A horn honked, and I saw Alejandro waving from the driver's side of a green Mazda Dragonfly convertible. I sprinted over to him and vaulted into the passenger seat. I snapped the seatbelt shut and we started off, accelerating almost as quickly as had the elevator. "What's happened?"
"Hal's been shot. The Warriors of the Aryan World Alliance tried to assassinate him."
I glanced at the dash clock—11:30—an hour and a half before Hal's planned meeting with the southside gangs. "Details?"
Alejandro punched the gas and popped ahead of a smoky truck. "Three kids, not yet part of WAWA, came to Hal's house and said they wanted to help him. He let them in, and they opened up on him. His kids are okay but his wife didn't make it. He was hit. Looks like she tried to shield him. Two ran away. One panicked, ran into a closet, and it shut behind him. Bat's watching him now."
Alejandro swung the Dragonfly wide to pass a Cadillac and sped out onto McDowell Road at the 46th-street exit from the Lorica Citadel. We fish-tailed wide, bumped the curb, then straightened out and shot down the road. In the distance I could see a set of flashing lights reflecting from Frozen Shade.
"Who knew about the meet?"
"Everyone. It was not a secret."
"Heinrich sends in some kids so he can deny having had anything to do with this."
"Looks like it." The art broker shot through a red light at 44th, squealing brakes and angry horns in our wake. "Glove compartment."
I opened it and found a .38 snub-nose in a clip-on holster. "Thanks. Is it that dicey?"
"The Blood Crips, Jade Dragons and Diablos have surrounded Hal's place. The already nailed one of the kids who escaped, and they're waiting for the one we have in the house."
The red light at the intersection of 36th and McDowell threatened to stop us, but Alejandro needed to make the turn, so he cut across the corner of the lot and bumped over the curb on 36th. He cranked the wheel to the right, getting us back into our lane, then cut through a driveway opening to park the car on the sidewalk next to a schoolyard. We ran across 36th and forced our way through the crowd lining the street near Hal's condo.
"No cops?"
Alejandro shook his head. "Scorpion stays away from this area."
I ran past the ambulance and into the living room. There I stopped. Blood covered the carpet and soaked the couch. Bullet holes lined the walls, starting low and tracking on up into the ceiling. A bloody handprint on the wall to my right and a trail of blood led to a back bedroom. I followed it, passing by Bat as he stood guard beside a closed closet door.
"Alejandro, who's got the kids?"
"Natch has them. She's taking them to stay with their grandparents over on the west side. Diablos granted passage and the Blood Crips are running as outriders."
"Good."
Two EMTs worked feverishly in the back bedroom with their equipment boxes and monitors spread all over the place. They had Hal on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face. His shirt had been torn open, and they had two compression bandages on him. Both were already soaked with blood. One had been a high hit on the left and the other was stomach. He already had an IV drip punched into his right arm and that wrist had been fastened to the stretcher by a restraining strap.
When Hal saw me he started to stir. One of the emergency medical technicians turned toward me, saying, "You wanna tell him he can't wait no more? He's gonna die if . . ." The man paled.
"Hi, Jack!" I greeted him enthusiastically. "Long time no see. Played pool lately?"
Ignoring anything he said, I knelt beside Hal's head. "Hang on, Hal."
Hal grabbed my sleeve with his left hand. "My kids?"
"Safe."
"Candy?"
"She's gonna be fine, Hal," I lied. "You gotta let these guys get you to the hospital. Your job is to recover. We'll take care of things here."
A painful grimace contorted his features. "Take care of my kids, Caine. No war."
I nodded. "No war."
"Caine, no killing. Not while you have another choice."
"No killing, Hal. Let them get you out of here."
His grip tightened on my arm. "Promise me, no killing."
"No killing, Hal. I promise, as long as you promise not to die."
"Deal."
"Deal." I freed his hand from my arm and stood. "Get him out of here." I grabbed Jack's shoulder as his partner wheeled Hal outside earshot. "If he dies on the way to the hospital, or I find his wife didn't make it to the morgue, you'll take a long time to die. You understand me?"
"Y-yess."
"Good. Leave me that green trauma box. You can get it later."
"S-sure. Just let me out of here."
I followed him out into the front room, but stopped beside Bat. "The kid in the closet?"
The big man nodded. "No bullets. No blades."
"Take him out, blindfold him and bind him." I pointed to the wide pool of blood on the floor. "I want him kneeling there."
I stepped outside as the ambulance slowly started to make its way through the crowd. I saw a large number of people, black, brown yellow and white, staring at the house and talking to each other. They managed to segregate three other groups of individuals who, I imagined, were the three gangs Hal had planned to meet.
Off to my right I saw a knot of Hispanic men, all wearing sleeveless black T-shirts with an inverted star screened on the shirts in bright-red ink. It had been stylized to look like blood dripping down from the design. As had the WAWA people, the Diablos had also chosen to undergo some cosmetic alteration which, as nearly as I could see, constituted the addition of little horns on their foreheads and a peaking of their ears. They wore black fingernail polish and the older male gang members had grown very devilish Van Dykes.
