Sacrifices (16 page)

Clap gave the kid a rueful grin. “You think you got it bad, I'm the guy got stuck with this stupid nickname. Think about that a minute.”

“You wanna get outta here, man,” the kid said, but his face had softened some.

“Just tell Stash we need to talk to him 'bout the Locos.”

The kid actually spat. “Fuckin' chavalas. Punks. Think that voodoo shit gonna stop us?”

“I got some inside info on that,” Clap said, “but I ain't talking to you about it. Me and Stash go back, and
I
don't know
you
. Trust me—you don't want him to find out I was here and you didn't say nothing.”

That was enough, at last. “Wait a sec,” the kid said. He stepped back, got out his phone, and dialed.

Clap leaned toward Genevieve and lowered his voice. “Used to be a few bills'd get a lot more respect around here. Must be a lotta five-O up in here lately. Or something else.”

“I'll bet on the something else,” Genevieve said, without taking her eyes from the kid on the phone. He was speaking in rapid, agitated Spanish, and her Spanish didn't extend much beyond a few day-to-day words. Following the kid was hopeless. “You get any of this?” she asked Clap.

“Not much—too quiet. I think he's talking to somebody who's gonna talk to somebody. Pissant here don't swing a big enough dick to get Stash down here himself.”

“Great.”

After an extended phone call, during which Genevieve half expected somebody to issue an order to shoot them all on the spot, the kid hung up and stepped back to the vehicle.

“He's coming,” the kid said. “Pull around over there, though. You fuckin' up my corner.”

“Thanks, man,” Clap said, and he pulled away. The spot the kid had pointed to was the driveway to the back of a liquor store, but Clap didn't seem to mind blocking it. He backed in, left the engine running, and turned up the air-conditioning. “Well,” he said, “they didn't shoot us. Hope you really do know something about their voodoo situation, or we could be in for a bad ride.”

“I hope so, too,” Genevieve said.

The wait wasn't long. A couple more cars came by and engaged in quick transactions with the boys at the corner, but the third car, an Impala that looked, ironically enough, like cop surplus, slowed and stopped in front of them, blocking the driveway.

“They think that's gonna stop me, they got a surprise coming,” Clap said.

“It'll be fine,” Genevieve said, with far more confidence than she felt. “Just remember that we're guests here.”

He looked at her with a mix of horror and contempt. “You let them think we're punks, and they will curb-stomp us just because they can. Show some respect, but don't take no shit. Got that?”

“If those are the rules.”

“Don't ever doubt it.”

Two guys got out of the Impala. If there were more inside, Genevieve couldn't see them through the bubbly, homemade tint job. They were big men, older than the kids on the corner, both sporting Mexican Mafia tattoos that said they'd already done time. Both wore white tank tops, exposing the rest of their tattoos for the world to
see, and both had guns jammed in their waistbands. They didn't care who saw them, apparently, indicating just how far the rule of law stretched down here.

The two men split up, each swaggering around to a different side of Clap's ride. Genevieve's heart raced. Rat, Slammer, and Tulip might be packing, but she doubted they could get their weapons out before these two men killed the lot of them—and surely not before they shot her and Clap up front, if they took a mind to.

This seemed a far cry from meddling with incantations and diagrams by candlelight, and she wondered how in the hell
that
had led
here.
She seemed to be questioning a lot of her decisions lately.

Clap rolled down both front windows. “What up?” he asked.

The guy on his side, a big gothic “18” tattoo visible above the neckline of his tank top, hooked his thumbs in his khakis. “Hear you wanna talk to Stash 'bout our problem.”

“That's right.”

“The fuck do you know about it?” the guy on Genevieve's side said. He had a goatee, a complement of half a dozen gold teeth, and what looked like a permanent scowl.

“I don't know shit about it,” Clap said. He pointed at Genevieve. “She does.”

“Then she can come with us,” Eighteen said. “You can stay right the fuck here.”

“Stash don't know her,” Clap said.

“And he don't care about you,” Eighteen said.

