One of the shadows resolved itself into a moving form—DeWayne, rushing toward the fight.
DeWayne’s foot swung forward in a swift, vicious arc. His Doc Marten connected with Stevie’s head with a sound like a baseball bat hammering a triple deep into left field.
Stevie’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed.
Nail gasped, pulling sweet air into his lungs, his chest heaving. When the world seemed in no danger of permanently receding again, he shoved Stevie off him and sat up.
DeWayne stood a few feet away, stooped over with his hands on his knees, breathing almost as heavily as Nail himself. His face was practically gray. “Clarence is gonna kill me,” he said.
“You didn’t load the fuckin’ gun?” Nail asked. “How you gonna shoot a guy with an empty fuckin’ gun?”
“I just figured you kept it loaded. At least it wasn’t a fuckin’ fork.”
Nail laughed. He glanced over at Stevie’s prone form and saw the slow rise and fall of his chest. “He ain’t dead.” Probably better this way than if the gun had fired, actually. There was still at least a chance they’d be able to patch this shit up with Clarence, however small.
DeWayne straightened, grinning. “Lucky him.” His grin didn’t fade a bit as he looked at the car and announced, “Hey, what’s her name’s gone.”
Chapter 28
After the endless procession of thugs had taken communion, Hector did . . . something. Karyn couldn’t quite tell, because the demon in her head was apparently a little sensitive where Hector was concerned. When Karyn had first seen Hector come out of the back, the images went berserk. Dozens had flashed through her mind, too fast to follow, and when they’d slowed, Karyn wished they’d speed right back up again. They were all death—execution, in fact. Hector, with his neck under the heavy blade of a guillotine. Bound at hands and knees and kicked off a bridge. Tied to a post and burning. On his knees in an alley with a gun pressed to the back of his head. Karyn held the gun. Whenever she looked in Hector’s direction, the demon went crazy, generating a frenzied and endless sequence of ways to off Hector and bouncing off the insides of her skull like a fly caught in a jar. It was hard to pay attention to anything going on around her. It had, in fact, taken her a few moments to even place the guy and link him back to the jawbone job. He’d deteriorated considerably since then. The tank top and sweatpants were particularly disturbing, for some reason. Before, he’d at least nodded toward normal dress, but now it appeared he didn’t give a shit.
At any rate, Hector did something—waved, gestured, spoke, she wasn’t quite sure—and the crowd gathered itself. Those seated stood. Somehow a selection process had occurred. Somebody moved to pull Karyn to her feet, and she stood before they could follow through. Anna did as well. In the end, ten of them headed or were shepherded toward the door from which Hector had emerged—Sobell and his new bodyguard, Hector, the old man who had apparently orchestrated this mess, the woman next to Anna and two of the others, and Anna, Karyn, and Genevieve. The others waited.
Karyn glanced at Anna. “How are you feeling?”
Anna held her hand out, flat, and wobbled it. So-so.
Karyn wasn’t sure what to make of that. The demon had explained the communion episode with a single expressive, if awful image: Hector, jamming a tapeworm down Anna’s throat.
Flashlights flicked on as Hector led them back into the depths of the jail. It amazed Karyn how easy it was to stop paying attention to the world she saw with her eyes and focus on the image in her mind. She was still getting this figured out, but it was vastly better than the lost existence she’d had before, and she’d already learned a few tricks. In particular, the image, when not screaming homicide, helped her focus on the sounds around her, helping her pick one stream of noise from the rest, like focusing on a single conversation in a crowded room. They went past some administrative area and into the cell block proper. It didn’t look like maximum security to Karyn—decent enough rooms, enclosed rather than exposed, windows on the doors—but the feel of the place was still institutionalized despair and wasted lives. Some of the walls were tagged with graffiti, crude scrawling in black spray paint rather than anything artful. Lots of variations on “Fuck the police.”
Minimum security or no, this was a sprawling complex, and with the block walls and no windows, it seemed as though it must be deep inside the earth. Karyn had to keep reminding herself that she was aboveground, not descending into some Hell-bound mine shaft.
