I sat back in the dark with my stomach growling and examined one of the wards the boy had set. It took some time to figure out how it worked, but as far as I could tell it wasn’t much more than an alarm. I waited until their snores were shaking the trees before I disabled the ward and sneaked into the camp. I helped myself to the pot of stew that was still bubbling over the fire and drank three bottles of water before I turned to leave.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” the boy said. He was standing a few feet behind me along with a striking man I hadn’t seen when I’d scouted the camp. I would have remembered him if I had. He was taller than the boy, nearly seven feet, and his shaved skull and face were crawling with swirling black tattoos.
That’s how I met Thomas. I didn’t learn that he was a Sinistra or about any of the Houses Major for almost a year. By then I’d been riding with his nomads and we’d crisscrossed the country a half dozen times. I learned about the culling, the civil war inside his family that started with his grandfather’s murder and still continues today.
Believe me when I tell you that Thomas has no love for his family. I witnessed a dozen raids against House Sinister targets: underworld bankers, weapons caches, and the like. Thomas took on the other Houses too, but always what he considered legitimate targets. Whenever they found drugs, they destroyed them all. Anything else was used to bankroll his crew. I’m not saying he’s a saint, far from it, but he has a strict code of ethics, even if they’re not socially acceptable. He accepts no authority above his own.
I was never part of his crew, but I was his friend. When I left, we parted on good terms and with the understanding that I’d do nothing to bring undue attention onto his activities. I reached out to him last year when I was on the run again and he’s reached out to me now. If you want to learn who is behind the Santa Muerte and the Dust, trust me, Thomas will know.
#
Silence greeted the end of my story. It wasn’t condemnation; it was the quiet mulling over of facts. The Company wasn’t a saintly order either, it wasn’t designed to be. It was put together to get an ugly job done.
“I’ve got no love for some of the policies of this country,” I said. “I think it’s criminal what they do to my people, but that isn’t the question here. You’re all wondering when push comes to shove where I stand, with you or with my old friend.”
Heads nodded around the table. I pointed to the Brand glistening on my neck. “The Sons of Madera weren’t formed to settle a score among the witches. They were created to fight a growing tide of dark magick, originally within our community, but outside it as well. We were the first Shadow Company. My loyalty is to the same mission we all share. I took the long ticket to stay out of prison, but I stay with the Company for you, my brothers.
If my friend is behind the Santa Muerte, then I won’t hesitate to protect my unit. I hope to my gods that I don’t find Thomas on the other end of my gun, but if I do, I won’t hesitate.”
Smiles and nods worked their way through the unit. Soldiers don’t fight for king and country. That might make a great rallying cry, but ultimately, we fight to protect the brother next to us. We fight for each other.
“One last question,” Mac said and by the way he said it I knew that this was the critical one. “I know that there are things you’re not telling us, but on this I have to be absolutely clear. In the time that you rode with Thomas did you ever witness him using black magick?”
That was the real question and it was one I’d wrestled with for years. Thomas walked a line, a razor thin line between black and white. He’d done things I didn’t agree with, broken laws and killed people, but he hadn’t used his gifts for that. Not that I’d seen in any event. He had one foot planted firmly in the dark, but when I’d known him, only that foot.
I shook my head, “his code isn’t what I’d call normal, not by a long shot, but neither is ours,” I added. “He’s unyielding. If we go at him with force, he’ll respond in kind. But if we don’t threaten him, he’ll talk and honestly. He owes me.”
“Okay,” Mac said surprising me. I expected him to be the holdout. “Extraordinary conditions sometimes require extraordinary measures. We’ll talk with your tame black hat, but if he’s behind this Thorn, I swear I’ll put him down like a mad dog and I won’t think twice about it.”
“Good enough.”
Chapter 24
Jacksonville, Tuesday Midnight
Neighborhood around the Rookery
The rookery was a neighborhood in northwest Jacksonville, just south of the Trout River. Thomas gave it the name while we were on a scouting trip because of the nineteenth century monastery that fronted a large central park. He’d laughed when he’d first seen it, joking about how the monks staring down from their windows must have looked like crows to the people below.
When I rode with him, we’d never used it. We never used any of the places Thomas identified. We’d roll through a city and his men would disperse, reporting back in a day or two about likely spots. The more interesting of these Thomas would check out himself and if he liked what he saw he’d give it a name. Over the years he had hundreds of locations scattered across the US stashed in his memory, ready for use if he ever felt the need.
“Don’t think of him as a hood,” I cautioned, “or some dipshit biker. Thomas is more like one of those guerilla generals with a bolt-hole in every village. He stays alive by constantly moving, but never blindly. No one knows his endgame, but don’t doubt that there’s a strategy to everything he does.”
“Would that include befriending a runaway witch who’d later join the Company?” Stevens asked from behind the wheel. “You said that he told you he was waiting for you when you met.”
“I really couldn’t say. Thomas never explained why his crew was out there in the woods that night. I never thought about it.”
“Anything else you might not have thought about?” Mac asked.