The Jade Dragons had also engaged in body augmentation. Most notable, of course, was the scaly flesh covering their faces, throats, chests, backs and hands. Unlike the Diablos, who apparently ranked each other by the length of their horns, the oriental gang differentiated themselves by scale color. The younger members had pale blue scales while the older Dragons had graduated to a deep green hue edged with gold. The eldest members also had modified their ears to lengthen and flatten them, making them look like bat wings covered in lizard flesh. The Dragon I thought to be the leader also had a sagittal sail that rose and fell like a fish's fin as he breathed in and out.
The Blood Crips, by comparison, looked positively normal in their red and blue leather jackets. Once archenemy gangs, they had consolidated their forces around the turn of the millennium because of the pressure from other gangs. Their augmentation looked, to me, to be fairly utilitarian. Their brows and cheekbones had been enlarged to sink their eyes back to less vulnerable depths. Likewise the backs of their hands looked improbably smooth, as if each had inserted a weighty prosthesis to increase hitting power and help control the recoil on automatic weapons. They had also adopted the tradition of their Afro-American ancestors in employing ritual scarring on their faces.
I pointed at the two Diablos members with the longest horns. "You two, in here." I picked out the leader of the Dragons and the person who looked most like his lieutenant. "Inside, now." Lastly I turned to the Blood Crips and knew their leadership had to be embodied in one of the surliest individuals I'd ever seen. "You and your second, let's go."
The leader just let his body slump half sideways as he made a big show of crossing his arms. "Fancy man don't order me."
The other gang leaders stopped, waiting to see how I'd handle this revolt. "Seeing as how you have nothing better to do with your time, and Mr. Garrett asked me to act in his stead, I request the pleasure of your company inside, now."
"Or else what?"
My voice dropped to a low growl. "I didn't give you an 'or else' because I don't make idle threats. I'll tell you this: It's obvious that the possible alliance Hal was engineering has some people scared. If you're together, no one can hurt you. If you want the Blood Crips to be outside the fold, fine. You walk away now." I turned a
nd walked back into the house, with the two Diablos and the two Dragons following me. The Blood Crips came a bit later, moving at their own pace.
Keeping a decent space between each other, the gang members stood there and silently regarded the Aryan kneeling in the blood. It had already begun to soak into his faded jeans and white socks. Bat had bound him hand and foot, then used a torn strip of material from the boy's thick white T-shirt to blindfold him. The kid shivered and swayed a bit.
"This, gentlemen, is one of the three assassins who tried to kill Hal Garrett. Though Heinrich will deny it, he sent these three boys out to do a job with no training. You can see by the bullet tracks in the walls that the guns recoiled unchecked and tracked right out of the killing zone."
I dropped down on my haunches in front of the kid. "What's your name?"
"Screw yourself, nigger-lover!"
The Blood Crip leader took a half-step forward and aimed a kick that would have crushed the kid's skull except that Bat grabbed the ganger by the collar and jerked him back. "What chu do that for, man? I'll do the murdering piece of shit."
I shook my head. "No. No killing. Hal made me promise no killing."
The Blood Crip leader jerked his thumbs back at himself. "Hey, Rafe didn't promise Hal jack!"
"And I didn't promise Hal I wouldn't kill you, so we're even, aren't we?" I grabbed the white kid's jaw. "What's your name?" Fear radiated off the kid like heat from a bonfire. He wanted to defy me, but his last outburst had seriously depleted his nervous courage. Blind, kneeling in a sticky liquid that was chilling his knees and toes, he knew his situation couldn't get any worse.
He held his head up. "Ich heiße Willem."
"Good. Now listen, Willem, I know it's probably futile to get you to say anything against Heinrich. There is very little I could do to scare you into that, especially since I've already said I'm not going to kill you. Therefore I've decided to do something else that might, oddly enough, save your life. You won't like it, but it's for the best, really." I looked over at Alejandro. "Get me the green box from the bedroom, please."
Emphasis on the word green made Willem uneasy. I took advantage of that. "I'm sure, Willem, that Heinrich, your fearless leader, has told you all sorts of things about the 'mud people.' He's told you how they're savages, and Rafe here would love to dance a little tattoo on your head to reinforce that message." I quickly read the name embroidered on the breast of Rafe's lieutenant's jacket. "Jalal, on the other hand, is rather quiet and civilized. You've been twisted by stereotypes, and I mean to let you correct those lousy impressions."
Alejandro set the box down beside me, and I flipped it open. I quickly located and tore open the biggest syringe I could find. I gently slid it under Willem's nose as I might have done with a fine cigar. "This, my friend, this syringe, will be the instrument of your enlightenment. You know, of course, how whites are the superior race because our blood is pure. Well, Willem, I'm afraid your name is about to become Mud."
Rafe looked hard at me. "What chu doing man? You want answers from him, not to edjukate his sorry ass. Leave him to me, I show him who's the deffest race. Then we go and kill us some lilywhite priss-boys."
