Premonitions (20 page)

“Slow night,” somebody said.

Nail gave a start. Some guy was sitting right there next to him at the bar, and he hadn’t even seen him.
Guy must have just sat down,
Nail thought uneasily, but part of him knew better. He wasn’t the kind of guy you could just sneak up on. On that side of his body, his skin crept, like it was trying to crawl away from the newcomer.

“Yeah,” Nail said, his mouth suddenly dry. “Always a slow night in here. Don’t know how they stay in business.”

He didn’t look, but something shifted in his peripheral
vision, and he felt the presence move closer to him, practically leaning against him. He got the impression of a hunched man in a long coat, collar up, some kind of hat pulled down low over his forehead, but he couldn’t quite make out any details—not the kind of hat or the color of the coat, or even a single element of the man’s face. Was he a white guy? Black? Did he have any facial hair? Did he have brown eyes? Did he have
any
eyes? That thought sent another crazy prickle of gooseflesh rippling along his body.

He decided to not look at the guy. He had a hunch he wouldn’t like what he saw.

“Secret for a secret,” the guy whispered, the sound like dead leaves blowing over tombstones.

Nail’s mouth had gone desert dry,
bone-
dry, and what the fuck was Pete doing? He was clear across the bar, on the goddamn phone.

The guy next to him wasn’t the kind of guy you left hanging, though—and wasn’t there something else, too? There was a strange pull, an urge to tell what he knew. Distantly he was aware that that was an urge he almost never had, but that didn’t seem so important right now.

Nail licked his lips. “OK.”

The guy leaned in even closer. Something wispy and insubstantial brushed Nail’s ear, and his body convulsed with a racking shudder.

“Enoch Sobell,” the guy said.

Maybe this is just the guy I need to talk to.
“Yeah?”

“He ain’t in charge anymore. His boys are leaving him.”

Holy shit.
Curiosity overwhelmed fear completely for one moment. “For who?”

“No getting greedy. I gave you one—your turn.”

Secret for a secret? Nail suddenly realized he didn’t know shit. Wasn’t that why he was here?

“Karyn’s gone,” he said. He wasn’t sure where the thought had come from, or why it seemed like an appropriate offering—the words had simply bubbled up and fallen out of his face. It felt like the guy held his breath, though, listening intently to Nail’s every word. It was a good feeling. “After the job went bad, she took off. Don’t
know where. Don’t know if she’s still in town. She doesn’t drive, though, so if she skipped town, it would have to be on a bus or something.” His mouth seemed to be running of its own accord, and there were a dozen things jammed behind his teeth, all crowding to get out at the same time. “I don’t know how things got so fucked up,” he said. “We made the drop. Greaser got the bone and he even took half the money. I swear.”

He felt a faint pressure on his shoulder—a hand, probably—and another shudder threatened to ripple through him. Then the voice, closer than ever. “Thanks. And one more thing, for your service . . .”

A cold draft slipped down the side of Nail’s face and down his collar as the guy whispered into his ear. “That night at Mendelsohn’s.”

Nail’s spine went rigid. “How do you know about that?”

“Sobell was there. He had business with a demon. The man’s got a lot of troubles right now. A lot of enemies.”

“Goddammit, how do you—”

The guy was gone.

Nail looked around the room, wide-eyed and still somewhat dazed. The two guys were still huddled in a booth, Elly in the corner. Pete gave him a bitter, bemused smile. “Hear anything interesting?”

Nail didn’t know where the whispering guy got his information, but there was no doubt the guy knew some shit he was definitely not supposed to know. The comment about Mendelsohn’s place was unsettling, if true, and even if it wasn’t, he shouldn’t have known Nail had anything to do with it.

Sobell’s got a lot of enemies right now, the guy had said, and Nail didn’t miss the fact that all of the “secrets” he had offered were Sobell’s. Whether the guy was deliberately trying to stir up some shit or not, if he was running around handing out that kind of information, things were about to get ugly. Nail left in a rush.

