“Have you ladies reached a verdict?” Sobell asked as the two women stepped into the room.
“Yeah,” Anna said. She wore an embarrassed grin, which immediately put Nail on alert. He’d never known Anna to be embarrassed about anything. “I’m up for it,” she continued, “but Karyn says we already delivered your, um—what was it? Your ‘stupid goddamned bone.’”
“Is that right?” Sobell asked. Nail swore he heard amusement under the man’s voice.
“Yeah, that’s about right,” Karyn said. She crossed her arms and sat back in her previous spot on the couch. She closed her eyes. “It’s not our fault you picked a lousy messenger.”
Anna shrugged and gave Sobell a look that said, See? Can’t do a thing with her.
Surprisingly, Sobell smiled. “Not a very sophisticated negotiation, ladies. But I can’t fault the logic. Name your price.”
“The cash part will be the same as the last time,” Karyn said. “It’s the same job, after all.”
“I get the bone, you get two million dollars, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Need I point out that you’re in as dire a predicament as I am? Call it one million, and be glad you have my assistance.”
Anna and Karyn exchanged a glance. If Anna nodded, Nail couldn’t tell, but Karyn seemed to find a decision on her face. “Deal,” Karyn said.
“Shake on it, or you’ll just take my word?”
Karyn was rubbing her head, and Nail swore she missed the question entirely. He didn’t like that one bit. Anna stepped in without much of a hitch, though Nail doubted that Sobell missed the lapse.
“We’ll take your word, thanks,” she said.
“Great. Let’s get started.”
“That’s not everything,” Anna said.
“No?”
Karyn shook her head, apparently catching up to the conversation. “I need blind.”
Sobell’s bland smile didn’t budge. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a medication. It helps with my condition.”
“I don’t really deal in pharmaceuticals.”
“It dulls my perception. Keeps the future from squashing me where I stand. Do you know where to get some or not?”
“No.”
There was a long pause, and Nail didn’t miss the way Karyn’s face fell, or the worried look Anna gave her. Not good.
Sobell folded his hands in front of him. “Do we have a deal, or what?”
Karyn looked to Anna, then nodded. “Yes.”
Nail took a quick read of every face he could see. It was tough to make out details in the dimness, but he got enough. Genevieve was ready to go, practically jumping up and down in her seat. Anna had that determined set to her jaw that said she, too, was ready, and best get the fuck out of her way. Karyn was distracted, already looking at something past Sobell’s head.
And Drew. The guy’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again, and he glanced back at the door. Couldn’t make up his mind whether to talk or run.
“Spit it out,” Nail said.
“Who, me?”
“Yeah. You.”
Drew shuffled his feet and took another look at the door. “Well, I was wondering, um . . .”
“You get a full cut,” Anna said. “Two hundred Gs.”
“Really?” Drew said.
For the first time since Sobell walked in, Nail let his gun drop. “Bullshit. I’ve been busting my ass in this outfit for years, and he walks in off the street for a full share?”
“It’s always been one share per person,” Karyn said.
“Besides,” Anna put in, “he’ll have earned it, if he can do what we need him to.”
Drew whipped his head around to gawk at Anna. “Huh?”
“Let’s hear it,” Nail said. “This oughta be good.”
Anna leaned against the wall, a smug smile on her face. “We’re outnumbered. Greaser’s got Sobell’s guys, and the Brotherhood brought a small army to track us down. Only, if you think about it, the Brotherhood really doesn’t give a shit about us one way or the other.”
“Oh, no,” Drew said.
“That’s right. It’s the bone they want. We can tell them where to find it—we’ll pick up a distraction and some firepower at the same time. Except they have no reason to believe us.” She clapped a hand on Drew’s shoulder. “But they might believe you.”
“That’s insane. If they think I’m messing with them, they’ll kill me.”
“Better make it good, then.” She turned back to Nail. “That worth a share?”
“Yeah. I think it just about is.”
Anna clapped her hands together. “All right. Here’s how this is going to work.”
Chapter 27
“This is dumb,” Genevieve said. “Karyn or Nail ought to be here. They’re actually good at this shit.”
“None of us is in a position to get everything we want,” Sobell said. “I, for one, remain unconvinced that you aren’t about to quietly knife me and leave my body in a Dumpster for the rats to fight over.”
Genevieve shook her head. “No percentage in that.”
“Admirable.”
The two of them stood next to an empty parking attendant booth, staring across the way at Sobell’s building. Nearby, a cheap plastic sign, zip-tied to a chain-link fence, buckled and flexed in the wind. This was a nice part of downtown, but that didn’t preclude the presence of yet another overpriced parking lot, one of the thousands of flat spots that stood out like scabrous bald spots in the mostly vertical city. At least nobody would question them, if they didn’t stand there for long.
From everything Genevieve could see, and everything she remembered, Sobell’s building was a nightmare. Bad enough that the lobby was lit up like full daylight, but floodlights poured thousands of blue-white watts on the stairs out front as well, and the little stalks of cameras seemed to protrude everywhere, inside and out. “You must have a hell of an electric bill,” she said.
