Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  It also got much darker as they moved away from the church. All the lights near the fence were dark, coincidentally or not, and soon it became hard to see Nail a stone’s throw to her right. She slowed, thinking they must be approaching the spot by now, but she still couldn’t see anything.

  Then a sound. A light whuuf, a pause, then a scraping sound. A shovel sliding through dirt. The airy thump after that was a dry shovelful of dirt hitting a bigger pile, she thought. The rhythm was fast, and now that Anna’s own breathing had slowed, she could hear ragged breathing ahead. Less than fifty feet, that was sure, and maybe less than thirty.

  Whoever it was was working hurriedly, which must mean they weren’t paying close attention to what was going on around them. She wouldn’t get a better chance.

  Anna dropped to her knees and started crawling slowly toward the sound. Yet again, she wished she were armed.

  Slowly, the pile of dirt came into view as a rough conical mound silhouetted against a distant dim porch light. She could see the motion of the shovel occasionally now as it traveled in its arc and threw dull glints of nighttime light back at her. The digger was barely visible as a dark shape, almost entirely swallowed up by the excavation.

  I could hit him with a rock from here, if I had one. Anna glanced toward Nail, an indistinct shape crouching ridiculously behind a headstone no more than eighteen inches high. He might have made a gesture of some kind, but if so, she had no idea what he wanted. He could have been scratching his ear, too. No telling.

  Anna considered the options. Sit tight and wait the digger out. See what he was doing firsthand, maybe follow him home or to wherever he was headed after this. Alternatively, she could go accost him right now. Lay the fucker out with a boot to the dome and get the answers later. She knew that was a bad idea—trying to wrangle an unconscious body out of the cemetery would be sure to attract attention—but it appealed to that urge to move so strongly she caught herself pushing up from the ground before she came to her senses.

  “Hurry up, man,” somebody said, and Anna froze. The voice had come from over by the dirt pile somewhere. A man’s voice, with the typical East L.A. accent, so probably a local. He sounded nervous.

  The shovel’s rhythm halted, and now Anna clearly heard the heavy, labored breathing of a man operating at close to his physical capacity. “You . . . could take . . . a shift,” the digger said. His accent wasn’t local at all. He spoke in a sort of crisp, overenunciated manner, nearly spitting the t at the end of “shift.” No obvious accent to speak of, but there was something subtle about the way he swallowed some of his consonants, and the deliberateness of his speech made Anna wonder if he was covering something up, or if he’d taken pains to eliminate his accent entirely. In her mind, she was already picturing him as a cadaverous, gangling tall Scandinavian, with straw-blond hair and sunken eyes.

  “I ain’t goin’ down there,” the other voice said. “Shit ain’t right.”

  “That . . . isn’t for us . . . to decide.”

  “I decided just fine. You do what you gotta do, but I ain’t goin’ down there.”

  “God will absolve us of these crimes,” the digger said. Sounded as though he was finding his breath.

  “You better hope so.”

  “Ye of little faith.”

  A jangle of chain as the guy outside the hole shifted his weight. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

  “That you are.”

  “You gonna finish this nightmare, or what? You get that box open, I ain’t holdin’ the flashlight—best get that through your head right now.”

  There was a pause, then the digging resumed. Any doubts Anna had about what was going down here were gone—the local guy had pretty much confirmed grave robbing. But what the fuck? Who here would be buried with something worth anything?

  She looked over at Nail’s position again. He was now flat on his belly, trying to make the absolute most of his small headstone. There was still no good way to communicate with him.

  Anna went back to waiting. The bass from the party was just audible from here, and the occasional shout carried over it. Hell of a party, she supposed.

  It wasn’t long before the digger’s shovel bounced off the casket, the impact hollow and wooden. Anna strained her ears as she tried to construct some kind of image of what was going on.

  “Hold the light,” the digger said.

  “Fuck you, I told you I ain’t holdin’ the light.”

