Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  “Assembling high explosives.”

  From the shock on her face, he realized he’d gone too far. “I kid, Erica. Just a joke. I do need to put together the most basic of occult defenses, though. Forcas detests me, and while he might be able to stave off his worst impulses long enough for us to work together, I’d be a fool not to take some precautions.”

  “We’ll be followed,” Erica said.

  “And if they pull us over, the worst they’ll find is a bag full of cash, and you and an army of the best criminal lawyers money can buy will exhaust them and finally bury them over the issue of probable cause. I am a millionaire, remember, not some street-level dope pusher.” He laughed as a surprising thought occurred to him. “Incredibly, we’re not actually doing anything illegal tonight.”

  “No explosives?”

  “Sincerely. I promise, no explosives. You’re losing your sense of humor.”

  She bit back a retort, Sobell was surprised to see. He wasn’t the only one wearing down, it seemed.

  “Fine,” she said. She got up to leave.

  “Before you go . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Leave the phone.”

  She took it back out of her purse and hefted it, as if she might just throw it at him. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

  “Erica,” he said, dropping any pretense at jocularity. “Take a moment to remember to whom you are speaking.”

  She met his gaze and held it, and once again he thought she was about to open up and give him both barrels. At last, though, she put the phone on the desk and walked out.

  He picked up the phone and started dialing.

  Chapter 25

  “Would you look at that?” Nail said wonderingly.

  Up front, in the driver’s seat, DeWayne made a show of looking out the windshield and side windows. “I don’t get it. It’s fucking dark. These people don’t believe in streetlights?”

  Nail glanced to his left, where Sheila sat beside him, covered by the gun he wasn’t sure he could even shoot straight. She watched the street, her expression going through a discomfiting sequence of alternating detached curiosity and fear.

  He looked back out the windshield. “It’s not all dark, though.” It was just one porch light, two houses down from the Gorow place, but the effect it had on the street—and on Nail’s mood—was huge. It was like the sun had come up on this miserable little street for the first time in centuries, chasing away all the creeping and scuttling things, burning away pale sickly fungus and cobwebs alike.

  “Well, hell. Neighbors gonna fuck that guy up. Breakin’ the rules.” DeWayne made a clucking sound. “And frankly, I gotta tell you, this doesn’t even rate on the scale of shit I don’t believe tonight. You sure you doin’ all right?”

  Nail turned his head left, then right. He wasn’t yet a hundred percent, still dizzy and sometimes disoriented or confused, but he hadn’t felt like throwing up in the last twenty minutes. He knew DeWayne wasn’t asking about that, though. He was asking about everything else. He’d asked if Nail was in a cult, if Sheila was in a cult, if the both of them were in a cult together, what was up with his girlfriend (Nail had had to disabuse him of the notion that he and Karyn were involved, and who the hell knew where he’d gotten that idea?), who this Van Horn guy was and was he in a cult (Nail had simply said yes, because it was easier than trying to explain, and not all that far off), if it was true that cults were heavy into S and M sex parties and if so could he get an invite, and every other question that had popped into his head, since he had no filter between brain and mouth. If he thought something, he goddamn well said it.

  “I’m good,” Nail said. “Feeling like a badass.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Head on into the alley,” Nail said. DeWayne obliged. A cat ran for cover as the lights swept over it. The place seemed free of its weight of foreboding, a perfectly ordinary alley.

  “No car,” Nail said.

  “Huh?”

  “Go down to the end.” Sometimes Anna parked the next street over, but Nail didn’t think that was the case this time. Sure enough, down at the end of the alley, there was no car.

  Fucking Van Horn.

  “Turn around. Take the main street,” Nail said.

  DeWayne turned back on to the street. Still no squirrels or creepy birds or legions of rats—turn the lights back on, clean up the yards some, and things would be back to normal.

  “Stop here.”

  DeWayne stopped the van in front of the house and twisted around in his seat.

  “Now what?”

