"Go," Cross said.

Condor raced across to the case, picked it up with both hands so he wouldn't have to shut it, and ran back to where Cross was waiting.

Cross dropped to one knee and methodically played a flex wand with a tiny fiber-optic light at its tip over the contents.

"It didn't blow up," Condor said, unnecessarily.

"You never celebrate a kill until you make sure the body's not breathing," Cross said, softly.

Condor nodded. It wasn't a lesson he would forget. If the Badlands had ever built an idol to worship, it would have looked like Cross.

"Thirteen bars," Cross finally said.

"Looks like Chang was throwing us a bonus," Buddha said, surprised.

"Or setting us up for one," Cross answered. "Maybe he was just staging a scene. There's always a next time."

"Not for Chang, there won't be," Buddha replied.

THE CREW arrived back at Red 71, entering by different paths. They were all inside the poolroom when three men approached. Bowing deeply, they handed Cross a carved wooden stick wrapped in black silk.

Cross returned their bow, after which the three men turned sharply and walked out of the poolroom.

"What's that?" Princess demanded to know.

"A message," Cross told him. "From the head of the gray-tooth crew."

"What message?"

Cross twirled the stick slowly in his hands. "Buddha?"

"Got me, boss."

Rhino took the stick from Cross and disappeared behind the beaded curtain.

BUDDHA HAD dropped three hundred dollars to Princess at the pool table before Rhino returned.

"Some of the symbols are Cambodian, I think," he said. "Nothing matched exactly, but pretty close."

"And ..." Cross prompted.

"It says either that our enemies are now his enemies ... or that we can redeem the stick for a body. Payable anytime, and it can be any body we want."

"Now, there's a man with cla.s.s," Buddha said, answering an unasked question.

THE SHARK Car slid into the darkness of a parking lot and spun so that it came to rest with its nose facing out. The view through its windshield was once a large housing project. Its low-rise section had already been converted into expensive condos, but the high-rise buildings were still listed as "slated for demolition."

This being Chicago, "slated" could mean years. In the interim, one of the high-rise buildings had been converted into a major drug supermarket.

The arrival of the Shark Car was immediately noticed by the gang a.s.sembled at the entrance to the high-rise.

"Don't those fools know they got to come over here, they want to make a buy?" a black teenager with long dreads sneered. "What they think, we gonna send over some b.i.t.c.h on roller skates?"

"Zip it, boy," a far more experienced gangster ordered. He was immediately obeyed. After all, wasn't he twenty-six years old, with nine of those years spent in various lockdowns, a known killer who had embraced the "don't mind dying" credo well over a decade ago and lived it since? In a world where the road ahead forks just once-the jailhouse or the graveyard-he qualified as a tribal elder.

"You know them?" another youth asked the leader.

"Yeah, I know them. You better know them, too."

"Why would I-?"

The speaker stopped mid-sentence, awestruck. His eyes were riveted to a man climbing out of the back seat of the Shark Car. He was looking at a creature from another world: a man whose body was so outrageously muscled that it looked like a comic-book creation. The creature's head was shaven. Despite the evening chill, he wore only a Day-Glo lilac tank top over a blousy pair of baby-blue parachute pants. A diamond bracelet flashed on one wrist; a watch with a huge luminescent face graced the other.

But none of that shocked the youth as much as the creature's face. He wore conspicuous rouge on his cheeks and a liberal supply of eyeliner, and his mouth was slathered with pink lip gloss. A long earring dangled from his right ear.

"That ... can't be."

"Oh yeah, it can," the elder said. "You looking at Princess himself, boy. The real thing."

"Princess?"

"That's his name, fool."

"He's a-?"

"Don't fall for the costume," the elder warned, now addressing an ever-gathering crowd. "All you got to know about that man over there is that he is a stone beast. Stronger than a team of oxen, and crazier than a flock of loons. Totally in-sane. He dresses up like that so he can get people to jump him."

