The next time he was conscious, it was four days later and the pain was a constant, slightly muted screaming that turned into five-alarm agony if he did anything so foolish as to touch the back of his head in any way.
He should have been killed, they’d told him. He’d been standing a hundred yards or so from some rich muckety-muck’s house when the IRA blew it up for reasons he neither understood nor cared to, and a quarter of a brick had hurtled in a straight line from beneath the window casement to a spot on the back of Enoch Sobell’s head, somewhat on the left.
If not for having taken a few magical precautions, it would surely have killed him. Even so, the wound had hurt like a bastard and taken weeks to heal, and he’d had little patience for the IRA ever since.
His current injury made that earlier one feel like a paper cut.
My head. Ohhh, my fucking head. The top of my head’s off, I know it. The whole top. Brain’s probably got flies on it, laying eggs. And it’s drying out, most certainly. What happens when your brain dries out? Is that a problem?
He instinctively moved his hands toward the pain, but caught himself before he did anything stupid. Like prodding my exposed brain with my filthy bare hands. Idiot.
He needed to get up. He wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened over the last—how long?—but he could see nobody in the room other than a couple of lumps that were almost certainly dead bodies. That meant even more violence than the shot he’d taken to the head, which meant police, who, of course, were all in Greaser’s pocket. If they found him here, he was fucked. More fucked, rather.
His head felt like somebody had taken an auger to it, drilled out a nice hole, packed it with gunpowder, and lit the fuse. At least when the IRA had blown him up, he’d gotten to spend four days in a coma and miss the worst of it.
Nonetheless, he sat up. The room spun and nausea seized his gut. A slow bead of thick blood oozed down his forehead. Sweat popped out over his whole body. With a grunt that came out alarmingly close to a wheeze, he used the dresser to pull himself to a kneeling position. The room not only spun now—it turned upside down and actively tried to shake him off. He gripped the edge of the dresser with both hands until his fingers ached.
Eventually the room settled down to a low, rolling motion. Sobell forced himself to stand. He had a bad moment when his unsteady feet buckled, nearly dropping him back to the ground, but sheer terror of the pain that would ensue if he bumped his head helped him regain his balance.
Breathing like he’d just run half a marathon, Sobell stood and looked at himself in the reflection from a framed photo of a bland landscape.
So much for my rakish good looks. Still, it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It only felt like the top of his head had come off. In reality, it appeared the bullet had entered just above his right eye, skidded along his skull, and traced a red-hot line beneath his skin about six inches long before exiting and blowing a hole in the wall. Part of his forehead hung down in a gruesome flap, and his head hurt like hell, but he’d gotten off lucky.
Nothing a couple of safety pins won’t fix. His stomach convulsed at the thought. That wasn’t, apparently, something he was ready to even joke about.
He straightened, and another bad dizzy spell sloshed through his head. Again, he steadied himself against the wall, and when the moment passed, he took a cautious step toward the door.
As expected, the room was over its quota for dead bodies—three of them. Two were men Sobell didn’t recognize, presumably members of the Brotherhood. Brown was the third. His body leaned against the wall, eyes open, torso shot full of holes.
Sobell sighed. This had not been one of his finest moments. He’d badly misgauged the Brotherhood’s motivations. Either rational self-interest wasn’t among the Brotherhood’s virtues—which he could well imagine—or they were playing a different game. Maybe they thought if they knew the location of the bone, they could get it themselves. Hell, maybe they were right.
He opened the door and walked out, one shuffling step at a time.
* * *
Nail didn’t scream when Drew helped him up, impressing even himself. He wanted to scream, and if he’d been a hundred percent sure it wouldn’t get him shot, he’d have cut loose with a roar that would have woken people up in Long Beach. He almost passed out instead, but after a blurry few moments during which he couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on, he found himself on his feet, leaning against the building. A few moments after that, he was half draped over Drew, hobbling down the alley. A brief pause for Drew to check around the corner, and then they were out in the open.
The parking lot was almost empty. Sure enough, the Brotherhood had split.
“Fuck yeah,” Nail said—and then he remembered. “Shit. Brown. He make it?”
Drew gave him a blank look. “Huh?”
“Brown. Is he alive?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“Come on. We gotta go check.”
The blank look turned incredulous. “You gotta be shitting me.”
“Nope. Never leave a man behind. Guy’s a dick, but he pulled some Sylvester Stallone shit in there, and we’d probably both be dead if he hadn’t.”
“Unfuckingbelievable,” Drew said, but he started hauling Nail toward the apartment.
A moment later, a figure lurched out of the apartment. Drew let out a terrified squawk and went for his gun before Nail put a hand on his arm and stopped him.
“Jesus!” Drew said.
Sobell took half a step and then slumped against the doorframe. “No, but that wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been a victim of a case of mistaken identity.”
“Brown?” Nail asked.
“Dead.”
“Shit. We gotta get out of here.”
“I’m shambling as fast as I can. This may look like a mere scratch, but, surprisingly enough, it’s actually rather painful.”
“Well, come on,” Nail said. “We ain’t got all day.”
