I did my best not to squirm as he peeled me down to the core with his red-eyed gaze. “Yeah, well,” I said.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” he said. “So what if you can light something on fire with a few words or move books across the room without touching them? In respectable work, that’s not gonna help the quarterly bottom line any.” He put the glass on the table and spun it between his two hands. “And the price. Don’t forget the price. We work with demons, Jimmy, and if we’re not careful, their influence can creep in and corrupt everything we touch. If regular people knew what we do, and how we do it, they’d burn us at the stake. They have burned us at the stake. These days, we’re a lot more circumspect. They might hear whispers, but nobody takes the whispers all that seriously.”
“There’s . . . nothing?”
“Certainly nothing that might attract any attention from the public. And besides, look at it this way. Suppose you’re an army sniper. You’ve spent years learning how to put a bullet in a two-inch circle from a mile off. That’s all you know how to do. When you’re discharged, what do you do? You can kill a Central American dictator a mile away in a high wind, but the marketing department doesn’t have much use for that. Neither does the IT department. Or Accounting.” He sighed and poured himself another couple of fingers of bourbon. “Well, that’s us. You, me, Lazzaro. A couple hundred others I know of on the East Coast, a few hundred more on the West. Maybe ten thousand in the world, all told.”
I thought about his sniper analogy. “What about the government?”
He curled his upper lip in something halfway between a snarl and a sneer. “There are a few of us. Working their asses off in some desert shithole under constant surveillance, in case one day they step over that last line and the demons move in. The ones that aren’t the subjects of fucking experiments, anyway.” He shook his head. “There is no straight for us. You want to do magic, you do it from the underworld. Appropriate, no?”
I nodded.
I didn’t go back to school after that. Ma was furious, as expected. I let her shout until she was hoarse and then did what I was gonna do anyway. My old man looked at me like I was a new species of gorilla or something, but he had long since finished arguing.
In mid-January, I moved into an upstairs apartment a little way down the block. I still saw my folks almost every day, but now I didn’t have to worry about them worrying about my coming and going at all hours. My weekly nut had gone up to two grand, since I was doing pretty well, and the comings-and-goings had gotten a lot worse as I tried to keep up with that.
I also started going to church every Sunday.
* * *
I sat in the church, tenth row from the back next to my parents, staring over the priest’s head at the crucifix. It was huge, maybe twelve feet high, with the starring actor carved and painted in loving detail, slightly larger than life-size. I’d been staring at that thing almost every Sunday since I could remember, always looking for something in the emaciated stack of ribs and rivulets of glistening blood. When I was a kid, that crucifix had scared the bejesus out of me. Sister Mary Catherine explained the concepts of sin and damnation to us at CCD one day, and every Sunday after, I’d look up at that tortured figure, waiting for him to open his eyes, uncurl the thorns from off his head, and step down from his cross. I was sure he would single me out with a crooked finger, come over, and thrash the living hell out of me.
I must have missed the forgiveness part of Sister Mary’s lecture.
When I got older, I watched for something else, and even I wasn’t quite sure what. By the time most kids are fourteen or so, they’ve started to go one of two ways—wild-eyed rebellion and rejection of everything their parents stand for, or gung-ho acceptance. As far as religion was concerned, I was lost somewhere in the middle. You don’t need to see a lot of the world, especially if you grow up in a poor, rough section of town, to start to suspect there might be a big helping of bullshit served up every Sunday along with the religion, and it’s not much of a step past that to guess that maybe a big portion of that bullshit is the religion. I had a lot of doubts. That wasn’t the sort of talk I could have with Ma or even my old man—they wouldn’t hear any of it—and Sister Mary Catherine and her ilk would have gotten so mad they would have simply ruptured something vital and dropped dead if I brought it up with them. So I stared up at the crucifix every Sunday, looking for some shred of revelation that never came. I privately concluded that it wasn’t ever going to come, and that the whole thing was crap.
