Authors: Jamie Schultz
Drew pulled his gaze from the window. “You think—you think those guys are gonna be OK? I mean, they didn’t have to take me in. I wouldn’t want . . . you know.”
“I don’t think Mendelsohn’s got any problem with them,” Anna said, forcing as patient and calming a tone as she could manage.
And anyway, it’s not like there’s anyone left to talk about them.
She kept her face still, even as her gorge rose at the intruding thought. “Just you. So what’s up with that?”
“You know. It’s like, deserter policy. Like the army. You know.”
“Try again,” Karyn said from the front.
Anna tried on a reassuring smile. “She’ll know if you’re lying. Every time.” Maybe not strictly the truth, but who knew? Even Karyn didn’t fully understand Karyn’s gift.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
Nail shot an evil glance into the rearview mirror. “I just shot two people and stabbed a third to get this information. You think I’m gonna stop now?”
“Hey!” Genevieve said. “I don’t want to hear that kind of shit. We’re the good guys, remember?”
“There ain’t no good guys.”
“Look,” Genevieve said, ignoring Nail. Drew turned in his seat to see her. “We got in the middle of some severe shit back there. All we want to know is who we’ve pissed off, how bad, and why.” Her tongue fiddled with a stud in her lower lip for a moment. “It might actually be a matter of survival now.”
That was smooth,
Anna thought.
Didn’t play directly on the “you owe us” thing, but came at it indirectly. He’ll get there himself, instead of feeling like it’s being used as a crowbar on him.
It appeared Genevieve had a few different kinds of tricks in her bag.
Might be a good idea to keep that in mind.
“It’s Mendelsohn,” Drew said, his voice suddenly heavy with exhaustion. “And the Brotherhood. You already know that.”
“How bad?”
“How bad do you think? There’s four dead guys back there, that I know about. It’s not like you fucked up their bake sale, you know?”
Anna felt a sudden, intense urge to slap him. She chalked it up to stress and put her hands in her lap.
“Okay,” Genevieve said. “Why? Why is it so important that they get rid of you?”
“Ain’t just me. There were a couple others, but they’re both worm food.”
“That’s even worse. Tell us why.”
Drew kicked the back of Nail’s seat, like a five-year-old with nowhere else to vent his frustrations. “I know all
their shit. I was
way
in, you know? And they don’t like their secrets getting out.”
“What secrets?”
“You know. Like, initiation and shit.”
Genevieve didn’t even dignify that with a question, merely looked at him.
Drew sighed. “It’s the goddamn ritual.” He lowered his voice, mumbled something that even Anna couldn’t make out from right next to him.
“What?” Genevieve asked.
“I said
they’re gonna kill somebody
!” Drew shouted. “Kill somebody! A fucking sacrifice, all right?”
Anna glanced at Genevieve, but the other woman didn’t look away from Drew for a moment. “Who?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. An ‘innocent,’ whatever that means.”
“Jesus, Drew. What did you get yourself into?”
“You don’t get it,” he said. “You always sat on the sidelines and laughed at us, but you don’t know what it’s like to be
in
. It’s—it’s . . .” Tears glistened in his eyes. “It’s the best thing you ever felt. All the time you’re surrounded by people who have your back no matter what. It’s like you fit somewhere for the first time ever. Don’t you get that?”
Silence, then Nail’s deep voice: “Yeah. I get that.” He paused. “It fucks with your head. Shit you never would have dreamed of before starts to seem normal after a while, because you’re tired and everybody else says it’s cool.”
Drew nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly it.”
Nail’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a smile as bitter as any Anna had ever seen. “U.S. Marines, First Recon. Four years.”
“Damn, dude.”
“Yeah.”
