Premonitions (21 page)

Anna listened with mounting unease. She remembered Greaser’s car sitting at the drop site for more than an hour and Nail commenting on how strange that was. Greaser had left, in the end, but now the remains of a car that had been blown to hell were parked in the same garage. Probably even the same spot. Which meant—what?

It meant a setup, of course. Her best guess was that Greaser’d torched his own car and run off with the million bucks and the bone, leaving Anna and company as the perfect fall guys for Sobell and the Brotherhood to take their wrath out on.

“Where is Ames?” the loud guy demanded.

Adelaide started humming. Something smashed against the wall.

The afternoon had passed
with a wretched, crawling slowness, each moment dragging reluctantly after the last in a chain broken only by the occasional illusory rap at the door or ring of the phone. Karyn had jumped at nearly every one, triggering a startled reaction from Drew.

“Take a nap or something,” she’d told him after the first hour. “You’re not helping.”

“We’re sitting here waiting for what? Somebody to come kick our heads in?”

“Tahiti is out, remember? I don’t know what the hell else we’d do besides wait. Unless maybe you’ve got some new bright ideas?”

“This sucks,” he’d said, and then he’d curled up on the chair and turned his back to her. Still jumped a lot, though.

The waiting was bad enough, but as the afternoon wore on, Karyn began noticing other things that were even more worrisome. At first, the knocks merely came with more frequency. Then the phone began ringing virtually nonstop, the racket from the old handset ceasing only long enough for Karyn to let out one tense breath before it began again. Eventually, she’d moved the damn thing into the other room, and when that proved inadequate to stifle its ringing, she’d put it in the oven and closed the door. If the gas had still been connected, she would have been sorely tempted to melt it to slag, but even this way it was quieter.

By evening, she was wondering how she’d ever sleep again. She sat on the couch and put her fingertips to her temples, trying to drive out the noise by raw concentration. Closing her eyes didn’t help—it turned out that blocking out all visual stimulus made the noise that much worse—so instead, she stared straight at the wall ahead of her, unblinking as though she were trying to set it on fire with the intensity of her gaze.

Part of the wall turned gray as she focused on it. At first, she thought it was a trick of vision, like when stars would sometimes seem close enough to grab when she stared at them intently enough. She squeezed her eyelids shut for a count of ten and opened them again.

The gray spot had spread.

What the hell?

She got up from the couch and walked across the room, holding one hand out in front of her.
What is that?
The spot was gray, fuzzy, and almost circular in outline, and she had no idea what it was until she reached the wall and leaned in close. A faint, familiar smell came from the spot.

Mold. That’s mold.
As she watched, the spot expanded to the size of a dinner plate, then a hubcap, then larger, like watching a time-lapse video. The center sank in, leaving a dark hole. She reached out a hand to touch it, but felt only smooth, flat wallpaper.

“What are you doing?” Drew asked.

“This is so w—” she began, turning toward him.

She screamed and jumped back. Drew was gone, and Anna was in his place, a bullet hole slightly off-center in her temple. Blood and worse spattered the couch, the chair, and the wall behind her.

“Whoa! Hold on! Relax, OK? What’s going on?” The apparition stood.

Drew. That’s Drew.
It didn’t look like Drew, and it didn’t sound like him either. It spoke sort of like he did, but the voice was all Anna. Karyn stared in fascinated horror.

There was a rattle from the front doorknob. The Anna figure disappeared, leaving only a nervous-looking Drew
who, this time, jumped at the same moment Karyn did. He froze, leaning toward the back door like he was ready to bolt.

“Oh,” she said hoarsely. “Company.”

“Don’t—” he began.

She took a few steps and opened the door.

Nail stood there, fist cocked back and teeth bared. A moment later, he recognized her, lowered his fist, and grinned.

“God, it’s good to see you,” he said. Behind him, Genevieve smiled.

“You sure about that?”

“Hell yeah. Anna said she stopped by yesterday, but the place was empty. This is the only
good
surprise I’ve had in a week.”

“Yeah, well. Come on in,” Karyn said. As he and Genevieve came in, she looked past them to the street, then shut the door. She gave Genevieve a curt nod. “Where
is
Anna?”

“She said she had an errand to run,” Genevieve said.

“What errand?” Karyn asked.

“The kind of errand you ought to give her a big hug and a thank-you for when she gets back,” Genevieve said. “You know what I mean.”

Karyn’s concern bloomed into something approaching panic. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Call her. Right now.”

