The sun was rising when we docked in Everett. By that time, my ankle was swollen and unbearably tender. It had to be broken. Walking was impossible; Talbot and Captain had to practically carry me to the truck. They laid me in the bed, and Talbot sat beside me. He looked as though he wanted to talk but wisely kept his mouth shut.
We stopped off at a supermarket on our way to wherever we were going. While we waited in the parking lot, I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost immediately. I woke again instantly when we pulled out of our parking space.
Not long afterward, we were back in the plane and in the air, heading south. I wanted a chance to talk to Captain—to apologize—but I never got it. Then it was too late, and I knew I’d never get another chance. I didn’t even know her real name.
I sat on the plane, miserable and tired. I wanted to lie down, but there was no space.
Annalise sat next to me. She held a plastic bag full of sliced meat. “Remember how bad it was to heal those burns?” she asked. “Broken bones are worse.”
She was right.
When we landed in Burbank again I was shaky and sick to my stomach, but I could walk again and my bruises were gone. I rode back to the hotel with Annalise and Talbot, but I couldn’t look at them. I was wrung out and tired, and pissed off at the world.
Annalise had Talbot drive us to my Escort. “Stay here,” she told him. Talbot gave us an unhappy look as we climbed out and went to my car. There was no pain in my ankle at all. It was completely healed.
Annalise stood beside the driver’s door. The heat roasted us. “Well, he was useless.”
“He wasn’t wrong to run, boss,” I said. I sighed. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. “Csilla didn’t give him a useful weapon. He’d have fed a predator, and there would have been two victims to draw them in. You might not have gotten them all with your green fire.” She shrugged. I was boring her. “What’s next?”
“Same thing we’ve been doing: find your buddy Wally King. I want you to get out there. Here.” She gave the cellphone back to me. A quick check showed that the pictures I’d taken had been erased. “My number is in there. Call me when we have some killing to do.”
“What about the predators he’s been summoning?”
“Wally King is our top priority. If I find out anything about those pictures, I’ll let you know. The predators …” It was her turn to sigh. “You knew these people, yeah? If you confirm they have predators in them but you can’t bring yourself to cure them, give their names and addresses to me.” I knew what she meant by cure. “I can make it quick, Ray.” There was no kindness in her voice, and I was glad of it. The woman who’d given Captain that note shouldn’t play at kindness.
She turned and walked back to her van. Did I want to see Annalise burn Fidel down to a pile of bones? Did I want to sit alone in a motel room, TV blaring, while I knew she was out there killing him, or any of them?
Hell, no.
I drove back to my motel.
Annalise had promised to tell me what she learned about Wally’s pictures. She had never offered to pass me information without prompting before. Now, just as she was trusting me, I wanted to be far away from her.
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 friends 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 the 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.”
Ty dropped his shirt to cover the sigil. It occurred to me that I had Annalise’s cell in my pocket. I took it out and lifted Ty’s shirt again. He went stiff and awkward when I touched him. I snapped the picture quickly and backed away. Ty frowned at me and straightened his shirt. “Yeah. The ink was diluted, I think, and when it wears out, I’m history, right?”
I looked him in the eye. “Caramella is already dead.”
“Damn.” He turned his back and stepped over to the bureau. There was another unrecognizable spaceship on it. Ty flicked it with his fingers. It slid across the painted wood and fell to the carpet with a fragile plastic sound.
“Ty,” I said, pointing my thumb at Dale. I chose my words carefully. “Do you care about this victim?”
Dale looked at me, shocked. “Victim?”
Ty laughed sadly. “Oh, Ray, you have no idea. You don’t know how many times I’ve had to pick up a credit card he’s left forgotten on a restaurant table. Or car keys. You don’t even know. But yeah. I love him.”
“Then you have to get away from him.”
“No!” Dale shouted. “Ty, I don’t know what’s going on, okay, but—”
“Shut up,” Ty said. His tone wasn’t unkind, just sad. “I mean it.”
“When Caramella went,” I pushed on, “she nearly took Vi’s daughter with her.”
“Vi’s daughter?” he said, as though it was hilarious that I’d called her that.
“Yes. And not just her, either. When this thing takes you, it’s going to take whoever is nearby, too. Ty, I can—”
“You can what, Ray? What? Tell me what you can do?”
