Premonitions (19 page)

Ruben guided the car into a parking space—if not the same one they’d been parked in before, then one very near it—and stopped with a jolt.

“Easy on the brake there,” Gresser said.

“Yes, sir.” Ruben checked the mirror again, met
Gresser’s eyes, and looked away. The others sat, facing forward and awaiting orders like obedient dogs.

Gresser set the box on the seat next to him, calmly reached inside his jacket, and pulled out a gun. Marty and Jorge were dead before they could even think about turning around. Marcus managed to get half turned and even one hand on his gun before Gresser shot him three times through the seat.

Only Ruben was smart enough to get out of the car. He ducked as soon as the firing started and pushed the door open, sliding out after it. Gresser pulled the trigger twice, sending bullets into the dashboard and instrument panel.

“Shit.” The car was full of blue smoke, enough to make Gresser’s eyes water, and his ears rang like an air raid siren. Who knew firing a gun inside a car was so goddamn
loud
?

The window to his left blasted inward, spraying black glass over the inside of the car. He tried to crouch, but he was simply too big to make that effective. He grabbed the box, and keeping as low as possible, made for the nearest door. Bullets tore into the seat behind him and into Marty and Jorge’s bodies, and then he was out.

“Ruben, you’re making a mistake,” he shouted. His own voice sounded weirdly hollow and distant in his ears, like somebody else was talking to him through a long tube.

Ruben may have been a meathead, but he was smart enough not to say anything and give Gresser a read on his location.

OK, smart guy. Let’s see how you like this.

Gresser simply walked around the back of the car. The first shot missed him clean. The second dug a blazing furrow in the side of his neck. By then, Ruben was out of chances. He stood ten feet back from the vehicle, gun gripped in both hands and panic in his face.

Gresser shot him in the gut. He dropped, mewling. He tried to get off another shot, but it went wide and ricocheted off the concrete.

“Hey, smart guy,” Gresser said, kicking the gun from
Ruben’s grasp. “You shoot for the body, not the head. Bigger target.” He shook his head. “Didn’t I teach you better than that?”

Ruben gasped and clutched his stomach. “Boss . . .”

“Don’t you fuckin’ ‘Boss’ me. C’mon.” Gresser grabbed the big man by the back of his coat and hauled him back to the SUV. Left a pretty good blood trail, but he didn’t figure that’d be a big deal.

More blood pattered down on the concrete, and Gresser’s hand went to his neck. He bent down, checking his reflection in the side mirror. The wound was bloody, but he’d had worse. “Shit, that’s ugly. Your hands weren’t shaking so much, I’d be a dead man, Ruben. How do you like that?”

Ruben didn’t have much to say. Looked like he’d gone into shock. Probably better for him that way.

Gresser opened the driver’s door and hoisted Ruben inside. Ruben wasn’t any too helpful, so it took a bunch of grunting and heaving and swearing, and at the end of it, Gresser’s head spun in wide, wobbly circles. He put a hand against the vehicle to steady himself.

After the world stopped trying to buck him off, he took his gun back out of his jacket. It was a nice gun—a nickel-plated, pearl-handled Colt .45 that dated back to God-knew-when. Too bad.

He checked Ruben’s breathing. Not much of that, anymore. Ol’ Ruben was alive, but not by much. Gresser put the gun in Ruben’s waistband. Then he took his rings off—silver pinkie ring on the left, big gold skull on the right—and jammed them on Ruben’s fingers.

There.
Sobell didn’t know how many guys he’d taken with him on this job, and probably couldn’t have named more than four or five of Gresser’s meatheads out of dozens anyway. Ruben was big enough to pass for Gresser, once enough damage was done to the body.

Gresser popped open the fuel door.

Enoch Sobell sat facing
the window that looked out over the city, though he’d stopped really seeing this view years ago. It may as well have been a mediocre painting, purchased long before and, with all its meager secrets gone, reduced to little more than wallpaper in a fancy frame. He looked over it, past it, his eyes fixed on a spot in the cloudless sky and his mind running pointless laps.

