Mob Rules (18 page)

“Jesus Christ, Honey. This is amazing.” The trees and foliage looked like they were alive. Everything was perfect, right down to the moss and lichen growing on the rocks.

“Thanks, I really like it. I wanted to make a cave behind the waterfall, but I'd have to cut a hole in your wall.”

“Screw it,” I said. “Go ahead. This is incredible.” I didn't ask where the waterfall was coming from, or why the pool didn't fill up and overflow its banks.

“Okay, thanks. And I'm sorry about your table. It kind of got out of hand.”

I shrugged. “I never use it anyway. Mrs. Dawson is probably freaking out, though.”

“She probably can't even see it. I think maybe she sees this place like it was when she lived here.”

“She tries to, anyway. She doesn't like the condos much.”

I went back out to the living room and Honey followed.
She sat on the arm of the couch, her legs tucked under her, and watched me brood for a while.

“So tell me,” she said finally. “Maybe I can help.”

“I tracked down the vampire. He's being protected by another outfit. It got ugly.”

“How ugly?”

“I have a lot more guys to search on FriendTrace, and I don't even know their names.”

“FriendTrace?”

“Yeah, what I use to contact the dead.”

“Oh. Well, I'm just glad you weren't hurt worse.”

“The thing is, I think I screwed up. I'm not sure where exactly. When this thing came down, I had good reasons not to disclose all the details to my boss. I thought I did, anyway. But I think I should have, sometime between then and now. Probably when I caught on to the possession thing. At the time, it seemed like it had an easy solution. Go to the Between, deal with the spirit, problem solved.”

“But now?”

I sighed. “Now, it's getting out of control—like your nest.” I smiled weakly. “I feel like a degenerate gambler who's dug herself a hole and just keeps laying bets to try to get flush.”

“So get out of the hole. Go to your boss.”

“Now I don't think I
can
go to my boss. I withheld crucial information from him—namely that his own son is involved. I've been…socializing with him, and what's worse, I've been lying to him. I broke into his house and scared him half to death. I've been doing all this while the outfit is more or less at war.”

“It's gotten pretty complicated,” Honey said.

I laughed. “Yeah, but that's not the bad part. The bad part
is that I'm no closer to solving the problem than I was when I started.”

“And that's why you don't want to go to your boss.”

I nodded. “At this point, I can't undo anything. I think I just have to try to make it right. He's still not going to be happy when he finds out what I've been up to, but if I can solve the problem…at least that's something. Like I said, I have to keep laying bets to try to get flush.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I have no idea,” I said, and laughed. “The vampire's protection isn't going to last forever. The problem is, I don't have that kind of time. I'm still convinced I'm not going to be able to get at the spirit in the Between without first getting through Fred.”

“So you'll have to deal with him in the Between. He won't have protection there.”

“Yeah. But I already know he can kick my ass in the Between. The spirit probably can, too. Which means I need you to train me, pronto.”

“So let's get started.”

I nodded. “I'm worried about what's going to happen in the meantime. I'm worried that by the time I'm ready to deal with the vampire and the spirit, it's going to be too late. When I broke into Adan's apartment, the spirit possessed him again. I put a guy on him yesterday, for a while, but Anton would be fucking useless if it came to that.”

“You need to buy some time,” Honey said.

“Yeah. I need a way to slow the spirit down, make it harder to possess Adan. I'll talk to Mr. Clean about it, but he seemed to think the only way I could protect Adan was by destroying the spirit. That's why I went into the Between in the first place.”

“He's right. You don't have any magic that can stop the spirit from possessing Adan.”

“That's what I was afraid of. If the spirit was powerful enough to defeat all the wards his father has on him, there's nothing I can do about it—short of abducting Adan and locking him up inside a protective circle somewhere. That seems like it might be digging the hole a little deeper than I want to.”

“You don't have the magic to do it, but I do,” Honey said.

“You do?”

“Yeah, and frankly, Mr. Clean might have mentioned it to you in the first place. How well do you know him, Domino?”

