Drawing Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

“If he’d had a
real
lawyer, the jury would’ve given him a medal instead of a jolt Inside. And Rhino should never have been
near
a prison. Buddha, all I can say is, the second I met him, I knew he was one of us.”
    Tracker nodded. “Only you are different, Cross.”
    “Me? What’s that mean?”
    “Of all of us, including myself and Tiger, you are the only one who is a true criminal.”
    The room went silent.
    A long minute passed.
    Tiger’s hard-edged, sultry voice broke the quiet. “You can’t be born a criminal.”
    “This is true,” Tracker agreed, speaking as if only he and Tiger were in the room. “But Cross is…an enigma. He could have done many things with his life. He is extraordinarily intelligent, a master tactician, the finest strategist I have ever met. But all of these gifts are in the realm of crime. I don’t know why he was first imprisoned, but—”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Cross interrupted. “It was a long time ago.”

    THE MAN with the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand ground out his cigarette after the third drag.
    “This whole thing smells bad to me,” he said. “Hemp
had
to know what would happen if he took out Ace’s woman. That means he was trying to draw Ace out into the open. And there’s no upside to that move.”
    “Ace does not have your…coldness inside himself,” Tracker spoke. “He is an assassin, so not a man ruled by emotion. But if his woman, the mother of his children…”
    “I still can’t see it,” Cross said quietly. “There’s no way it makes sense. And nobody to ask about it.”
    Tiger slid off the desk and pointed a long fingernail at her wristwatch. The large digital display was flickering. “We may have somebody we hadn’t thought of,” she said. “We need a big monitor and some cords with heavyweight USBs on one end.”
    “Get Rhino,” Cross said to Tracker.
    As the Indian walked through the curtain of black ball bearings without seeming to disturb them, Cross turned to Tiger.
    “What?”
    “Mural Girl was working yesterday,” she said, again tapping her heavy wristwatch. “The camera’s still in place. Maybe the footage…”
The wall had once been whitewashed, but time had faded it to a shade of ecru that seemed to blanket certain parts of Chicago…parts known to be don’t-go-there dangerous. The DVD that Tiger was playing showed all kinds of ghetto artistry. Not tagging, more like murals. Mostly portraits and scenes.
    “Martin Luther King on the same wall as H. Rap Brown—haven’t seen those two together before. Look to you like the same artist did them both?”
    “It was the same artist,” Tiger told Cross. “No secret about it. We talked to her ourselves. She said it was a ‘spectrum mural.’ Nobody bothered her while she was working.”
    “Who was watching her back?”
    “Nobody, is what she said. She’s not affiliated, and she wasn’t flying colors.”
    “A mural like that one…a lot of work.”
    “Took her a little more than two months, working every day.”
    “Neighborhood girl?”
    “You could say it like that,” the Amazon answered. “Let’s add it up. This girl—and she’s a pretty girl, mind you—works on that mural every day. Nobody bothers her. Nobody even…I don’t know, it’s like she’s got protection everybody knows about, but it can’t be that. Rhino ran her through our system. No hits—she’s not with anyone.
    “Now, here’s the thing. Ace said there was a gunfight right across from the mural one night. Not late at night, when it was only just getting dark. None of the bangers got hit, but a little child took one in the back as she was running for cover. Died in the street, waiting for transport to a hospital.
    “Just as Ace was coming back, first light, he sees a pair of playing cards on that wall. Huge ones, covering the whole mural. Two cards: ace of clubs, jack of hearts.”
    “Painted over what that girl was—?”
    “No. That’s just it. It was kind of