Hell no, she wanted to say, but the situation had already gone beyond that. The last thing she wanted was for this to spiral into some sort of macho pissing contest. There were guns out now—the odds of things ending in a friendly ass-beating were probably nil.
“Let’s go,” she said, and she pushed the car door open.
She followed the two men to the car. There was nobody else in back, she was surprised to note. The kids on the corner couldn’t have missed the five people in Clap’s car, and they would have passed that information along. She wondered what it meant that Stash had sent only two men in response. Maybe he was relying on the corner kids to back them up. Maybe he didn’t think Clap and company were enough of a threat to bother sending more. Maybe his other guys were tied up with bigger problems. Given all the shit going down, Genevieve bet on the last.
The two guys in the car didn’t say much, but it turned out to be a short drive anyway, just a few blocks to a boarded-up Radio Shack. It didn’t look like the kind of place anybody would run a gang out of. Genevieve had expected a strip bar or a pawnshop or the like, though those were in short supply around here. Hell, maybe this was the place. Or maybe it’s an out-of-the-way place to leave my corpse, she thought before she could stop herself.
Eighteen and Goatee got out of the car and walked to the building without looking back to see if Genevieve followed. She got out and caught up just as Eighteen swung open the heavily barred front door.
The inside had been gutted, stripped down to bare studs and floor decking, and a handful of tables and boxes moved in and arrayed in rows. The place had the air of a temporary military operation or something of the like. To Genevieve’s relief, there were a handful of people already inside. Two of them sat on the edge of one of the tables, another was pacing the floor behind them, and the fourth leaned over another table, frowning.
The fourth man looked up from the table when the door opened. He was another tough guy like Eighteen and Goatee. Unlike the prison tats his compadres wore, though, he’d had serious, expensive ink done at some point. A woman’s face in photographic detail on his left shoulder, some kind of panther down his right arm, and a dozen others in vivid colors.
He grinned when he got his first look at Genevieve. “Nice ink,” he said.
She laughed. “Yours is pretty good, too.”
“Shorty says you got solutions to my problems.”
“Maybe,” she said. She walked to the table, conscious of all the eyes on her. It felt, oddly, like the first time she’d met Anna and Karyn’s crew—a group of unfriendly strangers staring her down, waiting for her to screw up or give something away. She’d managed pretty well then. She’d do all right here. The familiarity was comforting.
There was, oddly enough, a map on the table, reinforcing the impression that this was a psuedo-military operation. Somebody’d drawn red X’s and black X’s in several areas. She leaned in. Most were clustered along Gant Street, but there were others as well along the opposite side.
“What do the X’s mean?” she asked.
“I’m Stash,” the guy with the nice tattoos said, extending his hand.
She took it. “Genevieve.”
“Where’s your hood, Genevieve?”
“My . . . ?”
He cast a significant look at two of the other men, communicating something she didn’t pick up. “Where you from?” he asked. “You don’t look like no barrio rat.”
“The Heights.”
“You slumming today?” one of the other guys put in.
“No. I’m looking for something. I thought you fellows could help.”
“You even know who the fuck we are?” he asked.
“Yeah. Eighteenth Street.”
Cries of disgust went up from three of the men. “Aw, fuck you, bitch,” one of them said. “Get the fuck out of here,” another added.
“Everybody chill,” Stash said. “Maybe Genevieve don’t know everything that’s going on today, but that ain’t no crime. It don’t mean she can’t help.”
She recalled the clusters on the map, and the generally hostile air of the place, and it made sense. She did a quick survey of tats, matched it up to everything she’d researched on her phone, and felt like slapping herself in the head. “The Flats,” she said, pointing at one of the guys. “Krazy Eights, and Diaz Crew,” she added, pointing to two others in succession.
“So now we gotta kill ya,” Flats said. She thought he was joking.
“We don’t get a lotta white girls from the burbs in here offering to help,” Stash said. “So how ’bout you tell us your game?”