“So they suck you in a little at a time,” Drew said, “talk about the great glory of bringing your god to Earth, and when they start talking about the ‘unfortunate necessity of sacrifice,’ you don’t even blink. And, if they can help it, they don’t give you one moment alone. Cut you off from family. Keep you short on sleep, so you’re never
quite thinking clearly. And people around you are, like, disappearing into a closed room for hours a day, doing weird shit. Some of them never come out, and they’re getting weirder and weirder, but you’re so damn tired it never registers. And then one day, you’re on the shitter getting your two and a half minutes of personal time, and you’re like, ‘Whoa. Did I agree to
kill
somebody?’” He looked at his hands as though they were already stained with blood. “So then you’re all, holy hell, this is fucked. I gotta get out of here.”
He rubbed his forehead with both hands. “And then four guys show up to turn you into a hundred and sixty pounds of hamburger meat. And your friends, too, for good measure.”
Anna felt for the guy, but that didn’t stop her from trading a
very
uneasy glance with Karyn during his monologue. “Um, what was that about ‘bringing your god to Earth’?”
“Come on, can’t you just let me out here?”
“What, are they gonna kill you deader because you talked to us?”
“
They’re
not, no.”
Another nervous look toward Karyn. “Who is?”
“I don’t know, man. But this is a
god
we’re talkin’ about. Shit makes me nervous, OK?”
Tommy cleared his throat. “It’s not a god.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t want to mess with it. I just want to hide somewhere and hope nobody ever finds me again.”
Nail turned the van, jounced over some potholes. A short acceleration, and they were on the 405. Even at this hour, there was a steady stream of traffic trundling along well below the speed limit.
“Why don’t you get out of town?” Anna asked. “Why stay here?”
Drew snorted. “Unlike you high rollers, I got no money. Nowhere to go. And the last people willing to put me up—well, you saw how that went. They won’t want anything to do with me now.”
Anna hesitated for just a moment, then reached into
her pocket. She came out with a roll of bills. “I think this is about four hundred, maybe four fifty. We just need straight answers to a few questions, and it’s yours. After that, we’ll take you straight to the bus station, if you like.” Hope and suspicion flared to life on Drew’s face. Anna couldn’t help a sidelong glance to see Genevieve’s reaction. She was smiling, a carefree grin that said,
Hell yeah—that’s my girl
. Unless that was wishful thinking on Anna’s part.
“You’re fucking with me.”
“It’s either this, or Nail pulls your toenails off,” Anna said, but her tone was joking and she smiled as she said it. “I know what I’d go with.”
“Cash first?” he tried.
“Sure.”
Drew took the money gingerly, like it might rear up and sting him with a hidden scorpion tail. Once he was sure it wasn’t going to bite him or explode or something, he thumbed through it and stashed the wad in his pants pocket.
“Okay. Shoot. Er, ask.”
“This ritual—it uses a jawbone, right?”
Drew nodded nervously, then wiped at his forehead. “Yeah.”
“All right. When and where does it go down?”
This time, Drew looked left and right, like a virgin approaching a streetwalker, waiting for cops to jump out of every window and door on the block. But there was only the crew in the van, and nothing for him to see. “Mendelsohn’s place. The sixteenth.” He made a twitching half shrug. “New moon.”
“Who, and how many?”
“Everyone. All of them. Sixty or more, anyway.”
Nobody said a word, but Tommy looked like he was going to chew through his bottom lip and Karyn’s face had taken on a queasy greenish cast. Anna’s stomach flopped over a few times.
“No problem,” Nail said, his voice so even that Anna at first thought he was serious. “I’ll just get on the horn
and call in an air strike. We’ll pick the bone out of the rubble.” He shook his head. “Shit.”
* * *
Anna closed the apartment door, locked it, and paused. Karyn stood a few feet away, leaning against the back of one of the chairs and waiting. That was good. They needed to talk. Tension had crackled in the air between them since before dropping Drew off at the bus station.
Anna turned, fighting the urge to lean back against the door. “So.”
“So.”
How was this supposed to go? In the ten years she’d known Karyn—most of which they’d lived and worked together—there had only been a handful of arguments. Usually Karyn pointed the way and Anna did the dirty work and didn’t second-guess her. Shit, she saw the future, right? Nothing to argue about.
Not this time.
Anna leaped into the silence first. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Karyn said, fixing her with a too-direct stare, almost an
I dare you
.