Nail shrugged. “Been calling her for half an hour. No answer.” He paused, studying Karyn’s face. “We cool?” he asked.

Karyn glanced at Drew, who was standing half in the living room doorway looking like he had to pee real bad. “Yeah,” she said absently. “But we have to find Anna right now. Where’d you park?”

“Couple blocks down.”

“Let’s go.”

Nail frowned. “That ain’t such a hot idea. Sobell’s guys are trashing the earth trying to find us.”

“Sobell?” Karyn asked. “Why would Sobell be looking for us?”

“We got the bone and made the drop. Now the bone’s
gone and Greaser’s dead,” Nail said. “We don’t know what happened, but think about it. If you’re Sobell, all the signs point right back to us. He’s already sent some guys.”

Karyn scowled at Genevieve. “Isn’t this your department? Can’t you call him up and straighten things out?”

“I wish.” Genevieve leaned back against the wall, most of the swagger gone out of her. “Greaser was my contact, for one thing. For another, I know you think me and Sobell are like two peas in a pod, but really, I’m just like you guys—a contractor. If he thinks you fucked him over, he thinks I helped.”

Karyn considered this for all of a second. “Too bad. We have to—” She stopped abruptly, a sick feeling in her gut and a horror in front of her. She thought she might have screamed again, or maybe it had just come out in a breathless wheeze.

“What’s wrong?” Genevieve asked. It wasn’t Genevieve anymore, though—she’d turned into Anna just as Drew had. This time there were six bullet holes, all through her torso, though she was still standing, propped against the wall with eyes half shut. “What’s wrong?” the apparition asked.

Karyn closed her eyes and held her hands open in fans by her sides. One breath, then two. This wasn’t real. When she opened her eyes, everything would be back to normal.

She opened her eyes.

Nothing was normal. Three Annas stared back at her. Two had been shot, and the third had sustained a blow that had pushed in the corner of her head, distorting her face horribly.

“It’s cool,” the third Anna said. “It’s cool.”

“Yeah,” another one added. “Everything’s fine.” Blood pulsed out of a hole in her chest with each word.

“All right,” Karyn said, though her heart pounded and it was all she could do to keep herself from hyperventilating.
Not real.
But it was always real, wasn’t it? At least, sort of. And she didn’t need to be told again.

“We have to go,” she said.

“I don’t know . . .” the Anna with the crushed head said.

“Anna’s going to get killed. We have to go
now
.”

One of the Annas—Genevieve, Karyn thought—seemed to turn a shade paler, and alarm filled her voice. “Adelaide?”

“Yeah. That place is crawling
with guys from the Brotherhood.”

“What?”

“What about him?” The Anna with the broken head pointed to the one behind her. “What the hell is he doing here, anyway?”

“He comes, too,” Karyn said. Now was not the time to bother with that second question.

The one behind her started. “Um, I—”

“Can’t leave you here,” Karyn said. “Sorry. Now, for the last time, we need to fucking
go
. Move it!”

Enoch Sobell paced his office.
He hated it. Pacing was so . . . so
prosaic
. Expectant fathers and anxious boring people of all stripes supposedly paced, and if there was one thing he strived not to be, it was boring.

Anxiety, though, seemed to have a will of its own. Every time Sobell sat, he ended up tapping a foot, then shifting left and right, unable to get comfortable, and before he knew it, he was strolling the length of the office over and over again, shuffling his thoughts into apparently random combinations.

If it worked worth a damn, he might not have minded so much, but he couldn’t think of a single instance where he’d actually gotten a useful idea out of pacing. It was always when he stopped thinking of a problem that he found the solution.

Sex would be great right now.
It would, too, but these days it took quite a production to get him up to the task, and he’d probably get interrupted in the middle, which would only piss him off further.

Coke?
No. That just made him wired and, oddly, amped up his focus, so he’d pace twice as fast and think about the problem twice as hard.
Acid?
It had been decades since he’d used the stuff, but it might do the trick. He couldn’t concentrate on shit when he was tripping, best as he could remember, and the hallucinations might even be inspiring.

He shook his head.
Better not.
The problem was
solved, he was sure. The Whisperer Shade would find Ames, and he’d take care of the rest. It wasn’t so much that he needed to come up with a solution, he realized—he was simply terrible at waiting.

The intercom buzzed.

“Mr. Sobell, we’ve got a solution,” Brown said through the tiny speaker.

Uh-huh.
He rolled his eyes, but he buzzed the man in.

