She might have been dead the way she stood so still. Dead and propped up against the door at the end of the narrow hallway.
Kasmira stepped up to the old woman and stopped. Ann and I waited a respectable distance away.
Thin, bony arms rested against her chest, folded. She wore a pale blue kaftan robe, roped at the waist with a white cotton cord. She stared at us with the same clear jet eyes as her granddaughter. Her hair was long for an old woman's. It hung in gentle grey waves down to the small of her mildly curved back.
"Well?" she croaked. She wasn't unpleasant to look at. She carried her years with pride and dignity. She simply looked old.
Ann stepped forward. "I'm Ann Perrine. We met once, a few years ago. I work for Bautista Corporation."
"And he?" she asked with a disdainful glance. The emphasis she put on my gender was as sharp as her athames.
"Dell Ammo," I said. "Ann tells me you can explain what's been going on outside. Did you get a look at it?"
Bridget smiled faintly. "I felt some static. Something screwed up a spell of mine, so I asked Kasmira to check things out. She went sensitive and saw what the others were seeing."
"Blood," Kasmira said softly.
"Yes," said Ann. "She told me that much. Can you track down the source for us?"
The old woman unfolded her arms and stood away from the doorframe. Picking up a cane from behind a wall hanging, she leaned forward to say, "That's hard work. Why should I do it?"
Ann stepped very close to the woman and whispered in her left ear. Bridget shook her head, pointing to her right. Ann changed sides and whispered again. Bridget frowned for a moment.
Her eyes widened. "Others have tried," she said. "And failed miserably."
Ann smiled at me. "None of them were professionals." She seemed to be enjoying all this.
The crone narrowed her gaze and peered at me as if I were a bad joke. "That has little bearing on why you wish me to unravel a psychic incident."
I continued to search for my cigarettes. "We're apparently the center of the occurrences. Perhaps the focus of a"-I had to clear my throat before saying it-"a psychic attack." I gave her the rundown on our mile-and-a-half excursion. She grilled me all through it with the incisiveness of a district attorney.
"The image on the building. It looked like a moosehead?"
"Yeah," I said, "sort of. Like a lousy drawing. The antlers drooped and the eyes were under them, off the sides of the head."
"The break in the clouds-was it round, square, oval?"
"A rip. A long slit, like a cat's eye." I watched her for a clue. Her face was impassive. "And then," I said, "we ducked into that apartment complex and everything stopped as long as we stayed inside."
She nodded and smiled. It was a cagey, smug sort of smile. "That has nothing to do with your problem. A pair of quite powerful witches once lived there. They stayed long enough to create a zone of safety. Many circles such as that exist. You don't see any blood drizzling in here, do you?"
"Can you determine the source?" Ann asked.
Bridget shifted her position and sighed. "That would require some effort to discover."
The customer bell rang. Kasmira stepped out front to handle it. Paying trade, after all, came first.
The old woman stood her ground. "You still haven't given me a reason I consider sufficient. It's not as though I can rattle off a quick prayer and an angel pops in with the answer by special delivery. Results vary according to the time and energy invested. You're asking quite a lot of an old woman." She stared at us, waiting.
I figured that she wanted her palm crossed with a little silver. I was wrong.
Ann's lips tightened to a thin line, then parted. Her voice took on an edge I hadn't heard before. In a low, cool tone she spoke, gazing at Bridget with a chilling gaze.
"The lady requires your assistance."
The old crone stared back for a long moment, a silent communication ping-ponging between them. In that time, the lines from decades of frowns appeared as deep furrows above her eyes, only to fade when she broke into a warm, assured smile.
A wrinkled hand tightened and loosened around the cane's grip. Bridget nodded for a moment. Her eyes closed lightly, then opened. She turned to reach for the doorknob behind her.
"In." She pointed toward the darkened room.
Ann stepped in. Bridget followed, snapped on a light. I brought up the rear, wondering what sort of mystic nonsense would happen next. Only I wasn't too sure that the word nonsense worked as well for me as it used to.