Anna plowed ahead. “You’re jumpy as hell lately,” she said. “And it’s worse when you’re around the guys. It looked like Tommy scared the shit out of you earlier.
Tommy
, of all people. What is going on with you?”
“What’s going on with
you
?”
“Huh?”
“Instead of focusing on the job, you spend half your time drooling at the spy Sobell put in our crew. You think that’s doing us any good?”
“That don’t have anything to do with anything. I ain’t dropped a single ball—”
“Just a matter of time.”
“Jesus! We wouldn’t have
anything
to go on yet if not for Genevieve, and I’m not fucking up.” A sort of stealthy, destructive anger welled up in her. “And what about that shit today? That was bad. Worst we’ve ever seen.”
“I know.” Karyn’s face was still, frozen. Anna recognized the look from long ago, when Karyn had been
seventeen years old and fighting with her aunt nonstop. It meant she was dug in, fortified, and nothing short of heavy explosives was going to move her. Anna’s mood darkened further.
“Did you see any of that coming?” A cheap shot, but it was out before Anna could stop it.
A pause, and a slight wrinkling of Karyn’s brow. “Not . . . not really. Not before I said something.” The words didn’t have the ring of truth to them, exactly, but they didn’t carry the false note of a lie, either. More like . . . confusion? Anna’s anger took on an unsettling undercurrent of worry.
“We should get out,” Anna said. “We never should have gotten in.”
“Have you lost your mind? It’s two—” Karyn stopped herself.
“Two million dollars,” Anna finished for her. “It’s still not worth it.”
Karyn shook her head. “You don’t get into bed with Enoch Sobell and just walk away with the job unfinished. We have to do this.”
“Four people got killed today, Karyn!”
“Yeah, and four people would have gotten killed if we hadn’t been there—the wrong four, if you ask me.”
“There’s four more I’m worried about now.”
“Don’t you mean five?”
Anna stared into the angry furnace of Karyn’s eyes. “Yeah. I suppose I do.”
Karyn’s smile turned nauseatingly sweet. “Then why don’t you ask Genevieve how she feels about bailing out?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Why, because she’s Sobell’s lapdog? Funny, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Karyn pushed away from the chair she’d been leaning on. “I’m going to bed. Figure out what you want to do. We’ll have it out with everyone in the morning.”
She stalked away and disappeared into her bedroom.
It felt like the
air
was rotten,
Nail thought. Everything about Anna and Karyn’s apartment put his back up. The two of them wouldn’t look at each other, and a couple of times he was pretty sure he saw Anna biting back some kind of bitter, mean-spirited comment. Impossible to tell, sure, but from the sneer that started to form on her lips each time, right before she silenced herself, it wasn’t hard to guess.
He squeezed his left fist, held it, then straightened his fingers. Then did the same with his right hand. Off-brand isometrics, but they kept him calm. He knew everybody else thought he was a rock—and fuck it, man, he was—but this was getting to him. Not the firefight, but the rotten rift that seemed to be forming between Karyn and Anna. Back in the service, a couple of guys in his squad got into some bad blood like this, and it had damn near poisoned the whole group’s morale. Squad leader thought he’d fix it by letting the guys go out back and beat the shit out of each other. It sort of had. Not that it improved the relationship any—the fight had cemented the original resentment—but one of the guys ended up in the infirmary with a torn ligament in his elbow and pretty much out of commission after that. Squad leader got demoted and the other guy got transferred, so the problem got fixed, anyway.
That kind of solution was no solution, far as Nail was concerned.
“That was some heavy shit yesterday,” Anna said, finally breaking the silence. The four of them were gathered around the card table, awaiting Genevieve’s arrival. Anna still looked everywhere but at Karyn.
“I have a feeling we’re going to see more of that before this is over,” Anna continued. “Maybe a lot more.” She looked from Tommy to Nail, eyes sliding right past Karyn again. “The money still look worth it?”
Silence. Karyn had pushed her chair a few extra feet back from the table, indicating she was going to sit this one out. Tommy’s gaze went from Karyn to Anna to Karyn, and it was obvious the rottenness in the air had got to him, too. He wasn’t going to say shit, Nail thought. Not until it was safe, anyway.
