All in all, it had been a life of ups with very few downs, if he didn’t count being run out of town on a rail every now and then. The last couple of decades, he’d tired of running scams and finally set to building himself an empire. With the collected wisdom gained from observing a couple hundred years of human nature, it had gone even more smoothly than he’d expected.
Now, though, he worried. It would never show on his face, he was certain of that, but in the still, small, untouchable center of himself that paid no attention to his will or his desires a speck of worry had formed and, like a creeping mold, it grew. Forget the bone. You win some, you lose some, and he’d lost that one, at least temporarily. But then Greaser had gotten, well, greased. And the Brotherhood had risen against him. Surprising, that—he’d read them as essentially spineless—but not the end of the world.
But Luis? And the men he’d had with him? And random, godforsaken street people? A snatch of Bible verse, held over from his tent revival days, ran through his mind.
“And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.”
“What’s that?” Brown asked.
“Leviticus. Chapter twenty-six, verse seventeen. Not the most uplifting book of the Bible, Leviticus, but quite memorable for the quality and thoroughness of its threats. Nobody beats old Jehovah on spite—that’s certain.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ah. Brown had collected enough of his wits to return to soldier automaton. Too bad.
“How’s your hand?”
Brown looked at him with poorly veiled suspicion. “Hurts like hell. Why?”
“Just checking. I’d wrap it if I were you—don’t want to leave it open. Might get infected.”
Brown grunted and turned to the window. Sobell did likewise.
I will set my face against you.
Sobell searched the faces as they passed, looking for recognition, hatred, or some sign he could interpret for an explanation. Nothing, or nearly so. Once in a while, he’d catch a narrow-eyed stare from a punk in a doorway or a woman on a street corner, but on second glance, it was always gone, just a figment of his sudden paranoia.
I will set my face against you.
Maybe they would—maybe He would—but this empire wasn’t falling without a bloody fight.
He watched as the low, crumbling buildings gave way to tall structures of gleaming glass and stone, watched the figures moving in pools of light, nearly disappearing between streetlights as though they stopped existing in the darkness. Fewer people walked here at this hour, most of the denizens of the business district having fled to the suburbs at the close of day. Sobell found consolation in the increasing emptiness—it seemed a sign that, here at least, things were as they should be.
His office building loomed ahead, an oasis of brilliant white security lights amid the dingy glow of streetlamps. Usually the illumination gave him a sense of invulnerability, a feeling that he’d see any approaching threat long before it became a real danger, but tonight he felt exposed. Walking through those lights would be like stepping under the shining eye of God and inviting an awful scrutiny he wouldn’t be able to withstand.
I will set my face against you, he thought again, and the image of Luis’s face, twisted with rage, swam in his mind.
“Go around back,” he said while they were still a block off. “To the loading dock.”
The cabbie drove past the building, and Sobell watched for any sign that something had gone amiss. Nobody stood in the bright lights out front, and the usual security guard was visible through the glass doors, seated at the desk and watching the monitors. Nothing irregular at all. If it hadn’t been for Luis, Sobell would have stopped here and walked right in, just like any other night.
The cab turned to go around the building, and Sobell had the driver pull over at the corner and let them out there. He tossed the guy a fifty and waved him away without a word, so preoccupied he was with watching the building.
“Everything OK, sir?” Brown asked.
“Everything? Of course not.” He took a few steps and looked around the side of the building, back to the dock. Plenty of light here, too, and one guard as always.
“Looks like Sammy’s on duty,” Brown said. “We should be good to go—I trust Sammy.”
Sobell scowled at him. “I don’t.”
“He’s worked here since—”
“So had Luis, and yet he recently decided I’d look good with a few extra orifices in my person.”
“You want me to check it out?”
Sobell nodded slowly. “I think that would be an excellent idea. Are you still armed?”
“Yeah.”
Brown started down the ramp, and Sobell ducked back around the side of the building, peeking around to watch. The guard saw Brown coming and waved. Brown walked all the way to the bottom, then up the short stairs to the dock. The two men exchanged words, totally inaudible from this distance. Sammy grinned and said something. Brown shook his head. Sammy nodded and inclined his head toward the door.
Sobell leaned around to get a better view—this was moving from conversation to altercation quickly, and he wanted to see everything.
Brown shook his head again and took a step back.
Sammy lunged for him. Startled, Brown fell back. One foot went off the back of the concrete, and one hand shot out and secured itself in Sammy’s jacket. Both men pitched off the dock, a shoulder-high concrete platform, and fell to the hard ground below.
Brown hit so hard Sobell heard the air blast out of his lungs, and the man arched his back and writhed like a fish. Sammy recovered faster and got to his feet, though he’d injured something badly—it looked like his right leg wouldn’t take any weight.
He stood over Brown and pulled out a gun.
Sobell started running—oddly enough, in Brown’s direction. Should be going the other way, he thought as his shoes clicked on the cement. It was true that Brown deserved better than to be abandoned and shot down like a dog, but Sobell had left better men to worse fates. Stressful night, addled my brains, he thought, but he kept running.
