Premonitions

by Jamie Schultz

  Nail pulled the red-faced guy up in front of him. The guy groaned as he tried to put his weight on his left leg, and he ended up standing on only the right.

  “What the fuck?” Nail asked.

  “You’re a dead man,” one of the guys up the stairs said. Tall guy with a crew cut that emphasized his already flat head.

  “Yeah, I got that. You wanna tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “You shoulda skipped town after you did Greaser, asshole. Now you’re gonna pay.”

  “‘Did’ Greaser? I ain’t ‘did’ no one, man. We made the fuckin’ drop.”

  This was bad. It didn’t make any sense for starters, but these didn’t look like the kind of guys who worried too much about that. If it weren’t for the red-faced sack of shit in front of him, they’d have put a bunch of holes in him already. He wasn’t sure they weren’t about to try anyway.

  “How about you put the gun down and let Teddy go, and we’ll go somewhere and talk this out?”

  Okay, they were definitely going to shoot him. Crewcut’s voice had gone all singsongy, like he was trying to get a mean dog to calm down. He sounded about as sincere as a mob lawyer.

  “How about you throw me that bag, and I walk away real slow, and nobody shoots nobody?” Nail tried. He didn’t have much hope that that would work, but you never knew. Besides, that was a quarter of a million dollars sitting in a bag next to Crewcut’s feet. Had to at least make a little effort for it.

  “Nobody’s gotta get hurt here,” the guy said. “You got something that belongs to Mr. Sobell. You give that to me, and I’ll take the money, and maybe you’ll get a good long head start.”

  Crewcut had a shit poker face—Tommy would have taken him for a mint—and Nail read the precise moment the man decided to shoot him.

  Nail shoved the red-faced guy forward. Crewcut’s gun went off, the bang echoing brutally in the stairwell. Nail fired back in his general direction, even as he lunged toward the stair rail. Didn’t hit shit that he could see, but at least a couple of the guys tried to get down. Crewcut fired again, wildly, missing, and Nail rolled over the rail.

  He landed on his feet, more or less, on the next flight of stairs down. Above him, the red-faced guy was slumped against the wall, bright blood pumping out onto the stairs. The other guys were running down past him.

  Nail took off. A firefight in close quarters with these clowns would be a fucking disaster, total chaos, and even if he had a huge edge in training, there was no telling what would happen. Four steps down, he jumped the next rail again, then ran, skipping three steps at a time, all the way to the bottom. A couple more shots were fired. God knew where the bullets ended up, but they didn’t hit Nail.

  He bolted past the air-conditioning units, hung a sharp left and headed for the parking lot. A glance behind him showed his pursuers huffing and puffing, having finally come around the corner—far enough away he could get some wheels before they could catch up to him. He jumped in his van.

  “Hey!” one of the guys shouted. Now, though, there were other people around, maybe half a dozen scattered throughout the parking lot. Lot of witnesses. Maybe that meant something to these assholes and maybe not, but no more shots were fired.

  Nail fired up the van. Moments later, he was leaving tracks of melted rubber at the parking lot exit. He took the first left down a narrow alley, then screamed back out on the next street, eyes half on the road and half on his mirrors. Another couple of quick turns and an ignored red light later, he thought he was clear.

  He pulled into another alley and reached for his phone. Dialed Anna while staring at his mirrors. Voice mail.

  Not good.

  He floored it, and the van roared out into the street. Anna and Karyn’s apartment was fifteen minutes from here, if traffic didn’t fuck him. Fifteen minutes. Karyn was probably safe—she wasn’t around and anyway, she was Karyn. Anna, though . . . Had Sobell’s guys already gotten to her?

  Nail glanced at the speedometer, saw he was doing sixty in a thirty-five. Too bad. If the cops stopped him, he’d tell them there was a murder in progress.

  He dialed the phone again. Nothing. Flipped through his numbers, veered around a black Toyota that was lurching down the middle of the road like a wounded animal, and dialed Genevieve. No answer.