Nail put both hands on the table, palms down, and exhaled. He looked Anna in the eyes. “I seen worse. Anybody here expect this to be easy, for the kind of money up for grabs?”
She didn’t look away from him, but her face remained frozen, totally unreadable, and she didn’t respond.
Tommy’s game of eyeball tennis expanded to include Nail. “Enoch Sobell,” he said, tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth. “Guy like me could learn a lot from him. Hate to burn the relationship.” He scratched at the stubble on his head, then added, seemingly as an afterthought, “Hate to kill anybody else, though.”
“Do you want to do this or not?” Anna asked.
Rather than answer, Tommy practically broke his neck in his hurry to look to Nail. Nail was suddenly, uncomfortably aware that he’d become the focus of the room. Karyn watched him from her aloof perch to his left, Tommy looked to him like a drowning man to a rope, and Anna stared, straight and level. Had she blinked in like the last five minutes?
“I need this,” Nail said softly. The words hung there, heavy, and he thought he saw Anna’s expression flicker to something else for a moment. “I mean, I need something,” he hastened to add. “If we don’t do this, I gotta line up something else in a fuck of a hurry. And unless it pays real good, something else right after that.”
Karyn stirred, shifting in her chair. “Tommy? You want to do this?” It wasn’t quite the question Anna had asked, Nail noted.
Before Tommy could answer, somebody knocked on the door.
Go the fuck away!
Nail wanted to shout. Instead, he got up, leaving Tommy pinned under the twin gazes of Karyn and Anna, and walked over to the door. He checked the peephole and let Genevieve in.
Tommy glanced at her, then nodded at Karyn. “Yeah. I do.”
“You’re late,” Karyn said.
“Our employer wanted an update. I miss anything?” Genevieve asked, her trademark smirk already in place. It didn’t do much to hide the circles under her eyes, though, or the weariness in her voice.
Guess nobody’s sleeping well these days.
“No,” Karyn said. Genevieve came over to the table and put a wooden box on the corner.
“What’s in the box?” Tommy asked.
Genevieve gave the box a shove toward the center of the table. “Quarter million dollars.”
“Say what?”
That’s the first good news I’ve had in a week,
Nail thought.
A wide smile spread across his face. This was a straightforward solution to a straightforward problem, one he happened to know exactly how to solve. “The man understands.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Anna asked.
“Go ahead, big guy,” Genevieve said. “You got it.”
“Next time the bone comes out to play, it’s gonna be in a guarded place with a shitload of people around. Means if we’re gonna get at it, we’re gonna need ordnance.
That
is our expense account—am I right?”
Genevieve nodded.
He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, still smiling. “This is my department.”
“Wait. ‘Ordnance’?” Tommy was sitting straight up, at full attention, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the box. “What do you mean, ‘ordnance’?”
“I’m thinking tear gas, flashbangs, smoke grenades.
Maybe a fifty-cal.”
Probably too heavy,
he thought, amending his list already.
Maybe just an M240.
“I don’t want a slaughter,” Karyn said, her voice uncharacteristically hard. Nail didn’t miss the relief that softened Anna’s face. “We’re not butchers.”
“And there’s the ‘innocent,’” Genevieve pointed out.
Nail shrugged. “’Kay. No fifty-cal. The other shit’s nonlethal, more or less, and I don’t see how we crash that party without it.”
Karyn flipped the top of the box open. “Is this an advance?”
“No,” Genevieve said, waggling her finger. “Like Nail said, it’s an expense account. If that won’t do it—I’m not sure I can go back to the well, but I’m not sure I can’t, either.”
“Christmas in August,” Nail said. “Oh man, am I gonna have some phone calls to make.”
He surveyed the room. Tommy still hadn’t been able to look away from the box, Genevieve was grinning broadly, and Karyn’s mouth had set in a line of quiet satisfaction. When he looked at Anna, she gave him a tight-lipped smile and a small, resentful shrug.
“Guess we’re all in,” Anna said.