They went farther into the building. When the demon images remained those of Karyn’s surroundings, the flashlights played over everything in spastic trajectories, unpredictable and unmatched to her movement. Much of the rest of the time, the demon was bombarding her with images of Hector’s execution, Clockwork Orange–style, like if she saw it enough times she’d decide to follow through on the suggestion.
“Shut up!” she yelled as they turned a corner. “Shut up! Shut up!”
The images cleared, briefly, showing mild amusement on the part of some of her captors, and a total lack of interest from others. Anna mouthed some words. Karyn nodded to make her feel better, having no idea what she’d said, but guessing it was some kind of status check.
I am officially a ranting crazy woman now, she thought, a private joke that lost all its humor before she even finished thinking it.
They went farther into the building. It split into a couple of main hallways. They hugged the left wall and, after passing yet another row of cells, entered a bigger room off to the side. The flashlights showed nubs of burned candles sitting in pools of wax, chalk in wide arcs across the floor, and rows and rows of chicken-scratched graffiti across the walls.
No. Not graffiti. These markings were the same kinds of symbols Tommy and Genevieve always used. Genevieve, in fact, had covered walls of Karyn’s great-aunt’s place with them, in an attempt to keep the crew hidden at one point.
Somebody shone a light into a corner, revealing a heap of colorless, holey blankets.
He’s been staying here, Karyn thought. Hiding.
In her mind, Hector exploded into a million pieces, leaving a red soup in the middle of some noonday, western-town-looking street.
Thanks for that. Asshole.
Hector said something, and the man Anna had identified as Van Horn pointed to Karyn. The whole room turned to her, giving her the feeling she’d suddenly been shoved onstage.
Now Van Horn said something, and one of his minions began lighting candles. Two, five, ten—a dozen. More. In the center of the room, the candlelight revealed a huge occult diagram on the floor, much bigger than any Karyn had ever seen. You could park a pickup truck on it and not go outside its boundaries.
In the center was a five-pointed star, and in the center of that was a star-shaped arrangement of what looked like pine two-by-sixes, lying flat on the floor, and gang-nailed together. Karyn had the sudden grim intuition that it would be just about the right size for a person to lie down on. Then she saw the restraining straps screwed into the boards.
Sobell stepped forward. He gave her one of his supposedly charming smiles, and said a bunch of shit, not a single word of which she heard.
In her mind, the surroundings were replaced by a massacre. Bloody bodies lay scattered around the room, chopped and shot up and who knew what else. Only Anna was left standing. Kill them all being the subtext, she imagined. Just how the fuck was she supposed to do that, if she even wanted to?
Sobell was back, brow furrowed in concern.
“I can’t hear you,” she said. “Not a single word.”
He said something else. She guessed from the tilt of his head and the cocked eyebrows that it had been a question.
“I’m alive. More or less undamaged. What do you want from me?”
Sobell said something and looked to Hector. Another image of blood and pain blotted out the scene briefly.
Hector walked a few steps around the perimeter of the drawing, coming closer to her. She fought the urge to l
ean away. He said something else and pointed at the wooden frame.
The next image Karyn saw was unbelievably strange—a series of vaguely human-shaped creatures in a burning cloud, each creature with four faces. Human, lion, eagle, and something that looked like a cow or maybe a water buffalo. “What the hell?” The image vanished, replaced by a woman in a robe standing in what Karyn supposed was a Greek temple, a line of people waiting in front of her. Then a man on an island. Hovering above him, an angel broke a seal.
The first image was utterly incomprehensible, but the second and third at least suggested something. “Prophecy,” Karyn guessed. “You want to speak to the oracle.”
Hector nodded, a grin seaming his face.
“Too bad. I can’t hear a thing. Your oracle is deaf as well as mad.”
Hector merely grinned wider, exposing his teeth, his hand still pointed at the frame. He didn’t come closer, though, and he made no move to coerce her.
“If I do this, we walk out of here,” she said. “Me, Anna, and Genevieve, unharmed.”
