Premonitions

by Jamie Schultz

  Anna pushed open the door, wincing as the damp smell hit her. There was mold growing in here that science hadn’t ever heard of, she was certain. She followed the hall straight to the back and paused at the top of the stairs. Had she heard a voice? Or had that been the product of her own keyed-up mind? Or Adelaide talking to herself?

  She waited, straining to hear anything, but there was nothing. Stepping cautiously so as to make no noise, she turned the corner. One slow step at a time, she descended the staircase.

  She had made it about two-thirds of the way down the stairs when she heard something splash beyond the doorway. A moment later, a man’s voice reached her, coming from much closer than she would have expected.

  Uh-oh. She backed up the stairs as rapidly as she could, keeping her eyes fixed on the doorway the whole way. Once she made it to the top, she thought about running for it, but there really wasn’t much of anywhere to run. Her car, maybe, but if whoever it was saw her, she could be in a lot of trouble. Instead, she went up the stairs. The fourth step sagged underfoot, sending a sickening bolt of shock through her stomach, but it didn’t give out, and she reached the landing without mishap. She edged around the corner where the stairs switched back. It was dark here, away from even the faint light that came through the first-floor windows, and while that wasn’t exactly what she’d call safety, it was reassuring.

  “Fucking move.” A man’s voice again, this time coming from the hall. Anna peeked around the corner. The thin, bedraggled figure in front was Adelaide. A skinny guy with blond dreadlocks walked behind her, shoving her with the barrel of a gun. “Fucking move!” he said again, and Adelaide shuffled forward a little faster. She was laughing now, or maybe talking to herself, bursts of sound at erratic pitches, and the sound made Anna shiver.

  Another man, a squat, solid-looking fellow in a T-shirt and jeans, followed the two of them. Anna didn’t recognize him, but she had no trouble at all picking out the first as one of the guys from the Brotherhood they’d spent the better part of a day trailing around after, way back at the beginning of the job.

  She pulled back behind the corner, cursing under her breath. What could the Brotherhood possibly want with Adelaide? Maybe they’d followed Karyn here, or maybe they’d found her some other way, but no way was this a coincidence. No way.

  She heard the creak and scrape of the front door opening, and the low orange light of sunset flooded through the hall, then vanished again.

  Shit! They were going to be gone in a few moments, and then what? Maybe Adelaide knew where Karyn was, and even if she didn’t, Anna didn’t know where else Karyn would be able to get her medication.

  There was, she supposed, some chance that Karyn was here, downstairs—but if that was the case, she was already beyond help. Those two guys would have made sure of that.

  She went down the stairs and crept out of the building as quickly as she dared. When she emerged from the building, the dusty sedan was already moving away. She let it get almost out of sight at the end of the block before running out to her car.

  As she started the car, she took out her phone and dialed Genevieve. No answer.

  “Call me,” she said, and then she pulled out after the departing vehicle before it disappeared from sight entirely.

  * * *

  They weren’t pros. That much was obvious, Anna thought. She was pretty good at tailing by car, but these guys didn’t drive like they had even considered the possibility that somebody might follow them. They took a leisurely thirty minutes or so to drive a straight shot to a motel that looked like it had been run-down on the day it was built, forty years ago. They parked, shoved Adelaide across the mostly empty parking lot, and disappeared into a unit across the way.

  I don’t owe her anything, Anna thought. I should just get clear of this shit. And while that was true, the yammering voice of worry was louder, shouting over and over: Where’s Karyn? Where’s Karyn? What about her meds?

  The lights were on in the motel room the three people had gone into, and from the shapes moving on the curtains, it looked like there was a whole lot more than three people in there. Who, she wondered, was in charge of this mess? What were they talking about? What was Adelaide saying? She wished Nail was here. He had equipment for this kind of thing, or knew where to get it. Supersensitive microphones. Lasers you could bounce off windowpanes to pick up sound vibrations. All kinds of shit like that.

  Well, there’s the old-fashioned way.

