Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  The darkness crept up the corner to the ceiling, extended along the edges of the room, and stopped. Waiting.

  Nothing else happened.

  I guess that’s all the answer I’m going to get.

  “What do you want?”

  A new image popped into her mind: a swimmer, thrashing and floundering, out past her depth and maybe snagged on something that was pulling her down. From a boat, somebody extended a hand toward her.

  The image was hard to mistake: it was an offer of help.

  Bullshit. “Why?”

  This time, she got a vision of Anna—almost an iconic image, plucked from Karyn’s memory. Anna, standing on the courthouse steps in that raggedy-ass jean jacket she always wore, seventeen years old and bumming a cigarette. No sound accompanied the image, but Karyn knew the day like her own birthday. The day Anna had thrown in with her, offered to help. More than ten years ago. Both their lives had changed course forever that day, Karyn’s away from madness, at least for a time, and Anna’s in ways that maybe weren’t quite as good for her.

  But this wasn’t Anna. She knew that. So . . .

  Two more images: Nail, picking Karyn up and dusting her off after a job turned into a brawl a couple of years back. And—who the hell? A little girl, maybe ten, in a familiar schoolroom. Raquel Huang. That’s Raquel. Her best friend in the fifth grade. Wow. She barely remembered that.

  She understood now. Question: why do you want to help me? Answer: I’m a friend!

  Right. Years ago she’d reached the conclusion that anybody who has to tell you they’re a friend most assuredly isn’t.

  “What do you want?”

  A jailer, opening the door to a filthy dungeon, letting the dazed inhabitant out into the sun. A surgeon, stitching up a ragged seam of hideously torn flesh. More signs of help. I just want to help you! Sure.

  “How?”

  The room again. This time, the darkness was gone, and there was nothing in the corner but dirt and cobwebs. Anna rested on her haunches in front of Karyn, studying her intently with unblinking eyes.

  “I don’t get it.”

  A vague man shape, hulking and ominous, seen through a windshield so dirty as to be almost opaque. As Karyn watched, water slopped onto the windshield and was pulled away in three swift, straight swaths, revealing the man. It was a homeless guy, sun- and windburned, with sores at the corners of his mouth—and a squeegee in hand. He grinned and gave her a thumbs-up. Then he was gone, and Anna was back, only the slight crease between her eyes betraying her interest.

  Why this again? What’s it . . . Oh my God.

  “Anna?”

  In her mind, the image-Anna’s expression changed to one of surprise. Then she leaned forward. Her mouth formed a single silent word, and she extended a hand.

  Karyn felt the pressure of fingertips on her knee. She reached out, saw her hand and leg in the image. With her eyes she saw only her hand, from a slightly different perspective. The effect was bewildering, the way the line of a straw submerged in water breaks, only with her hand as the straw. But her hand found Anna’s, and she gave it a squeeze.

  Anna’s face broke into a smile, maybe the biggest Karyn had ever seen from her. A rush of words followed—all inaudible, and Anna’s lips moving too fast for Karyn to even have a prayer of following.

  “Hold up,” Karyn said. “I can see you, sort of, but I can’t hear you.”

  Anna held up her hand in the peace sign, or maybe for victory. She spoke with exaggerated care, forming each word slowly. It didn’t matter—Karyn was no lip-reader. But the context, and some guesswork, made it pretty clear what she was saying.

  “Two,” Karyn said, laughing. “You’re holding up two fingers.”

  Anna’s face lit up in delighted laughter, and the image vanished. In its place, her own middle finger, the toothpick burned down to less than half.

  “Okay,” she said. “I get it. Your miracle cure isn’t perfect, but it beats the hell out of this. I’m sure you’ll do this for me out of charity, right? You’ll help me out of the goodness of your heart?”

  A monstrous face, eyes narrowed to gleefully malicious slits, and an overlarge mouth full of dagger-shaped teeth. It grinned.

  “I didn’t think so.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she shouldn’t be dealing with this thing. To her knowledge, she’d never personally met anybody who had bartered with such a creature—other than, she supposed, every magician she’d ever met, but that situation was a little different. A direct deal? Unheard of, at least in her limited experience.

