Before we’d left the diner, we’d worked out the finer details of the plan, so that a simple phone call would set things in motion.
The phone rang once, twice, three times and then, on the fourth ring, was picked up. I waited a moment; if Denise said hello that would mean someone was on to them.
When the silence continued, I spoke a single word.
“Execute.”
The phone was hung up on the other end, signaling that my message had been received.
There was no going back now.
So be it.
35
My intention was to slip off the property, grab a cab to the place where Durante had hidden the final portion of the Key, and return with it before anyone even knew I was gone. I would then find a decent place to hide it until it was time for the next stage of our plan.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
No sooner had I left the bungalow than Rivera intercepted me and put me to work. I accompanied him back and forth across the property and throughout the house, using my ghostsight to examine all of the arcane wards and defenses that had been erected in the wake of Grady’s murder. We were still at it, several hours later, when we were both summoned to Fuentes’s office.
When we arrived, we found Ilyana already there and Fuentes pacing back and forth behind his desk. The atmosphere in the room was tense, and as I pretended to feel my way to my seat I could feel my heart rate kicking up.
Here we go.
Fuentes got right down to business.
“A courier just delivered a priority letter from Jack Bergman. He’s offering to turn over the final piece of the Key in exchange for his life. He has asked for a meeting at nine this evening, at a location he will reveal closer to that time. Thoughts?”
Ilyana was the first to speak up. “It could be a trap. We know Bergman was taken from the motel by person or persons unknown; perhaps they are trying to set you up, take you out.”
Rivera seemed to consider this for a moment and then shook his head. “I just don’t see it. With Durante’s death there isn’t another practitioner in town that could challenge your power. We’ve eliminated or driven off any serious challenge to your authority and we would have known if anyone of that caliber had entered the city, especially in the last few days. Bergman’s not a player; I think he’s just scared out of his mind and is looking for a way out.”
“Hunt?”
I was surprised that Fuentes bothered to ask my opinion, but we’d planned for it just in case.
“Strong emotions can often stick to an object, leave a kind of emotional trail if you will. If the letter truly is from Bergman, and if he is truly scared out of his wits the way Rivera suggests he would be, then I should be able to see it using my ghostsight.”
Fuentes glanced at Rivera and raised his eyebrows, questioning what I’d said without coming out and saying so. I had to resist the urge to laugh in his face when Rivera nodded.
Gotcha, I thought with smug satisfaction.
“Excellent idea, Hunt,” Fuentes said. “Please, take a look. I’m placing the letter directly in front of you on the edge of my desk.”
I could see it just fine, but of course he didn’t know that. I pretended to give it due consideration and then sat back, clutching my head as if the effort had been a bit much.
“Fear. Definitely fear. A little bit of hope, too, but mostly fear. Whoever wrote that letter really doesn’t think they’re going to come out of this alive.”
It was all bullshit, plain and simple. Denise had written the letter and paid the courier to deliver it as a priority parcel. When Fuentes arrived with his two pieces of the Key, Denise and Dmitri would be waiting to help me with the final part of our plan. And though he didn’t know it yet, the Preacher was going to help too.
Willing or not.
But first I had to get the targets to the meeting place.
And pick up the final piece of the Key somewhere along the way.
“All right, that settles it,” Fuentes said. “The three of you will be my escorts. I want this thing to go off without a hitch.”
“Yes, sir,” Rivera replied.
“What about Bergman?” Ilyana asked.
Fuentes laughed. “I’m surprised you even need to ask. Once he turns over the remaining piece of the Key, kill him and anyone who’s with him.”
36
Once the decision had been made to meet with Bergman, Fuentes kept the three of us busy throughout the rest of the afternoon, which proved even more frustrating than the morning had been. Every time I would try to find an excuse to leave the property, even for only a few minutes, Rivera would be there, giving me a new task to perform. My paranoid nature told me he was intentionally keeping an eye on me because he and Fuentes knew the truth, knew I’d been the one to kill Grady, knew I was setting them up for a fall. Then my rational side would rear its head, reminding me that these guys were paranoid to begin with and they didn’t have to know anything about what was really going on behind the scenes to want to keep me in their sights. I was, after all, an outsider and, to top it all off, here against my will.
I was ready to scream in frustration by the time the call from “Bergman” came in that afternoon. The meeting site turned out to be a warehouse along the docks in Long Beach, some thirty miles away. Of course L.A. traffic being what it is, we needed at least an hour to get there at this time of day, leaving us with just enough time to get our things together and get on the road.
Fuentes had wanted to get there ahead of time, in case Bergman changed his mind and tried to bolt at the last minute, but their strategy of keeping us in the dark until the last minute would make that difficult to pull off. I knew there was no chance of Bergman getting cold feet, particularly since Bergman wouldn’t be anywhere near the place, but there was no way I could talk them out of the frantic rush to leave without making it obvious I knew something they didn’t.
