Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  My duffel was still in my room; I was glad I’d paid for the week. Then I showered and lay on the bed. I dreamed of a huge mob of women, all of them clones of Captain, weeping on their knees beside tiny caskets.

  When I woke up, it was just six o’clock. The air-conditioning had turned the place into a fridge. My throat was raw from the dry air. I went into the bathroom and ran cold water over my hands.

  I’d nearly died the night before.

  It seemed like such a small thing. I nearly forgot my keys. I nearly bought new shoes. I nearly died. I looked at my face in the mirror, remembering the way the talon had clamped down on me, and trying to picture how it would look in the light.

  I also remembered the Iraqi kid with the Jackie Chan DVDs—maybe he would have made it if he’d had an Annalise of his own at his back—an Annalise who threatened a woman’s son.

  I left the room and got into my car. The filling station was packed; cars were lined up three deep at each of the pumps. After I topped the tank, I drove aimlessly for a while.

  Annalise had offered to kill my old crew for me. I knew she thought she was doing me a favor, but I couldn’t turn the responsibility over to her. I had come here because my old crew was in trouble. I wanted to save them.

  That was the hard part. I wanted to be a guy who saved people. I wanted to protect them from sorcerers and predators, but that wasn’t how this game was played. Arne and the others were being eaten alive by predators, and I had no idea how to save them. In fact, I was nearly certain it couldn’t be done.

  I knew what I had to do. I had to kill them. Because it didn’t matter what they’d done, and it didn’t matter if they had people who loved them and kids to look after. Only the predators mattered. Not the people.

  I said it aloud in my car: “Only the predators matter. Nothing else.” It was easy to say when I was here alone. It was a lot harder when I was holding a gun to someone’s head, or swinging a length of pipe in a crowded room. I had killed people to get at predators, and if I had to be honest with myself, I knew I’d do it again.

  But I couldn’t kill a woman’s kid because she refused to give me a boat ride.

  The Twenty Palace Society had changed me, but maybe I needed to do more to change the society.

  I parked a block away from the Roasted Seal. I didn’t have a conscious reason to go there, but it was as good a place as any to take the next step. I walked through the back alley to confirm that it was empty before I went to the front.

  The bar was busier than it had been, which meant it had ten or twelve people in booths or sitting at the bar. The bartender was new, but he looked enough like the other guy to be his brother. A pair of middle-aged women gave me the once-over as I scanned the room, but Arne wasn’t there, and neither was Lenard, or anyone I knew. One thick-necked guy with a crew cut looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was talking on his cell and looking down at his beer, not at me at all.

  Most of the crowd were watching Mexican soccer on two flat-screen TVs mounted high on the wall. The surging white noise of the crowd was the loudest sound in the room.

  Three tall, slender men occupied Arne’s booth. They wore waitstaff black and had stylish haircuts. They were victims; they wouldn’t know where to find Arne.

  The back door had already been replaced, and the wall was patched with fresh spackle. Soon it would be painted over, I was sure, and all traces of that incident would disappear.

  Behind me was the alcove Lenard had been standing in. It was a wait station, but there were no waiters here. The plastic tub was dusty, and the notepad on the counter had yellowed at the edges. Only the bar stool looked as if it had been used lately.

  Lenard’s small locker was there, painted the same dark color as the wall. The lock had a little slot for a key, but I had something almost as good.

  The urge to look around the room to check who was watching me was powerful, but I knew it would just draw attention. I took the ghost knife from my back pocket and sliced through the lock. The door squeaked as it swung open.

  Right at the front was a Nintendo DS; Lenard liked his videogames, especially when he needed to kill some time. Beside that was a roll of cash no thicker than the cord of a vacuum cleaner. But in the back, hidden in the shadows, was a foot-high gold statue of a hairless man standing on a black base. The base was made to look like a spool of film, and a nameplate had Ellen Egan-Jade’s name on it.