  She gave it another moment’s thought, staring at the window the whole time, and then got out of the car. The room next door to the lighted window was dark, and she approached it as quickly as she could. The place was old, the door locked with actual hardware, and it took her all of fifteen seconds to jimmy the lock. She slipped inside and closed the door.

  Nobody was inside, but it looked like the room had been rented out. A weathered backpack lay on one of the beds, a red nylon duffel bag at the foot of the other. Anna hoped the owners wouldn’t be back soon. She went around to the right-hand wall, easing around the TV, and pressed her ear to the wallpaper.

  The walls were typical of cheap motels, and while the voices were muffled, she could clearly make out the sound of somebody shouting.

  “Where is she? Where is she?” A man’s voice, rising to a shrill note at the end. The sound, Anna thought, of a guy on the verge of completely losing his shit. Somebody gave a quiet answer she couldn’t make out. It sounded like a woman’s voice.

  Dammit, speak up. I can’t hear a damn thing.

  “TELL ME!”

  Then silence. A few moments later, several men began talking in low voices, but again, Anna couldn’t make out much. It was just so much maddeningly indistinct mumbling through the plasterboard.

  She looked at where the TV sat on a short dresser. Well . . . Moving carefully, she pushed the dresser away from the wall, pivoting it on one corner. It was empty, made of cheap fiberboard, and not very heavy. The TV cord stretched out behind it, so she reached down and pulled the plug from the wall. Then she took out her pocketknife, flipped open the blade, and crouched down in the space formerly occupied by the dresser.

  If the rooms mirrored each other, as suggested by the doors, this would be a great way of listening in without being observed. The dresser on the other side should block the hole from sight, but there was enough of a gap because of the space needed for the plug that it wouldn’t block a lot of sound. It would be almost as good as being in the same room with them.

  As long as I’m not too loud. And the dresser is in the same place. Ugh. Yeah. Her knife poking through a visible spot in the wall would invite some unpleasant attention in a hurry. She pulled her pistol from her jacket and put it down next to her where she could get at it quickly.

  The first layer of sheetrock was straightforward enough. She slid her knife through and slowly cut a fist-sized piece out. She was pretty sure the sheetrock was thinner than code, which suited her fine. The rasp of the knife against the gypsum seemed loud in her ears, but the voices continued talking, so she kept going slow. White powder covered her fingers and floated to the carpet as she sawed, and at last she pulled the piece away, revealing the narrow gap between the walls and the back of the piece on the other side.

  Already the voices were clearer.

  “. . . wasn’t there,” a man said, sounding rather defensive. “. . . don’t know.”

  “Did you see anyone?” The loud guy again.

  More mumbling. Anna put the point of her knife to the wall and slowly began drilling a hole through it.

  “. . . nothing. I mean, the place is a mess, but we couldn’t find nothing.”

  Anna’s knife poked through the drywall, and she froze. If the dresser wasn’t in the same location on the other side, there would be a quarter inch of shiny metal protruding from a spot about a foot off the floor in the middle of a blank wall on the other side.


  A moment passed without outcry, and Anna pulled the knife back. Adelaide’s voice drifted through the little hole in the wall, sounding small and scared.

  “Home. Adelaide wants to go home. Right now. Her head hurts bad today, so bad. Stuffed with rats.”

  “It’s OK.” The man’s voice had quieted, dropped to a soothing murmur that was barely audible through the wall. “It’s OK. We’re going to help you, remember?”

  “Adelaide doesn’t know. She can’t—Adelaide can’t think.”

  “You came to us, remember? We can’t help you, if you don’t help us.”

  She sold us out. Plain and simple. Goddammit.

  “Adelaide needs . . . She needs quiet.”

  Instead of cutting her some slack, the guy raised his voice. “Where is the relic?”

  “Adelaide wants to go home!”

  “You said you’d bring us Ames. Where is she?”