“I can get you away from people—”
“Fuck that. I want to live.” Ty bared his teeth at me as he said it, letting anger give him strength. “I’m not going to give up now! I’m going to find this Wally King, and I’ll offer him the money. If that doesn’t work, I’ll offer him his own damn life. He’ll show me a way—”
“Ty—”
“No, Ray, shut up! He’ll show me how to take it off and put it on when I want, and—”
“Ty, it’s not a goddamn jacket! It’s down in your lungs, isn’t it? It’s breathing for you, and it’s up your nose and in your head. And it’s strong, I know. It’s not going to let you put it on and take it off like a hat.”
“What can you offer that’s better, Ray? I wouldn’t even be in this mess if it wasn’t for you, and you want to take me somewhere quiet to die?”
My ghost knife was in my pocket, but if I used it, the drape on him would kill him, and who knows how many more would come through. Ty wouldn’t be happy to see me reaching into my pocket just then, either.
“You were wrong about one thing, Ray. Wally King did ask me to do a little something for him, but I wasn’t going to do it. I think I changed my mind.”
He turned into a silhouette, giving me a glimpse of the Empty Spaces, then he vanished.
I spun and tore the covers off the bed, throwing them at him. I didn’t have to bother; he wasn’t hiding from me, he was charging. The striped sheet flopped over Ty’s head just before he slammed me off my feet into the wall.
I was pinned, the wooden bedpost digging into my low ribs and kidney. Damn, he was strong. I felt his right hand release my shirt, saw the blanket flutter as it slid off him. I raised my left hand to protect my head.
His first punch glanced off my triceps and the top of my head. It probably hurt him as much as it hurt me. His second struck the part of my forearm protected by spells. That one didn’t hurt me at all.
His weight shifted and I twisted to the left. His third punch landed right on my solar plexus. He might have killed me with it if not for the spells there.
My feet were off the floor, and I didn’t have room to lift them onto the bed. Instead, I kicked low, hoping to hit Ty’s knee. I missed. I had no idea where he was. All I could see was Dale standing in the corner with a horrified expression.
I tucked my chin and protected my face as well as I could. Even though I couldn’t see him, I could feel him. He was still holding me with his left hand. I reached out with my right, trying to find his eyes, but he wrenched himself away and slammed me down on his bed.
I could hear his breathing, ragged and furious, but I looked straight through him at Dale. While he rained down punches on me, I curled my legs and kicked at him again. I needed to get him off balance. I needed leverage.
Ty switched his grip on my shirt so his knuckles would grind into my throat. I finally managed to get a good kick against his knee and made him stagger. He didn’t let me up, but the pressure eased, and I had a moment’s break from the beating I was taking on my ribs and my left arm.
His grip on my throat loosened. I caught his thumb in my right hand and started to peel it back. He wouldn’t let me break it, though. He ripped his hand away and backed off.
For a moment I was afraid he’d gotten smart. If he’d let go of me and hit me with a bit more distance, I’d never have been able to protect myself. I pushed my way off the bed toward him, determined to keep him close.
I hadn’t yet gotten all the way upright when a fat ceramic lamp floated off the bedside table and rushed at me. I swung at it with my protected forearm and shattered it. Broken bits of clay clattered against my face and chest, and the heavy base struck my lip painfully.
I felt something kick against my feet, and I was on my back again. Ty fumbled at my shirt, trying to get control of me and pin me again—he could turn invisible, but he couldn’t break his fighting habits. He had to stick with what he was comfortable with.
Shards of broken ceramic jabbed painfully into my back, and the twisted metal workings of the lamp lay across my chest. I grabbed it. The shade had come off, but the bulb had not broken. I felt Ty heave his weight on me, about to throw more punches, and I jabbed upward.
It wasn’t hard to guess where he was. The thin glass of the bulb shattered with a muffled shink sound, and I pushed.
I heard Ty back away, cursing. The bulb was broken almost down to the socket, with a couple of nasty glass shards sticking out. I’d expected to see blood on them, but there was nothing, just a faint, slimy sheen. I tossed it aside and sat up off the bed. Ty didn’t come at me again.
He cursed again, and I oriented myself on the sound. The left side of my body below my arm was bruised, and I had several spots on my face and head that felt painful and inflamed. If he’d been planning to beat me to death, it would have taken him a long time, but he was capable of it.
Ty cursed again, and this time his voice had gone high with fear. Had I hit a vital spot like a throat or an eye? I couldn’t say I was sorry if I had, but I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of killing him here. I wasn’t ready to face four drapes, or to defend Dale from them.
Ty let out a wordless cry, then said: “It’s like a tongue!”
“What’s happening?” Dale cried.
