Fire Season

by Stephen Blackmoore

  “What, I’m the boogeyman now? Come on. ‘Go to sleep son, or Eric Carter’s gonna get ya.’ I’m a goddamn teddy bear.”

  “We know you’re not doing it. We can help you with the situation. Get people like Werther off your back. That’s at least worth listening to, isn’t it?”

  I admit, it would be nice to have people not shooting at me quite so often, but let’s be honest, they’re going to anyway. If I jump in with anybody, eventually they’re gonna try to kill me. Letitia’s group, Gabriela, somebody else. It’s not something with good odds as a long-term prospect.

  But it can’t hurt to talk, can it? If there’s evidence that this Councilman Chu has that I’m not setting all these fires, maybe people will calm the fuck down.

  “All right, Scarecrow, let’s go see the Wizard.”

  * * *

  —

  Councilman Chu lives in Encino. Letitia tries to tell me about his district, its borders, and all I can picture is reproducing amoeba, which, this being L.A., somehow seems to fit. But then she won’t shut up about it and my eyes glaze over and I finally have to tell her to stop talking or I’ll shoot her.

  Chu lives in the hills above Ventura Boulevard among the twisting side streets where the houses are hidden by overgrown ivy and shade trees that have been there since the thirties.

  We ditched the truck. It was a little conspicuous, what with the dented, blood-covered hood and the missing passenger door. The thought of stealing another car made Letitia a little sick, so I took that hit. A snap of the fingers, a little bit of magic, and we were on the road in a gray Honda Accord in no time flat.

  She’s not sure what to do with me. I’m giving off mixed signals by keeping the gun in my hand with a round in the chamber, but the safety on. I might shoot her. I might not. Who can tell? Certainly not me. I haven’t made up my mind, yet.

  She pulls onto a tiny side street off of Hayvenhurst and onto a steep driveway. At the top it widens into a circular patch outside a two-story mansion with a three-car garage. One car, a nice, but not too nice, Volkswagen SUV sits to one side. Letitia pulls up the Honda behind it and parks.

  “Real man of the people, this Mister Chu. So down to Earth and humble. How many bedrooms does this place have? Five? Six?” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against money. I’m a fan of money. I steal it whenever I get a chance.

  But I’m not a fan of the rich. I don’t know if it’s irony, chutzpah, or my own Holier-Than-Thou-Angry-Young-Man shtick that’s let me ignore the fact that I’m just as much the privileged, moneyed elite as this guy, but since I found out I’ve inherited more money than I can count, it’s harder to lie to myself.

  Money, like magic, is power. And like any power, you can do something cool with it, or you can wave it in everybody’s face like a drunken frat boy swinging his cock around. I don’t know this Councilman Chu, but I already don’t like him.

  “He’s one of us,” she says, as though it explains everything. Sadly, it pretty much does. With so many mages it’s all about power, presentation, influence. Anyone worth a damn wouldn’t be living in a series of motels across the city like I do. They’d buy property, cement their positions, grow their network.

  There’s that annoying cognitive dissonance again.

  “Who owns the krautwagon?” I nod toward the VW. It’s clearly not Chu’s. Too shabby, no flash and dazzle. This is a car that actually gets used, probably for a commute.

  “Peter Sloane. He’s an Assistant District Attorney.”

  “What? No circuit court judges? Senators? The President? And I thought this was a professional circus.” We get to the door and she rings the doorbell. “You don’t need the gun,” she says.

  “Probably not, but it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.”

  The door opens up to a young man in a blue pin-stripe suit. Blond, mid-twenties, one of those smiles always plastered on a politician’s face. He steps to the side, waving us in.

  “Mister Carter,” he says. “It’s nice to finally meet you. I’m Peter.” He puts out his hand to shake and then notices the gun in mine. “Oh. I see. I imagine you must have some questions.”

  “You could say that.” He might be an ADA, but everything about him screams mook. Whatever he is in this line-up, he’s expendable help. You can almost smell the redshirt on him.