His brand-new lieutenant, a clod who went by the uninspiring name of Brown, clomped into the room.
He’s not stupid,
Sobell reminded himself.
But he’s a crank-turner, an order-follower. He’s never had an original idea, and he never will.

“About a third of the guys haven’t checked in,” Brown said. “Nobody knows where they are.”

“This is bad, Mr. Brown.”

“Yeah.”

“The last time I got fucked this thoroughly, it took six whores and twenty thousand dollars, plus extra for hardware and damages. I couldn’t walk for four days afterward.”

“Um.”

“I think I was on a mix of methamphetamine and Darvocet at the time.”

“Uh.”

“I was considerably happier about that fucking, Mr. Brown.”

Brown shuffled his feet. “I, uh, can’t say as I blame you. Sir.”

“Any word on the body?”

“Which one?”

Which one. Christ. Like any of the others are important.
“Gresser’s. They’re sure it was him?”

“It’s kind of a mess. I don’t know if there’s even enough left to get a match through dental records. The gun, though—well, that was a mess, too, but we’re pretty sure it was his.”

On the one hand, that was another miserable facet to this five-cornered goatfuck. Gresser could be relied upon to handle disasters like this with virtually no oversight. On the other hand, Sobell was glad the bastards who’d gotten the drop on Gresser hadn’t taken him and tortured the fuck out of him or anything like that. He knew
way
too much for safety.
I’d probably have to have gotten rid of him eventually anyway,
Sobell thought with a sigh.
And also, those grapes probably taste like shit.

“No sign of the, ah, object either,” Brown offered.

“That would have been a lot to ask.” Sobell sighed again. “I assume you’ve already pulled the home addresses of Ms. Ames and her merry crew of assholes?”

“Uh, no. They’re not exactly in the phone book.”

Sobell fixed Brown with a stare hard and pointed enough to nail somebody to a cross. “That’s why we have people, Mr. Brown. And money. I assure you, your pre- decessor had all this information secured.”
Probably in his goddamned firebombed skull, which does me exactly no good now.
“If he found it, you can, too.”

“I’ll get right on it.”

“Yesterday would be nice. They’re probably all long gone by now. I think one of Gresser’s former employees might also have the address of Ames’s dealer. You might send someone around there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, would you be so kind as to get the fuck out of here?”

Brown nodded, did an about-face, and quickly exited the room. Now that he’d been given some direction, he’d keep grinding away until he found the info he needed. It
might take him a while, but he’d get there. Why it required a lightning bolt from Heaven to give him the idea in the first place was something Sobell would never understand.

This whole mess was a distraction he did not need. His most trusted lieutenant murdered, a bunch of thieves run off with an artifact that might or might not be useless but certainly had been fairly paid for, and all the while a demon’s enigma awaited his attention, if he planned on living much past his next birthday.

“Never mind that for now. There is work to be done,” he announced to the empty room. He stood, stretched, and walked to the staircase. Up the stairs, through the antechamber, and into his office. He opened a concealed sliding door behind his desk chair and entered his private chamber.

The room was a mirror image of the office, spare, with only the objects in the alcoves breaking the blankness. Whereas the impressive and expensive were on display in the office, here Sobell kept the real collection. No more than a dozen items, and most of them appeared to be junk. Katherine’s gown, for example, was a thin scrap of ancient, nearly transparent rags, and the Babylon Codex had to be encased in glass, lest the slight draft of a person’s passage cause it to crumble further. But Sobell had seen the gown cloak a six-foot man in the appearance of a small child, and the one page of the Codex he’d managed to read had scared him so badly he hadn’t gone near the case since.

He wasn’t sure what he needed today. It would be the height of stupidity to wait for Brown to get this issue resolved himself, so Sobell would have to get dirty, but the right way to do it eluded him. A seeking spell wouldn’t work without a bit of hair or blood from the party being sought, so that was no good. A demon would certainly do the job, but his recent encounter had reminded him most firmly why he’d sworn off summoning demons years ago, after one had slipped the leash and gone on a rampage that made the current clusterfuck look about as important as losing a game of Parcheesi.
Demons were squirrelly fuckers—one little mistake in the binding, and a demon would walk through it like the Arc de Triomphe.