Anna had gotten nowhere
after revisiting what felt like every last place she and Karyn had spent more than twenty minutes in the last year, and she was about ready to give up. Karyn had apparently scrubbed herself from the face of the earth, at least as far as anybody knew. She had considered casting a wider net, maybe even getting a skip tracer who owed her a favor on the job, but eventually rejected the idea. Surely there was nobody better to go crawling through L.A.’s underbelly, lifting up rocks and asking clever questions of the creepy things that came scuttling out, but Anna didn’t want to spread this around. The skip tracer would get the job done, sure, but he’d let something slip—he’d probably have to, to get it done. Anna and Karyn had made enemies over the years, and there were eight or ten parties Anna could think of off the top of her head that would be only too pleased to find out that the two of them were separated, that maybe Karyn had her guard down.

They’d be wrong, of course—Karyn would see them coming from six miles off. Her guard, Anna thought, had probably not been up this far in years. The big worry was that if Karyn wasn’t seeing
every
kind of trouble coming by now, she would be soon, and she couldn’t run from everything.

That thought had triggered Anna’s next logical avenue in a flash of insight that, in retrospect, had taken way too long to arrive. Karyn couldn’t stay down forever, or
she’d lose her mind. If she wanted to prevent that, there was only one person to go to. Now Anna slowed the car and frowned. Ahead, two cars were parked in front of Adelaide’s building. It was tough to be sure from here, but it looked like the one in front was sitting on four flat tires. She turned the ringer off her phone, put it in her pocket, and parked just around the corner.

She approached the parked vehicles warily, looking for any sign of movement. Nothing stirred. Sure enough, though, the front car’s tires had been slashed. Whose car? Somebody who’d driven Karyn here? Somebody else entirely? And what about the other car, a blue sedan covered with a film of road dust? Adelaide didn’t get a lot of visitors, so the odds that this was somebody else who had just happened by weren’t great.

A glance inside the first car didn’t give her anything useful. A couple of wadded-up fast-food wrappers told no story worth knowing, and a handful of grimy nickels in the armrest didn’t say much, either. The second car was similarly unhelpful. If she wanted to learn anything else, not to mention maybe scoring some blind
for Karyn, she’d have to go see if Adelaide was around. She forced down a faint sense of disgust that threatened to swell, but there wasn’t much she could do to calm her pounding heart.

She’s not dangerous,
Anna reminded herself.
She just freaks me out. Some people are freaked out by bugs, I’m freaked out by crazy, basement-dwelling prophets who like rats too much. No shame in that, but there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Plus,
she recalled,
I still have Nail’s gun.
It was snug in the inside pocket of her jacket, the weight swinging against her body when she walked. That didn’t calm her down any, but it helped her summon the will to move.

Adelaide’s building was as much of a wreck as ever, about as destroyed as a building could be without a bomb having fallen on it.
One day this goddamn building is going to fall in and kill her, and then I won’t have to do this shit anymore.
Or would she? Karyn would have to score blind
somewhere, and anyway it was hard to
imagine how Adelaide would fail to see a mundane disaster like that coming. Probably she’d just move out the day before the collapse and go find another horrifying building to squat in.

Anna pushed open the door, wincing as the damp smell hit her. There was mold growing in here that science hadn’t ever heard of, she was certain. She followed the hall straight to the back and paused at the top of the stairs. Had she heard a voice? Or had that been the product of her own keyed-up mind? Or Adelaide talking to herself?

She waited, straining to hear anything, but there was nothing. Stepping cautiously so as to make no noise, she turned the corner. One slow step at a time, she descended the staircase.

She had made it about two-thirds of the way down the stairs when she heard something splash beyond the doorway. A moment later, a man’s voice reached her, coming from much closer than she would have expected.

