Premonitions (14 page)

The doctor showed up
not ten minutes after Tommy’s final, anguished breath. Anna sat on the dirty ground, leaning back against the fender of an old Buick, and let Nail deal with him. If there was anything left to wring from her spent emotions, she couldn’t find it. The past hour she’d careened from the adrenaline rush of the job to the horror of what happened to Tommy to the bottom of a well of grief so deep she thought she’d never climb all the way back out, and now she was empty.

She thought maybe she ought to feel ashamed of her outburst at Karyn, but she didn’t. Maybe Karyn couldn’t control what she saw or how, but that was her fucking job—that’s what they relied on her for. And then she’d just walked off, leaving Nail and Anna holding Tommy’s corpse, Genevieve standing to the side, face white and staring.

Fuck her,
Anna thought, but even that thought carried no emotional weight.

Across the small clearing, Nail slipped the doctor a handful of bills. The two of them hoisted Tommy’s body and disappeared down the canyon of stacked cars.

That’s it. That’s the last of Tommy. The last wisecrack, the last magic trick I’ll watch him fuck up horribly. One last disappearing act. Guess the joke is on us after all.

She didn’t look up as the crunch of footfalls came her way. “Hey,” Genevieve said.

“Hey.”

Genevieve sat in the dirt next to Anna and took her hand. “He was good people,” she said softly.

Anna nodded.

They sat in silence for a long time. Genevieve’s hand was warm and dry in Anna’s, the bones thin and surely too frail to hold Anna up after this. But there was strength there, and Anna felt it flow into her—not much, a trickle rather than a flood, but enough. If only Karyn had been by her other side . . .

Genevieve shifted. “So, uh, I don’t know if this is a good time, but . . .”

Anna lifted her head. “What?”

“Well . . .” Genevieve pulled her backpack into her lap, then pulled out the box she and Tommy had prepared for the job. Black, covered with silver runes as always. The silver handle gleamed faintly yellow in the reflected gloom from L.A.’s skies.

Genevieve unhooked two clasps and opened the box. An old jawbone sat inside like the bottom half of a sinister grin. It looked right at home, yellowed and dry in this desert land. There was something about it that encouraged the eye to linger while making the stomach turn slow, oily circles.

Anna looked up. “What the fuck? How?”

“I found it in what was left of Mendelsohn. I just stashed it when the shit got ugly. Didn’t have time to do much else.” She closed the box. “What do you want to do?”

“I
want
to ram it so far up Enoch Sobell’s ass it’ll count as dental work. But we should cash it in. Fuck, we earned it.”

“You want to make the call, or should I?”

“I’ll do it. But I have to go home first. I need to talk to Karyn.”

* * *

“Karyn?” Anna called as she entered the apartment.

Nothing.

She stepped inside, closed the door, and swore. Karyn hadn’t even gotten home yet, which meant what? That she was out getting hammered? That she’d been ambushed by somebody who’d tailed them from the
clusterfuck at Mendelsohn’s? Or maybe she’d just taken the long way home, needing to clear her head.

Still, that didn’t feel right. Karyn didn’t really party, and she didn’t spend a lot of time wandering the streets, either—too many possible surprises, too many nasty things she tended to see in the people she moved through.

Anna went into the living room, pulled out a folding chair and leaned forward, hanging her head on the card table. She’d wait for a while, and Karyn would come in, and everything would go back to making sense. Maybe they’d have it out, maybe they’d just grieve together, but everything would be fine.

Goddammit, Karyn. Where are you?
She dialed Karyn’s number on her cell. It went to voice mail. She put the phone away and stood. Maybe there was a beer in the fridge. Maybe that would take the edge off the mild panic that was threatening to slip its leash and run racing around her head and heart.

The fridge contained the usual condiments and clotted milk, a loaf of bread—kept there so the roaches couldn’t find it—and a bundle of asparagus Karyn had gotten excited about for no good reason and brought home shortly before the goddamn job had really taken off and asparagus became the last of anybody’s concerns. It had blackened and grown some vegetation of its own.

There were also three bottles of Old Milwaukee. Anna’d almost rather drink horse piss, but Karyn liked the stuff.

Plus, we’re fresh out of horse piss,
Anna thought as she grabbed a bottle. She stared at the other two for a moment, then grabbed them, too. It wasn’t like they were any worse warm.

