Premonitions

by Jamie Schultz

  “Guy doesn’t lack for balls,” Genevieve said.

  “Till they cut ’em off,” Anna muttered.

  Sobell walked straight to the door and knocked. The door opened, and he walked inside. Once he was gone from view, the door shut after him.

  “That’s that,” Anna said. “Let’s get moving.” She backed up the car and pulled out.

  * * *

  When Sobell came in, Nail didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried. He and Brown had been treated well enough so far, but Martel had made it very clear that they’d walked into captivity, at least for the short-term. Maybe Sobell’s arrival would get that sorted out, and maybe it would mean Martel didn’t need them anymore. Maybe that slippery bastard Sobell would find some creative way to sell them out.

  Sobell nodded at him, the picture of calm confidence. Nail wished he felt the same way. He wasn’t tied up, not yet, but he was seated on the edge of the bed with armed fanatics filling the available space around him. If he sneezed, one of these jumpy motherfuckers would probably shoot him by accident.

  Sobell turned to Martel. There was something odd about the way Sobell looked at the man. His eyes had locked onto him among all the others, though when he’d walked in, there hadn’t really been any reason to pick him out from the rest. Did he know the guy from somewhere? What was going on here?

  The two men considered each other for what seemed like a very long time.

  “Mr. Enoch Sobell,” Martel said, spitting out the words as though they were something disgusting he’d eaten. “Enoch,” he whispered.

  “At your service. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” He made no move to extend his hand, and he paid no attention to the small army that crowded the room. Martel was the only guy there, as far as he was concerned.

  “Where is the relic?” Martel asked. Nail didn’t like the avid gleam in his eyes or the way his face had become flushed and feverish. The way his hands twitched and flexed, seemingly of their own accord. This was a guy for which rational, considered action was rapidly becoming a nonoption.

  “Ah, excellent. I was hoping I could discuss that with you. You see, that particular object has become a source of no small amount of trouble for me, personally.” Sobell’s voice was even, his face composed. Did he not see that Martel was on the verge of losing it, or was he just that cool? Even the other cult members in the room had begun trading anxious glances and adjusting their grips.

  “Where is it?”

  “One of my lackeys unexpectedly grew a spine and ran off with it. Frankly, I’d like to be rid of the, ah, object in question. I have a proposal for you.”

  Martel said nothing, but Nail could see his jaw muscles bunching and imagined he heard the sound of grinding teeth.

  “You help me deal with my wayward minion, and I’ll gladly relinquish the relic into your capable hands. Our goals are completely aligned in this matter.”

  Martel peeled his lips back like a growling dog. “Where is it? Where?”

  “My office. Of course, there will be the security personnel to deal with, but you look like an intrepid lot. I expect you’ll have little trouble with them.”

  Martel smiled, and Nail read genuine joy in his face. “Well, Mr. Sobell, that sounds more than fair.”

  “Splendid,” Sobell said. “There is one other issue I was hoping I might discuss with you. One of a more personal nature. Potentially very lucrative for you.”

  “Oh?” Martel said, turning away from the other man. “Do tell.”

  Martel’s body blocked Sobell’s line of sight, but Nail saw him reach for the pistol on the dresser.

  “Yes. Well,” Sobell began. “I don’t suppose we could speak pri—”

  Martel’s movement was fluid and almost casual. He picked up the gun, turned, and at a distance of less than a yard, shot Sobell in the head. The bullet caught Sobell in the right side of his forehead, snapping his head back and spraying blood across the room. Sobell collapsed.

  Nail was already moving. When Martel grabbed the gun, Nail grabbed the guy to his own right, a slow brute brandishing a shotgun. He pulled, spinning the man around between him and most of the guns in the room, and he ripped the shotgun from the man’s hand. The route to the door was blocked, but there was only one guy between Nail and the window. As shouting started behind him and somebody fired, he threw that guy to one side. Two more shots sounded from behind, and somebody screamed. Nail felt something hot tear into his side as he threw himself through the window.