Uh-oh.
She backed up the stairs as rapidly as she could, keeping her eyes fixed on the doorway the whole way. Once she made it to the top, she thought about running for it, but there really wasn’t much of anywhere to run. Her car, maybe, but if whoever it was saw her, she could be in a lot of trouble. Instead, she went up the stairs. The fourth step sagged underfoot, sending a sickening bolt of shock through her stomach, but it didn’t give out, and she reached the landing without mishap. She edged around the corner where the stairs switched back. It was dark here, away from even the faint light that came through the first-floor windows, and while that wasn’t exactly what she’d call safety, it was reassuring.

“Fucking
move
.” A man’s voice again, this time coming from the hall. Anna peeked around the corner. The thin, bedraggled figure in front was Adelaide. A skinny guy with blond dreadlocks walked behind her, shoving her with the barrel of a gun. “Fucking move!” he said again, and Adelaide shuffled forward a little faster. She was laughing now, or maybe talking to herself, bursts of sound at erratic pitches, and the sound made Anna shiver.

Another man, a squat, solid-looking fellow in a T-shirt and jeans, followed the two of them. Anna didn’t recognize him, but she had no trouble at all picking out the first as one of the guys from the Brotherhood they’d spent the better part of a day trailing around after, way back at the beginning of the job.

She pulled back behind the corner, cursing under her breath. What could the Brotherhood possibly want with Adelaide? Maybe they’d followed Karyn here, or maybe they’d found her some other way, but no way was this a coincidence. No way.

She heard the creak and scrape of the front door opening, and the low orange light of sunset flooded through the hall, then vanished again.

Shit!
They were going to be gone in a few moments, and then what? Maybe Adelaide knew where Karyn was, and even if she didn’t, Anna didn’t know where else Karyn would be able to get her medication.

There was, she supposed, some chance that Karyn was here, downstairs—but if that was the case, she was already beyond help. Those two guys would have made sure of that.

She went down the stairs and crept out of the building as quickly as she dared. When she emerged from the building, the dusty sedan was already moving away. She let it get almost out of sight at the end of the block before running out to her car.

As she started the car, she took out her phone and dialed Genevieve. No answer.

“Call me,” she said, and then she pulled out after the departing vehicle before it disappeared from sight entirely.

* * *

They weren’t pros. That much was obvious, Anna thought. She was pretty good at tailing by car, but these guys didn’t drive like they had even considered the possibility that somebody might follow them. They took a leisurely thirty minutes or so to drive a straight shot to a motel that looked like it had been run-down on the day it was built, forty years ago. They parked, shoved Adelaide across the
mostly empty parking lot, and disappeared into a unit across the way.

I don’t owe her anything,
Anna thought.
I should just get clear of this shit.
And while that was true, the yammering voice of worry was louder, shouting over and over:
Where’s Karyn? Where’s Karyn? What about her meds?

The lights were on in the motel room the three people had gone into, and from the shapes moving on the curtains, it looked like there was a whole lot more than three people in there. Who, she wondered, was in charge of this mess? What were they talking about? What was
Adelaide
saying? She wished Nail was here. He had equipment for this kind of thing, or knew where to get it. Supersensitive microphones. Lasers you could bounce off windowpanes to pick up sound vibrations. All kinds of shit like that.

Well, there’s the old-fashioned way.

She gave it another moment’s thought, staring at the window the whole time, and then got out of the car. The room next door to the lighted window was dark, and she approached it as quickly as she could. The place was old, the door locked with actual hardware, and it took her all of fifteen seconds to jimmy the lock. She slipped inside and closed the door.

Nobody was inside, but it looked like the room had been rented out. A weathered backpack lay on one of the beds, a red nylon duffel bag at the foot of the other. Anna hoped the owners wouldn’t be back soon. She went around to the right-hand wall, easing around the TV, and pressed her ear to the wallpaper.

The walls were typical of cheap motels, and while the voices were muffled, she could clearly make out the sound of somebody shouting.

“Where is she?
Where is she?
” A man’s voice, rising to a shrill note at the end. The sound, Anna thought, of a guy on the verge of completely losing his shit. Somebody gave a quiet answer she couldn’t make out. It sounded like a woman’s voice.

Dammit, speak up. I can’t hear a damn thing.

“TELL ME!”

