“But you know Greaser took the damn thing now,” Anna said.
Sobell folded his hands, crossed his legs, and leaned back in the chair. His grin wasn’t even smug—it was a calm half smile that said, Ah, at last a civilized discussion. “Yes. I finally figured that much out, though it took an inexcusably long time. In any case, I’d be grateful if you could tell me what happened after you gave, ah, Greaser the bone.”
Anna shrugged. “Nothing. He and his guys stayed put.”
“Stayed put for a long time,” Nail put in. “Way longer than they were supposed to.”
“And then?”
“Then they left,” Nail said.
“They left? You’re certain?”
“Yeah. We watched until they took off.”
Sobell nodded. “The burned wreckage of the vehicle was found in the parking garage you specified for the drop. Mr.—Greaser went back to set you up.”
“We figured,” Anna said drily.
“Still, it’s unlike him to meddle with objects for the collection—he’s picked up half a dozen for me over the years without showing the slightest interest in fucking around with them. You didn’t give it to him wrapped in tissue paper, did you?”
“No!” Genevieve said, her professional pride apparently wounded. “The box was good, warded inside and out. We didn’t even open it when we gave it to him.”
“Greaser did,” Anna said. “After we handed it over. He opened the box and had a look inside.”
“Did he close it again?”
“Sure.”
Her arm beginning to weary, Anna lowered the gun, though she glanced at Nail to make sure his was still at the ready. “Look, we know he took the damn thing. It pissed off everybody in the known universe. None of this helps us.”
“Just assembling the facts, dear.”
“Don’t call me dear.”
“Apologies. You’d stopped pointing that gun at me, so I thought we were getting close.”
“Whatever,” Anna said. “Enough of this shit. You don’t get to come here and ask all the questions. We get a turn.”
He shrugged. “Ask.”
“OK. The bone. What did you want it for?”
Sobell cocked his head, brow knit in puzzlement. “For? Some things aren’t for anything, child. Like a ten-foot-high stack of hundred-dollar bills or a wriggling pile of nubile whores, some things are worth having for their own sake.” He favored them with an oily grin. “Actually, though, in this case, I was going to use it to jump-start my career in politics.”
Blank stares and gaping mouths greeted this statement, and Anna felt her own jaw drop. “You what?”
“I assure you, even being a notorious crime lord wears thin after a while. I have other ambitions. Can I count on your support in November?”
“You’re insane,” Anna said.
Sobell merely shrugged. “It’s been said, though not generally when people think I can hear them. However, this is beside the point. Do you have other questions, or can we get down to business?”
“What business?”
“Oh, boy,” Nail muttered from somewhere behind Anna and to her left.
“I propose an alliance. Your crew, combined with my incomparably vast army”—he raised his eyebrows and glanced toward Brown—“and any other tricks I may have up my sleeve.”
“An alliance to do what?”
“We need to repurloin that godforsaken bone before we all end up with even greater problems.”
Anna looked right and left, checking the expressions on her companions’ faces. Genevieve was listening with avid interest, of course, but Sobell had Nail’s complete attention as well. Drew, too. Even Karyn seemed engaged rather than drawn into whatever strange world she now lived in. They were going to do this, Anna realized—they’d done everything but say yes.
“And how is stealing that thing—again—going to clear up any of this mess?”
“I’m so glad you asked. Rumor has it that, if you hold the Devil’s jawbone, those who can hear you speak will believe any lie you tell them.”
Anna thought that made a certain amount of sense. In any case, she could see how that would allow a dirtbag like Greaser to take over Sobell’s operation, at least temporarily.
“Actually,” Sobell continued, “although my preference is to recover the bone, at this point I’d be quite happy to simply destroy it.”
“Whoa!” somebody said. Anna turned to see Drew standing, hands up as though he were trying to push Sobell away from him over a distance. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.”
“Why ever not?”
“It’s a piece of a god,” Drew said. “What if you can’t destroy it? What if you piss it off?”
“It’s not a god,” Genevieve said.
“It’s not even a piece of a god,” Sobell added.
Genevieve gave him a cocked half smile. “Thank you.”
“Presumably if we destroy it, we break its power. Then I can go back to my riches, drugs, and multifarious sex partners, and you can go back to skulking in the undergrowth and doing work for people like me. I’ll make sure you’re well compensated, I assure you. You can probably take quite some time off skulking, if you so desire.”
Drew stood with his mouth half-open, trying to cough up a reply that seemed lodged in his throat.
“That arrangement should be agreeable for all of us, no?”
“No!” Drew shouted, finally getting the word out. “The Brotherhood will kill all of us. How are you in any position to prevent that?”
“I’m not right now, obviously, but once I am again at the reins of my vast criminal empire, I should be able to whip something up.”
Drew shook his head wildly from side to side. “You don’t get it. It’s not a thing or a relic or an artifact to those people. It’s their god. Physically. Like, in the flesh. I mean—you know what I mean. When it was stolen, they were in the middle of trying to bring the damn thing to life.”
“And?”