I shrugged. “He's a jinn. He's my familiar. He can be an asshole sometimes. That's about it, I guess.”

“He's dangerous, Domino. He's not evil, exactly, not like your spirit from the Beyond. But there's nothing human in him, either—nothing at all. He's been here since the world was made and he'll be here still when the stars wink out and the skies go dark. He's your familiar, yes, but he hates it.”

“Well, I knew he wasn't very happy about it.”

Honey shook her head. “You've made him a slave, Domino. It's not the same as making a person your slave—he doesn't suffer from it. He can't suffer. But he hates it all the same. It's ego. Really, that's all he is—an ego so strong, and powerful, and willful that it will endure until the end of time.”

“So you're saying he doesn't necessarily have my best interests at heart.”

“He wants you to die, Domino. More than that—he wants to be the one who tricks you into getting yourself killed.
That's the game, to him, and it's the only thing that makes his servitude bearable.”

I frowned. “I don't know about that. I owe him a lot of favors. I'm pretty sure he intends to cash in someday.”

Honey laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Of course he does! He intends that you die, and when you do, you'll serve him until your debt is paid off.”

“After I'm dead? He never said anything about that.”

“That's because—”

“I didn't ask,” I finished. “Well, this is good to know.”

“You don't seem all that mad about it.”

“I guess I'm not surprised. I can't really call myself his master and then pretend I didn't know what it meant.” Mostly I was thinking about Rashan. He hadn't told me any of this, and he must have known. I could only think of one motivation for that. He'd wanted me to figure it out on my own, and if I didn't, I'd have been an acceptable casualty. I wasn't really surprised by that, either. I'd always known I didn't work for a saint.

“Well, I'd be pissed,” Honey said. “Mr. Clean sent you into the Between knowing you wouldn't be able to handle what you found there. The only reason he even told you about me is that it indebted you to him further.”

“Yeah, nice play. So tell me what you can do for Adan. You have magic that can protect him?”

Honey nodded. “I'm basically a spirit, too, you know. Not like the one that's possessing Adan, but still a spirit. Predators like that are common where I come from, and we have ways to protect ourselves from them. If we didn't, there wouldn't be any of us left.”

“So what can you do?”

“I can make you a potion. It won't be much, like a
thimbleful. You can put it in Adan's food or drink. He won't even have to know about it.”

“Will it drive the spirit out or whatever?”

“No, it will only make it harder for the spirit to possess him. Ordinarily it would make it hard enough that the spirit would be better off looking for a different host. But this spirit has a lot invested in Adan already, so I'm not sure it will want to start all over.”

“But it will buy me some time.”

“Yes. It should make the possessions less frequent, and if we're lucky it will prevent the spirit from possessing Adan for a long enough period of time to complete another ritual. At least for a few days.”

“That's good enough. It should give me enough time for you to train me in the kung-fu magic so I can destroy the spirit in the Between.”

“I think so,” Honey agreed.

“What's it going to cost me, Honey?” I looked at her, hard.

“I'll do it as a favor, no strings attached,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I like you. Because I want to be here, in Arcadia. I belong here, Domino. My people weren't born of this world, but we long for it. We made ourselves its first children, spirits of tree and stone and brook.”

“You must hate what we've done to the place.”

“Cities are good, too,” she said, laughing. “It's the magic of this world that we crave, and there's magic in the streets as well as in the groves and the hills. I want to dwell in this world again, and if I'm going to do that, I need your friendship more than I need to nickel and dime you for favors.”

I laughed. “If friendship is all you want, you've got it,
Honey. I'm not in a good spot, but I don't even want to think about where I'd be if it weren't for your help.”

“Good. Then come take a shower with me.”

“I, uh…I'm not sure we—”

“I'm still kidding,” she said, giggling. “I know humans have strange ideas about such things. I can wait.” She winked at me and I blushed. “Go boil some water in a large pot—one of the copper ones I used for the healing salve. I'll get some things from the garden.”

