Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (25 page)

    
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven
. . .

    
Once
inside, she locked the door and sat down on the toilet, trembling in spite of
herself. She couldn’t be absolutely certain there weren’t knives raised over
her. When she had composed herself, she punched in the number on the business
card.
    

“This is Henry Lee’s little black book,” said
Detective Aquino, unzipping the evidence bag and removing a well-worn
paperback. “It’s all Greek to me.”

    
“Well,
Latin, anyway,” said Raszer, accepting the book. “But you probably know that.
Liber Null
—
The Book of Nothing
, or of no value, at least not to the
uninitiated. I’ve got a copy in my library.”

    
“I guess
I’m not surprised,” said Aquino. “It’s a book of magic spells?”

    
“More
like magical
practice
,” Raszer
answered, flipping to the title page, and an inscription:
Henry—Good luck on the left-hand path. Do nothing is the law. Cheers,
H.

    
“Hmm,” Raszer mumbled, and turned to Aquino. “Any
idea who H. is?
Cheers
would suggest
a Brit.”

    
“I
thought the same thing,” Aquino repled. “Of course, we couldn’t ask Henry. When
I pressed Emmett on it, he said it was probably a British soldier Henry met in
Iraq. But I got the feeling he was making it up. So what’s the book for? Not
pulling rabbits out of hats, I guess . . . ”

    
”No,”
said Raszer. “Not unless a rabbit is what you’re after. It’s for achieving
results. You might even call it pragmatic sorcery. The left-hand path is the
path of power through intuitive self-knowledge. The magician uses his active
imagination to harness the chaos at the heart of the universe. From that, he
makes his own gods.”

    
“You
lost me there, amigo. Exactly how does he do that?”

    
Raszer
lit a cigarette and sat down on an oversize trunk. They were in a warehouse
space in San Dimas shared by regional police departments, an elephant’s
graveyard of evidence collected from ten thousand crime scenes: an archive of
sin. On Raszer’s left were two nitrous oxide tanks, found at the trailer in Burro
Canyon, and the fragments of a backyard methamphetamine lab. On his left was a
box containing an assortment of Henry’s black rocks and fat little Mesopotamian
goddess statuettes.

    
“Back in
the ’70s,” Raszer began, “a British magician by the name of Peter Carroll,
who’d been—until then—an adept of Aleister Crowley, decided that ceremonial
magic had gotten too highfalutin—too full of silk robes and mumbo-jumbo. He was
a bright, serious guy, as far as it goes, and he’d noticed all the bizarre
stuff happening in science: chaos theory, black holes, quantum entanglement,
you know . . . ”

    
“No, I
don’t, actually . . . but go on.”

    
“Well,
to Carroll and his friends, all the old Egyptian magic, with its determinism,
its invocation of dead gods, and its elitism, just didn’t jibe with a science
that said the universe came down to quarks and uncertainty. Old-school magic
was for horny old men in smoking jackets. Carroll wanted rituals that were
effective, so he threw the religion out of magic and focused on screwing with
the universe itself.”

    
“Screwing
with the universe,” said Aquino drily. “Okay. You still haven’t told me how me
it works. How you make a god.”

    
“Maybe
you should read the book,” said Raszer. “I’m not saying I’m a believer, but,
like all magical insight, it has an angle of truth. Put it this way: modern
physics says, in a way, that everything is everything. The universe in a
nutshell . . . ”

    
“I did
try to read
that
book.”

    
“If the
universe is enfolded in every stitch of space time, then God’s in the stitches,
too. Which means God’s in you and me . . . in the fabric, not a separate thing.
And if chaos is bubbling under it all, then
some
force has to evoke order—things, people, events—from the chaos. Carroll says
basically that this force is imagination, the same kind a method actor uses to
create a character. You go into your temple—if you’re Henry Lee, maybe that’s a
trailer—you set your goal: You want Susie to love you, or you want a better
job, or whatever. Then you work yourself into a state of gnosis—”

    
“What’s
that?”

    
“Let’s
just say it’s a kind of mainline to the divine, without any interference from
the mind. It’s living inside the truth.”

    
“How do
you get there? Yoga? Meditation? Magic mushrooms?”

    
“All or
none of the above. For chaos magicians, it’s whatever works. Sex can do the
trick, if it’s done right . . . even focused masturbation. Self-inflicted pain.
Anything that takes you beyond ego. Then you say to yourself,
I believe in Isis, or I believe in Cthulhu,
or I believe in Mary Worth
. . . ”

    
“It
doesn’t matter what you believe in?”

    
“Doesn’t
matter, as long as you believe for the duration of the ritual.”

    
Raszer
held the cigarette in his teeth and reached behind his left into the box
containing Henry’s icons. He fished out the largest and most worn of the black
rocks.

    
“Then
you summon your servitor—your god-form—into a sigil, like this rock or a
statue, and you go to work. How you do the work is what the book’s about. How
successful
Henry
was is hard to say,
but he sure had an effect on Emmett Parrish.”

    
“I’d
like to hear about that,” said Aquino. “Did he stick to his story?”

    
“I—”

    
Raszer’s
cell phone bleeped, sparing him any dissembling. “It’s Raszer,” he answered,
bouncing Henry’s rock on his palm. It was surprisingly heavy for its size,
polished from handling, and had a distinctive navel-like dimple. And there was
some-thing else, something he couldn’t quantify—an emission, a kind of heat.

    
The
voice on the other end was all contained panic. Remarkably contained,
considering its message. Raszer glanced at Aquino, shook his head, and rolled
his eyes apologetically toward heaven. He put the phone to his chest.

