Skeleton Crew (15 page)

There weren't many access ways down to the beach through the tightly packed homes, and we didn't want to cross in front of the vodyanoy's house. This might have presented a minor obstacle in the real world, but fortunately, we didn't mind trespassing. We chose an older wood-frame beach house a few doors down to the east. When we were as sure as we could be it was uninhabited, we went in through the front door.

The house was narrow but had three floors. The upper floors had wide covered balconies that ran the entire width of the beachfront side. The balcony on the top floor was crowded with boxes and spare furniture. Whether its current owner or one long dead, someone seemed to have used the balcony for storage. The neighbors probably wouldn't care much for the untidiness, but the junk made a convenient concealed position for a couple of snipers.

We all sat on the deck and huddled around, waiting for showtime. Adan was working the bolt of his rifle back and forth and sighting along the barrel. Honey and Jack sat cross-legged facing each other, whispering in their own musical language. I just sat quietly and watched them. None of them had to be there. Even Adan could have stayed behind to run the business side of the outfit. We still needed juice, after all—now more than ever. They weren't there because they were getting paid. They weren't there for power. I knew why Honey was there—she was my friend.

If I'd been a normal person, it would have been an easy thing to take for granted. Well, if I'd been anything like normal, I probably wouldn't have been sitting in a beach house in the spirit-world version of Malibu waiting to do
a hit on a Russian river spirit. That aside, friendship wasn't something I could take for granted because I'd never really had it. Chavez was the closest I'd really come to it and even then the outfit was always between us. We were probably as close as two gangsters could be. Maybe someday, on the other side of this war and with the outfit behind us, we could have a real friendship, a normal friendship. Of course, I knew the chances weren't very good that either of us would live that long.

And that made me think of Adan again. It seemed like just about everything made me think of Adan. He was a gangster now, too. So what made me think he was my friend? He'd been given power and authority within the outfit, but he had little if any support. He needed to make his bones, prove he had juice. He needed to win friends and influence people, and from what I'd seen, he wasn't all that good at it. He was smart, but he didn't know the outfit. He didn't know the underworld, didn't belong to it. Adan didn't have a history in my world. He needed to form alliances and win the respect of the big hitters and their crews to consolidate his power.

If I looked at it with a clear head, that's why Adan was here. The wartime captain is in a tight spot, here's Adan to step in and save the day. He wasn't my friend. He was playing an angle, just like everyone else.

Adan wasn't the changeling. He looked the same, talked the same, had all the same mannerisms and body language. At the club, he'd even smelled the same, like apples and cinnamon, though I couldn't be sure if that was Adan or the fairy mojo Oberon had put on us. Since squeezing the changeling, I had defenses against fairy glamour, but I'd either let them down or Oberon's magic was powerful enough to defeat them. What about Adan's glamour? Why
had
he smelled like apples and cinnamon that night? Was it possible he knew the effect it would have on me? Might he have used his glamour to seduce me?

There was a fine line between healthy suspicion and paranoia, and it was especially fine where fairies and victims of fairy abductions were concerned. Fortunately, I didn't share Adan's weaknesses. I knew the underworld, I knew the outfit and I knew a thing or two about exposing rivals and forging alliances. The key to both was to slow the fuck down. Don't make assumptions. Don't jump to conclusions. Sit back, watch and learn. You couldn't always know what was in another gangster's heart, but if you had some patience he'd show you soon enough.

I glanced up and caught Adan staring at me. He smiled and went back to playing with his rifle. All I needed was a little patience. Lie back in the weeds and let this guy reveal himself. Maybe he'd prove himself an ally, a partner, even a friend. That would be nice. And maybe I'd find out he was just playing the game. That wouldn't be so nice, but it wouldn't be the first time and at least I'd know how it was. The ball was in Adan's court, and I could play it either way. The truth was, he needed me more than I needed him. I liked it that way. I always had.

“It's time,” Adan said.

