Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  Clarence has saddled me with a crew of misfits, Sobell thought. At first the thought rankled, in a sort of “Look how far I’ve fallen” way. Just a few months ago, he’d had a criminal empire at his disposal, and he’d had a waiting list for the city’s powerful to get an audience with him. Now he was hiding in the backseat of a vehicle owned by a second-rate gangster, relying for protection on a green kid and a man who probably knocked over automobiles when startled.

  Once he got past his initial horror, though, he had to appreciate the symmetry. These gentlemen came from a different time and place, and had altogether different talents, but they weren’t wildly dissimilar from the crew he’d come up with so many years ago. Then it had been Edgar Van Horn, who had been a gambler on the scale of the big loser in Mark Twain’s frog story; Catherine Bligh, an incredibly talented magician with a glass eye she couldn’t stop fiddling with; and Peter Bergman, Sobell’s rival and best friend. Now Edgar and Peter were dead, and he hoped for her sake that Catherine was as well, given what he knew last about her whereabouts.

  Everything had turned to shit, certainly, but if a couple of hundred years of living had taught him anything, it was that life did that from time to time, no matter how good you thought you had it. Ricky, Jake, and Four Door might not have been the ideal companions he would have chosen, but they were what he had, and in his younger days he had been the master of making do with what he had. He thought they might do just fine.

  Ricky parked in front of a two-story home done up in dull white siding. It sported a nice covered porch and an immaculately tended lawn, and Sobell smiled at the incongruity. Simon Cantwell was about as slimy a bottom-feeder as Sobell had ever known, but he’d carved out a charming little piece of suburbia here.

  It would be a pity if I have to burn it down around him.

  Sobell briefly considered leaving his security detail in the car, then discarded the idea. Another time, he would have relied on more subtle tactics, but he was weak now, and looked it, and Simon would be quick to take advantage of that.

  “Four Door, Jake. Would you be so kind as to accompany me? Ricky, it might be a good idea for you to keep the engine running, at least until we know what we have here.”

  “Gotcha,” Ricky said. “Don’t fuckin’ kill no one, okay? Don’t need to make this no harder than it already is.”

  “Words to live by,” Sobell said.

  He got out. Jake slid out behind him. Four Door got out and slammed the door hard enough to rock the vehicle.

  They were conspicuous, Sobell thought as he walked up the sidewalk toward the front door. Four Door, in his white button-down and slacks, would have blended in well enough, if he weren’t the size of a truck, and Sobell himself had his screaming pink polo shirt and unsteady walk. Jake was the least conspicuous of the bunch. It would be best to get inside quickly.

  He stopped at the door and rang the bell.

  “Simon, I need to speak to you.”

  No answer. He rang the bell again and knocked.

  “Simon, rouse your miserable hide and get out here. I know you don’t go to work before dusk.” He lowered his voice. “Jake, please go around and make sure the gentleman we’re here to meet isn’t scarpering out the back.”

  Jake ducked his head in an exaggerated sort of bow and took off as quickly as he could without running.

  “I won’t take up much of your time,” Sobell said to the door, “but I’m not going away until we speak.”

  Was it possible, he suddenly wondered, that Simon was in there right now calling the police? Surely he wouldn’t be that stupid. Simon only played safe bets, and he must know that there wasn’t anything safe about crossing Sobell. Right?

  A few seconds passed, during which Sobell imagined he could already hear the sirens. Simon only played safe bets, generally, but it wouldn’t do to underestimate the driving force of a moment of cowardice.

  “Kick down this door,” Sobell said.

  Four Door looked down the street. “I don’t know . . .”

  “I’ll stipulate that it’s a poor, extreme solution, but I haven’t got another and time is of the essence.”

  “You’re the boss.” The big man made it look easy, as if he hadn’t done anything more than give the door a gentle shove with his foot. The jamb splintered and the door swung open.

  Sobell glanced back at Ricky and made a gesture he hoped would be correctly interpreted as “Bring the car around back.” Ricky pulled out a second later, so unless he was abandoning them, he’d gotten the message.

  Sobell went inside, followed by Four Door. He shut the door and slid an end table in front of it to keep it closed. It was spotless Americana in here, complete with a soft gray carpet and an oak entertainment center. Oddly prosaic for a man who owned chains of pawnshops and strip clubs and had some hand in peddling a third of the occult objects in Los Angeles.

  The man himself was nowhere in sight. If Sobell looked through the white-trimmed doorway to the kitchen, he could see Jake hanging out by the back door, so Simon hadn’t gone that way.

  Sobell went for the stairs. Nicely carved handrail, more oak for the risers. He was beginning to wonder if this house wasn’t a decoy or something, a place where Simon could invite middling members of the business community without seeming like the freak he undoubtedly was. It didn’t seem likely. The address had come from Sobell’s former lieutenant, Joseph Gresser, before his untimely demise, and Gresser hadn’t made mistakes about this kind of thing. Still, Sobell worried.

  He opened the first door on the left, and the worry vanished. The man himself was on his bed, propped up on one elbow, a lock of greasy blondish hair hanging in his face, his body wrapped in a tangled sheet from armpit to waist. Simon slept in the nude, Sobell noted, and while he would rather have been spared the sight, it would have the desired effect of making the man feel more vulnerable.

