Premonitions

by Jamie Schultz

  “We have to go,” she said.

  “I don’t know . . .” the Anna with the crushed head said.

  “Anna’s going to get killed. We have to go now.”

  One of the Annas—Genevieve, Karyn thought—seemed to turn a shade paler, and alarm filled her voice. “Adelaide?”

  “Yeah. That place is crawling with guys from the Brotherhood.”

  “What?”

  “What about him?” The Anna with the broken head pointed to the one behind her. “What the hell is he doing here, anyway?”

  “He comes, too,” Karyn said. Now was not the time to bother with that second question.

  The one behind her started. “Um, I—”

  “Can’t leave you here,” Karyn said. “Sorry. Now, for the last time, we need to fucking go. Move it!”

  Chapter 22

  Enoch Sobell paced his office. He hated it. Pacing was so . . . so prosaic. Expectant fathers and anxious boring people of all stripes supposedly paced, and if there was one thing he strived not to be, it was boring.

  Anxiety, though, seemed to have a will of its own. Every time Sobell sat, he ended up tapping a foot, then shifting left and right, unable to get comfortable, and before he knew it, he was strolling the length of the office over and over again, shuffling his thoughts into apparently random combinations.

  If it worked worth a damn, he might not have minded so much, but he couldn’t think of a single instance where he’d actually gotten a useful idea out of pacing. It was always when he stopped thinking of a problem that he found the solution.

  Sex would be great right now. It would, too, but these days it took quite a production to get him up to the task, and he’d probably get interrupted in the middle, which would only piss him off further.

  Coke? No. That just made him wired and, oddly, amped up his focus, so he’d pace twice as fast and think about the problem twice as hard. Acid? It had been decades since he’d used the stuff, but it might do the trick. He couldn’t concentrate on shit when he was tripping, best as he could remember, and the hallucinations might even be inspiring.

  He shook his head. Better not. The problem was solved, he was sure. The Whisperer Shade would find Ames, and he’d take care of the rest. It wasn’t so much that he needed to come up with a solution, he realized—he was simply terrible at waiting.

  The intercom buzzed.

  “Mr. Sobell, we’ve got a solution,” Brown said through the tiny speaker.

  Uh-huh. He rolled his eyes, but he buzzed the man in.

  Brown walked in with a suspicious spring in his step, and Sobell scowled. Now was not a good time to be jaunty. He’d goddamn well better have a solution, acting like that.

  Brown pulled out a small device, little more than a phone-sized LCD screen with a few buttons at the bottom. He held it with a smile.

  “Mr. Brown, what in holy blue fuck is that?”

  “GPS.”

  “Thank Christ. I was afraid I might get lost in here.”

  “It’s not for you, sir.”

  Sobell drew in a long breath, forcing himself to be patient. “Please tell me what you plan to do with that thing.”

  Brown’s smile grew. “Manny and Carl found the Ames woman’s apartment.”

  “Good. What about the others? Did you find all of Gresser’s records?”

  The smile faltered. “Um, well. I haven’t found any records. I mean, Manny and Carl found the apartment. They were . . . confused. Like, they said you told them where to go. They seemed, I dunno. Kind of out of it, honestly.”

  Sobell found that rather disturbing. He wouldn’t have recognized Messrs. Manny and Carl at gunpoint. It was likely he’d never even seen either of them. He filed the fact away for later. “Continue,” he said.

  “They said they almost caught Genevieve Lyle at Ames’s place, but she took off with a guy matching the description of DeShawn ‘Doornail’ Owens.”

  “And?” Despite himself, Sobell was getting interested.

  “And, Ms. Lyle left her phone.” Brown grinned like he’d delivered the punch line to the world’s funniest joke.

  Sobell didn’t get it. “So?”

  “So, the outgoing call record only has four numbers in it. We checked them—all prepaid, so they can’t be traced. But we called them. Two are out of service, and one goes to Owens. And the last goes straight to a woman’s voice mail. All she says is ‘Leave a message,’ but we’re pretty sure it’s Karyn Ames.”

  “How do you know it’s not her favorite fuckbuddy?”

