The 5th Witch

by Graham Masterton

  The witch suddenly stopped howling and stared at Annie with contempt. “You think this chit of a girl is any match for me?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarser than ever. “You have no idea what you have let loose, either of you.”

  Dan said, “If you give us some help here, things will go a whole lot easier on you. I can promise you that.”

  “The only help you need is a helping hand to hell.”

  “You understand the seriousness of the charges against you? Even if you’re not looking at the death penalty, you’re looking at several lifetimes locked up in Valley State.”

  “You really think that frightens me?”

  “Come on,” said Dan, trying to sound reasonable. “All you have to do is tell us your name and where you come from.”

  “You know who I am, and you know where I come from.”

  “Yes, but just for the record.”

  The witch stared at him without saying anything, and for the first time in his life Dan felt serious dread.

  “Okay, you don’t want to talk. I’ll come back later.”

  “It will do you no good, I promise you. And as for her—” She waved her bony-fingered hand at Annie and said, “—she thinks she knows the craft, but she knows nothing. If she could truly see the future, she would cut her wrists with a broken piss-bottle.”

  Annie didn’t answer, but gave the witch a surprisingly indulgent smile.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Dan. “Maybe a few more hours in here will make her see some sense. Besides, we have some more witches to catch, don’t we?”

  The witch started to chuckle, and more strings of saliva slid from her lips.

  “I’ll tell you something,” said Dan. “You really do have a serious drool issue.”

  At that, the witch twisted her head around and spat directly in his face. Dan pulled out a crumpled Kleenex and wiped off the spittle in disgust, but it was clinging and viscous, and it was like trying to disentangle himself from a very wet spiderweb.

  “Do you know what happens if a witch spits on you?” The witch grinned. “This young girl will tell you. You will never marry, you will never have children, and you will never be happy for the rest of your life.”

  Dan took Annie’s arm, and they pressed the buzzer for Officer Ridley to let them out. The witch gave them one last mocking look, and then she went back to her rocking and her ululating.

  As they walked back along the corridor, Dan kept on furiously rubbing at his face. “Yuck! Is it true what she said?”

  “About never marrying and never having children and never being happy? Oh, it will be if the curse is never lifted. But most curses can be lifted. I can lift it for you myself with a little angelica and some rose of Jericho. Oh, and maybe some rue.”

  “Get anything out of her?” asked Officer Ridley. “Apart from spit, I mean.”

  “Are you kidding me? If I hadn’t seen for myself what she’s capable of doing, I would have put her down as a total nutjob.”

  But Annie said, “The most important thing is she’s sealed up in here, so she can’t share her power with the other three. Once we’ve caught them all, and sealed them up, too, their sisterhood will be broken up forever. I’m not saying they’ll ever be completely harmless. They’re witches, after all. But they won’t be able to take over a whole city again.”

  They climbed the stairs. The whole station was bustling, officers hurrying in all directions, carrying helmets and carbines and shrugging themselves into Point Blank Body Armor. It was ten after six, and the operation to arrest the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov was already under way. Outside they could hear engines starting, and there was a smell of exhaust fumes in the warm early-evening air.

  “I should come with you,” said Annie. “I could give you some protection in case anything goes wrong.”

  “We can’t have civilians on a bust. Much too dangerous—and distracting, too.”

  “What about the staff at the country club?”

  “Guttuso’s booked one of their private dining rooms. He always does. He doesn’t like to be seen in public these days, and he’s always worried about somebody taking a potshot at him. We’re going to evacuate all the waiters before we go in and move them well back out of the firing line. Now maybe you’d better get home. You have a hungry kitten who needs feeding.”

  “Dan—”

  “Look, don’t worry. At least I have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to be up against. And I’ll have my cell phone with me. If I need any magical advice, I’ll call you.”

  “It’s not that. It’s Ernie.”

  Dan had taken out his gun and was checking it to make sure it was clean and fully loaded. “Ernie? What about him?”

  “When I read Rosa’s fortune…I told her that I saw her and the boys standing in a beautiful garden.”

  “That’s right. And?”

  “What I didn’t tell her was that the garden was a cemetery, with headstones, and that Ernie wasn’t there. Rosa was a widow.”

  Dan slowly holstered his gun and frowned at her. “Ernie was dead? Like, how far into the future are we talking about?”

  “I’m not sure. It upset me, so I didn’t want to continue. All I can tell you is that the boys looked much more grown up than they do now, maybe fifteen or sixteen—but who knows? Ernie might have been dead for years and they were visiting his grave.”

  “Shit,” said Dan. Then, “Listen, when you read somebody’s fortune, does it always come true? What I mean is—is there any way of changing it?”

  “I think it’s unavoidable. You can’t alter the future any more than you can alter the past.”

  “Is there any way of finding out when he’s going to die? If we go find him, could we do it now?”

  “We could try. But I can’t tell his fortune unless he wants me to.”

  As if he had been cued for a stage appearance, Ernie appeared through the jostling crowds of officers. “Hey, muchacho! How did you get on with Endora?”

  “She spat on me, put a curse on me, and told us we were a couple of know-nothing losers, but apart from that—great.”