“A trifle. You should see my monthly graft expenditure.”
Genevieve chuckled.
“How many guards?”
“Usually two out front, but unless my eyes deceive me, they’ve staffed up since lunchtime. Look.”
Sure enough, Genevieve could see at least four big Cro-Magnon bruisers behind the security counter. A tall, garish wall of pink-and-black marble towered behind them, and two wide corridors stretched back on either side—the halls to the elevator lobby.
“Four’s workable,” Genevieve said.
“Not four. Look to the sides of the door.”
For an old guy, Sobell had incredible eyesight. If Genevieve squinted, she could just make out the shiny tip of somebody’s shoe on the left side and something that might be an elbow on the right—men flanking the door on the inside.
“OK, six. That’s not good.”
“Eight,” Sobell said. “Check the mirror.”
The mirror of which he spoke was a tiny reflective circle, from here about the size of a dime held in an outstretched hand. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said.
“And they’re all one button away from summoning the rest of Security. If a man were to show up on the front stairs with so much as an angry expression on his face, the guards could have a dozen more security personnel here inside of a minute.”
“Shit.”
“That was this morning,” Sobell admitted. “By now, I have no idea what the security arrangement looks like. I rather doubt Greaser has relaxed it.”
“The front door is out, then.”
“Barring some unforeseen stroke of brilliance on your part, yes.”
“All right. Let’s see what’s around—hey! Someone’s coming out!”
A man had emerged from the hall. Genevieve couldn�
��t make out his features from here, but he seemed like an older gentleman, maybe in his fifties. Salt-and-pepper mustache, bit of a gut, but he walked with a certain swagger. He triggered a sense of vague recognition, but Genevieve couldn’t figure out where he’d seen the guy before.
Two of the security guards opened a set of glass doors for the guy and let him out. He nodded to them and headed down the steps toward a boring blue sedan illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant.
“Ah. Bill Mendez.”
“Who?” Genevieve asked.
“Chief of Police of Los Angeles. Stand-up fellow,” Sobell said. “Quite incorruptible. Or was, until a short time ago.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Nothing that increases our chances of success, I wouldn’t imagine.”
The car pulled away, and Genevieve turned her back to the street, hunching her shoulders and pretending to study a sign on the attendant’s booth.
“I don’t suppose you can just walk in and order the guards to stand down?” she asked after the police chief’s car had gone.
“Now, why didn’t I think of that?”
“What?”
Sobell rolled his eyes heavenward. “No, I can’t just walk in. I assure you, they will shoot me on sight. They’ve already tried.”
“Oh. It was worth a shot.”
“If that pun was intentional, I may have to shoot you.”
“Not at all.” Genevieve squared her shoulders. “Can we go around back?”
“Why not?”
“Jesus,” Genevieve muttered, and she kicked a pebble across the sidewalk.
* * *
Karyn put her hand on the car’s door handle and paused. “I don’t feel good about this,” she said.
Anna’s reasoning had sounded good when she’d proposed this little side trip. Think about it, she’d said. Adelaide is way gone. She’s so far gone, there’s no way she’d be able to go out in public without using blind. No way. She’d get mowed down by a bus the first time she tried to cross a street.
Karyn had shaken her head. I don’t know. Maybe she just knows how to use it somehow. She lives with her condition better than I do.
If you mean that she’s gone completely insane, then yeah, I guess so. But she’s not stupid. She’s got a stash. Think about how much we’ve paid her over the years—it’s gotta be close to a million bucks, and she lives in a dripping wet hole in the ground. I bet she needs to buy the stuff, too. That’s where all the money goes.
But she didn’t have a stash, Karyn had protested. Otherwise, she’d never have gone out when Drew and I came last time.
Except you weren’t going to pay her. Maybe she knew something, knew she’d be more likely to get paid if she brought those guys back with her. Maybe she was getting desperate, too. Look, she was screaming about needing to go home, telling those fuckers she could help them, if only they would take her home. She’s got a stash.
Karyn had grudgingly accepted that maybe Anna’s line of reasoning wasn’t totally broken. Or maybe she had simply been grasping at the nearest convenient straw. At the rate the visions were worsening, she worried that she’d become completely disconnected from reality in a matter of days. An exploratory mission to check out Adelaide’s stash was the only game in town. Now that they were here, though, Karyn just wanted to get the hell away.
Anna turned off the car. “Don’t feel good about it, or you saw something?”
“Don’t feel good. I didn’t see anything special.” That wasn’t strictly true—she’d seen a thousand people, objects, and creatures on the way here that easily surpassed “out of the ordinary” and went straight on into “freakish and terrifying,” but if any of it had particular significance, she couldn’t suss it out.
“You want to call it off?” Anna meant it, Karyn knew, but her voice still held a frustrated anger. It said, If you thought this was a bad idea, you should have said something sooner. That was probably true, but Karyn didn’t see what choice she had. She felt like she was losing her mind, and rapidly.
“We’re not going to find anything here.”
“You want to call it off?” Anna repeated, and this time the anger poked through the surface.
