Bleak History (11 page)

Forsythe had put her to work in the field-even when he didn't seem to trust her. And for reasons she didn't fully understand, she didn't trust General Forsythe.

“That's it for me today,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Am I getting a ride or do I take a cab all the damn way to Brooklyn Heights?”

CHAPTER
FIVE

Gulcher was getting tired. But there were the cops to deal with before he could rest. Jock was already sacked out in a dressing room, in the tunnels under the casinos; snoring on a cot down the hall from the place they'd stacked the bodies. Six bodies, the ones who'd died in the melee.

Gulcher had always heard there were tunnels under big casinos, used for all kinds of behind-the-scenes business and preparation, but he'd never seen them before. In the case of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino, they were tacky but clean, well-lit underground corridors, the linoleum peeling in some places. The tunnels connected dressing rooms to stages, counting rooms to cashier booths, administration to security.

Gulcher had found an administrator down here, a middle-aged guy with a nice suit. Guy who was now dead. And the suit fit Gulcher pretty good. He wore the sunglasses—they never looked out of place in a casino—and a big smile as he met the cops talking to his security people. There was a plainclothes detective and a uniformed police lieutenant with the three Atlantic City PD cops. One of the cops had a take-out coffee in his hand; the lady cop was chewing gum. The third one kept touching a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, like he couldn't wait to get out and have a smoke. Somehow these casual details were reassuring to Gulcher as he shook hands with the lieutenant. The guy introduced himself. Made sure Gulcher heard the rank. Gulcher told him his own name was Presley. It was a name he'd always liked.

“Hey, thanks for coming over, Lieutenant,” Gulcher said. Saying it loud to be heard over the whistle and yammer and clatter of the slot machines. People were playing again as if there hadn't been a pile of bodies here just about forty minutes ago. And the players he'd taken control of, short those who'd died, were back at it too. Not remembering anything.

“Yeah, we had a rough time with some tweakers,” said Stedley, the casino's head of security. Bulky but slick guy in a tailored suit, immaculate grooming, whitened teeth. He flashed a sharklike smile. “But we took care of 'em long time before your people come. One of our guys got a gash in his  scalp—you can see the blood from it.”

Gulcher looked at Stedley in muted wonder. Stedley was so thoroughly Gulcher's man now. Never remembered any other arrangement. To Stedley it was as if he'd always worked for Gulcher. The whisperer, what it could do! It was just fucking mind-blowing. It was mind-facing, really.

The lieutenant, a middle-aged black man with salt-and-pepper hair and a little mustache, was staring at Gulcher, chewing his lower lip. Maybe starting to recognize him from the APB out on him. But the suit, the situation, and the sunglasses made him unsure. And Gulcher knew he could make him forget about it in a heartbeat.

“We'd have come sooner,” the lady cop said, “but, uh...” She looked maybe Puerto Rican to Gulcher; small and plump but not bad looking for a cop. “But there was an explosion, a gas main went up, a quarter mile to the west—maybe you saw it on the news already. Lot of panic over there.”

Gulcher figured that explosion was the whisperer's doing too.

Or maybe he should say it was Moloch's doing. Wasn't it
all
Moloch? Somehow, Gulcher didn't like to think about Moloch Baal. Who and what that was.

“Sure, I understand,” Gulcher said. “You guys hadda deal with the explosion, but we had everything here under control. Yeah, it was just some tweakers on crack, or maybe meth. They jumped a couple of my guys. There was a shot fired too, but nobody hurt, and that guy got away. Just ran out. We'll send over some surveillance tape for ya. I sent the guys home, who got jumped. They're bruised up some—didn't need any hospital help. The crackheads, we taught 'em a little lesson, sent 'em on their way. I don't think they'll be back.”

The cops chuckled. Except for the lieutenant, him being a real straight arrow. Opening his mouth maybe to ask Gulcher to take off those sunglasses.

Gulcher was already muttering a couple of names. And there was a squirming in the air around the lieutenant's face.

The lieutenant's eyes glazed over. He yawned. Seemed to frown, as if he was trying to remember something. Then he shrugged. His voice real dull, he said, “Yeah, okay, fellas, well, next time we'll
s°
want to talk to your witnesses. But I guess it's copa-cetic as is right now. You send over that video, okay?”