  “You ready to roll?”

  “Sure. But there’s something I wanted to ask you first. I know you weren’t too happy about Annie telling your fortune for you—not in front of Rosa—but maybe you could let her do it now.”

  Ernie blinked at him. “You want Annie to tell my fortune? Why?”

  “For fun. But she also can tell if you need to take any special precautions.”

  “Special precautions? You mean this evening? While we’re doing this bust?”

  “Not necessarily. Just, you know, in general. After all, you have Carlo and Sancho to think of, as well as Rosa.”

  “What do you mean by special precautions?”

  “Well, like maybe wearing body armor.”

  “Are you wearing body armor?”

  “No…but we’re not front line, are we? It won’t be us kicking the doors down.”

  “So, if you’re not wearing body armor, why should I?”

  “Because you should. That’s all I can tell you. Better yet, why don’t you tell the lieutenant you’re sick? Go home. Drink lots of Corona. Play dominos with your boys.”

  Ernie turned to Annie. His expression was very serious. “When you were telling Rosa’s fortune, did you see something?”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Ernie. I can’t be sure. But I think it would be a good idea if I told your fortune, too, so that you know what to look out for, and when.”

  “No. I told you before. If each day is not a surprise, then what is the point in living at all? This is a dangerous job we do. Any day we could get hurt or maybe killed. I know that. I could die from eating too many burritos. I could die from a Russian space satellite falling on my head. It’s not up to me what happens. It’s up to God.”

  “El Gordo,” Dan appealed. “You’re making no sense, man. Look, suppose you stepped off the curb and there was a truck barreling toward
you at sixty miles an hour, and I shouted, ‘Look out!’ Would you carry on walking because it wasn’t my responsibility to stop you from getting squished, it was God’s?”

  “I don’t care. You don’t tell my fortune. That’s it. That’s my decision, okay?”

  “Okay, if you won’t do it, you won’t do it. But if you get killed, don’t come whining to me.”

  They drove out of the police station and headed west on Sunset. The sun was dazzling, so Dan put on his mirrored sunglasses. Ernie had sat on his sunglasses last week, and so he had a monstrous lump of grubby Band-Aid right between his eyes to hold them together.

  They made up an informal motorcade. Ahead of them there were five squad cars, and behind them came two black SWAT vans.

  “I’d love to know how the captain got himself the green light for this little caper,” said Dan. “I thought the chief wanted us to leave these sleazebags to their own devices.”

  He stopped for a red traffic signal and watched appreciatively as a girl with very long blond hair and a very short checkered skirt crossed the road in front of them.

  “Now there’s the kind of woman I should be chasing tonight,” he said, raising his sunglasses and giving the girl his special toothy grin. “Not some crabby old gang of witches.” The girl turned around as she reached the opposite side of the road and gave him the finger.

  Ernie shook his head. “If I were you, muchacho, I would stick to witches. And don’t grin like that. It’s terrible.”

  “What do you mean? It never fails, that grin.”

  “Sure. It never fails to make you look like you just arrived from the Ozarks.”

  They followed the squad cars as they turned up Laurel Canyon. After a while, Ernie said, “From what I was hearing back at the station, the chief is pretty much a basket case. Stays in his office all day and won’t talk to nobody. Scared of his own reflection, that’s what they say. The only reason they haven’t replaced him is because Artisson and Vasquez and Krylov have insisted that he stay. Deputy Chief Days isn’t much better, but he seems to have gotten at least one of his balls back.”

  They drove along Mulholland until they reached the entrance to West Grove Country Club. Two sandstone pillars supported a wrought-iron arch with the club’s insignia in the center of it—a coronet and two crossed golf clubs. Beyond the arch, a red asphalt drive curved up toward a collection of low, art-deco style buildings. The main clubhouse had an entrance like a 1930s movie theater, and the steps that led up to it were built on top of a reflecting pool with ducks and a fountain.

  To the left of the clubhouse, around a shady courtyard, there was a complex of conference rooms and private dining rooms. It was in here that the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov were meeting with Giancarlo Guttuso.

  Dan parked at an angle outside the country club entrance and climbed out of his SUV. Lieutenant Harris was already there, talking to the SWAT commander—a squat barrel-chested man with a prickly ginger mustache.

  “Looks like we’re dead on schedule,” said Lieutenant Harris. “We have twenty-seven plainclothes officers inside the club, posing as members and guests, and they’ve gradually been extracting all the civilians and most of the staff. The last of them will be coming out any minute now.

  “We have another thirty-six officers dressed as waiters and kitchen staff, and as soon as the place is clear, they’ll split up into teams of six. Six of them will go for each of the witches, and six of them will go for each of the mobsters. We have another team to get Guttuso and his bodyguards out of there. Detective Scott’s in charge of that because Guttuso knows him and trusts him.”

  He looked around. The golf course that surrounded the country club was emerald green and peaceful, and a cool evening breeze was blowing from the west. The parking lot was full of gleaming black SUVs—Cadillac Escalades, BMWs, and Porsche Cayennes. A groundsman in an orange baseball cap was sweeping the front steps of the clubhouse as if he had been given the rest of his natural life to do it, but apart from that, the club looked deserted.