“Ty!” I said. “Show yourself.”
He did. There was a tiny drop of blood on his shoulder. It didn’t look serious to me, but Ty shuddered and twitched back and forth. “Ah! Omigodomigodomigod …”
I moved toward him at the same time Dale did. There was still a delicate sliver of glass protruding from his skin. While I watched, it slowly backed out of the cut as though pulled by an invisible hand, then fell. I picked it up off the carpet. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it.
Dale grabbed Ty’s bare arm, then let go with a hiss. Ty grimaced and turned his face to the ceiling. The cut on his shoulder didn’t look serious. It barely seemed to be bleeding.
“Shit!” Ty gasped. “It’s digging in and squeezing—Ah, God!” He grimaced and staggered as though the right side of his body was paralyzed. “It’s milking the blood out of me!”
I grabbed his gloved hand. It was bone dry, while my clothes were soaked with sweat. “This way,” I said. “Quickly.”
Dale struck my hand away. He was stronger and faster than he seemed. “You’re the one who hurt him! Get out! Get the fuck out!”
“I’m the only one who knows what’s going on!” I shouted, surprising myself with my sudden anger. My face was in pain and felt swollen. Not to mention, I was trying to help a guy who had been beating the crap out of me a minute earlier.
“This is my place!” Dale shouted, and he was angry enough to let a Georgia accent show. “Mine!”
“Stop fighting,” Ty said, “and do something about this leech.”
Dale and I looked at each other. I waited for him to lay out a plan, but it was pretty obvious he had nothing. After a couple of seconds, I turned to Ty.
“All right, asshole,” I said. “That thing on you is starving.”
“Jesus, shit!” Ty said, as the blood welled up around his little scratch and vanished. “It’s drinking my blood?”
“It won’t be satisfied with your blood. It wants your skin and your guts and all the thoughts in your head, too. It wants everything, and like I said, it’s starving. Now, it can’t feed on you while Wally’s spell is in place, but—”
“But it’s taking the parts that come out of me. I’m not stupid.”
I led the two of them into the other room, fighting very hard against the urge to tell him just how incredibly stupid he was. It was hard to raise my left arm, and my upper left incisor felt loose in my mouth. Ty parked himself on a chair at the little dining room table. Dale said he was going to the bathroom for bandages and disinfectant. I went into the kitchen, set a small cast-iron skillet on the stove, and turned the gas under it as high as it would go.
“Ray.” Ty’s voice came from the other room. I didn’t think he could see what I was doing, because I don’t think he could have been so calm. “I’m sorry.”
I told him what he could do with himself.
“Then why are you helping me?”
There were gel packs in the freezer. I took two, pinning one against my ribs with my elbow and laying the other on the side of my face. “Because you may be a selfish, self-justifying asshole who thinks he can buy his way out of this mess, but that thing on you is worse.”
“It’s really alive, isn’t it? It’s a monster.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. Predators killed people, and so did I. “It’s an animal,” I said. “And it’s probably a person, too. I think it’s smart—maybe as smart as a human, but in a different way.” The dry skillet had begun to smoke faintly.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Listen, if it’s hungry, and it can’t eat me, can’t I get it to go to someone else? You know? Agh!” He paused while the drape worked on him. “Why can’t I just, I don’t know, transfer it?”
The packs were too cold. I tossed them into the sink on top of a pair of tiny bowls. “We don’t do that,” I said as I went into the other room.
Dale returned with a roll of bandages and a squeeze tube of disinfectant. He crouched in front of Ty and tried to squeeze gel onto the cuts. Ty looked me in the eyes, and for the first time I saw desperation there. “Ray, there’s got to be a way.”
I looked directly at Dale. “Ty, who do you have in mind?”
“No,” Ty said. “There has to be someone else. Some bum off the street maybe. Somebody worthless.” He winced and clutched at his shoulder. “Hey! There’s a guy at the gym who smacks his wife around sometimes. He’s the one.”
“Even if I knew a way, I wouldn’t do it,” I said.
“Why not?” Ty demanded, as Dale flung the squeeze tube onto the table with an annoyed hiss. The drape was not letting him put the disinfectant on. “Why does it have to be me? If this thing is going to kill somebody, why can’t it be him? Why me?”
I thought about the rape souvenir Lenard kept in the locker at the Bigfoot Room, and Maria’s endless talk about finding a job, and Ty himself holding me down while he was hitting me. Why do any of us do anything? It’s not like we put a lot of rational thought into things. “You two have slept together in the last few days, right? I mean, in the same bed.”
