Ahead of her, Mendelsohn let loose a scream of terror unlike anything Anna had ever heard, a high-pitched, wavering shriek more like a mortally wounded animal than a human being.
Anna didn’t know what the thing in darkness was, but she felt it, and the hate radiating from its heart set her body trembling with fear. Her screams joined Mendelsohn’s, and she threw herself to the side, back, in any direction at all that would get her away from it.
The fucking bone wasn’t worth this. She managed to orient herself and began to flee back to the corridor, just as Tommy rounded the corner and rushed into the room. He took half a dozen halting steps into the room, seeming to stare blankly at the thing in darkness. His goggles blew apart. He fell to his knees, mouth still hanging open.
To Anna’s left, the darkness reached out and enveloped Mendelsohn. There was a horrible wet, crunching sound. Incredibly, Mendelsohn’s scream grew louder. Across the room, Tommy began clawing at his own face. Anna ran toward him.
Ahead of her, somebody else emerged from the corridor behind Tommy. Whoever it was fired one shot, a brief bright blaze in the darkness, stumbled back and fired again just as Anna reached Tommy.
Warm wet blood sprayed across Anna’s arm, and Tommy collapsed to the floor.
Mendelsohn’s screams stopped abruptly, and suddenly the darkness and hate were gone.
“Tommy!”
The blood was forgotten as Tommy’s screams ripped the air. Anna knelt next to him, mindless of the hot wetness that soaked the knees of her jeans. She pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on.
“Tommy, are you all—” The question fell dead from her lips when she saw the tattered hole in the front of his shirt. For a moment, she could do nothing but stare. Then Tommy’s screams tapered off. He curled up, huddled into himself, and shivered.
Genevieve rushed into the room, stopped, and looked around helplessly. She ran past Anna, doing something in the darkness, something that involved a lot of wet, squishing footsteps, but Anna paid no attention.
There was no more time for this. Anna pressed a button by her hip and spoke into her headset. “Tommy’s down!” she yelled. “Abort this fucking disaster. Nail, get the van out front. Now!”
Chapter 12
“Fuck! Fuck! Put him down, here. No, here. Christ, not on the ground, put down a blanket or something!” Anna ran her hands through her hair, smearing sweat, blood, and grime across her forehead. “Where’s Lau? Where’s the fucking doctor?”
They’d fled to the junkyard after the debacle at Mendelsohn’s. Anna had stolen one of the cars out front and hauled ass to meet Nail, transferring Tommy to the van outside the estate. Tommy had screamed and cried during the whole ride, but now he was alarmingly quiet.
“He’s coming,” Nail said. “Fast as he can.” Sweat shone on his face, gleaming in the van’s headlights. Destroyed cars hulked around them. They seemed to lean inward, grilles spread in grim metal smiles, to watch the bloody spectacle.
“It’s gonna be OK, man. You gonna be OK.” Nail knelt next to Tommy, holding his head up and trying to give him water. It spilled down his cheeks, and Tommy coughed twice, violently. Dark specks appeared on Nail’s skin and glasses.
“OK,” Genevieve said. She paced back and forth between the stacks of cars and repeated this pointless bullshit to herself. “OK. OK. It’s going to be O-fucking-K. OK.” Anna thought she was hyperventilating.
Anna knelt on Tommy’s other side, opposite Nail, and pushed like hell on the wadded-up shirt that was holding Tommy’s guts in. It was soaked through already, and her hands were slimy with blood.
“Where’s the fucking doctor?” she shouted.
“He’s coming! He’s coming, goddammit!” Nail said.
“I need more bandages. Now!” She didn’t know whether she needed more bandages or not—where was Lau, fucking Lau, the fucking doctor?—but she had to do something.
Nail handed her his shirt. “It’s all I got.”
She took it. She threw the old, blood-soaked shirt to the side. The light wasn’t great, but even so, she gagged at the sight of Tommy’s wound. His T-shirt was shredded, a ragged hole blown through it by the bullet that had mushroomed and fragmented as it plowed through his body. A hole big enough for her to put both fists in poured blood from high in his belly.