I sat up and looked down the beach. An old man with a close-cropped white beard walked toward us along the high-tide line, surrounded by half a dozen ghosts. He wore an old felt hat and a bright red track suit—what was it with Russian gangsters and track suits, anyway? His bodyguards looked like disposable muscle, except that some of them had obviously drowned. Their bodies were pale and bloated and their clothes hung in damp tatters. A couple were even sporting long strands of seaweed like feather boas.

Jack pulled Honey to him and kissed her, long and hard. Then they both nodded to us and disappeared. Adan and I lay flat on our bellies, aiming our guns through the slats in the balcony railing. I'd cautioned Adan to stay back—you wanted to sight through the railing, but you didn't want the barrel extending past it. It was the kind of thing a trained bodyguard could spot, more easily than you'd expect.

It was still daylight, though it was late enough I imagined the sun would be setting into the sea in the real world. The light in this place was indistinguishable from midday, and we'd have good visibility—by the standards of the Between—if we needed to use our weapons. The plan was for the piskies to attack when the group drew even with our position, to give us the widest possible field of fire. We waited and I watched Adan out of the corner of one eye. He was calm, breathing deeply and easily, his finger resting lightly on the trigger of the rifle.

The piskies' initial attack went just as they had planned it, and it failed completely. One moment the vodyanoy was walking leisurely along the beach and the next moment his throat had been opened from ear to ear. Juice the greenish-brown of stagnant river water sprayed across the sand and spattered the nearest bodyguards. The old man clutched at his throat and fell to his knees. The ghosts drew weapons and closed ranks, looking around in panic, but the piskies didn't show themselves. Then the vodyanoy reached into his jacket pocket with one bloody hand and withdrew something small and white. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like an egg. He slammed it down on the beach, crushing it, and golden light poured from within.

“It's a true-seeing charm,” I hissed, and Adan nodded.

The light revealed the piskies, hovering in the air above the vodyanoy's head with their swords bared and wet with
the creature's juice. When they became visible, the ghosts attacked, opening fire with a variety of weapons that ranged from revolvers to Thompson submachine guns. The piskies spun and darted and most of the bullets missed completely—it was a lucky break none of the ghosts was packing a shot gun. The piskies sang their ancient songs and their defensive glamours withstood the few rounds that found their targets.

Silver fireworks flashed in the air as the bullets exploded against the fairies' shields, and pixie dust cascaded down on the attackers like emerald-green confetti.

When the glowing dust touched them, the ghosts dropped their weapons and began clawing at their eyes and bare skin. First their clothes and then their spectral flesh began to disintegrate under the magic's touch and the ghosts came undone like crematory ash carried on the wind.

While the piskies dealt with the bodyguards, the vodyanoy was changing. His mouth widened and his skull expanded, seeming to bulge and bloat. His body became squat and obese, while his arms lengthened and thickened, and his hands contorted into webbed claws. His eyes grew large, and round and yellow, and his hair fell from his skull in clumps. Finally, the track suit split at the seams, revealing amphibian, gray-green skin that glistened in the wan light.

“Son of a bitch is a frog,” I said.

“Fishtail,” said Adan. I looked again. The vodyanoy's legs and feet had transformed into a mermaid's tail that darkened from pale gray to near-black at the fins.

“Okay,” I said. “Son of a bitch is a frog with a fishtail.”

The vodyanoy opened its maw wide and made a noise that was something between a roar and a croak. It sounded a little like a foghorn but with a sickly organic quality that made me a little nauseous. Swamp-water juice covered
its bulging throat and pale, flabby chest, but the wounds appeared to be closing.

The piskies attacked again. They darted in and slashed with their silver swords, opening long wounds in the soft flesh that gaped and oozed. Honey circled around and dived at the thing's head, her sword reversed and gripped in both hands as she went for one of its unblinking yellow eyes. At the last instant, the monster's head snapped up and a sinuous amphibian tongue flashed from its mouth. The disgusting appendage struck Honey in her center of mass and held her fast, then reeled her in to the yawning maw with dizzying speed.