    
“It’s,
uh, my girlfriend,” he said, and winced. “Will you give me a minute?”

    
Aquino
grunted knowingly, and gave a nod. Raszer stood, and with a thief’s sleight of
hand dropped the rock into his jacket pocket. As he walked across the concrete
warehouse floor, Aquino’s eyes tracked him. As practiced as Raszer’s own method
acting was, it couldn’t disguise the draining of the blood from his face.

    
“All
right, Layla,” said Raszer softly, when he had gained fifty feet of distance.
“Take a breath and start again. I’m here. I’m listening.”

    
“Harry’s
dead,” she said. “It’s them. He’s in my apartment.”

    
The
words were all in her throat, their pitch flattened by fear or numbness.

    
“Harry’s
in your apartment?”

    
“Yes. On
the bed. No, I mean the killer—”

    
“Where
are you now?”

    
“In the
bathroom.”

    
“Is it
locked?”

    
“Yes,
but that won’t—”

    
“Okay. I
want you to listen and do exactly as I say, all right?”

    
“All
right.”

    
“Even
hired assassins—especially hired assassins—try to avoid collateral damage. If
you stay where you are, he will probably leave. I’m going to call the police,
and then I’m coming straight to you, okay?”

    
“Yes.”

    
“Now,
when we’re done, I want you to put down the phone, walk over to the toilet, and
take the lid off the tank in back. That’s probably the heaviest thing in the
bathroom. It will knock even the biggest man cold. Stand behind the door, up
against the wall, and raise the lid above your head. If he manages to get in,
bring it down hard and take his weapon. I’m on my way. It’s going to be okay.”

    
Raszer
flipped the phone shut and stood for a moment with his back to Aquino. There
were advantages, not to say honor, in telling the truth, but the truth would
take time, and a small-town cop might create variables whose impact he couldn’t
predict. He turned around and raised his hands in the air in a gesture of
defeat.

    
“I’ve
got trouble, Detective,” he called out. “Gotta go. I’ll call you from the car.”

    
Aquino
smiled grimly. “Don’t cut me out, Raszer,” he shouted. “You could find yourself
very alone up here. And, uh—” He aimed a finger at Raszer’s left pocket.
“You’ll return that piece of evidence when you’re through examining it, right?”

    
“Right,”
said Raszer. “Thanks. I’ll call you.” He turned and strode deliberately to the
exit, all the while hearing Harry’s words in his head:
A fishing cottage will suit us fine.
 

    
As soon
as he’d cleared the door, Raszer speed-dialed #9. It was a direct-dial to the
BlackBerry carried by Lieutenant Borges of LAPD Homicide, promoted to that
division only two years earlier from the Missing Persons Unit that Raszer
himself had briefly served. Borges wasn’t the top cop, but he was the one man
on the force who took Raszer at face value and could be counted on not to go
procedural on him if the game called for different rules. He was a tall,
crater-faced Argentinean with his own sense of the surreal, and he was as
familiar with L.A.’s alter-reality as an international port of mayhem and
occulted enterprise as he was with its potholed streets.

    
Nothing
could save Harry Wolfe, and nothing short of light-speed would have gotten
Raszer there fast enough, so he drove with due speed by the fastest route he
knew, down the 2 freeway’s roller-coaster grade to the 5 North and off at
Glendale Boulevard. When he arrived at the scene, he found Sunset barricaded
between Hyperion and Maltman, and traffic snarled beyond hope of getting within
a block of the building. He parked in a red zone adjacent to the Silver Lake
Spanking Parlor, jumped out, and sprinted onto Sunset and past the barricades
with his PI card held high.

    
“Stephan
Raszer,” he called out to the beat cops. “Borges wants me. Can you radio
ahead?”

    
His legs
turned to molten lead. Up ahead, he counted six squad cars with lights flashing
and a paramedic van with its stretcher out. Beyond the second set of barricades
stood a KTLA news van, and pulling in beside it was the local Fox affiliate.
All the street noise played second fiddle to the weirdly phase-shifted beating
of three helicopters—two police choppers and a news unit—in the cloudless blue
sky overhead.

    
Not again
, he thought, slowing his pace.
Please don’t let her be dead
. Because
if she were dead, it could only be the result of his having intruded on her
haven, breaking the fragile membrane of security that playing possum afforded
her. Impractical as it was, Raszer sought to never leave tracks, to leave a
scene as he had found it, to not let his zeal for the quest be the cause of
pain to any but his adversaries. It was of a piecewith his thirst for
anonymity, his resentment of guys who peed all over their turf, his almost
Asian desire for lightness of being. In practice, such nonintrusion was a
quantum impossibility, no more realistic than expecting an electron to
disregard the presence of an observer and a battery of measuring equipment.
Still, he hoped.

    
He
spotted Borges in the midst of a huddle, a head taller than anyone else, and
better dressed. All eyes were on the top floor and roof of Layla’s four-story
building. At the moment, there was nothing to see there, but when Raszer
surveyed the same elevation on the opposite side of the street, he saw the
police sharpshooters lined up like tin soldiers. Harry Wolfe’s killer had not
left the building.

    
“Luis!”
he called out to Borges, fifteen feet short of the huddle. “Lieutenant . . . ”

    
Borges
stepped away from his men and approached Raszer with a slow nod and a tight
smile, combing his fingers through a crop of thick hair the color of tarnished
silver. He offered his hand; Raszer grasped it warmly.

    
“What
have we got?” Raszer asked.

    
“We’ve
got a corpse, a killer, and a hostage,” he replied.