  “Hang tight for a sec. Keep an eye on her. I gotta go check on something.”

  He got out and stepped onto the sidewalk. Be nice if he had some light. Better than a flashlight. If the house was empty . . .

  He heard car doors open behind him as he walked up to the house. He’d thought the place had lost much of its malevolence, but dread kindled in him as he approached. Dark, wet smears stained the sidewalk, the front step, even the doorknob. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tried the door. It opened easily.

  He reached around the doorjamb, feeling for light switches. He found three, flipped them all, and got not a flicker for his trouble.

  He got out his flashlight and went in.

  The place stank, but no worse than any of half a dozen places Nail could think of off the top of his head. Mostly those were combat zones, so it was pretty goddamn weird for an upscale place in Beverly Hills to have that tang of corpse and gunpowder hanging in the air, but at least it was familiar.

  He did a quick search of the place. There wasn’t nearly enough time to go through room by room, but the blood trail led him to the important parts. Mona was dead, and nobody else was around. Not Van Horn, not any of his crew. They’d been here, though.

  He found DeWayne and Sheila back in the main entry room, both staring at the body there, presumably for different reasons. “I know that guy,” Sheila said.

  “I just, uh, wanted to get off the street,” DeWayne said.

  “Come on. Out.”

  Outside, Nail tried to pull enough of his concentration together to take stock of the situation.

  “Now what?” DeWayne asked. “Ain’t shit in there but dead people, and I gotta tell you, I never seen anything like that in my whole life. That is fucked-up.” He kept talking. Nail, at a loss for anything else to do, dialed Anna again. No answer.

  When he put his phone away, Sheila was standing on the sidewalk, staring at what was left of her hands. She turned the left one over and looked at the back, then turned it again to inspect the front. The whole time, she shook her head.

  “Your people were here,” Nail said.

  She nodded.

  “Where’d they go after that?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Think faster.”

  She spat, thick and red, and whether it was directed at him or not, he couldn’t tell.

  “There’s blood,” she said.

  “Yeah. Fuckin’ everywhere.”

  “No. Here. And here.” She pointed with the remaining finger on her right hand. Nail came closer. The locusts here had been kicked away in patches, and sure enough, there were scattered drops of blood on the sidewalk. Might have been somebody from the house, but as he looked at the parallel trails of crushed locusts on the street, he thought it more likely that somebody had gotten in a car here, either wounded or covered in the blood of the dead.

  Sheila crouched next to the drops, studied them, then stood again.

  “I can find them,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe. What if I do? What happens then?”

  Nail mulled it over. “You think Van Horn will trade for you?”

  “I don’t know.” For once, she seemed neither bloodthirsty, demonic, nor an alien in her own skin. She just looked weary and afraid. “It’s worth a try. I’ll need some help.” She held up her hands. “I can’t do it myself anymore.”

  N
ail looked quickly away from the tears that suddenly shone in her eyes. “Yeah. Okay. What do you need?”

  It didn’t take long. At her direction, he got some string—a spare bootlace, in fact, at which DeWayne exclaimed, “You keep spare shoestrings?” and Nail replied, “Doesn’t everyone?” After that, she did some simple preparation, writing symbols awkwardly on the back of an envelope that contained the van’s registration, and Nail helped her with more manual details.

  At the end, she held up a simple little contraption, and DeWayne snorted. “Look at that. You got a cigarette tied to a piece of string.” The bootlace looped around the middle of the cigarette, holding it roughly parallel to the ground. It wavered gently, as though stirring in a light breeze.

  She touched the filter end of the cigarette to one of the drops of blood on the sidewalk. “And the end with the blood on it points toward the others, probably.”

  Nail groaned. “Jesus Christ, why is it always blood? Can I tell you how tired I am of blood?” He let the “probably” slide. Just didn’t have the energy to go into it.

  “It works, that’s all, and it’s what I have. Are you ready to get us out of here or should we talk about it some more?”