Just as a scream began to bubble up in my throat, Jack was there. He darted between the vodyanoy and Honey and severed the creature's tongue with a powerful two-handed slash. Honey tumbled to the sand, pulling the limp, rubbery flesh from her body.

I knew what was coming before it happened, but there was nothing I could do about it. Jack had gotten too close. One of the vodyanoy's webbed claws flashed out and snatched him from the air. The monster tightened its fist and squeezed, and Jack screamed. Then the vodyanoy slammed him down into the sand, silencing the piskie warrior.

“Cover me,” I said, and I was over the railing before I had a chance to think about what I was doing. It must have been at least thirty feet to the stone-tiled patio below the balcony. I whispered Honey's mantra as I fell: “Magic and mind, magic and mind…”

I landed in a crouch with the fingers of one hand braced against the stone to steady myself, and then I was running for the beach. I was a hundred feet from the vodyanoy when I started firing Ned on the run. Honey was still down, struggling to free herself from the sticky, severed tongue,
and the creature was dragging itself across the sand toward her, pulling with its powerful arms and slapping the sand with its fishtail.

In the real world, with a normal gun, you wouldn't have high expectations for any shots you fired at a dead sprint. This wasn't the normal world, though, and Ned definitely wasn't a normal gun. A burning blue wound blossomed in the vodyanoy's side and another where the thick tail merged into his torso. He let out another watery foghorn blast but kept crawling toward Honey as the sapphire energy chewed his blubbery hide. The piskie pulled frantically at the clinging strands and tried to scramble away, but the vodyanoy was covering a lot more ground than she could.

I knew I wouldn't be able to get there in time. I could keep firing and hope for a lucky shot that would put the creature down or I could stop and aim. Indecision gripped me and I barreled on across the sand by inertia, fanning the Peacemaker's hammer and silently praying for a kill-shot. The vodyanoy opened its mouth and screamed again, drowning Honey in a deluge of mucus, spittle and bile. It reached for her with one clawed hand, its long, knobby fingers twitching eagerly.

Then I heard an echoing crack like thunder rolling overhead, and the vodyanoy's head exploded, splashing greenish-black juice across the beach. The monster's fat body dropped and jerked a few times before collapsing into a pool of evil, foul-smelling magic that quickly soaked into the sand.

I ran to Honey and helped pull the last bits of tongue from her. Then we both looked over to where Jack had fallen. He lay there unmoving, his body limp and broken. A tortured cry tore itself from Honey's lips and she half ran, half flew to his side. She cradled him in her arms, tilted her head back and wailed at the sky. I dropped to my knees
beside them just as Adan ran up, holding the rifle lightly in one hand.

Jack coughed and opened his eyes. He blinked. “Good fight,” he said.

Honey made fists of both hands and began flailing at him, pummeling his chest and stomach. She was laughing and crying, and Jack finally defended himself by grabbing her and pulling her onto the sand with him, rolling over so she was pinned beneath his body.

“Do not cry, my love,” he said, and I noticed the slight brogue in his voice for the first time. “The gods gave us victory this day and there is life in us still.” Honey pulled him closer and kissed him fiercely.

I looked at Adan and cleared my throat. “Maybe we should…”

“Yeah,” he said, and we turned and walked back toward the beach house.

“Nice shot,” I said.

He shrugged. “Frog-boy had a big fucking head.”

“Yeah, he
did.
”

Adan glanced at me and lifted an eyebrow. “What's the problem?”

“I was supposed to bring it to the Burning Man.”

I was prepared to tell the Burning Man to grab a shovel and scoop up some sand if he insisted on having De dushka's head. As it turned out, news of the hit beat us back to Van Nuys and the spirit wasn't inclined to jack me up on a technicality. He'd arranged to escort Adan and me to the Mocambo later that night. It seemed the piskies weren't welcome—La Calavera had a problem with the way the fairies had moved in and used her turf as a rest stop on the way from Avalon to Arcadia.

