Premonitions

by Jamie Schultz

  “Anna.”

  “Great. We’re all friends now. Wanna fill me in?”

  Anna and Nail both looked to Karyn, who waited a second and then gave a reluctant nod. Regardless of Karyn’s personal distaste, there wasn’t anything obvious coming off Genevieve to set her alarms ringing.

  “All right,” Nail said. “Gather round, folks.” He turned to the hood of an ancient Buick that might have been lime green in some forgotten year, and started spreading photos out on the hood. Genevieve, Karyn noted, took the opportunity to snuggle in right next to Anna, and Tommy wasted no time coming around to Genevieve’s other side.

  Jesus, she thought again, and turned to the photos.

  Nail had done a simple drive-by earlier and taken the snapshots—nothing complicated, not yet, but he’d gotten the important stuff. Nathan Mendelsohn’s estate, in glorious digital color. Gently rolling hills, shaded in strategic spots by towering palm trees. Lush grass, the only thing green in L.A. County in the dry heat of August. A wide, immaculate driveway stretching out languorously at the feet of a white stucco manse. And a high brick wall topped with mile after flashing mile of concertina wire.

  “That’s what we got,” Nail said. “Up in Topanga Canyon, right up against the state park. Middle of fucking nowhere.”

  Anna leaned over the pictures, shuffling a few around to get a better look.

  “Where are the cameras?” Anna asked.

  “Where aren’t there cameras?” Nail pointed out half a dozen spots, index finger jumping from one picture to the next. “Here, here, here, and here. And here. And those are just the obvious ones. Pretty sure some are hidden.”

  Genevieve shifted, leaning in next at Anna’s left, causing Anna to take one small, shuffling step away. Sobell’s screwing with you, Karyn thought, trying to project the thought over to Anna. He’s done his homework, and he knows your type. Tommy’s too, apparently.

  Yeah, Tommy’s too. Even now, Genevieve was brushing her hand across Tommy’s under the guise of reaching for one of the photos. He was hyper, too, and simply would not shut up.

  “Check this out,” he said, pointing to a symbol carved in the bricks on either side of the main gate. “Warding?”

  Genevieve lifted an eyebrow. “Fleur-de-lis.”

  “Oh. I mean, shit yeah. I’m looking at it upside down.”

  Anna glanced at Karyn to share an eye-rolling “Would you believe this?” moment, but Karyn’s mouth was set in a line. This shit is not funny.

  “Not a hundred percent sure, but I think this”—Nail pointed to an indistinct white smudge on one of the photos, then another—“and this might be actual guardhouses, if you can believe that shit. Fucker’s got the place locked down.”

  “He would,” Genevieve said, mouth twisting into a moue of disgust. It was the first emotion Karyn had seen on her face that didn’t carry a hint of mockery.

  “You know him?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t make us beg—spill it. What do you know?”

  All eyes were on Genevieve, and this time she seemed discomfited by it rather than combative. She didn’t step away from the car, but she leaned back like she wanted to. “Mostly the same shit you can get off the Internet. He owns an investment firm. Used to sit on L.A. city council. Makes the gossip rags sometimes, depending on who he’s banging at the moment.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  Anna opened her mouth to reply, but Karyn spoke first. “Get out.”

  “What?” Genevieve’s diffidence was gone now, and a low tension started building in the yard, like a deep hum that was rising in pitch moment by moment. Tommy looked from Karyn to Genevieve and back, eyes wide, mouth tiny and afraid.

  “If you’re not going to be straight with us, get lost. You’ve got an ax to grind with this guy, and I don’t need some personal vendetta messing up an otherwise professional job. So spill it, or get out.”

  “You can’t fire me.”

  Karyn didn’t blink. “Okay,” she said. She slid her tongue along her teeth. “Nail, please shoot her.”

  Nail reached for his pistol. Tommy grabbed his arm. Genevieve and Anna both threw up their hands. Lots of people started talking at once.

  “Whoa! Hold on!”

  “Hold up there, big guy.”

  “Wait a sec!”