"What?"

"Like I said, crazy to the max. The only screws he don't got loose, they entirely missing. Understand? To that maniac, the other guy has to start it. Otherwise, he don't do nothing.

"Listen close, now. That ... thing over there, you can even call him out of his name, he still won't make a move. But if you move on him, you as good as gone. That man so strong he could kill a refrigerator."

The leader looked around carefully. Then he directly addressed the younger man. "You think I'm blowing smoke, you think a man looks like that can't tear you apart, just walk over and b.i.t.c.h-slap him."

"b.i.t.c.h-slap him with this," another young man boasted, pulling a 9mm semi-auto from his belt. "What he gonna do then?"

"Put that away, fool! You show steel to those guys and they make you a corpse. Guaranteed."

"What guys?"

"That's the Cross crew in that car, youngblood. Or some of them, anyway. Trust me on this-your d.i.n.ky little nine wouldn't make a dent in that car, not even in the gla.s.s. And whoever's in that car, they packing heavy enough to level this whole d.a.m.n building behind us."

"d.a.m.n!"

"d.a.m.n is right, bro. They been around since forever. You ever hear of the guy they call the Ace of Spades, over on the South Side?"

"The hit man? The one who walks around with a sawed-off around his neck?"

"Himself. He's an OG of that crew. Him and this white dude, Cross. Word is, they hooked up Inside. Same place I did time in myself," he added, with an undertone of pride. "They been together ever since."

"He's in that car?"

"How would I tell? Look through that black gla.s.s? I'm trying to school you and all you do is ask me dumb-a.s.s questions. Listen! Just learn this much and you be fine: you don't want no part of n.o.body you ever see in that car. Case closed."

"So what they doing-?"

"Fine," the elder says, in the resigned voice of a man having to prove the obvious. "Just stay here. I mean, don't move, you hear me?"

With that, he walked toward the Shark Car, hands held in plain sight. Held open and extended from his sides.

THE OTHER gang members watched as their leader approached the driver's side of the Shark Car. The window must have been down, because they saw him carefully place both hands on the sill.

No sound reached their ears.

Their leader backed away from the Shark Car, then moved toward his gang, hands back in the cla.s.sic "I'm no threat to you" position.

"They got business here" was all the leader told his crew.

"They didn't pay no tolls."

"You making me real tired, young boy," the leader said. "Tolls? They wanted, they could've cut us all down like this"-snapping his fingers-"only they wouldn't even make that much noise doing it."

"We got-"

"Some chumps have got to learn the hard way. Listen! The hard way with those guys is you stop breathing. I can't let you make those kind of mistakes. They didn't pay no tolls to park in our place, right? And that's what we all about, right? Money. Am I telling the truth?"

"That's my name," the teenager with the pistol said.

The leader reached in his shirt pocket and extracted a playing card: the king of clubs. He showed the card to all the young men standing close to him.

"King. That means 'ruler.' And that's us. Never mind that Amor de Rey c.r.a.p from the PRs-they at least got enough sense to stay over by Humboldt Park, where they belong.

"Now, you say you all about the Benjamins, right? Okay, Big Money, I got this deal for you. I'm gonna walk a few feet away ... just over to there, see? I'm gonna stand by myself and hold out this very same card in my hand. You ain't gonna hear nothing, but the guy I spoke to-Buddha, that's their driver, and the best man with a pistol in Chi-town-he's gonna put a round right through the middle of this here card.

"He misses, everyone who gets down gets paid. He misses bad enough to hit me, that's my problem."

"Everybody gets paid ... what?"

"Whatever they put up," the leader told the growing crowd, taking off his jacket and spreading it on the ground. "You said it yourself-n.o.body plays for free. Not here, not nowhere."

THE LEADER walked about twenty paces to his right, then stopped. Bills poured into the lining of his jacket, as more and more of the watchers jumped to get in on the action.