I also considered asking Adan to stay behind. I knew the only way to stop the zombie outbreak was to rescue the Xolos, but in the meantime there were zombies running loose in L.A. Still, if Oberon, Terrence and Chavez couldn't keep a lid on things, Adan probably wouldn't make much of a difference. I didn't really know what I'd be walking into—except that it was an underworld nightclub in the Between run by the Lady of the Dead. Even if I couldn't be sure where I stood with Adan, I needed backup. I also needed to keep an eye on him.

We grabbed some dinner in my condo and then crossed back over into the spirit world a little after ten. We met at
the warehouse in Van Nuys and I was surprised to see the Burning Man had left his gangbangers at home. When I asked about it, he explained that the Mocambo was considered neutral ground in his world, and besides, there would be enough “dangerous men” in the club that a couple ghosts wouldn't make much difference if things got ugly. I didn't have a problem with it—the Burning Man was my ticket in the door, but he wasn't my friend. Whether he had muscle or not, it wasn't likely to change my fortunes either way.

We walked into the mist and emerged on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, circa 1949. I didn't recognize most of the old buildings that lined the street, and I figured all but a few had been demolished to make way for the chic boutiques, shops and street-level malls that hugged the boulevard in my world.

This was also the first time in the Between I really missed cars. You didn't need them with the mist to transport you instantly wherever you wanted to go. But this street, in this time, had been a kind of drive-through shrine to the automobile. I should have seen Cadillac convertibles, Packard coupes and Lincoln Cosmopolitans cruising the boulevard.

Instead, the street was empty but for the few well-dressed ghosts with somewhere to be.

The Mocambo club was a two-story stucco building with a Spanish tiled roof and a row of faux-shuttered windows running along the top floor. There was a small marquee and a short canopy covering the entrance. The marquee was blank. I didn't know if that was an oversight or some kind of existential statement.

The ghosts flanking the front doors were nothing special to look at, but malevolence rolled off them in waves. I wondered about the things they'd done in life to earn their juice
in the shadow world. The Burning Man ignored them and they didn't challenge us as we passed.

We followed our host down a short, dark hallway past a coat check and then stepped out onto the main floor of the club. The place made the Carnival Club seem a little staid and conservative by comparison. The central bar was designed like a carousel, featuring polished brass poles and a canopy with a red and white pinwheel design overhead. Candy-striped pillars were scattered around the floor and each was crowned with concentric, irregularly shaped hoops that gave them the appearance of huge, fanciful umbrellas. Behind the bar and adorning the walls were dozens of plaster figurines. There were weird, anthropomorphic animals in opulent, old-fashioned clothes, a variety of mythological creatures leering down at the crowd and vaguely human figures so bizarre as to be near-abstractions. Glass cases were set into the walls running up toward the stage. Ghosts were locked inside the cases, and they were of varying ages and vintages to judge by their clothing.

We were greeted by a hostess and escorted through a maze of round tables with white tablecloths to a booth with red-and-white-striped upholstery. Ghosts hung on the walls between our table and the adjoining booths like captive thieves. The Burning Man ordered champagne and waited until we sat, and then he went to make the rounds. I looked at the champagne but I wasn't about to drink any. It couldn't actually be champagne in the Between and I didn't want to know what it really was.

The back wall of the club was draped in rich gold curtains that were pulled back from the stage and bandstand. A female ghost stood in the spotlight singing a Billie Holiday number to the accompaniment of the house orchestra.

I realized all of the staff were ghosts—the bartenders,
waiters and cigarette girls, as well as the entertainment. The patrons were something else entirely. I'd never imagined a place where the Burning Man would appear ordinary, but the Mocambo was that place. Most of the clientele looked at least somewhat human and all were impeccably dressed.

