“Meh. I’m okay. Mostly just feeling stupid.”
I fill her in on what happened at Samantha’s. She makes the appropriate sympathetic noises at the right moments. She’s good. Power aside, I can see why people flock to her.
“You trusted her, didn’t you?” she asks.
“Doesn’t happen often. Don’t think it’ll happen again anytime soon.”
“Trust isn’t so bad, you know. I trusted you. You came through for me.”
“Hey, you’re still my best bet in all this. Besides, you’d have been fine.”
She crosses the threshold, sits next to me on the bed. “No, I wouldn’t have. You gave me an anchor. Something to come back to. Land of the dead’s not a fun place to get stuck.”
She says to the guy with no pulse.
“Wasn’t me bringing you back.”
She pauses a moment, a word on her lips. Whatever it was, she changes her mind. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” she says. She slaps my thigh, stands up. “But enough of this emo bullshit. We need to find that rock.”
“I’m out of ideas. My only lead’s leaking in the back of a morgue wagon right about now. I appreciate all this, really, but the rock’s gone. Pretty soon Giavetti’s going to do his thing, and it’ll all be over. I’ll be out of your hair. Better I just go find a hole to wait it out in.”
I’ve been thinking about packing it in since I got back. Really, what’s the point? Giavetti uses that thing, and I’m going to flake away like government cheese.
“Jesus, you’re a pussy,” she says. “You’re this goddamn close, and you want to give up?”
“You know where Giavetti’s at? I’m tapped. Better he just use the damn thing. Solve all my problems. This point, I just want it over.”
“I don’t know where he is, but I know someone who does.”
I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner. Probably because neither one of us wanted to pay the price.
“I’m beginning to think it’s time to renegotiate,” Darius says, wiping down the bar with a cloth. I’m still not clear on whether any of this is real, but the drinks are good, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
“Oh come on,” Gabriela says. “We’ve got a contract.”
“That either one of us can break at any time,” he says. He flexes his enormous shoulders. “And I’m feelin’ a mite cooped up of late.”
“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” I say. “We’ve been over this before. He can’t find the rock. Even if he could, he can’t tell us where it is.”
“Don’t go presupposing for me, Dead Man,” Darius says. “I know things you can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah, and it means fuck all to me right now. Do you know where it is or not?” According to Gabriela, since Samantha died the spell keeping the stone hidden should have dissolved with her. Even when she comes back, anything that she’s done should still be gone. So now Darius should be able to pinpoint it.
“Of course, I do. But that’s privileged information. We’re not betting on the ponies, here. You want the whereabouts of the stone, it’s going to require a special price.”
“What is it?” Gabriela asks.
“I want a night with you, sweet thing,” he says. He chucks her gently on the chin. His smile is all teeth.
Gabriela, already a little pasty faced, goes a shade whiter. “What about the rest of our contract?” she asks. “If you’re renegotiating here, is that your new asking price for everything?”
He thinks a moment. “No. Same terms for the rest.”
“Not to break up a budding romance,” I say, “but there’s still the problem of actually telling us.”
“Oh, like you didn’t figure it out the last time. I’ll just make it easier on ya.” He puts up three fingers. “Scout’s promise.”
Gabriela seems to be seriously considering it. “Deal,” she says finally, putting out her hand. “When my next question is about the location of the rock, and you answer it, you have me for one night. Nothing rough. Nothing painful. All other questions are covered by the same terms.”
“Whoa. I don’t think so,” I say. Gabriela puts her other hand up to stop me.
“Not your decision,” Darius says. I swear he’s drooling.
“Do we have a deal, then?”
Darius’ hand swallows hers, and he pumps it like he’s pulling water from a well. There’s a sound just beyond my hearing. Like a pop, only not. Like a sound a sound makes when it’s not there.
“Don’t worry,” he says to me with a wink, “I’ll be gentle. Now, ask away.”
“Where is Giavetti holding his ritual?” Gabriela says.
Darius blinks at her.
“You bitch,” he says, though there’s an admiring tone in his voice.
“Okay, what just happened?” I ask.