Brown walked in with a suspicious spring in his step, and Sobell scowled. Now was not a good time to be jaunty. He’d goddamn well better have a solution, acting like that.

Brown pulled out a small device, little more than a phone-sized LCD screen with a few buttons at the bottom. He held it with a smile.

“Mr. Brown, what in holy blue fuck is that?”

“GPS.”

“Thank Christ. I was afraid I might get lost in here.”

“It’s not for you, sir.”

Sobell drew in a long breath, forcing himself to be patient. “Please tell me what you plan to do with that thing.”

Brown’s smile grew. “Manny and Carl found the Ames woman’s apartment.”

“Good. What about the others? Did you find all of Gresser’s records?”

The smile faltered. “Um, well. I haven’t found any records. I mean, Manny and Carl found the apartment. They were . . . confused. Like, they said you told them where to go. They seemed, I dunno. Kind of out of it, honestly.”

Sobell found that rather disturbing. He wouldn’t have recognized Messrs. Manny and Carl at gunpoint. It was likely he’d never even seen either of them. He filed the fact away for later. “Continue,” he said.

“They said they almost caught Genevieve Lyle at Ames’s place, but she took off with a guy matching the description of DeShawn ‘Doornail’ Owens.”

“And?” Despite himself, Sobell was getting interested.

“And, Ms. Lyle left her phone.” Brown grinned like
he’d delivered the punch line to the world’s funniest joke.

Sobell didn’t get it. “So?”

“So, the outgoing call record only has four numbers in it. We checked them—all prepaid, so they can’t be traced. But we called them. Two are out of service, and one goes to Owens. And the last goes straight to a woman’s voice mail. All she says is ‘Leave a message,’ but we’re pretty sure it’s Karyn Ames.”

“How do you know it’s not her favorite fuckbuddy?”

“We don’t, I guess. But she’s only called those four numbers in the last couple of days, so the safe money’s on Ames.”

Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but Sobell nodded, pleased. This was the best work he’d gotten out of Brown yet, and it was definitely worth checking out. “What now?”

“The phone is still on. Nobody’s answering it, but we can use the cell towers to track its position.” Brown held up a hand. “Let me amend that. We
have
used the cell towers to track its position. Then we send it to this unit.” He made a show of reading the GPS. “The phone is in a Motel 6 on Figueroa and Grand.”

Sobell nodded again, and this time he felt a grin spread across his face. “That’s good work. Let me grab something, and let’s go.”

“You’re coming?”

“Oh, yes. Though I warn you, if we go in there and I end up witnessing Ms. Lyle riding some ugly bastard like she’s practicing for the rodeo, I might have to shoot someone on principle.”

Brown actually chuckled. There was hope for the guy yet.

* * *

Joe Gresser had one hell of a headache. Tension, he thought. There was a lot going on, a lot to keep track of. A lot at stake. It didn’t help that he’d run his mouth for what felt like twelve of the last sixteen hours. Maybe that was an exaggeration, but he was still pretty sure he’d done more talking just that day than in all of the
preceding two weeks, and it was amazing how much that took out of him.

He turned in his chair, wondering if there was an aspirin in here somewhere.

His temporary base of operations was the office of a third-rate garage and full-time chop shop. The office was small and cramped, crowded with an oversize desk and a mess of filing cabinets. A ten-year-old computer squatted under the desk, hooked to an equally vintage CRT that whined like a swarm of mosquitoes. That was all fine—he wasn’t here for the decor. The garage itself was owned by somebody whom Sobell had some leverage over, and it was so tenuously linked to the man that Gresser doubted he even knew it was one of his properties. That would be good, for now. Nobody would come looking for him while he . . . prepared.

Low voices came from just outside the office door. Alvarez, it sounded like. Maybe he had news from the search.

“I ain’t goin’ in there,” Alvarez said.

Werner, the man tasked with guarding the door against interruptions, wasn’t having any of it. “Fuck you, then. I ain’t doin’ it, either,” Werner said. “It’s your news.”

Gresser chuckled and looked down at his left shoulder, down at the creature that now clung to his jacket collar with tiny claws. It was like some kind of grotesque baby, or—he grasped for the word—
fetus
, only with an oversize, weirdly shaped head. The jaw was sized for a normal adult, but the cranium had barely developed, remaining little more than a flat, faintly pulsing mass of flesh. Tiny slitted eyes glared from it.

“It’s going to be OK,” he assured it. “We got this.”

