Sacrifices (5 page)

“If you say we're bringing a knife to a gunfight one more time, I'm gonna kick you in the knee.”

“I'm with her,” Karyn said mildly. “Not one more time.”

“She's probably bluffing anyway. She'll be calling you up in a day. Maybe two.” Anna slapped a parking meter as she walked by.

“Elliot wants this,” Karyn agreed. “Did you see her face? She wants this so bad it hurts. She'll come back around.”

“Meanwhile, I have other sources,” Anna said. “Other contacts. I'll hit them up. We'll find something, so stop worrying.”

Nail's longer legs pulled him next to her. “You can't flash that prophecy—or whatever it is—around town. It'll get back to Sobell, and right now the only advantage we have is that he
might
not know we're looking for the same thing he is.”

They rounded a corner. Ahead, a food truck was selling spaghetti and meatballs, which Anna found inexplicably irritating. It was hot as hell, and whoever heard of a spaghetti truck anyway? Her stomach growled, and she walked faster. “Yeah. Well, too bad we don't know what it is.”

*   *   *

Anna hit the streets that evening determined to scour the city for anything that might be of use, no matter how many rocks she had to turn over, no matter how many terrible things came scuttling out. Her first several stops were a bust. Two guys who'd heard nothing relevant, seen nothing interesting, and didn't seem to give the tiniest shit about relics or saints, and another couple who weren't around. Anna wondered if they'd also heard from a particular attorney and reached the same conclusion that Rissa had, that maybe Sobell was going down and maybe he wasn't, but anybody close enough for him to grab was at severe risk of being drowned. She'd try again tomorrow but she didn't expect much. Rissa was no fool, and whatever else she thought of the other various fences and lowlifes she sometimes worked with, they had a cockroach's sense of self-preservation. Fuming a little more at every stop, Anna had done all she could do to keep her anger in check. The demon—she thought it was the demon, though it was hard to tell—stoked her anger, burned for her to express it. She wanted to key a car or kick a dog or punch a cop, just for spite.

The last stop, at around three in the morning, was Bobby Chu's party warehouse.
He's gotta have something. He'd fucking well better, or I'm gonna go berserk.
Anna wasn't sure what Bobby's trick was, but information seemed to drift to him and pile up as if he were some kind of deadwood or snag in the flow of gossip and news. Over the years, he'd told her about heists before they happened, stakeouts that had been staged, occult items that were moving through town supposedly in secret. It all came to Bobby. He didn't even seem to have to
do
anything other than keep throwing his parties.

Anna found the party at the warehouse in full swing, with so many cars overflowing the cracked asphalt parking lot that she had to go two blocks down the street to find a place to put her car. A thudding four-on-the-floor dance beat pounded its way through the corrugated metal walls of the warehouse and hit her in the chest while she was still a hundred yards away, and she clenched her fists.

I could lay waste to this.

The thought was sudden, alien, yet it made a perfect sort of sense. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could see the outlines of the diagram she'd need, almost hear the incantation weaving around the thumping bass. She would need some things—candles and oils, chiefly, probably also blood—and she would need some study, perhaps some practice, but churning somewhere in the back of her mind, sealed behind a heavy iron door, was enough power to melt the whole building to slag, send the walls pouring down into the parking lot like streams of lava, the screams of the people inside barely audible over the cataclysmic hiss and roar of the boiling metal.

Somebody opened the warehouse's door, sending a shriek of synthesizer lead and hair-raising cymbal crashing out into the night and pulling her attention away from the pictures in her head.

How long was I standing there?
She checked her phone. Ten minutes? More? She wasn't sure what time she'd arrived. There were spaces in the parking lot, though, that she didn't think had been there before.

Just another minute, and I can—

She cut off the thought. Another minute, another hour—if she wandered off down that tangent again, there was no telling when she'd rejoin the regular world again. And God forbid she actually figured out how to wreak the destruction that had seemed so seductive to her a moment ago.

All things considered, she thought it was a very good thing indeed that she'd left her gun back at the loft with Karyn.

She made herself walk to the warehouse, made herself pull open the door and take the blast of noise in the face. The music was killing her. Unusually discordant tonight, played loud enough to rattle the fillings loose from her teeth, loud enough that it seemed the metal walls of the warehouse must be pulsating in time like something out of a cartoon. Karyn would have liked this shit, Anna thought—enough chaos and noise to drown out the visions, and equally fun to
dance or zone out to. She couldn't remember the last time they'd gone out just for the hell of it, though.