Anna took her beers and settled into the beanbag chair, the only other piece of “furniture” in the living room besides the folding chairs and table. Almost nothing to show that people actually lived here, but like Karyn said, it was less shit to pack or abandon if they had to leave in a hurry.

Less shit to pack.
That phrase kindled up real dread in Anna’s belly, and an ugly thought crowded to the front
of her mind. She put the beer down and crossed the room to Karyn’s bedroom door. Knocked twice, just to be on the safe side. Then she went in.

The top drawer of the dresser hung open, half-empty, and the closet yawned like an opening to Hell. A handful of hangers had fallen on the floor. The black duffel bag—the one that Karyn kept packed in case they had to ditch in a hurry—was gone.

Karyn was gone.

The phone rang,
and Karyn jumped. It was the seventh time that night, or maybe the eighth, that the phone had started up its jingling, nerve-jangling racket, never mind that she’d pulled the cord out of the wall after the third time and smashed the phone to plastic shards and circuit board fragments after the fifth. A dull red ray of neon light slipped through a chink in yellow-and-brown flower-print curtains that hadn’t been changed or laundered since Lyndon Johnson was president, illuminated a swath of air thick with dust, and lit upon the wreckage of the motel room’s telephone. A few broken pieces of plastic that had landed on the top vibrated as the ringer made its futile plea for attention.

That’s not really happening,
Karyn reminded herself. The phone was broken, sure, but it wasn’t ringing. The plastic wasn’t doing a skittering little dance down the top of the machine. The neighbors weren’t about to start pounding on the door, demanding that she answer the phone goddammit it’s three o’clock in the morning.

She knew it was mostly in her head, though that hadn’t stopped her from answering the phone the first couple of times. It had just kept on ringing, of course, because the message it was trying to convey had nothing to do with the actual phone.

She sat on the edge of the motel room’s bed, on a cheap comforter that also hadn’t been laundered since before she was born, and rested her head in her hands.

It wasn’t going to go away. The phone wasn’t going to
stop ringing, not unless she gathered up its mortal remains, slipped out of the room, and dumped it in the swimming pool, or somewhere else out of earshot. And what would happen then? Either something else would start up, or maybe, finally, it would stop and leave her in peace—and she would go on, ignoring the message.

Because it
was
a message, no different from the usual stream of cryptic quasi-hallucinations that plagued her. They usually needed quite a bit of interpreting, but she thought this one was straightforward enough to figure out.

They were going to come looking for her. Probably already had. That meant she’d have to face them again, face Anna’s anger and Nail’s quiet rage. She’d let them down—and worse.

I killed Tommy.
Like I shot him myself. For four hundred thousand dollars I’ll never see.

She’d replayed that night so many times she felt as though she were living in a mental loop of the night’s events. Tommy’s charred eye sockets at the beginning of the evening, the mad run toward the ritual, her encounter with the guy who’d stabbed her. Little more than a scratch, really, but enough to separate her from Tommy when he’d needed her. Tommy had run, and she’d been writhing on the ground, kicking and fighting, when something had rushed past her, something vague and terrible. Her attacker had frozen, and she’d had this intense, paranoid sensation of being the center of some vast, hateful entity’s curiosity. Then the moment had passed and she’d scrambled free. After that, escape and recriminations.

Of course they’d come looking for her. Anna would, anyway, and once Anna got fixated on something, it would take the jaws of life to get her to let it go. She’d run down the taxi companies, find out which drivers were dispatched in the area earlier tonight, and call them, one after another, until she found the motel.

Karyn picked up her bag.

* * *

Twenty-six bucks. Karyn thumbed through the bills again and verified that they were all that remained of her cash
reserves.
Probably shouldn’t have stopped here,
she thought as she pushed a half-burned French fry around on the plate.
But a girl’s gotta eat.
That, and she felt pushed around today, shoved from one place to the next by sinister shapes lurking just at the edge of her vision. Everywhere she went, there was an obvious way to go, an obvious path to avoid. The effect was tearing apart her nerves.

She looked around the diner. From her seat in the corner, she could see the rest of the occupants, the people walking by the big glass window in front, and the door. No surprises, then. Not yet. Behind the counter, plates clattered and a beat-up radio played some ghastly Rod Stewart song.