“And what? This is the Brotherhood of Zagam. They thought they were moments away from bringing their god to earth, and then poof! It was snatched away. They will overturn heaven and earth, kill dozens or hundreds, do whatever is necessary to get it back and finish the rite. They will not stop. You have no idea what these people are capable of.”
“I have some idea. They’re definitely capable of killing eight or ten of my hired thugs in a firefight. I can’t imagine any escalation will deter them, if that’s what you mean.”
“See? This is crazy!”
“Nonsense. Once we have the bone, we have options. We can give it to them, though I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that. We can just lie to them and make them go away—they’ll have to believe us. If we destroy the bone, well, yes. Provided the Brotherhood doesn’t simply become discouraged and go home, there’s nothing for it then but a bloodbath. C’est la vie.”
“Jesus,” Drew said.
“I’m impressed, if that’s any consolation. You’ve clearly done your research.”
“It’s not research,” Anna said. “He’s one of them.”
Karyn frowned. “No, he’s not. He’s with us.”
“Whatever. He used to be one of them, anyway.”
Sobell smiled in a casually sadistic way that reminded Anna of a kid frying ants with a magnifying glass. “How badly might they want him back?”
“No,” Karyn said. “There’s no leverage there, so put it out of your head.”
“Pity.” He studied Karyn for a moment. “I’m sorry, we haven’t made formal introductions. You must be Ms. Ames.”
“Yes.”
“And what do you think of all this?”
Karyn’s face remained blank, a gray oval in the dim light. Anna wondered what she was seeing now, whether it had any bearing on the current
situation, or whether she was moving farther and farther away from everyone else’s reality. Anna thought of Adelaide and closed her eyes briefly.
“I’m listening,” Karyn said. “The Brotherhood was a problem we already had. So was Greaser and your thugs. I don’t see how your being here is all that much help.”
Sobell uncrossed his legs and put his hands in his lap, taking some time to consider. “I know where Greaser is,” he said at last. “I know the layout of the building and the nasty tricks that are set up to deter people like you. If we can get to him, we can get the bone, and then—problem solved. Also . . .” He said a few low words under his breath and snapped his fingers. A naked blue flame flickered to life in his palm, casting a thin, sickly light over his face. “Like I said, I know a few tricks.”
“Anna,” Karyn said, “can I talk to you in private?”
Karyn was still looking at the world through half-slitted eyes, Anna noted, and her face was a tight, unmoving mask of control. Somebody who didn’t know her might think she was holding back a mighty blast of anger, but Anna had seen this before, and she knew better. Karyn was hurting and she didn’t want it to show.
“Yeah,” Anna said.
“And we were making such progress here,” Sobell complained.
“You guys can get acquainted until we get back. Try not to kill each other.”
* * *
Karyn led the way out through the back door, and the two women went out to the wide concrete slab that stood in for a back porch. A breeze blew hot and dry, stirring the high brown grass of the lawn. It didn’t cool Anna in the slightest.
Karyn put her fingertips to her temples.
“Pretty bad, huh?” Anna asked.
“Yes, ma’am.” Karyn barked out a short laugh. “You know, I’m at the point where I don’t even know if this headache is real or if it’s just a premonition of a future headache.”
“I don’t suppose you can have a premonition of some aspirin to make it go away?”
That coaxed a tiny smile from Karyn’s lips. “As soon as I figure out how, I promise I will get right on that.”
“So what’s up?”
Out here, the streetlights and the city light reflected off the low umbrella of yellow-brown pollution gave enough illumination to read Karyn’s face, to see the faint twitching at the corners of her mouth and the subtle movements of her eyes. Anna liked what she saw even less than she had before. Karyn’s eyes darted from place to place without stopping, and her shoulders were pulled in like she was huddling up, making herself small. The constant tension would become excruciating after a while if it wasn’t already.
“I’m not getting anything bad off Sobell.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“I mean, well, he’s got bat wings and horns half the time, but other than that . . .”
“Holy shit! Don’t you think—” Anna broke off as she saw a smirk flicker across Karyn’s face and vanish. “You’re fucking with me,” she said.
“Yeah,” Karyn said, laughing a little.
Anna felt herself smile in response. “Knock it off!”
“All right, all right. Really, I’m not getting anything off him. I can’t tell if that’s because there’s nothing to get, or my condition’s being fickle, or if he’s got some serious shit locking that down so I can’t read him.”
“He can do that?”
“I don’t have any idea. If anybody could, though, you’d think he’d be on the short list.”
Anna turned in to the breeze, trying to get it to take some of the sweat from her skin. No such luck. “What do you think, then? About all this?”
“I don’t know. But I have to tell you, I’m useless right now. Jumping at shadows of things that aren’t even here yet.” She looked down at the cement and made a face. “I can tell you there’s probably going to be an earthquake here, a bad one, but I can’t tell you if it will be tomorrow or fifteen years from now.”
“You don’t get any credit for that. There’s always an earthquake here.”