She pushed her way through the crowd. Bodies jostled against her, kicking up warring reactions inside her. The thrill of contact, the sudden seduction of a stranger's touch, scraped against a bilious rage that any of these careless, heedless, mindless fucking people would dare invade her space like that. The first reaction was foreign, the second vaguely like the irritation she would have felt under normal circumstances, only intensified beyond all proportion.

Somebody slammed into the small of her back, sending her plunging forward. Her hands formed claws, which she clenched into fists. She closed her eyes, willing herself not to react. There were smaller workings than the one that would melt the building. She could start the guy on fire. Drop a lighting truss on his head. Work up a more insidious curse—insomnia-inducing nightmares for him and his for generations.

“Sorry!” somebody shouted.

Don't touch me,
she thought, at the edge of panic.
If you touch me
—

She ran. She dove through gaps in dancers, shoving them aside to cries and curses. Better that than she turn and wipe some poor dancing bastard off the face of the planet. The gauntlet of hips and hands, knees and feet seemed interminable, cuffing her on the shoulder, tearing her shirt, sending her stumbling—

And then she was through. Sweat dripped into her eyes and slicked the small of her back, and her heart raced, but she hadn't killed anyone.

Somebody close to her shouted, the words slipping by, dragged from comprehension by the undertow of the bass. She looked up. Bobby was sitting on his platform, a youngish Asian guy in the brown corduroy jacket he never took off, phone in one hand and tipping a fluorescent yellow drink dangerously in the other while he wiped at his leaky left eye with his sleeve. He looked at her as though he was waiting for an answer.

“What?” she asked.

“Who's chasing you?” he asked, a smirk teasing his mouth. “Cops? Dragons?”

“Fuck you, Bobby.”

“Come on up.”

She took his hand, and he pulled her up on the platform, lifting a black velvet rope over her head.

“What is
this
shit?” she asked, gesturing at the whole area. The platform hadn't been here the last time she'd been around, nor the ropes. There were five tables up here, spread reasonably far apart, and eight or ten people crowded around each, including Bobby's.

“Thought I'd try my hand at bottle service. You'd be amazed at the ROI on the bullshit cachet that comes with sitting up here over the rabble.”

“Gross.”

“I haven't stolen anything this month,” he said pointedly. The woman to his right looked at Anna like she was something she'd stepped in.

Not tonight, lady,
Anna thought.
Not unless you want me to Hulk the fuck out.
“Bobby, we gotta talk.”

He opened his hands. “Talk.”

“Not here. I'm going hoarse screaming at you. This shit is important.”

Bobby rolled his eyes and let out a dramatic sigh, but he got up. “Okay.”

Anna made herself look away from the woman next to him so she wouldn't see anything that might set her off.

She followed Bobby to the back. To the left of the toxic cesspools that passed as bathrooms was another door, this one locked. Bobby let them in and closed the door after. The room was narrow and crowded with shelves on which every kind of alcohol known to man had been stored according to an organizational system Anna couldn't fathom. It was dusty and poorly lit, but it was a few decibels quieter, and that was all that mattered.

“You punch anybody out tonight?” Bobby asked.

“No. Why?”

“You look like you kinda want to. I was hoping maybe
you'd already got some it out of your system, so it wouldn't be me.”

“I ain't gonna punch you, Bobby. Not tonight.”

His phone, a device that was for all practical purposes grafted to his right hand, buzzed. He tapped something out while Anna waited, then returned his attention to her.

“Okay, I might be tempted now,” she said.

He flashed a smile at her, probably assuming she was kidding. “What can I do for you?”

“I need news, and, unfortunately, there ain't anywhere better to get it.”

“This isn't how you suck up to somebody.”

She ignored him. “News. Anything weird, particularly occult stuff.”

He laughed. “What occult stuff
isn't
weird? Look, everything is a mess. The feds are looking for Enoch Sobell, the great-granddaddy of bad occult shit in L.A. All his guys have either clammed up or split, or in a few cases are popping their heads up to see if now would be a good time to start a turf war and claim some territory. Add that to the insanity with the locusts, and there are end-times preachers on every street corner. The occult underworld has gone crazy.” Another laugh, the strained kind that acknowledged basic powerlessness in the face of events. “Sorry, babe, but you're gonna have to narrow it down for me.”

She thought back to Karyn's prophecy and to Rissa's story. “Relics. Anything show up, anybody looking?” She tried to remember what Rissa had said. “St. Christopher's walking shoes. St. Peter's knucklebones, that kind of thing.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Just a sec.” He leaned against a shelf and typed some more on his phone.

“You ain't gonna be able to text so much after I shove that thing up your ass,” Anna said.

“Jesus. You on the—” He pulled his gaze from his phone and got a good look at Anna, and the words died. “Um. Sorry.”

“You were saying?”