“Never said I wanted to know where the stone was,” she says. “My next question wasn’t about the stone. And he has to follow the rules. So give. Where is he?”
He lets loose with a belly laugh that shakes the room. “See,” he says to me, “this is why I like her. Reminds me of a girl I knew in Persia way back when.”
He clears his throat, cracks his neck. His eyes roll back in his head. Really making a show of it. “He’s in the junkyard,” he says, his voice a carny fortune-teller’s.
“Junkyard?” Gabriela asks. “What junkyard?”
“Mackay Salvage,” I say. Jesus. Samantha really went to town on this one. Got Giavetti the stone, got him the book, even got him a place to fuck himself in. “It’s close. Next to the river.” I give her a rundown on the place, how I found it.
“Okay,” she says. “So we head over and—” The room shudders like it’s been hit by a city bus.
My guts twist with it, and fire shoots down my arms. Pain’s something I’d got used to not feeling, and the sudden shock of it sends me to my knees. It passes with the same sudden shock it came with.
“The hell was that?”
“Brownout,” she says, helping me stand. “He’s started.”
“Brownout?”
“The stone’s tapping into the local reservoirs,” Darius says. He’s not looking too comfortable with all this. “Drawing power. A lot of it. You have to go. Now.”
I’m getting that same sinking feeling I’ve gotten when I’m starting to rot. Only I don’t have the same hunger. I look at my hands. They’re starting to sink in on themselves. Going gray. Dark blotches are fading up through the skin.
The bar shudders again, and that blast of pain staggers me. Gabriela pulls me hard toward the door.
Darius is sweating. “Another shake up like that and I’m not sure I can keep my door open,” Darius says. He’s got a calm veneer, but something in his voice has me worried.
“This place isn’t a place,” Gabriela says to my questioning look. She’s shoving me along, and I’m having trouble keeping up. “It exists independent of the local pool, but the door doesn’t. He draws on that power to keep it open to the hotel. The power drops too much, and the door to the hotel shuts. Then we’re stuck.”
“And if it goes away completely?” My voice is cracked and hoarse, like it’s got holes in it.
“The bar disappears,” Darius says. “Oh, it’s still here, but it won’t look like this. The surroundings won’t be quite so … pleasant.”
“What about you?” I ask him.
“I’ll be fine. This place is all for your benefit, not mine. Go on. Git.”
The bar patrons, figments of Darius’ overactive imagination, start to snap out of existence. A dancer goes. Then another. Then whole swaths of them. The music disappears instrument by instrument as phantom jazz musicians disintegrate on stage. It’s like watching popcorn in reverse. The walls shimmer, get indistinct.
We run to the door. Halfway there my left leg goes numb. I drag it the rest of the way. Gabriela yanks the door open. The hotel lobby’s on the other side, but it’s flickering like a bad print of a Chaplin film.
�
��Fuck,” she says.
“That’s bad?”
“Very.” You can almost smell the gears turning in her head, weighing odds, looking for options. A weird calm settles over her.
“If I go through when it flickers out,” she says, “I won’t be coming through alive.” The flickering is getting worse, the dark spaces noticeably longer.
“We’re stuck?” A flake of skin drifts lazily off my forehead to the floor.
“We’s too many people,” she says. “You’re already dead.”
“No. You’re not staying here. You can’t. There’s got to be another way out of here. Darius said—”
“Darius is oversimplifying. No, it won’t be pleasant, but it won’t kill me to be here when the lights go out.”
“Do you know that for sure? What happens when this place goes dark?”
She looks back at Darius. He’s washing shot glasses. Whistling to himself. Trying to be calm. He’s not fooling anyone. The glasses pop out of existence as soon as he puts them down.
“No,” she says. “But I do know that I’ll die if I go through now.” She’s trying hard to maintain, but I can see the fear in her eyes.
“If I get Giavetti before all the power’s gone—”
“Then the bar, the door, all of it, should come back. Hopefully, I’ll come back with it.”
“I’ll stop him. I’ll get you out of here.”
