But if reason dictated leaving the car behind, it also dictated taking it as far as it would go: the end of the asphalt, near Claire Mason’s house. Nowhere to hide a car there, either. Jacob would have spotted it on his way up.
He stayed there for another twenty minutes, agonizing.
A slash of bats dirtied the clouds.
The death house lay in cold repose.
Drawing up to a crouch, Jacob broke across the open ground; steadied himself against the front door for a two count and twisted the loose knob and swept in, gun drawn, clearing room to room, his hope withering in square-foot increments.
Nothing.
Nobody.
A second sweep ended in the kitchen, where he paused, pinching the bridge of his nose disgustedly as adrenaline flushed from his system and his lungs began to burn.
He’d had him, and lost him.
Or he’d never had him. He’d gotten overconfident. Made assumptions.
Fucked up.
He hammered the countertop in frustration, received the rebuke of a sparse echo.
Massaging his hand, he stared at the spot where the Hebrew lettering had been. The smooth wood bore no sign of it.
He thought about the missing brick from the Alt-Neu.
Thought about Mai running from him, gone in an instant.
Women he tried to make love to, recoiling in agony.
Bugs.
If all that could happen, why not a magically vanishing BMW?
Straight down the rabbit hole.
Since his return to L.A., he had been singularly focused on making the arrest. He’d allotted no time or space for dwelling on his mental state, and that had kept him from experiencing the full extent of his wretched confusion.
Now it rushed out of him, spurting from every raw orifice, dissolving the surface of reality. His heart wouldn’t shut up. He held his splitting head together between his forearms, walking around the kitchen in circles. He’d fucked up, and because of that, more people were going to die. Tonight, or if not tonight, soon.
He tottered from the house and clicked on the flashlight and wandered over the property in the rising wind. Knees popping, he traversed the eastern slope, chasing every feral whine that escaped the canyon’s lonesome depth. He went as far as the horizon and felt the seduction of gravity and imagined letting himself fall. He remembered Peter Wichs’s hand on his arm and scrambled back to higher ground.
He was wasting his time.
Covered in scrapes and sweat, he straggled back to the Honda and collapsed in the driver’s seat. The phone flashed. Nine more attempts at communication by the Commander.
report progress ASAP
never mind Jacob wrote back they arent here will revisit tomorrow
He pounded through the return trip as fast as he could without snapping the chassis, composing a mental list.
Pernath’s father’s house.
The office in Santa Monica.
The office in Century City: source security footage and determine who Pernath’s passenger was.
Piss-poor list, reeking of failure and futility. No item on it appealed to him as much as the default retreat to home and alcohol.
Crossing from dirt to asphalt, he stomped the accelerator. The Honda’s wheels spun out and he shot forward and he sped toward defeat.
Then he saw Claire Mason’s driveway and her CCTV cameras.
The woman was a gift from the paranoid gods.
Braking, he backed up, pulled to Mason’s talk box, and punched the intercom button.
It rang seven times. Maybe even Claire had a social life.
A scratchy voice filtered through the speaker: “Who is this?”
“Ms. Mason? Detective Jacob Lev from LAPD. I don’t know if you remember, but I was—”
“I remember you.”
“Great. I apologize for disturbing you—”
“What is it, Detective?”
“I was hoping I could come in and have another look at your security footage.”
“Now?”
“If that’s all right.”
“Are you aware of what time it is?”
He had no clue. He glanced at the dash clock—after midnight.
“I’m truly, truly sorry,” he said. “I really hate to have to disturb you like this, but—”
“It can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t urgent, ma’am.”
Impatient exhalation. “Hang on.”
He glanced at the black camera eye on the intercom box, pictured her shuffling off to consult her monitors. He smoothed his hair and wiped dust from his face and prepared a smile.
The box spoke: “Detective? What did you want to see?”
“The road. From a couple of hours ago. I’ll be quick. Thanks.”
The gate shivered and began to slide.
He released the brake, wound up the same crushed stone path, through the same spotlit xeriscaping, toward the same stern modernist silhouette.
The front door opened. Same tatty green bathrobe in a widening slice of yellow light. Same scowl; same steaming tankard of tea. Except this time she didn’t offer him any.
They walked wordlessly to the security room. He stood behind her, averting his eyes as she typed in her password.
“I’m looking for vehicles en route to 446,” he said.
She clicked. Eight panels, eight blank swathes, bathed in green. The time stamp counted 00:13:15, 00:13:16, 00:13:17 . . .
“How far back?” she asked.
“Three hours. Eight-thirty.”
“That’s three and three-quarters hours,” she said.
“I know.” Strictly speaking, a wider window than he needed. “I’m sorry.”
She sighed and reset the counter to 20:00:00. The screen gave a pixelated flinch.
They sat silently as minutes passed at 8×. Jacob couldn’t decide whether he was rooting for the car to appear or not. Stupid, gullible, or crazy: which title did he prefer?
The counter reached eight-thirty without anything happening. Claire Mason turned and arched an eyebrow at him and increased the playback to 24×. The counter began to reel. Nine. Nine-ten. Nine-twenty. He’d picked up Pernath’s tail at about ten after eight. The drive to Castle Court took about an hour and a half. The counter hit nine-thirty and he tensed up in anticipation.