  “Hopefully we can give you satisfactory answers.”

  “For your sake, I hope so, too.” He turns the smile up a couple thousand watts, but I’m not buying it. If Letitia and Chu are mages, I’m sure Peter is, too. Privilege, money, and power give people a confidence they don’t deserve. I should know.

  I don’t know how powerful he is, or what his knack might be, but I’m pissed off enough not to care. If I have to beat the crap out of Chu and these two, I will and I won’t look back.

  I follow Letitia and Peter into a cavernous foyer and on to a living room that looks like an old Victorian gentlemen’s club. Bar on one side, a group of thick, leather-upholstered chairs around a coffee table.

  David Chu gets up from one of the chairs. Tall, Asian, a Mister Rogers sweater, and movie star good looks that I assume he intends to convey honesty and youthful energy. To me it makes me think of those deep-sea fish that are all teeth and a glowing lure to pull in other fish to eat them.

  “Mister Carter,” he says. “I’m so glad you could make it. I hope your drive over was uneventful.” He doesn’t try to shake my hand, seeing the gun and taking it in stride.

  “Some gunfire, some magic, some people dead. You know the drill.”

  “Sadly, I do,” he says. “I was Downtown during the riots helping protect businesses from looting.” He raises the t-shirt under his sweater and I can see a couple of puckered scars from what look like bullets, a surgery scar up to his belly button, and one that looks like a bad burn.

  “I lost about a foot of my large intestine and a kidney,” he says. “Some of our people took advantage of the chaos to try breaking into other mages’ homes, labs, and hiding places. There was a lot of fighting. And a lot of dying.”

  “I remember,” I say. The riots sucked for everybody, and of course all the magic types decided it was the perfect time to act on old grudges, grab territory, remove rivals. “Shit happens.”

  “Indeed, it does. Have a seat. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Nah, I’m good.” I gesture with the gun and Letitia and Peter get the hint and sit in a couple of other leather chairs. I stay standing.

  “Tish? Peter?”

  “I could use an iced tea,” Peter says, as if having a suspected arsonist waving a gun around happens to him all the time.

  “Nothing for me,” Letitia says. “Thanks.” There’s a tremor in her voice, but I don’t think it’s fear. At least not fear of me. One of her “colleagues”?

  “He killed Attila Werther,” she says.

  Chu raises his eyebrow. “Really? Now that’s a feat.”

  I wave it off. “He’s not dead. He’s just someplace he doesn’t want to be. He’s a smart boy, he’ll figure a way out before he gets eaten.”

  “Your mercy knows no bounds,” Chu says. Two glasses slide into the room hovering at about waist height. They float down to rest on the coffee table, coasters sliding out from a stack to catch them. It’s showing off. It’s a little thing, but I get the feeling that Chu’s the sort of guy who’d use a handshake to assert dominance, or some such bullshit.

  He showed me his, it’d only be polite that I do the same. But I resist the urge to slip over to the other side and pop out behind him with my straight razor.

  “I notice you don’t seem to have a lot of wards covering this place,” I say. I felt a few when I walked through the door, but nothing impressive. Mostly low-level alarm type stuff. Nothing that would fry an intruder’s brain, say, or melt their eyeballs in their sockets.

  He shrugs. “If I’m
not here I don’t much care, and if I am, well, I handle it myself.” That tells me pretty much everything I need to know about this guy.

  I holster the Browning. There’s no point keeping it out. If things get hairy it’s all going to be tossing spells at each other. If I’m reading him right, keeping it out is just going to be seen as a weakness, and that leads to the kind of fallout that’s more of a pain in the ass than I’m really up for right now.

  “All right,” I say. “I’m here. I’m told you had a proposition for me.”

  “You spent some time in Mexico recently,” Chu says. “I hear you caused quite a stir with some of the cartels. Must have made some enemies.”

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  “Why did you do it?” Peter says. He takes a sip of his tea, blue eyes locked on me like missiles.