  Six minutes, and he was almost there. That would be a new record. He dialed the phone again. No answer at Anna’s number. No answer at Genevieve’s.

  He rolled into the parking lot at Anna’s place eight minutes after starting out for it. To his surprise, Genevieve was standing out on the fire escape. Her back was pressed to the stucco, and she was slowly edging toward the ladder.

  He parked the van, grabbed his newly acquired shotgun—draping a jacket over it as an afterthought—and ran over.

  Genevieve caught his eye and put her finger over her lips, telling him to be quiet. Not three feet from her, the window was open. The sound of something smashing came from inside.

  Genevieve made it to the ladder and started descending. A moment later, a heavyset guy poked his head out the window.

  “Hey!” the guy shouted.

  Nail brought up the shotgun. “Hey yourself.”

  The guy disappeared back into the apartment. Any second now, he’d be back out, waving a fucking gun. Or maybe he’d be smart enough to send a friend around front.

  “Come on, girl,” Nail said. “We gotta go.”

  Genevieve dropped to the ground. Sure enough, the guy peeked out around the edge of the window, waving some hardware around. Nail pulled the trigger. Stucco and plaster rained down on the fire escape. Some lady walking her dog yelled at her kids to get inside.

  “Nice timing,” Genevieve said.

  Nail didn’t take his eyes from the window. “Where’s Anna?”

  “She’s not here. She’s . . .” She looked up at the window. “I’ll tell you later. What now?”

  “You hear sirens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He threw his keys to Genevieve. She got in behind the wheel of the van.

  Nail backed up, keeping the shotgun trained on the window.

  “You don’t know who you’re messing with, asshole!” the guy shouted. Tough talk from a guy who won’t come out where I can see him.

  Nail got into the van and poked the shotgun through the open window. “Gen, get us out of here.”

  “Right on.”

  They pulled away. Nail half expected the guy in the window to start blazing away at them once they were halfway down the block, but evidently he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.

  Nail looked over at her. “You OK?” He flexed his right hand and grimaced.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah. Where’s Anna?”

  “Went looking for Adelaide.”

  “Who?”

  “Long story. What are you doing here?” Genevieve grinned. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Buncha guys came for me, too. I busted my hand on some motherfucker’s hard-ass head. First time that’s ever happened. You gotta have a hard-ass head to break my hand.” He moved it again, and again made a pained face. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could track Karyn if I had a hair or something. I’ve checked already, but I thought I’d make another run at it, just in case. No luck.”

  “You don’t answer your fucking phone anymore?”

  Genevieve grimaced. “I left it on the counter. I heard it ring, but I was hiding from those guys by then. Guess they’ve got it now.”

  “Too bad. Any way you can get ahold of Sobell?”

  “Why?”

  “Greaser’s dead, and Sobell didn’t get the bone.”

  Genevieve turned her head sharply toward him. “What?”

  “That’s what they told me. They were ready to fuck me up because t
hey think we killed Greaser and took the bone and the money.”

  Genevieve’s face, pale to begin with, was nearly white. “Oh, this is not good. Not good at all.”

  “No shit.”

  * * *

  “There,” Nail said, pointing at an open spot next to the curb. Genevieve parked and reached for the ignition.

  “Don’t turn it off,” Nail said. “Just in case.”

  “Sure you don’t want some help?”

  “I’d rather you kept the car running.”

  “Okay.”

  He got out. The sun was edging down below the concrete horizon, and long shadows covered the sidewalk. He walked fast, ignoring the throbbing in his hand. Hopefully he wouldn’t need Gen’s emergency getaway car service, but after the day’s events, it couldn’t hurt to have her ready. If there was an open price on their heads, Pete would know, but Nail didn’t give it much better than sixty–forty odds that Pete would give him the lowdown rather than try to collect.