The room enclosed an area not much larger than the waiting room of my office. Dark, heavy curtains bordered three walls, including the one with the door. Bridget closed the door and drew the drape across it.The wall to the left was covered with a bookcase stuffed ceiling high with books-old and new-and rows of computer plaques, each hand-labeled with its contents. In front of the draped wall opposite the bookcase squatted what looked like a cluttered coffee table. It supported candles and wooden carvings of deer and crescent moons. The obligatory crystal ball sat in a bronze eagle's claw right next to a ceramic incense burner shaped like a dragon. Every so often, little puffs of smoke snorted from its nostrils.
The wall across from the door had a low, Japanese sort of table near it. Bridget sat down on her heels and beckoned us to follow.
Ann sat in the same fashion. I creaked down on my backside and folded my legs in front of me. The parquet floor hadn't been waxed in decades. It felt cold, but not chilly.
"I'll do this for you," the old woman said. "Just sit there and be quiet."
I finally found my pack of Camels-they had migrated into an inside coat pocket I'd forgotten existed on the newer styles. Before I'd even pulled one out of the package, Bridget eyed me.
"No smoking."
I nodded and returned the pack to its hiding place. It was a reasonable request.
A second later, she lit up enough incense to fumigate a flophouse.
Ann straightened up to take a deep breath of the stuff. She closed her eyes. The only indication that she'd been through any sort of ordeal was her kinked and tangled hair. The rest of her bespoke the outer calm of a resting feline.
Bridget slid a deck of cards from the table's edge to its center. Her fingers nimbly shuffled the deck.
I noticed that the cards were larger and thicker than the usual cards I'd played with. She mumbled to herself most of the time, her voice as soft as silk against satin. She began laying the cards out as if she were playing Solitaire.
I had some trouble figuring out the suits.
There were paintings of a man hanging by one leg, men and women with swords and cups, cards with fools, lovers, and buildings being struck by lightning. Each one seemed to have been drawn by a different artist.
I had no idea the Tarot fad had lasted this long.
She finished laying out the cards in a sloppy pattern. For a long time she just sat and stared at them. Her dark gaze flitted between scanning the cards and glancing at me and Ann. She said nothing.
"Well?" I asked after a few minutes. I was getting antsy.
She held up one hand and scooped up the cards with the other. Ann opened her eyes to look at me and smile, shaking her head a bit. She turned toward Bridget and closed her eyes again.
The old dame reshuffled the deck, murmuring in a low tone. I sighed and looked around the room.
The curtains-colored a rich, earthy hue of redwood soaked in burgundy-blocked almost all the noise from outside. The only sound in the room was the slide and slap of cards being redealt.
When she'd laid out the cards, only silence remained.
After a long wait, Ann cocked open one eye to look at Bridget. The old woman gazed from Ann to the cards, then back again to Ann. She appeared amply astonished.
"Blessed be," she muttered in a breathless old voice. "Kasmira!" The shout sounded like a gunshot.
The girl entered quickly.
"Fetch me two orange candles and the large purple one. Remember to mark them down as office use in the inventory."
Kasmira nodded and whirled about to leave. Even in her haste, she maintained an air of otherworldliness.
"Over here," the crone said, making her way to the altar. Her cane tapped against the wooden floor like a skeleton's heel. She eased down, took a moment to adjust her dress, then began to arrange things on the top of the low table. She made with small talk all the while.
"What do you do for a living, Mr. Ammo?"
I shrugged noncommittally. "Find missing movie stars, prevent world wars, calculate batting averages-the usual."
She set a couple of white candles on the table around a chalked-in star. The five-pointed variety. She harrumphed and continued.
"The aura of death that you radiate-is that the usual, too?"
That made me frown. I never thought of myself as a particularly transparent person.
"A living soul projects many aspects," I said. That ought to amuse her.
"So it does, Mr. Ammo. So it does. On this plane and others. I see death in Malkuth-the sphere of Earth. Higher in the Tree of Life I see-other manifestations."
"I see." I didn't see.
Kasmira stepped in with the three candles. Bridget took them and thanked her. "Now watch the store, dear, and don't let anyone-or anything-disturb us."
"Yes, Grandmother." The girl tipped her head and ducked out of the room. The door swung shut, closing with a muted whoosh.
"It would appear, Mr. Ammo," the old dame said, "that you have an impressive destiny awaiting you."
"Mom will be thrilled."