I boiled water and watched Honey brew the potion. It wasn't like any magic I did, and by the time she was finished I was nodding off in my chair. I'd been awake for a long stretch, and even without the events at Adan's loft and the junkyard, I'd have been exhausted. As it was, I barely managed to stumble into my room and collapse on the bed before I was out.

I woke up at about five in the afternoon. I had a hangover from my overindulgence at the salvage yard, and I used a spell to nuke a burrito and get the juice flowing. The hair of the dog smoothed out the throbbing in my temples and steadied my hands, but the burrito didn't do much for my stomach.

I spent some time with my head in the toilet and took a shower. By the time I was dressed, I felt just about good enough to go back to bed.

Instead, I called Adan. I had a small glass vial loaded with the potion, and I needed to hook up with him long enough to deliver the goods. I was thinking dinner, since I didn't have much to show for the burrito and it would give me the best chance to dose him.

“Not dinner,” Adan said when I made my suggestion. “I don't want us to get predictable.”

I rolled my eyes. This thing was complicated enough without having to worry about rules of dating etiquette. I mentally ran through other options that would involve the ingestion of food or drink. “We could go to a club, do some dancing, have a few drinks.”

“I've had enough of nightclubs for a while. How about the Commerce?”

“Poker?”

“Yeah, they have decent no-limit games.”

“You play poker?”

“Sure. Everybody with too much money and no job plays poker these days…people like me and Ben Affleck.”

“Okay, that sounds fun. Do we have an angle?” All the big poker rooms in town have spotters with a little talent whose only job is to make sure people like me aren't juicing the games. We could still cheat the old-fashioned way, though, playing partners and working the rest of the table as a team.

Adan laughed. “I'm dating a thug. We're just playing for fun, Domino.” Cheating
is
fun, but I was secretly relieved. I'd be better off playing it straight. I'd be able to sit next to Adan, and it would make it a hell of a lot easier to slip him the potion.

“All right, sounds good. Pick me up at eight.”

“You pick me up. I tend to drink a little when I play cards. And bring plenty of money—I'm pretty good.”

“You shouldn't have told me that. You might have been able to hustle me.”

“Now I've got you thinking about it. You're doomed.”

“True. See you at eight.”

“Later.”

 

The Commerce Casino opened in 1983, about ten miles from downtown L.A. just off the Santa Ana Freeway. It had expanded a couple times, and now it was the largest card room in California. I've heard it's the largest in the world.

It's also one of the largest juice boxes in town. With over two hundred tables and all the cards and chips and probabilities
dancing twenty-four hours a day, it's like a numerological ritual the size of an amusement park. Rashan didn't have a piece of it, though. If anyone was tapping it, they were much bigger fish than the L.A. outfits.

The City of Commerce itself isn't much to look at, and the casino sticks out like the proverbial twenty-dollar necklace on a two-dollar whore. It's supposed to be Vegas glitzy, I guess, but doesn't get all the way there. There are cheap red lights running up to the entrance to let you know you're on the right track. A garish statue in the lobby that might be a female sphinx is about the only thing suggestive of a theme.

I surrendered my car to the valet and looked at him long enough to make sure he'd be nice to it. We went in, and the floor manager I knew got us adjoining seats at a no-limit table with a four-hundred-dollar buy-in. I had an idea to show off a little, but he seemed to know Adan better than he knew me. He seemed to like him better, too.

I'm a decent player, even when I can't cheat. I'd been playing since I was a kid, so I'd seen enough hands to feel comfortable with most of the situations that come up. In most of those games I was using enough juice to know what the other players were holding, but even without the juice, I can usually tell if a guy is strong or weak, and I can usually figure out what he thinks I'm playing.

In this game, I just wanted to loosen up the table and make sure Adan was having fun. I ordered drinks and kept them coming often enough to set a fast pace.

For the first hour or so, I played just about any two cards and I played passively enough that everyone was eyeing me like a malfunctioning ATM. I handed out my four hundred pretty fast and bought in again. I did it with such good humor that everyone had a nice time.

