Devil's Business bl-4

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “You must be hungry, luv. What can I bring you?”

  “I like burgers,” Kim said. “Burgers and chili fries.”

  “I’ll be back,” Pete said. Jack followed her to the door and caught her hand.

  “You sure about this?” he said. Pete gave him a smile.

  “I’ll be fine. Can’t hide in a shitty motel forever, can we? The girl’s got to eat, and so do I.” She turned her hand in his, and squeezed, before lifting his arm to examine it. “What happened to your jacket?”

  “Something thought it was tasty,” Jack said. Pete stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “Take it off. You look homeless.” She left, and Jack locked the door after her and went about chalking a hex. Not that it would do shit against Abbadon, but it was familiar and he needed something to do.

  Kim spoke from the bed. “She really loves you.”

  “Don’t know about that,” Jack said. “Tolerates, maybe.”

  Kim folded her hands over her stomach and swung her feet up on the bed. “Put the TV on. I don’t want to hear the hooker in the next room faking her way to twenty bucks.”

  Jack turned the telly to a news program and sat next to Kim. “Got some experience with that?”

  She sniffed. “That obvious?”

  “People like Anna prey on people on the game, and junkies, and runaways. Lost souls. I doubt it was your fault.”

  “I had a kid,” Kim said quietly. “Before this one. I was seventeen. He was born addicted to meth.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said.

  “When this happened, I was clean and I was living at Anna’s,” Kim said. “Getting fucked by her kinky friends wasn’t so bad. She fed us and we weren’t prisoners. Place to live. It wasn’t rape. More than I can say for when I was hooking.”

  “Did you really think you could raise your kid in that place and everything would turn out fine?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t fucking know,” Kim muttered. “I don’t even know who the father is, but I do know the baby’s going to be healthy this time and I’ll take it from there.”

  “Until Abbadon takes it from you and uses it as a vessel for one of his pals,” Jack said. “He screwed up with the last child. He won’t take that chance with you.”

  Kim sniffed again, and in the light of the TV Jack saw wet lines on her face. “What am I supposed to do?” she demanded. “If it’s not that, they’ll still take the kid. That guy you came with, Sanford. He told Anna when I got it in me he wanted to adopt it. Legal and everything. I thought it’d be great—he’s rich, and he could give the kid stuff I couldn’t.” Kim started to sob in earnest, her shoulders fluttering like wings. “When I found out … what he wanted it for … I knew this wouldn’t be any different than my other boy. But you don’t ask a man like Harlan Sanford questions. You just give him what he wants.”

  Jack peered through the curtains. Concentric cigarette burns let in the lights of the boulevard, the endless line of cars, and the hard diamond glitter of the Hollywood Hills beyond. “That you do,” he murmured.

  “Hey, where’s your woman?” Kim said. “I’m fucking starving.”

  “Excellent question,” Jack said. A burger shack sat diagonally across the parking lot from the motel, and he peered through the curtains again. Pete’s small, thin shadow was nowhere to be found.

  “Stay here,” he told Kim, stepping onto the landing and shutting the door behind him. “Pete?” he called.

  The parking lot was empty, mostly full of rusted-out cars and a few caravans, their windows covered with tattered curtains. “Pete!” he shouted, leaning over the rail to check the breezeway below.

  “Hey!” A door banged open, and a shirtless bloke with a gut leaned out, glaring at Jack over piggy cheeks. “Shut the fuck up,” he snarled.

  Jack pointed a finger at him. “Go back in your room.” He felt a wave of the Black batter against him, and knew from the man’s expression that his eyes were flaring ghost blue.

  The door slammed, and Jack started down the stairs. He’d panicked reflexively, and his heart was thumping fast enough that he could’ve just taken a snort of speed. “Pete!” he shouted. The motel sign in the window of the reception office glowed blue, telling him there was VACANCY … CLEAN ROOMS … AIR CONDITIONING. The sign flickered as he passed.

  He jogged across the lot to the burger shack. The interior was lit with harsh bulbs that washed out all the color, from the faded food pictures hanging above the counter to the teenager swiping a mop half-heartedly across the gray floors. He looked up when Jack banged the door open. “Fryer’s off. We’re closing in ten minutes.”