It shifted, making a squishing noise in the brownish slime that had oozed from its body, staining the jacket and Greaser’s undershirt, dripping down his belly and into his lap. It wasn’t happy, he knew. They were supposed to have an army around them, but something had gone wrong. He wasn’t too clear on the details—he wasn’t too clear on a lot of things right now. But it was manageable, he knew that. They’d made quite a start already. Alvarez and Werner had been two of Sobell’s
most loyal, and now they were Gresser’s, body and soul. There were over two dozen others who had also found themselves persuaded. There would be more.

He got the impression that his new little buddy was nothing if not opportunistic, which suited him right down to his bones.

“I’ll give it to you, and you tell him,” Alvarez said.

“Sorry, bro. I’m just the help.”

“Don’t ‘bro’ me, asshole.”

Gresser gave his little buddy a rueful smile. Buncha pussies they had working for them, but it was all going to be OK. There’d be others, better, when they weren’t quite so . . .

Vulnerable.

Yeah, that was it. Vulnerable.

“Yeah, fuck you, too,” Alvarez said. A moment later, the door opened. Gresser had a brief view of the garage beyond, a row of half-dismembered auto carcasses, and then Alvarez came in.

“Glad you could make it,” Gresser said.

Alvarez pressed himself back against the wall, eyes wide and fixed on Gresser’s little buddy. “Urk,” was all that came out. His throat worked as though he was trying not to puke.

Gresser shifted in the chair, crossed his legs, and folded his hands in his lap. “So?” he prompted.

“Mr. . . . uh. Gresser?” Alvarez said, face drawn tight in confusion. “I thought . . . Where’s . . . ? Mr. Sobell?”

Gresser frowned. His little buddy crawled up a few inches, allowing him to reach into his jacket. He pulled a pistol out and set it on the desk. “You can talk to me,” he said.

Alvarez managed to tear his eyes away from Gresser’s little buddy and focus on the gun. That seemed to help him gather his thoughts.

“A total zero, sir,” he said.

Gresser tipped his head back slightly, looking down his nose at Alvarez. “Really?”

“They knew we were coming,” Alvarez said, panic causing his voice to crack on the last syllable.

The creature around Gresser’s neck shifted. Its tiny eyes looked up at him, and then it moved its misshapen head and met Alvarez’s eyes directly. It chittered, a high-pitched clicking and squeaking noise that sounded to Gresser like laughter. Then it crawled up on Gresser’s shoulder and pushed close to him.

He’s lying,
it said.

That was funny, in a way, and Gresser smiled. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You’re way out of your league.”

Alvarez nodded. “Maybe they didn’t know we were coming, I don’t know. But they’ve all cleared out anyway. And . . . we lost Carl and Manny.”

Gresser nodded. Losing those two meatheads wasn’t so bad for its own sake, but it was an uneasy reminder of his own vulnerability right now. His little buddy made another gabbling sound, and Alvarez fought a losing battle to keep his disgust off his face.

“Is that all?”

Alvarez didn’t answer. Gresser tapped the gun on the desk, and once again Alvarez’s attention snapped back to the matter at hand.

“Uh, no. Not really.” He made a pained face. “There are . . . rumors. I don’t really—my head . . .”

No surprise there. L.A. was boiling over with rumors tonight, and it seemed like nearly every man in Gresser’s small army had called in or come by to deliver some piece of weird and often irrelevant news in the last few hours. Not all of it was useless, though, and it was a good practice to keep his finger on the city’s pulse.

“Spill it.”

“They’re all saying you—Mr. Sobell, I mean. They’re all saying he’s out. Like, out of his building. On the streets.”

Gresser checked with his little buddy, who laughed again. “Now, that
is
interesting. We might have an opportunity to move the schedule forward some.”

Alvarez said nothing.

“Forget about Ames’s crew,” Gresser said. “We’ll get to them later. Right now I need you to find as many of our guys as you can and send them here.” He smiled.
“Tell them Mr. Sobell wants to see them, here. Tell Werner to send ’em back to see me in groups no larger than two.”

“Yeah, OK. Sure thing.”

“All right. Get on it.”

Alvarez reached for the doorknob, and the creature on Gresser’s neck chittered.

“Oh, one more thing,” Gresser said.

Alvarez hesitated, then slowly turned around.

“As far as you know, you were back here talking to Mr. Sobell himself.”

Alvarez’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a horrid grimace, and he closed his eyes. His hand went to his temple. A moment later, he relaxed. He opened his eyes and lowered his hand. The confusion clouding his face seemed to diminish.

“Sure thing, Mr. Sobell,” Alvarez said.