“Sure, Lieutenant, no problem.”

The cops were already filing out. Gulcher watched them go, thinking,
I
took over his mind and made him all sleepy and he just let it go.

This was almost too good to be true. Just a little
too good.

***

THIRTY
-
SIX
HOURS
LATER
:
7 p.m. in New York City, the Lower East Side. Still light out. Still hot and muggy.

Gabriel Bleak was sitting at a table in a plywood booth covered with off-white acoustic fabric, using a computer with a dicey Internet connection, having paid the shop on East Fourteenth for an hour's time. The acoustic fabric was frayed at the corners, exposing the plywood. The guy sitting in the little booth next to him was playing an online first-person shooter, and he kept muttering to himself, cursing his adversaries under his breath. “Die...die.... Come on and...oh, man, that's bullshit. That's...I'll find your ass when I re-spawn...change ordnance...change to rocket launcher, you want to play like that.... Noobie, using your noob-tube on me, suck this! Suck rockets! Yeah!”

Which made it a little hard for Bleak to concentrate on his e-mail. Mostly just spam. A thank-you note from Lost Boys Bail Bonds. And another client, Get Right Out Bail Bonds, had put him on its e-mail list. It appeared, according to their list spam, that now they also cashed checks. Probably give you a check for catching a skip, then offer to cash it for you in the office and use the check-cashing fees to take back part of what they'd paid you.

Bleak wiped sweat from his forehead. Why couldn't this place get air-conditioning?

He wished he'd persuaded Cronin to use e-mail. They'd talked about it but Cronin said the Internet was “bad for a man who wants to think long thoughts.” He missed Cronin, and he missed Muddy. He worried that the dog was pining for him. There—an e-mail inquiry from Second Chance Bail Bonds.
Got a skip for you. Please come to office ASAP. Vince.

Wait. He'd never worked with Second Chance. Who was Vince and how'd he get his e-mail?  From the other bail outfits? Surprising, they didn't usually share skip tracers. And the guy acted as if Bleak were supposed to know who he was.

He'd check it out anyway. Not good to get paranoid and he needed the work.

It occurred to Bleak, suddenly, that the CCA could be monitoring his e-mail. So maybe it was good he wasn't communicating with Cronin that way. Time he got out of this place.

He did a disk clean, a few other quick moves to blot out his browsing history, and shut the computer down, suddenly feeling as if he might be arrested, here, at any moment.

Bleak got up, hurried out, blinking in the light spearing from the sun low between the buildings. He shaded his eyes, looked around. Didn't see that agent—rolling her name luxuriantly through his mind:
Loraine Sarikosca.
Was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment that she wasn't there. Which made no sense at all.

He hurried down East Fourteenth to Avenue A, then downtown, looking for a certain bar where he could get a beer in a cool room and think. A bar with a back way out, where he knew he wouldn't have to bust a hole in a wall if he had to escape.

Maybe we 're all going about this wrong. The ShadowComm—and me too. Maybe we should get lawyers. Challenge CCA right out in the courts. Come out of the closet more.

But he decided that thinking was left over from the days before the terrorist attack on Miami— before President Breslin had invoked National Security Presidential Directive 51, giving his administration special powers in the event of “catastrophic emergency” powers that verged on martial law. The president controlled the courts, now. More than ever. There was still resistance in Congress and on the state level to arrests of just anyone the government designated dangerous... and that resistance, for as long as it lasted, was probably all that kept CCA from pushing law enforcement to put out a general APB on Gabriel Bleak.

It was almost dark when he got to Telly's Tell 'Em Anything. Cool and pleasantly gloomy inside. Only one drinker there, an old man arguing with Telly about politics. Tending bar himself, Telly was a stout Greek with muttonchops and curly gray hair and a red nose; a double shot of ouzo always in one  hand, even when he was using the other to pour for a customer. He nodded to Bleak and nodded questioningly at the only draft-beer pull; Bleak gave a thumbs-up and went into the back for a quick pee. The old-fashioned men's room had a metal trough to piss in.

He was just stepping out of the men's room when a dry rustling sound and a creaky call drew his attention to the half-open door to the air shaft. It was where people went to smoke, with a bucket filled with sand and cigarette butts. And poised on the bucket was Yorena, cocking her head, shaking her feathers out.