  “My soul’s not for sale.” She wasn’t even sure if she had one, but even so.

  A kid grimacing and flinching away from a forkful of broccoli. A woman in a pretty dress crossing the street to avoid an overflowing sewer. Perhaps more directly, a man sniffing at a glass of blood-dark wine and pushing it away. After years of visions, many of which were nearly impossible to decipher, this game was almost fun. This group was easy enough to interpret: do not want.

  “Then what do you want?”

  There was a pause, and she thought it wasn’t going to answer. Then: An engorged wood tick, head buried in the flesh beneath a dog’s ear. A remora, latched onto the underside of a shark. Something thin, yellow-white, and wriggling, buried in the rich purple-red meat of a kidney or a liver. A tapeworm coiled up on itself in nauseating, segmented white loops. Karyn’s stomach churned.

  Parasites. Fucking parasites. “You want to . . . eat part of me?”

  A young girl, rolling her eyes. Then: a bearded man with a green duffel bag, standing beside the road with his thumb out.

  “You want a ride.”

  A slot machine, blazing light, coins overflowing from the tray at the bottom.

  She wasn’t even sure what giving it a ride entailed, but the parasite images were pretty suggestive. “No way.”

  She braced herself. She could feel the hate boiling off this thing, and it surely wouldn’t like being denied. Would it kill her? Assail her with horrible images? Worse?

  In her mind, she saw a puppy, bedraggled and soaking in the rain, looking in through a glass door.

  In case her point wasn’t clear: “Not a chance.” Here it comes—an attack, some kind of temper tantrum . . .

  An elderly man shrugging. A chubby woman with a briefcase holding out an illegible business card. A stockbroker-looking guy making that odious “call me” gesture by holding his fist to his face, thumb and pinkie extended.

  The darkness slipped away, pulling in its tendrils and shrinking into the corner, like a movie of some pressurized noxious gas escaping a container, run backward and in slow motion.

  She waited. No further images came. No sound. The cat lay dead on the floor, the little men dead and scattered around it, one with his head and an arm missing entirely.

  The remainder of the toothpick burned away, leaving nothing but the wound.

  * * *

  Anna watched Karyn’s eyes, but she was gone again, drawn into her strange, unknowable world. But for a few moments, it had worked. It had worked. That little black splinter had worked whatever magic it did, and Karyn had come back to her. Maybe there had been other visions, like Guy said—certainly Karyn had been conversing with something—and maybe not, but for half a minute, she had spoken to Anna. For real, not by coincidence.

  Hope, real hope, not simply the grinding slog in search of finding the real thing, filled Anna, growing with an inexorable pressure. The slog? Fuck the slog. If she was on the right path, she could slog with the best of them. As long as it took.

  Bobby, then. As soon as possible.

  Chapter 10

  “Here we go,” Genevieve said. Anna reached across to the passenger seat and squeezed her hand. Four days after kidnapping Van Horn, the meet was finally going to happen. They could off-load the guy and wash their hands of this mess. What happened to him after this . . . What happens to him after this is going to haunt me the rest of my life, Anna thought.

  Too la
te to cry about it now.

  She turned right into an underground parking garage, trying to fight a simultaneous sense of déjà vu and claustrophobia. They’d made the drop for Gresser on the first clusterfuck of a job for Sobell in a garage like this. It wasn’t even all that far away.

  They had less backup this time. Nail was back at their makeshift home base, doing little more than watching Karyn and waiting. That couldn’t make her feel any better about this. Not that he could have done much good this time. Last time the garage had been aboveground, so he’d at least had a clear shot. Here, not so much.

  Anna took the car down four levels, all the way to the bottom. This struck her as a bad idea. There were only a few cars down here—no people right now—but this was awfully public. It was one thing to exchange a couple of boxes or bags—people who happened to glimpse the transaction would probably assume it was none of their business and get the hell out of there. Trying to exchange a box for a gagged old man in handcuffs, though, would attract the attention of even the most hardened of city dwellers. Anna had proposed a hangar she knew on a seldom-used airstrip outside town, but the lawyer said no way. Sobell didn’t head out that way ever under normal circumstances, and he wasn’t supposed to do anything unusual these days. That wasn’t reassuring at all—it just seemed all the more likely he’d have cops following him around.