  “You see a woman in here?” Jack asked. His heartbeat had taken on a rhythm, a drum line of panic. No, no, no, no … “Black hair, leather jacket, about so big?” He held out his hand to Pete’s height.

  The boy shrugged. “Nah, man. Nobody like that.”

  “Maybe I can help.” Jack was only half-surprised to see Gator step out of the shadows of the corridor to the loo.

  “Where is she?” he said. He pulled the Black to him, felt his talent flare in his mind. He’d burn Gator where he stood if that was what it took, and he wouldn’t feel one iota of regret.

  “She’s fine,” Gator said. “You know, it didn’t have to be this way. Y’all made it real difficult for us to do what needs to be done.” He shook his head. “Mr. Sanford’s real upset with the two of you. He had me put Miss Caldecott up in one of his properties as insurance.”

  “Insurance for what?” His hands were sweating, and he was numb, but not with the unearthly cold he’d felt when he’d killed Parker. This was fury, and he recognized it. Rage and Jack were old friends, drinking partners, had spent long evenings together when he was younger and more foolish. It gifted him with broken bones and busted teeth and stints in lockup, but rage was a good friend to have when you were looking at someone like Gator who’d just kidnapped your pregnant girlfriend.

  “For Mr. Sanford,” Gator said. “He has to make sure you won’t get crazy and go off on him.”

  The door creaked again, and Sanford entered. He took a seat in the first booth by the door, and gestured Jack into the bench opposite. “I apologize for the hardball, Jack,” he said.

  Jack sat. He couldn’t think of a better response. Well, he could burn Gator’s face off and kick Sanford until even his own mother wouldn’t recognize his corpse, but that wouldn’t help Pete. He had to stay calm, for Pete. Get Sanford to tell him what he’d done with her. Play the game and not panic, not react like every bit of him was screaming to. For once, he could keep it together long enough to actually be the one who made things right again.

  “Isn’t this nice?” Sanford said. He gestured at Gator, who slipped the teenager a few bills.

  “Get that fryer goin’, boy. Bacon cheeseburgers all around, and make me up a batch of those cheese fries. Extra cheese.”

  The teenager looked at the three of them in turn, and then shrugged and went behind the counter, hitting switches to turn on the lights and the cookers.

  “In Hollywood we call this a sit-down, Jack,” Sanford said. “A meeting between opposing parties to find a mutually beneficial outcome.”

  “Where is she, Sanford?” Jack splayed his palms flat on the table. If he could keep his eyes on them, he could stay calm long enough to figure a way out of this. The ends of his tattoos curled around the base of his thumbs, crept between the webbing of his fingers. The fury of the Morrigan wasn’t going to do one fucking bit of good now. Pete depended on him not slagging Sanford off. She depended on him being clever, which didn’t come naturally. Smashing someone in the face was much more instinctive.

  “She’s fine,” Sanford said. “You think I’d manhandle a pregnant woman? You really have a low opinion of your fellow man, Jack.”

  “Things like you aren’t men,” Jack said. “A man wouldn’t take a woman’s baby to be used as a piece of fucking Tupperware for something like Abbadon.”

  “You rea
lly think that child would’ve had any kind of life with somebody like Kim in a place like Anna’s?” Sanford nodded his thanks to the teenager as he set down baskets of burgers and fries. “She was a junkie and a streetwalking whore when Anna found her. That’s not a mother, Jack. That’s a bitch who drops a litter.”

  He took a bite of his burger and licked his fingers. “You should try this. They know how to do meat right here.”

  Gator took a fistful of cheese fries and shoved them into his mouth. “Sure do. Just like home.”

  “In a way, Jack,” Sanford said. “You owe me one. You knocked off Parker without so much as a sorry.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jack said. “You let your pet monster off the chain, Sanford, and I put it down. You want to have a moment of silence? Maybe light a candle? Didn’t know the two of you were so close.”

  Gator grabbed him by the back of his neck, slammed his head into the plastic tabletop, and held it there. Jack could smell the chili powder and grease on his fingertips. “He was my friend, asswipe.”

  “Gator.” Sanford ticked his finger back and forth like a metronome. One, two, three. “That’s enough.”