"Yes, Mr. Ammo," she said, putting an orange candle on one of the points of the star. "She will be."
The old sorceress threw more incense into the dragon's belly. The room faded in a microcosm of L.A. smog.
Ann took a deep breath, savored it with a smile, and let it out slowly. I tried not to choke.
The lights dimmed. She probably had a switch under the altar. A dull red glow from the censer illuminated our faces.
"I must ask silence now, until you are requested to speak."
Ann and I nodded.
She struck a long wooden match, flooding the room with a surprisingly bright light. The flame touched the purple candle to ignite the wick. She lit the two orange ones next and finally the white ones. Five bright flames flickered at the points of the star.
She mumbled phrases that sounded like the echoes of a dying race's last words-or like the whispers of a new race's first. Sweet smoke wafted and swirled around her to catch orange light and black shadow. Her age-ravaged face became a harsh, angular mask mouthing her chant.
She broke the cadence of her invocation to say, "Join your hands." She resumed her mumbo-jumbo. Ann reached out, and I took her hands in mine. They felt smooth and lusciously warm, like ivory left in the sun. Our fingers entwined into a kind of quadruple fist and remained tightly bound between us.
Bridget's right hand reached out to clutch our fist. Her skin felt feverishly hot where I'd expected the cool touch of old age. Fingers like talons gripped the mass of locked knuckles and held on tightly.
A cloud of smoke from the dragon blew into my face, stinging my eyes. I blinked and tried to stop the irritated tears from flowing.
Bridget took a sudden sharp breath. In a loud, trembling voice, she mispronounced Ann's name-calling her "Anna Perrenina," as if she were Russian or something. The old woman's face grew placid, though her hand retained its iron grasp. She spoke in English now.
"The blood you see is the blood of the Maiden. The first blood. Blood of the Virgin, the Moon's tide. The tail of the Dark One points the way out and down, running near full circle."
She paused, her eyebrows wrinkling above sealed lids.
"The paradoxical one is the gambit. A thousand men, yet none. The obsidian blade is poised, the blood to flow greater."
Her voice rose in pitch, sped up. "Beneath the Earth is the realm of monsters born of fire who shun both day and night. The time of the Number is nigh! Two great forces must join, and two great forces must clash!" Her hand snapped away from ours and pointed at me.
I felt that terrible cold envelope me again.
"The storm is in your center!"
She seemed to be staring at me right through her shut eyes. Her finger wavered, drifted away from its target. She moaned.
Without warning, the candles fell over-knocked by something unseen. In the sudden, chilling darkness, I yanked my hands away from Ann and struggled to rise, listening for intruders.
Bridget breathed wearily somewhere on the floor to my left. Ann held her breath, made no sound.
From outside the room came the sounds of shattering glass. Kasmira's screams drifted through the walls and curtains with muted intensity, like a dim, nightmarish memory.
I made it to my feet and felt my way toward the door. Even the glow from the embers of incense had died out. I heard more glass breaking.
Ann found the light switch and turned it on. The bright glare of the overhead fluorescent tubes nearly blinded me. I saw her turning to attend to the fallen crone.
"Thanks, angel," I said, rushing to the door.
The crowd busting up the store stopped the second I stomped in. They were a strange lot-mostly young, mostly well-dressed. Trim, shaven, shorn. The black, leatherbound books they used to swat at the merchandise were like badges on cops. The crosses they swung as swords to smash bottles and panes told me the whole story. Or so I thought.
"Knock it off, kids. Go show your religious tolerance somewhere else."
They stared at me. I felt colder than ever.
The cleanest, most upright looking of the bunch-an auburn-haired boy in a blue serge suit-stepped to the front of the crowd and ogled me with the look of a rabid gopher.
"We know what you witches are up to." His voice trembled with rage. "God told us you're the one. You and these devil-worshippers have made a pact to-"
"Look, kid." I raised my voice to carry across the crowd. "I don't care what personal revelations you get in the bathtub, but I'm just a normal man doing normal things in a normal place of commerce. Scram before I call an atheist."
The kid held up his crucifix. The others followed his lead. I must have disappointed them when I didn't burst into flames or transmute into a bat. I made the mistake of letting loose with an appropriately derisive snort.