  Nail headed toward the car.

  Chapter 26

  The elevator to the garage stopped. Sobell got out, but to his surprise, Erica did not. “I can’t be a part of this,” she said.

  He put his hand in front of the elevator door to keep it from closing. “I’d say you’re fifteen years too late to make that decision, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s one thing to be at arm’s length, but this is something else entirely. Enoch, listen to me: I am no good to you in jail. If I’m implicated in any of this, I can’t be your counsel.”

  “Implicated in any of what? We are meeting with a former business associate of mine, as investors.”

  “Investors don’t hand over suitcases full of cash at two o’clock in the morning.”

  The doors tried to close again, and Sobell pushed them back. “And yet there’s not a single law on the books preventing it. Curious, wouldn’t you say? What you’re about to be ‘implicated in,’ if anything, is conducting a cash transaction for information or goodwill. Perfectly legal. The only conceivable issue is if Forcas fails to report the income to the IRS. I suspect he very well might—but that will be his problem. Now, enough is enough. Let’s go.”

  The elevator tried to close once again. This time, when Sobell stopped the doors, the elevator began to shriek.

  Erica stepped out. The doors closed. To Sobell’s relief, the shriek stopped.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s perfectly innocuous,” Erica protested. “It looks bad. It connects you to whatever this Forcas character does next. You make it sound like he’s unstable. If you give him some cash, then he goes out and breaks the law, they’re going to try to tie it back to you and use it as a RICO predicate.”

  “Only if they witness anything.”

  Revulsion flickered across her face. “Don’t tell me you have another jar of bugs.”

  “Sadly, no. I do have another solution, though. Don’t worry.” He tried on his best charming smile. “Think fondly of small tropical islands.”

  She made an exasperated noise and began walking toward her car. A few minutes later, they pulled out onto Figueroa.

  Erica was stressed to the point of losing her cool, a thing Sobell would have regarded as unthinkable until recently. He didn’t know anybody more capable of taking care of business, except maybe the late, lamented Joe Gresser, and Joe had handled a different kind of business entirely. Sobell watched Erica’s hands as they continually clasped and reclasped the steering wheel, like if she just got a firm enough grip on the thing, she’d be able to steer a course through this shit.

  Sobell thought that was simultaneously rather humorous and deeply worrisome. “Turn left.”

  She rolled up to the next light, slowed, and turned left.

  Sobell checked the mirror. There wasn’t much traffic at this hour, so the white Impala trailing half a block back could hardly have been more obvious. Sobell had Erica take a couple more turns, enough to prove to his satisfaction that the Impala wasn’t an unlucky wanderer. He took out Erica’s burner phone and sent a quick text message.

  “What are you doing?” Erica asked.

  He put a finger over his lips. “Shhh.” Not talking in the car had been her admonition to begin with, and it was a good one. “Right on McKenzie.”

  Another car, a blue rust bucket, joined the Impala behind them. A little while later, a newish pickup truck turned onto the street, cruising up the lane to their right. By the time a fourth car pulled in close, Erica looked panicky. She barely watched the road anymore, she was so busy checking the mirrors.

  Sobell nodded at the man driving the pickup truck. A few seconds later, there was a screech of tires as the guy apparently lost control. The truck dropped back, weaved across the road, and T-boned the Impala.

  “Next right,” Sobell said.

  Erica gave him an incredulous look, but she didn’t say anything. Good. He gave her instructions, one word at a time, occasionally even pointing one direction while saying another, just to be safe. Who knew what kinds of trickery those FBI types had gotten up to with their surveillance tools?

  “Here,” he said. “Pull over right here.”

  Erica stopped the car. There was nothing here—a chain-link fence in front of a weed-choked lot on the left, a concrete slope down into a drainage ditch on the right.

  Sobell got out. “Go home,” he said.

  She didn’t even try to argue, just stepped on the gas.