When I felt like Adan had to be feeling the drinks, I switched gears. I was sitting to his right, and I started to put some pressure on him. I wanted him thinking about his cards and his chips more than what I was doing with the drinks I was passing him.

Finally a hand came along that allowed me to get heads-up with him. I drew jack-ten of hearts on the big blind, which meant Adan was the first to bet. He stacked off four ten-dollar chips. That kind of bet in first position told the rest of the table he was playing a premium hand, probably a big pair. The guy on the button had been playing almost as loose as I had, and he cold-called Adan's open. I did the same, adding thirty dollars to the big blind that was already on the table.

The flop came down nine, eight, deuce, and the last two were hearts. This was just about the perfect flop for me. I had an open-ended straight draw and a flush draw, which gave me better than even odds to get ahead of Adan's big pair by the river. I'd also be the first to act and Adan would be sure to raise any bet I made. That kind of action would likely be too much for our third wheel, and Adan and I would play the rest of the hand mano a mano.

I opened for seventy dollars, a little more than half the size of the pot. Adan could see the straight and flush possibilities as well as I could, and he wanted to take the pot down right there rather than give them a chance to hit. He pushed all his chips in. The guy to my right pretended to think about it a while and then threw in his cards.

Now it was on me to either call Adan's bet or fold. It really wasn't much of a decision. I was almost certainly behind in the hand—Adan's bets told me he had a pair, and I had nothing. But I'd win the hand if I caught a heart, queen or seven on either of the last two cards. The rest of the table couldn't
know I had so many outs, though, and that gave me license to stare at Adan a while.

I probably stared at him longer than I had license to—long enough for the dealer to remind me a couple times that it was my action, and long enough for the cocktail waitress to deliver another round. Everyone else at the table was staring at Adan, too, trying to pick up something on him. He stared straight ahead, looking at nothing.

I leaned back in my chair, tipped the waitress, took the drinks off her tray and poured the vial I was palming into Adan's Scotch.

“Well,” I said, “at least I've got a fresh drink,” then I pushed my chips in and called Adan's raise. Adan let out a deep breath and everyone laughed, then nodded sagely when we turned over our cards. Adan was holding kings. The eight of spades came on the turn and the four of diamonds on the river, neither of which was any help to me.

“You should have folded,” Adan said, smiling as he raked in my chips. I didn't mind, because everyone at the table wanted to tell me I misplayed the hand.

“I thought you were bluffing, you bully.”

“I never bluff,” he said, and winked. Then he lifted his drink to his lips…and froze. He frowned.

“Something wrong?” I asked. My blood pressure spiked a hell of a lot higher than it ever did during the poker hand. Did the potion have an odor? Honey hadn't said anything about it…

Then Adan laughed and took a drink. “No,” he said, smiling at me over his glass, “I was just thinking that I'm getting drunk, but then I decided that was probably your plan.”

I laughed, too. “Sure,” I said, “that's obviously the only way I'm going to get my money back.”

“You sure that's the only reason?” he said, and a boyish grin brought those dimples out.

“A player never shows her cards.”

“I call,” he said and drained his glass.

 

I woke up at about ten the next morning draped over Adan's chest. He was still asleep, and his soft breaths raised goose bumps on my skin.

We'd left the card room after one in the morning and gotten back to his loft about half an hour later. We'd started kissing before the front door was closed and we laid down a trail of clothes leading to the stairs up to the bedroom.

I'd mustered enough moral fortitude to mention the complexity of the situation we were getting ourselves into as I took off my clothes.

“This is probably a bad idea,” I said as I sat on the edge of the bed and fought with my zipper. Adan was kneeling on the floor in front of me. His hands were on my breasts and he leaned in and kissed my neck.

“You should have thought of that before you got me drunk,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, probably,” I said, pulling off my jeans.

“Oh, well,” he said, and nibbled my ear.

“Yeah.”

“I'll still respect you in the morning.”

“Really?”

“I mean, I won't respect you any less.”

