To the work, Joseph. Finish the work.
He nodded and bent back to the desk. The drawing was a murderously complex piece of work, or at least it seemed that way, since he had no clear idea of what he was trying to do. The voice guided him, but words gave poor direction for this assembly of curves and lines, symbols and mystical connections, and the task was taking forever. No wonder his neck—no, his neck felt fine.
Perfectly fine.
The phone buzzed, startling him badly enough that he scratched a black line across the paper.
You stupid, worthless fuck!
It was true—he was stupid, he was worthless, and—
Later. Answer the goddamn phone.
He answered the goddamn phone. “What?”
“Sir? Mr., uh, Sobell?” The woman’s voice was halting and confused, her words an echo of the swirl of confusion in his own mind.
Wait. Am I Mr. Sobell? I thought I wasn’t, but then I was, and now . . . “What?” he repeated, cutting off the bewildering echoes bouncing back and forth in his skull.
“There’s been a security incident.”
“Take care of it.”
Hesitation. “Well, sir, it has been taken care of. We lost a man, though.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, though he felt more irritated by the interruption than sympathetic. “Make the appropriate arrangements. Surely you know how to handle that?”
The woman on the other end of the phone line hesitated again. Who was it? Shouldn’t he recognize her? God, his head was a mess. “It’s not that. It’s—we checked the security tapes. Your . . . uh . . . The guy pretending to be you—he was here.”
The guy pretending to be me. Who’s that? Who am I? There’s a guy pretending to be Sobell, or a guy pretending to be . . . to be . . . Joe. Joe Gresser.
It was Sobell, the voice reminded him. You were supposed to have him killed.
“Shit,” Gresser said. “You were supposed to have him killed.”
“He got away. We didn’t expect him to come here.”
Enough of the fog parted to give Gresser a clear look at that concept, and cold fear seized his guts. Sobell, for real, here. Gresser stared at the diagram he’d been working on, seemingly since sometime in the last century. He’d seen Enoch Sobell knock out one of these in fifteen seconds, and something very unpleasant had happened right after that, hadn’t it? Something that had required a shovel and a mop to clean up what was left of a man.
But wait. I’m Sobell. Right?
No, that wasn’t right. Goddammit, why was that so hard to keep in his head?
“Mr. Sobell?”
Oh, I am him. Another momentary burst of clarity. No, I’m pretending to be him. So the guy who was here was somebody pretending to be me pretending to—fuck! No, it was him.
“Where is he now?”
“We don’t know.”
The panic rose again. “He’s not in the building, is he?”
“No. No, sir.”
“Just—just go find him, all right? And kill him, for Christ’s sake!”
“Yes, sir.”
Gresser hung up the phone. God, this had gotten complicated.
Don’t worry about it. You have work to do.
Ah, right. The drawing. He got a fresh piece of that odd thick paper out of his (Sobell’s) desk and started again. This was important work, he reminded himself. Sobell—or a man pretending to be him, and let’s not get too hung up on the confusing details, OK?—was out there somewhere, and there was almost nobody else who could stop him at this point. Maybe the guys would find and kill him on their own—and maybe not. He could find the man, though, and this irritating goddamn diagram was the key. If he could find the man pretending to be Sobell, he could kill him.
He felt strangely vulnerable, and he wasn’t sure where the feeling originated. He was safe here, at the center of his (Sobell’s) empire. That had been part of the plan, hadn’t it? Wasn’t that why he was here? Safety. Power. They were kind of the same thing, when you got right down to it. Yet he was practically teetering on the edge of panic, filled with a sense of urgency. Time would fix it, if he could hold on long enough. Long enough to . . . what? To grow. The thought didn’t seem to be his, but the truth of it was obvious.
Tie up the loose ends. Stay safe and protect himself, until he could assume full power at the head of his empire. Something about that didn’t seem quite right, but his head was nowhere clear enough to figure out what.
He returned to his work.
Another set of orders hissed into his ear, another set of curves sketched on the paper. The strange fatigue in his back and shoulders built until he found himself leaning so far forward his face nearly touched the paper. Despite the comfort of the building’s air-conditioning, sweat dripped from his face, fell in drops from slick, clumped strands of hair.
Then, when it seemed that he must at last collapse and give up the whole enterprise, he finished.
From the top desk drawer, he pulled a plastic bag full of faintly disgusting human detritus he’d gathered from the office. It contained a few strands of short hair, a fine whitish dust gathered from the seams of his (Sobell’s) chair, and a wad of used Kleenex. He tipped the bag up and coaxed a single gray hair from the opening, placing it in the center of the drawing he’d labored over for so long.
Words came from somewhere, ugly, foreign words that meant no more to him than the babblings of an infant, but they wriggled inside his head and he knew he was to pronounce them aloud.
He said the words. Each one leapt from his tongue with a crack and a sizzle, and when he had completed the full incantation—
Nothing.
Again.
Once more, he urged the words from his lips, this time with an intensity and urgency lacking in the last round, propelled on by fear. Fear of what, he didn’t stop to consider.
Once more, nothing.