No, I won’t be doing that again.

He didn’t know a spell that would help, so he turned to the collection. Something here had to serve. He’d gladly have burned half the priceless artifacts in the room to get his hands on Ames and make an example of her. Really, what good were the damned things? Take St. George’s sword, for instance. It was impressive, ancient, maybe even holy, but how often did one need to cut through steel plate in this day and age?

He walked the perimeter of the room, pausing at each object. This was the largest collection of its kind that he knew of, and even so, he despaired of finding the right tool for this job.

He stopped in front of a black ceramic jar on a simple pedestal. The jar had been sealed with wax, the outside covered with symbols and runes Sobell didn’t recognize.

Aha.

There was a creature trapped in the jar, or so Sobell had been told. It was reportedly called a Whisperer Demon or a Whisperer Shade, depending whom you asked. He doubted it was a demon, since it’d be tough to jam a demon of any size into a container no bigger than a pickle jar, but who knew? The capabilities of demons were notoriously variable and not well understood.

The creature in the jar could help him, if even part of what he’d read about it was true. And yet . . .

It’s not
really
a demon. Probably. And, anyway, I won’t be summoning it. I’ll be doing the miserable fucker a favor, actually.
I
didn’t put it in that jar.

He almost walked away. Risk was part of what he did for a living, every day, but the uncertainty here made his mouth dry and his breath come short. Behind Door Number One was either the answer to his problems or something that would cheerfully fold him up and stuff
him
in yonder magic pickle jar, size considerations be damned.

But he thought of Gresser, burned beyond
recognition. Of two million dollars that had been stolen, like the perpetrators thought they were mugging a helpless grandmother.

Of the bone.

He got out his pocketknife—horn, ivory, and steel—and cut his left palm. He wiped the blood around the lid of the jar, three times in a circle, and spat out the words that were supposed to open the container.

On the third pass, the wax cracked and fell away. There was a faint hiss, as of escaping air, and then the lid popped off and fell to the floor.

When nothing further happened, he looked in the jar.

Empty.

I’m going to kill that son of a—

The faint hiss sounded again, this time from behind him.

Enoch Sobell turned slowly around. There was nothing behind him—except, wait. The hiss resolved itself into a distant-sounding chorus of whispers. An area of the wall opposite Sobell was darker than the surrounding walls, and very slightly wavy, as though he viewed it through a nearly invisible, rippling sheet of black gauze.

A word emerged from the whispers: “What?”

That was surprisingly to the point.
He paused, considering. It occurred to him that maybe the right thing to do was to set this aside for now, to go straight for the man the demon had shown him. Forget, however briefly, the slaughter of his best employee and the subsequent theft of what was his.

And if the man I’m looking for is on the other side of the world? What then?
Well, then, if what he’d learned about the shade was true, it might take months or more to find the man as it essentially went door-to-door chasing rumors across half the globe. Sobell didn’t have that kind of time, and his contacts would likely be better, and faster, for that purpose.
The wrong tool for the job, I suppose. Best resolve this current mess before it encourages any sharks to start circling.

“Karyn Ames. Find out where she is as quickly as you can, then come tell me.”

He got no response, but the air ahead of him fluttered once, then brightened.

He searched the room, looking for any telltale sign, finding nothing. He was alone.

That wasn’t so bad,
he told himself, but a deeper part wondered.

Two hundred fifty Gs,
Nail thought. It was a thought that still wouldn’t find a home, just kept roaming around in his head like it couldn’t settle in.
Two hundred fifty Gs.
Had to be a good thing, right? Had to be. Enough to get Clarence off his brother’s ass for good, take care of his own debts, and stash some away. There ought to be some fuckin’ relief in there for somebody, right?