  “You and me ain’t finished, boy,” Gator whispered in Jack’s ear. “Sooner or later, I’m gonna get you alone, and then the pain’s going to come.”

  “Looking forward to it, darling,” Jack grunted.

  “Let him up,” Sanford ordered. “Now.”

  “Sure, boss,” Gator said, and Jack straightened up, rubbing feeling back into his cheek.

  “Now’s the part where you threaten again to kill Pete if I don’t help you, right?” Jack folded his arms. “Get on with it, then.”

  “That threat never went away,” Sanford said. “But allow me to motivate you, rather than try more useless scare tactics. Abbadon knows you screwed him. He knows you tried to take his vessel away, and he won’t stop until he finds you. You think a couple of bespelled junkies are the extent of his reach? They’re not. Not by a long shot.”

  Jack gave voice to the whirlpool that had been brewing in his head since he’d found Kim. “What’re you up to, Sanford? You know an awful lot about Abbadon for somebody who’s only heard about him this morning. From me. Always a little breadcrumb when I got off the trail. Always a convenient helping hand.”

  He stood up, shoving his elbow into Gator’s gut on purpose. “Fuck you and your game, Sanford. Either you tell me what you’re really on about or I’m walking. I’ll figure out where Pete is on my own, and you know what’ll happen to you when I do.”

  Gator bared his teeth, gold gleaming almost black under the harsh light. “Maybe, but you know we’ll mess her up ’forehand.”

  Jack turned his eyes on him. “You lay one finger on Pete and it’ll be the last thing you live to regret. Make no mistake.”

  Sanford spread his hands. “This is all completely unnecessary posturing on your part, Jack. Fact is, if you knew the truth, you wouldn’t have helped me.”

  “And now?” Jack said.

  Sanford grinned, that maddening grin with vast emptiness behind it. “Now I suppose it doesn’t make a difference. You needed persuading, and I persuaded you, and nobody needs to gnash their teeth over it. Do as I ask and Pete will be sound as a pound. That is the expression, correct?”

  Jack found that rather debatable, personally, but he just nodded. Information over reaction. Calm over chaos. That was how Pete would do it. Pete would protect herself, and him, and Kim. She’d get to the bottom of it and find out what Sanford and Abbadon were really up to.

  “Fine. You got me,” Jack said. Sanford clapped his hands together and then wiped them with a wad of paper.

  “Excellent. Gator, pay up and go get the whore. We can’t have her running around in her condition.”

  Gator pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and shoved it at the teenager. “You did good, kid. Never saw nothing, right?”

  “Y-yes, sir,” the kid stammered. “Have a good night, sir.”

  Sanford escorted Jack to the same black SUV, but this time they both sat in the back seat. Presently, Gator came back, prehistoric brow set in a frown. “Whore’s not there.”

  “Fuck,” Sanford muttered, passing a hand over his face. “Abbadon can deal with her, then. Women are a pain in the ass, Jack. Don’t let that one you’ve gotten saddled with tell you any different.”

  Gator drove, but they didn’t go to Sanford’s house. They drove far to the east, past the outlying bits of Los Angeles, past Riverside and Thousand Oaks and into the high desert, until Jack could look down the mountains behind him and see Los Angeles spread out like a handful of broken glass under a streetlamp, gleaming and shattered into a thousand fragments.

  “Bright lights,” Sanford said. “Blinding, really. Hard to see what’s staring at you from the dark outside.”

  “I know what is,” Jack said. “So where the fuck are we going?”

  “To the truth,” Sanford said, as the car slowed and they turned up a long drive, lined with the wispy, dancing forms of cypress trees. “About me, Abbadon, and all of it. What you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Jack looked up the drive to the dark shadow of the house beyond. The Black was thick here, almost thick enough to touch, springing from the center of the roof and swirling across his senses in a tsunami.

  “Not really,” he told Sanford, but he got out of the car, gravel crunching under his boots, and walked toward the deep well of the Black anyway.

  PART THREE

  RESURRECTION

  “Kiss my ass.”

  —Last words of John Wayne Gacy

  CHAPTER 22

  There was silence when Jack approached the house, except for his boots on the gravel drive and the click of Gator’s lighter as he lit one of his brown, wormlike fags. No birds, no coyotes, not even wind disturbed the space around the house.

