Sacrifices (17 page)

“It's that fucking priest,” Diaz Crew said.

Genevieve looked up sharply. “Priest?”

“Shit was normal until he showed up. Gant Street's new best friend. Motherfucker.”

Stash nodded. “Showed up a few months ago, real friendly with Moreno. That's when everything started getting fucked-up.”

“What else can you tell me about him?”

He just shrugged.

Genevieve looked down at the stack of drawings and considered. There was enough going on with the drawings to raise some flags for sure, but add to that a newcomer to the neighborhood—a priest, no less, when the search for a relic was on—and she had all the confirmation she needed that this was worth looking into some more. “I'm going to need to consult with some people,” she said.

“That's it?” Stash asked. “That's what you got? I coulda got that from Black Cat here.”

A couple of the others exchanged an ugly glance.

Genevieve reached into her bra and pulled out the folded bills she had stashed there. “A thousand,” she said, and she tossed them on the table. “As a show of good faith. I'm not jerking you guys around, I swear.”

“Fuckin' better not be,” Diaz Crew said.

She ignored him, turning instead to the kid. “Can I copy down the drawings before I go?”

He nodded.

*   *   *

Dude fuckin' stank. Stank like a week-dead dog lodged in a sewer line. There wasn't gonna be no cleaning the passenger seat when this was done, Clarence thought. He was gonna have to have it reupholstered, and he wasn't sure even that would work. He knew a guy who cleaned up crime scenes and apartments where old folks dropped dead and rotted until somebody found them days or weeks later. Maybe that guy would be able to handle this shit. Or maybe he'd just tell Clarence to sell the car.

Insult to injury, the stink meant rolling up the windows and turning on the AC wasn't an option. The AC was going, sure, but most of it got sucked right out the window while the blast furnace of Los Angeles midday blew its exhaust into the car's interior.

“You okay, man?” he asked his passenger. The guy, Hector, just coughed, releasing another cloud of stench into the car. “You, uh, want some gum or something?” Which was like handing a Band-Aid to a guy with his intestines in his lap, so Clarence supposed it wasn't a big deal when Hector shook his head.

Clarence kept driving. It was twenty, twenty-five minutes to Burbank from here, which ought to give him plenty of time to contemplate just what the fuck he thought he was doing.
Getting desperate
was his first thought. If Owens wasn't bullshitting him, and this . . . affliction, or whatever it was really was fatal, things were bad. It wasn't just his nephew John anymore. He'd heard some disturbing rumors about Phil he kept meaning to check out and hadn't done so. None of the guys in the can
had gotten out on bail, but he'd gotten news from inside anyway. There were four of his other guys down with the same thing as Big John. All four in solitary now, since one of them had freaked out and stabbed somebody in the face in gen pop. That poor dumb slob wasn't ever getting bail now. Probably wasn't ever seeing the outside again, if Owens was right.

Clarence tucked some chew into his lip and sucked on it thoughtfully. This whole thing had him rattled, and he didn't dig that at all. He didn't
get
rattled, not usually.

It wasn't the dead guys. Guys died in this line of work. That was part of it—you knew that when you took the first step down the road, and if you didn't you were a fuckin' idiot and deserved what you got. Guys died, usually brutally, often horribly. What they did not do was conjure snakes from thin air, or, John's latest trick, turn common rats into dog-sized monstrosities with a few words and gestures and drops of blood and then start laughing maniacally until the monstrosity tried to bite their goddamn idiot face off. That shit was flat-out not allowed. It wasn't
normal
.

He'd been seeing the dog thing nightly in his dreams, chasing him and slobbering blood. Laughing sometimes, which it had no business doing. Sometimes it had a distorted human face—Big John's face. Clarence didn't need anybody to tell him what that meant. This shit was eating him up. If Big John had caught a bullet at the prison, Clarence would already have busted up a motherfucker or two and planted ol' John, and he'd be well on his way to forgetting about it. Instead, it ate at him—hounded him, you might say, day and night. Was John gonna drop dead, as Owens said? Or would he conjure up some terrible thing, something worse than the dog, that would go on a bloody rampage right after it tore his throat out and stole his face?

Stole his face? Where did that come from?