"Shut up, asshole, or I'll tell Bat to twist your head off and use it as a bowling ball." Willem started laughing, but I cut that short with one hard slap. "Moron, your arms and legs will be the pins, and there won't be picking up any spares for you. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to fill this syringe with blood, and I'm going to pump it into you, Willem. Your blood will become tainted. Then we're going to take you out in the desert and leave you in the sun so you darken up nice and good."
"Oh, man . . ." wailed Rafe. "I'll get you whitey blood by the buckets."
"That's it!" I pulled a needle from the trauma box, broke it out of the paper and fixed it to the end of the syringe. "Rafe, since you seem to have a single functioning brain cell, I think I draw from you first. Bat, bare his arm."
Rafe tried to move out of the way, but Bat jerked his jacket down to pinion the black man's arms at his elbows. A nice, fat vein pulsed across the top of Rafe's bicep. "Stay away from me, man. I ain't givin' no blood to that trash."
I shook my head and laughed. "That trash? By what warped sense of equality do you see yourself as superior to him? You're the bonehead who's all hot to go out and start a war, and over what? Over the shooting of man who wanted anything but a war! Lying on a stretcher with a hole in his chest and one in his gut, he made me promise, dammit, promise I'd not let a war get started. Hal Garrett apparently saw a lot more in you than I do, because he figured you had enough brains to see that dying doesn't help anyone. Hal, on the other hand, was offering you a way out of the hellhole."
I turned and looked at the other gangers. "You can all walk out of here and pick up guns if you want to, and go off to shoot the hell out of the Aryans. I'll make sure that any of you who survive that stupidity get slabs in the morgue together. Hell, maybe I'll just see to it you get pieced out by the Reapers, with the money going to the Sunburst Foundation, because that's the only way a war is going to benefit anyone."
I grinned at Rafe. "Maybe after I take some blood from you, I'll pump some of his back into your veins. Make you blood brothers because you're both of a like mind."
"Don't you go touchin' me with that thing." Rafe's eyes grew wide, and he struggled helplessly against Bat.
I popped the plastic cap off the needle. Rafe saw it, and his eyes rolled up in his head as he fainted dead away. Bat looked positively surprised as the ganger went limp. I motioned to Bat to lay Rafe down, then I pantomimed drawing blood. "Oh, yeah, Rafe, that's great. Dark, steaming, this stuff will do the trick."
As I moved back in front of Willem, I saw Jalal edging toward the door. "Where do you think you're going?"
The Blood Crip smiled at me. "I brained out as how if you pump that much black bride into Willem there, he's going to change fast. I was going to send some of the posse to get him some fried chicken and watermelon." He exaggerated his words, turning a racial slur into a statement dripping with sarcastic sincerity.
"That's very considerate of you."
Jalal grinned broadly. "Anything for a brother."
Reaching back into the trauma box, I pulled out a small vial of epinephrine. I drew enough of the synthetic adrenaline into the syringe to give Willem a real jolt, then swabbed his arm down with alcohol soaked cotton. "Won't hurt a bit, son." I looked over at the Dragons. "After this takes, I'll want a donation from you so we can give him almond eyes and make him better at math. Then from you Diablos I want enough blood so he can speak Spanish and eat jalapenõs without a problem."
"Anything to save him from Aryanism."
I plunged the needle into his deltoid muscle. "There you go. Boy, look at that. It's starting already."
Willem, helped along by the epinephrine, started to shake. Jalal nodded his head, "Color of weak tea, but it's building."
"Si, soon he looks the color of beans."
"Mahogany, really," commented the Dragon leader.
I ran my hand through his hair and mussed it up nicely. "And look at the hair darken. Rafe, you've got great blood."
"Billy," Jalal taunted, "you got a woman? My sister needs a squeeze."
The lead Diablo shook his head. "No, my sister will want him."
Willem broke a sweat that started to soak the blindfold. "No, you can't be doing this to me. You can't."
"We have, Willem, and it'll stick once we get you out into the sun. Once we do that, you're going to be one of the mud people forever! Have you ever read the book, Black Like Me? No? You should have tried it while you had the chance. It's old, now, but I'm sure Jalal and the others will give you the pointers you'll need to survive. Anyone got a watch? What time is it?"
"Midnight."
I let air hiss through my teeth as I breathed in. "Damn, he changed quick, but we've got six hours 'til sunlight. He may revert unless we can fix the change. Anyone know of a tanning salon near here?"
"Yeah, there's one at 30th and Thomas, about a mile and a half from here." Alejandro slapped Willem on the back. "I can have Bill over there in no time."
"No, you can't."
"Got to, Willem, otherwise you'll change back to your old, stupid self." I laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and squeezed it sympathetically. "My hands are tied, son."
"No, please! No." He began to cry and shake uncontrollably. I knew a chunk of it came from the drug, but he was scared down to his soul and then some. "No, please."
"Willem," I began in a slow voice, "you're asking me for a favor here, but you helped shoot a friend of mine. You have to show me you're sorry and you're willing to make amends for what you've done. You nearly killed a man who invited you into his home because you came asking him to help you. If I hadn't promised him, you'd be dead right now."