Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  Nail started the car. “Ain’t gotta ask twice.”

  Van Horn and his entourage drove an erratic, circuitous route, probably assuming somebody was following them at this point, but they ended up back at the same place they’d ended up the last couple of nights—an abandoned meatpacking plant at the end of a very quiet tenement block. Nail pulled the car up a short way at the other end of the street and watched them get out and then file into the building.

  He turned off the car and killed the lights. The three of them waited wordlessly in the vehicle. An hour passed. Anna played with the button on the glove compartment and wished for a cigarette. Nobody else showed up, and nobody came out of the building.

  “Where’s that leave us?” Genevieve asked finally.

  Nail grunted. “Same as before. He doesn’t go out alone, he doesn’t stay in alone. Either we grab him on the street and risk being killed or seen, or we go in.”

  “And just risk being killed.”

  “Any idea who those other guys were?” Anna asked. “Seems like we aren’t the only ones gunning for him. Sobell got somebody else on this, you think?”

  “Doubt it,” Nail said. “Not if he’s so concerned about taking him alive. Which probably means we got even less time than we thought.”

  “We scope the place tomorrow, then,” Anna said. “When they’re out doing . . . whatever.”

  It was action, anyway. Motion in some direction. That didn’t make her feel any better.

  * * *

  Anna jolted awake, heart pounding and breath coming panicky and shallow, but Genevieve was there, close, hand on her shoulder, hip touching her hip. Ready with soothing words in the darkness. “It’s all right; it’s okay. Shhh. It’s just a bad dream.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Anna said. She sat up and pushed the blanket away. Her T-shirt was glued to her body with sweat, her hair greasy and gross and hanging down in her eyes in wet tangles. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Genevieve said. She moved her hand to the back of Anna’s neck, kneading as though pushing on the flesh would somehow purge the fear. “Really.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Four or five in the morning, I guess.”

  So she’d gotten, what? An hour of sleep? Two? This was exhausting. “Did I scream?”

  A pause. “Only a little.”

  Anna grunted with disgust. She brushed the hair away from her face and stared into the blackness of the room. The room was entirely dark, and she figured that was just as well. The cinder block walls were oppressive, and she was convinced the pile of debris in the corner concealed a nest of wriggling, squirming creatures of some kind. Better not to see it . . . though now that she was listening, was there movement over there? A tiny piece of plasterboard sliding down the pile as some creeping creature pushed its nose out of its den?

  You’re imagining that, she thought, but she grabbed for her phone anyway and flipped on the light.

  Genevieve held up an arm, squinting. “A little warning would’ve been nice.” She looked worn down, too, in disturbing contrast to her usual energy. Genevieve had two arms tattooed in full, colorful sleeves, a shock of pink hair at the base of which blond roots had begun to show, over a dozen piercings in her ears and more in her tongue, lips, eyebrows, and nose, and she had an upbeat swagger about her that seemed impenetrable most of the time. Not tonight, though—she was peevish and tired, like Anna. Couldn’t really blame her.

  Anna turned the phone so that it threw its fragile, diffuse beam of light toward the pile of stuff in the corner. Nothing moved. She swept the light around the room. A backpack and some basic camping equipment lay over by the wall. Near Genevieve’s sleeping bag, a stack of Genevieve’s paperwork—occult stuff, notes and fragile old documents covered in cryptic scrawling. Anna found that stuff almost as creepy as the pile in the corner, but in the circles they traveled, having somebody with a little occult know-how was as necessary as lockpicks and police scanners, and Genevieve was among the best Anna had worked with.

  She moved the light back to the pile in the corner. Still nothing moving, and she wondered if that was because there was really nothing in there after all or because it was too smart to move in the light.

  “We’re getting that cleaned out of here in the morning,” she said.

  Genevieve nodded. “Same dream?”