And now here I was, staring up at the crucifix again. Now that I’d felt the thrill of magic, that rush that blew through my body like sex and drugs and the first drop of a big roller coaster—and now that somebody had told me the score, told me the price—church had become a mystery again. If Benedict was to be believed—and he’d never lied to me yet—demons were at the heart of magic. And if that was true, well, what did it suggest about the sorrowful figure at the front of the church, hanging from his awful tree?
It was enough to make a guy question his career path. I watched, waiting for a sign, a nod, any confirmation. As always, I was denied.
When Mass was over, I got up to leave with everyone else. I made it out to the foyer, and Kit grabbed me by the shoulder.
“Hey, what—”
“Come on,” she said, already dragging me back toward the stairwell.
I followed amicably enough, though part of me wondered if she was just doing me the courtesy of taking me somewhere private before slapping some cuffs on me. I knew better, mostly, but my heart sped up just the same.
She whirled on me the instant I rounded the corner.
“What are you mixed up in, Jimmy? You need to tell me, right now.” She had switched, rather effortlessly I thought, into full-on Cop Intimidation Mode, standing a few inches away from me, eyes wide and burning. She was half a head shorter than me, but I still felt like she was about ready to pull a Temple of Doom and rip my heart out through my chest. I put my macho on a shelf for a minute and took a step back. It just seemed safer.
“I’m not gonna talk about that. What’s this about?”
I saw one of her hands flex, like she was itching for a nightstick. “‘What’s this about?’ Jesus, Jimmy!”
“Blasphemy,” I said mildly.
Another of those red-hot laser beam glares. “That—that farm. The one you gave me directions to. The FBI raided it last night.”
“Huh. That was fast.” At least, that was the impression I got from listening to the guys at the club. To hear them talk, the FBI needed six months of surveillance to go across the street and buy a newspaper. “Good. Great. What are you so mad about?”
“I’ve got friends, Jimmy. I heard about what was going on up there.” Her cop facade cracked, and a sickened look took its place. “It’s horrible.”
“I know that. Why do you think I told you about it?”
“These people you’re in with aren’t playing games. This isn’t cops and robbers and at the end of the day you’ll pack up your toy guns and go home. I’ve seen what they do. These are the kind of people that will feed you your dick, then gut you like a fish while you watch, then leave you to bleed to death in the middle of the street. I’m not kidding.”
“Those aren’t my people,” I protested.
“No?” The steel was back in her voice. “Then tell me how you knew where to go. How you knew what they’d find there.”
I would have loved to tell her, if that weren’t the sort of thing that could be used against me in a court of law. “I can’t. But I swear I don’t have anything to do with the Russians. I got those directions through a—a third party. And that’s really all I can say about it.”
She watched my face as I spoke, and waited, staring me down, when I finished. Her gaze made me want to squirm, but I had nothing else to give her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a folded scrap of paper. “My buddy at the FBI wants you
to call him if you run across anything else. He’ll protect your anonymity, but he sure could use more tips like that one.”
She extended the paper to me. I stared at it like it was a venomous snake made out of nuclear waste, wearing a sweater knitted from the live squirming bodies of black widow spiders. No way I was getting anywhere near it. The FBI didn’t know me, didn’t give a shit about me, and they’d hang me out to dry faster than Joey the Slob as soon as it was convenient. Fuck that.
I thought about what Kit had said, though, and I made a different choice. Kit was Southie. One of us. We looked after our own, didn’t have much use for outsiders, and I guessed she probably didn’t have a lot more use for the FBI than I did. “No way,” I said. “Not gonna do it.” She opened her mouth to object, and I continued. “Anything I find, I’ll give to you. Only you.”
Puzzlement knitted her brow. “Jimmy, I don’t work organized crime. I’m a beat cop, that’s it.”
“I don’t care. You’ll look out for me.”