“No. I expect not.”
Chapter 30
“Mr., uh, Sobell? Um, sir?”
Gresser tried to lift his head, but it wouldn’t go. Something grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up for him. He felt gratitude for that, despite the pain.
He was supposed to say something. Words. There were some words he needed, but he couldn’t seem to find them. It had gotten hard to think. His back and shoulders hurt—well, no. They didn’t hurt at all. But there was a strange stiffness to them, and they didn’t want to move, and somehow that stiffness, that nonsensation of pain, was a source of constant distraction. And his hips, too. They didn’t quite . . . go.
“Sir?”
The wide-eyed lieutenant stared at him, expecting some kind of response. But what did he want? Gresser wasn’t Sobell, so why was this asshole bothering him? No, wait. I am Sobell. Right?
He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t have any words anyway.
A thin, bony hand, sticky with some kind of viscous fluid, crept around his head and seized his jaw.
Yes, he heard in his mind. The hand pulled his jaw open, puppetlike, and somehow the word came out.
“Yes?”
“A whole bunch of people just showed up down front. Like, twenty or so guys. They say they’re looking for you.” The young man, a broken-nosed bruiser who must have gone two-forty and probably made a habit of picking a fight with the biggest guy in any given bar, just for fun, shuffled his feet and kept his eyes down, daring only the briefest glances at Gresser.
“Who are they?” The hand worked his jaw again, and words came into his head and out his mouth at almost the same time. They sounded oddly doubled, as though he were speaking and whispering simultaneously.
“The Brotherhood.”
Gresser had no idea who that was or what it meant, but he straightened in his chair. A sound of grinding, crunching
things came from his spine, and he almost screamed before he remembered that it didn’t hurt. “Good,” he said. “Send them up.”
* * *
“Shit. Looks like the distraction’s arrived.” Anna looked out the hole in the window where a bunch of cars had roared up and parked in front of Sobell’s building. She couldn’t see most of them from here, but from the look of the stragglers at the end, it wasn’t the cops or Sobell’s guys. Had to be the Brotherhood, then.
“Nail with them?” Karyn asked.
“I can’t tell.”
“We gotta go,” Genevieve said. “Like, now.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Anna knelt and clipped her harness to the zip-line trolley. She didn’t get to use this stuff often, but it was her favorite part of any job that needed it. Hell of a rush, and probably the next best thing to flying. She didn’t feel great about the small crowd moving toward the front of the building, though, but there wasn’t any time left to fuck around. She just had to count on all the spotlights out front wrecking their night vision.
“See you on the other side,” she said, and she pushed herself out the window.
The harness caught, and the trolley took off, speeding down the length of rope. It was maybe a hundred feet across and twenty down—a good-sized drop that rocketed her forward. It was all she could do to keep an exultant yell smothered in her chest.
She made most of the drop and slowed as the rope started to sag toward the far end. By the time she reached Sobell’s building, she’d dropped enough speed that she was able to catch herself against the wall, legs absorbing the shock so well she barely made any noise above the squeak of rubber on glass.
She hung from the bottom of the sign. From here, she could see the complex mess of brackets and angle iron that held the sign in place, as well as the spot where the rope had coiled itself after it finished its work. She waved back at Genevieve and Karyn and pulled herself up behind the sign. Then she busied herself with more of the climbing gear. Unfortunately, the sign was too high above the nearest window to simply hang from the existing line—she’d need to set up a belaying system to get down where they could get in front of a window. Pain in the ass, really.
She set up the pulley and readied another section of rope.
Genevieve hit the wall a few moments later with too much speed and a muffled curse.
“Shh!” Anna whispered, looking down at where Genevieve twisted below her. “You OK?”
“Hit wrong. Twisted my ankle.”
“How bad?”
“It’ll be all right. Just hurts.”
“Christ. Get up here, would you?”
Genevieve clambered up onto the bracket system next to her. Even in this light she looked pale. “Conjuring up monsters? Sign me up. Hanging from a rope a hundred feet above concrete? Not so much.”
Anna hooked her to the new rope and tried on her best reassuring smile. “It’s all right. Just a few more minutes, and you’ll be on solid ground.”
Below them, Karyn stopped herself against the glass. She was even quieter than Anna had been, so much so that Anna might not have noticed her if she hadn’t been looking in that direction. A few moments later, and she joined them behind the sign.
Anna pulled on the rope holding Genevieve. “Ready?”
“I guess so,” she said. “This seemed a lot less scary when I was thinking it up.”
“You’ll be fine,” Anna said, touching her hand.
“I’m gonna hold you to that.”
Genevieve slid off the bracket and rappelled down eight feet or so, favoring her ankle but not badly. Once she’d gotten situated, she pulled a roll of double-sided tape out of her satchel. She slapped it on the glass in four places, the corners of a square about four feet on a side. Then she got out a few pages from the phone book that Sobell had scrawled on and stuck one in place at each corner.
She looked up at Anna one last time, a question on her face. Anna shrugged and gave her the thumbs-up. What else did she expect? Anna didn’t have any better idea than Genevieve of whether Sobell’s shit would work as advertised. There simply wasn’t anything else to go on.