  “We don’t, I guess. But she’s only called those four numbers in the last couple of days, so the safe money’s on Ames.”

  Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but Sobell nodded, pleased. This was the best work he’d gotten out of Brown yet, and it was definitely worth checking out. “What now?”

  “The phone is still on. Nobody’s answering it, but we can use the cell towers to track its position.” Brown held up a hand. “Let me amend that. We have used the cell towers to track its position. Then we send it to this unit.” He made a show of reading the GPS. “The phone is in a Motel 6 on Figueroa and Grand.”

  Sobell nodded again, and this time he felt a grin spread across his face. “That’s good work. Let me grab something, and let’s go.”

  “You’re coming?”

  “Oh, yes. Though I warn you, if we go in there and I end up witnessing Ms. Lyle riding some ugly bastard like she’s practicing for the rodeo, I might have to shoot someone on principle.”

  Brown actually chuckled. There was hope for the guy yet.

  * * *

  Joe Gresser had one hell of a headache. Tension, he thought. There was a lot going on, a lot to keep track of. A lot at stake. It didn’t help that he’d run his mouth for what felt like twelve of the last sixteen hours. Maybe that was an exaggeration, but he was still pretty sure he’d done more talking just that day than in all of the preceding two weeks, and it was amazing how much that took out of him.

  He turned in his chair, wondering if there was an aspirin in here somewhere.

  His temporary base of operations was the office of a third-rate garage and full-time chop shop. The office was small and cramped, crowded with an oversize desk and a mess of filing cabinets. A ten-year-old computer squatted under the desk, hooked to an equally vintage CRT that whined like a swarm of mosquitoes. That was all fine—he wasn’t here for the decor. The garage itself was owned by somebody whom Sobell had some leverage over, and it was so tenuously linked to the man that Gresser doubted he even knew it was one of his properties. That would be good, for now. Nobody would come looking for him while he . . . prepared.

  Low voices came from just outside the office door. Alvarez, it sounded like. Maybe he had news from the search.

  “I ain’t goin’ in there,” Alvarez said.

  Werner, the man tasked with guarding the door against interruptions, wasn’t having any of it. “Fuck you, then. I ain’t doin’ it, either,” Werner said. “It’s your news.”

  Gresser chuckled and looked down at his left shoulder, down at the creature that now clung to his jacket collar with tiny claws. It was like some kind of grotesque baby, or—he grasped for the word—fetus, only with an oversize, weirdly shaped head. The jaw was sized for a normal adult, but the cranium had barely developed, remaining little more than a flat, faintly pulsing mass of flesh. Tiny slitted eyes glared from it.

  “It’s going to be OK,” he assured it. “We got this.”

  It shifted, making a squishing noise in the brownish slime that had oozed from its body, staining the jacket and Greaser’s undershirt, dripping down his belly and into his lap. It wasn’t happy, he knew. They were supposed to have an army around them, but something had gone wrong. He wasn’t too clear on the details—he wasn’t too clear on a lot of things right now. But it was manageable,
he knew that. They’d made quite a start already. Alvarez and Werner had been two of Sobell’s most loyal, and now they were Gresser’s, body and soul. There were over two dozen others who had also found themselves persuaded. There would be more.

  He got the impression that his new little buddy was nothing if not opportunistic, which suited him right down to his bones.

  “I’ll give it to you, and you tell him,” Alvarez said.

  “Sorry, bro. I’m just the help.”

  “Don’t ‘bro’ me, asshole.”

  Gresser gave his little buddy a rueful smile. Buncha pussies they had working for them, but it was all going to be OK. There’d be others, better, when they weren’t quite so . . .

  Vulnerable.

  Yeah, that was it. Vulnerable.

  “Yeah, fuck you, too,” Alvarez said. A moment later, the door opened. Gresser had a brief view of the garage beyond, a row of half-dismembered auto carcasses, and then Alvarez came in.

  “Glad you could make it,” Gresser said.

  Alvarez pressed himself back against the wall, eyes wide and fixed on Gresser’s little buddy. “Urk,” was all that came out. His throat worked as though he was trying not to puke.