Sammy turned at the sound of Sobell’s footsteps, and Brown lashed out with one foot, hitting Sammy’s good leg. The leg buckled and Sammy dropped.
Brown went for the gun just as Sammy brought it around. It went off, the sound like a cannon in the concrete echo chamber of the loading dock, and Brown’s head jerked to the side. Four hands wrestled for control of the gun now, and the two men rolled and struggled on the ground.
Brown was wounded and tired, though, and Sammy slowly forced the gun back toward him.
Sobell took St. George’s sword from his jacket and pulled it clear of the sheath just as he reached the rolling knot of limbs that was Brown and Sammy. The gun went off again, sending a fine gray dust into the air and setting a bell to ringing in Sobell’s head. A shout, and a cry, and the two men rolled over yet again.
For a brief moment, Sammy’s back was to Sobell.
Sobell reached down and plunged the broken shaft of St. George’s sword into the nape of Sammy’s neck. There was no resistance whatsoever—he could have been swinging it in air—but the man’s head fell forward, and his body went limp.
“Shit!” Brown shouted, pushing away from the dead man. That Sammy was dead was beyond dispute—Sobell’s broken sword had left a deep, smooth-edged gash that went halfway through his neck. Blood spread in a widening pool.
“Quickly,” Sobell said. He pointed at the thin, transparent coil that spun down from Sammy’s ear. “Others will be coming.” With exaggerated care, he slipped the sword fragment back into its sheath—as far as he knew, nothing else would hold it. He offered a hand and pulled Brown to his feet.
“Thanks,” Brown said, still gasping.
“Let’s go.�
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“One . . . minute.”
“We don’t have a minute.” Sobell turned and began walking rapidly up the ramp.
Moments later, Brown followed. The commotion started behind them just as they rounded the corner. By then, Brown had found his breath, and the two men sped up. They jaywalked across the empty street, jogged rather tiredly down a couple of blocks, and finally Brown grabbed Sobell’s elbow.
“Stop, I gotta stop.”
Sobell glanced behind them—nothing. “All right,” he said, wiping his forehead and dabbing his handkerchief on his cheeks. “I confess I’m thoroughly sick of running myself. Let’s get off the street, though.”
They stepped into a darkened tavern, the particularly bilious variety known as a sports bar, but this one time Sobell was inclined to put up with it. Televisions squawked and blared eye-splitting color from every direction, and not a single person in the place was looking at anything else.
Without waiting for anybody to greet them, Sobell went to the booth farthest from the front window and sat. Brown scanned the room and then did likewise.
Brown hunched forward. “Sammy wanted to know if I’d seen you yet.”
“Lots of people seem to be looking for me right now. What did you tell him?”
“I said no.”
“Good.”
“Not really,” Brown said. “It got real weird after that. He told me I had to come up and see you immediately.”
Sobell raised his eyebrows. “Now that,” he said, “is quite interesting.”
“I told him I’d pass, maybe take care of it in the morning, and then—”
“I saw. He became rather insistent.”
The two men stopped talking as a perky waitress showed up at the table to take drink orders. In his current frame of mind, Sobell would rather chew ground glass than interact with the kind of cheerful person who asked questions like “How are we doing tonight?” but he wanted to attract attention even less. Placing an order was the easiest way to get her to go away with no fuss, so he did.
“It appears I have a doppelgänger,” Sobell said, once the waitress had gone.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means somebody is pretending to be me, effectively enough to control essentially all of my employees and usurp my very throne, so to speak.”
Brown’s face took on a skeptical expression. “Who could do that?”
“Only one person I can think of. Your predecessor.”
“Mr. Gresser? He’s dead.”
“Oh, I very much doubt that anymore,” Sobell said, mouth set in a grim line. It all made too much sense now, and he saw how much trust—how much power—he’d put in his former lieutenant over the last few years. Gresser had the hearts of the troops, he knew all the secret places and codes, and most of the shady side of the business. If anybody had a hope of picking it up, it would be him. But this wasn’t Rome—most people wouldn’t just accept that Sobell had been deposed by military coup. Not unless . . . “It also means one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It means the bone works.”
“I don’t—”
Brown broke off as somebody slid into the booth next to Sobell. Sobell reached for the sword’s hilt, then paused as he got a good look at the newcomer, or at least as close an approximation as it was possible to get. The figure next to him sat in a heretofore unnoticed confluence of shadows and was strangely hard to see, even at only an arm’s length away. It appeared to be a man, or at least the shape of one, draped in a long coat, hat pulled low. Sobell wasn’t sure, though, that it had a face, or even a head.
“Ames,” it said, a harsh, grating whisper like newspaper tearing.
Ah. The Whisperer De— Shade. Not a demon. A shade. “Yes?” Sobell’s voice wavered. Embarrassing, but Brown had the look of a man who had lost control of his sphincters, so he doubted he’d get any grief for it from that quarter. He did hope Brown’s face wouldn’t stick like that.
The shade whispered an address. Sobell repeated it in his head a couple of times to keep it fixed in memory.
“Very well,” he said. “You’re released from service.”