The youngsters took a collective step forward, broken glass crunching under their heels.
"Now you've done it," Kasmira said from behind the counter. "Jesus Chr-"
The ringleader's voice exploded. "A witch profanes our Lord's name!"
"Thanks, Kas," I said.
A cross spun through the air, whirring till it bounced off the steel edge of a shattered display.
I resorted to my parole officer image. "Can it, punks. You're not giving your faith much of a public relations boost."
"We're ready to die for our Lord," shouted a voice from the back.
"Right," I said, "and ready to kill for your Prince of Peace. You dopes give me a pain where I put chairs. For the second time-scram!"
The kids looked at one another nervously. The one with the loud mouth spoke in a voice that quavered with anger.
"There shall come a Rapture when all true Christians will rise unto Heaven, leaving you and your scum to the Earth and its Tribulation" "Well," I said, looking several of them in the eyes, "`the dead in Christ shall rise first.' Anyone want to get at the head of the line?"
The loudmouth in front suddenly looked as if he'd been struck in the face with a brick. He stared at a point somewhere behind me. So did the others, with varying degrees of alarm.
"We turn our backs on you. `Get thee behind me, Satan.'" He turned and spoke over his shoulder.
"Prepare yourself for Judgment, `for the Lord shall descend from Heaven with a Shout!'"
"I'll buy earplugs. Beat it."
He pursed his lips in repressed fury. "A lake of burning brimstone is waiting for you and your kind." He walked toward the exit as if in a daze.
Without so much as a parting shot, the rest of the flock ambled out of the shop. They mumbled among one another like JDs dispersed by a cop.
I turned around to see Ann standing a couple of feet behind me. I'd almost smacked into her. She had her hands over head, her fingers pointing forward. A smile of triumph spread across her lips.
"You can lower them now," I said. "This wasn't a stickup."
She smiled even wider until she took a look at the mess.
"Damned fishheads." Kasmira rose from behind the counter to start recovering the salvageable items. "It happens every year, right after Hallowmas," she quietly muttered.
"It looks like World War III," Ann said, stooping to pick up a red candle molded in the shape of a woman. She gazed at it with a sad frown.
"Bridget's all right," she said to Kasmira. "She's just exhausted. Do you have insurance?"
A weary voice from the back said, "Of course we do-through Bautista. Oh, shit." Bridget stared at the devastation.
"It's not too bad, Grandmother." Kasmira used a dustpan to scoop up multihued piles of incense. "Just a couple of windows and the main counter. They didn't take anything, and the expensive stuff's OK."
"Damned Christian of `em." The old woman paused to give me a twice-over. "You're a bright bit of luck that's stumbled into our lives. Beat it before I lose my womanly grace."
I glanced at Ann for a clue to my next action. She busied herself helping Kasmira.
"Go on," Bridget fumed. "You may not realize it, but you've got work to do!"
"Such as?" I asked.
"First, you've got to decipher what I relayed to you." She leaned against her cane, striving to look inscrutable.
"Why don't you save us all a good deal of time and tell me?"
"Because," she said with a sly smile, "I don't know what it means. I'm simply a vessel. I convey a message, using the best images I can. It's garbled by its transference through various spheres and planes of reality."
"I never cared for parlor games, lady."
"Mr. Ammo." Her voice was suddenly placating-almost friendly. "This game you've chosen to play involves far more than one mere parlor. This one is for the entire world and all it reflects."
I picked up a couple of bruised candles from the floor, dusted them off, and placed them by the cash register.
"The whole ball of wax. Right, lady?" I nodded to Ann and turned to leave. Blondie stayed put.
"Hang on, Dell. I've got a question." She turned to Bridget. "Is there a new moon coming up soon?"
"It's tonight. Saturday morning, actually."
"That clinches it." Her demeanor changed to intense determination. She turned and beat me out the door. Her hair shone in the sunlight like ropes of gold chain. "Thanks for everything!" she called back to Bridget. "I owe you a million!"
She glanced back at me. "Let's go, Dell."
"Where?"
"Your office, for starters."
"It's a long walk downtown. Or would you prefer to go back for the Porsche?"
She blanched.
"Besides," I said, "the car's hot. It probably has a want out on it by now, and I know lots of old associates who'd love to see me put away for a minor felony. It'd be a great joke."