“The only reason I haven’t freaked out yet is that I’m in a safe place that’s more or less controlled. I know there’s nothing here to be worried about, and even so I’m about one hair’s breadth from climbing the walls at all times. How’s it going to work out there, when it gets dangerous?”
“So you think we ought to do it then?”
“I told you, I don’t know. I just thought you ought to know about my situation before you make any decisions, and I didn’t want to talk about it in front of everyone.”
Anna frowned. “What do you mean, before I make any decisions? This is your outfit.”
Karyn took a step back from her, and Anna wondered what expression was on her own face that had caused that to happen. Once again, Karyn got very interested in the ground. “I walked out. I ditched you guys. It’s not my outfit anymore.”
“That’s crap, Karyn. You’re trying to walk out again right now and leave me with this shit.” Anna could feel something rising through her chest, filling her head with gunpowder and gasoline—not anger, but fury, the same fury she’d felt when Karyn had stood there like a fainting schoolgirl and watched Tommy die, while Anna herself was up to the elbows in his blood. That time, she’d let it out, nearly scouring away her oldest friendship. This time . . .
She let out a hot, shaky breath. In a tight, trembling voice, she said, “This has always been your show. You don’t get to walk out.”
“It’s always been the two of us,” Karyn said. “Never just me.”
“You don’t get to walk out,” Anna said. She was fully aware now that what she really meant was, You don’t get to leave me, but no fucking way was she saying that out loud.
Karyn must have read something in her voice, though, because she paused, opened her eyes fully, and met Anna’s gaze. And held it. “I don’t even know what’s real anymore—maybe half of everything I see, and maybe way less. If you want, I’ll—you don’t have to make all the decisions alone, but my judgment is unbelievably bad right now.”
Some of the fury still burned in Anna’s chest, but part of it had burned off, apparently releasing the kind of toxic fumes that made her eyes water. Rather than speak, afraid of how her voice might sound, she nodded.
“So now what?” Karyn asked.
“Do we take Sobell up on his offer or not?”
Karyn glanced skyward, tracking some phantasm across a long arc before returning to the question. “I don’t know. Part of me hates the idea. You know we can’t trust him. I think I believe Nail’s guy—Sobell probably had other reasons he wanted us to go into Mendelsohn’s. Other business he didn’t see fit to share with us.”
“Yeah. Can’t really say that would surprise me.”
“So working with him directly sounds like a good way to get screwed. On the other hand, we’re already screwed, and I suspect he has more than a few ‘little tricks’ to help us out with.”
“Oh? I thought you said in there that you didn’t see how he’d add much.”
“In front of him, yeah, that’s what I said.”
Anna grinned. “You want to be the bad cop, huh?”
“I want to set this up so we don’t end up in his pocket. If that means one of us has to play bad cop, I’m game.”
“Sounds good.”
“Also”—Karyn hesitated—“if we can get some cash out of him, maybe we can get back in Adelaide’s good graces.”
Anna nodded slowly. “Actually I was thinking the same thing.”
“And it’s gonna need to be a lot, especially once it’s divvied up.”
“Don’t sweat that. I mean, yeah, we’ll make a run at it, but even if we can’t get that much, we’ll still have my cut. We’ll manage until the next job, if we survive this one.”
Karyn shifted and crossed her arms. “That’s not going
to work forever. I don’t want to be your charity case. I need to put some money aside. You know. In case.”
“In case what?”
“In case.”
Anna felt the urge to put a hand on Karyn’s shoulder, but instead she just looked at her very directly. “I like Genevieve a lot, but no matter what happens with her or anyone else, I’m not going anywhere. Period.”
The breeze picked up, sweeping warm air over her body and doing little to cool her down. When it dropped again, she was aware of how quiet the night was out here. The traffic from the interstate seemed far away, more like the distant sound of the ocean. She imagined she could hear her own pulse, and briefly feared that it would drown out anything Karyn had to say.
But when Karyn spoke her voice reached Anna with absolute clarity. “OK.”
“I guess we’re in, then,” Anna said.
Karyn closed her eyes again, leaving them shut this time. “We probably ought to run it past the others—but, yeah. Basically. I don’t know what else to do.”
A 747 bound for LAX passed overhead. Anna wondered whether it tracked the same arc Karyn had watched a few minutes before. Karyn looked up.
“I’m about useless, though,” Karyn said after the jet had gone. “Really.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that, and I have an idea.”
“Good, because I have an idea about our numbers problem.”
“Numbers problem?”
“You know, the fact that there are maybe hundreds of them and seven of us.”
“Oh?” Anna said. “Spill it.”
* * *
The room had long since descended into an awkward silence when Nail heard the back door open. He hoped Karyn and Anna had worked their shit out, because this situation was in no way stable, and he was getting tired of holding a gun on Sobell and his security guy. It crossed his mind that the cleanest thing to do would be to shoot both of them and bury them in shallow graves in the desert, but he’d never shot anyone in cold blood before, and it held no appeal for him now. Better if Karyn had a solution, even if she was getting pretty flaky lately.
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