Toward the far end of the room sat a wooden desk.
Behind the desk sat Enoch Sobell.
Sobell rose as Anna and Greaser approached, extending a hand in greeting. He was a tall, sturdy man with a politician’s ersatz smile and hooded black eyes. His dark hair was dusted with silver at the temples. He could have been the CEO of a big company—and was, actually—but he had another vibe entirely, cold and hungry like a snake in a human suit.
Anna took his hand, thinking half-coherently, This man is the Devil.
“Please sit, Ms. Ruiz,” Sobell said.
Come into my parlor, Anna thought, but she sat.
“I don’t meet most of my contractors personally,” Sobell began. “I hope you understand the importance I put on this meeting.”
Anna thought of the few times she’d been deposed. There was a certain approach to making it through the minefield of a deposition intact, and the biggest rule was Don’t volunteer anything. If a question was asked, you answered it—and no more. Offering more information than asked for was a good way to get your ass in a sling, often producing whole ugly lines of questioning that never would have come up if you’d just kept your mouth shut. Enoch Sobell was no lawyer, but this seemed like a good time to stick to depo rules anyway.
“Yes, sir,” Anna said.
“I hired you to do a straightforward job. Difficult, yes, but not complicated.” Anna thought that was bullshit—there’d been nothing straightforward about it—but now did not seem like the time to correct him. Sobell continued. “I also hired you because you have—had—a reputation for discretion.” Greaser’s words, almost exactly. Not hard to see where he got them from. Sobell’s face creased in a slight frown, and he steepled his fingers together in front of him. A heavy ring with an overlarge green stone flashed on his right hand. “Eight dead in a gunfight in the home of one of the city’s more prominent citizens does not constitute discretion where I come from.”
What the fuck? She didn’t remember Mendelsohn’s any too clearly, but she would have remembered a firefight. Had Nail accidentally shot half a dozen people? That didn’t sound like something he would have screwed up, and no way would he have done it on purpose. And none of the rest of them had been carrying firearms.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “We didn’t kill anybody.”
“The papers say eight bodies were found.”
She remembered the remains found near Mendelsohn’s corpse. Genevieve’s monster had gotten Mendelsohn, and maybe somebody else. But surely not that many, unless others had been in the house when it broke loose. “Shot?”
Sobell shrugged. “Our fair city’s redoubtable news rags didn’t say. They just said eight dead.”
“Make it nine,” Anna said. The words escaped on their own before she could do anything to stop them. So much for depo rules. “We lost one of our own.”
Sobell stared at her, waiting.
Anna looked down. Again, the room seemed to crowd in on her, so close it seemed her chest couldn’t expand to draw in air. It didn’t make sense. A room this large should have felt more like an auditorium than a closet. Why aren’t there any windows in here? “No,” she said finally. Regardless of the body count, the whole thing had been loud and frightening. “We weren’t all that discreet.”
“The only reason the investigation hasn’t branched out into a number of unpalatable directions is that, according to my contacts, they found Nathaniel Mendelsohn’s body dismembered and stuffed into a number of plastic filing bins in his office closet.”
“What? He’s—what?” Hadn’t Mendelsohn been pureed and poured all over the floor of his own house by the fucking monster from the basement?
“Apparently, the remains had been decomposing there for some number of weeks, during which time a fellow referred to as the Revered One has been running things. Understandably, the authorities suspect some kind of cult infighting gone out of control. Hopefully they continue to suspect that, in which case this should all blow over nicely.”
“Um, good.”
He put his hands on the desk in front of him and wove his fingers together. “I’m not prone to making threats, Ms. Ruiz. But I do hope you understand that I’m a somewhat public figure. I can’t afford to be tied to any criminal activities.”
Translation: I’m going to kill you and your friends if you publicly link me to this clusterfuck. “I understand.”
“So. You called me. I assume you have news.”
Anna pulled in a long breath against the strange pressure of her claustrophobia. “Yes, sir. We’ve got the item.”
“The jawbone.”
It was all Anna could do not to cast a furtive look around the place—she’d long since gotten in the habit of never mentioning swag by name. “Yes, sir.” She swallowed. “We’d like to finish the deal.”
Sobell didn’t smile, but something in his eyes lit up. To Anna, he might as well have been licking his lips.
“Terms?”
“Original terms,” Anna said. Then, before she could stop her mouth, “We just want this to be done.” Oops. That was some shitty negotiation.
Sobell gave her a long, considering look that seemed to peel her flesh off in strips. Anna could feel the negotiation slipping out from under her, the price dropping by the second. She had a moment to wonder if Greaser was going to take a million regardless, or if his fuckup restitution fee was going to stay at half.
“Done,” Sobell said. Anna could hardly believe it. “Work out the exchange with Mr. Gresser.”
“Yes, sir.”
Chapter 16
“We’re not gonna find a doctor down here,” Drew said. “Even the guys working the homeless clinic won’t come down here.”