He stopped at the stairs to his apartment. The afternoon was the usual stifling hot, even though the stairway between the buildings was in the shade, and three floors all of a sudden seemed like a hell of a walk. Everything seemed exhausting. Times like this, it usually felt good to hit someone—go out, find the guys responsible, and make it right. Not this time. Tommy was dead, and it wasn’t even really anybody’s fault. Just a bullshit stray round. Oh, sure, somebody’d pulled the trigger, but Anna had filled him in. Everything had gone crazy by that point. Probably the shooter hadn’t even known what he was doing, just firing off a shot out of fear before he got the hell gone, practically a reflex, and Tommy’d been in the wrong spot. Nail had known a guy in Afghanistan who went out like that, only it had been friendly fire that time, some nervous kid named McCarthy behind the gun. Nail had felt equally useless then. What was he going to do, go pound PFC McCarthy into the ground? Guy had been on suicide watch ever since the shot, so it’s not like there was any satisfaction to be had there.

So that was Tommy. The situation with Anna and Karyn was no good, either. He’d already hit up a few spots this afternoon on Anna’s recommendation, hoping maybe to run across Karyn and talk to her some. Maybe try to mend some fences, or at least make sure she was OK. He’d never got the full story on her weird-ass talent, never wanted to, but he’d heard enough to know she could find herself in a bad way if she wasn’t careful, and Anna’s panicky voice on the phone had told him everything he needed to know about how serious it was. He’d had no luck, and now he was too damn tired to keep driving around.

He looked around, feeling at a loss for what to do with himself. A dozen or so feet away, four battered old air-conditioning units hummed, and beyond that, a sorry-looking hedge of some ugly damn bush put up a halfhearted screen between him and the street. He thought about going for a run, thought about the air-conditioning, and decided three flights wasn’t so far after all.

He hefted his duffel bag—
Two hundred fifty Gs
—and started up the stairs. Once inside, he’d take a shower, pull the curtains closed, and catch a nap. Then maybe try to catch back up with Anna, see if Karyn had turned up, or if there was anything else he could do.

“Hell, no,” somebody said from the next flight up. “My fuckin’ nephew’s too goddamn stupid.”

“He ain’t that bad. Cut him some slack.”

“I told his old man. I says, Denny ain’t got the sense . . .” The chatter continued, and Nail’s mind was already wandering away from it. He trudged up another few steps, then turned the corner.

There were four guys ambling down the stairs, two of them talking up a storm of bullshit, not ten feet away. Big guys, no-neck bruisers, and dressed way out of season in long coats.

Nail started to back up, hoping to duck back around the corner before they saw him, but it was too late. One of the men, a red-faced guy with a head like a bowling ball, pulled a sawed-off shotgun from his coat.

There was no warning, no “freeze, motherfucker,” and
the crazy-eyed grimace on the man’s face told Nail there wouldn’t be. He threw himself down and forward.

The gun went off just over his shoulder, a clean miss, and he plowed into the red-faced guy’s knees. Something popped and the guy howled as the two men fell, rolling down the stairs. After a thumping, bone-jarring ride down half a dozen steps, Nail caught himself. The red-faced guy rolled up a moment later, and before he could get his balance, Nail punched him in the head. Pain exploded in his hand, but the guy fell back down, stunned, and Nail snatched the shotgun from him.

The other three guys stood a little way up the stairs. Two of them had pulled out guns, too, little short-barreled Saturday night specials. Not real accurate, but they were too damn close to dismiss. A .22 and a .32, it looked like. Small, low-velocity bullets, which at least meant not a lot of stopping power.
Might not
go through a human body.

Nail pulled the red-faced guy up in front of him. The guy groaned as he tried to put his weight on his left leg, and he ended up standing on only the right.

“What the fuck?” Nail asked.

“You’re a dead man,” one of the guys up the stairs said. Tall guy with a crew cut that emphasized his already flat head.

“Yeah, I got that. You wanna tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“You shoulda skipped town after you did Greaser, asshole. Now you’re gonna pay.”

“‘Did’ Greaser? I ain’t ‘did’ no one, man. We made the fuckin’ drop.”