  “You don’t have to look, just hold the light.”

  “Man, I did not sign up for this.”

  “Enough. Your uncle has been chosen to lead you out of Egypt, and no amount of whining on your part will change that.”

  “Egypt? Man, the fuck you talkin’ about?”

  Anna peered around the monument to see the beam of a flashlight coming from the hole, splashing across the local guy’s ankles.

  “Do you enjoy the fruits of our labors here? The victories? The smiting of your enemies?”

  “For a guy who says he ain’t a priest, you sure talk like one.”

  “Do you think all that comes for free?”

  In the light of the flashlight, the guy shuffled his feet. “Man, ain’t nothin’ come for free.”

  “As you say. This is the cost.”

  “I get it, yeah. Just gimme the light, okay?”

  The guy bent down to get the light, then shone it in the hole. Anna got a glimpse of the digger. He wore a black shirt or jacket of some kind, and his graying hair was tied back in a thick ponytail. The man’s skin was the ruddy, rough leather of a white guy who’d spent a lot of years working outside. That made his age hard to guess, particularly as the light swung past and dropped him back into darkness.

  Then even his silhouette was gone as he ducked down into the hole. Anna checked with Nail again, but she could see even less this time, the flashlight having made a wreck of her night vision.

  More sounds of digging from ahead, along with the clattering of the shovel against the casket. A loud grunt followed by a gasp.

  “Aw, man,” the guy outside the hole said, backing up.

  “The light,” the digger said.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  More movement, and the sound of a clod of dirt collapsing into the hole. The digger coughed.

  “Told ya. Shit is nasty,” the other guy said.

  “A little respect, please. This is your ancestor.”

  “You diggin’ him the fuck up, and you wanna lecture me ’bout respect?”

  “Give me my instruments.”

  “Your what?”

  The digger made an exasperated noise. “My tools. The bag.”

  The guy bent over and handed a sack full of clanking metal into the hole. There was more noise as the digger set the tools down, still more as he rummaged through the bag. Then the digger’s voice sounded again, this time in a rhythmic, sonorous Latin, or at least something that sounded like Latin. A prayer, or a chant? Anna wondered. Genevieve would know. She wished she could record some of this on her phone without attracting attention, but it would be too risky to try.

  In any case, the strange words issuing from the hole, and maybe the whole set of circumstances in their entirety, made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. The party sounded like a transmission from a distant planet now. The only thing that mattered here was the cocoon of the cemetery wrapped around her and the ominous voice at its pulsing heart.

  The chant stopped. The guy outside the hole crossed himself.

  The next sound was a creak of metal, as of a hinge, followed by a dry crack. Anna pictured hedge clippers slicing through a thick branch, only she was pretty sure that it wasn’t a stick the digger was cutting through.

  “Ay Díos mío,” the guy outside the hole said.

  A second crack sounded.

  “The whole hand, man? What happened to
fingers? I was cool with fingers. I mean, compared to this.”

  “Please be quiet, Rigoberto.”

  “What’s next, the whole arm?”

  “That’s enough. Let me return this man to his rest.”

  “What, did you wake him up?” Rigoberto asked, his voice cracking on the last word.

  “Shhh.”

  The man in the hole recited more unintelligible nonsense. From the exchange, Anna guessed they’d be packing it up soon, filling in the hole and making off with the corpse’s hand. What did you use a corpse’s hand for, anyway? Another mystery Genevieve might be able to clear up, or another clue to give her to pass on to Sobell, depending. Maybe both.

  The magician, or whatever he was, passed up a bag and a box about the size of a shoe box and then climbed out of the hole. He picked the shovel off the ground and handed it to Rigoberto.

  Rigoberto turned off the flashlight, sighed, and started shoveling. Anna couldn’t make out many details of the other man, except to note that he was wearing some kind of full-length dress or frock or whatever you called the long black robe priests wore all the time on TV. No collar, though, that she could see.

  “Good night,” the man said.

