Premonitions (15 page)

“I don’t drive.”

He nodded, but, thankfully, didn’t offer any commentary. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that anybody who screamed at phantoms and ran out into the middle of a busy street for no apparent reason probably shouldn’t get behind the wheel of an automobile.

“Well, uh . . .”

“You have a car?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. There’s somewhere you can take me.”

Anna smoothed out
her jacket and tried to slow her breathing. She’d spent all night trying to track down Karyn, with no luck, and finally she’d taken a break. There was other shit that needed doing, even if she couldn’t really concentrate on it. She’d made a couple of phone calls, and she’d been invited to come to Sobell’s club downtown that evening. It was the kind of club that didn’t have a sign out front or flashy lights or even a name, the kind of place you went only when invited—and, if you were smart, you did your best most times not to get invited at all.

Anna had heard all the stories. Sobell practiced black magic here. A virgin was sacrificed once a month. Nightly orgies were the rule, and the mayor showed up every week to indulge in a kink that, depending on which rumor you believed, fell somewhere between mildly bizarre and downright unholy. Anna’s idea of a good time was a can of Bud and a roomful of slightly drunk, happy, chattering people—sex parties and blood rituals were, generally speaking, right out.

Yet here she stood. That was the trouble with being the woman who knows somebody who knows somebody. Sometimes the final somebody at the end of the trail of somebodies wanted to meet in person.

The club took up the top two floors of an office building—an outrageous use of prime office space, but Enoch Sobell could do what he pleased. It had a spectacular view of the city, and, as a bonus, the business district
was pretty empty at this time of night. Anna supposed that counted as additional privacy for Sobell’s guests.

She met a security guard at the loading dock near the building’s back entrance. The guy checked her ID against a list, mumbled a few words into a headset, and opened the door.

“Straight back. Take the elevator to forty-eight.” He didn’t frisk her or anything. Rather than take comfort in that, Anna found it unsettling. The guy probably
knew
she was unarmed, whether through a hidden X-ray scanner in the doorframe or through more occult means. Or maybe he was just relying on Anna’s reputation for not being crazy or stupid.

The door clicked shut behind her, and she swallowed thickly. Panic threatened to break loose, and she was suddenly convinced that the door was locked. She pushed the bar and it opened.

The security guard looked at her, annoyed. “What?”

“Uh, is there a bathroom?”

The guy shook his head in the universal
you sad asshole
gesture. “Upstairs. Forty-eighth floor.”

“Thanks.” Anna let the door shut again. The only light in here came from the white-and-red exit sign hanging above the door and the glowing green buttons of the elevator controls ahead. She fiddled with her jacket again, then crossed the short hall and hit the
UP
button.

The elevator doors slid open immediately, letting out a flood of low red light. Anna guessed that the inside of the car was originally supposed to be some kind of chic ultracontemporary design, all mirrors and chrome, but the red light edging the top and bottom bathed it in a sick, bloody radiance that turned her stomach. All the reflective surfaces just made it worse.

She got in and pushed the button for forty-eight. The elevator rocketed upward fast enough to upset her already queasy stomach, and she wondered for a moment if she would throw up.
That would look fucking great. Step out into Enoch Sobell’s private club with puke on my shirt. Maybe they’d shoot me for lowering the tone.

Perversely, the thought helped her get control of
herself. By the time the car started to slow, she was standing straight and she felt almost steady again. Still, she wished Karyn were there to tell her what to expect, let her know that everything was going to be all right.

Except it’s not.

The doors opened.

Anna’s heart rate shot up, and she could feel the pounding in her chest, but when she looked out, the only shocking thing was how normal everything seemed. Expensive, yes, but normal. The whole floor was open, affording a nice view of the city from anywhere in the single huge room. White marble covered the floor, and tables so black they looked like holes dotted the space. A round bar area occupied a space just off the room’s center.

There was nobody in the whole place.

She stepped out of the elevator and scanned the room again. With nobody in evidence, she decided to head toward the bar and wait. Maybe somebody would come around and get her.
Yeah, and take me up to the forty-ninth floor, where all the black magic and sacrificing takes place.

