Everybody Pays (28 page)

The Colonel dropped, crumpling lifeless even before the
ccccrack!!
was audible. The men stood frozen.

“Well, damn. It’s
already
too late, huh? Now, let’s all play Army, okay? Every motherfucker wants to live, put his hand up.”

Each man raised his hand like a kid in a classroom. Buddha sighed: “
Both
hands, you fucking morons.”

Weapons hit the ground as hands went into the air.

“Good. Now . . . you have that twenty-five around here or not?”

“No,” one of the men said. “It was . . . like you said. We thought
you
. . .”

“Sure. You were gonna see my money, then kill me and the shooter I brought along, right? If you lames are the master race, my money’s on the mud people. All right, we got two problems here. One for you, one for us. My problem is, you guys are like . . . witnesses, you know. And witnesses are bad for business. Your problem is to convince me why we shouldn’t just My Lai all you motherfuckers right now.”

“Nobody’ll know,” the biggest one said. “We can bury him right here. Just say he went underground. Nobody’s going to ask any questions.”

“Well, you see, they
might
. So I got this idea. You got any shovels?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Start digging.”

Three hours later, a man emerged from the woods. Princess. In full makeup, his perfume overcoming even the stench of fear that hung like a murky cloud around the assembled clot of men. “Take it,” Buddha told him. Princess unslung a Japanese katana from behind his shoulder, picked up the dead body by the belt with one hand, and draped it across a tree stump, poking it with his foot until the angle was satisfactory, then brought the sword down in a two-handed strike that severed the head cleanly. One of the watching men retched. Buddha pulled a heavy dark-green plastic bag from his jacket and unsnapped it so it was full-size. Princess unceremoniously dumped the head inside. Buddha pulled the yellow drawstrings tight. “Okay, there’s our proof. Now throw the body in there.”

The men did it, none of them looking down. Buddha watched patiently as they poured quicklime over the headless corpse and shoveled the dirt back.

“You can dig him up. Be a lot of work, but you could do it. But the forensics, they’d be
real
bad, you did something that stupid. So I figure your best bet is, leave him there. ‘Course, you
could
go to the cops, tell them what happened here. Probably not a good idea, but you all use your best judgment. Revenge is for amateurs. And amateurs don’t go up against pros. So, I was you, I’d go back to preparing for the Fourth Reich and forget this ever happened. Appoint yourselves a new Führer or whatever. But I see any one of you again, anywhere at all, you’re dead. And don’t think we couldn’t find you in jail, either. Nice doing business with you.”

It was hours after the intruders vanished before the first of the broken men moved.

“Look at that faggot. Christ! First time I ever seen one of them cruising on fucking
skates,
” the young man dressed in a black alpaca suit over a white silk turtleneck said to another dressed in the same exact outfit. Both were powerfully built, with razor-cut short black hair. At twenty yards, they could be mistaken for twins. They lounged against the side of a glistening black Cadillac limo parked just off the grass at the lakefront.

“Got some damn body on him,” the other said. “You gotta give him that. Motherfucker’s ripped to pieces.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t go for that.” The speaker caught a look from his opposite number. “Hey! I mean I don’t go for that
look,
understand what I’m saying. You can lift for strength or you can lift for looks. Me, I lift for strength. But you see them at the gym all the time.”

“See who?”

“Homos. Let me tell you, I think
most
of those bodybuilders are like that. I wish they wouldn’t let them in there at all—who knows what they look at in the shower. They give me the creeps.”

“You got a problem, Monty?”

“Problem? I don’t got no fucking ‘problem.’ What I got is same as you got—a job. And that’s what we’re doing, right?”

“Sure. At least I am.”

“What’s
that
mean?”

“Means that freakish-looking guy with all the muscles, he’s gone by us three times already.”

“So? Like I said, he’s cruising. Showing off.”

“Maybe. This job of ours—what you think it is?”

“We’re bodyguards,” Monty said proudly. “We protect the man.”

“What we are is bullet-catchers,” the other man said flatly. “That’s why they always want ’em big. We ain’t bar bouncers, okay? It’s not about flexing muscle. Our job, we get
between
trouble and the man.”

“Yeah? The way I figure it, we get paid to
stop
trouble. That’s what this is for,” he said, touching his suit just over the heart.

“You talking about your balls or your piece, pal? Because, you know what, neither of them is any good without the brains.”

“Which is what you got, right?”

“What I
got
is that I’m in charge here,” the other man said. “And if that faggot skates by here again, we’re gonna have a talk with him.”

A dusty blue Chicago Department of Public Works pickup truck pulled up about fifty yards away. The driver was wearing a green baseball cap. Two men took their time climbing out of the truck’s bed. They took even longer to pull on harness apparatus that carried small gasoline engines to power leaf-blowers.

“Your tax dollars at work.” The other man laughed. “Look at that: You got your basic nigger and your basic Uptown Indian, which is a nigger with red skin. But they get these soft jobs, taking their time, making good money. All that civil-service crap,
we
pay for it.”

“Maybe they’re on work release from the County.”

“No way. Then there’d be a guard with them. And there’d be more than two.”

“Man, you don’t miss much.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Monty. In our business, you
can’t
miss much, okay?”

The two men with the leaf-blowers pulled the cords on the gasoline engines strapped to their backs. The machines roared into life. They then began to amble slowly in a vague pincer movement, blowing fallen leaves into a pile. One of them had a stiff leg, forcing him to limp.