  Anna put a hand on Karyn’s shoulder. “Look, you were the one who said we gotta do it his way. Remember?”

  “That was before she started withholding important information.” She shot a poisonous glare back at Genevieve. “You’re either all the way in or all the way out.”

  Genevieve said nothing. The tension ratcheted up, and Tommy began casting nervous glances around at everybody as the silence dragged out.

  “Karyn’s right,” Anna said softly. “We either put all job-related stuff on the table, or this is hopeless.”

  Now Genevieve did step back. She waited with everyone staring at her for a long time before finally nodding.

  “I did some work for Mendelsohn a while back. He screwed me over.”

  “That’s pretty much how all these stories start,” Karyn said. “Keep talking.”

  “He’s in charge of that stupid cult—wants to be a big man in the occult world more than just about anything. But he’s shit. Can’t even nail the basics.” She made a sour face. “But he does have money.”

  “So he pays people like you to do the magic stuff for him,” Anna said.

  Genevieve put her hands in her pockets and gave a halfhearted shrug. “It’s a living. Or was, until the cult thing got too weird.”

  “So you left?” Tommy asked.

  “I sort of left, they sort of shut me out. I wouldn’t do some work Nate wanted; he got pissed. It wasn’t all that friendly a departure.”

  “What kind of work?” Anna asked.

  Genevieve shook her head. “Doesn’t have any bearing on the job. You can either trust me on that, or we can all start shooting at each other.”

  “So this is a personal vendetta,” Karyn said.

  “Well, yeah. But it’s not like I’m on some kind of kamikaze kill-him-or-die-trying trip. We steal the bone, it’ll fuck him up and humiliate him. And I’ll make a lot of money. That all works for me just fine.”

  “Sobell knows?”

  Genevieve stared flatly back at Karyn. “Sobell knows everything. I thought you’d have that figured out by now.”

  “Don’t suppose he knows the gate code,” Nail said dourly.

  “The gate code is the least of our concerns, big guy,” Genevieve said. “It’s been a while since I spent any quality time with Nate, but even back then he had guards out the ass. I can’t imagine the army he surrounds himself with now.”

  Nate? Anna mouthed to Karyn. Karyn just shrugged.

  “So. More recon,” Nail said.

  “Always more recon,” Anna said. She thought back to their last gig and added, “It’d be nice to be sure the damn thing is even there, too.”

  Karyn said nothing, merely stood with arms crossed, watching Genevieve through narrowed eyes.

  “That good enough for you?” Genevieve asked. “We all gonna play nice now, or you still want to shoot me?”

  Karyn forced a humorless smile. “Let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  Early evening, and the light had a strange yellow-red quality to it. Tall, dry grass rippled in a slight breeze—maybe beautiful, but Nail just thought it looked like the kind of place where wildfires got started and burned down a third of California before finally dying. From back here, though, up a slight rise, he could see to the other side of Mendelsohn’s wall. Wet green grass sparkled in an unbroken carpet all the way to the trees, past which he couldn’t see anything.

  Five steps down the hill and all that vanished, leav
ing him, Tommy, and Genevieve in an arid wasteland. This side of the wall, even the trees were stunted, twisted things barely worthy of the name.

  “Ha!” Tommy said. He sprang forward to the side of the road and squatted. “Jackpot!” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and picked up what looked like a foil gum wrapper with his thumb and forefinger. After a moment of proud inspection, he put it in a paper grocery bag.

  “Good start,” he said, beaming. “I feel lucky today.”

  Nail couldn’t help smiling back a little, and even Genevieve laughed. Tommy was a funny little guy, and it was hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm.

  “He always this excited about trash detail?” Genevieve asked.

  “It’s like a treasure hunt to him. Can’t say he’s wrong, either—he’s worked miracles with this kind of shit before.”

  Genevieve nodded. “I don’t doubt it. I just wouldn’t have thought this was the exciting part.”

  “You want to see a happy white boy, you get him ten minutes with the man’s Dumpster.”