“This job’s gonna be good for us,” Karyn said.
* * *
Anna slipped out of the apartment and pulled the door shut behind her. The air outside, hot, sticky, and stinking of exhaust and melting asphalt, felt almost as good as a nice cool swim compared to the place she’d just left. The morning had been endless, the apartment filled with a sullen silence that she had tried to paint over with noisy pop shit on the radio. By midmorning, she had been ready to kick the radio to death, but the complete absence of human voices in the apartment after would have been worse, maybe blowing up into a real screaming match if last night was any indication. When Tommy and Nail had arrived, the situation hadn’t improved any, but at least there was something else to focus on. Then Genevieve’s surprise delivery had completely changed
things. The brief planning session they’d had after that had gone well enough, but now Anna was brimming with questions.
She caught Genevieve just as she descended the stairs.
“Hey,” Anna said. “We need to talk.”
Genevieve leaned back against the railing and smiled. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“You want to go for a ride?”
“Is that what you wanted to talk about, or just where you want to talk about it?”
“The second one.”
“Let’s go.”
Genevieve’s ride was a Honda Civic that had seen better days, most of them over a decade ago. Anna brushed a fossilized French fry off the passenger seat and sat. Moments later, they were on the main road, noise from passing cars whooshing by as Genevieve drove. She kept it at exactly the speed limit, Anna noted.
“Lay it on me,” Genevieve said.
There was no easy or subtle way of going after this, so Anna plunged straight ahead. “What, exactly, is your relationship with Enoch Sobell?”
“About the same as yours,” Genevieve said without taking her eyes off the road.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Genevieve turned right at the next light and eased in next to a parking meter. Amber light from the dash illuminated the crescent of her cheek as she turned to meet Anna’s eyes. “It means just that. I don’t particularly like him, I don’t owe him my firstborn son, and, God help me, I’m not polishing his knob or anything like that. I’ve got a business relationship with the guy, and honestly, I’m probably never going to get out from under it. Same as you.”
“Same as me?”
Genevieve nodded. “Yeah. Once you start working for him, there’s really no walking away. If he thinks you’re useful, he’s gonna keep using you, and there’s not a lot
you can do about it. Between his money and his connections, he can completely fuck up your life if you piss him off.” She shrugged. “He pays well, so it could be worse.”
Anna remained silent, considering. A car drove by, bathing Genevieve’s face in glaring white light before dropping it into backlit darkness.
“You don’t look too surprised,” Genevieve said.
“Guess I’m not. I kinda figured this is how it would end up.”
“Top of the underworld food chain. That’s gotta count for something.”
“So, again: What, exactly, is your business relationship with Enoch Sobell? What’s the job
you’re
getting paid to do here?”
Genevieve twisted her mouth into her standard smirk. “What do you think?”
“So you’re his spy.”
“I prefer liaison. I mean, come on—it’s not like it’s a big secret. I do the go-between crap, give the creepy bastard an occasional status update, and I try to make sure the job gets done. Believe it or not, we really are all on the same side here. He dragged me into it because I know Mendelsohn, and because Tommy is in over his head on this one. Don’t tell me I haven’t been useful.”
Anna nodded. “Yeah. I’m just—yeah. Making sure, I guess.”
“No harm in that. We squared away?”
“Yeah.”
“Got anything else on the agenda for tonight?”
Anna’s first instinct was to pounce on that invitation like a cat on a scurrying rodent, but instead she leaned her head back against the window and sighed. “If I don’t get back soon, Karyn’s gonna rupture a blood vessel. Another time?”
“Sure. If we ever manage to work it into the schedule.” Genevieve grinned, washing away the disappointment that had surfaced briefly in her voice. “Home?”
“Home.”
The drive back took only a couple of minutes. Anna
got out at the curb, waved, and headed in to the apartment.
Karyn was still sitting at the table, shuffling through snapshots and plans. She looked up when Anna walked in, her face a still, cold mask. “You get everything you need?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Anna walked to her bedroom and closed the door. “Absolutely fucking everything,” she muttered.