  “Night,” Rigoberto said between shovelfuls.

  Oh, shit. Stupidly, Anna had assumed that both men would remain to fill in the hole, giving her and Nail some time to back off or circle around, but the man in the priest getup was already turning toward her. She ducked down behind the grave marker, pressing her body to the ground. Glancing right, she saw Nail do the same, at the same time edging his way around the stone.

  Swift footsteps rustled in the dead grass. The man was leaving at a rapid clip, probably in a hurry to be alone with his eerie artifact. Anna couldn’t tell how close he was, but from the sounds it seemed that he would walk right over her in a moment.

  The footsteps stopped. Anna held her breath. Clothes rustled.

  “Rigoberto?” the man said. It was easier to get a fix on him from his voice than it had been from the dry crunch of grass. He was on the other side of the headstone, maybe fifteen feet away. Not as close as all that, but close enough.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  “No sweat, Padre.” He chuckled. “Well, a little, I guess.”

  “Good night,” the man said again.

  Rigoberto resumed shoveling, and the man resumed his walk. Anna slid along the ground, wincing at the dry scrape of grass against her legs and her belly. The priest—she’d call him that, until she found out otherwise—walked toward the church. His back was to her now. All he’d have to do is turn around to see her stretched out behind the stone, but she didn’t dare go farther, since Rigoberto could already see her if he looked up again. She was just perpendicular to a straight line connecting the two men, and one more farewell or shared afterthought would get her—and presumably Nail—caught.

  The priest rapidly disappeared into the darkness, and Rigoberto kept shoveling. Once Anna was sure the priest wasn’t coming back, she started edging away from the open grave, listening for any break in the rhythm of the shovel. When none came, and she felt she was far enough away to avoid attracting attention, she got to her hands and knees and crawled backward until she’d found a decent-sized monument to get behind.

  Nail found her a few minutes later and sat next to her, his back against the stone. “You catch all that?” he whispered.

  “Yeah. Sounded like he took a hand.”

  “That’s what I heard, too. I ain’t gonna say we ain’t stole worse, but I don’t remember digging up any graves to get it.”

  “It’s about sacrifice, or something. The priest said it was the cost.”

  “Gotta be tied in with that shit we saw on the walls,” Nail said.

  Anna nodded. “Wait till he’s done, then go check back and check it out?”

  “Couldn’t hurt.”

  They waited. Rigoberto kept shoveling. After ten or fifteen minutes, the partygoers called it a night, or at least somebody turned the music off. Anna wished they’d left it on. It was eerie enough hanging out here in the dark, but the sudden silence made it that much worse. She was suddenly, acutely aware that Nail was sitting right over a dead person. She told herself that this wasn’t so bad. Sitting here was among the safer, more peaceful things she’d done in the last few months. That was true, but it didn’t diminish the unease she felt when a gust of wind rattled through the grass. Even Nail didn’t seem immune. He’d drawn his legs up to his chest and crossed his arms over them, as if trying to make himself small and unobtrusive. What did the dead care if you were small? What did they care about any of this shit?

  It took Rigoberto about half an hour to fill the hole in, during which Anna worked herself up into a nervous frenzy. A sudden banging of metal nearly caused her to jump to her feet and run, but the swearing that followed it grounded her again. The guy had just whacked the shovel into a headstone or something. Just an accident. In daylight, it would be funny.

  Rigoberto walked past, shovel over his shoulder, and soon disappeared in the darkness close to the church. Anna waited another minute or so before she couldn’t sit any longer. “Come on,” she said. Nail didn’t need much encouragement.

  The grave was easy to find, just past the stone Anna had hidden behind. Rigoberto had done a decent job replacing the sod, but the ground was still humped and uneven here, and the smell of dry dirt and clay filled the air, thick enough that it seemed to cling to Anna’s lungs.

  “Ever wonder why there’s always more dirt in a hole than oughta fit in the hole?” Nail asked.