Then silence. A few moments later, several men began talking in low voices, but again, Anna couldn’t make out much. It was just so much maddeningly indistinct mumbling through the plasterboard.

She looked at where the TV sat on a short dresser.
Well . . .
Moving carefully, she pushed the dresser away from the wall, pivoting it on one corner. It was empty, made of cheap fiberboard, and not very heavy. The TV cord stretched out behind it, so she reached down and pulled the plug from the wall. Then she took out her pocketknife, flipped open the blade, and crouched down in the space formerly occupied by the dresser.

If the rooms mirrored each other, as suggested by the doors, this would be a great way of listening in without being observed. The dresser on the other side should block the hole from sight, but there was enough of a gap because of the space needed for the plug that it wouldn’t block a lot of sound. It would be almost as good as being in the same room with them.

As long as I’m not too loud. And the dresser is in the same place.
Ugh. Yeah. Her knife poking through a visible spot in the wall would invite some unpleasant attention in a hurry. She pulled her pistol from her jacket and put it down next to her where she could get at it quickly.

The first layer of sheetrock was straightforward enough. She slid her knife through and slowly cut a fist-sized piece out. She was pretty sure the sheetrock was thinner than code, which suited her fine. The rasp of the knife against the gypsum seemed loud in her ears, but the voices continued talking, so she kept going slow. White powder covered her fingers and floated to the carpet as she sawed, and at last she pulled the piece away, revealing the narrow gap between the walls and the back of the piece on the other side.

Already the voices were clearer.

“. . . wasn’t there,” a man said, sounding rather defensive. “. . . don’t know.”

“Did you see
anyone
?” The loud guy again.

More mumbling. Anna put the point of her knife to the wall and slowly began drilling a hole through it.

“. . . nothing. I mean, the place is a mess, but we couldn’t find nothing.”

Anna’s knife poked through the drywall, and she froze. If the dresser wasn’t in the same location on the other side, there would be a quarter inch of shiny metal protruding from a spot about a foot off the floor in the middle of a blank wall on the other side.

A moment passed without outcry, and Anna pulled the knife back. Adelaide’s voice drifted through the little hole in the wall, sounding small and scared.

“Home. Adelaide wants to go home. Right now. Her head hurts bad today, so bad. Stuffed with rats.”

“It’s OK.” The man’s voice had quieted, dropped to a soothing murmur that was barely audible through the wall. “It’s OK. We’re going to help you, remember?”

“Adelaide doesn’t know. She can’t—Adelaide can’t
think
.”

“You came to us, remember? We can’t help you, if you don’t help us.”

She sold us out. Plain and simple. Goddammit.

“Adelaide needs . . . She needs quiet.”

Instead of cutting her some slack, the guy raised his voice. “Where is the relic?”

“Adelaide wants to go home!”

“You said you’d bring us Ames.
Where is she?
”

A high, wavering note sounded, an awful plaintive wail that made the hairs stand up on the back of Anna’s neck. A moment later there was a crash, then a thud. The cry stopped for a second, then started up again, louder this time.

They knocked her down. Kicked her chair over. Something like that.
Anna ground her teeth together and suddenly found herself wondering just how many men were in that room. Were they armed? If not, she could simply walk in, hold them at gunpoint, get Adelaide, and walk out. If they were, though . . . she’d have to get the drop on them somehow. And even then . . .

You are not just going to walk in there and shoot six or eight people.

No. No, she wasn’t. That didn’t leave much in the way
of options, though. Just being here was risky enough—a frontal assault on the next room was over the line even for her.

Somebody’s phone rang, and Anna moved closer to the hole. She heard a series of grunts and noncommittal responses, followed by a curt good-bye.

“OK,” the guy said. His voice was high and nervous. “Revered One?”

“Yes?” The loud guy again.

“That was Brother Sheffield.”

“And?”

“The stuff Sobell’s guy said checks out. Looks like something blew up at that parking garage. It’s surrounded by yellow tape and everything. Ames’s crew must have run off with the relic.”