  Oh, shit. Was this what Lenard did when he thought he could get away with anything? This?

  I snapped up the roll of cash. If he’d been standing beside me, I could have beaten the hell out of him. I could have kicked him in the nuts. I even, for a few moments, considered calling the cops. But no. I couldn’t do any of that. I took his money—let that be an expensive lesson. Then I’d tell Arne one of his people was keeping evidence of a rape and murder at the Bigfoot Room. I’m sure that would go over beautifully.

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  It was the bartender. I shut the locker as I turned around. “I’m looking for a guy,” I said, unsure if I should use Lenard’s name or how best to describe him.

  “Try a bar in West Hollywood,” he said, to general laughter. “This place is for people who want drinks.”

  Now every face in the room was turned toward me. Only Crew Cut wasn’t smiling. Suddenly, I recognized him. He had been the one who tossed Wardell’s jacket at him in front of Steve Francois’s fancy white house. He shut his cellphone off and put it into his pocket.

  At that moment the front door opened, and I saw several large figures backlit by the desert sun as they entered. Crew Cut slid off his stool.

  I sprinted to the back door, slamming it open. This time an alarm sounded.

  The alley smelled of garbage and concrete. I vaulted onto the dumpster, then jumped for the edge of the bar roof. Crew Cut and the rest of Potato’s crew weren’t idiots, even if they looked like they were. I was sure they’d have someone at the mouth of the alley.

  I scrambled onto the roof, feeling like a coward. Which I was. Ghost knife or not, I didn’t want to tangle with anyone in Potato’s crew. The door banged open a second time, and I heard heavy treads scraping against the ground.

  “Dammit,” a man said. Despite the alarm, I recognized the voice as Potato’s. “Gone.”

  “He didn’t come this way,” a second voice shouted. It sounded farther away.

  Another voice came from a good distance away. “Not this way, either.” I’d been right about the entrance to the alleys.

  Someone opened the dumpster lid and let it fall shut again.

  “How do they do that?” Potato didn’t sound annoyed at all. In fact, he sounded almost admiring. “Okay. This fucking alarm is going to bring cops. Let’s get gone.”

  I risked a peek over the lip of the roof and saw them moving away. Good. Just as they turned the corner, I threw my leg over the sheet-metal roofing and hung by my fingers. It was a three-foot drop to the concrete, and when I hit the asphalt, I was face-to-face with the bartender. He scowled at me from the open doorway, the Oscar statuette in his hand like a bell.

  “What the hell do you call this?” With the door open, he had to shout to be heard over the alarm.

  “Evidence,” I shouted back. “And you’re putting your fingerprints all over it.”

  His hand sprang open and the award clattered to the ground. I turned and ran toward the end of the alley that Potato and his men had not taken. Once I hit the sidewalk, I slowed to a casual stroll.

  I should have asked Wardell to drop me off a mile from my car and walked back to it. I should have realized that Francois would send Potato and his men after me once he found out about the video Arne posted, and that Wardell could tell them where he’d dropped me off.

  But had they already grabbed Arne off the street? Judging by what I’d just heard, I’d bet against it.

  Still, if Arne wasn’t at the Bigfoot Room, I didn’t know where to find him, and I didn’t have as many f
riends as I used to.

  I unrolled Lenard’s money and spread it flat under the floor mat. A cop would find it two minutes into a determined search of the car, but this was the best I could do. I drove back into Studio City and parked outside Ty’s gym.

  Six people pushed through the doors in a rush just as I reached them, but the last, a muscular woman who couldn’t seem to stand up straight, held them open for me. The front desk was swarmed with people turning in locker keys and receiving plastic cards in return. I waited for things to thin out, watching people get processed at the desk and exit. Leaving work, rushing home to make dinner, pick up their kids, or go on dates, they were nothing like me. And God, there were so many of them.