Ty saw what I was saying immediately. “Shit.”
Dale laid a bandage over Ty’s shoulder and placed some tape on it. Then he looked back at me. “What?”
“This thing’s been on him for days, waiting for the chance to feed. If it was going to jump to another unprotected victim, it would have done that already while you were sleeping. Wally didn’t put a mark on you, did he?”
“I don’t know any Wally.”
I turned my attention back to Ty. “It has a meal and it’s not letting go. Ever.”
“Goddammit!” Dale said. The bandage had slid to the side and bunched up, and the tape had peeled away. He started to lay another one in place, and Ty helped him hold it still.
I went into the kitchen. The skillet was smoking hot now, and slightly grayish at the center. I wrapped an oven pad around the handle and picked it up.
“What’s that smell?” Dale asked as I came back into the room. I shoved him aside and jammed the hot metal against Ty’s wound.
He screamed. Oh, how he screamed. His voice almost covered the sound of the meat hissing against metal, but nothing could mask the smell of burning flesh and polyester shirt.
After a couple of seconds, I took it off him. Then I grabbed Dale by the elbow and pulled him back. If the drape killed Ty, I wanted Dale and me to be far enough back that we didn’t fall into the Empty Spaces.
It didn’t kill him, though. Instead, Ty slid off the chair onto his knees, cursing and promising to kill me.
Dale tore out of my grip and rushed to him. “Oh my God, you—”
“At least he won’t bleed to death from a scratch,” I said. Of course, he would die soon enough anyway, but now I figured it was safe to take him outdoors. I went into the bedroom and slid open the closet doors. Half a dozen belts hung from a hook. I chose an army-surplus web belt.
And there on the floor was the open suitcase. I picked up a packet of hundred-dollar bills. The wrapper helpfully told me, in ink the color of spicy brown mustard, that the bundle was worth ten thousand dollars.
A suitcase full of money was a new thing for me. I’d always stolen cars, not cash. At least, not in piles. I didn’t have a job and I’d just taken a beating from a friend—I wanted this money so much that it made me angry. I tore the wrapper off and stuffed the folded bills into my back pocket. I could have made things hard for Ty and Dale by tossing the wrapper behind the bureau where the cops might find it, but I dropped it into the suitcase instead. I wasn’t put on this earth to help cops.
Back in the other room, Ty was smearing aloe on his shoulder. Dale stood between us, a butcher knife in his hand. I’m sure it was the biggest one he could find.
“You’re leaving,” Dale said. “Now.”
“I know. And I’m taking Ty with me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What are you gonna do? Stab me so my guts fall out on the carpet? Right here in your own apartment, with a suitcase full of stolen money in the other room?”
That was all he needed to hear. He sagged and turned toward Ty, letting the knife hang low at his side. “Ty …” His voice had an air of finality about it.
“Don’t say it,” Ty said. “I already know.” He stood. “I tried to do things the right way. I tried a regular job and taxes and everything, but I just couldn’t work it out.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m not going to go down without a fight.” Ty turned to me. “How much of the money did you take?”
“Less than all of it, but enough that I don’t feel like killing you anymore.”
Dale was staring at me. “Can you …” He couldn’t finish the question. I didn’t think he was even sure what he was asking for.
“I don’t know, but no one else is even going to try.”
Ty laid his hand on Dale’s shoulder. “Take the money and get out of town for a while. Take a week, drive up the coast. Use up some of that vacation time. If you spend the money slowly, no one will notice.”
“Tear off the wrappers,” I said. “Order something at a drive-through McDonald’s or something. Take the food out of the bag, stuff the wrappers into the bottom, and roll it up tight. Then stuff the bag into a trash can right there at the restaurant.”
Dale moved toward Ty. “Don’t,” Ty said, and stepped back. “It’ll burn you.”
Dale kissed him.
I looked away, but I didn’t turn my back. Dale still had that damn knife. After a short while, I heard Dale go into the bathroom. He closed the door and turned on the water to wash.
I wrapped the belt around Ty’s right wrist and tightened it as far as it would go. He let me. We left the apartment and went down the rough concrete stairs. I held the end of the belt like a leash. It made me feel like an asshole.
“I’m through playing games,” I said. “If you take that belt off or”—I couldn’t say it on a public stairwell—“do your thing, I’ll kill you, and to hell with the consequences.”
“I was the one who beat the hell out of Justin Gage, you know.”
I couldn’t remember who he was talking about, and I said so.