I nodded my head. “Yeah, watch out for Bender. He’s the guy with the facial tattoos that I mentioned. He’s Thomas’s bodyguard, but he’s much more than that. He’s the only guy I’ve met who can do Nunez’s ninja thing one better.”
Nunez snorted beside me in disbelief. “Seriously, watch him,” I said. “He can be standing next to you at high noon and the next instant he’s gone. Poof. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.”
We worked out a plan while we drove. Despite my assurances, Mac didn’t fully accept Thomas’s safe conduct. If things went sideways, he wanted insurance. We would drop Nunez off a few blocks before the meet and then circle around to give him enough time to get into position. I couldn’t remember the buildings in the area well enough to give him more than an approximation of what he might find; some office buildings I thought, a couple of rough tenements. I didn’t remember.
Nunez patted the barrel of his sniper rifle and told me not to worry. “Once I have Thomas in my sights, you’ll have your insurance Mac.” That was good enough for Mac and for the rest of the team, but I wasn’t sure. Overconfidence kills more men than bullets. They couldn’t process the fact that a civilian could be as good as I said, but they hadn’t seen him in action. I had.
“If you’re worried,” Ramirez said, “why don’t you scry the location?”
“In a moving car, are you out of your mind? I can’t even list all of the reasons that wouldn’t work. And don’t suggest stopping. Thomas knows we’re coming. He’ll have obscured the entire neighborhood, even against witchcraft. He’s seen what I can do.”
Ramirez shifted in his seat, pulling his eyes from where I sat and over to me. “Are you concerned about Thomas,” he asked. “Afraid he might not honor his word?”
“No,” I said shaking off the question. “He wants this meeting. He didn’t place that tarot card in the warehouse on the off chance we’d investigate. He knew we’d be there. No, I think he wants this meeting. I think he needs something from us, something that he can’t come straight out and ask.”
“You’re t
hinking too deep,” Ramirez said. “Besides you’re forgetting that he told us to back off. You asked for the meeting.”
“True, but you don’t know him the way I do. Trust me, there’s something else going on.” I was right, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t prove anything. All I had was a nagging suspicion that wouldn’t go away. Nothing about this Op felt right, not from the moment we stumbled into it. Now that I knew that Thomas was somehow involved, all of the strange coincidences started to look even stranger.
“Mac, what do you know about the Captain’s friend in the FBI?”
He turned around from his position in the front seat, immediately suspicious. “Agent Keynes? They were friends at SMU, I think. Why?”
“Testing a theory,” I said sinking back into the seat. Mac stared at me for a moment, but when I didn’t volunteer anything else, he eventually turned back to the road. Everything about this Op stank. Since the beginning we’d been jumping from one strange coincidence to the next, without ever stepping back to look at the overall picture. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being led by our noses down a dark road and I didn’t like it.
Didn’t anyone question how the FBI got involved? If the OSS were running a black op with the group behind the Dust, Ortiz should have been picked up or killed immediately. Either way he’d disappear and we’d never have known anything about it. But that isn’t the way it went down. Instead an old college buddy of the Captain’s, who just happens to be a FBI agent shows up with a vial of Dust and asks the Captain to investigate as a favor? And then all this shit unravels? We were being played.
Knowing that Thomas was somehow involved made me even more certain. It felt like one of his chess games. He’d make a big feint in one direction and while you were distracted by the knights and bishops massing in one area, he’d slip a few pawns through at the edge of the board and claim your king. If his hand knocked over the first domino . . . shit, Thomas wasn’t just on the periphery; his fingerprints were all over this mess.
It was his crew that hit Ortiz at the warehouse in the first place. Even without the tarot card the preciseness of the hit and the burning of the drugs were pure Thomas. He would have set up the interrogation room Ramirez found, but what did he learn from Ortiz and then why’d he let him go? I didn’t have answers for that one yet, but it would have been child’s play for him to get a sample of the Dust to the FBI and then bring us into the mix.
The more I thought about it the more certain I was that Thomas had tripped the first domino, but I couldn’t figure out his endgame. Not yet at least, but I was damned sure that I would. If Thomas had engineered this entire situation, he wanted something badly. Now all I had to do was figure out what it was.
#
Mac slowed the car four blocks from the meet and Nunez tumbled out hugging his M24 to his chest. Seconds later he was gone. I turned and tried to follow him but he disappeared into the dark a few steps from the car. The boy has skills, but the real question was would they be enough? If Thomas spotted him first, we might not have nearly the warm reception I was counting on.
We cruised slowly down dirty streets littered with handbills and human debris. Junkies crouched in doorways, right behind strutting women in spangled costumes displaying their wares. Sharp-eyed silhouettes leaned against the buildings, keeping track of everything that moved on the street. Somewhere among the scavengers I knew that Thomas had planted his agents, but I couldn’t pick them out. Everything appeared naturally unsettling.