Nine forty-seven: a square flash.
“Stop,” he barked.
She hit the space bar, pausing at 21:50:51.
“Can you go back a couple minutes?”
She stared at him impatiently.
“I saw something,” he said.
“That was me.”
His heart sank. “You’re sure?”
“I went to dinner,” she said. “I got home at quarter to ten. That was me, pulling in.”
“You’re positive,” he said.
She drew up. “Anything else, Detective?”
“Just a few more minutes, please?”
She let the video run up to real time: nothing.
“Thanks. Sorry.”
She stood up. “Should I be concerned?”
“Not at all. Thanks again. Really appreciate it. Have a good night.”
Her expression said that was unlikely.
She escorted him to the constricted entry hall, where he paused to thank her once more.
Stopped, breathless.
“What,” she said.
He was staring at a gilt-framed pen-and-ink drawing of a woman’s body lying among undulant vines, energy radiating out from her headless neck.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
She blinked once, then dashed the tea in his eyes.
—
IT HAD MOSTLY COOLED OFF; he was more startl
ed than hurt, and in the millisecond while his hands went up, he actually thought How rude.
She brained him with the mug. He heard a crack that he hoped was ceramic and not bone and pain trumpeted and his inner ear sloshed and he swung at her warping outline and she hit him again with something else, harder, heavier and he felt himself bowing sideways, sinking to one knee with his palm pressed to the cold concrete. She continued to hit him, breathing hard, emitting strange excited little chirrups. Blood streamed into his eyes. He rolled over into a puddle of tea to protect himself and she brought a picture (he did not know if it was To Be Brasher or another picture) crashing down on his upraised elbow. Glass teeth opened his forearm. She chopped the frame down like an axe, the corner spiking his temple, until the wood splintered; then she tried to stab him in the back with it, but he scissored his legs on the slick wet floor and he caught her ankle and she fell.
Dizzy and half blind, he surged atop her and got his hands around her throat and squeezed. Spit burst from her mouth. Blood jetted from his gashed arm and mixed with the foamy sludge running from the corners of her mouth and ran down her neck. He was trying to find her carotid. He needed four seconds of pressure. She twisted and kicked and clawed. A shadow fell across them.
A man’s voice said, “Enough.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
It was the only word he would hear Richard Pernath speak. Pernath was wearing pressed jeans and a charcoal polo shirt. He was barefoot and holding a pump-action shotgun, which he kept fixed on Jacob while Claire Mason crawled away, coughing and gagging. Jacob slid himself back toward the wall, pressing up against the plaster, gripping his wounded arm. The barrel of the gun moved with him. His sinuses were choked with blood. He spat. Pernath’s face twitched with revulsion but he didn’t blink.
Claire Mason stood to retie her bathrobe. She wiped saliva on her sleeve and said, “I’m sorry,” a remark that prompted Pernath to shoot the same disgusted face at her. The shotgun never wavered.
“I was getting him out,” she said.
Pernath did not answer her, and she told Jacob to stand up and turn out his pockets. He set his badge and phone on the floor. He took the spare ammo from his back pocket and placed it beside them. She asked where his gun was.
“My car.”
She patted him down nonetheless. He stood with his arms raised and his legs spread while she ran trembling hands along his inseams. The gash in his forearm was deep and ragged and perilously proximate to major blood vessels. It did not clot but oozed steadily, running down his biceps and dripping onto his shoulder and ear. Looking at it made him light-headed. His feet felt miles away.
They marched him out the front door. He could see the keys dangling in the ignition of the Honda. Pernath prodded him in the spine with the shotgun and he kept going.
They followed the network of brick paths lacing the property, heading around the swimming pool, in the direction of the orchard. Claire Mason led the way, ten feet in front of Jacob. He kept his wounded left arm aloft, over his head, clasping his left biceps with his right hand, trying to slow the bleeding. Runnels of blood pooled in the hollow of his collarbone. His temple bled, too. He left a trail of spatter on the brick. It would be easy to hose down. Same for the house’s concrete floors.
Pernath brought up the rear, keeping well back of Jacob, but close enough not to miss. Some of the shot might pass through his body and hit Claire Mason. Pernath wouldn’t care; he probably intended to kill her at some point. Jacob would simply be shortening the timeline.
He could appeal to her sense of self-preservation—tell her what became of all of Pernath’s accomplices. Jacob doubted she’d believe him. Whatever depraved magic the architect had worked on Reggie Heap and Terrence Florack, he’d done the same to her. Jacob read it in the way she kept glancing back at Pernath, her face green and rippling in the light of the pool, her expression drawn and fearful. She was appealing to him. For approval. For forgiveness. And without looking back, Jacob could tell Pernath wasn’t giving it to her.
Even if Jacob somehow got through to her, she couldn’t help him: she was unarmed.
They started around the orchard. It was larger than it appeared from the front, perfectly choreographed rows of lemons and figs and plums stirring heavily in the breeze. Their perfume made Jacob teeter. He considered lunging for the gun anyway; better than dying helpless.