  A high, wavering note sounded, an awful plaintive wail that made the hairs stand up on the back of Anna’s neck. A moment later there was a crash, then a thud. The cry stopped for a second, then started up again, louder this time.

  They knocked her down. Kicked her chair over. Something like that. Anna ground her teeth together and suddenly found herself wondering just how many men were in that room. Were they armed? If not, she could simply walk in, hold them at gunpoint, get Adelaide, and walk out. If they were, though . . . she’d have to get the drop on them somehow. And even then . . .

  You are not just going to walk in there and shoot six or eight people.

  No. No, she wasn’t. That didn’t leave much in the way of options, though. Just being here was risky enough—a frontal assault on the next room was over the line even for her.

  Somebody’s phone rang, and Anna moved closer to the hole. She heard a series of grunts and noncommittal responses, followed by a curt good-bye.

  “OK,” the guy said. His voice was high and nervous. “Revered One?”

  “Yes?” The loud guy again.

  “That was Brother Sheffield.”

  “And?”

  “The stuff Sobell’s guy said checks out. Looks like something blew up at that parking garage. It’s surrounded by yellow tape and everything. Ames’s crew must have run off with the relic.”

  Anna listened with mounting unease. She remembered Greaser’s car sitting at the drop site for more than an hour and Nail commenting on how strange that was. Greaser had left, in the end, but now the remains of a car that had been blown to hell were parked in the same garage. Probably even the same spot. Which meant—what?

  It meant a setup, of course. Her best guess was that Greaser’d torched his own car and run off with the million bucks and the bone, leaving Anna and company as the perfect fall guys for Sobell and the Brotherhood to take their wrath out on.

  “Where is Ames?” the loud guy demanded.

  Adelaide started humming. Something smashed against the wall.

  Chapter 21

  The afternoon had passed with a wretched, crawling slowness, each moment dragging reluctantly after the last in a chain broken only by the occasional illusory rap at the door or ring of the phone. Karyn had jumped at nearly every one, triggering a startled reaction from Drew.

  “Take a nap or something,” she’d told him after the first hour. “You’re not helping.”

  “We’re sitting here waiting for what? Somebody to come kick our heads in?”

  “Tahiti is out, remember? I don’t know what the hell else we’d do besides wait. Unless maybe you’ve got some new bright ideas?”

  “This sucks,” he’d said, and then he’d curled up on the chair and turned his back to her. Still jumped a lot, though.

  The waiting was bad enough, but as the afternoon wore on, Karyn began noticing other things that were even more worrisome. At first, the knocks merely came with more frequency. Then the phone began ringing virtually nonstop, the racket from the old handset ceasing only long enough for Karyn to let out one tense breath before it began again. Eventually, she’d moved the damn thing into the other room, and when that proved inadequate to stifle its ringing, she’d put it in the oven and closed the door. If the gas had still been connected, she would have been sorely tempted to melt it to slag, but even this way it was quieter.

  By evening, she was wondering how she’d ever sleep again. She sat on the couch and put her fingertips to her temples, trying to drive out the noise by raw concentration. Closing her eyes didn’t help—it turned out that blocking out all visual stimulus made the noise that much worse—so instead, she stared straight at the wall ahead of her, unblinking as though she were trying to set it on fire with the intensity of her gaze.

  Part of the wall turned gray as she focused on it. At first, she thought it was a trick of vision, like when stars would sometimes seem close enough to grab when she stared at them intently enough. She squeezed her eyelids shut for a count of ten and opened them again.

  The gray spot had spread.

  What the hell?

  She got up from the couch and walked across the room, holding one hand out in front of her. What is that? The spot was gray, fuzzy, and almost circular in outline, and she had no idea what it was until she reached the wall and leaned in close. A faint, familiar smell came from the spot.

  Mold. That’s mold. As she watched, the spot expanded to the size of a dinner plate, then a hubcap, then larger, like watching a time-lapse video. The center sank in, leaving a dark hole. She reached out a hand to touch it, but felt only smooth, flat wallpaper.