Karyn opened her eyes. The car she was in had become a rusty skeleton with a smashed-in windshield. In another half a second it became a faded junker, still running, but the dashboard had faded from the sun and the vinyl peeled from the seats and steering wheel. Outside, a fanged monkey led a strung-out woman down the street on a thin leash of iron chain. The symbolism was obvious enough, but Karyn had no way of telling what the woman was now. Already a hooker in need of a fix, or maybe just a woman on her way back from the late shift, years out from a possible encounter with the drug that would seize her life. Or, hell, maybe there was nobody there at all, and this person would come walking through, following her monkey, sometime tomorrow morning.
And that was only one thing. Everything was affected.
“No,” Karyn said. “Let’s try it.”
She opened the door and stepped out onto the curb. Her foot came down, turned strangely, and she stumbled. One arm flailed out and she caught herself against the car door, but her ankle cried out in protest.
“You all right?” Anna asked.
“Sure,” Karyn said, but she checked the curb. It had eroded substantially here, chunks of cement broken away and gone, but it had felt smooth and rounded. She kicked at it, gently so as not to do herself any further damage—and her foot bounced off air.
“Jesus,” she said, and she slumped against the car, back pressing against the window and head tipped back against the roof. “I don’t believe this.”
“What?” Anna came around to the other side. Concern warred with impatience in her eyes.
“I’m not even seeing the right ground anymore,” Karyn said. She kept her voice under control, but it was a close thing. Reality—or maybe just her sanity—was collapsing around her, and a sudden surge of terror threatened to overwhelm her. Tears swelled at the corners of her eyes, but thankfully didn’t fall. “I can’t even walk without hurting myself, because my eyes are now feeding me complete bullshit.” She rolled her head to the side and looked past Anna to the sidewalk. It had cracked and heaved in spots, creating great sloping ramps nearly as tall as she was that weren’t actually there at all. What would happen, she wondered, if her sense of touch bought into that vision, too? Would she hurt herself, break herself against the ground, and not even know it? Or would she slip right out of this reality into a new one, defined by her own hallucinations?
“Take my hand,” Anna said. “And close your eyes.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Come on. I don’t like being here any more than you do.”
The words and, even more, Anna’s tone made Karyn feel like a kid being dragged to the doctor’s office. She closed her eyes, put out her hand, and pushed away from the car. “This is dumb,” she said. “It’ll be faster if you just leave me here, check for the stuff, and come back.”
“Unh-uh. As soon as I leave you alone, one of the ten thousand happy assholes looking for us will come by. It’s almost a guarantee.”
“Oh, Christ. Let’s just get this over with.”
Anna walked forward. Karyn trailed a few feet behind her. The sidewalk felt rough and flat, as it should, and it made coarse sliding sounds as she shuffled her feet. She was tempted to open her eyes and have a look, but if the disparity between what she felt and what she saw was too great—if, for example, she found herself hip deep in a concrete slab or standing over a yawning hole—she thought she might just stop here and start screaming.
The toe of her shoe got hung up on an uneven chunk of sidewalk, and she stumbled. Anna’s hand tightened on hers.
“This sucks,” Karyn said.
“It’s like a game. Something you’d do when y
ou’re a kid.”
“That’s been a long time,” Karyn said. Anna made no reply.
The walk from the car to the building seemed impossibly long, the sidewalk a cratered, bombed-out landscape of treacherous cracks and holes. Anna pulled her in one direction, then another, presumably leading her around the worst of it, and announcing the unavoidable as they approached. “Hole. Ledge. Dip here.” Karyn tripped a few times, but only in small ways. Anna was good at this. Even so, with no visual reference, no sight of the end, she seemed to walk forever.
“Funny,” Anna said after an unusually wide detour. “This is usually your job.”
“Wha—” Karyn began, but then she got it. “Cute.”
“Maybe, but it’s true.” The sound of a heavy door swinging open on creaky hinges. “Threshold.”
Karyn picked up her feet and came inside. The cooler temperature in here would have been welcome if it weren’t for the dank stench. “Christ, I hate coming here.”
“Me, too. Come on, and let’s get it over with.”
Anna started forward, but Karyn didn’t move. All she could think of were all the reasons she hated this place, and it was ten times worse with her eyes closed. She felt, again, like she’d been reduced to childhood, afraid that a hand would reach out of the darkness and close around her arm, her ankle, her throat, and drag her to a secret, terrible place where monsters slept and lurked and ate. Especially ate.
“Karyn?”
“I’m ready. Go on.”
Anna resumed her slow walk into the building. Karyn allowed Anna to pull her to the end of the corridor, then stopped again.
“What is it?” Anna asked.
Karyn opened her eyes.
Anna’s flashlight shone in front of her. The staircase below looked intact, for a miracle, and the space beyond was the same wet blackness it had always been. Perhaps a beam or two had fallen in, but Karyn couldn’t tell. The walls of the stairwell, though, had undergone a horrifying transformation. The cinder blocks were gone, replaced by a rippling, fleshy wall on either side—faces, thousands of them, growing together seamlessly at the edges. Each showed only the bottom of the forehead to the bridge of the nose—the eyes, in other words.
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