  “Wha?” Simon said.

  I’ve fucked this up, Sobell thought. A moment of cowardice indeed. Hell. Would any of the neighbors have seen Four Door kick in the door? Was anybody home at this hour, or were they all away at their jobs? His hands shook, but his heart pounded like a war drum. This was stupid and hurried and dangerous, but it was a hell of a rush.

  He strode into the room. “I need answers, and you need to provide them. Quickly.”

  Simon struggled to a sitting position, pulling the sheet down over his balls in the process. That was something. “Mr., uh, Sobell?”

  “Relics. Unusual relics, particularly those associated with saints.”

  “Can—can I put on some pants? Get you a drink, we can talk?”

  “I’m sorry, Simon, but that’s not in the cards today.”

  Simon brushed hair out of his face. “Yeah. Uh, yeah. Relics.” He closed his eyes and swallowed. “Relics . . .”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Simon. But we do have to hurry.”

  “Okay. Yeah. There was a guy that came by asking about relics. Said—said his name was . . . Abas. Something like that. It was weird. I said, ‘First name or last?’ but he didn’t think that was too funny.”

  “Whose name?”

  “The priest. Or whatever he was. The guy looking for relics. Said he’d pay top dollar.”

  Who was this? Sobell felt a worm of dread uncoil in his stomach, and, not for the first time, he wondered how big a pile he’d stepped in. “You don’t know him.”

  “Never seen him before,” Simon said, nodding emphatically.

  “Why did you say he was a priest, then?”

  “He had one of those coats, the long black ones. Look, I ain’t fucking Catholic, okay, I’m just guessing here.”

  “I understand.” He paused, listening. No sirens. “What, exactly, was he looking for?”

  “Relics, like you said. St. Jerome’s foreskin, St. Monica’s scalp, that kind of shit.” Simon tried on an uneasy grin. �
��I told him I couldn’t help him, but you bet I started looking. Guy was flashing around gold, man.”

  “So you don’t know anything about any actual relics that have surfaced?”

  “No. Why? You buying, too?”

  “Listen to me. Whatever you find, you tell me about. Whatever this man tells you or asks for, you tell me about. I’ll pay handsomely for the information, and I’ll pay triple for any actual relics that surface.”

  “Triple what? I never said how much.”

  “Triple whatever you think it’s worth.”

  Simon’s eyebrows shot up. He understood, then, that Sobell was essentially handing him a blank check. That ought to be enough to, if not ensure his loyalty, ensure that he would check with Sobell before shifting any goods.

  “Now, my associate here is going to give you a phone number. If anything even remotely relevant comes up, you are to call that number immediately. I will arrange payment as soon as practical. In fact, I’ll see that somebody comes by later with an appropriate retainer for your services.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, great.”

  “I’ll be very upset if you sell anything of the kind without checking with me first. Understood?”

  “Yes. Sir.”

  “Good.”

  * * *

  Clap slouched in the driver’s seat, one hand draped over the steering wheel, zooming in and out of speeding highway traffic while he gave Genevieve the basic lay of the land.

  “You got about thirty gangs in the area we’re headed, but there’s really only four with all the power—the Flats, Eighteenth Street, Diaz Crew, and Krazy Eights. Just about everybody else is tied in with one of them.

  “’Cept Gant Street,” he said. “And those cholos are crazy.”

  “Great,” Genevieve said. “They’re the ones I’m worried about. What’s their deal?”

  “O.G. name of Rogelio Moreno runs the Locos—has for about twenty years, which is pretty messed up to begin with. You don’t see a lotta forty-, fifty-year-old bangers, you know? Most of these guys get out, get popped, or get dead way before that. On top of that, GSL is a shitty little gang—bunch of punks, no real territory, not much muscle. Moreno’s kept ’em alive by playin’ the big boys off against each other, one slippery alliance after another.”

  That sounded suspicious to Genevieve. “Just that? Alliances? No rumors about anything else?”

  “Not that I heard, but this ain’t my hood. I got a hookup in the One Eight might be able to give us the latest, though.” He passed a car going eighty and swerved back into the right lane. “But that ain’t gonna get us much closer to findin’ your valuables.”

  “I don’t know,” Genevieve said. She had an outline now, if no details. This Moreno guy was a hell of a leader and had somehow kept his gang from being exterminated for a long time, but playing off various factions could only last so long before they got sick of it and smashed him. Somehow he’d gotten an occult hookup before that could happen—a powerful, terrible one, based on the drawing Anna had sent. In the light of Karyn’s prophecy, coincidence would have to do a lot of work to hold up the weight of all that happenstance.

  Even if it was all a coincidence, though, this was where Anna was looking, so this was where Genevieve would be.

  Clap eased the car off the 5 down into the streets of Doyle Gardens. From the stories, Genevieve expected every house to be filled with bullet holes and the sound track to the neighborhood to be distant, nonstop firefights. Instead, there were rows of little clapboard houses behind chain-link fences, corner stores with signs in Spanish, and colorful murals on any surface they would fit. A couple of women hung laundry on a clothesline stretching across both their front lawns, and a handful of old men stood outside the butcher shop talking. Almost homey, if not for the groups of idle teenage kids hanging at the corners giving her the stink eye.