  She gave him a flat, perplexed look. “No.”

  “Just a joke,” he said. “But . . . huh.” He walked a few steps over to the next plot and toed the ground. “This one, too,” he said. “And I think the next one.”

  “They gonna go through the whole damn cemetery?”

  Nail knelt and pulled something from his pocket—a flashlight—which he shrouded in one hand as he turned it on. He shone it at a spot on the ground, then moved a few paces to the north and did the same. Lastly, he walked over to the grave Rigoberto had dug and, bending over to get close, inspected the headstone.

  “What are you looking for?” Anna asked.

  He flicked the light off and put it away.

  “Three robbed graves. Pedro Moreno, Alicia Moreno, and Manuel Moreno,” he said. “You tell me that’s a coincidence.”

  Chapter 11

  Genevieve sat up and rubbed sleep from her eyes. Her watch told her it was morning, though it was impossible to tell from this office, especially since Belial had taken the initiative to put more cubicle dividers and shit in front of the only window. It wasn’t as though sunlight would burn him to ash or anything, and as far as she knew, he didn’t even have an aversion to it, but this had become his den now and he had certain standards that must be maintained.

  Next he’ll have to fashion a chair out of my bones, just on principle.

  It was twenty after eight, the start of another long, shitty day. At least she’d be spending a lot of it outside. It was rank in here, stinking of sweat, more sweat, fast food, and the fetid rot that issued from Belial’s face. If he wasn’t dying of some kind of heinous internal infection, she’d love to know how. She’d had an abscess once that she’d thought was the single most disgusting thing in creation, but it had played kiddie T-ball compared to Belial’s major league stench.

  She wanted nothing more than to take a shower. It occurred to her that you could really tell your life had gone off the rails somewhere when, in the middle of one America’s largest cities, you spent weeks at a time unable to find a time and place for a shower. This was just the latest phase—how long had they lain low with Van Horn, and looking for him? Another situation with an abandoned building, and they’d been so goddamn busy that it was all she could do to get back to he
r apartment every few days to clean up. God, that had been miserable. No sleep, no showers, barely any sex, even while she’d been sharing living space with Anna. She supposed the lack of sex was a direct consequence of the other two—she’d mostly been too tired or too gross to try.

  Another sign that things have gotten totally fucked.

  She glanced at Belial’s lair and at the corner where Sobell lay curled up in a sleeping bag Tran had dropped off for him. Both were sleeping, or at least not moving.

  She checked her phone. Nothing new from Anna beyond the exchanges from last night. If they could sit down and talk things out, she thought it might still be okay, but she could hardly fault Anna for not trusting her right now. On the other hand, while Anna’s anger and silence might have been fair, they were still maddening. There was no hope of getting rid of the demon without some kind of occult intercession, whether it be Belial or Sobell or somebody else—maybe Genevieve herself, if she were smart and lucky—so for Anna to just blow her off looked crazy from that perspective.

  Anna’s strategy wasn’t hard to figure out, but Genevieve wasn’t at all sure it wouldn’t backfire on her. Sobell and Belial were dangerous—people?—to piss off, and Genevieve had doubts about the wisdom of trying to extort something valuable and occult from them. That kind of knife was slippery to hold on to.

  Her thoughts returned to the picture Anna had sent her. She hadn’t shown it to Sobell, mostly because she didn’t want him to know she was talking to Anna, even a little bit. However, there might be a clue of some kind in the photo, either to the overall problem or to Anna’s whereabouts. She’d take either.

  Genevieve opened the picture again. The diagram, she realized, wasn’t the only useful thing in the picture, and maybe not the most informative by a long shot. The graffiti around it listed gang members and street names—surely that ought to help narrow things down. Much of it she didn’t understand, since it was written in code or shorthand, but “18th St” was an easy place to start. “GSL” and “Locos” were less immediately helpful. For the first time in her life, she wished she knew a lot more about street gangs.