  “Same kind of dream.” Bang bang bang bang. Four shots, four holes in a human being. Another night spent reliving the clusterfuck at Sobell’s. She’d killed a man there, or what was left of one, before the bony horror the cult had summoned up tore itself loose from the guy’s carcass and attacked. The dreams were jumbled, fragmentary, and Anna no longer had a clear memory of what she’d seen and what her mind had reconstructed for her. She’d emptied an entire magazine into the bad guys; she was pretty sure that had happened. Adelaide had been there. She was definite on that. Hadn’t seen her since, which was a major fucking problem, since Adelaide was the only one who knew how to brew or conjure up the stuff Karyn called blind, the stuff that blunted her visions and kept her most of the way in the real world. In the dream, Karyn shoved Genevieve away from the business end of a shotgun just before it went off. In the dream, the blast caught Adelaide full in the face, turning her head into red mush and fragments. It hadn’t gone down quite like that in real life—Adelaide had survived, taking a few pellets instead of the whole blast—but it might as well have. Adelaide was gone, and Karyn was physically present but mentally in another time entirely, farther from Anna than if she’d been across the continent.

  Now every time Anna got a few hours in the rack, instead of a stretch of blissful oblivion, she got to relive that night’s violence over and over. Nobody had ever told her that the hangover off an ugly adrenaline high like that could last for weeks. Or months. There had been tough guys on the street where she grew up, before she ended up a ward of the state, hard-core gangbangers who claimed to have killed a dozen motherfuckers each. Maybe some of them had. They sure didn’t act as though they’d lost any sleep over it. Maybe that was just bluster. Maybe they were wired differently.

  Maybe I should just go ask them.

  Genevieve tried to pull her close, but Anna held up a hand. “I’m just gonna get up,” she said.

  “Come on, it’s late.”

  “And I’m done sleeping. I keep seeing his face. Its face. Both of them.”

  “Anna, he was a monster. It was a matter of survival.”

  “I don’t feel guilty,” Anna said. “I just feel bad.”

  Genevieve nodded, but it seemed perfunctory. That’s what you did with the traumatized woman, right? You agreed with her, even if you didn’t have the faintest clue what she was talking about. Genevieve’s heart was in the right place, she supposed, but it was still all so tiring.

  “I’m gonna get up.” Anna stood up. No need to get dressed—they were all sleeping in their clothes anyway, awaiting the moment when everybody had to suddenly get up and run to meet Sobell, fend off a small army of Van Horn’s deranged entourage, or deal with whatever other nasty surprise turned up. Maybe she didn’t smell the freshest, but she wouldn’t get shot trying to put on her pants, either.

  “Want some company?”

  “No. Thanks anyway.” She bent down and kissed Genevieve on the corner of her mouth.

  Concern warred briefly with exhaustion on Genevieve’s face before conceding defeat. Genevieve lay back on the bedroll the two of them shared and exhaled heavily. “Okay.”

  Anna pulled on her beat-up old jean jacket and left the room. The main space outside, where most of the interior walls had been torn down, was dark. Just enough of the city light made its way through the broken-out windows and holes in the walls to reflect off the moldering piles of sheetrock and make the path visible. The building they were squatting in was an abandoned elementary school, half-collapsed and full of debris. As bad as Anna felt, the building made it worse. The place was familiar in layout, but distur
bing and alien at the same time. She hadn’t gone to school here, but schools were all the same, and hanging out in this place felt like walking through the bombed-out ruin of her childhood. She would have thought she’d feel some kind of smug satisfaction at that—her childhood had been no great shakes—but no. Instead, it was more a reminder that everything went to shit in time, as though she needed a reminder.

  She knew why they were there. She got the logic of it. They were about to orchestrate a kidnapping, and you didn’t want to haul the guy you’d kidnapped back to your apartment, after all. It still sucked.

  Anna took the path around a pile of construction debris to the next room over in the row. Like most of the rooms, it hadn’t had a door when the crew moved in. Unlike with all the other rooms but one, they’d put a door on it right away. This one was a sloppy construction of three-quarter-inch plywood with some hinges Genevieve had scrounged up from somewhere. The other was somewhat sturdier.

  Using the light from her phone again, Anna found the bar that held the makeshift door shut and slid it out. The plywood’s slight bow sprang back, pushing the door open for her.