She put her wallet back in her pocket. Twenty-six bucks. She’d left the motel at four in the morning with every intention of getting out of town, but somehow that hadn’t happened. Instead she spent most of her cash on another room, and she’d only managed to wander since then. Besides the gentle, indefinable nudging from the visions, there wasn’t far you could get on twenty-six bucks, and once you got there, there wasn’t much you could do. And that was the crux of the problem right there, wasn’t it? What to do . . .

At the next table over, a cell phone rang, “Für Elise”
playing in tinny digitized tones that made Karyn’s fillings buzz. The phone’s owner ignored it, but he gave Karyn a tight, distracted grin when she looked at him. Then he went back to staring at his plate. The phone kept ringing. At adjacent tables, conversations went on uninterrupted.

Karyn ran through the short list of people who might help her. There was Benny, if she could find him. Crystal and Deke, maybe. If they didn’t feel like shooting her instead. There was—

Another phone went off, this one a few tables away. It offered a shrill, out-of-time counterpoint to the nasal Beethoven still coming from the first one.

A woman walked by the front window—thin, rangy, with chin-length dark hair and a faded jean jacket. Anna. Karyn hunkered down in her seat, dropped her head
forward, and covered her face.
I can’t deal with this. I don’t have to deal with this. Why now?
She peeked out between her fingers.

It wasn’t Anna at all. Didn’t look remotely like her, in fact, other than the jacket. This woman’s hair was a stringy blond, her build not as spare.

A third phone started ringing, then a fourth, then several more joined in. It was becoming impossible to hear the voices over the din, yet nobody else seemed bothered.

Karyn closed her eyes and concentrated on slowing down her breathing. Sometimes that helped.
When’s the last time I took my medicine?
She ran back the calendar in her head. What was today? Saturday? Hadn’t she taken the last of the stuff just the day before yesterday? Could it already be this bad?

No wonder she had somehow failed to leave town. In the back of her mind, the sensible part of her had insisted she keep close to her supplier. Still, that wasn’t going to do her any good with twenty-six bucks to her name, less the cost of breakfast. She’d be making snowmen in Hell before Adelaide would spot her on credit.

Another deep breath. The nagging ringtones diminished in volume, though there was something odd about the sound that didn’t reassure her at all. The sounds became muffled, swallowed, rather than simply switching off or decreasing in volume.

Karyn opened her eyes.

The whole left side of the room had plunged into sucking darkness. The wall on that side was gone, with only blackness in its place, and the blackness exuded darkness and shadow into the room. Close to it, people became vague and indistinct, turning into shadows themselves.

In the darkness, something writhed.

Panic threatened to close up Karyn’s throat, to make her heart squeeze into a bloody fist.
This isn’t really happening,
she reminded herself.
It’s a warning of some kind, that’s all.

The darkness moved forward, swallowing another
table. The ringing sounds from over there diminished as the people seated at the table disappeared into the shadow. A woman turned and cast Karyn a look of hatred so severe it made her flinch before the woman faded away.

The back wall of the diner, the one behind Karyn, sank into blackness. She clutched the edge of the table until her knuckles whitened and her fingers ached.

This isn’t happening. This is not happening.

Something—a tentacle, or the wet hand of a rotting cadaver—reached out of the blackness and touched her ankle.

It was too much. Karyn screamed. The shades in the diner leered. She launched herself from her seat, upending the small table. Glass shattered and cutlery flew, and she felt a faint twinge from the shallow cut in her calf, but she ignored it all as she fled for the door.

Shouting and noise came from behind her as she flung the door open and ran out onto the sidewalk. She barely stopped herself before she ran into the street. A quick, panicked look around showed her cars speeding past, people shuffling along in the lunch rush, a cop checking the parking meters. Almost normal, except for the way the radios screamed from the cars as they rolled by, except for the way the inside of the diner had become a black cloud inside the window, like a fish tank full of ink.

A bell jingled, and the door to the diner swung open. Karyn screamed again. Passersby turned to look at her. The women were all Anna, the men all Tommy. He wore the shirt he died in, bloody hole and all.

She turned to run and collided with a man on the sidewalk. He fell back, an irate expression on his face—and she recognized him. It was Drew, the former cult member they’d put on a bus for Seattle.

That’s not really him.

He stepped toward her, and Karyn shrank against a parking meter as he approached.