  One of them flagged down the car with an open palm as they approached. Clap slowed the car and rolled down the passenger window.

  “’Sup?” the kid asked. He was seventeen at the outside, his oversize jersey incongruous with his baggy shorts and white socks. “You need somethin’?”

  “Looking for Stash,” Clap said. He passed the kid a few bills folded into a tight square.

  The kid looked at the money with disgust. “I don’t know you, homes.”

  “He does. Tell him Clap needs a word.”

  “I don’t know no Clap.”

  From behind, one of the other kids shouted, “Bullshit, man. He had every kind of clap, and then some. That’s what happens when you don’t care where you stick it.” Laughter followed. The kid’s scowl deepened.

  Clap gave the kid a rueful grin. “You think you got it bad, I’m the guy got stuck with this stupid nickname. Think about that a minute.”

  “You wanna get outta here, man,” the kid said, but his face had softened some.

  “Just tell Stash we need to talk to him ’bout the Locos.”

  The kid actually spat. “Fuckin’ chavalas. Punks. Think that voodoo shit gonna stop us?”

  “I got some inside info on that,” Clap said, “but I ain’t talking to you about it. Me and Stash go back, and I don’t know you. Trust me—you don’t want him to find out I was here and you didn’t say nothing.”

  That was enough, at last. “Wait a sec,” the kid said. He stepped back, got out his phone, and dialed.

  Clap leaned toward Genevieve and lowered his voice. “Used to be a few bills’d get a lot more respect around here. Must be a lotta five-O up in here lately. Or something else.”

  “I’ll bet on the something else,” Genevieve said, without taking her eyes from the kid on the phone. He was speaking in rapid, agitated Spanish, and her Spanish didn’t extend much beyond a few day-to-day words. Following the kid was hopeless. “You get any of this?” she asked Clap.

  “Not much—too quiet. I think he’s talking to somebody who’s gonna talk to somebody. Pissant here don’t swing a big enough dick to get Stash down here himself.”

  “Great.”

  After an extended phone call, during which Genevieve half expected somebody to issue an order to shoot them all on the spot, the kid hung up and stepped back to the vehicle.

  “He’s coming,” the kid said. “Pull around over there, though. You fuckin’ up my corner.”

  “Thanks, man,” Clap said, and he pulled away. The spot the kid had pointed to was the driveway to the back of a liquor store, but Clap didn’t seem to mind blocking it. He backed in, left the engine running, and turned up the air-conditioning. “Well,” he said, “they didn’t shoot us. Hope you really do know something about their voodoo situation, or we could be in for a bad ride.”

  “I hope so, too,” Genevieve said.

  The wait wasn’t long. A couple more cars came by and engaged in quick transactions with the boys at the corner, but the third car, an Impala that looked, ironically enough, like cop surplus, slowed and stopped in front of them, blocking the driveway.

  “They think that’s gonna stop me, they got a surprise coming,” Clap said.

  “It’ll be fine,” Genevieve said, with far more confidence than she felt. “Just remember that we’re guests here.”

  He looked at her with a mix of horror and contempt. “You let them think we’re punks, and they will curb-stomp us just because they can. Show some respect, but don’t take no shit. Got that?”

  “If those are the rules.”

  “Don’t ever doubt it.”

  Two guys got out of the Impala. If there were more inside, Genevieve couldn’t see them through the bubbly, homemade tint job. They were big men, older than the kids on the corner, both sporting Mexican Mafia tattoos that said they’d already done time. Both wore white tank tops, exposing the rest of their tattoos for the world to see, and both had guns jammed in their waistbands. They didn’t care who saw them, apparently, indic
ating just how far the rule of law stretched down here.

  The two men split up, each swaggering around to a different side of Clap’s ride. Genevieve’s heart raced. Rat, Slammer, and Tulip might be packing, but she doubted they could get their weapons out before these two men killed the lot of them—and surely not before they shot her and Clap up front, if they took a mind to.

  This seemed a far cry from meddling with incantations and diagrams by candlelight, and she wondered how in the hell that had led here. She seemed to be questioning a lot of her decisions lately.

  Clap rolled down both front windows. “What up?” he asked.

  The guy on his side, a big gothic “18” tattoo visible above the neckline of his tank top, hooked his thumbs in his khakis. “Hear you wanna talk to Stash ’bout our problem.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The fuck do you know about it?” the guy on Genevieve’s side said. He had a goatee, a complement of half a dozen gold teeth, and what looked like a permanent scowl.

  “I don’t know shit about it,” Clap said. He pointed at Genevieve. “She does.”

  “Then she can come with us,” Eighteen said. “You can stay right the fuck here.”

  “Stash don’t know her,” Clap said.

  “And he don’t care about you,” Eighteen said.

  “I don’t give—”

  “It’s cool,” Genevieve said. “I’ll go.”

  “You sure about that?” Clap asked.