Sacrifices (22 page)

“This is crazy,” she said.

“I told you. Best get clear, chica.”

Genevieve's heart dropped as she realized Anna might be on her way, or already there somewhere. She got out her phone and dialed. The phone went to voice mail. “Anna, if you get this, stay out of the Gardens. They're about to become a war zone.”

There. Shit. Now Anna would know she'd been followed, but there wasn't anything Genevieve could do about that. Better that than she catch a bullet.

If only Genevieve could do the same for the priest.

A car packed with a small group of young Latino guys turned a corner a couple of blocks ahead, cruising toward Genevieve and Stash. Looked like six men, and one of them was the guy Stash had sent off to round them up like some kind of barrio Paul Revere. Guns bristled from the
windows. Another car pulled in behind them, and a third after that.

“This isn't worth it,” Genevieve said. “Not over a couple of street corners.”

Stash gave her that “Are you stupid?” look again. “What the fuck else you think we got?”

Genevieve's mind raced. What to do? Go with and look for an opportunity to cover for Anna, protect the priest, or learn some little tidbit that might be of use, and maybe get her brains blown out for her trouble? Stay clear and live with whatever the aftermath turned out to be?

She dialed Anna again. No answer. In the absence of any other information, she had to assume Anna and the others hadn't found the priest yet, and that the guy was still here, probably right where all the bullets were going to start flying.

Stash pulled keys from his pocket and headed toward the car parked next to the building, a puke-yellow rust bucket that had to be older than him by a decade or more.

“I'm coming with you,” Genevieve said, rushing to catch up with him.

“The fuck you are.”

“I need to talk to that priest. Are
you
gonna make sure he doesn't get hurt?”

A dangerous, bloody look came into his eyes. “You friends with Gant Street?”

“No! No! I just need information, that's all, but if he gets killed, I am screwed. I need to be here.” She thought for a moment, then offered: “I'll help you. Trust me—you want my kind of support.”

“Your kind of support.”

She pulled the small notebook she kept with her from her pocket and drew a series of lines on it, stabbed herself with the broken-off clip of the pen, and dripped blood on the drawing, saying a few quiet words over it as the blood droplets fell. Then she folded it up and stuck it in her pocket. “Makes me lucky.
I
might not be getting shot here today.” She hoped. In point of fact, this one was new for
her, from some of the materials she'd gotten from Sobell after the last job. She'd practiced the drawing and the incantation. Whether it actually worked . . . well, she hadn't asked anybody to shoot at her to find out. It wasn't a shield or armor, just luck. She thought it might keep the strays away, if not a shot aimed right at her at close range.

“Get in the car,” Stash said. “And make me one of those. Spoon,” he yelled, waving at a shorter kid wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses. He threw the kid the keys. “You drive.”

The three of them piled into the front seat—the only seat, actually. “An El Camino?” Genevieve asked. “You find this in a museum?”

Stash ignored her. A couple more guys jumped into the back, and Spoon took off, following what had now become a shitty, impromptu convoy of sorts, like something out of
The Road Warrior.

The lead car picked up speed, and the three behind leaped forward after it. A middle-aged woman covered her ears and went inside her house. Genevieve scribbled out a drawing for Stash, put a drop of her blood on it, and dragged the jagged metal of the pen clip across the back of his hand. He glanced down but didn't say anything, and she finished the working. “Keep it in your left pocket,” she said.

After a couple of blocks, Genevieve saw the remains of the drawing Anna had photographed. The four big symbols toward the middle had been scratched out, and the perimeter was marked with streaks of what looked like dried blood. The convoy rolled past at about forty miles an hour. Amazingly, nobody had started shooting yet. Somehow Genevieve had got it in her head that the men in the cars ahead would be blasting away, blowing holes in everything standing, but not a single shot had been fired so far.

This is crazy. Children could get shot. Old people. Anybody. Even these stupid fucking kids.
After the awful scene at Sobell's, she'd seen enough gun violence to last her a lifetime. This was going to be ugly and bloody. There had to be a way to stop it, Genevieve thought, but nothing came to mind.

