Sacrifices (24 page)

Silence prevailed, seconds stringing out into minutes as they each sifted their own thoughts.

“I give up,” Nail said after a while. “What's any of that mean for us?”

Anna shook her head. “There was one more thing. The priest—Abas—kept talking about blood and family. Said I didn't belong there, because I'm not blood or family. Then, after, when Moreno was hurt, he said something I didn't get. Something like ‘Take thy son, Isaac, and go to Moriah.'”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Karyn asked.

“Fuck if I know.”

“Isaac,” Nail said. “From the Bible story.”

Anna's expression was devoid of recognition, but Karyn got it. “Abraham and Isaac?”

“Yeah.”

Anna shook her head. “I don't get it.”

Nail chuckled. “Didn't you go to Sunday school? Just what in the fuck is this sorry old world coming to? So, God comes to Abraham in a vision or a burning bush or whatever the hell, and he says, ‘Go take your son up the mountain and sacrifice him to me.' Abraham's all ‘You're
the boss,' so he takes the kid up the mountain,
ties him down
, and gets ready to do that shit, when God interrupts. He says, ‘Just testing! You passed!' and lets him off the hook. The kid lives happily ever after and goes on to
begat
the whole population of Europe.”

“I don't remember that last part,” Karyn said. “But yeah. That's pretty much how the rest of it goes.”

“I mighta made that last part up.”

“Abas isn't Moreno's father,” Anna said. “Not old enough, I don't think. White, too. But he sure was fixated on the family thing. And blood, and . . . atonement.” Her brow creased in puzzlement. “I don't know. This magic shit isn't my department. We're out of magicians.”

“I'll check with Elliot,” Karyn said.

“I'll call Genevieve,” Anna said.

“I'll sit here with my thumb up my ass and say a little prayer,” Nail said.

Nail pulled into
the parking lot of his apartment building and saw Clarence sitting on the hood of a car, eating a goddamn sandwich of all things. He had half a mind to back out and keep driving, but by then it was too late. Clarence had seen him. Was waving him down, in fact, with the same hand that held the sandwich, as if the damn thing were some kind of lure.

Nail parked in the space right next to him, surprised to note that there were no tough guys in the car. He wondered if he'd ever seen Clarence away from his office without some bruising, no-neck dude less than twenty feet away, and couldn't think of a single time.

Nail got out of the car.

“I ain't heard from you,” Clarence said. “I was starting to worry.”

“Yeah, well. Things been a little fucked-up.”

“I hear that.” Clarence got off the car, transferred the sandwich to his left hand, and extended his right for a handshake.

Nail took it, thinking this was all deeply, deeply unreal. “What's the word?” he asked.

“Lots of words,” Clarence said. He looked haggard, even more so than usual, and he was chewing at the inside of his lip, as though he was anxious about something. “Can we talk in private?”

Nail froze. In private? Like where? Like his fucking
home
? Moments drained away, and he realized his silence was stretching out too long. “You wanna come inside a minute?” Clarence in his goddamn house—just about the second-to-last thing he wanted, but there was no way out now.

“Yeah. Sure.”

He led Clarence up the sidewalk, then up the outside stairs to the second floor. Clarence said nothing, just followed a few steps behind. Nail wondered if it was Clarence for a change wondering if somebody was about to take him somewhere out of sight and end him. Probably not, he supposed. If there was one thing Clarence could do, it was read people, and he'd read Nail years ago and decided he was, if not harmless, at least not going to beat his head in at the earliest opportunity. Too bad he was right.

Nail unlocked the door and went in. Slowly, so Clarence wouldn't think he was going for a gun or something. Just in case.

He flicked on the lights rather than open the blinds. The place was the same mess he'd left. After the first job with Sobell, when a bunch of thugs had shown up at Nail's place to take him out, he'd decided it was time to move. He'd found a decent apartment, not too far out of the way, the kind of place that didn't look too close at his fake ID and didn't check credit if you paid a big enough deposit, and he'd gotten settled in. Sort of. Got a bed and an easy chair and a TV settled in, anyway. Everything else was still in boxes all over the damn place. He'd been too busy to unpack. Some of the boxes he'd had occasion to at least open—the ones containing rope, or hardware, or potentially useful electronics—and those still sat in the same places, open tops gaping. Others remained sealed, the only indication of their contents written in Nail's meticulous hand in marker on the sides. Dishes. Cans of food and even a couple of MREs he'd never eat but couldn't make himself throw out. A box of old funk and Motown LPs and a busted turntable from when he was fifteen and thought for a few weeks he'd make a go at being a D.J. More crap he'd never use again and never get rid of. It was a good thing he moved regularly, he thought—it kept the
very worst of his pack rat tendencies from getting out of control.