  When things had slowed enough that the supervisor could pay attention to me, I stepped forward. She was the same one I’d spoken to a couple of days before, but she didn’t recognize me. I had to explain myself again. Ty wasn’t here, she told me, and no, I couldn’t have his address or phone number.

  A customer at the counter turned to me and said: “You mean Tyalee Murphy? He’s just around the corner. I’ll show you.”

  I followed him outside. We stood at the edge of the parking lot together. He gestured toward an intersection like a man karate chopping an imaginary opponent. “That street there beside the pet-supply store is Cartwell. I think. Whatever the name, you go that way one block and take the very first left. Ty lives on that block, on the left side, in a building with two beautiful jacarandas out front.”

  I had no idea what a jacaranda was, but I could figure it out. “That’s great. Thanks.”

  “No problem. You’re a friend of his?”

  “Actually, I’m a hit man hunting him down.”

  We laughed and went our separate ways.

  It was early evening, so parking on Ty’s residential street was impossible, but I did luck into a space around the corner. There were three buildings with two trees out front, and I found Ty’s name in the second one. I rang the buzzer and spent a few seconds studying the tiny fernlike leaves of the whatever tree out front. The security gate squawked at me like a mechanical crow, without anyone trying to speak to me first.

  I went inside and up the stairs, then knocked on the apartment door. It was yanked open by a short, slim Korean man. He had small features on a broad, smooth face, and he was so fit his collarbones showed at the opening of his polo shirt. Like the client who’d given me directions, he had hair that had been cut very recently, and it had a lot of mousse in it.

  Something about me startled him, and he laid his fingertips next to his throat. “You’re not the guy.”

  “No,” I answered. “I’m a different guy.”

  “I mean the pizza guy.” He looked me over, as though I might be hiding a pizza box somewhere.

  “I’m looking for Ty,” I said. “Is he here?”

  He moved his weight onto his back foot and put his hand on his hip. His expression suggested he thought I had a lot of nerve saying that to him.

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “I’m an old friend and I think he’s in trouble.”

  He started to say something but stopped himself to think about it. Then he let out a long, relieved sigh. “Come in come in,” he said, as though I was a doctor making a house call. “What’s your name?”

  “Ray.”

  “I’m Dale. I’m glad you came here and said what you said. I’ve been thinking something has been wrong for days, but … Ray Lilly? Tyalee told me about you.”

  All my old crew were talking about me. It made me feel odd; I never talked about them. “What did he tell you?”

  Dale looked around the room as though he was going to offer me a chair, but my question had made him rethink it. “He said you were the most honest thief he had ever seen, and that he could never trust you. What does that mean, anyway? Are you really some kind of thief?”

  Ty and I had been thieves together, but I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. “Let’s stay focused on Ty. Why do think something has been wrong?”

  “He won’t touch me,” Dale said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “He wears those gloves, and when I touch his skin …”

  “It burns.”

  “Yeah. And he gets angry, like he’s afraid for me. What happened to him?”

  I wasn’t going to go there. “Is he here?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  That wasn’t a good sign. Ty could have been lying somewhere in the apartment the way Caramella had.

  The buzzer sounded. I stepped aside to let Dale access the intercom, but all he did was press the security button. He was a victim waiting to happen, and I wondered what Ty saw in him.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “I haven’t even asked you to sit down. Come in, please, and be comfortable. Can I get you something? Beer?”

  “I’d rather have water.”

  “Of course, it’s so hot.” He hurried into the kitchen and filled a glass. I looked around the room. Their apartment had been furnished right off the showroom floor of IKEA, which made the place feel like a robot habitat. On the end table beside me there were two little spaceships facing each other. One was from Star Trek, but I couldn’t recognize the other. I had the sudden urge to smash them both.

  As Dale handed me the glass of water, there was a knock at the door. He opened it without looking through the peephole first, signed the pizza guy’s slip, and shut the door. I took the pizza box from him.

  “There’s something we need to do first.”