“Look, this is weird, and I think it's probably bullshit, but what the hell? Either I tell you or you pull out my kidneys, right?”

“Not funny.”

His phone buzzed. He glanced sidelong at it and put it in his pocket. “Okay, it's not saints or relics, exactly, but a couple of guys I know were telling me about this haunted church. Don't laugh. Or, hey, what do I care? Laugh if you want. I did. Anyway, there's lights on at odd hours, and a strange figure walking around, and weird sounds. The bangers down there believe it's an angel of God, come to protect them from the other neighborhood gangs, if you can believe that shit.” He gave her a “come on, it's funny” sort of grin. She didn't smile back.

“Where's the church?”

“You serious?”

The anger was ebbing, leaving a crushing weariness behind, as well as guilt. Bobby had always done right by her—he didn't deserve threats and insults. She scratched the back of her head and tried not to look at him. “Look, Bobby, I'm sorry. I'm in a bad spot. A real bad spot. I gotta get some answers, or in a few weeks or months, you're gonna have to find somebody else to come around and complain about the music. If you know where the church is, or even just the name, it would be a big deal to me.”

“Don't know where, but . . . Hold on,” he said. “I know this. It's . . . Nuestra Señora de las Misericordias.”

“Fuck, was that supposed to be Spanish?” Anna asked.

“You really suck at apologies.”

“Sorry, man. But thanks. I know where Nuestra Señora is,” Anna said. It made sense now, or it was starting to. Too many signs pointing to the same place, and Karyn's prophecy on top of it. Rissa's lost gangbanger, the church, and even the number seven—it pointed to an area Anna had known very well a long time ago, a few blocks in East L.A. where she'd lived until she was eight or so. And Karyn's prophecy . . . valley of the garden. Nail had guessed that might be some kind of biblical thing, but no—it was a neighborhood.

Doyle Gardens. That's it right there.
Anna didn't know what they'd find there, had no idea even what exactly they were looking for, but she'd bet a thousand dollars that the place it was hiding had just been narrowed to about eight square blocks.

“If I live through this, you're a lifesaver,” she said to Bobby, and she left him there dicking around with his phone.

“Come on back,”
Clarence said. He started through the gray-walled hall toward the back of the building without waiting to see if Nail would follow.

Nail stared after him, taking a moment to make sure he had control of himself. Clarence was a tall, skinny guy in his fifties or maybe older, and every time Nail looked into his craggy face with its permanent deadpan expression, he had to fight the urge to snap the man in half over his knee. Clarence had had Nail's older brother DeWayne's balls in his pocket for nearly a decade, and every so often he'd give them a little squeeze and Nail would have to come running with a pile of cash to bail DeWayne out of some new stupid situation. That had gone almost like clockwork until recently, when Nail had finally come into enough cash to settle all his brother's debts. He hadn't heard from DeWayne since the mess at the prison, so he was hoping his brother had finally had the sense to skip town. Though if Clarence hadn't called him over here to talk about DeWayne, Nail didn't know what else it could be.

Having taken a few deep breaths, Nail walked quickly to catch up. This was the usual routine, Nail thought, with one important change. One of Clarence's heavies fell in at the rear. The guy was big and probably armed, but Nail figured he could take him if it came to that. That wasn't the point, though. Used to be just him and Clarence for these
little chats. Maybe Clarence was taking a bodyguard everywhere now, or maybe Nail had become a special case.

Clarence opened the back door out to the loading dock. Nail squinted against the glare of the sun. He paused in the doorway. There was a car parked back here, a blue SUV with tinted windows. It was running.

Clarence lifted an empty plastic Pepsi bottle to his mouth and spat a stream of saliva and tobacco juice into it. “Get in.”

“This end up with me in a hole?” Nail asked. The words came out steady enough, but he was already checking exits, running options. It was a toss-up between using Clarence as a hostage and grabbing the big guy, using him as a human shield, and running back through the building. Neither option looked great.

“Don't know. You done anything that would make me wanna put you in a hole?”

“You know it don't always work that way. Might be lotsa reasons for putting me in a hole that got nothing to do with anything I did.”

“We're cool for now, unless you wanna keep arguing. Now get in the car.”

Something about Clarence's face gave Nail pause. Nail had expected the guy to have all the expression of one of those Easter Island statues. If Clarence wanted him dead, it wouldn't be an emotional thing. Just a business decision. If he wanted Nail alive, that wouldn't be an emotional thing, either. But that wasn't what Nail saw on the man's face. Instead, there was something—a slight drawing in of the eyebrows, maybe a tremor at the corner of his mouth, something small that Nail couldn't exactly put his finger on, but it gave the game away.