“Want a beer or something?” he asked as Clarence came in.

“This ain't a social call. Shit is out of control.”

“You're gonna have to narrow that down.”

Clarence transferred his sandwich from one hand to the other, then held his left hand out, palm toward the floor, for Nail to look at. Half the fingernail had been ripped off his ring finger, leaving a crusty scab.

“Get it caught in a door?” Nail asked.

“That Hector motherfucker. Guy's the goddamn Devil.”

Nail leaned back against the counter separating the living room from the kitchen, bracing himself with his hands. “What are you doing with that guy?” he asked. “He is not good for your health, Clarence, and I am not kidding.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I got that much figured out. Mighta been when he was drawing pictures in blood and smearing himself with raw meat, or maybe when he had a couple of my guys hold me down and tear out my fucking fingernail. Now he says if I take off or cross him, he's gonna fuck me up. After what I seen so far, I don't dare test him on that.”

“Jesus,” Nail said.

“My nephew's getting worse,” Clarence continued. “He made a dog appear out of thin air two days ago.”

“A . . . dog?”

“I don't know what it was, okay? It . . . kinda looked like a dog. Same size, four legs, too goddamn many teeth. So I'm gonna call it a dog. That a problem?”

“That works.” A dog? What the fuck? That wasn't any kind of shit Tommy'd ever gotten up to. Genevieve, neither. “I ain't gonna dress this up, then. Your boys are full of demons.”

“Yeah. And?”

“What do you mean ‘yeah'? You knew?”

“I didn't figure they got into a bad batch of PCP, Owens. But that don't tell me shit about the solution. They ain't got fucking exorcists in the Yellow Pages. I checked.”

“I ain't got a solution,” Nail said. “Wish I did. One of my friends is down with this shit.”

Clarence put his sandwich on the table. “What can you tell me about Hector?”

Nail's mind blanked. What did he really know about the guy?

“Don't fuck with me on this,” Clarence said. “I asked around. He was hooked in with that cult that got in the news a few months back.
You
were involved in that.”

A handful of replies leaped to mind:
Says who? Bullshit, I don't know nothing about no cult. You got bad intel, man.
None of them would hold any water now, not after his total freeze-up.

“Don't mess with that dude,” Nail said.

“Why not?”

“There's about a hundred reasons why not, but far as I'm concerned, it's because he's Patient Zero, you know what I mean? Meanest motherfucker in a mean, bad lot.”

“Why do they call him Belial?”

“Who's calling him that?”

“My guys.”

His guys? Nail had a sudden, atypical moment of claustrophobia, a terrifying sensation that he was surrounded, that the walls themselves were going to move in and crush him—no, not the walls. The
world
. He moved in a few different worlds, he knew that, but for one of them to reach out and clasp hands with another in this way, at such a deep level . . . He had a terrible feeling he'd be smashed between them.

“You introduced them?” Nail asked.

“Sobell's gonna screw us,” Clarence said. “Take the relic and run. Hector said we ought to work together to get ahead of him, but that was all bullshit. Now he's got five more guys down with this shit, and I'm starting to wonder—”

“He's got what?”

“Huh?”

“Five more guys down with what shit, exactly?”

Clarence scowled. “What do you think? Talking Greek and drawing weird shit on the walls.”

“Shit. Here we go again. Look, you gotta keep your guys away from him, Clarence.”

“Yeah, well, I pretty much gotta do what the fuck he tells me right now, don't I?”

“Is that all he's doing? Finding more guys?”

“Shit no. He's got guys out looking for the bullshit relic thing Sobell wants, and a whole lot of other weird stuff.”

“Other weird stuff? Like what?”

“Like other weird stuff. Oil, candles, chalk you can only get from these crazy bastards who are all into incense and pentagrams and shit. Fuckin' goat parts, and I ain't even kidding. I don't even know what else.”

Nail moved away from the counter and rubbed the side of his face. “Any idea what he wants it for?”

“Shit no. And here's another thing: I don't know what he's telling my guys, but they all looking at me awful funny lately. I get half a chance, I'ma kill that son of a bitch.”

“You don't wanna do that. I don't know if Sobell's gonna screw us or not, but I know he ain't got the answer to this. The problem with your guys, and my friend. But Belial might.”

Clarence closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger. “Damn.” He opened his eyes. “This is bullshit, Owens. You ain't got long. I love my nephew as much as the next guy, but this shit is about all I can take. Get me an answer.”