  Dan, however, could see the black-uniformed officers lying in the shadow of the bunkers, concealed in the alcoves beside the main entrance to the clubhouse, and crouching behind the ornamental flower planters and the wide-spreading cedar trees.

  “I’m assuming that you’ve briefed these guys about the witches?” he asked Lieutenant Harris.

  “They’ve been told that they’re something different from your garden-variety gangster’s arm candy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I mean have you told them that they have supernatural powers? Have you told them that they can shake people to death without even touching them and make them puke up the most disgusting stuff that you can think of?”

  “Hey, come on, Detective. You told me that you’d taken most of their power away from them.”

  “I have. But these officers still need to be aware that these women can work magic spells.”

  “They’ve been warned that all three women have unusual abilities in unarmed combat. If I had told them about ‘magic spells,’ do you honestly think they would have believed me? I told them to go in very hard and very fast and to physically restrain the women before anybody else. Gag them, too.”

  “Well, I guess that’s good advice. At least they won’t be able to do any whispering or charming or incantations.”

  Lieutenant Harris gave him a long, sober look. “When this is over, Dan, I want you to take a psych evaluation and a long vacation someplace normal, where ‘spell’ means ‘a short period of time,’ and nothing else.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It was 6:58 P.M. when one of Vasili Krylov’s heavies came out of the main entrance to the country club in his dark designer suit and his floral designer necktie and lit a cigarette.

  He leaned on the railing overlooking the reflecting pool, blowing smoke. Lieutenant Harris said, “Some fricking timing.”

  They waited tensely while the Russian continued to smoke.

  “We can bring him down,” said the SWAT commander.

  “In total silence? Before he has the chance to shout out or let off a shot?”

  “Sure. Officer Lefkowitz over there can blow off a mosquito’s left nut from a mile and a half away.”

  “We can’t just kill him in cold blood, Sergeant. So far he’s presenting us with no threat whatsoever, let alone a deadly threat.”

  “He’s a goddamned inconvenience. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Have two of your guys jump him. Then we’ll go in.”

  The SWAT commander gave a complicated hand signal to one of the officers hiding in the alcoves beside the main entrance. There was a moment’s pause, and then two officers came running toward the Russian while he was still leaning against the railing with his back turned.

  But he must have heard their composition-soled boots drumming across the decking because he half turned around, and when he saw them coming toward him he rolled over the top of the railing and dropped into the pool. He made a loud splash, and he startled the ducks, but the pool was only seven or eight inches deep, and he recovered his balance and started to run diagonally across it, leaping and bounding like a champion hurdler. He ran straight through the fountain in a burst of spray.

  “Goddamn it to hell!” cursed the SWAT commander. “Get in after him, you clowns!”

  The two SWAT officers clambered over the railing and jumped into the water, but the Russian was already screaming on his walkie-talkie. “Police! Police!”

  As he reached the far side of the pool, more SWAT officers rose from the nearby sand bunkers, and he shouted, “Chyort voz’mi! Police everywhere!”

  “Go!” said Lieutenant Harris, and the SWAT commander echoed, “Go!”

  But instantly, with a thunderous bang, the doors to the country club’s main entrance slammed shut. Every other door and window slammed shut, too, dozens of them, one after the other, like tumultuous applause.

  “They’ve locked the whole place down!” cra
ckled a voice over Lieutenant Harris’s walkie-talkie. “We’ll have to use the breaching ram!”

  Ernie looked at Dan uneasily. “How did they do that? Shut all those doors and windows, all at once? I thought they couldn’t hardly do nothing no more.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dan, but he wasn’t at all happy about it. He began to feel that something was about to go badly wrong. “Lieutenant!” he shouted. “Maybe the men need to pull back.”

  “Too late now!” Lieutenant Harris responded. “Come on, you guys, let’s get in there! Hard and fast!”

  The SWAT teams came pouring out of concealment and ran toward the country club buildings from all directions. Five men started to batter down the main doors, while the other teams swarmed around the conference center and the private dining rooms. They quickly set up mobile floodlights and swung them around to shine on the dining-room windows—although the shutters were all closed, and they couldn’t see the mobsters inside. The double oak doors were firmly closed, too.

  “Okay—go!” yelled the SWAT commander.

  Four men ran forward, carrying a breaching ram between them, while a dozen others covered them. But they hadn’t even reached the first step when the doors were flung open, and three figures appeared, calm and unblinking in the brilliant floodlight.

  On the left was Michelange DuPriz, wearing a clinging scarlet dress and a necklace of shining copper disks. Her snakelike hair appeared to be writhing like a Gorgon’s. On the right was Miska Vedma in a very short dress of metallic bronze satin and a bronze satin cap that completely covered her head, like a swimmer.

  In the center, her arms spread wide, was Lida Siado in a filmy yellow dress that looked like flames, and her hair tied up in a yellow chiffon scarf. Her eyes were staring and her white teeth were bared in a furious grimace. She could have been a madwoman on the steps of an asylum.

  “Have you no ears?” she screamed at the SWAT team. “Did you not hear our agreement, that we should live together in harmony?”