The demon images erupted in her mind, the shock of them like a blow, and she staggered. Hector, lounging on a pile of skulls, flies buzzing around him. His minions chopping down men, women, and children with knives and axes while he pretended to conduct them like an orchestra. Torture in back alleys, mutilation in half-lit warehouses, worse. Was that what Hector wanted? What she’d enable him to do with her prophecy? Some other, inadvertent consequence? Or just demon fun and games from her temporary resident?
“Not my problem,” she whispered, looking from Hector to his thralls to Anna, standing by the wall and watching, her expression locked down in the robot face she made when she was particularly stressed. “Not today.”
Hector pointed to Anna and Genevieve and nodded, then to Karyn and shook his head.
“You’ll let them go, but not me.”
He nodded again.
“Are you going to kill me?”
He shook his head.
Movement stirred at the edge of Karyn’s unnatural vision. She ignored it and focused on Hector. “Is this going to kill me?”
Again, he shook his head, looking decidedly annoyed with this exchange. The movement grew more agitated, and Karyn glanced over. Anna, waving her arms and saying something, gently restrained for the moment by a hand on her shoulder.
“But you just can’t give up your own personal oracle. Is that it?”
He gave her a phony-looking sheepish grin, as if to say, Hey, can you blame me? Then his face twisted in a snarl; then the snarl was gone.
She looked at Sobell. “If I make a deal with this guy, can he cheat?”
Sobell shook his head firmly as Hector looked at him. The second Hector looked away, he gave a shrug. Karyn wasn’t sure how to interpret that. No? Probably not? I don’t know, but I don’t really want to say that very loudly?
What choice did she have? Nobody was coming to help them. She wondered if Nail was hurt. Or dead. And the others sure as hell weren’t going to fight their way out. Hector had made some kind of alliance with Adelaide before, and while that had surely been a terrible arrangement, Adelaide had been happy enough to screw her over and go along with it.
And Anna would come back for her. She knew that, as certain as breathing.
She glanced back toward Anna, for whom gentle restraint would no longer suffice. Anna thrashed and shouted, her face racked with fury and pain, and two of Hector’s minions held her back. If Karyn concentrated on Anna hard enough, some of the words came through, and she could guess at others. She got “fucking martyr,” “don’t,” “again, goddammit,” and a whole lot of profanity that didn’t seem to be attached to any other particular phrase.
Sobell’s bodyguard hefted his gun and pointed it at Anna’s head, looking at Sobell with a question on his face.
“Put it down. Right now,” Karyn said. “She gets hurt, and I’m done here,” she said to Hector. “You will have to kill me, too, I fucking promise you.”
Hector nodded. Sobell waved at the gunman, and the guy lowered the gun.
“Please don’t do this,” Anna said. Through some hateful trick of the cosmos, the words came through perfectly.
Karyn tried to smile at her. “Don’t worry. This’ll be just one more jam for you to get me out of.” Before she got an answer, before she could even read Anna’s expression, she turned away. She couldn’t look at Anna anymore. It hurt too much, and right now it was bad for both of them.
She looked to Hector. “Yeah, okay. Fine. You got a deal. Let’s get this over with.” One of Hector’s minions reached for Karyn’s arm, and she stepped away. “I think I can walk over there myself, big guy.”
She stepped through the diagram, taking care not to smudge any of the lines. Tommy had always been obsessed about not breaking the lines, and whether that was correct or not, she didn’t figure on taking the chance.
She paused at the central star. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
“Gotta be at least twenty,” Nail said, tallying up his best estimate of the number of guys he’d seen go into the jail. “Might be thirty or more.”
The two men stood back by the car, side by side, staring at the jail. Stevie was in the back of the vehicle, trussed like a hog and gagged, still unconscious. Out of the way for now, but Nail sure wished they knew what to do with him.
DeWayne shook his head. “Yeah, and what’s her name already in there, I bet. Tellin’ everybody the party crashers are here. Man, I think we’re shit outta luck. Maybe we just call this off, huh?”