A single sharp crack of gunfire sounded up ahead.

*   *   *

The first shot bloomed into dozens as Rogelio Moreno burst into the house. Startled, Anna dropped her fork and jumped to her feet. Abas stood also, unsteady on his feet, worry etched in the lines of his face.

“What's happening, Rogelio?” he asked.

Moreno ran for the small living room. He shoved the couch aside and began pulling at floorboards. “They broke the wards,” he said. “They're coming. The Flats, the Eighteeners. Others. The kids are holding 'em, but . . .” He shook his head. The floorboards came up and he threw them aside, where they clattered against the wall. He reached in the hole and pulled out guns. A couple of AK-47s, Anna guessed, just about as illegal as it was possible to get short of a rocket launcher.

“Bullets won't stop this,” Abas said, even as the shooting outside picked up in intensity. How far away were they? A block? More?

“Then tell me what will,” Moreno said, slamming a clip home.

“I can stop this. It . . . it will cost.”

“Burn the bones, I don't care. Dead fuckin' relatives never did me no good anyway.”

“Dead relatives aren't enough. This will be worse.”

A window blew out with a crash, sending glass all over the kitchen. Right where Anna had been standing.

“Yeah. Fine,” Moreno said.

Abas, surprisingly, turned to Anna. “Go to the bedroom closet. There's a leather satchel. Bring it to me.
Now
, before people die.”

This is none of my business,
Anna thought, but she'd put herself here, and she didn't want more dead on her conscience. She moved, even as the priest began removing objects from the pockets of his robe.

The satchel took no time to find, and she paused as she picked it up. Was the relic in here? She could be gone with it in moments.

And people will die.

She couldn't help it, though—she opened the bag.
Inside, taped to the leather, were bristly things lined up in rows, as well as small vials of blood. Each had been labeled, and when she saw the words
LI'L FREAK
written in looping letters, she understood.
Not bristles,
she realized.
Locks of hair.

She closed the bag and rushed back to the living room. The table had already been pushed to the wall by the couches, the rug rolled back to reveal a circle carved in the battered pine boards of the floor. White wood shone against the wear and dirt and age of the rest of the floor—the carving was new, relatively.

Moreno pulled off his shirt, and Anna gasped. His chest, back, and shoulders were a webwork of wounds. Dozens of thin cuts, scabbed over, traced a gruesome, incomprehensible path over his torso. Magic, and worse than the normal kind, which seldom required more than a few drops.

Moreno lowered himself to the floor, arranging himself in the circle with an assuredness that told Anna he'd done this many times before. The cuts, no doubt, had come from other sessions of the kind. There would be more now. Anna felt a stirring excitement, almost sexual in nature, at the thought.
That's not me, either,
she thought. She wanted to throw up.

The priest had produced a skeletal hand from somewhere—
his robe, he keeps it in his fucking robe
—and he laid it on the floor at Moreno's head.

“The satchel,” he said.

Anna handed it to him. He pulled the contents out with a hurried precision, placing locks of hair and drops of blood in various locations on Moreno's body. Then he got out a knife. Not a pocketknife or one of those oversize survival knives, the KA-BAR things Nail liked, but an actual dagger, double-edged, inscribed along its length with crap Genevieve would probably have recognized.

At the first slash, Anna turned away. Not out of revulsion but the opposite—a fascination, a
hunger
had surged inside her at the sight of blood, and the part of her still capable of good sense didn't want to feed it.

Wait. Isn't this what I'm here for?
The bones, the
priest—to think now that this wasn't all tied in with Sobell's goal was too much of a stretch to be credible anymore. She sure as shit couldn't figure out what was going on here, but she knew people who might.

She turned back to the grisly scene, trying not to revel in it, and got out her phone. The priest was bent over Moreno's body, tracing bloody lines that to Anna's eyes looked far more than skin deep. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose as his incantation rose and fell. He wasn't paying her the slightest attention.