  She parked at the end and looked around, immediately identifying another reason to worry about this place. There was only one way out. She’d never had much of a problem with enclosed spaces before, but this felt more like a trap. The ceilings seemed unnaturally low, the lighting poor, and the shadows cast by the support beams dark and ominous. She’d never realized just how eerie a mostly empty parking garage could be, but she fully appreciated it now.

  “I don’t need this shit,” Anna said.

  “It’ll be all right. Let’s just get it over with.” Genevieve didn’t look too confident, though.

  They settled in to wait.

  * * *

  Erica picked Sobell up at the curb in a silver Lincoln Navigator. He let himself in and nestled a black ceramic jar between his legs. It was about a foot or so tall, wider at the top than the bottom, and heavy for its size. It might have been an urn containing the ashes of a dearly departed relative. Erica gave it a wary glance, but said nothing.

  “New vehicle?” he asked.

  She didn’t look at him as she pressed the accelerator. “Yes.”

  “A trifle large, don’t you think? I rather liked your old BMW.”

  She shrugged. When she added nothing else, Sobell turned his attention to the view out the window. It was good to be out—he hadn’t left his damn office building in ten days. He lived and worked in the top two floors, and though it was dull, he didn’t need to go out for anything in the world. If he was under surveillance, he was determined to be the most boring surveillance target the world had ever seen. He no longer spoke on the phone at all, except with his assistant, nor conversed about anything but sex, booze, and legitimate business anywhere inquisitive law enforcement personnel could conceivably pick up his voice. He was going out of his mind sitting on his thumbs while the clock ran down. He could only hope Elliot and company were also bored stiff.

  “How’s business?” he asked.

  Erica gave him a deadpan stare. “This is my personal vehicle, Enoch. Think about that for a second.”

  “So business is good, then.” That wasn’t her point, he didn’t imagine. She probably thought the car was bugged. It probably was.

  “It’s good enough.”

  She was angry, so angry that she was barely bothering to mask it beneath a veneer of civility so thin it was, in fact, transparent. He knew she didn’t like being used as his personal driver, and she liked working under the scrutiny even less, but most of all she hated where they were going and the people they were going to meet. She’d been livid when he told her, and had, incredibly, initially refused to participate. He didn’t blame her for trying to dissuade him— the first part of her job as his attorney was to inform him of risk. He did blame her for trying to press the issue, though. The second part of being his attorney was to shut the fuck up and do what she was told.

  So, yes, she had quite the poor attitude today. She was also going to strain something in her neck as often as she checked the mirrors.

  “Relax, Erica. Everything is going to be fine.”

  She didn’t acknowledge the statement, but he thought she stopped checking the mirrors quite so much.

  Five minutes later, she turned the vehicle in to a parking garage at the south end of downtown. She eased the car down the ramp inside. Four floors down, at the very bottom, an old brown Buick beater idled in one of a handful of occupied parking spaces. Sobell gestured, and Erica eased the Lincoln in next to it so that the passenger side was next to the other car.

  “Wait here a moment,” Sobell said. “And please stay calm.”

  “Wha—?”

  He held a finger up to his mouth. “Shhh.”

  He got out, cradling the urn in his left arm. Ruiz opened her car door and had one foot out when he held up his hand.

  “Ms. Ruiz, Ms. Lyle. I suggest you remain in your vehicle for a few more moments. Be sure to roll up the windows.”

  Ruiz scowled. “Why?”

  “Exodus, chapter ten.”

  “What?”

  He knelt and set the urn on the concrete ahead of him. Motion at the edge of his vision and the subsequent slam of a car door suggested that Ruiz had quashed her rebellious streak and followed his instructions. Good for her.

  He pulled at the jar’s lid. The wax cracked.