It was the laughing that bothered him the most. That had only happened in his dreams, though. Hadn't it? Except . . . he wasn't a man given to flights of fancy, and it
had
made some kind of weird gurgling noise, hadn't it,
right as it leaped at stupid, laughing John? It was
John
who had been laughing, though, not the dog . . . he thought. He was almost sure.

Hector was staring at him, he realized. The man's face had been pointed in his direction, sending waves of stink over here for a good five minutes, and Clarence had been so fixated on that goddamn dog thing that he hadn't even really noticed.

“I'm dying,” Hector said, his voice a breathy rasp. “Dying.”

“What, right now? You need me to pull over?”

Jerome in back made a snorting, laughing sound, but Clarence was serious.

“Sobell is lying, Clarence,” Hector said. “I'm dying. Your people are dying. There's nothing he can do to help any of us.”

Clarence turned to look at Hector, coughed, then faced forward again. Fuck yeah, Hector was dying. Seemed like he might already be the other side of dead. “Everybody's telling me all kinds of things. Gets to be so a man don't know what to believe.”

“He
lies
.” And, in a whisper afterward that sent prickles of gooseflesh up Clarence's arms:
“Lies. Lies. Liar
.
”

“He's paying the bill, though, isn't he? So I got no better reason to believe you than him.”

“I'm dying. Rotting from the inside out. I've become so awful my own flesh is trying to get away from me.” He swallowed thickly. “It
creeps
.”

Clarence could imagine a lot of things that might mean, but he didn't want to think about it. Anyhow, Hector's hygiene issues didn't change his credibility none. He nodded, gave a wry and tight-lipped smile to indicate that he understood, and watched the road. In the rearview mirror, Leland caught his eye and circled a forefinger around near his own temple.

Don't I know it?
Clarence thought.

“You can't trust him,” Hector continued.

“Can't trust you, either.”

“We have common cause,” Hector said. “You and I.
Us
.”

“We got less in common than just about any two people I know,” Clarence said. He was beginning to wonder if this was worth it. There was money, sure, and Big John was family, but how far could a man be expected to go, even for family?

Pretty far,
he thought.
Owens is proof enough of that, and I ain't no less of a man than he is.
He could imagine his sister's face if he told her John was dead on his watch. Probably no tears—she was a hard woman—but her eyes would get soft. Mouth would tremble. A moment later, she'd look at him with a hate that would never, ever go away.

“I'm dying,” Hector said, yet again. “This . . . carcass won't contain me much longer. Your people are dying.”

“I heard.”

“The cure is the same for all of us.”

“The thing we're supposed to be looking for.”

Hector coughed again, and this time a few dots of blood spattered the dash.
Definitely burning this car.
Clarence imagined a fine mist of blood in the air he was breathing, and his chest froze. How much of what Hector had was contagious? “Sobell seeks a relic.”

“Yeah. That's what I heard.”

“It's not enough,” Hector whispered. “No relic alone can help us now.”

“How do you know I ain't gonna go right back and tell him you said so?”

“You aren't a stupid man, Clarence.” Whispers afterward, repeating his name.
Clarence. Clarence.
“Who do you think put you in this position to begin with?”

“I been up a few nights thinking on that,” Clarence admitted.

“We can help each other,” Hector said. “To Sobell, all men are nothing but tools, to be used harshly and discarded when their usefulness has ended.”

That wasn't too far different from Clarence's own philosophy, with one exception. “I ain't nobody's tool,” he said.

“You're either the sculptor, the chisel, or the stone being shaped,” Hector said.

The guy was full of shit. Clarence didn't have a shred of doubt about that. But he might be only
half
full of shit. Maybe less. The idea that Sobell would treat him like a chisel and toss him out when he'd been used so hard he got damaged wasn't so much a worry as it was a fuckin' law of nature.

Hector would fuck him over, too, as soon it became advantageous. That didn't mean he might not be useful. It might take some careful positioning, but Clarence thought it could do him a world of good to cozy up to the man. Metaphorically speaking.

“I hear you,” Clarence said. “I believe you, too. I just don't know what I can do for you. I ain't much more than a gofer here.”