She took four pictures before realizing that video was really the way to go here. The drawing was only part of the story. The motions and the chant told the rest. Genevieve might be able to make sense of them, and if not, she'd find somebody else. She started recording.

Gunshots sounded outside. Somebody yelled.

Moreno bucked as if struck, his head snapping to one side. He grunted in pain. The priest chanted louder. Invisible blows seemed to rain down on Moreno's body—Anna could see his flesh pucker and ripple at the points of impact. The grunts became screams. Bone cracked. Something invisible slammed into Moreno's forehead, and his head bounced off the floor. Purple-black bruises began appearing over his torso and arms.

Anna was torn. Half of her felt sick and horrified, and the other half wanted to watch with avid excitement while Moreno was pounded into mush. With difficulty, she squelched the latter.

She put her phone away.

“You have to stop this,” she said. “You're killing him.”

The priest didn't look up, but he did interrupt his chanting. “Look at him. He's not restrained. He's here because he wants to be—it's all we can do now. You should go.” He resumed chanting without a breath after the word “go.”

Anna stood, helplessly watching.

*   *   *

Genevieve craned her neck as she tried to see what the hell was going on ahead. There had been that single shot, then a fusillade, and then a big maroon car had barreled
out of a side street and plowed into the lead car. Gant Street might not have been expecting this, but
somebody
had been prepared.

Stash stuck his torso out the window as the convoy came to a halt. “What the fuck? Move!” he shouted, to no effect. Genevieve couldn't see much from here, but she could see enough to know that the accident with the red car had blocked most of the street. Tires squealed, but the wreck ahead didn't move. One of the cars started backing up to try to go around, but the others vomited out their passengers as more than a dozen men decided to bring the fight on foot.

Stash and Spoon both got out. Genevieve followed, cursing under her breath.

They made it up to the wreck, keeping low. The driver of the red car was dead, his body riddled with bullets, but he'd made a hell of a mess blocking the road.

Just a kid,
Genevieve thought as she glimpsed his face.
Jesus, they're all just kids.
Another barrage of shots sounded, and Stash pulled her down behind the wreck. Most of the men crouched here, temporarily cowed.

“Where they at?” Stash asked, in nobody's particular direction.

“Back there,” one of the younger kids said, waving something that looked like a low-rent Uzi toward a couple of cars parked in front of a little shack of a house. It was just past the intersection—Genevieve could hit it with a thrown rock. Bullet holes peppered the cars and the front of the building, but as Genevieve popped her head up to get a better look, two guys took shots at her. She flattened herself to the ground, heart pounding in her ears, an inane thought echoing in her head:
nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
Where had she heard that? she wondered as she pressed her face to the dirt. Churchill said it, she thought. Fuck that guy. She felt like puking.

“How many?” Stash asked.

“Four, for now.”

“Four,” he said, gasping. “We can take four.”

“What are you thinking?” Genevieve asked.

“We rush 'em when I say ‘go.'”

“That's insane,” Genevieve said, but the guys around her were nodding. “This isn't fucking Normandy.”

But Stash was already assigning roles. This group to go down the alley and around. This group to throw down a barrage of covering fire. This last group—six guys, with Stash himself at the lead—to charge. He grinned at Genevieve. “Hope that shit you gave me works.”

“Don't do this,” she said.

He waved at the guys to go. A group of five split off, heading down the alley. More shots were fired, missing their targets.

Stash pressed back against the car's tire, waiting. His face was flushed, eyes bright with excitement. He was going to die here, or somebody else was, and there wasn't a goddamn thing Genevieve could do about it.

Forget it. Who gives a shit? They're gangsters. This is what they do.
The words were hollow, a useless screen that couldn't shield her from the awfulness of what was about to happen.

Stash moved to a crouch. A moment later, he leaped to the top of the car, screaming and firing his gun. His guys were right with him, and the air ruptured with the sounds of gunfire. Genevieve covered her ears.