  Together, we searched the apartment. He looked in cabinets and cupboards, and above them, too, searching for a clue to Ty’s odd behavior. I went through the motions with him, but what I really wanted to do was check every corner and behind every bit of furniture for a shape that could be touched but not seen. We didn’t find that, but in the bedroom, Dale showed me something else.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should, but …” He dragged a stainless-steel suitcase out from under the bed. I knew what was in it even before he opened it.

  Cash. It was bundles of twenties and hundreds, all thrown in randomly, and all bound up in paper wrappers.

  I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. The urge to slug Dale, hard, and run out the door with this money was incredible. So many of my problems could be solved with this suitcase. And he was a guy who didn’t even look through the peephole before opening his door. It would be a useful lesson for him.…

  “Look at this! It’s just like a movie!” Dale made that sound like an insult. “I don’t even know where it came from!”

  I held up one of the bundles. The name of the bank was printed on it. “Yes, you do.”

  He plopped down onto the corner of the bed. “Okay. I do. But Ty, he … Okay. Once, about a year and a half ago, I had a flat on my car, and I couldn’t afford a new tire. I was really, really broke, and he and I had just gotten together, okay? And I was upset because I’m in frickin’ L.A. without a car, okay?

  “The next day, Ty had put four new sidewalls on it. He thought I would be happy, but he had even less money than I did. He hadn’t even started to cover his facility fee at the gym. I’m not stupid, okay? I knew he hadn’t bought them. But I made him promise not to steal again.”

  “But you kept the tires,” a voice behind us said. I spun around, my pulse already racing. Ty stood in the doorway, his hands empty. He looked at Dale, then at me, then back at Dale again, as though he wanted to make us unmeet each other.

  “Why is this here?” Dale demanded. “In my home!”

  Ty glanced at the suitcase without much interest. “I need it,” he said. “I need to offer it to someone to get him to do something for me.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Wally King?”

  “Yeah,” he said to me. “You’ve been putting it together.”

  “I still have a couple of blank spots in the story. Help me with the rest of it.” He laughed at me. It was a cynical sound; he wasn’t so glad to see me anymore. “All right, then,” I said. “Help me get t
he guy who did this to you. No one else can.”

  “You’re the one who did this to me.”

  “That’s bullshit, Ty.”

  “Well, what do you expect from me?!”

  His shout echoed in the tiny room. Dale bolted to his feet and retreated toward the corner. I held myself absolutely still, and I knew right then I would have to kill him.

  “What do you expect from me, Ray? This guy shows up out of the blue at the Bigfoot Room saying he knows you. He says he can do things for us, and Luther is right there to say it’s true, it’s all true. He promises us power, and he delivers, too. All he asks is one favor in return, and he hasn’t even collected from me yet.”

  “I don’t think he’ll bother, Ty.” You’re just a distraction. You’re his wooden man. “Tell me what happened.”

  He sighed. “What’s the use?”

  I thought about Wally’s cabin and my iron gate. Maybe I didn’t need him to explain it all to me. “I’ll tell you, then. You went somewhere secluded. Wally had a circle or square or something painted on the floor—maybe it was drawn in chalk—and it had symbols around it. Then he put a symbol on you, too, and you got into the circle. What was next? Chanting? Music? Did he draw another symbol?”

  Ty wasn’t in the mood to answer questions. “How did you know he drew a symbol on me?”

  “Because he put a thing on you. Something alive, and the only reason it hasn’t killed you yet is that you’re protected.”

  Ty lifted his shirt, exposing ab muscles that gave me a twinge of envy. And a sigil.

  It wasn’t large, barely as wide across as seven quarters arranged in a circle, all touching. Three squiggles had been drawn inside a slender ring, but this time I couldn’t figure out what those squiggles might represent.

  Then I realized that the ink was fading. The outer ring especially was wearing away.

  Dale had leaned in close to me so he could look, too. “It’s henna,” he said. “But fading.”