  The glass shattered, and Nail flew through the window frame and landed shoulder-first on the sidewalk. The shock knocked the wind out of him, but he scrambled, gasping, to his feet and stumbled away from the window.

  More shouts came from the apartment.

  The first guy out the door nearly ate a blast of buckshot, but Nail’s shoulder screamed in pain as he brought up the gun, and he knew as he fired it was a clean miss. A chunk of cheap siding two feet left of the door disintegrated—but, somehow, the guy took a hit and fell back in the room.

  “Run!” a familiar voice shouted, and Drew dove out the window, pistol in hand. Behind him, more noise and shots came from the room—sounded like Brown was in there, giving as good as he got.

  Nobody else came out for a moment, and Drew picked himself up from the pavement. “Go!” he shouted. He reached Nail a couple seconds later and practically pushed him around the side of the building.

  “Come on, come on! We gotta get out of here!” Drew said in a hoarse and ragged whisper. He shoved Nail toward the back, prodding him with something that felt like a barbed electric cattle prod.

  “Ow, man! What the fuck?”

  Drew looked down at his hand. It was covered in blood. “Oh, shit.”

  “Ah, shit. Guess they got me.”

  “Just move, OK?”

  Nail nodded. Now that he noticed, his lower back hurt like somebody’d turned a goddamn weasel or something loose in there.

  He leaned on Drew and limped toward the back.

  * * *

  “Now would be good,” Genevieve whispered.

  “Shut it, OK?” Anna fiddled with the lockpicks some more, trying to get the damn lock to cooperate. Security was lax here—not even close to the same league as Sobell’s building—but that didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t come along eventually. Genevieve ragging on her didn’t help.

  You’d think she’d never done this before, she thought. She felt the last tumbler click into place, and she pushed the door open.

  “Voilà.”

  She checked with Karyn, who nodded, and then she went in. Genevieve and Karyn slipped in right after her, Karyn taking pains to ease the door shut without making any noise.

  They found themselves in a stairwell, illuminated by one white lightbulb on each landing. Everything—walls, ceilings, stair treads, and handrails—was coated in an utterly forgettable shade of gray paint, the goal, Anna supposed, being to bore any intruders to death.

  “Come on,” Genevieve said, shifting the bag on her shoulder. She headed up the stairs. The echoes from her footfalls were no louder than whispers, but to Anna they seemed about as subtle as a kick to the head.

  Now who’s got nerves?

  She waited for Karyn to follow Genevieve, then brought up the rear.

  The ascent was long, leaving Anna gasping as she huffed and puffed her way upward. I thought I was in better shape than this. Genevieve was even worse off, and she had to pause for a few moments at the eighth floor to get her breath. Anna didn’t complain—just gave Genevieve a weak grin, squeezed her hand twice, and took the opportunity to stock up on oxygen herself.

  They stopped on the twelfth floor, and Genevieve cautiously pushed open the door. “Looks clear,” she said.

  They came out on a wide, carpeted walkway surrounding a large atrium that ran up the center of the bui
lding. The offices were situated along the outside walls.

  “Which one?” Anna asked.

  “That way,” Karyn said, pointing. “That’s east.”

  The three of them walked to the office suite at the east end of the walkway, staying well away from the handrail. All it would take was one bored security guard looking up to ruin their night if they got sloppy.

  A glass door set in a glass wall barred their entry into the office suite. Another few moments with the lockpicks cleared that obstacle away, and Anna swung the door open. She took two steps inside the office, and the whole place lit up, fluorescent ceiling lights flickering on in banks across the wide open space. She froze.

  “Motion sensor on the lights,” Karyn said.

  Anna gave her a sheepish grin. “I knew that.”

  “Let’s move. I don’t know how often the guard does a walk-through, but I bet he’ll check out the lights.”

  “There’s a switch, too,” Genevieve said. She stepped in and shut the lights down. Anna felt her pulse start falling back toward normal.

  “Come on.”