  Nail stopped walking and stared at the wall again. It was maybe two hundred feet from where he stood on the shoulder of the road, stone, ten feet high and curving away into the distance. How much did it cost to cart that much fucking stone out into the middle of nowhere? “Motherfucker sure likes his privacy,” Nail muttered.

  “Yeah,” Genevieve said. “More than ever, I hear.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I hear he doesn’t come out anymore. Stopped going to council meetings, never leaves the grounds. Real Howard Hughes shit, you know?” She pushed aside a clump of crackling brown grass to reveal a sun-bleached Pepsi can. “This?”

  “Nah. Too old.”

  She let the grass go. It didn’t even spring back to its former position, just sort of lay pushed to the side, broken. “He was getting pretty flaky back before I took off, but I guess it’s gotten way worse.” She shrugged. “Crazy zillionaires, right?”

  Nail resumed walking. They were far enough back that there shouldn’t be much scrutiny—even the most paranoid zillionaire didn’t keep cameras watching every swath of land hundreds of feet out from a mile-long wall—but he’d feel better if they kept moving. Get this done as soon as possible, just in case.

  “Oh my God,” Tommy said. “Check that out.” He was pointing ahead, to where Mendelsohn’s driveway joined the gravel road. Nail squinted. Looked like there was a white . . . something over in the drainage culvert. Nail’s eyes were pretty good, but the light was for shit. How Tommy could make it out, he had no idea.

  Tommy bounded ahead, cackling. “McDonald’s bag!”

  Genevieve laughed again, and Nail shook his head. “Maybe he thinks he’s gonna find a cheeseburger.” He glanced to the gate. Nobody. The place might have been deserted, if the lawn weren’t so perfect.

  They walked on, Genevieve making a decent attempt at searching the weeds for trash and Nail focusing more on studying the wall than garbage recon. His commitment to the job hadn’t faltered—the prospect of paying off Clarence and getting DeWayne out of that shit for good was enough to ensure that—but the shine was off it. This shit was even weirder than their usual gig. He liked the challenge, but there was every reason to make sure they checked all the boxes on this one, and then went back and checked them again.

  They were still fifty feet or so back from Tommy when Genevieve spoke. “So, uh, Karyn. She doesn’t like me much.”

  “Doesn’t trust you. It’s not the same thing.”

  “She doesn’t like me, either.”

  “I guess that’s true, but that ain’t the important thing. Give you some advice?”

  “Yeah. I mean, please.”

  “Just do a good job. Do what you say you’re gonna do, and do a good job. I know she ain’t Enoch Sobell, but you get in good with Karyn, and you might get a good thing going.”

  Genevieve’s expression was guarded, but by the way she waited, considering his words, Nail thought he’d made an impression.

  “We’re all on the same side here,” she said after a moment.

  “Then you got nothing to worry about.” He paused, then decided to go ahead. “I’ll tell you this, though. If you change your mind, think maybe it starts to look like a good idea to pull something funny, you might do some checking first. You ask the right people, and Karyn’s got a rep.”

  “I’ve heard. She’s psychic, or something.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I guarantee, you start thinking about fucking us over, she will see that shit coming before you even make up your mind.”

  There was a pause. Then: “What about Anna?”

  “What about her?”

  Genevieve’s expression held nothing of guile, but it was a little too flat to be real. “Just, you know. How’s she fit into all this?”

  “Have to ask her.”

  Genevieve smiled. “I might just do that.”

  Nail grunted and kept walking. A plastic food wrapper of some kind, trapped under a stick, fluttered in the breeze. Nail went down the embankment, put on a glove, and picked up the wrapper. His thumb slid across congealed orange grease, and he had to wonder why the fuck any rich guy would ever eat a nasty two-dollar microwave burrito. Ants ran up his hand onto his wrist, and he sighed. There were parts of every job that sucked, he knew, but trash detail was about the worst part of this one.

  Behind him, Genevieve rustled through more of the high weeds.

  “So,” she said, “how’d you get into all this?”

  He looked back, still holding the burrito wrapper. “You ever stop talking?”

  She only smiled more. “It passes the time.”