Nail nodded. “I hear anything else, I'll pass it along.”

Clarence wasn't paying attention anymore, though. He was out the door and gone a moment later, pulling his phone from his pocket. He slammed the door behind him.

Nail walked around the counter to the sink and threw a little water on his face. It was cold, but not cold enough—he wanted to shock himself awake. Shock himself right into another world entirely, clear his head so thoroughly it wiped away the warped nightmare his life had become over the last couple of months. Like a baptism, cleansing him of the mistakes of his life. Instead, he got a lukewarm, chlorine-stinking rinse that didn't even get the grit out of the corners of his eyes. Same shit, different day.

He wiped his face with his shirt and headed back out.

On the road, he was mildly surprised to see that everything looked normal. Too many cars, signs yelling
CLEARANCE!
and peddling cheeseburgers and Coke in bright colors, palm trees, and sickly dead lawns. Hard to imagine that life was going on as usual for everybody else when it felt to him that the cancer at L.A.'s heart had suddenly metastasized, gone terminal. Couldn't anybody else see that shit was falling apart? Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just his own world, and that of the people closest to him. And Sobell. And Clarence. And dozens of other criminals and lowlifes, like some sort of underworld apocalypse, the cops' ultimate self-cleaning oven. Come to the dark side, and it'll burn through you like lung cancer.

And, like a cancer, it would spread.

*   *   *

Karyn kept herself company with morbid thoughts all the way to the meeting spot Elliot had designated, a parking lot outside a Best Buy, of all things. Elliot waited at the edge of the lot, out of uniform today in jeans and a sweater, which made Karyn suddenly wonder what day it was. Was today Saturday? Sunday? Did FBI Non-Standard Whatever people get weekends off? What about bank holidays?

“What do you have?” Elliot asked, skipping straight to business before Karyn had even closed the car door.

“Something we need you to have a look at,” Karyn said, producing her phone. Anna's video was there, along with a couple of photos. She pulled up the photos first. The first was Abas, still in his black robe, leaning over Moreno, who looked to be in some seriously rough shape. The priest's face was visible in profile, Moreno's blocked behind the priest's head. Karyn put the phone on the hood of Elliot's car. “Do you know this guy?”

Elliot studied the photo a long time before answering, “No.”

Nail came around the car and looked over her shoulder as Karyn brought up the next picture. This photo was more of the same, though in this one Abas had moved to Moreno's other side, and neither man's face was visible. “That's a big damn knife,” Nail said.

In the next picture, the priest was cutting Moreno. It wasn't a good shot of the priest, but Moreno's face was visible.

“Who's that?” Elliot asked.

Karyn considered. She and Elliot had an arrangement, but Karyn wasn't sure she wanted to test just how far that extended. If she answered Elliot's question, that whole area of town might end up crawling with feds in short order. On the other hand, given the grave robbing, the name Moreno seemed essential to this whole weird business, and she didn't think answers were coming from elsewhere. “A gang leader named Rogelio Moreno,” Karyn said.

Elliot nodded acknowledgment.

The other pictures were more of the same. The video, though—ugh. Karyn had watched it earlier, and it kindled the same sense of sick revulsion in her as boxing movies wherein somebody got punched to death. Moreno's grunts as he held back screams were bad enough, and the jerky, violent motion of his body even worse, but what really got to Karyn was the sudden snap, a sound that had to be bone cracking, standing out clearly above the background noise of the video. Even Elliot, impassive to that point, winced.

When it was over, Elliot played it again. Karyn leaned back against the car and sat that one out.

“Do you mind if I send myself a copy?” Elliot asked.

“Knock yourself out.”

She fiddled with the phone for a minute and then handed it back to Karyn.

“Well?” Karyn asked.

Elliot sat on the hood of the car, facing Karyn. Her face was open, frank. “I can tell you I've never seen anything like it.”

“Great. Is there anything you can tell us at all about it?”

“Not right now, but we've got archives. Documentation. I can see if there's anything I can dig up on the ritual in the video.”

“Such as?”

“What it does, where it came from. Who else might be involved. It'll tell me some things about the practitioner, too.”

“Abas. The priest.”

“Sure, if that's what he is. Every working—‘spell,' if you want to call it that—has some signature elements to it. There are often lots of ways of achieving similar effects through a working, so the specific methods a practitioner chooses to get a given job done can tell us some things about where and from whom he or she has learned their craft. Hints about their occult lineage, if you will.”

To Karyn, that sounded pretty thin, but she and the crew had put together some pretty useful info from disparate elements in the past, and she wasn't in a position to discard information. Any little bit would help.