Thankfully, Rivera demanded we take two different vehicles for security reasons, and when he put Ilyana and me in the same vehicle and he and Fuentes in the other, I wanted to shout in satisfaction.
Now, at least, I had the means to retrieve the final piece of the Key. All I had to do was convince Ilyana to play along with me for the ruse I had planned. Given her previous comment that her presence here wasn’t entirely voluntary, I was hoping I could appeal to her desire for freedom and enlist her help in pulling all this off. If she disagreed, I was going to have to find a way to take her out of the equation, perhaps permanently.
That was a task I wasn’t looking forward to.
I would have preferred leaving the final piece of the Key right where Durante had hidden it. It would have been safe there and there wouldn’t have been any chance of it falling into Fuentes’s hands. But in order to fulfill the letter of my bargain with the Preacher, all three pieces of the Key had to be present when he arrived to collect. That meant I had to retrieve the final piece or deal with the Preacher’s wrath, and something told me that I didn’t want to default on the terms of our agreement.
All of which meant I had no choice about what I had to do next.
“I know where to find the final piece of the Key,” I said to Ilyana, as we began the journey to Long Beach with the last of the day’s sunlight.
Ilyana was driving and she barely glanced in my direction as she said, “Not funny, Hunt.”
“I’m not trying to be,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I know where it is. I need your help to get it. If we do, I promise that you won’t have to worry about Fuentes or Rivera any longer.”
She started to laugh and then stopped. “You’re serious,” she said, her voice trembling slightly.
“Of course I am. Did you think I would make something like that up and dangle it in front of you, of all people? Give me some credit.”
She was quiet for a time and then, “Where is it?”
Her voice was full of need, of longing. Maybe even anticipation.
“I can’t te
ll you that. Not until you give me your word that you’ll help me take down Fuentes. Are you with me or not?”
Her brow creased in confusion. “You’d take my word as bond? Even knowing what I am?”
“You’re not that different. You want your freedom as much as I do.”
To her credit, she only took another thirty seconds to think about it. “Done. I give you my word that I will help you break free of Fuentes’s control and influence.”
That was good enough for me. “We need to go to the Hollywood sign. We need to do it alone and we need to go now.”
She didn’t question it; she just picked up her cell phone and pushed a speed dial number. When whoever it was on the other end answered it, she said, “I think we’ve picked up a tail. Keep going; we’ll check it out and then hang back a bit to discourage any others that might be out there.”
Ilyana listened for a moment and then said, “Relax, Rivera, I’ve got it. Better to deal with it now than to lead them all the way to Long Beach and the meet-up, right?”
Rivera must have agreed, for Ilyana killed the connection and then took the next turn we came to, cutting off the car beside us and banging a hard right in the process.
“This excuse should be good for twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes. Beyond that we’re going to face some serious scrutiny when we catch back up with them.”
“That should be more than enough time,” I told her, while secretly hoping I was right. Ghosts could be fickle creatures and the one we were going to visit had more reason than most.
37
The sign.
Or, as the locals call it, the Sign.
Perhaps one of the most famous landmarks in the entire world, right up there (at least Los Angelinos think so) with the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids of Giza. Built on the edge of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, the Sign looks down on the city of L.A. with casual indifference, the perfect attitude, I thought, to match the very thing it now stood for, the hope and misery forever bound together in the Hollywood entertainment industry.
Originally built in 1923 as an outdoor ad for a suburban housing development known as Hollywoodland, the Sign has become the symbol of something that’s hard to define. Like the section on an old map marked by the warning, “Here be dragons,” the Sign seems to shout a message all its own, one that on the surface screams “Dreams are made here,” but underneath breeds the harsh cynicism of an industry that can chew you up faster than a spectre-eating demon, present company excluded.
We were here to meet with someone who had experienced that cynicism firsthand and who had succumbed to the dark allure it exuded.
In years past it was possible to scramble up the steep face of Mount Lee to reach the fifty-foot-tall letters fashioned of wood and sheet metal, but erosion, vandalism, and concern for the welfare of those stupid enough to attempt the stunt eventually resulted in a fair amount of changes.
The sign was restored in 1978 and the original letters were replaced by forty-five-foot steel behemoths, designed to last for decades to come. The sturdiness of the structure would make what I had to do here tonight easier, so I was thankful for that, but the increased security that went along with it didn’t have me jumping for joy. I couldn’t blame those in charge, though. The sign had a long history of incidents surrounding it, including the one that had brought me there that night.
In September 1932, an English stage actress named Lillian “Peg” Entwistle used a workman’s ladder to climb to the top of the letter H and then threw herself off the top, the first person to commit suicide from the sign.
Durante had given the last piece of the Key to Peg’s ghost. She was the one we came here to find.
After we gained entrance to the place, of course.
In 2000, the L.A. police had hired Panasonic to install a rather intricate security system designed to stop trespassers like me. The system consisted of a perimeter fence topped with razor wire, twenty-four-hour surveillance cameras, infrared detectors, motion detectors, and regular foot and air patrols by the Los Angeles Police Department.
