muscled youth wearing a black-and-silver Raiders jacket.

“You Randall?” Ace asked.

“Yeah, man. But I was only playing. I ain’t gonna rape nobody.”

“That’s right,” Ace said, nodding at Rhino. The monster slid forward so quickly Randall had no chance to move. Rhino hooked him in the stomach with the same hand that held the Uzi. The boy grunted as he doubled over. The monster-man snatched him by his jacket and threw him off the roof.

One of the boys turned away, vomiting against the wall.

“You got paid,” Ace said. “Anything happen to the lady or the girls,
nobody
gonna die as easy as that punk just did.”

“He’s on the top of the list,” the white-coated intern said into the pay phone in the basement of the hospital.

“You’re sure.”

“No doubt about it. He gets the next one.”

“Kiss your student loan goodbye,” a voice told him.

A phone rang in the living room of a modest home in Merrillville, Indiana. It was snatched on the first ring by a pretty woman whose face showed hard lines of stress.

“Yes.”

“It’s time,” a voice said. “You remember where to meet?”

“Yes.”

The woman put down the phone. “Joanne, come in here,” she called.

A teenage girl walked into the living room, a paint-daubed artist’s smock covering her to her knees.

“What is it, Mom? Did they find . . . ?”

“Not yet, darling. I have to go out for a while. You watch your brother. And say a prayer, okay?”

The girl nodded. Stood patiently for her mother’s kiss.

The woman drove quickly to the parking lot of a local diner. She pulled into an empty slot in the back, started to roll down her window; before it was all the way down, she saw a man detach himself from a motorcycle and start toward her.

He approached, leaned against the car, his face hidden from her eyes.

“He’s on the top of the list,” the man said.

“I know. We waited so long.”

“You sure you want to go through with this? It’s expensive. And they could find a donor on their own. Maybe in a real short time.”

“He doesn’t have much time,” the woman said.

The man was so old that even his expensive cologne couldn’t mask the stench of the grave. A silk suit hung limply on his wasted frame. A two-carat blue-white-perfect solitaire flickered in the neon light from the bar, the ring sliding down his bony finger toward the knuckle as his palsied hand trembled. The black Lincoln stretch limo was parked in an alley behind the bar, the old man seated in the cavernous back seat. Bodyguards flanked the limo, standing outside. The chauffeur’s partition was closed.

The door opened and a man climbed inside, seated himself across from the living skeleton. One of the bodyguards closed the door behind him; it made a noise like a bank vault.

The two inhabitants of the back seat sat in silence, both waiting.

“You’re good,” the old man finally said, his voice a reedy imitation of a human’s. “You got patience. Respect. The old ways. Too bad you were never one of us.”

“There aren’t enough of you left,” the other man said.

“Yeah, that’s true. Less of us all the time. This . . . thing you got to do, it ain’t for me. Rocco, he couldn’t take me down. Too many buffers. The Accountant, he calls himself. Like he knows it all. He don’t know it all, see? The big thing he don’t know is that
we
know. The indictment is sealed, but we know what’s coming. He’s going to turn. Roll over like the cowardly dog he is, take a couple a years in a Level One, play some tennis, come out and start over. You got everything you need?”

“Rocco Bernardi. That’s all I need.”

“Then it’s done, Cross?”

“We got two things left, then it’s done.”

“Here’s one,” said the old man, handing over a thick envelope.

“Watch the news,” Cross said, stepping out of the limo into the night.

A phone buzzed in the guard booth at the gates to a mini-mansion in the lush suburb of Winnetka.

“Front gate, Tony speaking,” a smartly uniformed man answered.

“Have Ricardo bring the Mercedes around to the front.”

“Yes, sir,” Tony answered, nodding over to another uniformed man next to him in the booth. “Right away.”

The other man took a holster and cartridge belt from a hook, strapped it on, walked across the manicured, floodlit lawn to a four-car garage. He pressed a transmitter on his belt and the garage door rose. The interior was as brightly lit as an operating room. The man opened the door of a black Mercedes SL 600 coupe, its flanks gleaming as if polished with oil. He started the car, sat patiently, listening to the muted purr of power. Then he slowly backed out to the circular driveway in front of a white brick two-story house. He climbed out of the driver’s seat, leaving the door open.

A man came down the steps to the car, moving with an air of moderate caution. He was dressed in a conservative midnight-blue suit. His brilliant white-on-white shirt set off a red-and-blue tie in a tiny diamond pattern that rippled in the glare of the floodlights.

“Everything okay?” the man asked.

“All quiet, Mr. Bernardi,” the guard said, touching his cap with two fingers. He maintained his position even as the Mercedes shot off, firing a barrage of marble chips from the driveway at his ankles.

The Mercedes turned the corner, heading for downtown Chicago. Bernardi punched a single button on the cellular phone in the console between the bucket seats and lit a cigarette while the phone rang through the speaker system.

“Hello . . . ?”

“It’s me. I’m on my way.”

“Oh,
good,
honey. I was wondering when—”

“Don’t wonder, bitch. That’s not your job. I’ll be there in an hour, tops.”

“I’ll be waiting, honey. I—”

He broke the connection.

As the Mercedes turned onto a winding stretch of road, a young woman in a wheelchair watched from a darkened room lit only by the sickly amber glow of a computer screen. She lifted a pair of infrared night glasses to her eyes, touched the zoom, zeroed in on the license plate: ACCT 1.