  He took a quick look up the street, just to be sure, then stepped into Pete’s Paradise, a tropical-themed shithole that pretended to its name about as well as Spam pretended to be steak. The door closed behind him with a rattle. One look at the place, and he almost turned around and walked out. There were maybe six people in the whole bar, bartender included, and there was a bad vibe here. A couple of guys in the corner had their heads together, muttering, but they stopped and stared at him when he looked their way. Behind the bar, Pete himself suddenly turned his back on a customer who’d been leaning over the bar, close enough to whisper, Nail thought. Even Elly, the woman who regularly hung out in the back corner alone and drank herself to oblivion every night, was talking into a cell phone, one hand covering her mouth and the bottom of the phone.

  Nail put his hand on the door to let himself out, and stopped. They ain’t talking about you. Can’t be. That’s just nerves talking. He walked to the bar with his head up, and sat at the end of the bar opposite the bartender’s buddy.

  “How about a Bud?” he asked, overloud. Pete made a show of wiping down a glass first, but he made it to the tap eventually.

  “Slow night,” somebody said.

  Nail gave a start. Some guy was sitting right there next to him at the bar, and he hadn’t even seen him. Guy must have just sat down, Nail thought uneasily, but part of him knew better. He wasn’t the kind of guy you could just sneak up on. On that side of his body, his skin crept, like it was trying to crawl away from the newcomer.

  “Yeah,” Nail said, his mouth suddenly dry. “Always a slow night in here. Don’t know how they stay in business.”

  He didn’t look, but something shifted in his peripheral vision, and he felt the presence move closer to him, practically leaning against him. He got the impression of a hunched man in a long coat, collar up, some kind of hat pulled down low over his forehead, but he couldn’t quite make out any details—not the kind of hat or the color of the coat, or even a single element of the man’s face. Was he a white guy? Black? Did he have any facial hair? Did he have brown eyes? Did he have any eyes? That thought sent another crazy prickle of gooseflesh rippling along his body.

  He decided to not look at the guy. He had a hunch he wouldn’t like what he saw.

  “Secret for a secret,” the guy whispered, the sound like dead leaves blowing over tombstones.

  Nail’s mouth had gone desert dry, bone-dry, and what the fuck was Pete doing? He was clear across the bar, on the goddamn phone.

  The guy next to him wasn’t the kind of guy you left hanging, though—and wasn’t there something else, too? There was a strange pull, an urge to tell what he knew. Distantly he was aware that that was an urge he almost never had, but that didn’t seem so important right now.

  Nail licked his lips. “OK.”

  The guy leaned in even closer. Something wispy and insubstantial brushed Nail’s ear, and his body convulsed with a racking shudder.

  “Enoch Sobell,” the guy said.

  Maybe this is just the guy I need to talk to. “Yeah?”

  “He ain’t in charge anymore. His boys are leaving him.”

  Holy shit. Curiosity overwhelmed fear completely for one moment. “For who?”

  “No getting greedy. I gave you one—your turn.”

  Secret for a secret? Nail suddenly realized he didn’t know shit. Wasn’t that why he was here?

  “Karyn’s gone,” he said. He wasn’t sure where the thought had come from, or why it seemed like an appropriate offering—the words had simply bubbled up and fallen out of his face. It felt like the guy held his breath, though, listening intently to Nail’s every word. It was a good feeling. “After the job went bad, she took off. Don’t know where. Don’t know if she’s still in town. She doesn’t drive, though, so if she skipped town, it would have to be on a bus or something.” His mouth seemed to be running of its own accord, and there were a dozen things jammed behind his teeth, all crowding to get out at the same time. “I don’t know how things got so fucked up,” he said. “We made the drop. Greaser got the bone and he even took half the money. I swear.”

  He felt a faint pressure on his shoulder—a hand, probably—and another shudder threatened to ripple through him. Then the voice, closer than ever. “Thanks. And one more thing, for your service . . .”

  A cold draft slipped down the side of Nail’s face and down his collar as the guy whispered into his ear. “That night at Mendelsohn’s.”

  Nail’s spine went rigid. “How do you know about that?”

  “Sobell was there. He had business with a demon. The man’s got a lot of troubles right now. A lot of enemies.”