  The office was a wide-open floor plan, cut into pieces with short dividers, barely higher than the desks they contained. The outside wall was blocked by offices, also with glass doors. Through the nearest, outside the window, Anna could see their target. She led the way over and went in.

  Across the street, Enoch Sobell’s building stood tall. Two floors down from where Anna stood, the ESE sign reflected the light from the street below, just like on the building’s other three sides. It wasn’t much to hang your hat on, but it ought to be enough.

  “All right,” Genevieve said. “All right.” She didn’t move, though, just kept staring out the window.

  “Faster would be better,” Anna said.

  “Right.” She put down the heavy bag and pulled out a few items—two vacuum cups with heavy-duty handles on them, and an industrial glass cutter. She also pulled out a huge coil of nylon rope.

  Anna picked up the vacuum cups and stuck them to the window, pumping a few times to get the air out. It’d take a hell of a lot more than the weight of the glass to break them free now. While Genevieve messed with the rope, she scored the glass with the cutter. After she’d made a few wide, sweeping lines, she pounded lightly along them with her fist while Karyn held the vacuum cups.

  The glass came free, neat as you please, in a big sheet about three feet square. Karyn pulled it out and leaned it against the wall, disengaging the suction cups. The building’s windows were double-paned, so they’d have to repeat the process one more time to open the room to the outside.

  No problem. One more go with the cups and glass cutter, and a second sheet of glass joined the first. A hot wind blew in the hole, ruffling Anna’s hair, and she took a few steps back toward the corner. Despite her nerves and the urgency of the situation, she smiled. She was doing the one thing she was good at, right here with her best friend and her lover, and if she just kept thoughts of the next steps at arm’s length, she actually felt good. Better than good. She touched Genevieve’s shoulder with her fingertips. Karyn glanced over and gave her a tight, distracted smile. As good as a blessing, Anna thought.

  At last, Genevieve finished securing the end of the rope around a nearby structural column. She’d had to punch a hole through the wall to do it, but the gleam of metal behind the sheetrock, the structural member holding up the ceiling here, helped fill Anna with confidence. That thing wasn’t going anywhere. All she had to worry about was Genevieve’s knot. She took reassurance from the fact that it was about the size of a big man’s fist.

  Genevieve gave the rope a couple of hard yanks. “OK, that oughta do it. Now, the tricky part.”

  “Yeah,” Anna said. “It’ll be a miracle if this works.”

  “Ease up, huh? I don’t need the attitude.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  Anna watched as Genevieve slid the whole coil of rope closer to the hole in the window. It was about four hundred feet of serious nylon climbing rope, taken from Nail’s stash. Nail was usually the guy responsible for fucking around with this sort of thing, and he’d have tested the rope religiously. She hoped. In any event, he didn’t like to keep damaged equipment around. It offended him.

  Genevieve sat cross-legged next to the rope and used a Sharpie to draw a diagram on the matted surface of the cheap carpet right in front of the window. It must not have been her usual rigmarole, since she kept referring to a page torn out of the phone book as she worked. Anna didn’t want to think about that.

  At length, Genevieve finished the diagram and shoved the coil of rope on top of it with a grunt. She glanced quickly up at Anna and Karyn, then back to the work. Anna heard her let out a long, shaky breath.

  “It’s gonna be fine,” Anna said.

  “Shh.”

  Genevieve started chanting. For over a minute, Anna stood and watched, enduring the hot wind and the growing sense of concern that the night security guard would come by any time. Genevieve’s chanting seemed to have no effect on anything, and Anna began to worry about that, too. If she fucked this up, the plan was DOA. Even Karyn was getting anxious, shifting her weight from one leg to the next and darting glances at the door.

  After a long, nerve-racking wait, the end of the rope moved. It picked itself up, snakelike, and climbed out the hole. Genevieve’s eyes widened, but she didn’t break off the chant. The backs of Anna’s arms and neck prickled with gooseflesh.