He coughed again, less violently this time. A thick trickle of black blood ran from his mouth.
“Can’t breathe,” he said. His voice was barely audible, a low sound like softly tearing paper, but Anna felt a crazy relief. They were the first coherent words he’d said since she and Genevieve had found him. “No air.”
Anna crumpled Nail’s shirt into a ball and jammed it into the wound, trying to ignore the slippery, squishy feel. Apply pressure, she thought. You’re supposed to apply pressure. Really, though? Were you still supposed to apply pressure when the bandage was going into the guy’s stomach cavity, and your hands were going in after it? Was that really how it was supposed to work? She didn’t know, nobody knew, and Lau wasn’t there and nobody could tell her anything, so she pushed until the wound was packed and her fingers were touching things she didn’t want to think about.
Tommy didn’t even wince. Anna watched his face for any sign of emotion or engagement, but he’d checked out again since his earlier comment. She hoped he was drifting somewhere without pain.
Anna looked up, past Tommy and Nail. Karyn stood in the center of the clearing. Her face hung slack, seemingly without comprehension, but wetness gleamed in her eyes. By her sides, her fists hung loose, closing and opening in uneven twitches.
Like Tommy’s heart, Anna thought.
Nail dropped his hand to Tommy’s wrist. “I can’t find anything,” he said. “Come on, man, give me something here.” Worry creased his brow, and his eyes were in constant motion, moving from Tommy to Anna to Karyn.
The twitching in Karyn’s hands weakened, then stilled.
“What are you doing?” Anna yelled. “Fucking help us!”
Karyn stepped back, still staring at a spot somewhere past Anna. The sound of her boots grinding the rocky sand was louder than Tommy’s breathing. “I don’t—”
“Didn’t see this coming, did you? You don’t think maybe you coulda cracked open the future and looked around for this?”
Karyn flinched. “I couldn’t, it doesn’t—”
“You couldn’t what?” Tears mingled with the sweat running down Anna’s face. She didn’t care. “You couldn’t what?”
For the first time, Karyn focused on Anna’s face. “You know it’s not that easy,” she said. A note of pleading had wormed its way into her voice. Anna found herself taking a small, petty satisfaction at that. “You know that.”
Nail’s voice, low and jagged: “He’s not breathing.”
Anna pulled her attention back to Tommy. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead, and blood from his mouth and nose pooled at the base of his neck. His chest didn’t move.
Nail closed his eyes. He started to speak, let out a half-strangled syllable, then shook his head.
Anna met Karyn’s eyes and summoned every ounce of venom she had. “You were supposed to stop this,” she said.
Karyn’s gaze lingered on her face for one long breath. Then, without a word, she turned away and started walking.
Chapter 13
The doctor showed up not ten minutes after Tommy’s final, anguished breath. Anna sat on the dirty ground, leaning back against the fender of an old Buick, and let Nail deal with him. If there was anything left to wring from her spent emotions, she couldn’t find it. The past hour she’d careened from the adrenaline rush of the job to the horror of what happened to Tommy to the bottom of a well of grief so deep she thought she’d never climb all the way back out, and now she was empty.
She thought maybe she ought to feel ashamed of her outburst at Karyn, but she didn’t. Maybe Kary
n couldn’t control what she saw or how, but that was her fucking job—that’s what they relied on her for. And then she’d just walked off, leaving Nail and Anna holding Tommy’s corpse, Genevieve standing to the side, face white and staring.
Fuck her, Anna thought, but even that thought carried no emotional weight.
Across the small clearing, Nail slipped the doctor a handful of bills. The two of them hoisted Tommy’s body and disappeared down the canyon of stacked cars.
That’s it. That’s the last of Tommy. The last wisecrack, the last magic trick I’ll watch him fuck up horribly. One last disappearing act. Guess the joke is on us after all.
She didn’t look up as the crunch of footfalls came her way. “Hey,” Genevieve said.
“Hey.”