Karyn couldn’t argue with that. Tenement buildings loomed over the street, most of their lower windows covered in sheets of graffiti-tagged plywood, and the potholes in the road yawned like bomb craters. The idle, the unemployed, and the unemployable stood around everywhere, smoked cigarettes on every stoop.
“Nope,” Karyn said.
“But you’re not looking for a doctor, are you?”
A ball rolled out into the street, and a couple of kids ran after it without even checking for traffic. Drew braked with a jolt. “Are you?” he asked again.
“Not exactly.”
“Shit. What are you hooked on?” The kids gave him the finger and cleared out, but he didn’t move the car forward.
“You want to get going,” Karyn said. “You stay still long enough here, somebody’ll start stealing parts off your car with you in it.”
“Very funny,” he said, but he pressed the gas. The car rolled forward at a cautious twenty miles per hour. Drew took his gaze from the road long enough to look at her. She didn’t look back. “I get it—the screaming, the shakes. My sister tried to get off the horse cold turkey once, and it didn’t look too different.”
“I’m not a junkie.”
“Well, it isn’t your fucking doctor that lives down here in the DMZ,” Drew said, the note of anger hard and surprising in his voice.
“Depends what you mean by ‘doctor.’”
“There’s a clinic I know—methadone. I think you can get state help for the fees.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me right. I’m not a junkie.”
Again, Drew stopped the car. This time, he turned to face Karyn. “Then what are we doing here? Tell me we’re not here to meet your connection.”
“What’s it to you?”
“That horse my sister was trying to get off? What do you think pulled her into that stupid fucking cult? Nothing cleans a person up like getting religion.” Karyn heard his teeth grind together. Then he spoke again, quietly. “I followed her right in. I’m trying to help, for God’s sake, not deliver you to the butcher.”
“It’s not like that,” Karyn said. “Reall
y.”
“Then what’s it like?”
For one crazy moment, she thought about explaining. But when has that ever ended well? Instead, she grabbed the door handle. “It’s all right. I’ll walk from here.” She pushed the door open.
“Whoa!” Drew’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. “Are you insane? Skinny white girl down here alone? They’ll eat you before the end of the block.”
“Nobody’s going to eat me,” she said, though she could see things moving in an alley off the other side of the road, and she wondered if that was really true. She didn’t get out of the car.
“Come on. Close the door, and I’ll get you out of here.”
She sat back, but she didn’t close the door. She measured Drew with a long, searching look, and finally decided—What the hell?
“OK,” she said, “I’ll be straight with you. I do need to meet my hookup.”
Drew opened his mouth, so she continued before he could stick his foot in it. “But it’s not heroin. Really. I’ve got a . . . condition.”
“A condition.”
“Yeah. I can keep it under control, but I need a very special, very expensive kind of medicine.”
“The kind you won’t find in the pharmacy,” Drew said.
“That’s true, but it’s not what you’re thinking. There’s nothing illegal or dangerous about it. It’s just rare and expensive.”
“And peddled out of a crack house.”
Karyn shrugged. “If you like.” She closed the door. “Can we go?”
Drew didn’t answer, but he took his foot off the brake, and the car started rolling. “What condition?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Drew nodded and guided the car around a chasm in the pavement. Karyn saw lines of tension on his face, tightness around the eyes and lips.
“Turn right ahead.”
Drew steered the car onto a side street that was, if possible, in even worse repair than the street they’d been on. If Karyn hadn’t spent so much time down here, it would have been hard for her to believe this was America, not some bombed-out Eastern European relic of World War Two. Here the idlers were gone for the most part. Only the most desperate of squatters lived in the condemned buildings in this part of town—and the odd person who was so determined to have solitude in the middle of this city that they were willing to live somewhere nobody else would come.
She felt a surprising surge of warmth toward this stranger who’d picked her up and helped her when everything else had turned to shit, and, without really thinking about it, she said, “I hallucinate the future.”
“Huh?”
“That’s my condition. I hallucinate the future.”
She imagined she could see Drew’s skin crawling, a wave of goose bumps traveling up his body. Almost everybody had one of two reactions to her “condition”—outright disbelief, which wasn’t so bad, or a bad case of the creeps. Sometimes it passed.
“That’s an odd way to put it,” Drew said.
“It’s the truth. I don’t see the future, not in any way that makes sense. I get images overlaid on top of images, all smashed in with the regular world. I can’t tell any of it apart, except that most of the hallucinations don’t make any sense. Even the stuff that does usually needs a lot of interpretation.”
Drew grinned. “How come you don’t make a killing at the stock market?”
“It’s that interpretation bit,” Karyn said. “It’s a bear. Plus, it’s not like I get to know what I want to know about—I just get what I’m given.”
“And the medication? Is that for real?”
“Oh, yeah.” She watched a stray cat batting at a piece of litter before answering. “My condition gets . . . pretty bad if I don’t keep it suppressed.”
“The screaming and running into traffic.”
“The future’s an ugly place.” So’s the past. “Pull over here.”