The figure lost form and dissolved—coat, hat, and all—right into the seat, sending up a seething fog of cold vapor. Sobell had an urge to move away from the spot, but he was already nearly pressed to the wall.
He surveyed the room. No, sir, not attracting any attention here, he thought disgustedly—but, amazingly, they hadn’t. The ball game went on undeterred, and the denizens of the establishment kept their slack faces trained on the screens.
“Released from service?” Brown asked.
“Of course,” Sobell said. “You’re not my only employee. Sometimes, for the tough jobs, it’s best to find a good contractor.”
“What did it say?”
Ames. That was a useless endeavor now, if his hunch about the new occupant of his office was correct. The takeover of his business operations was irritating enough, but somehow what really galled him was that Gresser had actually moved into his office. The nerve of the man! Hadn’t he been treated well over the years? Treated like a king, practically. Hell, Sobell would have given him most of the less savory enterprises in name as well as in practical fact, if he’d asked. For years, he’d been paid handsomely, and Sobell had looked the other way at the occasional graft or bonus extortion Gresser levied on certain associates, reasoning that they were perks suitable for a man in Gresser’s position. In fact, Sobell had gotten every dime he was owed, as far as he knew, and he’d done a fair amount of checking. If Gresser had the habit of pushing a little harder and pocketing the difference, that was fine.
But now he’s in my office. And not just in the office giving the orders, but sitting on Sobell’s collection, too. Not that Gresser’d be able to figure out how to use any of that shit, but he’d done an admirable job of cutting off Sobell’s access to it. Sobell inhaled slowly, then let out a long, steady breath, trying to cool the fury building in him. It didn’t work. He would gladly have brought his own building crashing down, collapsing it with Gresser in it and sealing it like a tomb, but of course he’d been concerned when he built it about somebody doing the same thing to him, and the girders and foundation were heavily warded. The trick he’d pulled in the alley earlier wouldn’t work, nor would anything like it. Dynamite would, though, he thought, remembering what he’d told Brown earlier. But, no. Too ostentatious, and too impersonal. He’d like to choke that bastard Gresser to death with his own hands. Plus, dynamite would probably destroy his collection and his documents. And, besides, one didn’t generally blow up a major building in this day and age without repercussions. Somehow, it would get tracked back to him and ruin years of work.
“What did it say?” Brown asked again.
“Oh. It divulged the whereabouts of Karyn Ames.”
“Karyn . . . ? Oh.” Unsurprisingly, Brown seemed unsure of what to do with this information now. Sobell himself wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Or, actually . . . most of his resources were held inaccessible in that building, and Ames was a notorious thief. And, if rumor was to believed, psychic.
“Shall we pay her a visit?”
“Um, sure. Can I take a piss first?”
* * *
Gresser leaned over Sobell’s desk, laboring away at a—at a what? What the hell was this thing? He held a pen in his right hand, and he was tracing out a bizarre series of lines and symbols on a thick sheet of something that seemed closer to leather than paper. Sobell had surrounded himself with this kind of crap, which was his privilege as a crazy old rich bastard, but what did Gresser know about it?
He wished his thoughts weren’t so fuzzy. He wished his back didn’t hurt so much. There was a weight there, bearing him down and crushing him. His spine cracked and his shoulders screamed as he stretch
ed, and he groaned aloud.
What’s bothering you? The voice came from nowhere, but it was very important to answer it.
“I can’t—I don’t . . .” He closed his eyes tightly shut, searching for some focus. For one desperate moment, his identity thinned out like rotten, unstable boards beneath his feet, and he teetered on the verge of panic.
Who am I? he wondered. I’m Enoch Sobell—no, that’s ridiculous. Well, wait. Everybody talks to me like I’m Enoch Sobell. But I don’t remember being Sobell before. Before, I was . . .
Clashing memories spun in his head. For the past—how long? For the past little while, everybody had been calling him Sobell, but he remembered fear on their faces, fear and confusion. Perhaps he frightened them, but he wondered if he’d vandalized his own memories, painted the fear in like graffiti. Maybe they hadn’t been afraid at all. Maybe they were always afraid.
Another memory—a young punk, a big kid with a smashed-in face, almost as quick with his mind as with his fists, though nobody ever credited it. A dead man lay at the kid’s feet, sprawled out in his own blood, and an older man stood with his hand on the kid’s shoulder. The older man was Enoch Sobell, but Gresser couldn’t fit himself to that body, to that point of view. No, he suddenly understood. He was the kid in this memory. He was . . .
Joe Gresser. Always had been. But then what was he doing here? And why did his back hurt so much?
What’s bothering you? The voice again, and Gresser felt a pain in his neck now, as well as a redoubling of the pain in his shoulders. He ought to look down and see what was going on there. It might be serious.
“Back hurts. Too heavy,” he said.
There’s nothing on your back. Nothing heavy at all, and no pain. You’re strong, Joseph.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.” He straightened up. Bones ground together between his shoulder blades, and the rifle fire of ligaments snapping back in place over knobs of bone cracked and popped. It didn’t hurt, though. Wasn’t heavy. A crushing fatigue had settled into his muscles, but even that seemed distant now. I’m strong, he reminded himself.
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