  “Since I was in Mexico, I figured I’d murder a bunch of cartel assholes.” Letitia gives me another one of those looks like back in the car, like she doesn’t want to believe me, but does, anyway.

  “But why did you go to Mexico?”

  “To murder a bunch of cartel assholes.” Now Letitia smiles and leans forward. I can see the cop in her eyes. I get the feeling that she’s very good at her job.

  “You don’t need to tell us if you don’t want to,” Peter says.

  “So glad to have your permission. We were talking about enemies.”

  “Have you heard the name Jacqueline Sastre?” Chu says. Shit. Now it starts to make sense.

  “La Niña Quemada,” I say. “Yeah. I heard about her in Mexico. She kills a lot of people. She’s really good at it.”

  Chapter 9

  “Jacqueline Sastre’s a high priced sicaria, an assassin, for the cartels,” I say. “They call her The Burning Girl, La Niña Quemada. She’s very good at what she does. She’ll do the beheadings, the sniper attacks, garroting, whatever. But she really likes to set people on fire. Last I heard she was working for Cartel del Golfo.”

  I also heard that she’s a demon or a Bruja, but I’m doubtful. The Federales can’t catch her because the ones who aren’t corrupt are incompetent as fuck. They named her after a couple dozen burnings and the demon/Bruja story stuck.

  Chu manifests a thick manila folder in the air in front of him. It glides over to my side of the table and I have a really hard time not rolling my eyes. Dude. Just use your fucking hands.

  I open the folder to a series of reports and photos from various agencies and police departments in Mexico and the U.S. In the most recent photos, she’s a bottle-blond, light-skinned Latina, tall, with dancer’s legs and model looks. She’s been at this job for only a few years as far as anyone has evidence. They say she started as some narco’s girlfriend, and when he wouldn’t kill the snitch his betters told him to, she picked up a gun and put two in the snitch’s head herself. Then she put two in her boyfriend.

  From that point on, the story goes, she gets plenty of work. Young, pretty, charming, ruthless. For a while she specialized in killing cartel rivals in what you’d think are safe places, their homes, their clubs, their beds. Nobody checks you for weapons if they know you’re blowing the boss.

  The photos show the progression of both her career and her inevitable jump off the deep end. Cartel violence is brutal, cruel, and messy, but she really cranks it up to eleven.

  I’ve seen worse than what’s in these photos, but man, this is some harsh shit. Beheaded bodies hanging from meat hooks off freeway signs, coolers filled with body parts, severed heads with the victims’ genitals stuffed in their mouths.

  A few of the reports talk about Santa Muerte, how police think Sastre worships her. The thought fills me with an anger I can’t quite place. Yeah, I know I went to Mictlan to kill her and all, but at least I didn’t make up some Satanic Panic bullshit about her.

  Or maybe I’m angry for another reason that I don’t really want to look at.

  Then we get to the bodies that gave her her name. Corpses in barred cells burned down to blackened bones, elaborate tables covered in thick metal straps holding half-burned bodies, eyes wide, faces contorted in agony. She didn’t just kill people, she hunted them down, caged them, tortured them with fire and burned the skin off their bodies until they couldn’t take anymore.

  A more recent set of photos have names at the bottom in letters made on a label maker and stuck to the prints. When some of the names are people I’ve heard of, Travis Niesler, LeAnna Bruce, Joy Bennett, I know they’re the mages she murdered. There are others I recognize, more for their last names than their first, members of L.A.’s more influential mage families.

  Like all the others, their corpses are barely recognizable as human. Ash and split bone, cracked teeth scattered like popcorn kernels. If I went to each of these places, would I see their ghosts? Could any of them talk to me? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt they’d have anything useful to tell me other than how much it hurt.

  The final page is a zoomed-in surveillance photo from a month ago showing Sastre after she’s just crossed the border into San Diego. She’s smoking a cigarette and smiling at the camera.