I shook my head. A Santa Ana wind had turned the day pleasantly warm outside. We strolled east on the boulevard. The Bible-thumpers had made themselves scarce.
We walked down to the freeway bus stop and waited for the connection to Old Downtown to show up. Unlike the true believers in the store, passersby didn't pay us much notice. Quite a few of them still seemed to be wandering around in shock.
Ann sat down on the bench beneath the overpass. She seemed unconcerned about the dust and city grime. "The important thing to do now," she said as if continuing some other conversation, "is to decode what Bridget said."
I sat down, stretching my legs out. "She said that even she didn't know what she meant."
She stared up at the grey concrete overhead. "The blood was the blood of the Maiden, the Virgin. A girl's first menstrual period. She said that it was the First Blood and linked it to the cycles of the Moon. That was pretty explicit. The cramps I experienced confirms that. Severe menstrual cramps, and I'm nowhere near my own period."
I nodded politely and watched the traffic speed by. I wasn't too interested in women's medical problems.
"Dell," she said finally, "We're going to encounter a lot of things that seem strange or inconsequential on the surface. We have to be aware of every little detail. The phenomena that a lot of people call `magic' consist of methods to unlock selected portions of the human mind. Once open, these parts of the mind can perform astonishing feats and induce powerful changes in the outside world. After what happened to us, you can't deny that there are certain people who can see things that others can't."
I didn't like it. It sounded too self-consciously mystical. "I could still be tripping on the drugs," I said.
"Not many people see an RTD bus stop on acid."
"Could be a bum trip."
"Dell-just because most people can't integrate a variable across an interval doesn't mean that a mathematician is a magician simply because he can."
"It would have a thousand years ago."
"Yes, but we see the difference now. The mathematician has merely been trained to use a part of his mind in a specific manner. A… whatever you want to call her-a witch-is trained to manipulate a different set of symbols for the same purpose: to understand and utilize nature."
The bus arrived. I flagged it down.
Ann stood and stretched like a gold and turquoise cat. She wasn't concerned with any reply I might have made. We were both tired.
The bus lumbered off the freeway and slowed. It was an aging thing, wary of its movements. It hissed and grumbled to a halt, its brakes creaking like old muscles.
Ann paid for both of us. I picked seats near the rear exit. The only other passengers were an old woman behind the driver and a young bum behind us. The old lady wore a rotting brown cloth coat and held a paper bag full of paper bags to her chest. She muttered quietly to the outside world, damning it for her grief.
The young man sat reading a trashy pornoplaque, the cleanest thing about him. Sweat stained his denim jacket in twin circles under his arms. He chewed on something that occasionally dripped past his lips into his ruddy beard, disappearing from sight.
After several minutes of uncomfortable silence, Ann asked, "Do you believe in god? Really believe?"
"No. It wasn't part of my upbringing."
"Do you believe in satan?"
"It's a package deal, sister. I don't believe in either one. If I need to see the devil, I only have to look as far as a local precinct house where a cop beats out confessions. Or a government office where nicely dressed agents take your money to line their pockets. Or the city streets where some punk would kick his grandmother's head in for a quarter."
"Humanity's not all that bad, Dell."
"Sure," I said, "I know-somewhere there glows the pure fire of truth, reason, justice, and hope." I drew a cigarette from my pack and lit it. "I'd like to find it someday."
The old lady at the front looked at me and pointed at the No Smoking sign. She coughed into her hand, looked at it, and wiped it on her coat.
Ann didn't notice. She smiled at me. "You may have your chance yet."
"Yeah. And pigs may fly." I gazed out the window. "Speaking of which, that police helicopter's been circling Van Ness for quite some time."
Ann looked and frowned. "Think they found the Porsche?"
"Money talks. Cops love to listen. The church can make lots of conversation." I smiled. "I wonder how Golding's going to explain it."
"Let's get back to the rest of the message." She chewed on her lip. "Do you think we should risk going to your office?"
I took a long drag on the cigarette while considering the question. Finally I said, "I think we'll have some time before any officer decides to brave the Arco itself. The story about the radiation dies hard. Beathan and his boys are more likely to conduct the search rather than bring in a third party."