I knew instantly the moment we crossed into his territory. It might just be temporary, because Thomas never stayed anywhere too long, but I could feel his stamp immediately. His territory was a pristine island standing in the middle of a rotting swamp. The buildings themselves were still worn and in ill repair, but the layers of handbills and ever-present graffiti were gone. In their place a lone Eye of Horus has been painted in blue and silver.
There were no drug dealers or junkies on his streets and the prostitutes handled their business from a lone motel transformed into a bordello done up in mauve and gray. We passed two bars that sported more than their fair share of motorcycles parked outside in neat rows, each bike pointed outward for a quick getaway if needed. The people we passed on the street appeared relaxed and unhurried, but everyone marked our car as we glided by.
“Holy crap,” Ramirez whispered. “It’s another world over here. How’d he clean out the gangs?”
“My guess is he offered everyone a chance to leave,” I said. “The strongest leader on the street would be picked up and hexed. His crew would be given twenty-four hours to leave. Anyone who refused would be hunted down and exterminated. It wouldn’t have taken long,” I guessed, “maybe a week before the streets were clear. After that he pushed out until he had a comfortable boundary. Inside his lines no crime would be tolerated, none.”
“Damn, that’s brutal.”
“But effective,” I said. “Most of the residents would be grateful. They’d rat out their friends, cousins, and the guy down the street who beat up an old lady. Each would receive one warning. If they ignored it, they’d disappear forever. Within a month this would be one of the safest places to live in the city.”
“And the police do nothing?” Mac asked.
“What could they do? Honestly Mac, for the most part they were probably grateful. After all his crew just swept out the trash. Businesses returned and kids could play in the streets. I’m not saying that I approve of his methods, but they’re effective.”
“So, he owns all of this now?”
I glanced around and nodded. I’d seen him do this before in Charlestown and San Antonio, “every square inch.”
We turned a corner, disturbing a pickup game that stretched across the street. Stevens slowed the car and the players slowly moved over to the sidewalks. No one hurried or turned away, instead all eyes were on us, taking in the details to report back later. Two kids rode up on us on their bikes and making motions for him to roll down the window.”
“You the Army?” one of the kids asked.
“Stevens glanced around the car and chuckled. “Not the whole Army kid, but yeah. We’re looking for—
“We know who you’re looking for,” the kid assured him. “Not coming down here to cause trouble, are you?”
“Not at all, son,” Stevens replied. “We just want to talk.”
“He’ll meet you in the park, follow us,” the kid said as he pedaled faster, pulling in front of the car. The second kid took up position alongside the drivers’ window and kept glancing in trying to see what we were doing. I was fairly certain that he couldn’t see the guns since the cabin was dark, but he was definitely looking. Thomas would expect us armed, so this was just the neighborhood trying to discover our intent.
We followed the kid on the bike for another block until we spotted the park. It had probably started out as a vacant lot, but an effort had been put into its transformation years ago. You could see recent efforts to spruce it up, some new plants had gone in, but for the most part it was still ragged. Patches of dirt warred against the encroaching grass and the playground equipment was rusty from disuse.
The park had likely been a battleground between the gangs before, maybe a shooting gallery for the junkies. Now the kids were reclaiming it, but it would take time before the neighborhood put its own sweat and dollars into the effort. A rough coffin of pallet wood leaned up against a light pole on the corner.
“That meant as a warning to us?” Ramirez asked, pointing.
“Don’t know,” I said to no one in particular. It was a bit theatrical for Thomas, but that could be exactly what it was. It made an impression, which I was sure was the point.
The kids waved to us and told us to pull over. “He’ll meet you by the dugouts,” the kid on the lead bicycle yelled before wheeling about and riding away. I’d have thought that their curiosity would have gotten the better of them, but whoever had directed them to escort us in had told them to leave right afterwards. Thomas was
afraid that it might get ugly, I thought. Maybe the coffin was a warning.
“Side arms only,” Mac said as we stepped out of the car, “and keep them holstered.”
He glanced about, pointing out the darkened doorways and low rooftops that fronted the park. I noted a dozen places where shooters could be stationed if things went bad. Perhaps the park was a peace offering. Inside its boundaries there was very little cover, although it could just as easily become a killing field now that I thought about it.
I shuddered and moved to the front, taking the lead. Mac and Ramirez moved to my right and left, leaving Stevens to take up the rear. He kept up a mumbled commentary as we stepped into the park.
“I wonder why he wanted to meet us here,” Ramirez asked.
I had an answer for him, but I didn’t think he’d like it. By meeting out in the open, Thomas kept his base a secret and also demonstrated this authority to the street. There wouldn’t be any whispers that he was afraid of the government. Besides there were numerous places where he could position his own sharpshooters, I had no doubt that Nunez wasn’t the only one covering us from the rooftops.
“Fan out a little and keep your hands away from your guns,” I said.
“He’s got eyes on us?” Mac asked.
“More than that,” a voice said from behind my left shoulder, near a scarred oak that had survived the park’s tumultuous past. The voice was casual. The inflection was odd, stressing individual letters in a manner no native speaker would. I recognized it immediately and turned to face Bender.
The Dead Pools Page 17