“I know. I’d kiss you for good luck, but you’re going a little green.”
“That happens.”
“I won’t hold it against you. Now go. Before I kick you through.”
There’s no way to time it, so I just step through. There’s a roar in my ears, a sense of cold and hot at the same time. My vision goes black.
When I can see again, I’m through. My clothes are smoking a little. The hotel lobby’s just as it was. I turn back to the door.
But it’s already gone.
Chapter 28
Driving to the junkyard is a challenge. I’m going fast. Faster than before. The skin on my hands has split, spilling thick blood across the steering wheel. The tendons in my left ankle snap halfway there, and I have to shift gears with a flopping foot that might as well be a stump.
If my nose hadn’t already shriveled into my face I’d probably mind the smell. As it is, I can barely stand catching a hint of my reflection in the rearview mirror.
Day one I should have gotten myself embalmed.
As I cut through downtown toward the river, I can see I’m not the only one hurting.
There’s a minor riot going on, and the cops are out in force. I can’t help but think it’s Gabriela’s homeless vampires going apeshit. The schizophrenic normals can’t be helping. I can’t tell who’s who.
To everyone else it probably looks like a lot of junkies in Skid Row got the same bad batch of heroin. But in one of the scattered crowds I think I recognize the woman Gabriela brought in the other day to pay Darius. She’s screaming, shrieking like Ethel Merman with her pubes on fire. Doing her part to add to the general noise and chaos. She’s got three cops on her. Tosses them into a street lamp like she’s shrugging off a sheet.
I pass by just as they start in on her with the tasers. I can’t do anything for her.
I turn the radio to a news station. This isn’t the only place shit’s happening. The news reports have already started. The city’s gone bugfuck, and nobody knew it was coming.
If Gabriela and Darius are right, it will be over soon, one way or another.
It starts to rain about a block later. We’re in the middle of a drought. Nothing for six months and now this. It starts as the kind of spatter that you can call rain only because it’s damp and falling from the sky.
But it gets worse fast. It’s slow going as months of road oil lift up, makes the streets slick. If nothing else gets on the news tonight, this will. We do rain like some people do rivers of blood. I can’t think of a better sign of an L.A. apocalypse than water from the sky.
By the time I pull up to Mackay Salvage, sheets of it are pouring down on the city. This isn’t an L.A. rain. This is a winter in Seattle rain.
I pull into the gravel lot, tires sloshing through new puddles. It’s empty but for three cars: a beat up F-150, a Corolla, and a Mercedes that looks like it’s just off the showroom floor.
Danny’s car. Interesting. I wonder if he’s in the trunk.
There’s another wave of gut twisting. They’re coming more frequently now, and the skin on my right pinky sloughs off to bone. If I don’t do something soon, there’s not going to be any of me left.
I shuffle inside, left foot dragging behind, Glock held tight in my hand. It’s getting harder to hold as I lose skin and muscle.
I wend my way through stacks of dead cars, gutted engines, listening, trying to hear for a sign of Giavetti. It’s tough. My right ear has gone completely deaf, and I can barely see through the rain and my tunnel vision. Everything looks like it’s seen through a fish-eye lens.
There’s a growl behind me. I spin toward it, almost lose my balance. One hand on a fender, the other on my pistol. Giavetti’s mastiff stares at me.
The thing is huge. Rain slicks across its back, pooling in its jaws. It’s the size of a fucking horse. Got teeth you could shred a car with.
But it’s not the dog that grabs my attention.
“That you, Joe?” Danny asks. Porkpie hat pushed back onto his bald head, water soaking into his jacket. He doesn’t look scared. Nervous, yeah, but not like he should with that dog towering over him. He shines a flashlight over me, his brain finally getting what his eyes are telling it. The horror on his face thick as clown makeup.
“Yeah, it’s me.” My voice comes through like it’s run through a cheese grater. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to talk. “What are you doing here, Danny?”
He should be gone. Dead or skipped town, but not here with Giavetti’s mastiff acting like he’s its babysitter.
