Free Blackjack by Andrew Vachss Page B

“Not for him.”
    Wanda didn’t speak, just threw a couple of keystrokes at her type pad.
    Tracker tapped his heart as the large monitor flashed on an Indian hunting party returning to camp, finding those they left behind hanging upside down, bleeding out, stripped of bone matter.
    Cross nodded his understanding.
    “Why not ask me, too?” Tiger half-snarled. As if in compliance, Wanda hit more keys.
    “They took out three of my sisters,” Tiger whispered as the monitor showed three women, all armed to the teeth, standing in a back-to-back-to-back triangle in some sortof tunnel. Their faces reflected both calmness and rage—warriors facing certain death, determined not to go easily. Or alone.
    Cross lit a cigarette. Wanda’s face showed disapproval. Cross didn’t look nervous, didn’t look bored, didn’t look impatient.
    Finally, the blond man broke the silence. “We know what you are, Mr. Cross. And we have a job for you.”
    “You don’t have a clue about what I am, pal. All you know is what I do.”
    “Meaning …?”
    “I don’t know what you do, and I don’t give a damn. But I know what you
are
.”
    A grin flashed across Tiger’s face. Even Percy nodded his head in agreement.
    “We didn’t bring you here to play word games,” the blond said.
    “You don’t know me. Maybe you know some of the things I’ve done. Or I’m supposed to have done. Whatever, you don’t know much more than rumors. You don’t want to play word games, you can stop talking in code anytime you want. Just get down to it. What do you want done?”
    “The job—”
    “Not the job, the price. Say the figure for me to get something done. Or the threats if I don’t, whatever you deal in.”
    “Neither. How about you just tell us whether you’ve ever seen anything like this before?” The blond tossed some photographs on the table in front of Cross.
    A number of corpses, hanging upside down as one might hang a slaughtered steer to drain its fluids. The blurred background was a thatched hut of some kind, suggesting only an equatorial climate.
    “Yeah,” Cross said, bringing a look of surprise to the blond’s face.
    “Where?” he asked.
    “Africa. We came back from patrol, found the whole sweeper team hung up, exactly like that.”
    “What did you think it was?”
    “What did I
think
it was? We all
knew
what it was. A message from the Simbas. That’s the way they did things over there: kill your enemy and leave his head on a stake. Discourages anyone else from hanging around.”
    “Did it work on you?”
    “Sure,” Cross replied, surprising the blond once again.
    “Then look at these.…” The blond tossed more pictures on top of the originals. All same-signature corpses, but the settings were vastly different. A penthouse apartment, a hunting lodge, an abandoned warehouse. No individual bodies, all multiple kills.
    “They all look alike,” Cross said, neglecting to mention that he had viewed an exactly similar scene only a short while ago.
    “Those scenes are not—”
    “Not the scenes.”
    “What, then?”
    “The bodies of the losers.”
    “Don’t you mean ‘victims’?”
    “Fighters aren’t victims. These are all some kind of battle sites. And a C-note to a dime says it wasn’t civilians who got taken out.”
    “They …?”
    “I told you before. The Simbas.”
    “Wanda …?” The blond man turned to her. She was busily tapping away at the computer keyboard with one hand, clicking a silver pen against her teeth with the other. “Simbas … Got it. None ever captured alive. Some of the intel says they’re a myth. Not really a tribe at all. There’s no hard—”
    “A myth?” Tracker interrupted, surprising everyone on the team. “Like the so-called Seminoles in Florida? They set up base in the Everglades, down where Stonewall Jackson wouldn’t go after them. So they had to call Cherokees who refused to walk the Trail of Tears by something other than their true name. It was Jackson who