  Karyn was inside. Awake, unfortunately, and sitting in the corner with her knees pulled up to her chest. Her eyes didn’t move toward Anna, didn’t register her presence at all, even though the pupils dialed down to tiny dots as Anna moved the light over her. She was seeing another time, Anna knew, or more likely an amalgam of dozens or hundreds. Waking nightmares.

  This was what Karyn had been most afraid of, back when Anna first met her. Not of going crazy, but of losing her mind in a more literal sense. The distinction was probably moot anyway. The effect was the same.

  “How are you feeling?” Anna asked. She always did. Always said something. Karyn seemed to understand fragments of it sometimes, and Anna figured she must be awfully lonely in there.

  If Karyn got any of it this time, she made no answer. She pulled her ponytail holder loose from her brown hair and retied it, seemingly apropos of nothing. The faint, permanent lines of anxiety in her forehead seemed deeper than usual, but that might just have been Anna, projecting her own fatigue on everything around her.

  “I’ll find you,” Anna said. “I’ll bring you back. Just hang tight.” She waited a few minutes, hoping maybe Karyn would catch sight of her and say something. When Karyn remained silent, she left, barring the door once more.

  “You’re up early,” Nail said. He sat in front of the door to the next room over, back braced against the cinder block wall. From here he was little more than a low, lumpy silhouette. If not for the orange ember of the end of his cigarette, she might not have seen him at all.

  She walked over and sat next to him. He was a big guy, ex-military, still carrying most of the muscle, but she wondered if he was wearing down, too. He seemed squared away most of the time, though—boots polished, shirt tucked into his fatigue pants, clean-shaven every single day. “Any trouble?”

  “Nah. Night’s pretty calm.”

  “Wish I felt the same.”

  Nail took a drag from his cigarette and offered it to her. She followed suit, watching the end flare up in the darkness.

  “Can’t sleep?” he asked.

  “What was your first clue?’

  He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “Can’t hide nothin’ from me.”

  She inhaled again, burning down a third of Nail’s cigarette in one long drag. Genevieve would give her a hard time, if she saw her now. I thought you quit, she’d say, frowning. No, Anna thought, suddenly confused. Karyn would do that. Gen never knew me when I smoked.

  “You ever kill anyone?” she asked.

  Nail took the cigarette back. Another brief orange flare as he inhaled. “Yeah.”

  No surprise there. A guy didn’t tour Iraq with Marines First Recon to tickle people. She was surprised at his tone, though. Less matter-of-fact than she’d expected, a little heavier. Or maybe she was reading too much into it.

  “It bother you?”

  He flicked an ember onto the concrete floor. It fragmented, sending up a tiny shower of sparks. “Depends what you mean by that.”

  She wished she could read his face, but there wasn’t enough light. “Like, you know. Insomnia.”

  “Bad dreams.”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned his head to look toward her. She wondered if he could see anything more than she could. Maybe it was because he couldn’t that he continued.

  “First guy I ever killed was because my brother’s a fuckin’ idiot,” he said. Not what she’d expected, though by all accounts his brother was, in fact, a fuckin’ idiot. “You know, he was in college? UCLA, where Dad worked maintenance. He woulda been the first on that side of the family to finish, if he’da finished.”

  Anna waited while Nail seemed to collect himself. She remembered his brother, DeWayne. They’d met, briefly, during the first job Nail had ever worked with her and Karyn. Nail’s whole share of the take, or as near as made no difference, had gone to bailing DeWayne out of the kind of jam that usually ended with a body in a Dumpster or behind a warehouse somewhere. A whole lot of Nail’s money went down that hole, she thought, though she never asked about it.

  “Trouble with DeWayne,” Nail continued, “is that he got more brains than sense. Everybody knows he got no sense. Always running some clever scam, always thinks he’s got the angles figured . . .