“Yeah,” the guy from Diaz Crew said. “You a cop?”
“Jesus, how stupid do you think I am?” Genevieve asked.
“Cops are pretty stupid.”
“No. I am not a cop.”
“Your game,” Stash reminded her. “What is it you want outta this?”
“Just information. Tell me about anything weird that’s going on around here. Occult stuff. ‘Voodoo shit,’” she added, fingers supplying air quotes.
“They said you were gonna tell me about the voodoo shit,” Stash said.
“You tell me what it is, I’ll tell you what it means, if I can. Unless you’ve got somebody in that scene already.”
Stash shrugged. The guy from Krazy Eights shook his head, adding, “Paco’s in solitary, and they ain’t never letting him out.”
“We got shit,” Diaz Crew said.
Pretty much what Genevieve had been counting on. Few enough people had the talent for the occult in the first place, but on top of that it was like high-energy physics, or maybe some kind of engineering discipline—it required access to rare, expensive resources and tools, and ideally a mentor or instructor of some kind. Not a lot of any of the above in the barrio. There might be a handful of kids scattered around who heard voices or had a knack for finding things, but without training, it wouldn’t go a hell of a lot farther. Add to that the generally unsavory nature of the occult and the heavily Catholic population, and she wasn’t surprised that qualified practitioners were even thinner on the ground here than usual.
“The red X’s are where we’ve lost guys,” Stash said. “The black ones are where we’ve seen drawings.”
“I know the type,” Genevieve said. “Do you have any pictures?”
A kid next to Stash, younger than the others at maybe fourteen, pulled a sheaf of notebook paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He set it on the table in front of her. His demeanor caught her eye. It wasn’t the devil-may-care swagger she would have expected, tossing the stuff on the table with an “ain’t no thang” expression on his face. It was gentle. Reverent, she might have said.
“May I . . . ?” she asked.
The kid nodded.
She spread the papers out on the table. On each one, somebody—probably the kid, she guessed—had drawn an occult diagram. Below each, he’d written an address.
“They’re all different,” she said, puzzled. Not greatly different, but significantly so. She would have thought that, whatever they did, it would be a one-size-fits-all solution. “Are you sure these are exact?”
Anger flashed across the kid’s face. “I wasn’t born yesterday, lady.”
She held up a placating hand. “Just checking. These are . . . irregular. Unusual.” She was conscious of everybody watching her, and it seemed as if the whole room was holding its breath, waiting for her to draw a conclusion.
She checked the map. She didn’t know whether the inventory of diagrams was complete, but it was clear that a boundary had been drawn around a section of territory.
“It’s a curse of some kind,” she said.
“No shit,” Stash said. He’d spoken up for her, but now his patience was running low.
“If you erase the drawings, it’ll break the curse,” Genevieve explained.
<
br /> “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”
“They’re guarded?”
“They don’t erase.”
“It doesn’t have to be literally erased. You can just tag over it or something.”
Stash shook his head. “That don’t work, either.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You don’t think we tried that? Homeboy here threw a can of black paint over one the other day, covered it all up. I looked away for half a second, and when I looked back, it was like the fucking thing had, I dunno, floated to the top of the paint. Fizzy tried knockin’ off a chunk of the brick, and you could still see the drawing. It was like it had soaked all the way through. Short of blowing the building up, I ain’t sure what else to do. Hell, I’m a little scared that won’t even work.”
Genevieve was silent. This sounded impossible, given what she knew. The surefire way to wreck any magic requiring a diagram was to damage the diagram. That was, like, gospel. Practitioners went to great lengths to build expensive, hard-to-damage installations for summoning and other workings for just that reason. The idea that a diagram would be indestructible or self-repairing or whatever was going on here was deeply unsettling.
Maybe it’s not the diagrams themselves. Maybe there’s another spell, somewhere else, protecting them. But now she was into the realm of pure conjecture, grasping for what she hoped was true rather than toward anything she knew to be.
“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.
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