“Hey,” he said, “are you OK?”

Nail walked by, flecked in blood from head to toe. Karyn tried not to stare. “Do I look OK?”

He paused, a wry grin on his face. “I’ve seen okayer.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I—I get distracted sometimes.”
Who the hell is this?
She wished the Drew mask would disappear and she could figure out if this was somebody she should be afraid of, or a genuinely concerned passerby who ought to just move on.

“I got that. The distraction thing, I mean. Are you OK? I mean, do you need some help?”

She didn’t know how to answer. Behind the man, the black cloud roiled and boiled inside the diner. It was starting to seep out through the cracks around the door, and her eyes were drawn back to it again and again. She feared that it would burst forth when the next person opened the door. Everybody on the street wore the face of somebody she knew, and the cars racing past blasted radios that screamed at her in a foul, loathsome language she couldn’t understand. This was as bad as she’d let it get in years, so, no, she wasn’t OK. But who could help her?

Besides Adelaide.

“That’s sweet, but—” A woman—another Anna, of course—reached for the door to the diner, and Karyn cut off the thought. She wanted to shout, to lunge forward, slip past Drew, and tackle the woman before she could unleash whatever was behind Door Number One.
But there’s nothing there. Nothing. It’s all in my head.
Except . . . maybe the door was a helpful symbol, and maybe the thing
would
come boiling out and swirl around the Anna-faced woman to engulf Karyn and tear her mind apart. It wasn’t real for anyone else, but it might be real enough to her.

The door opened, and a black tide, like an oil gusher bubbling up from Hell, flooded out.

Karyn ran. No pause to think or consider—just pure reaction poured out through her heels.

A screech of tires ripped the air, followed by the hollow
pop
of metal banging together, and Karyn’s hip caromed off a car that had barely stopped in time to keep from turning her into a wet smear on the road. She spun, cast a quick look over her shoulder, and kept running. Somebody swore. She didn’t care. She hit the sidewalk on the other side of the street and kept going.

Ten steps and she stumbled over an Anna in bag lady drag, hauling a rusted red wagon. Four more and she bounced off a Tommy, blood on his hands up to the elbows, then a Genevieve. She stumbled, pitched forward, and fell to the sidewalk, erasing the skin from her palms—but she caught herself before her face hit.

“Jesus, are you OK?”

She pushed herself to a sitting position and winced as her raw hands scraped the sidewalk. It was Drew. Behind him, no black tide, no Annas or Nails. No Tommys. Something seethed at the mouth of an alley a block or so back, and she shuddered, but it really wasn’t so bad.

“You asked me that before,” she said, her voice shaking alarmingly. “It depends what you mean by OK.”

“It was a stupid question both times. Let’s get you to a doctor.”

Karyn started to her feet. Drew took her arm and helped pull her up. “I’ll be fine.”

“Pull the other one.”

“Huh?”

“Leg. Pull the other leg.”

“Oh. Right.” She looked distractedly past him, to the alley, and fought the urge to look behind her again.

Drew sighed. “I don’t mean to be a pain, but I’d feel like a complete asshole if I just left you here. You obviously need some kind of help. A doctor, probably. And, you know—you helped me out before, so it must be my turn.”

Karyn’s shoulders pulled inward, tense, as though she expected something to attack her from behind. She tried to make them relax, but they weren’t having any of it. This whole scene was a nightmare, and it was probably going to get a lot worse before it got better—if it ever did get better. It had been years since she’d tried to do this at all, let alone cold turkey.

“Your turn?”

“Um, yeah. Maybe you remember—bad scene at the garage? Guns, fire, all that shit?”

“You’re Drew?”

He glanced around them. “You know, I was OK with
the freaking out, but now you’re really starting to make me nervous.”

“We put you on a bus.”

“You put me at a bus station.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t go. I don’t know anywhere else. Tina’s my only family, and she’s here.”

“You’re crazy.”

“
I’m
crazy?” He twisted his face in a worried, confused half smile. “Look, we need to get you some help.”

Her normal inclination would have been to tell him where he could stick his help, but this was out of control and getting worse. “OK,” she said, surprising herself a little.

“OK what?”

“OK. Take me to get help.”

“Oh.” Drew frowned, like he was trying to figure out for the first time exactly what that would entail. “You want to follow me in your car, or what?”