  “He started running sports book his second semester at college. He’d made a little pile of cash his first semester betting on that kind of shit, and he thought he’d make a whole lot more if he set himself up as the house, you know? Thing is, it took off. Started with a few guys he knew, and then a couple guys at one of the frats wanted in, and they told their friends, and so on. Before too long, there’s thousands of dollars changing hands, I shit you not, and he’s takin’ his ten percent off the top. But that ain’t quite good enough. DeWayne, he’s figured all the angles, decides that the Badgers are a lock for the fuckin’ Rose Bowl or some shit, so he takes the money he’s supposed to be sitting on to pay the winners and he bets it himself.”

  “Ouch,” Anna said. “He lost it, huh?”

  “No, he won. Stuck his neck way out on the chopping block with other people’s money, and for a goddamn miracle, he didn’t get his head cut off. Won something like thirty grand.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “DeWayne’s the kind of guy—let’s just say he’s got a knack for turning gold to shit. If everybody’s got one God-given talent, that’s his. The bet wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he just couldn’t stop himself running his mouth after. He couldn’t help it. He just couldn’t help it. Couldn’t help flashing the cash, neither. He took care of himself, yeah, but he also put new tires on Ma’s car, bought me a new computer. I swear he was talking to roofing contractors before Dad asked him where the hell the money was coming from. DeWayne told him it was a scholarship, and I don’t think nobody believed that shit, but that’s all we could get out of him, so it just ended with Dad telling him to spend it on school.

  “Me, I knew the score. I was just too stupid to care. Far as I was concerned, DeWayne was the coolest big brother a kid could want. He let me hang with him and his boys, never tried to get rid of me. I was seventeen, hanging with college kids whenever I wanted, having a great time.

  “I shoulda seen it coming, though. Whenever DeWayne gets real nervous, real jumpy, it’s because he done some shit he knows he shouldn’t have, and he’s waiting for it to hit the fan, and he got real jumpy late that spring. He didn’t leave the apartment he was staying at for three days. Wouldn’t go near the windows, even though it was a hundred damn degrees in there. Sent me out to get him some smokes twice, to pick up some food once.

  “So what happened was some low-life wannabe connected guy running book heard about DeWayne’s business from one of the frat kids, then heard about the pile of money from—well, who the fuck knows? Anybody coulda told him by that point. Anyway, he puts two and five toge
ther and thinks, ‘Okay, here’s some son of a bitch cutting in on my business, and now he’s got a pretty good stash to fund it.’ It’s one thing when a guy’s coordinating bets between a handful of buddies, but it’s something else entirely when he’s working twenty, thirty clients or more, and he’s got enough dough to pay out. Starts to look like a real business, you know? So I guess he made some threats, and DeWayne told everybody that that motherfucker was toast if he messed with him, or something like that, and word got around, and DeWayne wised up and hid his ass.

  “Anyway, I show up at DeWayne’s on day four, and the door’s kicked in. I walk in, stop in the middle of the living room when I hear yelling from the back. Begging, really. ‘Jesus, Trigger, take the money, take all of it, man. I don’t care.’ All that kinda noise. Then some shit smashing. Then a gunshot, and the real screaming starts.

  “That’s what gets me moving. I grab a fork—a fuckin’ fork, because it was lyin’ on the coffee table next to a plate with some dried tomato sauce on it, and I didn’t have a goddamn brain—and I run back. DeWayne’s on the ground, blood squirting out of a hole in his leg, and this big dumb asshole—Trigger, I guess—is standing on the wound, got his heel on it, grinding away, yelling, ‘You like that, motherfucker? You like that?’ And he’s not paying too much attention to the gun, just sort of waving it around, but for one second it’s not actually pointing at nobody, and he’s half-turned, and I jump on him.”

  Anna passed the cigarette back. Nail took it, took the last drag off it, and crushed the butt against the concrete. He exhaled heavily, and the plume of smoke took on a brief, swirling life of its own before dissipating.

  “You know what it takes to kill a motherfucker with a dinner fork?”

  Anna shook her head.

  Another deep breath let out. “Sorriest goddamn mess you ever saw. My arm was sore for a week.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Didn’t sleep any too good for a long while after that. Then 9/11 happened, and I enlisted, and I seen a whole lot worse since.”

  “This where you tell me it gets better with time?”