“Maybe there’s a back way in,” Nail said. “Must be, this place is huge.”
“I don’t know. Want to spend an hour dicking around to find it? Maybe call ahead, see if they’ll prop the door open for us? Anyway, the longer we screw around here, the more likely it is that your lady friend gets them to send out an army of pissed-off guys to rearrange our faces.”
“You got another suggestion?”
DeWayne just shrugged.
“Never thought I’d do this,” Nail said. He pulled out his phone and dialed. It rang twice, then three times, and just when he was afraid he’d have to leave a message, he heard the click of connection.
“Hello?” The woman on the other end didn’t sound tired at all, but she was surely pissed off.
“Special Agent Elliot?”
DeWayne’s eyes widened. “What?” he whispered.
“Owens? Is that you?”
“Yeah. You want Sobell, or am I interrupting something?”
“I’m checking one of my guys into the hospital. He got T-boned by a couple of bastards trying to follow Sobell, so you better have something.”
“You mean like a RICO predicate? ’Cuz I got him on a RICO predicate. Right now, in fuckin’ progress.”
DeWayne was shaking his head, like one of his core beliefs had evaporated. Like gravity had turned out to be a mass delusion after all this time.
“Don’t fuck with me, Owens,” Elliot said.
“I don’t even wanna take your ass to dinner. Think I’d be doing this if you hadn’t fucked me first?”
“What’s the crime?”
“Kidnapping, three counts. If you don’t hurry up, it’s gonna be murder, I guess.”
“Where?”
Nail gave the address. “Old prison,” he added. “Bring the SWAT team or whatever else you got. He’s got twenty guys or so with him, maybe thirty. Not too many armed, I don’t think, but I don’t really know.”
“I can’t mobilize a SWAT team on your say-so.”
“Mobilize what the fuck you got, then, because I’d guess you got a short goddamn window here. Three hostages, all women. Two Caucasian—”
“Ames, Ruiz, and Lyle.”
“Yeah.”
“What does Sobell want with the hostages?”
“Don’t know. But how long you wanna screw around before he does whatever it is he’s doin’ and gets out, leavin’ you with three dead bodies on your hands?”
“Dammit. I’ll send local P.D. and follow up as soon as I can.”
“Are you not hearing me, lady? Kidnapping. Two counts, red-fucking-handed. He’s there, right now, and you are gonna get people killed you don’t get here with your best, like yesterday! I’m not talkin’ the county sheriff with his thumb up his ass. I mean professionals!”
There was a pause, during which Nail thought he heard distorted speech over a hospital intercom. Then: “I’ll get my best team there as fast as I can. We’re some distance out, though. Might be thirty minutes. Maybe more.”
“Shit. Hurry the hell up.”
“Stay put. Don’t mess with these guys.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He hung up the phone and stuck it back in his pocket.
DeWayne was staring at him, mouth hanging open. That almost made it all worthwhile. “Okay, great. So the feds are on their way. Now what?”
Nail considered. No telling how long it would take Elliot to get her team together. No telling what would happen between now and then. Impossible to know whether Anna, Karyn, and Genevieve were even still alive. Their odds had to be getting worse by the minute.
“Now we go find the back door.”
* * *
The others—the new ones—had given Sheila a hard time at first. Raul had recognized her and let her inside the front door of the old prison with a smile, but the others hadn’t recognized her once she was inside. One told her to fuck off, another to beat it. Others, more than a couple, eyed the bloody wrappings on her hands and licked their lips. A few made faces of pity or disgust and kept their distance or looked away. She’d felt her blood rising, that killing urge sending strength into her arms and jaws, and only Deanna’s arrival and an intense exercise of will had kept her from trying to tear somebody’s head off.
“Who are these people?” Sheila had asked.
“More of us,” Deanna had answered. “New brothers and sisters.”
There were a lot of them, Sheila noted. That was the dawning of her suspicion. So many, and all at once. No care had been taken in selecting them—Belial and Van Horn had simply rounded up and given the blessing—curse—affliction to any warm body they could find.
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