  Gresser shifted in the chair, crossed his legs, and folded his hands in his lap. “So?” he prompted.

  “Mr. . . . uh. Gresser?” Alvarez said, face drawn tight in confusion. “I thought . . . Where’s . . . ? Mr. Sobell?”

  Gresser frowned. His little buddy crawled up a few inches, allowing him to reach into his jacket. He pulled a pistol out and set it on the desk. “You can talk to me,” he said.

  Alvarez managed to tear his eyes away from Gresser’s little buddy and focus on the gun. That seemed to help him gather his thoughts.

  “A total zero, sir,” he said.

  Gresser tipped his head back slightly, looking down his nose at Alvarez. “Really?”

  “They knew we were coming,” Alvarez said, panic causing his voice to crack on the last syllable.

  The creature around Gresser’s neck shifted. Its tiny eyes looked up at him, and then it moved its misshapen head and met Alvarez’s eyes directly. It chittered, a high-pitched clicking and squeaking noise that sounded to Gresser like laughter. Then it crawled up on Gresser’s shoulder and pushed close to him.

  He’s lying, it said.

  That was funny, in a way, and Gresser smiled. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You’re way out of your league.”

  Alvarez nodded. “Maybe they didn’t know we were coming, I don’t know. But they’ve all cleared out anyway. And . . . we lost Carl and Manny.”

  Gresser nodded. Losing those two meatheads wasn’t so bad for its own sake, but it was an uneasy reminder of his own vulnerability right now. His little buddy made another gabbling sound, and Alvarez fought a losing battle to keep his disgust off his face.

  “Is that all?”

  Alvarez didn’t answer. Gresser tapped the gun on the desk, and once again Alvarez’s attention snapped back to the matter at hand.

  “Uh, no. Not really.” He made a pained face. “There are . . . rumors. I don’t really—my head . . .”

  No surprise there. L.A. was boiling over with rumors tonight, and it seemed like nearly every man in Gresser’s small army had called in or come by to deliver some piece of weird and often irrelevant news in the last few hours. Not all of it was useless, though, and it was a good practice to keep his finger on the city’s pulse.

  “Spill it.”

  “They’re all saying you—Mr. Sobell, I mean. They’re all saying he’s out. Like, out of his building. On the streets.”

  Gresser checked with his little buddy, who laughed again. “Now, that is interesting. We might have an opportunity to move the schedule forward some.”

  Alvarez said nothing.

  “Forget about Ames’s crew,” Gresser said. “We’ll get to them later. Right now I need you to find as many of our guys as you can and send them here.” He smiled. “Tell them Mr. Sobell wants to see them, here. Tell Werner to send ’em back to see me in groups no larger than two.”

  “Yeah, OK. Sure thing.”

  “All right. Get on it.”

  Alvarez reached for the doorknob, and the creature on Gresser’s neck chittered.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Gresser said.

  Alvarez hesitated, then slowly turned around.

  “As far as you know, you were back here talking to Mr. Sobell himself.”

  Alvarez’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a horrid grimace, and he closed his eyes. His hand went to his temple. A moment later, he relaxed. He opened his eyes and lowered his hand. The confusion clouding his face seemed to diminish.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Sobell,” Alvarez said.

  Chapter 23

  The van ride to Adelaide’s ranked among the most surreal experiences Karyn had ever had. She ended up in the backseat next to one walking, talking dead Anna, while two more sat up front. She started labeling them in order to hold on to her sanity. To her right was Drew-Anna, the one whose brains were leaking out her head. Genevieve-Anna drove, and Nail-Anna rode shotgun—and held a shotgun, for that matter. Held it in his lap out of sight, but this business with Sobell evidently had him worried pretty badly.

  Karyn felt a moment of unaccustomed warmth toward Genevieve when the other woman pressed the pedal to the floor and sent the van blasting forward almost before everybody was sitting down.

  “Where?” Genevieve-Anna asked.

  “Next left,” Karyn said. “Then right on Santo Domingo.”