Genevieve sat in the dirt next to Anna and took her hand. “He was good people,” she said softly.
Anna nodded.
They sat in silence for a long time. Genevieve’s hand was warm and dry in Anna’s, the bones thin and surely too frail to hold Anna up after this. But there was strength there, and Anna felt it flow into her—not much, a trickle rather than a flood, but enough. If only Karyn had been by her other side . . .
Genevieve shifted. “So, uh, I don’t know if this is a good time, but . . .”
Anna lifted her head. “What?”
“Well . . .” Genevieve pulled her backpack into her lap, then pulled out the box she and Tommy had prepared for the job. Black, covered with silver runes as always. The silver handle gleamed faintly yellow in the reflected gloom from L.A.’s skies.
Genevieve unhooked two clasps and opened the box. An old jawbone sat inside like the bottom half of a sinister grin. It looked right at home, yellowed and dry in this desert land. There was something about it that encouraged the eye to linger while making the stomach turn slow, oily circles.
Anna looked up. “What the fuck? How?”
“I found it in what was left of Mendelsohn. I just stashed it when the shit got ugly. Didn’t have time to do much else.” She closed the box. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to ram it so far up Enoch Sobell’s ass it’ll count as dental work. But we should cash it in. Fuck, we earned it.”
“You want to make the call, or should I?”
“I’ll do it. But I have to go home first. I need to talk to Karyn.”
* * *
“Karyn?” Anna called as she entered the apartment.
Nothing.
She stepped inside, closed the door, and swore. Karyn hadn’t even gotten home yet, which meant what? That she was out getting hammered? That she’d been ambushed by somebody who’d tailed them from the clusterfuck at Mendelsohn’s? Or maybe she’d just taken the long way home, needing to clear her head.
Still, that didn’t feel right. Karyn didn’t really party, and she didn’t spend a lot of time wandering the streets, either—too many possible surprises, too many nasty things she tended to see in the people she moved through.
Anna went into the living room, pulled out a folding chair and leaned forward, hanging her head on the card table. She’d wait for a while, and Karyn would come in, and everything would go back to making sense. Maybe they’d have it out, maybe they’d just grieve together, but everything would be fine.
Goddammit, Karyn. Where are you? She dialed Karyn’s number on her cell. It went to voice mail. She put the phone away and stood. Maybe there was a beer in the fridge. Maybe that would take the edge off the mild panic that was threatening to slip its leash and run racing around her head and heart.
The fridge contained the usual condiments and clotted milk, a loaf of bread—kept there so the roaches couldn’t find it—and a bundle of asparagus Karyn had gotten excited about for no good reason and brought home shortly before the goddamn job had really taken off and asparagus became the last of anybody’s concerns. It had blackened and grown some vegetation of its own.
There were also three bottles of Old Milwaukee. Anna’d almost rather drink horse piss, but Karyn liked the stuff.
Plus, we’re fresh out of horse piss, Anna thought as she grabbed a bottle. She stared at the other two for a moment, then grabbed them, too. It wasn’t like they were any worse warm.
Anna took her beers and settled into the beanbag chair, the only other piece of “furniture” in the living room besides the folding chairs and table. Almost nothing to show that people actually lived here, but like Karyn said, it was less shit to pack or abandon if they had to leave in a hurry.
Less shit to pack. That phrase kindled up real dread in Anna’s belly, and an ugly thought crowded to the front of her mind. She put the beer down and crossed the room to Karyn’s bedroom door. Knocked twice, just to be on the safe side. Then she went in.
The top drawer of the dresser hung open, half-empty, and the closet yawned like an opening to Hell. A handful of hangers had fallen on the floor. The black duffel bag—the one that Karyn kept packed in case they had to ditch in a hurry—was gone.
Karyn was gone.