The bar was empty, too, so she sat on a stool and spun to look out at the city. No sound disturbed the silence, and after a few minutes alone Anna felt her mind returning to its well-worn track. Where the hell was Karyn? Was she OK? With every passing hour, Anna’s anxiety worsened, and the likelihood that Karyn had gotten herself in real trouble increased.

She’s not a child,
Anna reminded herself. But Anna’d been looking out for her for so long, it was hard to imagine how Karyn would get by alone.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of hard soles clicking on marble. She turned. The lights were low, but the big man in the expensive suit was hard to mistake.

Greaser came over to the bar. He didn’t sit.

“Drink?” he asked.

Anna dredged up a halfhearted smile. “I’m on the clock.”

Greaser nodded. “Mr. Sobell’s used to getting what he wants,” he said abruptly, leaving the subject of drinks to die in the dirt. “The way he wants it.”

“That’s what I’m here about.”

“I hired you because you have—had—a reputation for being discreet.”

That drink sounded better by the second. “This job was an exception,” she admitted. “But we got it done.”

Greaser put his hands in his pants pockets and stared down at Anna. “Who do you think recommended you clowns to Mr. Sobell? What idiot put his own reputation on the line getting you this rather lucrative job?”

Anna groaned.

“That’s right. You made me look like a fuckup. I probably don’t need to tell you how much I hate looking like a fuckup.”

“No.”

More silence. Greaser’s face loomed like a planet, blocking out most of Anna’s vision. Sweat trickled down her sides.

“So,” Greaser said. “You have it now?”

“Not on me.”

A muscle bunched in Greaser’s jaw. “No shit. But you do have it.”

“Yes.”

Greaser got right in Anna’s face. The smell coming off him was like hot breath blowing from the den of a waking predator. “You’d better not be fucking with me.”

“No.”

“Here’s the deal, then. Mr. Sobell wants to talk to you. If you’re lucky and very good, he’ll agree to pay you the original price. What you do with the money after it changes hands is up to you.”

“Um, OK.”

“You’re going to give half of it to me. We’ll call it reparations for making me look like a fuckup.”

There it was—the sucker punch. Anna sucked in a breath. The others were going to be pissed. But what else could she do?

“OK,” she said. And a million dollars evaporated.

“Great. Glad we got that straightened out. Let’s go see the boss.”

They took the stairs, a set of spiraling black risers that was nearly invisible against the backdrop of the city. The antechamber at the top was a square room paneled in strips of ebony that had been polished to a deep luster. Despite the high ceilings and the room’s overall size, the blackness seemed to push in on Anna. She didn’t feel any better when she noticed that the ebony had been carved with thousands of symbols—floor, walls, and ceilings—until the room looked like an oversize version of one of Tommy’s boxes. She felt a pang, and she wished Tommy were here to explain what the hell all this meant. It could have been anything, she figured, from some kind of awful curse to a glorified burglar alarm to nothing more than a rich man’s eccentricities, no more potent than the writing on the side of a cereal box.

Greaser took her through a pair of oversize double doors—twelve feet, if an inch, and yet Anna still felt the urge to duck her head.

The next room surprised her. It was almost a normal office, albeit a large one. Soft white carpet covered the floor, and the walls were lined with a warm, reddish-brown wood. Mahogany, maybe. The only odd note was a series of alcoves along the walls, each with a pedestal on which some strange object had been placed. Anna didn’t look too closely, but she saw a heavy, leather-bound book, a chunk of carved stone that looked vaguely Mayan in origin, a dented helm from the Middle Ages, and more. As she walked through the room, she also noticed a total lack of windows.

Toward the far end of the room sat a wooden desk.

Behind the desk sat Enoch Sobell.

Sobell rose as Anna and Greaser approached, extending a hand in greeting. He was a tall, sturdy man with a politician’s ersatz smile and hooded black eyes. His dark hair was dusted with silver at the temples. He could have been the CEO of a big company—and was, actually—but he had another vibe entirely, cold and hungry like a snake in a human suit.

Anna took his hand, thinking half-coherently,
This man is the Devil.

“Please sit, Ms. Ruiz,” Sobell said.

Come into my parlor,
Anna thought, but she sat.