Overall, it was both a comprehensive and effective design.
Thankfully, I had Ilyana on my side and we were going to make short work of the security. Get in, get what we needed, and get out again, all without being caught. That was the mission protocol for the evening and we were ready to carry it out.
Time was at a premium, so we couldn’t make our way down to the sign from above as I would have preferred. Instead, we parked on a side street, cut through several yards to reach the base of Mount Lee, and then began climbing upward.
It didn’t take long to reach the fence.
“Would you mind?” I asked.
“Not at all.”
Ilyana walked forward, grabbed a section of the chain link and tore it free of the pole to which it had been secured. From there it was a simple matter to hold it open long enough for both of us to slip through to the other side.
Knowing an automated call was already going out to the L.A. police, I didn’t waste any time, hustling forward and climbing up the last hundred feet to stand level with the base of the letter W as quickly as I could. Ilyana followed, with, I must admit, a bit more grace than I. Once she joined me, we both moved over to the letter H.
The feed from the surveillance cameras surrounding the sign was visible from several different Web sites and I wondered how many people were chatting about me on the Internet as I made my way over to the access ladder at the back of the H and began climbing upward. Hopefully we’d be long gone before someone tied my image to that of the man wanted for multiple murders by the FBI and Boston PD.
Otherwise, things might get a little uncomfortable up here.
Peg Entwistle had thrown herself off the top of the H, so if I wanted to meet her ghost that was where I had to go as well. The wind whipped and picked at me as I made my way up the ladder, and I knew it would be even worse once I reached the top, but there was nothing to be done for it. Hand over hand, foot after foot, I went up that ladder.
Reaching the top, I paused to catch my breath with the city of Los Angeles spread out below me. Lights gleamed and glistened and from here the town looked like a jewel in the night. It was a beautiful sight and I took a few seconds to drink it in.
Then, just to remind myself that all is not as it seems, I triggered my ghostsight.
The city below me was transformed. Angels warred over downtown, riding the air currents like massive eagles, swooping and diving as they slashed and hacked with the weapons in their hands, spilling blood onto the streets below. Darkness lay about much of the city, creeping insidiously into areas that had previously been bastions of light and power, now grown cold and dark with the futility of their inhabitants. I stood there, a watcher of the dark, and felt it watching me in turn.
It was enough to make me shudder and turn away.
Enough dillydallying, Hunt, I scolded myself, and dug my harmonica out of my pocket. Putting it to my lips, I began to play a summoning song.
It was a soft, gentle melody, a wistful song of lost hopes and dreams, of desires unfulfilled. I’d never heard it before, but I knew it was right just the same, just as I’d known that the ghost of the long-lost actress was the final piece needed to solve the puzzle.
I played until the smell of gardenias washed over me.
It was Peg Entwistle’s favorite scent of perfume and one of the signs I was looking for.
Slowly I turned around and there she was, standing about five feet behind me. She was slim and good-looking, with short-cropped blond hair and a crooked little smile. She was dressed in a skirt and top; her jacket, shoes, and purse had been left behind on the ground, neatly folded.
At first I thought she’d seen me, for her attention was focused completely in my direction, almost unnervingly so. But then she started walking toward the edge and I realized what was happening; she was going to throw herself off the H just as she had some eighty-odd years ago. If she did, it would be nearly impossible to get
her to manifest herself again in time to make the meeting. I was going to get one chance at this!
I pulled out my harmonica and began to play, letting the full force of my emotions pour into my music. Peg managed a few more steps, closing roughly half the distance to the edge. I tried different styles and tunes as I searched for the right one.
So focused was I on getting it right that I nearly jumped out of my skin when a police helicopter came roaring over the hill behind us. A spotlight speared down from above and it didn’t take long for it to find me standing there atop the H. I knew they couldn’t see Peg and wondered what was going through their minds as they looked down from above to see me swaying there, harmonica to my mouth and weird strains of music pouring forth, a modern-day Nero fiddling while the city below me was lost to darkness rather than fire.
My question was answered seconds later as the booming voice of the chopper’s PA system split the night. “This is the Los Angeles Police Department. You are trespassing on private property. Climb to the top of the hill behind you and wait for the arrival of other officers now en route.”
I didn’t bother to acknowledge them in any way; I was focused only on the song pouring out of my instrument, knowing that if I were to be distracted now I’d lose my tenuous hold on Peg’s ghost and destroy any chance we had of getting free of Fuentes.
The music was working, there was no doubt about that. Peg had stopped her inexorable walk toward the edge of the sign and was standing there, as if in indecision. A few more minutes and I’d have the link I needed to get her to release the rest of the Key.
The voice boomed again, the spotlight still holding me in its grip. “I repeat, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. Continue to ignore our instructions at your own risk. Officers are on their…”
There was a shattering of glass and the light went out. The PA boomed a final time, “Shit! Shooting at us!” and then went silent as the chopper banked away.
Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Page 20