  A sudden pressure threw him backward, and then the noise was everywhere.

  Dear God, he thought, I’ve suffered a complete failure to extrapolate. One bug sounded like this, so a million or so must be loud enough to drown out his conversation and thick enough to block any cameras or recording devices. It was, but it was worse than that. The sound was beyond deafening, full of crackling and whizzing and shrieking, like standing in the middle of a raging forest fire. Like riding a tornado. Or sticking your head in a blender the size of a bus—and that was here, at the center, where the swarm was thinnest, or at least was supposed to be. He couldn’t tell. All around him the bugs flew, and the world was full of the chatter of their wings and the snap of their bodies ricocheting off concrete and cars. Rows of them had settled on his arms. Some were singing their hellish mating song, while others appeared to have already paired up, and they were getting it on right on the sleeve of his Armani suit.

  He stepped toward Ruiz’s car, or at least the general direction of where he thought it must be, and he soon made out its shape among the locusts. As he got closer, he caught glimpses of the two women through the carpet of locusts that was beginning to cover the windshield. Ruiz wore the expression of somebody who’d eaten some suspicious seafood and wasn’t sure yet if she was going to be sick. Genevieve was fascinated, craning her neck and watching through the windshield with her mouth hanging open.

  He swept his arm across the driver’s-side window, clearing a spot, then pointed at the back of the vehicle. Ruiz swallowed, then opened the door and rushed out into the storm. She flinched as a locust the size of Sobell’s index finger bounced off her forehead. She began to yell something at him and stopped as she realized that either he wouldn’t be able to hear it or a bug might fly into her open mouth.

  She went back to the trunk with Sobell following closely behind. No sooner had she popped it open than it began filling with locusts. Van Horn, blindfolded and cuffed inside, failed to appreciate the situation as quickly as had Ruiz. He started shouting, and a moment later he was spitting smashed chitin and thick yellow goo out of his mouth.

  Sobell and Ruiz each grabbed an arm and hauled Van Horn out. He stood unsteadily.

  A hand grasped Sobell’s upper arm. Erica. Good.

  Sobell led the way toward the nearest vehicle he’d seen, a white Prius parked a few spa
ces down. They reached it without mishap, and Erica pulled a flat, thin piece of metal from her coat—an item known colloquially as a slim-jim, Sobell believed—and handed it to Ruiz with a sharp gesture toward the car.

  Ruiz did not disappoint. Sixty seconds later, they were all in the car, Sobell and Van Horn in the back, Ruiz in the driver’s seat, and Erica in the passenger seat. It took a try or two to get all the doors closed, but the noise abated to something resembling tolerable once they did. Sobell took a quick look around. Everybody seemed whole. Locusts clung to each of them in spots, and each of them sported dozens of tiny cuts and scratches, but that seemed pretty minor, all things considered.

  “What the hell was that?” Ruiz asked.

  “Biblical plague. I’ve had it in a bottle for nigh on forty years. Poetic, don’t you agree?” He wasn’t going to add that it was also deeply irritating. An entire biblical plague, and he’d had to blow it for a few moments of private time. Granted, he was prepared to blow through every last item in his stash that he’d collected over the years, if it meant staying alive, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying.

  “You . . . unleashed a plague of locusts on Los Angeles?”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds. Places were a lot smaller in biblical times. I imagine the locusts will denude every tree and shrub for a few city blocks, but it isn’t as though the local crops will suffer. Now, if you’ll leave us for a moment, I need to talk to Mr. Van Horn.”

  “When I drop off the goods, I get paid.”

  “I expect I’ll have more instructions for you shortly. When I issue them, you will receive payment. It’s not as though I’m going to stiff you and run off, is it? I don’t have the car keys.”

  The incredulous look on Ruiz’s face told him what she thought of that—probably something along the lines of You just unleashed a giant swarm of locusts from a jar, and I’m supposed to believe that a lack of car keys is going to slow you down?—but she didn’t argue. She sighed and pushed the door open, heading back out into the swarm. The noise screamed in, then dropped back to tolerable levels abruptly when she slammed the door.