"Gambit!" she said suddenly.
I ground out my cigarette butt under my heel and turned toward her. Her eyes had regained some of their life.
"A gambit is a move in chess where an unimportant piece is sacrificed near the beginning of the game as part of a greater strategy."
"And who's the pawn we're looking for?"
"Bridget said, `The paradoxical one is the gambit.'" Ann mused for a moment. "`A thousand men yet none' is a paradox."
"It's a contradiction, actually. You think a thousand men are going to be sacrificed somewhere?" I watched the `copter circle around south Hollywood a couple more times. They gave up and flew east.
"Maybe a thousand men. Maybe none." She leaned back to stare at the ceiling. "The paradox is linked to the gambit somehow. And what about the monsters beneath the earth born of fire and all that?"
I shrugged. "Hell, obviously. It's got to be all a metaphor."
"Yes! But for what?"
I spread my hands helplessly. "I'm no philosopher."
The bus rumbled over the Harbor Freeway junction, which was more pothole than pavement. It lumbered up the Third Street offramp. I pressed the bell strip to signal the driver. He turned around to look back at us with languid, pained eyes. Air brakes wheezed, coughed once, and growled us to a halt. The doors ached open.
"Metaphors are fine," I said, stepping off the bus and extending my hand to her like some scruffy Galahad. Like a tousled Guinevere, she took my arm and stepped to the pavement. "Except that a metaphor can be misconstrued. Look at the different ways the stories in the Bible are interpreted. That stuff she mumbled could have a hundred different meanings. If it means anything at all."
We crossed the freeway overpass to stroll down toward Figueroa and the Arco Towers. Ann grew moody.
"We'll just have to keep at it until we find the answer."
"Fine," I said. "My fee is five hundred grams a day. In the meantime, I'm involved in another project."
She stopped and turned toward me. The wind from the freeway blew through her hair, tugging at her dress. Her hair and shiny Danskin top shimmered in the descending sunlight like a dream of drifting gold dust on a distant blue horizon.
"This is part of your project. Those phenomena were no coincidence. Those priests didn't pick us randomly to kidnap. Those Nazarene Nazis didn't just happen to pass by the store and decide to smash it up. They recognized you as being a focal point of fundamental importance."
"So I've got someone running scared. So Ammo's setting up the crime of the millennium. The world trembles." I kept walking.
She fell in step with me after a moment. "It's more than that, Dell. Bridget said, `The time of the Number is nigh.' I think you just hit on it. We're less than two months away from the millennium. A lot of people believe that the millennium will mark the return of the kingdom of god."
"Then they'll be off by a year. The millennium begins with the year two thousand one."
"People like large round numbers."
"Yeah," I said. "Especially on pieces of engraved paper. And that's just what all the professional prophets and doomsayers have been getting in exchange for undelivered goods."
"Wouldn't it be nice to change that?"
We'd reached the bottom of the offramp. I turned right at Figueroa.
"Killing God wouldn't change that," I said. "If He even exists at all, He hasn't done much to prevent people from exploiting His name. Removing Him won't stop the con game."
"It might," she said, "if the victims saw through the sham."
The day was still clear, the sky about as brown as it usually is in fall. Most of the derelicts were somewhere else. A beautiful day. Not a drop of blood in the sky. Old Downtown lay quiet and still, the late afternoon shadows long and cool.
Ann stopped to point in shock at what was left of the sign advertising the underground Arco Plaza shops. The shops had been abandoned after the blast, of course, and the below-street mall sealed up.
"Dell-" She dropped her arm down and turned to me. "You know the traditional image of the Devil's tail, don't you?"
"Long. Black. A heart or spade shape on the end."
"Like an arrow."
I nodded. She nodded. We looked at the Plaza sign. A fat black arrow described a three-quarter circle to point downward.
"`The tail of the Dark One points to the out and down, running near full-circle,'" she recited. "He's down there!"
It was as if someone had thrown a switch.
I tried to ask, "Who?" but the word froze in my throat as I stared at the sky. Without a cloud anywhere, the sky suddenly darkened. A wind whipped up behind us, icy and insistent. My ears rang from growing pressure, like an inaudible vibration that blanked out all sound. Above us, the jagged remains of the tower were transformed into a gleaming black dagger poised over the earth.