  “You’re too fuckin’ friendly—you know that?”

  “Come on, spill it.”

  That wasn’t going to happen, and he felt a bright spike of anger that she’d even pushed him on it. He hadn’t shared that story with anyone, not even Tommy. Anna and Karyn had been there, helped him and his world-class fuckup brother out of a bad spot when nobody else in the world would, and as far as he was concerned nobody else in the world ever needed to know about it.

  “All you need to know is that those two women are like my sisters. I’d do anything for them, and I mean literally fucking anything. Got that?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I got it.”

  They went back to picking through the weeds, and Nail picked up the pace some, leaving Genevieve behind. Too damn many questions. It didn’t take him long to catch up to Tommy.

  “Burrito wrapper,” Nail said, holding up his prize.

  Tommy opened the bag. “In it goes.” He stepped close to Nail and glanced meaningfully back at Genevieve. “What do you think?” he whispered. “I got a shot?”

  “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Nail said. “Hurry up and let’s get this over with.”

  * * *

  Karyn turned on the kitchen faucet, waited for the water to cool down to room temperature, and filled a glass. She took a sip, wrinkling her nose at the chlorine. Though she kept meaning to get a water filter, somehow it never happened.

  The dead bolt on the front door turned with a scraping sound, and Anna let herself in. “How about a beer?” Anna asked.

  “Hey, shut the door—huh.” It was already shut.

  Anna put her elbows on the peeling Formica counter that separated the entry from the kitchen. “How about two beers?”

  “That good, huh?”

  “None of the usual suspects are giving me anything. I hear Tommy and—”

  The dead bolt on the front door turned with a scraping sound, and Anna let herself in.

  The other Anna kept right on talking. “—Nail got some good stuff but—”

  “How about a beer?” the new Anna asked.

  “—gonna need some prep time—”

  “How about tw
o beers?”

  Karyn closed her eyes. Go away. Please go away. When she opened them again, both Annas were leaning on the counter, moving and talking out of sync with each other. The sound wasn’t much worse than two people talking over each other, but looking at them made Karyn feel dizzy. They were superimposed, but not like double-exposed film, where one or both seemed somewhat insubstantial—both were perfectly solid, and the resulting amalgam had a distorted figure, arms that were unnaturally wide where one Anna had moved slightly with respect to the other, twenty fingers, and a face that could have inspired either Picasso or Hieronymus Bosch.

  The dead bolt on the front door turned with a scraping sound—

  Karyn nearly ran for her bedroom. She crossed the living room in half a dozen rapid strides, closed the bedroom door, and paused with her hand on the knob, listening. The chatter from the other side faded, but that didn’t make her feel better. Her heart slammed in her chest, so forceful she could hear the hissing swell of blood rush through her ears, and she wondered for a moment if she might pass out.

  I can’t do this. I can’t have this now.

  She pressed her ear to the door. The thin material, barely better than cardboard, let everything through, and she heard what might have been a fourth voice joined to the others.

  If they come in here, I’ll scream, I swear.

  Without turning her back to the door, she crossed the small room to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a plastic zipper bag.

  From outside, the voices quieted until Karyn couldn’t hear them anymore. Maybe the Annas had gone. Maybe they were all out there having a beer together. Karyn knew they weren’t real, and she was even fairly sure they were harmless, but she couldn’t make herself check if they were still out there.

  After what felt like a long time, she sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the zipper bag and running her thumbs over its contents.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  In truth, she wasn’t sure what she hated more—the necessity of the bitter concoction, or the undeniable fact that there was noticeably less in the bag than there should have been. She’d gone to see Adelaide—when? Four days ago? Something like that. Ten thousand dollars down the tube for a stash that ought to have lasted six weeks, or a month at the least, and at the rate she was going she’d be out again in a little over a week. Three years ago, ten grand would have lasted all summer. Where did that trend end up? Would the stuff eventually stop working entirely? Sick dread, a coil of barbed wire, twisted in her belly. She’d been there before, visions crowding on top of each other until they drew an opaque veil over reality entirely. Going back to that was unthinkable.