Clarence was anxious. He wouldn't be anxious about capping Nail. That kind of thing was old, old news for him, and probably wouldn't even get him to look up from his desk as he dispatched somebody to take care of it. It was something else. Might be he had bigger problems. Might be he needed some help.

Nail jumped down off the loading dock platform and got in the backseat of the car. The driver, a big dude wearing a stocking cap, nodded at him.

Clarence came down the stairs, around the other side, and got in back as well. His bodyguard got in the front. A good sign, Nail figured.

The driver took the car around the building and headed toward the street.

Clarence spat into the bottle again. Nail kinda wished he'd use a can or something. The brown juice sloshing around the bottom of the bottle was visible through the clear plastic, and it was goddamn disgusting. He forced his attention from it.

It was all Nail could do not to ask where they were going. It would be useless—he'd get no answer, or one he couldn't trust—yet basic humanity made him feel that the question ought to be asked.
Stupid
.

“I got dead guys, Owens. I got guys in jail.” Clarence rolled the bottle between his hands. He wouldn't look at Nail, just kept staring at the open mouth of the bottle.

“That's rough,” Nail said, “but it ain't got nothing to do with me or DeWayne.”

“Yeah, well, I don't know about that.”

Nail waited, but Clarence didn't add anything.

“You looking for him?” Nail asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think you got your money. You don't need nothing else from him.” Clarence's expression remained flat and skeptical, so Nail continued. “Look, he didn't rat. The cops picked him up—”

“The feds picked him up.”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

“Not really.”

“And they gave him a hard time, and then let him go when they didn't have shit.”

Clarence spat. “Yeah? How do I know that?”

“'Cuz I'm telling you.”

“Uh-huh. Dead guys, guys in jail.”

“You know my brother didn't have nothing to do with that.”

“I got a guy says he saw him leaving. That's all I need to hear, till I can talk to him.” He coughed. “Got a guy says he saw you leaving, too.”

“Yeah. Cuffed and dragged.”

“And here you are, while I got dead guys and guys still in the can.”

“Yeah, well, it turns out they can't charge you just for being present at a massacre.”

“Hmm.”

Nail couldn't tell where they were headed. This part of town, everything was seedy strip malls, all pawnshops and payday loans, sometimes with sorry-looking brown palm trees to try to dress them up. The car could be going in circles, for all he knew.

“Want to tell me what you were doing there?” Clarence asked. He'd stopped staring at the bottle, and he'd fixed his gaze on Nail's face.

“Had a friend in trouble. Thought I'd get her out of that shit before she got hurt. That didn't work out so good.”

“Uh-huh.”

The driver pulled into a cracked, rutted parking lot. There were maybe a dozen cars parked here, most of them at least ten years old and battered. Two of the suites in the strip mall were vacant, and one of those had had its main window smashed out in some long-forgotten act of vandalism. Next to it, a noodle joint, and next to that a weary-looking hardware store.

The driver brought the car around back to another loading dock. The one behind the hardware store, Nail was pretty sure.
Lots of bad shit in a hardware store.
The thought came unbidden, and with it the sickening tang of his own fear.
You wanna fuck somebody up, here's the too
ls.

“Get out,” Clarence said. “Something I want you to see.”

“At the hardware store. I dunno, man. I seen
Casino
.”

Clarence gave a short, dry laugh. “I wanted you dead, I'da had it done already, 'stead of wasting my time with
this shit.” The humor fell away from his face. “Now get the fuck out the car.”

Nail got out. Clarence and the bodyguard did likewise.Once again, Nail found himself sandwiched between the two. He followed Clarence up the stairs and into the building.

The air-conditioning was a welcome change, immediately chilling the fingers of sweat that oozed down the sides of Nail's head. The smell, though . . .

“Something burning?” he asked. Clarence and the bodyguard shared a glance, the meaning of which Nail couldn't divine, and then Clarence walked down the hall a little farther. He stopped at a door. The glass window had been hung with a blind, so Nail couldn't see in.

Clarence opened the door. The burning smell grew more intense. “Hey, Big John. How's it hangin'?”

An indistinct murmur came from the room. Clarence beckoned Nail over.

Nail stepped forward and looked in the room. He let go a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. He'd worried that, despite Clarence's assurances, maybe there'd be a guy with a gun ready to waste him, or a chair with some leads hooked to a car battery, or something equally terrible. Instead, there was a big guy—the name wasn't ironic, apparently—sitting in a chair, hunched over a table. That was it.

“I don't get it,” Nail said.

Clarence gestured at the room with an open hand.
Have a look around,
he seemed to be saying.