“Good enough.”

We'd made love most of the night. We did it well enough that, like Honey's glamour, it didn't want to come unmade in
the sunlight. Now was the time for morning-after regrets and self-recrimination, but I didn't have either. I was feeling pretty good about the world. After a few days of getting stuffed at the scrimmage line, I felt like I'd finally made some forward progress.

At the very least, we'd made it through the evening's activities without Adan's evil twin making an appearance. Maybe the potion was working, or maybe it was just dumb luck. Either way, I hadn't had any trouble falling asleep with him, and I still had all my skin where it was supposed to be.

Despite the weak protests of the night before, I'd blown by the point of no return in our relationship with a smile and a wave. Adan had been plenty of trouble already and he'd probably be even more when I told his father how it was. But I had the idea he'd be worth a lot more trouble than I'd actually get. I didn't feel inclined to worry too much about my boss unless and until.

There weren't many guys in L.A. I could ever have something with that amounted to more than a friendly roll in the hay. Most of the guys I met were interested in me because I was a gangster, and those were the ones I'd never take seriously. The rest weren't interested in me for the same reason, and those were the ones who made me feel sorry for myself. I couldn't hope for any better than a gangster's son who didn't care either way what I was. Adan, I knew, was a lot better than I deserved.

Adan stirred and then tilted my chin up to plant a kiss on my mouth. “Good morning,” he said, grinning.

“One of the best,” I said and kissed him back. “Sorry, my mouth probably tastes like I brought the casino home in it.” Adan tasted just like he always did, like the apples and cinnamon on a freshly baked Washington. That didn't seem fair,
and I wondered why I'd never worked up a spell for morning breath.

“It just tastes like you. I like it.” As if to prove it, his head disappeared under the sheets and I stopped thinking for a while.

Later, we took a shower together, dressed and breakfasted on our cinnamon apple pizza. It tasted so much like Adan it was almost like making love again.

“Do you have to work today?” he asked when we were done.

“Yeah, actually, I have a lot to do.” I looked at my watch. “I should get going.”

“I want you to stay.”

“I want to, too, but I can't. I still have a job, and it's more important than ever that I do it well. The only legitimate objection your father can make about this is that it interferes with my work.” That wasn't the only reason it was more important than ever, but I didn't tell Adan that.

“You're a very responsible gangster, aren't you?”

I almost choked on my coffee. Spending the night with Adan was about as far as I could get from responsible. I wasn't going to feel anything but great about it but I wasn't going to call it responsible, either.

“This thing I'm working on,” I said, “it's pretty important. About as important as my job ever gets. If it weren't for that, you'd have to kick me out.”

“The murders,” he said.

My eyes snapped up to him but I got a hold of them pretty quick. I shouldn't have been surprised he'd heard about it. The outfit is big for an outfit but small for anything else.

I nodded. “You heard about it, huh?”

“Yeah, and I heard you were working on it. I heard Jamal
was one of the guys that was killed.” He was looking at me like we were playing a poker hand.

“Yes, he was. His parole officer said Jamal was hanging out at the club. That's why I was down there that night.”

Adan nodded, but his eyes didn't leave mine. “And after that?”

“After that, what?”

Adan just looked at me.

“I'm not here because of work, Adan. Is that what you think?”

“Maybe you think I'm involved somehow, because I knew Jamal.”

“Jamal and the other guy were squeezed, Adan. It was a ritual execution, a hit. The killer is a sorcerer. You couldn't have had anything to do with it, and if I thought you did, this isn't the angle I'd take.” I wished it were true, all the way around. I hoped my wishing would make it sound less like bullshit than it did to me.

“Yeah, okay. I didn't really think so, obviously, but I wanted to hear you say it.”

I nodded as small as I could and smiled, and felt like shooting myself.

“If you want to ask me anything else about Jamal, I don't mind.”

“If you know anything you think might help, I'll listen.”

“Well, it's like I told you, I really didn't know him very well. Maybe a little better than I told you, that night.”

I just nodded.