  Once her taillights had disappeared around a brick building, the blue rust bucket pulled up. The driver was a grinning Latino guy with what appeared to be gang and prison tattoos down the length of his arms and covering most of his neck. “Mr. Sobell,” he said. “Toomey sent me.”

  Sobell got in, kicking a crumpled white bag over to the driver’s side. “Enoch Sobell,” he said, holding out a hand.

  The guy grabbed hold and squeezed once, hard. “Rhino.”

  “That’s the name your mother gave you?”

  “Naw, man. She calls me Enrique.”

  “Are you armed, Enrique?”

  The guy pulled up his shirt, revealing the grip of a fearsomely large revolver.

  “You still use revolvers? I’d expected some kind of intimidating rapid-fire weapon.”

  “Kill ya just as dead,” he said.

  “Word up.”

  Enrique gave him a dead-eyed stare, probably trying to figure out if Sobell was messing with him. “Where we goin’?”

  “Forward, for now.”

  More directions, more miles gone. It seemed like hours since getting the money together and leaving the office, but barely forty minutes had gone by. Somewhere, some angry cops were doubtless still having a heated argument with a couple of beefy gentlemen who had run their car off the road. Risky, Erica would have said, and she would have been right. Sending semireliable accomplices to take out law enforcement officers was not an action a prudent man would take. He’d sent good accomplices to do it any number of times, but those days had passed with Gresser, and with the FBI’s mapping of his usual network of contacts. He was cashing in favors now, relying on a friend of a friend—rather, minions of a distant business associate—and flying on hope. If the guys in the truck escalated the situation to violence, or, God help him, had outstanding warrants, it could get bad.

  So be it. It was out of his control now.

  He guided Enrique down a few more streets. He was surprised at the contempt he felt for the places they passed, boredom combined with a weary disgust. This was his kingdom, and Enrique and those like him were his vassals. It wasn’t what he’d envisioned. He’d never been idealistic about it, but he’d harbored a secret thought that he’d rule over a league of honorable criminals, blue-collar and white-, Robin Hood’s Merry Men without the altruism. It turned out there really w
as no honor among thieves, and the street corners he’d once dreamed of ruling were miserable places where miserable people went for goods or services that had slid down between the iron rails of the law. He’d never allowed himself to completely romanticize these places before, but he’d never felt like taking a flamethrower to them, either. Now, though, he felt he’d be happy to napalm all of L.A., if he could just get away from the place.

  Getting a shade maudlin in here . . .

  By the time they reached the address Van Horn had provided, he felt as if they’d crawled through every rat hole and back alley in Los Angeles, and as if many of the worst bits had stuck to him.

  “Follow me,” he said to Enrique.

  “Wasn’t part of the job.”

  Christ. It was hard to believe he’d fallen this far. “Five hundred dollars.”

  “A’ight.”

  They got out. Sobell stood by the car, looking over the place. From the fences, graffiti, razor wire, and layout, he guessed it was an abandoned jail. Not large enough to be a full prison, but it definitely evoked correctional facility.

  “Don’t shoot anybody unless I say so,” he said.

  He headed toward the front door.

  * * *

  Van Horn pulled the vehicle to a stop in front of a foreboding gray building, surrounded by fences and covered in graffiti. He had everybody get out of the van. One of his entourage had some candles, which he distributed to the others and lit using a borrowed lighter. The group surrounded Anna, Karyn, and Genevieve and herded them inside.

  Anna knew of the place. A women’s correctional facility that had been shut down sometime back. Rumors were, appropriately enough, that the place was haunted. “Infested” might be a more accurate word now, she thought, but regardless the place was pretty spooky. Block walls, heavy rusted doors with—strangely enough—the knobs removed. Stolen? Salvaged? Who knew? There were no windows. No lights other than a handful of candles Van Horn’s entourage held. Abandoned or no, the oppressive aura of despair clung to the place.

  Anna leaned toward Karyn. “I guess I always knew I’d end up in a place like this,” she said.