Drew made a face. “Why the hell would somebody dealing in crazy expensive ‘medication’ live in a crack house?”
“You think my condition’s bad, wait till you meet Adelaide.”
Drew grimaced as he guided the car over to the side of the road. “Great.” He parked two feet away from the curb, but Karyn didn’t feel like now was a good time to criticize his parking skills.
“This won’t take long,” she told him. “You can wait here, if you want.”
He looked up and down the street. Nothing moved but the stray cat they’d passed earlier. “There’s nobody here. At all. The whole street.”
“Adelaide likes her privacy.”
“It gives me the creeps. I’m staying with you.”
“Up to you.”
Karyn got out. Drew turned off the car and followed, his footfalls loud in the empty street.
At the front door of the apartment building, Karyn hesitated. She always met Adelaide here, but she’d never gotten comfortable with it, and it looked like the door had taken a close-range shotgun blast since her last visit. There was a hole clean through it, shreds of veneer surrounding the hole like long teeth. Adelaide wouldn’t bother to fix it, Karyn knew. A working front door was the least of her concerns, if she even noticed at all.
Karyn pushed open the door. It swung inward with the slightest touch, hitting the wall and hanging askew on one hinge. A rank, wet smell—mildew and rot and stagnant standing water—belched from the inside of the building.
Drew coughed and covered his mouth. “Ugh. Is she, uh, dangerous?”
Karyn stopped at the threshold. “Very. Whatever you do, don’t look directly at her. You’ll turn to stone.”
“You’re joking,” Drew said, his eyes wide.
“Yes, actually.” Karyn smiled. “Just be polite, and don’t talk unless she asks you something. It’ll be fine.”
She went inside, wrinkling her nose at the smell and shaking her head in astonishment at the ruin. No matter how many times she came here, it was impossible to get used to. Nobody had lived in this building for years, obviously—other than Adelaide. The sheetrock had rotted and fallen off the walls in most places, landing in moldering piles and leaving the skeletal framework of the building exposed and rusting. Grime streaked the floor. Holes gaped in the ceiling like infected wounds.
Karyn made her way down the hall and turned at the end. She pulled open another door, this one heavy and metal.
“The stairwell?” Drew asked, his voice high and anxious. “You sure these stairs will support us?”
“Don’t worry. We’re not going up.”
“That’s not better.”
She was inclined to agree, but she said nothing as she headed down the stairs. Her calf complained at each step, and her hip joined in as well, angry from her encounter with the car outside the diner. They loosened up as she moved, but she still had the impression she was more hobbling than walking.
The stench worsened during her descent, and it soon became obvious why. Brackish black water covered the floor, coming halfway up the bottom step. Oily rainbows swam on the surface amid floating black lumps and rotting detritus.
Karyn reached the bottom and stepped right in. The water filled her shoe. Her stomach made a noise of complaint.
Ahead of her was a doorway, and beyond that was darkness, lit only by shafts of sickly light coming through the dingy panes of the basement windows.
“Oh, nasty. It’s warm,” Drew said as he stepped into the water behind her.
“Shh.”
“You’re not going to lure me down here and kill me, are you?” he asked in a whisper.
“Nah. I only do bag ladies.”
A pause. Drew’s shadow on the bright patch of water ahead of her stopped moving.
“Joking,” she said.
“I must be nuts,” he said, but he started moving again.
Something
pale shifted, flashed in the water ahead of her, and was gone. Was that actually there? she wondered. The water wasn’t deep enough to harbor much of anything beyond a few frogs and the odd billion or so mosquito larvae, or at least she didn’t think so. But if it wasn’t really there, what was the message? What was it trying to tell her?
There’s a game with no end. Keep walking. Warm water sloshed around her ankles as she moved forward. She could see a room ahead, sun filtering down through the filthy windows and offering a little light, but she knew Adelaide wouldn’t be there.
She turned to the right and kept moving. After a dozen steps, only the vaguest of light and dark shapes suggested walls and openings. Karyn held her hands out in front of her to avoid running into anything.
A hand dropped onto her shoulder, and she whirled around.
“Don’t want to get separated,” Drew said softly.
“No.” She’d been here dozens of times over the years, but she still felt glad of Drew’s presence. She usually hadn’t come alone before, either.
That thought triggered an unwelcome swarm of associations. Not now.
Her right hand hit a wall, slid across a slimy surface. She stepped left and through a doorway, wincing as damp spiderwebs trailed over her skin. Not for the first time, she thought she’d scream if a spider ran across her face. This time, that didn’t happen.
Behind her, Drew ran into the doorframe and swore.
Ahead and somewhat to the right, a faint flickering lit up the dank basement. It was slight, an orange wash over indistinct humps and walls, but the darkness had been so complete before that it seemed almost as good as huge floodlights. Karyn wasn’t sure she wanted to see her surroundings any more clearly than this, anyway.
She walked to where a section of the ceiling had fallen in, leaving a space barely high enough for her to get through without crawling. The light came from beyond. She crouched and shuffled through.
Premonitions Page 15