  “What are you doing?” Drew asked.

  “This is so w—” she began, turning toward him.

  She screamed and jumped back. Drew was gone, and Anna was in his place, a bullet hole slightly off-center in her temple. Blood and worse spattered the couch, the chair, and the wall behind her.

  “Whoa! Hold on! Relax, OK? What’s going on?” The apparition stood.

  Drew. That’s Drew. It didn’t look like Drew, and it didn’t sound like him either. It spoke sort of like he did, but the voice was all Anna. Karyn stared in fascinated horror.

  There was a rattle from the front doorknob. The Anna figure disappeared, leaving only a nervous-looking Drew who, this time, jumped at the same moment Karyn did. He froze, leaning toward the back door like he was ready to bolt.

  “Oh,” she said hoarsely. “Company.”

  “Don’t—” he began.

  She took a few steps and opened the door.

  Nail stood there, fist cocked back and teeth bared. A moment later, he recognized her, lowered his fist, and grinned.

  “God, it’s good to see you,” he said. Behind him, Genevieve smiled.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Hell yeah. Anna said she stopped by yesterday, but the place was empty. This is the only good surprise I’ve had in a week.”

  “Yeah, well. Come on in,” Karyn said. As he and Genevieve came in, she looked past them to the street, then shut the door. She gave Genevieve a curt nod. “Where is Anna?”

  “She said she had an errand to run,” Genevieve said.

  “What errand?” Karyn asked.

  “The kind of errand you ought to give her a big hug and a thank-you for when she gets back,” Genevieve said. “You know what I mean.”

  Karyn’s concern bloomed into something approaching panic. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Call her. Right now.”

  Nail shrugged. “Been calling her for half an hour. No answer.” He paused, studying Karyn’s face. “We cool?” he asked.

  Karyn glanced at Drew, who was standing half in the living room doorway looking like he had to pee real bad. “Yeah,” she said absently. “But we have to find Anna right now. Where’d you park?”

  “Couple blocks down.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Nail frowned. “That ain’t such a hot
idea. Sobell’s guys are trashing the earth trying to find us.”

  “Sobell?” Karyn asked. “Why would Sobell be looking for us?”

  “We got the bone and made the drop. Now the bone’s gone and Greaser’s dead,” Nail said. “We don’t know what happened, but think about it. If you’re Sobell, all the signs point right back to us. He’s already sent some guys.”

  Karyn scowled at Genevieve. “Isn’t this your department? Can’t you call him up and straighten things out?”

  “I wish.” Genevieve leaned back against the wall, most of the swagger gone out of her. “Greaser was my contact, for one thing. For another, I know you think me and Sobell are like two peas in a pod, but really, I’m just like you guys—a contractor. If he thinks you fucked him over, he thinks I helped.”

  Karyn considered this for all of a second. “Too bad. We have to—” She stopped abruptly, a sick feeling in her gut and a horror in front of her. She thought she might have screamed again, or maybe it had just come out in a breathless wheeze.

  “What’s wrong?” Genevieve asked. It wasn’t Genevieve anymore, though—she’d turned into Anna just as Drew had. This time there were six bullet holes, all through her torso, though she was still standing, propped against the wall with eyes half shut. “What’s wrong?” the apparition asked.

  Karyn closed her eyes and held her hands open in fans by her sides. One breath, then two. This wasn’t real. When she opened her eyes, everything would be back to normal.

  She opened her eyes.

  Nothing was normal. Three Annas stared back at her. Two had been shot, and the third had sustained a blow that had pushed in the corner of her head, distorting her face horribly.

  “It’s cool,” the third Anna said. “It’s cool.”

  “Yeah,” another one added. “Everything’s fine.” Blood pulsed out of a hole in her chest with each word.

  “All right,” Karyn said, though her heart pounded and it was all she could do to keep herself from hyperventilating. Not real. But it was always real, wasn’t it? At least, sort of. And she didn’t need to be told again.