This was bad. It didn’t make any sense for starters, but these didn’t look like the kind of guys who worried too much about that. If it weren’t for the red-faced sack of shit in front of him, they’d have put a bunch of holes in him already. He wasn’t sure they weren’t about to try anyway.

“How about you put the gun down and let Teddy go, and we’ll go somewhere and talk this out?”

Okay, they were definitely going to shoot him.
Crewcut’s voice had gone all singsongy, like he was trying to get a mean dog to calm down. He sounded about as sincere as a mob lawyer.

“How about you throw me that bag, and I walk away real slow, and nobody shoots nobody?” Nail tried. He didn’t have much hope that that would work, but you never knew. Besides, that was a quarter of a million dollars sitting in a bag next to Crewcut’s feet. Had to at least make a little effort for it.

“Nobody’s gotta get hurt here,” the guy said. “You got something that belongs to Mr. Sobell. You give that to me, and I’ll take the money, and
maybe
you’ll get a good long head start.”

Crewcut had a shit poker face—Tommy would have taken him for a mint—and Nail read the precise moment the man decided to shoot him.

Nail shoved the red-faced guy forward. Crewcut’s gun went off, the bang echoing brutally in the stairwell. Nail fired back in his general direction, even as he lunged toward the stair rail. Didn’t hit shit that he could see, but at least a couple of the guys tried to get down. Crewcut fired again, wildly, missing, and Nail rolled over the rail.

He landed on his feet, more or less, on the next flight of stairs down. Above him, the red-faced guy was slumped against the wall, bright blood pumping out onto the stairs. The other guys were running down past him.

Nail took off. A firefight in close quarters with these clowns would be a fucking disaster, total chaos, and even if he had a huge edge in training, there was no telling what would happen. Four steps down, he jumped the next rail again, then ran, skipping three steps at a time, all the way to the bottom. A couple more shots were fired. God knew where the bullets ended up, but they didn’t hit Nail.

He bolted past the air-conditioning units, hung a sharp left and headed for the parking lot. A glance behind him showed his pursuers huffing and puffing, having finally come around the corner—far enough away he could get some wheels before they could catch up to him. He jumped in his van.

“Hey!” one of the guys shouted. Now, though, there were other people around, maybe half a dozen scattered throughout the parking lot. Lot of witnesses. Maybe that meant something to these assholes and maybe not, but no more shots were fired.

Nail fired up the van. Moments later, he was leaving tracks of melted rubber at the parking lot exit. He took the first left down a narrow alley, then screamed back out on the next street, eyes half on the road and half on his mirrors. Another couple of quick turns and an ignored red light later, he thought he was clear.

He pulled into another alley and reached for his phone. Dialed Anna while staring at his mirrors. Voice mail.

Not good.

He floored it, and the van roared out into the street. Anna and Karyn’s apartment was fifteen minutes from here, if traffic didn’t fuck him. Fifteen minutes. Karyn was probably safe—she wasn’t around and anyway, she was Karyn. Anna, though . . . Had Sobell’s guys already gotten to her?

Nail glanced at the speedometer, saw he was doing sixty in a thirty-five. Too bad. If the cops stopped him, he’d tell them there was a murder in progress.

He dialed the phone again. Nothing. Flipped through his numbers, veered around a black Toyota that was lurching down the middle of the road like a wounded animal, and dialed Genevieve. No answer.

Six minutes, and he was almost there. That would be a new record. He dialed the phone again. No answer at Anna’s number. No answer at Genevieve’s.

He rolled into the parking lot at Anna’s place eight minutes after starting out for it. To his surprise, Genevieve was standing out on the fire escape. Her back was pressed to the stucco, and she was slowly edging toward the ladder.

He parked the van, grabbed his newly acquired shotgun—draping a jacket over it as an afterthought—and ran over.

Genevieve caught his eye and put her finger over her lips, telling him to be quiet. Not three feet from her, the
window was open. The sound of something smashing came from inside.

Genevieve made it to the ladder and started descending. A moment later, a heavyset guy poked his head out the window.

“Hey!” the guy shouted.