Again, a voice whispered, and he began anew. This time, though, he read defeat under the whisper’s rage. Whatever was supposed to be happening wasn’t happening, and maybe it wouldn’t.
He spat out the last word in a final, foul-sounding guttural heave of his throat.
Nothing.
Behind him, in a place between his shoulder and the nape of his neck, the whispering thing howled and screamed.
Chapter 26
Peanut butter on stale crackers. Not enough to go around, but Karyn hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and Nail had spoken up loudly on her behalf. She bit off a piece, trying to choke down the queasy feeling kicked off by the thick, sticky texture and the cardboard taste of the crackers. She had to eat, she knew. It wasn’t clear whether the dizziness she’d been experiencing was a symptom of her condition or just low blood sugar, but she hadn’t had a real meal in a couple of days now, and regardless of the phantasms and half-assed prophecies that swam in the air before her, she needed some calories.
She took another bite with her eyes half closed to filter out some of the chaos she saw. Earlier, she’d tried closing them entirely, but that seemed like a good way to smear peanut butter over a third of her face. Amusing to the guys maybe, but not worth it.
“How are you doing?” Drew asked, sitting on the couch next to her. “You, uh, you don’t look so good. I mean—that’s not what I meant. I mean, are you sick?”
“Just overtired,” she said.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. No. Not at all. Nothing is OK. The visions were bad now. Everything existed in a state of flux between present and future, the future sometimes plain, sometimes bizarrely symbolic, and sometimes wholly uninterpretable. Right now, she saw the eventual fate of the house—roof collapsed, walls decayed, one wall wide open to the street. She could feel the wind blowing in, hot and dry and reeking of asphalt, and her hair blew across her face with a light, nervous touch.<
br />
At least her friends were whole. She hadn’t had to listen to a talking corpse now for a good twenty minutes, though she occasionally got unsettling glimpses of their futures, too—Nail, his skin dry and wrinkled, a patch over one eye. Genevieve with a few new tattoos, the lines around her eyes deep as she wept into her hands. Anna, hard and humorless. Nothing to be done about any of that, and most of it was so far off it could change radically between now and then anyway. Or so she guessed. She hadn’t had it this bad before, had never seen this far into the future, and had no idea what it meant.
She ate another couple of crackers, but she might as well have been chewing warm mud. It sat in her stomach in a heavy ball, roiling in slow waves and offering nothing to sustain her.
The talk in the room went around in obnoxious circles. She checked in every once in a while to see if anything new had been unearthed or discussed, but it was all depressingly constant. Anna would announce that they needed to wrest the bone from Greaser. Nail would point out that they didn’t know where Greaser was. Anna’d say that she herself could find him, she could find anyone, given time—and Nail would counter that as soon as she went out in public, Sobell or the Brotherhood would waste her on sight. Genevieve agreed with Nail’s assessment and kept touching the back of Anna’s hand, like she was afraid Anna was going to simply disappear or something. Drew brooded in the corner, adding nothing.
While they talked, Karyn tried to tune out the craziness around her and concentrate on the problem of blind. She didn’t know where to begin getting more, and she wasn’t sure how well she’d be able to cope with even a few more days of this. She and Anna had been lucky and resourceful to find Adelaide and her nasty miracle drug back when, and that was without dozens or hundreds of people waiting to gun them down as soon as they stuck their faces out in public.
The problem was intractable and terrifying, and between the rapidly aging room and the ongoing argument around her, Karyn could barely focus on it. And, as if to tease her, every so often the discussion would wind down, the conversation would falter, and, just when it seemed possible that a moment of peace could be had, Anna would kick-start the whole thing again.
This time around, Anna was trying to convince Nail that it wouldn’t hurt if she started calling some of her contacts, and Nail wasn’t having any of it.
“Do you know what kind of people these are?” he asked. “They’re thieves, for fuck’s sake—and worse. They’re just gonna sell us out.”
“I don’t have to tell them anything. I just need information.”
Karyn tuned them out and, for once, turned to her hallucinations for solace. The house had regressed in time, rebuilt itself around her. The walls stood, whole and strong, and the interior was still marked with Genevieve’s scrawlings at the base of the doors and windows. It might even be now in her head instead of tomorrow for a change. Nothing in the room told her otherwise.
“No, you don’t have to tell them anything—but then they won’t tell you shit. We’re not talking about charities, you know?”
The phone rang, its old-fashioned bell shrill and clanging even from the phone’s new home in the oven, and Karyn jumped.
“What is it?” Genevieve asked.
“So I lie,” Anna said. “It’s not that hard.”
The phone rang again, and the front door swung open. Karyn checked the others—they were still caught up in their argument, and nobody’d noticed the door, so she assumed it hadn’t actually opened.
“Are you OK?” Genevieve asked.
“That works once,” Nail said, “and after that nobody believes a fucking thing you have to say.”
“If ever there was a time to blow my cred, I’d say that’s now.”
In the doorway stood a silhouette, completely black and featureless against the porch light across the street. As Karyn watched, it held out its hands, palms up, in an ambiguous gesture, either offering something or demonstrating that it carried no weapons.