“He made me a deal.” He sounds dubious. “He’s going to—”
“Make you live forever?” I finish. “I know about his deals. Look at me. This is what you’ll get. Didn’t figure you for stupid. Thought you’d be smart enough to run to Mexico, Giavetti on your ass and all. That story on the phone just bullshit?”
“No,” he says, voice wavering. “He really did tear Bruno’s face off. But he caught me outside the hospital. Told me about the stone, what it could do. What it did to you.” His voice trails off.
I spread my arms out, limp in a slow circle so he can get a good look. “Pretty cool, huh? The ladies’ll fuckin’ flock to you with a look like this, yeah? Come on, Danny, don’t buy into the bullshit. Look at me. This is what he’s offering. This is his idea of immortality.”
Danny’s shaking his head. “He told me about you. What happened to you. Said he screwed things up. Figured it out this time. Told me how you stabbed him in the back and ripped him off. I helped him get the stone back. I’m gonna live forever.”
I laugh. A wet, grinding cough. Bad brakes on a steep hill. “Come on. Like you don’t know a con when you see it. He needs you for something else. Otherwise, once he had the stone, he’d have just thrown you away.”
“Don’t listen to him, kid,” Giavetti says, stepping from behind a stack of trashed cars. “Look at him. He’s just bitter.”
But Danny’s wondering. I can see it in his eyes. He’s not buying it. Narcissistic fuck. A little slow, but he’s not stupid. You can almost hear the gears grinding inside his head.
Giavetti notices it, too. He steps up behind him, slaps a friendly hand on his shoulder. “I keep my word,” he says. “You’ll live forever.”
He shoves a wicked looking blade through Danny’s back, punching it out through his chest. Danny lurches, tries to steady himself, grab at the blade.
“Kids these days,” Giavetti says. He yanks the blade free, wipes the blood on Danny’s rain-soaked jacket. Danny slides to the ground. Still alive but probably not for long.
“Not sure which one of you pisses me off more,” I say. “You for being such a dick, or him for being such an idiot.”
“Hey, I gave him my word. He’ll live forever. More or less. I mean, you know, in me.” He crouches down to Danny. “Sorry kid. I meant to tell you. See, I’m old. Look at me. But you, you’re nice and young and, well, I could use some of that youth, you know? So, I’ll be taking yours. No hard feelings?”
Danny makes a halfhearted swipe at Giavetti and starts a gurgling scream. Giavetti kicks him to shut him up.
“This won’t work,” I say.
“Why? Because Sam’s book is bullshit?” I’m not sure if I’ve got enough of a face left to show my surprise, but he catches it, anyway. “What, you thought I didn’t know about that? Come on. Bitch has been trying to kill me for half a millennium. You think I’m going to trust her now? No, this one’s going to stick.”
He starts to walk away, ignoring me like I’m just some insignificant nuisance. Yeah, well, this nuisance has a big fucking gun.
I take a shot, but my aim is so off it punches a hole in a radiator a good ten feet above his head instead.
The dog springs, ready to jump, but Giavetti stays it with his hand.
“Jesus, you just don’t give up, do you? I don’t have time for this crap.” He pulls the stone out of his pocket. It’s throwing out a glow like it’s on fire. It’s hard to see Giavetti past its brilliance. I tear my eyes away from it, shift my aim.
But I can’t pull the trigger. My arm locks up. Pulling against it just makes it shake like I’ve got chronic Parkinson’s.
Giavetti plucks the gun out of my hand. With a quick slide he dismantles it, drops the pieces on the ground in front of me.
“Doesn’t it suck,” he says, “to have salvation just out of reach?” He turns away to leave. “Bruno,” he says to the dog. “Sic him.”
The mastiff charges. I can’t move. It grabs me in its jaws like a chew toy and tosses me into a stack of Volvos. My gun clatters to the ground. I hear bones crunch. My left arm snaps at the shoulder.
And this time it hurts.
Giavetti watches the dog bounce me around a couple of times before he decides to leave his pet to play with its food. If he says anything, I can’t hear him past the rain and the ringing in my head. Besides, I think my ears have been torn off.
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