Nail brought up the shotgun. “Hey yourself.”

The guy disappeared back into the apartment. Any second now, he’d be back out, waving a fucking gun. Or maybe he’d be smart enough to send a friend around front.

“Come on, girl,” Nail said. “We gotta go.”

Genevieve dropped to the ground. Sure enough, the guy peeked out around the edge of the window, waving some hardware around. Nail pulled the trigger. Stucco and plaster rained down on the fire escape. Some lady walking her dog yelled at her kids to get inside.

“Nice timing,” Genevieve said.

Nail didn’t take his eyes from the window. “Where’s Anna?”

“She’s not here. She’s . . .” She looked up at the window. “I’ll tell you later. What now?”

“You hear sirens?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” He threw his keys to Genevieve. She got in behind the wheel of the van.

Nail backed up, keeping the shotgun trained on the window.

“You don’t know who you’re messing with, asshole!” the guy shouted.
Tough talk from a guy who won’t come out where I can see him.

Nail got into the van and poked the shotgun through the open window. “Gen, get us out of here.”

“Right on.”

They pulled away. Nail half expected the guy in the window to start blazing away at them once they were halfway down the block, but evidently he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.

Nail looked over at her. “You OK?” He flexed his right hand and grimaced.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah. Where’s Anna?”

“Went looking for Adelaide.”

“Who?”

“Long story. What are you doing here?” Genevieve grinned. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Buncha guys came for me, too. I busted my hand on some motherfucker’s hard-ass head. First time that’s ever happened. You gotta have a
hard
-ass head to break my hand.” He moved it again, and again made a pained face. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I could track Karyn if I had a hair or something. I’ve checked already, but I thought I’d make another run at it, just in case. No luck.”

“You don’t answer your fucking phone anymore?”

Genevieve grimaced. “I left it on the counter. I heard it ring, but I was hiding from those guys by then. Guess they’ve got it now.”

“Too bad. Any way you can get ahold of Sobell?”

“Why?”

“Greaser’s dead, and Sobell didn’t get the bone.”

Genevieve turned her head sharply toward him. “What?”

“That’s what they told me. They were ready to fuck me up because they think we killed Greaser and took the bone and the money.”

Genevieve’s face, pale to begin with, was nearly white. “Oh, this is not good. Not good at all.”

“No shit.”

* * *

“There,” Nail said, pointing at an open spot next to the curb. Genevieve parked and reached for the ignition.

“Don’t turn it off,” Nail said. “Just in case.”

“Sure you don’t want some help?”

“I’d rather you kept the car running.”

“Okay.”

He got out. The sun was edging down below the concrete horizon, and long shadows covered the sidewalk. He walked fast, ignoring the throbbing in his hand. Hopefully he wouldn’t need Gen’s emergency getaway car service,
but after the day’s events, it couldn’t hurt to have her ready. If there was an open price on their heads, Pete would know, but Nail didn’t give it much better than sixty–forty odds that Pete would give him the lowdown rather than try to collect.

He took a quick look up the street, just to be sure, then stepped into Pete’s Paradise, a tropical-themed shithole that pretended to its name about as well as Spam pretended to be steak. The door closed behind him with a rattle. One look at the place, and he almost turned around and walked out. There were maybe six people in the whole bar, bartender included, and there was a
bad
vibe here. A couple of guys in the corner had their heads together, muttering, but they stopped and stared at him when he looked their way. Behind the bar, Pete himself suddenly turned his back on a customer who’d been leaning over the bar, close enough to whisper, Nail thought. Even Elly, the woman who regularly hung out in the back corner alone and drank herself to oblivion every night, was talking into a cell phone, one hand covering her mouth and the bottom of the phone.

Nail put his hand on the door to let himself out, and stopped.
They ain’t talking about you. Can’t be. That’s just nerves talking.
He walked to the bar with his head up, and sat at the end of the bar opposite the bartender’s buddy.

“How about a Bud?” he asked, overloud. Pete made a show of wiping down a glass first, but he made it to the tap eventually.