Genevieve tapped the center of the square. The window blew inward in a soundless explosion, the draft of its passage pulling Genevieve in after it. She grabbed at the edges of the window frame, steadied herself, and looked up at Anna, eyes wide. Her mouth widened in a grin, and she returned the thumbs-up.
Moments later, the three of them were inside. The room was a small office, the pictures on the wall vague dark spots, a small desk pushed back against the corner. Powdered glass crunched like sand underfoot.
Anna checked her gun. “Ready?” she whispered.
Genevieve nodded.
Karyn closed her eyes, then opened them again. Her face was pale against the darkness. “Genevieve, you . . . Maybe you should stay here.”
Anna cut in before Genevieve could do more than look puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe she should stay here. I think . . . I think this could be really bad for her.”
“You think, or you know?”
Karyn studied the floor, kicked at the sand there, then looked back up. “I know,” she said softly. “As much as I know anything.”
Silence greeted this pronouncement. Anna looked from Karyn’s anguished face to Genevieve’s worried grin. She thought of Tommy. Judging from Karyn’s expression, she wasn’t the only one. “Gen, maybe you should sit this one out.”
“Right. And just how do you plan to get past the seventh seal and the magical gatekeeper at the end of level nine?”
“The what?”
“You know what I mean.” She held up a sheaf of papers. “I’m only about halfway through the phone book here, so unless you’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, I’m all you got.”
There was no answer for that, so Anna looked back to Karyn.
“Genevieve, can Anna and I have a minute alone?” Karyn asked.
“No.” Genevieve shifted her weight, but she didn’t back away. “You just told me I’m toast real soon, unless we do something about it, and now you want me to step out into the hall alone? No way.”
“They’re already in the building,” Anna said. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
Karyn cast a despondent look out the window, where the rope still hung between the two buildings. The faint pull of wind dragged her hair across her forehead. “If she goes up there with us, she’ll be in real danger.” She took a quick look at Genevieve, then resumed staring out the window. “This shit comes true, Anna. Tell her to stay here.”
“She doesn’t tell me to do anything,” Genevieve began, and Anna cut her off.
“It doesn’t always come true,” Anna insisted. “We can stop it this time, like we have a million times. This is what you do, Karyn. You see it coming, and you get us out of the way.”
“Not every time.” Karyn’s face crumpled, and even in the low light reflected from the building across the way, Anna saw the bright bubble of tears threaten to burst.
She pulled Karyn to her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Tommy wasn’t your fault. I never should have said those things.” Karyn’s body convulsed with sobs, and Anna felt the hot streaks of tears wet her collar.
“I can’t . . .” Karyn’s words were lost in a fresh flood of sorrow, and she clung to Anna with a fierce desperation that Anna had never expected. Anna’s heart felt like it was being wrung out like a wet dishcloth—but they didn’t have time for this now.
“Later,” Anna said. She gently pulled Karyn’s hands from her. “We have to do this now. The others are counting on us.”
The naked misery on Karyn’s face was almost too much to bear, and Anna felt a rush of relief when she wiped her face and nodded. “Yeah. OK.”
Anna turned to Genevieve. “You OK with this?” It would be OK, she thought
. Karyn would keep her from getting hurt. That’s what she did, for everybody. Except once.
Genevieve summoned up one of her wry grins. “Long as you two are in front.”
* * *
“Ah. Home sweet home.” Sobell stood at the front stairs of his building, doing his best to bask under the glare of the floodlights rather than wince. “I suppose I should be happier to see it.”
“That’s it, then?” Drew asked, the sound of hope unmistakable in his voice. He’d been anxious ever since they left Nail at the emergency room. Sobell couldn’t blame him.
“That’s it. Unless you’d care to stick around for the finale?”
Drew shook his head. “No, thanks. The Brotherhood—they’re done after this? I won’t have to worry anymore?”
“No more worries,” Sobell said. He twisted his hand a certain way and spat out a nasty syllable. The spreading grin died stillborn on Drew’s face, and he fell to the ground. His eyes were still open and frantic, darting left and right in rolling arcs, but he made no sound as Sobell leaned over him.
“I’m sorry, young man. Truly.” One swipe from St. George’s sword, and blood flooded forth from Drew’s open throat, the pool spreading quickly to a shallow groove in the marble. Sobell stepped over it just as it reached the edge and spilled over. Drew gurgled, but scarcely moved—the paralysis was thorough.
Another short incantation. Nothing happened visibly, but the next unwanted visitor to attempt to cross that line would be the recipient of a particularly unpleasant surprise. And the next after that, and so on.
“So much for Bill Mendez and his boys,” Sobell muttered. He dipped his index finger in Drew’s blood and drew three runes on his own face—one on his damaged forehead, one below each eye—and then followed up with yet another incantation. He imagined he could hear the clamor of hungry, sharp-toothed mouths swell around him.
Is this the last one? The one where I finally step over the line, and they take me?
Premonitions Page 32