Chapter 14
The phone rang, and Karyn jumped. It was the seventh time that night, or maybe the eighth, that the phone had started up its jingling, nerve-jangling racket, never mind that she’d pulled the cord out of the wall after the third time and smashed the phone to plastic shards and circuit board fragments after the fifth. A dull red ray of neon light slipped through a chink in yellow-and-brown flower-print curtains that hadn’t been changed or laundered since Lyndon Johnson was president, illuminated a swath of air thick with dust, and lit upon the wreckage of the motel room’s telephone. A few broken pieces of plastic that had landed on the top vibrated as the ringer made its futile plea for attention.
That’s not really happening, Karyn reminded herself. The phone was broken, sure, but it wasn’t ringing. The plastic wasn’t doing a skittering little dance down the top of the machine. The neighbors weren’t about to start pounding on the door, demanding that she answer the phone goddammit it’s three o’clock in the morning.
She knew it was mostly in her head, though that hadn’t stopped her from answering the phone the first couple of times. It had just kept on ringing, of course, because the message it was trying to convey had nothing to do with the actual phone.
She sat on the edge of the motel room’s bed, on a cheap comforter that also hadn’t been laundered since before she was born, and rested her head in her hands.
It wasn’t going to go away. The phone wasn’t going to stop ringing, not unless she gathered up its mortal remains, slipped out of the room, and dumped it in the swimming pool, or somewhere else out of earshot. And what would happen then? Either something else would start up, or maybe, finally, it would stop and leave her in peace—and she would go on, ignoring the message.
Because it was a message, no different from the usual stream of cryptic quasi-hallucinations that plagued her. They usually needed quite a bit of interpreting, but she thought this one was straightforward enough to figure out.
They were going to come looking for her. Probably already had. That meant she’d have to face them again, face Anna’s anger and Nail’s quiet rage. She’d let them down—and worse.
I killed Tommy. Like I shot him myself. For four hundred thousand dollars I’ll never see.
She’d replayed that night so many times she felt as though she were living in a mental loop of the night’s events. Tommy’s charred eye sockets at the beginning of the evening, the mad run toward the ritual, her encounter with the guy who’d stabbed her. Little more than a scratch, really, but enough to separate her from Tommy when he’d needed her. Tommy had run, and she’d been writhing on the ground, kicking and fighting, when something had rushed past her, something vague and terrible. Her attacker had frozen, and she’d had this intense, paranoid sensation of being the center of some vast, hateful entity’s curiosity. Then the moment had passed and she’d scrambled f
ree. After that, escape and recriminations.
Of course they’d come looking for her. Anna would, anyway, and once Anna got fixated on something, it would take the jaws of life to get her to let it go. She’d run down the taxi companies, find out which drivers were dispatched in the area earlier tonight, and call them, one after another, until she found the motel.
Karyn picked up her bag.
* * *
Twenty-six bucks. Karyn thumbed through the bills again and verified that they were all that remained of her cash reserves. Probably shouldn’t have stopped here, she thought as she pushed a half-burned French fry around on the plate. But a girl’s gotta eat. That, and she felt pushed around today, shoved from one place to the next by sinister shapes lurking just at the edge of her vision. Everywhere she went, there was an obvious way to go, an obvious path to avoid. The effect was tearing apart her nerves.
She looked around the diner. From her seat in the corner, she could see the rest of the occupants, the people walking by the big glass window in front, and the door. No surprises, then. Not yet. Behind the counter, plates clattered and a beat-up radio played some ghastly Rod Stewart song.
She put her wallet back in her pocket. Twenty-six bucks. She’d left the motel at four in the morning with every intention of getting out of town, but somehow that hadn’t happened. Instead she spent most of her cash on another room, and she’d only managed to wander since then. Besides the gentle, indefinable nudging from the visions, there wasn’t far you could get on twenty-six bucks, and once you got there, there wasn’t much you could do. And that was the crux of the problem right there, wasn’t it? What to do . . .
At the next table over, a cell phone rang, “Für Elise” playing in tinny digitized tones that made Karyn’s fillings buzz. The phone’s owner ignored it, but he gave Karyn a tight, distracted grin when she looked at him. Then he went back to staring at his plate. The phone kept ringing. At adjacent tables, conversations went on uninterrupted.
Premonitions Page 13