But even when they lacked the Burning Man's special effects, they clearly weren't mortal. Some were impossibly tall and gaunt, and others were obscenely fat. I saw a woman in a crimson evening gown with barbed wire woven into the flesh of her throat and wrists. I saw a man in a tuxedo with a mask of human skin not his own.

It wasn't hard to pick out La Calavera. She stood by the bar attended by a small army of waiters and sycophants. She was beautiful, with dark hair, pale skin and a lean, sinuous body. She wore a white cocktail dress with cascading ruffles and a wide black belt, black pumps and a huge floppy black hat with an elaborate bow. Her face and mouth were painted white to mimic a skull, with blacked-out eyes and nose and dark lines on her lips suggesting teeth. When I turned my head to point her out to Adan, the makeup job faded and I saw a fleshless human skull beneath the oversize hat.

“There's our girl,” I said to Adan. “When you look at her out of the corner of your eye, you get the full
calavera
effect.”

“What does
calavera
mean, anyway?”

“Look at her like I said and I'll bet you can tell me.”

Adan looked over at the bar, turned back to me and then did a double-take. “Goofy hat?” he said.

“Try again.”

“Skull.”

“There you go,” I said. “
La Calavera Catrina
—the elegant skull. What else do you see?” I knew my world better
than Adan did, I knew the underworld, but he'd had more experience with this place.

Adan was silent for a moment, watching her intently.

“She's straight out of the Beyond,” he said. “Not Avalon—somewhere else. She's a spirit but not born of the earth, like your jinn. An outsider.”

“She's got juice.”

He nodded and looked around. “You can tell that much even without the sight. Every player in the club is afraid of her. I've seen worse, but not usually in the Between. She needs a lot of juice to sustain herself here. She can pull some from the Beyond but she's got a lot of local sources, too.”

“So this thing with the Xolos, it's producing for her.”

Adan nodded. “She needs a lot of rackets. And her operations must have taken a hit when Oberon moved into Hollywood.”

“So La Calavera has a beef with Oberon. He's a threat.”

“Yeah, but you have to look at the other side, too. She's a threat to him. He's got a rival gang boss operating just on the other side of the veil.”

“I can't see a way to connect Oberon to this, but I don't like the fact I just coincidentally find myself in conflict with one of his enemies. The king should be on this job.”

“You think he played us?”

“I don't know,” I said. “There's no reason to think Oberon knew anything about what was causing the zombie problem, or that La Calavera had anything to do with it. It's just awfully fucking convenient for him and that makes me suspicious.”

“So how are we going to do this?”

“We try to get close. It's a dogfighting ring, which means there's wagering. We want in on the action. If we can get
inside this thing, that's our best chance to find the Xolos and free them.”

“And to find out if King Oberon knew about the racket and put us between him and La Calavera,” Adan said.

“Showtime,” I said. The Burning Man had stopped by the bar and was deep in conversation with La Calavera. She looked in our direction and we made eye contact. Just for a second, I saw the naked skull again. Then she smiled.

She stood and took the Burning Man's arm, and they walked over to our table. “La Calavera Catrina,” he said, “may I present Adan Rashan and Domino Riley.” Under different circumstances it might have hurt my feelings that he introduced Adan first, but I knew his sense of propriety was stuck in 1949, just like the rest of the club.

“Master Rashan,” she said, “your father's name is well-known here. Welcome to the Mocambo.” Her smile was dazzling.

“Thank you,” Adan said, and gestured to the space beside me. “Would you care to join us?”

La Calavera seemed to notice me for the first time since our little stare down. I smiled and tried to force as much warmth into it as I could, which probably wasn't much. “I think not,” she said, returning her attention to Adan. “I adore this performer and I would rather like to dance. I'm sure your companion won't mind.”