Another bloody cough, and this time Hector wiped a gob of red phlegm on the dashboard.
Jesus fucking Christ.

“We need a weapon,” Hector said. “A weapon to strike against the source of this corruption, to cut it from our spirits like cutting out a cancer. A weapon, and strength in numbers.” He coughed another of his ghastly coughs again. “Bring me to your people. I can help them. Slow the changes. Buy time.”

Clarence looked away from the road and checked Hector's eyes. The guy was desperate, no doubt about that. He might even be sincere. Maybe he was lying his ass off, or maybe Sobell was, but there wasn't no reason not to work both angles. If Sobell used Clarence's guys to find the solution, great. If not, maybe Hector here would offer up another way.

He considered his options. Big John was his first concern, but maybe that wasn't the best idea. Phil Holsom, though . . . He was down with this stuff, too, and that might be a better way to go. Phil was solid, dependable, and a good earner, but he also was meaner than a pit bull with a mouthful of ground glass. If this went bad, nobody would miss him all that much. It wouldn't be hard to spin up a story about Phil pissing the wrong guy off, and there wouldn't be a lot of questions. The man's wife would probably be grateful.

“Let's go see my man Phil,” Clarence said.

It was off the beaten path a good way—Burbank was forty-five minutes or more from Phil's place in Compton—but depending on how this went, Clarence wasn't sure they'd be hitting Burbank after all. Sobell had a problem with it, he could go fuck himself.

Phil's place was in a two-story apartment complex across from a dollar store and a discount liquor shop. The complex was surrounded by a red-brown metal fence, but it looked to have been recently renovated, and the lawn in the courtyard was kept well enough. Decent enough digs for the neighborhood. Clarence entered the code at the gate and parked his car inside. He got out and started walking toward the first-floor apartment on the corner.

Hector followed him, with Jerome and Leland trailing a little farther than normal, probably to get some distance from the smell.

He was only a few strides from the door when it opened. A heavyset woman with close-cropped hair and bright earrings came out and pulled the door shut quietly, as though trying not to wake a baby. Clarence saw her shoulders slowly descend an inch or two as she let out a breath.

When she turned around, she gasped and one hand went straight to her chest. “Jesus, you scared me.”

“That's a big bag,” Clarence said.

She looked down at the big beach bag she carried. From where Clarence stood, it looked full of clothes.

“Gonna visit my mom,” she said. She sounded like any of a dozen lowlifes trying to tell Clarence that they were on the way to see him with the money, really, and then they'd just gotten sidetracked.

“Anything I need to worry about in there, Cheryl?” Clarence asked, tipping his head toward the apartment door.

She licked her lips nervously. “I . . . I don't know. He's . . . busy.”

“Is he awake?”

“Uh. Sort of. Not really?”

“You don't sound too sure.”

She looked at the sidewalk, then back up, and she
shrugged. “I ain't too sure. He's in the bedroom, kinda . . . zoned out?”

“Does he have a gun?”

“Three or four of 'em, I think.”

“Does he have a gun on him?”

She shrugged again and gave him an embarrassed smile. “Don't know.”

She'd been honest with him after the initial lie, Clarence thought, but there was no way she was visiting her mom. She'd packed clothes enough for a week, from the look of things, and from the terror on her face, he thought she wasn't planning to come back at all. From what he knew of Phil, the man wouldn't have tolerated that. That she'd taken time to pack anything at all rather than just head for the hills suggested Phil wasn't altogether with it. “Go visit your mom,” he said.

She walked away, casting nervous glances back over her shoulder until she reached her car.

Clarence waited until she pulled away and then put his hand on the doorknob and slowly turned it. He pushed the door open with the palm of his other hand, letting it swing open as he stood outside. When he saw nobody inside, he went in. It was a good-sized two-bedroom apartment, and even if Phil was a mean fucker with impulse control problems, he apparently hadn't blown all his cash on booze and drugs. Either that or his old lady kept him in style. Slick furniture, lots of leather, nice TV. Nice decor overall, like maybe an interior designer had been at the place. Even a couple of pieces of art, nice blown-glass stuff like decent Chihuly knockoffs. He would have guessed Phil had the artistic sensibility of a trout, but there they were.