“I don't give—”

“It's cool,” Genevieve said. “I'll go.”

“You sure about that?” Clap asked.

Hell no,
she wanted to say, but the situation had already gone beyond that. The last thing she wanted was for this to spiral into some sort of macho pissing contest. There were guns out now—the odds of things ending in a friendly ass-beating were probably nil.

“Let's go,” she said, and she pushed the car door open.

She followed the two men to the car. There was nobody
else in back, she was surprised to note. The kids on the corner couldn't have missed the five people in Clap's car, and they would have passed that information along. She wondered what it meant that Stash had sent only two men in response. Maybe he was relying on the corner kids to back them up. Maybe he didn't think Clap and company were enough of a threat to bother sending more. Maybe his other guys were tied up with bigger problems. Given all the shit going down, Genevieve bet on the last.

The two guys in the car didn't say much, but it turned out to be a short drive anyway, just a few blocks to a boarded-up Radio Shack. It didn't look like the kind of place anybody would run a gang out of. Genevieve had expected a strip bar or a pawnshop or the like, though those were in short supply around here. Hell, maybe this
was
the place.
Or maybe it's an out-of-the-way place to leave my corpse,
she thought before she could stop herself.

Eighteen and Goatee got out of the car and walked to the building without looking back to see if Genevieve followed. She got out and caught up just as Eighteen swung open the heavily barred front door.

The inside had been gutted, stripped down to bare studs and floor decking, and a handful of tables and boxes moved in and arrayed in rows. The place had the air of a temporary military operation or something of the like. To Genevieve's relief, there were a handful of people already inside. Two of them sat on the edge of one of the tables, another was pacing the floor behind them, and the fourth leaned over another table, frowning.

The fourth man looked up from the table when the door opened. He was another tough guy like Eighteen and Goatee. Unlike the prison tats his compadres wore, though, he'd had serious, expensive ink done at some point. A woman's face in photographic detail on his left shoulder, some kind of panther down his right arm, and a dozen others in vivid colors.

He grinned when he got his first look at Genevieve. “Nice ink,” he said.

She laughed. “Yours is pretty good, too.”

“Shorty says you got solutions to my problems.”

“Maybe,” she said. She walked to the table, conscious of all the eyes on her. It felt, oddly, like the first time she'd met Anna and Karyn's crew—a group of unfriendly strangers staring her down, waiting for her to screw up or give something away. She'd managed pretty well then. She'd do all right here. The familiarity was comforting.

There was, oddly enough, a map on the table, reinforcing the impression that this was a psuedo-military operation. Somebody'd drawn red
X
's and black
X
's in several areas. She leaned in. Most were clustered along Gant Street, but there were others as well along the opposite side.

“What do the
X
's mean?” she asked.

“I'm Stash,” the guy with the nice tattoos said, extending his hand.

She took it. “Genevieve.”

“Where's your hood, Genevieve?”

“My . . . ?”

He cast a significant look at two of the other men, communicating something she didn't pick up. “Where you from?” he asked. “You don't look like no barrio rat.”

“The Heights.”

“You slumming today?” one of the other guys put in.

“No. I'm looking for something. I thought you fellows could help.”

“You even know who the fuck we are?” he asked.

“Yeah. Eighteenth Street.”

Cries of disgust went up from three of the men. “Aw, fuck you, bitch,” one of them said. “Get the fuck out of here,” another added.

“Everybody chill,” Stash said. “Maybe Genevieve don't know everything that's going on today, but that ain't no crime. It don't mean she can't help.”

She recalled the clusters on the map, and the generally hostile air of the place, and it made sense. She did a quick survey of tats, matched it up to everything she'd researched on her phone, and felt like slapping herself in the head. “The Flats,” she said, pointing at one of the guys. “Krazy
Eights, and Diaz Crew,” she added, pointing to two others in succession.

“So now we gotta kill ya,” Flats said. She
thought
he was joking.