“I don’t know if I can guarantee that,” she said. I thought her face said something else, though. She wasn’t thrilled about my new vocation, but I was a neighborhood kid, I’d come through with a big tip that saved a lot of people, and she wasn’t gonna fuck me over. If she caught me doing anything illegal, she’d bust me in a hummingbird’s heartbeat, but until then she’d look after me.
“We’ll see,” I said, and I started up the stairs.
“You’re gonna get killed, Jimmy. You ain’t Whitey Bulger, you know,” she said after me.
I grinned and turned the corner.
And that’s how I graduated from mere snitch to informant.
Chapter 8. The Wizard
Rumors flew like bullets at the club that afternoon. Kit might have gotten the news first, but it had reached the guys not long after, and it seemed like everybody had a different version of what went down.
“They had fifty kids in the barn, I heard,” Joey the Slob said. “They were movin’ through ’em like an assembly line.” He chuckled wetly. “Feds put a stop to that shit.”
“Yeah, the feds carted away Chebyshev’s guys by the truckload. Serves that creepy old fuck right.”
“I heard they had two hundred bodies buried out back—no guts, no teeth, no nothin’. Just piles of skin and bones.”
“It was just whores,” Sam insisted. “They were just runnin’ whores. You guys are nuts.”
“No,” Big George said. He’d gotten rid of the truck for us, and he knew better. “It wasn’t just whores.”
The details weren’t too clear, but I figured I didn’t ever want to know the details. The basic outline had been confirmed, and that was more than enough for me. I hung out through the afternoon, though, listening to the horror stories and losing game after game of pool to Tink. He took off his newsboy cap and polished his bald head with a rag after every game. “Me and the cue ball got an understanding,” he said, oblivious to the discussion over at the card table. “That’s another fifty you owe me.”
By evening, I was starting to feel more at ease. Nobody had asked a single question about how the feds had found the farm, and it didn’t look like anybody cared. I checked the wall clock, thinking about heading out to meet a fence Big George had introduced me to.
The door banged open, letting in a blast of icy January air, dotted with stinging flecks of ice.
“Shut that thing!” somebody yelled. “You born in a barn?”
Benedict strode into the room, his coat flapping in the jagged wind. His eyes found me instantly, and he made a sharp “let’s go” gesture. For one moment, I thought he knew something about my recent talks with Kit, but then he found Lazzaro and made the same gesture. I put my cue down and went over.
“Found him,” Benedict said, and his eyes were bright like razors. “Come on. We’re gonna end this fucker.”
* * *
Lazzaro and I followed Benedict out into the spitting sleet. Beads of ice caught in my eyebrows, and I pulled my collar up around my face, as best as I was able. It was a relief to slide into the cozy warmth of the car.
Benedict looked back from the front seat. “Finally traced him—Chebyshev’s new wizard. He got sloppy in the aftermath of the raid and didn’t mask himself. He’s ours, if we don’t screw this up.”
“No sweat,” Lazzaro said, punching his palm.
“He’s working up a death spell,” Benedict said. Excitement had limbered up his tongue considerably, I was surprised to see.
“Yeah?” Lazzaro asked. He grinned.
“Something horrible, complicated, and, if successful, extremely bloody. All that carnage at the farm was research.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Doesn’t matter. From the look of his notes, he’s not that close to getting it. He’s just a psycho, and we’re going to end him before he has a chance.”
“His notes?” Lazzaro asked, leaning forward.
“End him?” I said.
Benedict crossed his arms and gave a smug grin. “Yeah,” he said, neatly ignoring Lazzaro. “End him.”
Eagerness and dread churned in my gut. This was big, and I was stoked to be in on it. On the other hand, we were gonna go whack a guy out. I’d never been on a hit before, and I hadn’t allowed myself to think much about it. I mean, I knew it had to happen one day, but I didn’t think it would be so soon, and I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. I doubted I was gonna stay up at night racked with guilt for whacking a psycho who worked for that creepy old gangster—that was genuinely making the world a better place, as far as I was concerned, and good business to boot—but I figured I’d have to feel something after taking a man’s life. I wondered what that would be.