  Considering how many watch lists she’s on it’s a little surprising. Looks like the person who compiled this file felt the same way. There’s a Post-it note stuck to it that says “WTF?? HOW DID THIS GET MISSED?” They don’t understand. They never will. But I do.

  My eyes hang on her, her just-lit cigarette, her brazen attitude. I close the folder. “Fascinating stuff,” I say. “But how do you know she did it? I see the corpses, I see a picture of her coming in through San Diego, but that’s it. What do you have linking the two?” I’m fishing. Curious to see what they know, what they don’t.

  “Witness reports,” Letitia says. “You hear about a warehouse club fire last weekend?”

  “Must have missed it.”

  “Sixteen dead, sixty-four injured. We talked to over a hundred people trying to figure out what happened. The details are sketchy on when and in what order, but they all roughly match up. A woman came into the club, shot a girl in the head, then lit her on fire.”

  “But how—” Letitia cuts me off by shoving her phone in my face. There’s Sastre in the background of someone’s selfie. And another. And another. And another. Letitia scrolls her finger, zipping through photo after photo. She’s shot from multiple angles in dim light and bright. Photobombing selfie after selfie as she makes her way toward her target.

  Thank fuck for Millennials.

  I already know that she did it. It was that last photo in the folder, the one taken at the border crossing. She had that taken for my benefit, because I’m the only one who’d know what it meant. Standing there, defiant, looking into the camera, smoking a cigarette.

  Which she had lit with a battered Zippo inlaid with an elaborate jade and turquoise pattern on its side. I know that lighter. It’s the one Quetzalcoatl gave me to burn down Mictlan. The lighter holding Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire.

  “The girl she shot and burned,” I say. I think back to the photos. Most looked to be in houses, or on sidewalks, but only one looked like it happened in a warehouse. Takes me a second to remember the name. “Amanda Werther, right? What’s her relation?”

  “Attila Werther’s granddaughter,” Chu says.

  “Wait a second. I don’t get it. If there’s all this photo evidence, why the fuck does Werther think I killed his granddaughter? And everybody else?”

  “First of all, he doesn’t. Not about his granddaughter,” Peter says. “He’s seen these selfies. He knows it was a woman. He just hasn’t made a connection to the rest of the murders, yet. Second, he hasn’t seen the rest of the file. We’re part of the Cleanup Crew. It was easy to copy photos off phones and the internet and wipe them clean.”

  “We wanted to isolate this and find the murderer before Werther and the big families got involved,” Chu says. “There would have been a bloodbath. The last thing we need are mages t
rying to kill each other in the streets of Los Angeles.”

  “Yeah, because that never happens,” I say.

  “Look,” Letitia says. “We didn’t make the connection at first. Everybody figured it was a rivalry, and as far as the Werthers and anyone outside this room knows, it was. Nobody thinks you did that one.”

  “But they think I did all the rest? Then give them all this and get them the fuck off my back.”

  “We can’t do that,” Chu says. “If we do, then whatever plan she’s got either goes down the drain or is accelerated. And given her predilection with magical fire, we’d really rather not push her into lighting up the whole city.”

  “Fuck you,” I say standing up and heading toward the door, the folder in my hands. “Fuck all of you.” I get to the door and the folder evaporates into smoke.

  “That’s not going to work,” Chu says. “The folder’s merely a projection. The real one is in a safe place.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you’re the perfect bait,” Chu says. “She clearly wants to make your life miserable and she can’t keep killing people and expect that no one’s going to figure it out eventually. I don’t know if she’s hoping you’ll be dead by then, or if she has something else in mind. But if we want to keep people safe, we have to draw her out.”

  “I’m wondering how you’re gonna spin this into campaign rhetoric. You do know that most of L.A. isn’t made up of mages, right?”

  “Is it wrong of me to want to save my city?” he says.

  “No. But that’s not what you’re doing,” I say. “You want to hang me out to dry and use this to get a feather in your cap among the mage families. Even if you lose the mayoral election because the normals don’t vote for you, you’re going to get more respect from them. And they’ve got a lot more power at their disposal.”