  “Goddammit, how do you—”

  The guy was gone.

  Nail looked around the room, wide-eyed and still somewhat dazed. The two guys were still huddled in a booth, Elly in the corner. Pete gave him a bitter, bemused smile. “Hear anything interesting?”

  Nail didn’t know where the whispering guy got his information, but there was no doubt the guy knew some shit he was definitely not supposed to know. The comment about Mendelsohn’s place was unsettling, if true, and even if it wasn’t, he shouldn’t have known Nail had anything to do with it.

  Sobell’s got a lot of enemies right now, the guy had said, and Nail didn’t miss the fact that all of the “secrets” he had offered were Sobell’s. Whether the guy was deliberately trying to stir up some shit or not, if he was running around handing out that kind of information, things were about to get ugly. Nail left in a rush.

  Chapter 20

  Anna had gotten nowhere after revisiting what felt like every last place she and Karyn had spent more than twenty minutes in the last year, and she was about ready to give up. Karyn had apparently scrubbed herself from the face of the earth, at least as far as anybody knew. She had considered casting a wider net, maybe even getting a skip tracer who owed her a favor on the job, but eventually rejected the idea. Surely there was nobody better to go crawling through L.A.’s underbelly, lifting up rocks and asking clever questions of the creepy things that came scuttling out, but Anna didn’t want to spread this around. The skip tracer would get the job done, sure, but he’d let something slip—he’d probably have to, to get it done. Anna and Karyn had made enemies over the years, and there were eight or ten parties Anna could think of off the top of her head that would be only too pleased to find out that the two of them were separated, that maybe Karyn had her guard down.

  They’d be wrong, of course—Karyn would see them coming from six miles off. Her guard, Anna thought, had probably not been up this far in years. The big worry was that if Karyn wasn’t seeing every kind of trouble coming by now, she would be soon, and she couldn’t run from everything.

  That thought had triggered Anna’s next logical avenue in a flash of insight that, in retrospect, had taken way too long to arrive. Karyn couldn’t stay down forever, or she’d
lose her mind. If she wanted to prevent that, there was only one person to go to. Now Anna slowed the car and frowned. Ahead, two cars were parked in front of Adelaide’s building. It was tough to be sure from here, but it looked like the one in front was sitting on four flat tires. She turned the ringer off her phone, put it in her pocket, and parked just around the corner.

  She approached the parked vehicles warily, looking for any sign of movement. Nothing stirred. Sure enough, though, the front car’s tires had been slashed. Whose car? Somebody who’d driven Karyn here? Somebody else entirely? And what about the other car, a blue sedan covered with a film of road dust? Adelaide didn’t get a lot of visitors, so the odds that this was somebody else who had just happened by weren’t great.

  A glance inside the first car didn’t give her anything useful. A couple of wadded-up fast-food wrappers told no story worth knowing, and a handful of grimy nickels in the armrest didn’t say much, either. The second car was similarly unhelpful. If she wanted to learn anything else, not to mention maybe scoring some blind for Karyn, she’d have to go see if Adelaide was around. She forced down a faint sense of disgust that threatened to swell, but there wasn’t much she could do to calm her pounding heart.

  She’s not dangerous, Anna reminded herself. She just freaks me out. Some people are freaked out by bugs, I’m freaked out by crazy, basement-dwelling prophets who like rats too much. No shame in that, but there’s nothing to be afraid of.

  Plus, she recalled, I still have Nail’s gun. It was snug in the inside pocket of her jacket, the weight swinging against her body when she walked. That didn’t calm her down any, but it helped her summon the will to move.

  Adelaide’s building was as much of a wreck as ever, about as destroyed as a building could be without a bomb having fallen on it. One day this goddamn building is going to fall in and kill her, and then I won’t have to do this shit anymore. Or would she? Karyn would have to score blind somewhere, and anyway it was hard to imagine how Adelaide would fail to see a mundane disaster like that coming. Probably she’d just move out the day before the collapse and go find another horrifying building to squat in.