I tried to imagine the moment the guy’s life drained away, and then I realized something. “I don’t have a gun,” I said. Almost none of us carried guns on a regular basis, so that was no surprise. Cops stopped us all the time for trivial shit, to see if they’d get lucky, and nobody wanted to be the guy telling a cop, Gee, Officer, I must have left the permit for this concealed handgun at home. The serial number? Yeah, it rubbed off last time I was cleaning it. I’d only handled one a couple of times, on jobs that had the potential to go really bad, and I’d never fired one. Still, you didn’t go whack a guy with spit and a mean look.
“I do,” Lazzaro said. Of course. He was probably the one exception to the general rule, and that was because he was fucking crazy. We had a rule about killing cops—that was the surest way to start a police crackdown that wouldn’t end until heads were busted or a shitload of us were in jail—but if anybody would break that rule, it would be Lazzaro.
Benedict ignored Lazzaro. “I don’t have one for you, Jimmy. If somebody comes at you, burn ’em. You know the spell.”
I bounced my legs anxiously. Yeah, I knew the spell for the job. Fire was easy for me. Whether I had a gift for it or fire was easy in general, I wasn’t sure, but I’d picked it up fast. Burn ’em. Great. I wondered if that would count as death magic. I guessed not. Benedict was pretty serious about staying away from that shit, and I didn’t get the sense he’d have taught me anything that qualified. How burning someone to death with magical fire didn’t count as death magic was beyond me, but Benedict had stressed to me a thousand times that demons are strict letter-of-the-law types. Not too different from Mafia lawyers, really.
After fifteen minutes or so of navigating the icy streets, the driver pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the lights. To our right stood a row of run-down apartment buildings, many of them boarded up and all of them covered in layers of graffiti.
Benedict got out of the car, and Lazzaro and I followed. The three of us ducked our heads as we walked into the wind, and Benedict nearly had to shout to be heard.
“I’ll go in,” he said. “If everything goes according to plan, you guys will cool your heels and I’ll come out a little later with the problem resolved.”
“And if not?”
“Jimmy
, you’re gonna wait out back and watch that exit. Frankie, you’ll wait out front. Nobody gets past you. You got that? Nobody.”
The building was a trashed, shitty tenement building, not too different from Benedict’s, and I wondered what drew wizards to places like this. Worldwide, did everybody with a talent for magic live in a building that was thinking about falling down as soon as it mustered the energy?
I went around to the narrow alley around back, grateful for the shelter. The sleet still came down back here, and everything was coated in a thin layer of ice, but at least the wind wasn’t scouring the skin off my face. Out front, Lazzaro would hardly be so lucky.
I put my hands in my pockets and tried to keep warm. I hoped Benedict had this handled, because I didn’t feel too good about going after any wizard that got the best of him. It was all I could do not to rub my chest as I thought about the jolt that had come off the safe I’d tried to open, way back when. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of whacking the guy at all, let alone with a blast of magic, but I knew I was outclassed here. If it was him or me, I was definitely going to shoot first.
I reviewed the incantation in my mind, determined not to choke when the moment came. It should be intuitive, Benedict always told me. It probably was, but this would be my first time in action.
I wished I had a fucking gun. Squeezing a trigger took a hell of a lot less time than fifteen seconds of chanting and arm-waving, and there was less chance of fucking it up. If only Benedict hadn’t been in such a hurry. I ducked down behind a heap of ice-covered trash bags, hoping that concealment would give me the extra time I’d need if the guy came out this way.
Ice accumulated on my hat and tried to get under my collar, and I shivered. I thought about pacing to keep warm, but that seemed like a good way to get distracted and probably killed. I huddled down and waited.
The Price Page 6