  Places like this were rare, places where the Black exerted such perfect control over the environment of the daylight world. Usually they were concentration camps, mass graves, sites of massacre or cold-blooded murder. Jack had backpacked in Belgium and stood in the perfect stillness of the Ardennes Forest, watched the green- and gray-uniformed spirits flit among the trees, and heard the absolute stillness of the Black, which had absorbed the deaths of thousands on the soft, spongy ground.

  Sanford at his shoulder made him jump. He tried to disguise it as working the kinks from his neck, but Sanford’s grin told him he hadn’t managed it. “Aren’t you going to ask me where we are?”

  Jack shrugged. “Wouldn’t want to rob you of tour-guiding.”

  “You know,” Sanford said, starting for the front steps, broad as three bodies laid end to end, “that whole smartass defense mechanism isn’t fooling anyone.” He looked back at Jack, his eyes pools in the low light. “Everyone is afraid of something, Jack. Even you.”

  Gator shoved Jack from behind. “Move it, peckerwood.”

  The doors opened at Sanford’s approach, and he shoved them wide. “You said you wanted the truth, Jack. So come in.”

  Jack looked up out of habit. Nothing was carved into the doorframe, and no hexes hung in place, but the psychic void inside would be enough to deter all but the most ignorant of mages. Which placed him squarely there, he supposed. Jack Winter, tilting at windmills and leaping off cliffs.

  The foyer was laid out in tiles that rang under his heels. Dead leaves skittered in the corners when the door shut. A fountain dominated the center, a nymph being swallowed by a many-eyed, tentacled sea beast. The nymph had long lines of rust traveling down her breasts and the apex of her thighs, water long gone.

  “Nice place,” he said. Sanford flipped an old push-button switch and a single bulb in the chandelier above flickered to life.

  “It gets the job done,” he said. “Built by an orange farmer in the twenties. Howard Hughes stayed here. And Basil Locke bought it in 1939.”

  Gator was still in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, and Sanford snapped his fingers at him. “For fuck’s sake,
nothing is going to bite you. Get in here.”

  Jack watched the big man’s back stiffen. Maybe Gator wasn’t as colossal a moron as he appeared. If Jack had a choice, he wouldn’t be here either. While Sanford puttered around, he went over the list. Pete wouldn’t be here—he would’ve felt her, if she was anywhere on the grounds. She wouldn’t be at Sanford’s house. Too obvious for a man who loved a twist ending. That left a myriad of places Jack hadn’t guessed at yet, which meant he had to go along with Sanford a little longer. He just hoped he didn’t lose his temper and stave the bastard’s face in before he made sure Pete was safe.

  “Locke made a couple of films overseas,” Sanford said. He walked, turning on lights as he went, until they stood in a vast atrium that overlooked the view of Los Angeles, far in the distance. “Genre stuff, nothing that the international audience was interested in. But he met a nice young man named Heinrich Himmler in Germany, in 1938. What a Russian-born lapsed Jew was doing partying with fledgling Nazis, I couldn’t tell you, but he picked up some interesting theories. Did you know that both Himmler and Hitler were deeply involved with the Thule?”

  “Everybody knows that,” Jack said. “It’s not exactly a state secret.”

  “The Nazis didn’t understand the Black,” Sanford said. “Didn’t understand that to use magic you had to have your frequency tuned in the first place. Have the knack. But Locke did. And when he came back, he bought this mansion. Spent more and more time up here. After 1942, he never made another film. He died here, in obscurity, with massive debts. A couple of studio heads kicked in and bought the place out of pity, used it for a few location shoots, but as you can tell…” He gestured around the empty room. A single ratty sofa, the kind of plaid that always seemed to be stained with beer and cum no matter how clean it was, sat in one corner, its arms chewed by rats.

  “Not exactly a comforting sort of air to the place,” Jack said.

  “Film crews suffered a rash of unexplained deaths, a wing caught fire in the seventies and burned some no-name actress,” Sanford said. “After the fire, the estate came looking for investors, and they contacted me.” He grinned, walking to the windows. Outside, a swimming pool full of dead branches and a foot or so of stinking sewer-tinged water glowed with oily life. “I knew right away what had gone on here.”