I was expecting deer in the headlights, but Adan was smooth. Maybe too smooth. “I'd be delighted,” he said, smiling. At least he slid the other way out of the booth so I didn't have to get up. They walked together to the dance floor and every eye in the club followed them.

The Burning Man nodded to me once and wandered off. Even without the burning I wouldn't have wanted to dance with him, but he could have asked. Instead, I got to sit
there, alone, with the champagne I couldn't actually drink because it was probably pureed human soul or something, and watch Adan and La Calavera cut a rug.

The ghost who had taken the stage looked and sounded just like Frank Sinatra early in his career. It couldn't actually
be
Sinatra—from what I knew about the guy, he might not be in heaven but he probably wasn't still playing the Mocambo. He did “Close to You” and followed it up with “Almost Like Being in Love.” There'd been some daylight between Adan and La Calavera when they started, but they were wrapped up pretty tight by the time the blue-eyed bastard got to “Some Enchanted Evening.” I considered whether it would be an unforgivable breach of etiquette to shoot the entertainment.

Eventually, they made their way back to the booth, walking arm in arm and laughing. Adan stood aside and allowed La Calavera to sit first, and then he slid in beside her. She took a long drink of champagne and her shadowed eyes glittered as she watched me over the rim of her glass. She set the flute back on the table and licked her lips.

“What brings you to the Mocambo tonight?” she asked. “Surely, it wasn't just to share.” I saw her arm move and Adan swallowed hard. She'd put her hand on his thigh. At least I hoped it was just his thigh.

“We heard there was action here,” I said. It probably wasn't the best choice of words.

La Calavera laughed and leaned into Adan. “More action than you'd like, perhaps.”

I grinned and shook my head. “Okay, let's get this out of the way. I'm a guest in your club so I don't want to disrespect you. On the other hand, there
is
a limit to how much shit I'll eat just to be polite, and I'm filling up pretty fast. As far as Adan goes? Between you and me, sister, I don't think
he likes it cold. But if he's buying what you're selling, by all means, get your nasty on so we can stop pulling each other's hair and get down to business.”

I got another flash of the bony hag behind the pretty face, and then La Calavera smiled. “I do believe I'm going to like you, Miss Riley.”

“Call me Domino.”

“Very well, Domino. You can drink the champagne, by the way. It's just juice. You'll like it.”

I was more worried about where the juice had come from and how it had gotten into the bottle, but I picked up my glass and took a drink. I probably wasn't going to get an invitation to the dogfights if I was afraid of a little Between-style bubbly. I drained off half the glass and put it back on the table. It
was
pretty tasty.

“So what business do we have, you and I?” La Calavera had gone from hanging all over Adan to pretending he didn't exist. For his part, Adan seemed relieved by the abrupt shift in focus.

“We heard you were running a game—not the kind of action we get on our side of the tracks.”

“It's true,” La Calavera said. “I do provide certain amusements for the denizens of this place. Just as you do, I'm sure, in the mortal city. But I have to say, we don't enjoy the patronage of humans very often—even of human sorcerers. We play big, as they say, and the stakes can be intimidating to those on a more limited bankroll.”

“Juice,” I said. “You play for juice.”

“Of course. Gold can be useful to those of us with dealings in the mortal world, but juice is the only currency that has real value here.”

“Our bankrolls are petty deep. We run an outfit—”

“I know who you are, Domino, and I know you have
the juice to play with us. I simply don't want there to be any unpleasant misunderstandings later. You're new here and you might be excused for thinking we run a
friendly
game.”

“No game worth winning stays friendly very long.”

La Calavera smiled. “Isn't it so?” she said. “Very well, where do your particular interests lie? Poker is quite popular right now and dice are always in fashion. We do have more…exotic…games, as well.”

“We're here for the dogfights,” I said.

La Calavera's eyebrows jumped. “I must say, I'm surprised you've even heard of the dogfights. I wasn't aware your friend the Burning Man knew of them.”

“He's not my friend, just a guy I went to see about a gun.”