“We don't get a lotta white girls from the burbs in here offering to help,” Stash said. “So how 'bout you tell us your game?”

“Yeah,” the guy from Diaz Crew said. “You a cop?”

“Jesus, how stupid do you think I am?” Genevieve asked.

“Cops are pretty stupid.”

“No. I am not a cop.”

“Your game,” Stash reminded her. “What is it you want outta this?”

“Just information. Tell me about anything weird that's going on around here. Occult stuff. ‘Voodoo shit,'” she added, fingers supplying air quotes.

“They said you were gonna tell me about the voodoo shit,” Stash said.

“You tell me what it is, I'll tell you what it means, if I can. Unless you've got somebody in that scene already.”

Stash shrugged. The guy from Krazy Eights shook his head, adding, “Paco's in solitary, and they ain't
never
letting him out.”

“We got shit,” Diaz Crew said.

Pretty much what Genevieve had been counting on. Few enough people had the talent for the occult in the first place, but on top of that it was like high-energy physics, or maybe some kind of engineering discipline—it required access to rare, expensive resources and tools, and ideally a mentor or instructor of some kind. Not a lot of any of the above in the barrio. There might be a handful of kids scattered around who heard voices or had a knack for finding things, but without training, it wouldn't go a hell of a lot farther. Add to that the generally unsavory nature of the occult and the heavily Catholic population, and she wasn't surprised that qualified practitioners were even thinner on the ground here than usual.

“The red
X
's are where we've lost guys,” Stash said. “The black ones are where we've seen drawings.”

“I know the type,” Genevieve said. “Do you have any pictures?”

A kid next to Stash, younger than the others at maybe fourteen, pulled a sheaf of notebook paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He set it on the table in front of her. His demeanor caught her eye. It wasn't the devil-may-care swagger she would have expected, tossing the stuff on the table with an “ain't no thang” expression on his face. It was gentle. Reverent, she might have said.

“May I . . . ?” she asked.

The kid nodded.

She spread the papers out on the table. On each one, somebody—probably the kid, she guessed—had drawn an occult diagram. Below each, he'd written an address.

“They're all different,” she said, puzzled. Not greatly different, but significantly so. She would have thought that, whatever they did, it would be a one-size-fits-all solution. “Are you sure these are exact?”

Anger flashed across the kid's face. “I wasn't born yesterday, lady.”

She held up a placating hand. “Just checking. These are . . . irregular. Unusual.” She was conscious of everybody watching her, and it seemed as if the whole room was holding its breath, waiting for her to draw a conclusion.

She checked the map. She didn't know whether the inventory of diagrams was complete, but it was clear that a boundary had been drawn around a section of territory.

“It's a curse of some kind,” she said.

“No shit,” Stash said. He'd spoken up for her, but now his patience was running low.

“If you erase the drawings, it'll break the curse,” Genevieve explained.

“Now, why didn't I think of that?”

“They're guarded?”

“They don't erase.”

“It doesn't have to be literally erased. You can just tag over it or something.”

Stash shook his head. “That don't work, either.”

“I don't follow you.”

“You don't think we tried that? Homeboy here threw a can of black paint over one the other day, covered it all up. I looked away for half a second, and when I looked back, it was like the fucking thing had, I dunno, floated to the top of the paint. Fizzy tried knockin' off a chunk of the brick, and you could still see the drawing. It was like it had soaked all the way through. Short of blowing the building up, I ain't sure what else to do. Hell, I'm a little scared
that
won't even work.”

Genevieve was silent. This sounded impossible, given what she knew. The surefire way to wreck any magic requiring a diagram was to damage the diagram. That was, like, gospel. Practitioners went to great lengths to build expensive, hard-to-damage installations for summoning and other workings for just that reason. The idea that a diagram would be indestructible or self-repairing or whatever was going on here was deeply unsettling.

Maybe it's not the diagrams themselves. Maybe there's another spell, somewhere else, protecting them.
But now she was into the realm of pure conjecture, grasping for what she hoped was true rather than toward anything she knew to be.