The figure stepped over the threshold and abruptly disappeared. Karyn blinked and the vision was gone, the door closed—but the phone rang louder, screaming over the conversation in the room.
She stood. “Somebody’s coming,” she said. “Now, right now.”
“What?” Genevieve asked. “How?”
Nail went for one of his guns and tossed another to Anna. “How much time we got?” he whispered.
Somebody knocked on the door. Inside the dark room, heads turned toward the door. The doorbell rang.
“I think it’s cool,” Karyn said.
Anna raised her gun toward the door. “How sure are you?”
“Not very.”
Another knock, and then an exasperated voice, smooth and male, came through the door, barely muffled by the cheap wood. “I know you’re in there. How long do we have to continue this charade before you let me in? Or I could call the police. I’m sure they’d love to have a conversation with you all, or at the very least draw a great fat lot of attention to this nondescript suburban shithole.”
“Uh-oh. It’s Sobell,” Anna said.
Nail moved to the curtain and gently parted it a finger’s width. “Two guys,” he whispered. “I can take them now. Just say the word.”
“Really, Ms. Ames, Ms. Ruiz, I’m sure we have more to gain working together than by remaining at odds. We have both been liberally fucked by the same party, and, frankly, I didn’t even get a token lube first. I’d very much like to talk with you.”
“Is this shit for real?” Nail asked.
Karyn nodded. “I think so.”
Anna shrugged. “Let him in.”
Nail stepped next to the door, undid the sorry security chain, and turned the knob. He flung the door open and stepped back.
“There,” Enoch Sobell said. He held his hands open in front of him in exactly the manner Karyn had seen in her vision. “Was that so hard?”
* * *
“Sit down,” Anna said, gesturing with her gun toward the uncomfortable chair in the corner. She wished it had nails sticking out of it, for all the trouble this asshole had put them through.
Sobell did as he was told, though Anna thought she detected an ironic, amused smile on his face as he walked.
“Who’s this?” she asked, flicking her gaze toward the guy with Sobell. He was a big man with close-cropped graying hair and square shoulders, who reminded her of a middle-aged football player just starting to get soft around the middle. Tough-looking, but not enough for her to take the gun off Sobell, even for a second.
“That is the entirety of my loyal army,” Sobell said as he eased himself into the chair. Damned if his presence in the chair didn’t elevate it from lumpy ass-breaker to something more like a throne, albeit one in hideously poor taste. “You can call him Mr. Brown.”
“Hey,” the guy said, accompanying the words with a lazy wave.
“You can sit on the floor. Put your hands in your lap. If you move them, I will shoot you.” She hated the sound of the words coming out of her mouth.
“You got a fuck of a lot of nerve, coming here,” Nail said, also training his gun on Sobell.
“If you say so,” Sobell said. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
“What do you want?” Anna asked.
“How did you find us?” Genevieve asked at about the same time.
Sobell didn’t even bother to look at Genevieve. “I’d like to clear up a misunderstanding,” he said.
“I don’t think we misunderstood anything,” Anna said. She wished she knew how Sobell could face down both her and Nail, and their respective firearms, without showing a trace of anxiety. She was so nervous the grip of the gun dripped sweat.
Maybe he’s bulletproof, she thought, and then dismissed it. Bullshit. Focus, woman!
“Perhaps not. Whereas I seem to have misunderstood quite a bit. The time seemed opportune to
get some clarity in my thinking, before I killed a lot of the wrong people.”
“And you think we can help you with that?”
“The clarity, or the mass murder?”
Jesus. Who actually admits to things like that? “The clarity. Let’s go with that.”
“Ah. Well, yes, actually. I was rather hoping you could tell me exactly what happened with the magic disappearing bone after you handed it over.”
“After we—what?” Nail shouted. “You’ve been fucking shooting us and shit all day, and you already knew we made the drop? You asshole!”
“Cool it,” Anna said, though a similar thought had occurred to her, adding rage to the fight-or-flee rush pounding through her body.
“No, I won’t cool it. He’s been fuckin’ playing us this whole time. He knew about the demon at Mendelsohn’s. Had business with it. You stop to think that if he hadn’t been fucking around with that thing, Tommy might still be alive?”
“I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but I assure you I was not fucking around with the demon at Mendelsohn’s. Thanks to your efforts, it got loose before I ever showed up,” Sobell said. “I would have liked to speak with it, yes, but you all made sure that couldn’t happen.”
“We had nothing to do with that,” Anna said.
“You’ll pardon me if I’m not ready to take your word for it.”
“You knew about the demon, though,” Nail said, rather weakly.
“So did you. I’m not sure what your point is.”
“My point is, you’ve been screwing around with us since the start. And now what? After a long day of trying to shoot the shit out of us, you’re here to finish the job in person?”
“Actually, I haven’t so much as lifted a finger against you,” Sobell said. “I have been out of the loop, as they say, up until a short time ago, and my erstwhile lieutenant has run amok. He has been ‘fucking shooting you and shit’ all day, probably in an effort to delay the moment wherein I finally figure out what is going on.”
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