He laughed a little. “Guess you wouldn’t. He’s a big figure in my life, but … He’s the Cardio-eira guy at the gym where I work. You know, like Tae-Bo, but with capoeira? Never mind. It’s a new fitness thing that’s been getting pretty popular, even though it’s really stupid. Everyone who went to the gym wanted Gage—I couldn’t even pick up the guy’s sloppy seconds. And to make it worse, he was always being nice to me about it. Encouraging me that I was good enough and telling me how it all takes time … like I needed attaboys from him. Do you know how much the gym charged me to work there?”
“No.” I tried to sound like I cared, but I failed. He glanced at me. He could see how I felt, but he was too busy feeling sorry for himself to drop it.
“Well, it’s a lot. After I kicked his dancey little capoeira ass, I took over a bunch of his clients, but I could tell they weren’t going to switch permanently. It was just a waste. Maybe I should have killed him. He was just lying there, at the end—I could have stamped on his neck, you know? But I wasn’t desperate enough for that. That’s what I told myself. I wasn’t desperate enough. I thought I could be a straight arrow, you know? Like Dale. Such a waste, man.”
He didn’t sound sorry about what he’d done. I guess that would have been too much to expect. We reached my Escort and I opened the door for him. He sat and I shut the door. I went around to the driver’s side and climbed in.
“I should have taken that money,” he said. “I had hopes for it.”
“Wally doesn’t need your money.”
“Maybe he wants it.”
“For God’s sake! It should have been obvious to you a long time ago that you cannot pull the usual shit here. You can’t buy off or bully these people. There’s no way to blackmail them. They have their own little world, and it only comes into contact with ours when they need to kill someone or find a patsy.”
“Fuck you. I’m nobody’s patsy.”
“Fuck me? You have a living stomach lining over your whole body, and it’s going to start eating you soon. You’re a patsy. Deal with it. Whatever Wally really needed, he tried to get it with Luther. You weren’t involved.”
Ty turned toward me suddenly. “Tried? At that house?”
I didn’t like the look on his face. “Dude—”
A Range Rover screeched to a halt right in front of my car. I jammed the key into the ignition at the same moment that Ty opened the passenger door and turned invisible. The engine started as I lunged toward Ty but missed him. He was gone.
The doors of the Range Rover swung open. Meatheads One, Two, and Three piled out.
To hell with this. I threw it into reverse and tried to back out of my spot. One of the meatheads fired three rounds into my engine block.
Immediately, the engine started grinding and lost power. I cut the wheel, backing up anyway, but I didn’t have the space to make the turn, and I plowed into the street-side taillight of the car parked behind me.
By then, a man was standing by my window, tapping a pistol against the glass.
I turned off the engine and opened the door. Their ugly faces were all around me, thick, pouchy, scarred with acne. Hands pressed me against my car and patted me down the way a cop would. They found my cell and ghost knife, and this time they kept both. They also found the ten grand. Damn, I hadn’t even gotten to the end of the block with it, and now I had to listen to them laugh as they split it between them.
A woman on the sidewalk held up her cellphone and snapped a picture of us. I stared straight at her, knowing my face would be recorded. Too bad I was on the twisted path; by the time she showed the photo to someone, it would no longer look like me.
“Let’s go,” one of the men said. They dragged me into the Range Rover and shoved me into the back, where I sat squeezed between two guys who smelled like sweat and enchilada sauce.
Potato Face sat in the front seat. He looked me over and turned away. He’d caught me, but he didn’t look happy about it.
We pulled away, leaving my car with the money under the floor mats jutting into the street. An embarrassing pang of grief went through me. I’d killed too many people to be moved by the loss of an old vehicle, but I was anyway.
We drove on Beverly Glen Boulevard much too fast. The windows were open, but the freeway air blowing into my face was dry and hot—there was nothing cooling about it. I asked for water, but no one acknowledged me. I was forced to sit quietly and wonder how I was going to track down Ty again, not to mention the others, and how much time I had before he fell out of this world and let more predators in.
We pulled up to Francois’s big white house and parked at the curb. There was a blue panel van in the drive, and its back doors swung open as we got out of the car. Two more meatheads climbed out, with Arne and Lenard at gunpoint.
Arne had a nasty smile on his face. “God, it’s a beautiful day. Am I right?”
Lenard snorted. I wondered why the two of them let themselves be captured. Were they trying to keep their power a secret? I thought I was the only one concerned about that.
The three of us let ourselves be herded up the front walk toward the house.