“Here they come,” the other man said to Monty, nodding his head toward two elderly men walking together as if on an outing from an old-age home.

“Should we—?”

“No. We stay right here. Whatever Don Moranelli is saying, it’s not for us to hear. Just get the engine started so it’s nice and—”

One of the leaf-blowing men shrugged out of the harness and dropped to the ground, ripping a rifle loose from its Velcro mount against his thigh. He wrapped the rifle’s sling around his forearm, propped himself on one elbow, and spread his legs so that his body formed a Y. The other leaf-blower turned toward the two approaching old men and aimed the tube of his machine at them—a gush of fire erupted, engulfing both men instantly. One of the bodyguards was already running toward them when it happened; the other pulled his pistol and dropped to one knee. The prone rifleman fired twice. One each.

The shark car slid to a stop, its rear doors popping open. The workers and the truck driver all ran for it. The loudest sound was the roar of the abandoned leaf-blowers. Until the truck exploded with such force that it left a crater as a monument to its destruction. The two old men were microscopic particles. The two bodyguards were perfectly preserved. For the autopsy.

Nobody saw anything.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Cross told the woman seated across from him. They were separated by wire mesh.

“You think my hair grew in stripes
naturally
?” the woman chuckled. “They’re not big on beauty aids in here.”

“No. You’re a lot . . . thinner.”

“Why don’t I take that as a compliment?”

“Cut it out, Tiger. You doing the time hard?”

“No. But it’s like my hair. I can’t get the vitamin supplements I need. Or access to the workout machines. The feds seem to think it’s only the male prisoners who deserve that kind of stuff. So I have to make do, that’s all.”

“Anybody—?”

“Bothering me? You’ve been Inside. You get tested. It wasn’t much.
Nothing
in here is much. My biggest problem is staying out of the middle, you know? I’m not going to get in anyone’s car. They know that now. If I want a girlfriend, I can have my choice. But nobody’s going to choose
me
.”

“Okay. You got money on the books?”

“No. Going to leave me some?”

“Yes.”

“You’re wondering why I never told you, right?”

“Yes.”

“But that isn’t why you’re here, right?”

“Right.”

“Same old motormouth Cross.” She smiled. “I know what it says on my papers, but that’s a load of crap. It was out west. Some working girls got together, decided they didn’t need pimps to be working them like mules and keeping all their cash. Sure, some of them, they’re in the life because they got all kinds of . . . whatever, it doesn’t matter. But the prostie pro, she just wants the coin. And what they were paying the pimps for, supposedly, was protection. Except that they weren’t
getting
protection. So they opened up a little joint. On their own. I came on to cover it. Percentage deal. There were a few rough spots, but we finally got it running nice. Then this creep comes in, wants to turn a
hard
one, understand? Nobody wanted to play. I told him, move it on out—there’s plenty of dungeons in town, they’ll give you anything you want to buy. He goes into the usual ‘fucking cunt’ rap and I figure he’s all done. But then he pulls a piece and tells everyone to face the wall. I heard the handcuffs and I thought I knew what was coming next. I spun off the wall and dropped him before he could crank one off. And
then
we find out he’s a federal marshal. A kinky, sick, pervert of a federal marshal, but . . . Anyway, the lawyer I got, he made a deal. I keep quiet about what really happened, his widow gets a line-of-duty pension. And he’s got three kids. That’s nice, I tell him. But I’m not sitting for a murder beef when it was self-defense. My lawyer, he points out that the whores I was bodyguarding, they weren’t exactly my sisters, and their stories were already pretty much what the government wanted. They could take a hooker’s walkaway on the pross stuff . . . or accessory to murder, if they didn’t play nice. Rolling over—now,
that
was something they were already used to. I didn’t have a chance.

“And if I let it ride without a squawk, I’d get manslaughter—sixty to one eighty. That’s months, honey. Even on a max-out, I’m gone in seven, eight years. Or I could take my chances with a jury. With my priors, and all those girls playing parrot for the feds . . . ah, it was no contest.” She leaned forward, using her elbows to create the deep cleavage inmate wardrobe didn’t otherwise permit. “Now tell me . . . why are you here?”

“We got an offer,” Cross said quietly. “A job. Down south. Understand?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a bad job. We passed. But Uncle said we had to take it or take off. I’m . . . deciding. Anyway, they said, if we took the job, they’d spring you. Provided you went in on it.”

“What’s that mean, spring—?”

“Means you die in here, Tiger. On paper. You don’t go over the wall, you walk out the gate. And disappear.”

“Sounds too good to be—”

“Sure. That ‘on paper’ thing would probably turn out to be true enough, this job they’re talking about.”

“So why would you—?”

“We’re going to do it or we’re not. If we do it, you want in? Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“If we don’t do it, we’re leaving.”

“America?”

“Whatever you want to call it. Doesn’t matter. It’s not
our
country. Never was. Not for any of us. Except for Fal. And they
took
it from him, from his people. If we go, we’re going to close everything down. Buddha’ll stay. He’s got the papers on everything, all legit. And nobody’d want his baggage anyway.”

“You mean So Long?”

“Yeah. And his kids. Fal, he’ll stay too. He’s not with us anyway. Ace won’t leave either. He mostly works alone. And he’s got a woman too—she’s not a pro. It’d just be me, Rhino, and Princess. And you, if you want.”