  The van careened from side to side around each corner, until even Nail-Anna was telling Genevieve-Anna to slow it down a little, huh? They couldn’t do Anna any good if they were all dead or in jail. Karyn shouted directions from the back, trying to focus on the streets and the map in her mind rather than the odd, unreal details that showed up alongside the road—images of decay, mostly, rusted-out vehicles and collapsing buildings. Like the mold in her aunt’s place, these weren’t visions of tomorrow or the next day, but of some distant future, and she had to continually remind herself they weren’t relevant to here and now.

  “There,” she said. “Adelaide’s. Stop up there on the right.”

  “Anna’s car’s not here,” Genevieve-Anna pointed out. The streetlights here were dark, broken in many cases, but she flicked on the van’s high beams. The only car on the street was Drew’s, sitting forlornly on its flat tires.

  Karyn could feel her pulse pounding in her chest, her neck, even her wrists. Where was Anna? It wasn’t simply that she’d come and gone and was safely on her way, or Karyn wouldn’t be surrounded by macabre visions of her best friend’s walking corpse. “The Brotherhood . . . I don’t know.”

  “Goddammit, you have to know!” Genevieve-Anna yelled, and Karyn’s sense of unreality pressed in on her. Was that Genevieve really talking, or was it a vision of Anna herself, pleading for Karyn’s help?

  Drew-Anna cleared his throat. “Um. I might be able to help.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” Karyn said softly.

  “No, I, uh, I might know where she is. I mean, there’s really like only one of two places it could be.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence, then all the Annas started talking at once, the racket threatening to split Karyn’s skull. She pressed her hands to her head, as if with enough pressure she could get everything to calm down.

  Nail-Anna turned around and stuck his shotgun in Drew-Anna’s face over the back of the seat, as he kneeled backward in the passenger seat.

  “Start talking,” Nail-Anna said.

  “Motel 6, Figueroa and Grand.”

  Genevieve-Anna didn’t wait. She pulled the van out with a lurch.

  “Good start,” Nail-Anna said. “Keep going.”

  “Or there’s an apartment complex, but a bunch
of the guys live there. I’m guessing they won’t use that unless they have to.”

  “Keep talking. What else do you know about all this? What the fuck are you even doing here?”

  “Look, I didn’t want any part of this shit, really. This isn’t my fault.”

  Nail-Anna racked the shotgun. “I would hate to have a Pulp Fiction moment in this car, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “Please don’t,” Genevieve-Anna said. “Just let the guy talk, huh?”

  Karyn studied Drew-Anna. The only message she could pull from her vision was the obvious one—Anna was going to get hurt or killed, if she hadn’t already. She saw no signs that might be interpreted as threat or duplicity, and she hadn’t the whole brief time she’d known Drew. She’d ignored or misinterpreted signs before, but this wasn’t the same—there was nothing here to misinterpret. If she was missing something, it was very subtle indeed.

  “Ease up,” she said. “I think he’s safe.”

  “Not good enough,” Nail-Anna said. “Not this time.”

  Karyn winced inwardly, but she couldn’t fault Nail for that after the way the last job had gone down. She wasn’t even sure whether to trust herself.

  “Can you at least put that thing away?” Karyn asked. “This isn’t Afghanistan. Somebody’s going to see you and call the cops.”

  “OK,” Nail-Anna said, pulling a pistol from his jacket. He slid the shotgun down onto the floor, and pointed the new gun at the backseat.

  “That’s not what I was going for.”

  The gun didn’t waver.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Drew-Anna said.

  “Anna. Who’s got her? How many? What are they going to do with her?”

  Drew-Anna squirmed. “Look, they’ve been working up to this for over a year. They’ve been told for weeks that their god would come to them in the flesh—”

  “It’s not a god,” Genevieve-Anna said.

  “—when the time was right and the ceremony was complete. When you crashed the party and stole the relic, it had to be like Armageddon for ’em. I bet they’re goin’ crazy. Like, some fucking Crusades shit. They will do anything to get that thing back. I, uh, I really doubt they’d stop at kidnapping and, uh, torture.” He said the last word quietly, as though hoping nobody would hear.