  Anna and Karyn both walked to the window and watched as the rope paid itself out. Moments later, Anna saw the end of the rope appear clear across the way. The rope had wriggled across the street, and now the other end was slithering up the side of Enoch Sobell’s office building. It was a profoundly unsettling sight, and suddenly the breeze coming through the hole didn’t feel so warm at all.

  This was the dangerous part. If anybody on the street saw this, they probably wouldn’t be able to resist fucking with it. Anna prayed that the security cameras at the corners of the building weren’t of high enough resolution for the rope to show up on them.

  As Karyn and Anna watched, the rope climbed to the ESE sign across the way, twenty feet or so down from their position. It disappeared behind the sign and began hauling itself up. Soon, the coil had run out, and the rope began tightening. Anna wondered again how good Sobell’s security cameras were, and how attentive his guards.

  The U-shaped arc of rope got shorter and higher. No alarm sounded. No security personnel ran out into the street, pointing.

  Then the rope was tight, a nearly straight length connecting the two buildings.

  Genevieve stopped chanting. “Holy shit,” she said. “It worked.”

  * * *

  Nail slumped against a couple of trash bins in the alley behind the apartment building, breathing fast. Somebody had lit a fucking fire in his guts. Drew crouched next to him, on the verge of panic—basically a liability at this point. Any minute now, the people from the Brotherhood would come running, waving their guns around, and overrun the two men, but for some reason it hadn’t happened yet.

  Over the sound of blood rushing in his ears, Nail heard a car engine cough its way to life. Two more, maybe three, started up after it.

  No way. It can’t be this easy.

  Drew heard it too, and hope dawned on his face. “I think they’re leaving,” he whispered.

  “Fucking . . . great.”

  “How you holding up?”

  “Guts aren’t in my lap.” Nail pushed himself upright and winced. “I guess the guy ahead of me slowed the bullet down some.”

  “Um. OK. I’m gonna go out and see if they’re gone.”

  “Give it a minute, huh?”

  Drew leaned forward, trying to peer around the trash bins. They weren’t very big trash bins, and they were plastic besides. If somebody saw him, they wouldn’t be much good
for cover.

  “Get down, dumbass!” Nail said.

  “I don’t see anybody.”

  There was surprisingly little blood, and no exit wound. Hurt like a motherfucker, but he’d had worse. Pulse was good, skin didn’t feel clammy, best as he could tell, so at least he wasn’t going into shock. Probably. Still, this was nothing to fuck around with.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take a quick look. Then we get the fuck out of here, if we can.” And find a fucking doctor.

  The alley was empty so far, as best as Nail could see from where he lay. Drew crept out, gun at the ready. His hands were shaking. Boy’s gonna get his ass killed. Mine, too.

  Drew walked down the alley, nearly to the end, and stopped. The apartment building stuck out, blocking off the view at the end, and he’d have to jog right to come around the end of that building. If somebody was waiting for him, that’s where they would be.

  Drew disappeared behind the little turn. Nail waited for shots.

  Nothing.

  Shouldn’t the cops be getting here pretty soon? Nail wondered, and the thought surprised him so much he almost laughed aloud. First time I can remember wishing for some cops. If they were coming, though, they were taking their time. Or hell, maybe gunfire was so common down here that nobody’d bothered to call them. Wouldn’t that be funny?

  Yeah. Like a heart attack.

  Still no sounds. A minute passed during which Nail’s wound seemed to stiffen up, such that every breath grew more painful. Where’d the fucking bullet end up? Kidney? No, probably be bleeding worse if they’d hit a kidney.

  Movement at the end of the alley. It was Drew. He walked quickly to Nail.

  “It’s clear,” he said.

  “Come on, then. Get me the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  Once, in Dublin in the seventies, Enoch Sobell had gotten clipped in the head by a piece of debris from an exploding house. One moment, he’d been strolling down a calm street in an expensive neighborhood, enjoying the sun and the clear sky and, for once, not up to anything more complicated than stretching his legs. Then came a mighty roar, and something that felt like a meteorite the size of a school bus smashed into the back of his head.