“I don’t meet most of my contractors personally,” Sobell began. “I hope you understand the importance I put on this meeting.”

Anna thought of the few times she’d been deposed. There was a certain approach to making it through the minefield of a deposition intact, and the biggest rule was
Don’t volunteer anything.
If a question was asked, you answered it—and no more. Offering more information than asked for was a good way to get your ass in a sling, often producing whole ugly lines of questioning that never would have come up if you’d just kept your mouth shut. Enoch Sobell was no lawyer, but this seemed like a good time to stick to depo rules anyway.

“Yes, sir,” Anna said.

“I hired you to do a straightforward job. Difficult, yes, but not complicated.” Anna thought that was bullshit—there’d been nothing straightforward about it—but now did not seem like the time to correct him. Sobell continued. “I also hired you because you have—had—a reputation for discretion.” Greaser’s words, almost exactly. Not hard to see where he got them from. Sobell’s face creased in a slight frown, and he steepled his fingers together in front of him. A heavy ring with an overlarge green stone flashed on his right hand. “Eight dead in a gunfight in the home of one of the city’s more prominent citizens does not constitute discretion where I come from.”

What the fuck?
She didn’t remember Mendelsohn’s any too clearly, but she would have remembered a firefight. Had Nail accidentally shot half a dozen people? That didn’t sound like something he would have screwed up, and no way would he have done it on purpose. And none of the rest of them had been carrying firearms.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “We didn’t kill anybody.”

“The papers say eight bodies were found.”

She remembered the remains found near Mendelsohn’s corpse. Genevieve’s monster had gotten Mendelsohn, and maybe somebody else. But surely not that many, unless others had been in the house when it broke loose. “Shot?”

Sobell shrugged. “Our fair city’s redoubtable news rags didn’t say. They just said eight dead.”

“Make it nine,” Anna said. The words escaped on their own before she could do anything to stop them.
So much for depo rules.
“We lost one of our own.”

Sobell stared at her, waiting.

Anna looked down. Again, the room seemed to crowd in on her, so close it seemed her chest couldn’t expand to draw in air. It didn’t make sense. A room this large should have felt more like an auditorium than a closet.
Why aren’t there any windows in here?
“No,” she said finally. Regardless of the body count, the whole thing had been loud and frightening. “We weren’t all that discreet.”

“The only reason the investigation hasn’t branched out into a number of unpalatable directions is that, according to my contacts, they found Nathaniel Mendelsohn’s body dismembered and stuffed into a number of plastic filing bins in his office closet.”

“What? He’s—what?” Hadn’t Mendelsohn been pureed and poured all over the floor of his own house by the fucking monster from the basement?

“Apparently, the remains had been decomposing there for some number of weeks, during which time a fellow referred to as the Revered One has been running things. Understandably, the authorities suspect some kind of cult infighting gone out of control. Hopefully they continue to suspect that, in which case this should all blow over nicely.”

“Um, good.”

He put his hands on the desk in front of him and wove his fingers together. “I’m not prone to making threats, Ms. Ruiz. But I do hope you understand that I’m a somewhat public figure. I can’t afford to be tied to any criminal activities.”

Translation: I’m going to kill you and your friends if you publicly link me to this clusterfuck.
“I understand.”

“So. You called me. I assume you have news.”

Anna pulled in a long breath against the strange pressure of her claustrophobia. “Yes, sir. We’ve got the item.”

“The jawbone.”

It was all Anna could do not to cast a furtive look around the place—she’d long since gotten in the habit of never mentioning swag by name. “Yes, sir.” She swallowed. “We’d like to finish the deal.”

Sobell didn’t smile, but something in his eyes lit up. To Anna, he might as well have been licking his lips.

“Terms?”

“Original terms,” Anna said. Then, before she could stop her mouth, “We just want this to be done.”
Oops. That was some shitty negotiation.

Sobell gave her a long, considering look that seemed to peel her flesh off in strips. Anna could feel the negotiation slipping out from under her, the price dropping by the second. She had a moment to wonder if Greaser was going to take a million regardless, or if his fuckup restitution fee was going to stay at half.

“Done,” Sobell said. Anna could hardly believe it. “Work out the exchange with Mr. Gresser.”