The clump of young men watched as their leader held up the playing card, face out: first to his left shoulder so all could see, then at the extended end of his right hand.

Three seconds pa.s.sed in dead silence. None of the watching crowd heard a sound, but suddenly they saw the playing card fluttering into the night air.

The leader who had been holding the card never noticed a clump of pulsating shadow at his feet. Nor did he hear the word "Nah" in a dialect he would have recognized as his own had his ears been able to pick up an outside-human-range harmonic.

He retrieved the card from the concrete ground, looked at it with satisfaction, and carried it over to the waiting crowd.

The king of clubs had been center-punched by some kind of projectile, clearly displaying what all recognized as the characteristic pucker of a bullet wound.

"Never saw one that small," one of the young men said, careful to keep his voice on a note of wonderment, avoiding any hint of challenge.

"That's a NATO round," the leader told him, confidently. "Like a .22, but much faster. They for rifles, but Buddha's got his carry-piece chambered for them."

"Man can shoot like that, he don't need no big slug," one of the teenagers said, trying for a sage tone of voice. "Put a slug in your eye, you are gonna die."

The leader slapped the young man's upturned palm, acknowledging the correctness of his observation.

"Cost you all some cash," he said, glancing down at the mountain of greenbacks piled up on the inside lining of his jacket, "but that's all it cost. And now you know-you ever see that car, see it anywhere, you don't run, you stand still. Real still. If it's you they want, you dead no matter what you do. But if it's someone else, reaching for your protection could get you good and dead. You get in their way, you never get to stay. Feel me? Feel me now?"

The crowd all murmured some form of a.s.sent.

"Pick up my money," the leader ordered one of his flock. "I get it from you later."

With that, he walked over to the crumbling ruins of what had once been the entranceway to the building which now housed only drug merchants. Leaning his back against this support, he ma.s.saged his right wrist with his left thumb, as if to shake the muscle memory of how close Buddha's silent bullet had come.

When he stopped rubbing, the still-pristine king of clubs hidden in the sleeve of his Chicago Bulls sweatshirt was fully dissolved into an unidentifiable dark smear.

MINUTES LATER, a shouted "Five-O!" rang out from behind the leader's crew as an "unmarked" pulled in next to the Shark Car.

"Chill!" the elder commanded. "This ain't nothing about us. Not with that Shark Car sitting there."

A man got out of the front seat of the unmarked-but-obvious police car. He walked toward the back as the rear door of the Shark Car opened and another man stepped out.

Detective Mike McNamara, the legendary confession-coaxer of Cook County, and the man-for-hire known as Cross spoke to each other, too softly for anyone to hear, shielded from view by Princess's bulk.

The hyper-muscled man in the outrageous makeup began to juggle three baseball-sized objects. He handled them so expertly that it was clear this was an old act for him. Not so for the drug-dealing gang, which watched in utter fascination, now completely distracted.

Cross and McNamara returned to their respective cars.

The unmarked pulled out.

The man called Princess caught one of the b.a.l.l.s he was juggling in his right hand, flicked his wrist, and lobbed it in a long arc, high over the heads of the youthful gangsters. He instantly repeated the move twice more, so that all the b.a.l.l.s were simultaneously airborne.

They were still floating in the night air as Princess dove into the Shark Car, which barked its tires once and was gone.

Several of the gang were still reaching for their guns when the first grenade hit, tearing chunks out of the upper-story bricks behind them.

"YOU HAD to do that?" Cross said, his voice suggesting that he had said the same words many times before.

"I was just having fun," Princess said, sulking. "Buddha had fun, and you didn't say anything to him."

"Never mind," a high-pitched, squeaky voice came from the back seat, soothing the hyper-muscled man. That same voice was then directed at Cross, with just a touch of annoyance. "You know how easily he-"

"I know, Rhino," Cross said, addressing a huge dark ma.s.s taking up virtually every inch of the back seat that Princess wasn't using.