Wanting to know how far behind Pernath was, he said, “I spoke to Reggie’s father.”
Silence.
“He wants that drawing back.”
Not even an errant breath.
Jacob kept walking.
—
THE GREENHOUSE OCCUPIED the lawn beyond the orchard. It was vast and unlit, a glass hangar, its southern side reflecting the cityscape. Jacob wondered what they were growing, that they needed so much area. He wondered why they needed a greenhouse when it got so hot in the Hollywood Hills.
Claire Mason crouched down to fiddle with the numerical padlock on the door.
Jacob’s left hand had gone numb, the fingers curling up like fruit rotting on the vine.
The padlock snicked open. Claire Mason opened the door and switched on the lights and lines of fluorescent tubes crackled to life and he saw what they were growing.
Nothing.
An empty grassy scroll, violently uniform in color; no pots or planters, no climbing vines, no irrigation system. Here and there the ground humped, and there was a disruption in the pattern of the grass. Jacob had counted six such patches before he felt the shotgun in his back again.
They walked him to a flat spot at the far end. It looked as good as any a place to die. Claire Mason tramped over to the corner and came back with a shovel. She tossed it down at Jacob’s feet and told him to dig.
He’d seen that in movies, had deemed it silly. Why would a person consent to dig his own grave? The implied threat of torture, for one. But that was secondary, he realized, to the desire to prolong life. It was amazing, what the human spirit would accept: a few more minutes, even the wretchedest imaginable, were preferable to death.
He bent to pick up the shovel. It felt heavier than it should. His left arm below the elbow had gone the same chalky hue as his hand. The gash once again began to ooze as he gripped the handle and put his foot on the blade and sank it into the earth and pried up a hunk. He dug slowly, thinking about his phone and wondering if Mallick was monitoring its location. He almost laughed, remembering his annoyance at the Commander’s nannying. He hoped they didn’t waste time searching the house. He hoped they noticed the trail of spatter.
“Hurry up,” Claire Mason said. She paced in a five-foot radius from Pernath, as though tethered to him, while the architect stood relaxed, hip cocked, the shotgun leveled at Jacob’s midsection.
The shovel beat a funeral cadence. Its handle ran slick with blood. Jacob’s vision effervesced. His head fuzzed with white noise. He was having trouble standing. With nothing to catch hold of, his heart beat fast and light. His back was clammy, his arm numb to the shoulder. Beneath the grass lay a vivid red clay, manic with worms and grubs, a sunken island in a green sea.
He dug six inches deep, seven, eight, nine, and counting.
The buzz in his head rose to a vengeful tide, loud enough to drown out the retch of splitting earth.
Stomping down hard on the shovel, he lost balance, steadied himself, paused, eyes closed, expecting retribution, a brief blast of noise before silence.
Instead, he heard Claire Mason’s voice shrilling—what is that—and then all was lost to the churn of innumerable wings.
Jacob opened his eyes.
Richard Pernath was staring up at the greenhouse’s glass ceiling with his head hatched back at a severe angle. The shotgun hung forgotten at his side.
Claire Mason, equally rapt, pointing upward, her throat open in a mute scream.
A black mass in the sky, wid
ening, blotting out the stars as it swept down toward them. The gray pallor of the greenhouse lights gleamed fleetingly in a hard underbelly for an instant and Jacob saw six hairy jointed legs and wings like sails and a beetle the size of a horse exploded through the roof, plunging them into darkness, knocking Jacob flat on his back.
The drone vanished, replaced by silence, then the guttural register of anguish.
Jacob clawed himself upright.
The iron frame of the greenhouse was frayed like thread, every panel ruptured except the ones directly above him. He sat in a patch of clean grass while the ground around him glittered.
Claire Mason ran in circles, batting at the air, howling, her skin riddled with shards of glass.
Richard Pernath was on his hands and knees, a large triangular shard jutting from his back like a silvery dorsal fin.
The beetle was gone. In its place stood a woman of perfect sculptural symmetry, lithe and naked in the moonlight. She began to advance on Claire Mason, who backed away, mewling and clutching at the bent frame of the greenhouse.
“No. No.”
The naked woman raised her arms and the muscles in her back danced, and then, before Jacob’s eyes, she convulsed, and changed, swelling to monstrous proportions, to a thing blocky as a tower.
A gnarled appendage grew out of the claylike mass, lifting Claire Mason’s body from the ground. Another tendril coiled around Mason’s neck and there was a hiss and sizzle as her head separated and pipped to the ground and bounced, the severed neck sealed clean.
Mason’s still-bleeding body collapsed in a pile.
With another convulsion, the tower of clay was gone and the naked woman turned to Jacob wearing Mai’s smiling face.
Richard Pernath had managed to crawl to a hole in the greenhouse wall and was worming his way through. Mai started after him, but changed course and came toward Jacob, striding heedlessly over broken glass.
Jacob tried to tell her to leave him, get Pernath. The sound that came out of him was weak and wet. Mai knelt before him and took his hands in hers and drew him close. The heat of her body made apparent the deathly cold of his own.
The Golem of Hollywood Page 43