“What?” Bleak asked.

The bird made a come-with-me motion with its head. A very human motion.

Bleak shook his head. “I just got here. You want to wait, then maybe.”

He went back in the main room, found his beer waiting for him, and quickly drank half of it.

So Shoella wanted to see him. Sending Yorena was safer than e-mail. He was trying not to think about the CCA threat; didn't want it to consume his life. Figured he could dodge them till they got interested in someone else. But that was probably what this call by Shoella was about: CCA.

Bleak paid, left a tip, and headed out the front door. Long shadows slanted across from the west side of the street. A group of young tourists, in shorts, walked along talking excitedly in German. They seemed to be taking pictures of some of the elaborate neopsychedelic graffiti on the walls of the old buildings.

Bleak started to step into a doorway—and was driven back by the strong reek of urine. He went a little farther down, found a cleaner doorway, and went to stand just inside, waiting.

He only had to wait about a minute. A flapping, a shadow over the dirty sidewalk, and he knew that Yorena was there.

“Okay,” Bleak muttered, “take me to her.” The shadow wheeled and darted to the downtown direction. He followed, glancing up to see the familiar flickering in and out of view about two stories up. Pigeons and crows scattered to get out of its way; one pigeon was two slow; the familiar veered, struck, and the bird fell, spiraling and trailing feathers, to smack bloodily onto the sidewalk. Pigeon Lady would not be pleased.

He stepped over the dead bird and followed the shadow downtown.

***

IT WAS DARK WHEN Bleak got to the Battery area, at the lower tip of the island of Manhattan, and he was getting footsore. He was aware of Yorena flying overhead, but couldn't see the familiar. He wasn't surprised at meeting Shoella here; he knew she liked to stay close to running water; close to rivers and the sea. She felt powerful there. He drew power from running water too, but he suspected Shoella needed it more.

That's where he found her, on the walk overlooking the water, just beyond a small park at Battery Place. She was standing in a cone of darkness where there should have been light—a line of lampposts paced down the walkway, following the railing, the lamps all lit up, except the one she stood under, the only one that wasn't working. He looked up at the light fixture and saw that the lamp glass was blocked off; it was covered with black butterflies and moths, a living swarm of the creatures summoned by Shoella that kept most of its light muffled.

She was a thin dark figure in the oasis of shadow. Yorena flew to Shoella's shoulder, the creature nestling her head in the wildness of Shoella's black hair as Bleak walked up and leaned against the other side of the post. Behind them, lights twinkled from high metal-and-glass buildings; before them, the river surged and hissed.

“Well?” he asked, enjoying the cooling breeze off the water.

“Lots of things,
cher
darlin',” Shoella said, her voice grave. “There's a spiritual blackout, you feel?”

“Something of the sort. Last night. As I was going to sleep, I usually get a hit of the Hidden—like the big picture, out a certain distance, a few hundred miles.” She nodded. Knowing what he meant. “And?” “And there were a lot of blank spots.” “Hey, where you staying anyway—not that boat?”

“No, in the city.” He became aware that Yorena, sitting wings-folded on Shoella's shoulder, was watching him narrowly; seemed to be listening closely. He found it annoying. “There's a hotel I know, where they don't ask me for a credit card, and there they don't have tweakers making noise in the hall,
and there's no bedbugs and I even have my own bathroom. Clean linen. Lot of old-time junkies there, but they're pretty quiet, they're on the methadone.”

She turned to her feathered familiar. “'Blank spots,' he says, Yorena!” Shoella looked back at him, her head cocked like the bird's. “There's great holes in the Hidden, in the Northeast, holes you could drive a truck through, Gabriel. The Hidden is there—always, everywhere!—but there are places you can't see into it, now. Big places. This is new. And it is
tres
persistent over to Atlantic City way.”

“Yeah. But then Jersey's always a spiritual blackout.”

“Hey! Not funny! Everyone got to bash Jersey. They take good care of me, many good people in New Jersey. Now—this blackout...there is something else there. While some places are black, other places are shining with a
volcano light.
Yorena, you are hurting my shoulder again.” She shrugged Yorena away; the bird flew to the railing overlooking the river and hunched sullenly to watch them.