Nail obliged. The burning smell, he noted, came from candles, arranged in a rough circle on the floor. Wide puddles of wax surrounded each, and Nail got the impression that several candles had burned to nothing in each spot, only to be subsequently replaced. The room's walls were largely covered in Peg-Boards hung with tools. Tools and papers, Nail noted. Irregularly shaped papers torn carelessly from notebooks or invoice pads or, from the look of things, whatever was handy. Nail inspected the nearest, where a dozen or so business cards had been stuck together with masking tape to form a wider writing surface.

He didn't recognize any of the specifics, but he knew that kind of writing. Tommy had done that shit. Genevieve did it by the bucket load—had once done the better part of the interior of a house in Magic Marker to keep the bad guys from finding them.

“What are you into, Clarence?” Nail asked.

“Why don't you tell me?”

Nail glanced uneasily over at Big John, who, he saw, was now scribbling over the surface of his table. Quick, sure lines, accompanied by a low mutter Nail didn't like at all.

“This is—” Nail cut himself off as the tenor of Big John's muttering abruptly changed, growing louder and picking up speed. Nail turned, annoyed and concerned in equal measure, and Big John sat up straight in his chair, a beatific, awful smile spreading across his face. He spread his hands apart and said one final word.

In the space between Big John's hands, a seething black cloud appeared.

“What—” the bodyguard began, and then something uncoiled from the cloud, abruptly dispersing it as it leaped out.

Nail didn't even have time to think. The thing that had burst from the cloud—
Snake!
Nail thought, and it had that general shape, though he saw no details—flew through the air toward him. He batted it out of the air, felt a sting in his palm. The snake hit the floor and reared up immediately. Nail saw a serpentine body, maybe a meter long, thick as his wrist, lined with wicked spines. It hissed, spreading a spiked hood like some nightmare version of a cobra, and it struck.

Nail danced back. The snake hit the floor in front of him, missing by inches, and before he could think better of it or change his mind or even decide to run, he stomped on its head. The thing's body slashed through the air, its spines shredding the leg of his pants, and he stomped again, then again, then another time for good measure, until it stopped moving.

He backed up, panting. He got a good look at the ruined creature as he stepped away. It was shaped like a snake, more or less, but covered in a shiny blue-black, its
scales made out of something more like an insect carapace than whatever the hell normal scales were made out of. Jagged spines, reminiscent of those on cricket legs, ran down both its sides. An iridescent green eye stared up from the crushed ruin of its head. As Nail watched, it crumpled into the black smoke it had come from, and then it was gone.

Big John gave him an irritated look that seemed to say,
What the hell, man?
and then went back to mumbling.

Clarence was staring at the spot on the floor with wide eyes.

“Outside,” Nail said.

They stepped into the hall, and Clarence closed the door. Clarence and the bodyguard stood on either side of Nail, staring holes into his head. Nail thought he could still hear muttering through the door. “
Outside
, outside,” he said.

Back down the hall, and it seemed to Nail that Big John's low, guttural muttering followed him the whole way, putting evil suggestions into his mind at a level just below that which his conscious mind could understand. The heat outside was welcome, not least because it put another door between him and Big Bad John.

Nail checked his hand. Slashed up a bit, ugly but not deep. He hoped that thing hadn't been poisonous.

“So,” Clarence said. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Nail gave him a wary look. “I don't know nothing about any of this.”

“Bullshit. You think I deal with a man for as long as I've dealt with you without doing some checking? I know the circles you travel in. I've heard
all
the rumors. I hear what they say about Karyn Ames. So don't bullshit me. You know enough about this shit to be useful. So, what's going on with Big John?”

Nail sighed. He pointed toward the door with his thumb. “How long he been doin' that?”

“That?”
Clarence said. “He ain't never done
that
before. I don't even know what the hell
that
was.”

“The drawing, I mean. The weird talking.”

“Since yesterday. He was one of just a couple guys got out when the feds came down on your shit the other day.”

“He didn't do any of that stuff before?”

“Are you fuckin' kidding me?”

Nail wondered how much to share. Clarence had stepped in something bad here. How much did he need to know? Nail hoped he could get a favor out of this, if he played it right, but it was just as likely that Clarence would call them barely even, no matter how much dirt Nail coughed up.

“You want to put him down,” Nail said. “It don't need to be ugly, but you don't want any part of this.”

“That's my brother,” the bodyguard said, his voice an anxious whisper.

“My nephew,” Clarence said.

“He hurt anyone yet?” Nail asked.

Clarence shook his head.

“Hurt himself?”

“No.”

“He will.”

“He seemed okay,” the bodyguard said. “I mean, before whatever that was. Just, y'know, a little weird.”