"We can't get down there," I said over the deafening silence. "The Plaza's been a ruin ever since the bombing. Abandoned. Most of the radioactive debris was washed into it during the decontamination."
Ann stared in horror at the phantasmal ebony blade suspended above us. Blood formed along its cutting edge, running down to fall in impossibly huge droplets to the rubble in the street.
Laughter echoed up from somewhere. A mocking, derisive obscenity that sounded uneasily familiar, like the voices that shout in nightmares.
We both stood our ground. Shadows reached down from the lightless sky to flit about us. They snaked and twisted about, always at the edge of perception, just at the far corner of sight.
"How dangerous is it down there?" Ann asked.
"You have to ask?" I swatted at the spooks even as the wind pushed us closer. "I lived two hundred feet above it for twelve years and got cancer for my trouble."
"If he's down there," she said, not even hearing my answer, "we've got to stop him." She glared unblinking at the dagger aimed at the heart of the world.
"If he's down there-whomever you mean-I need to get into my office. The church tithed my Colt when they sapped me."
"You want to go inside that?" The glittering, bloody image transfixed her.
I grabbed her arm. "Sure." I pulled her toward the mirage. "It's just like the blood before-an illusion. Fake. You want to burrow down into a radioactive swamp! Which is crazier?"
The cold wind had become a gale. It blew at our backs, urging us toward the glistening point of the blade. I didn't like that one bit. Maybe, I thought, just maybe some magical equivalent of judo was called for. Take the offensive. Turn the impetus against the attacker.
Running away seemed much more sensible.
Something small and hideously blue-black skittered past us, chattering like an angry monkey, to vanish into the false night. The shadows gained strength. They squeezed at our chests to keep us from breathing. My lungs labored like a frantic animal in a giant's fist. I dragged Ann forward.
She snapped her wrist out of my grasp with a defiant tug. She didn't run away, though-she kept my pace. We clambered over crumbled steel and glass to reach the place where the tower's revolving doors should have been. A roiling pattern of black and grey enveloped everything. It looked like the surface of some horrid polluted sea. I reached out toward it, plunged into it up to my wrist. It felt like liquid nitrogen.
I screamed. The wind threatened to shove me completely into the swirling maelstrom. I curled my burning hand into a fist and rammed forward.
My knuckles cracked against glass. Cool, smooth, firm plate glass. The kind of glass you can see and feel on any building anywhere.
The shifting darkness raced away from where I hit to reveal the side of Arco North. Overhead, the knife and the blood unraveled into nothingness. The sky lightened to the intensity of approaching twilight-the west glowed red-orange. The wind died down to a gentle breeze. Everything lay in shadow, but at least these shadows stood still.
I had managed to come within a foot of the revolving door. We stepped through into the lobby and rushed toward the elevator. I didn't feel like climbing up and down stairs at the moment. I punched for the one operating car. It creaked to life like an old dog dutifully trudging down to its master.
"We've got to find a way down below." Ann looked at me. Her eyebrows arched with a gentle curve that straddled the thin line between an affectation of perpetual surprise and the impression of shrewd, shrewish cunning. They managed to frame her cool blue eyes with a deep warmth. When she wanted them to. Right now, the lines enclosed a look of tired persistence.
"I want to get this over with," she said. "I can't have this go on much longer."
"It'll be over soon enough, kid. Everything ends before we're ready for it."
The lift shuddered to a stop. The doors parted with the creak of metal that sees too little use.
I told her to hold the doors open while I trotted off to my office. She leaned against the electric eyes to cut off their light. She closed her own eyes, cutting off their light, too.
My office looked and smelled as it always did. Dead. Just like the promise of wealth and comfort I'd envisioned years ago.
Promises.
Life promised nothing except a pointless existence punctuated by an early death. Or so I'd heard.
My cheerful mood was not improved by the message on my answering machine. I rummaged through the desk for my other pistol.
"Dell"-the voice on the tape sounded worried-"this is Joey Moreno. You gotta come over right away. Some priests from my archdiocese just left here, asking some really strange questions about you and that TV nut Zacharias. Something funny's going on. I'll be waiting."
The line clicked and buzzed. I found my other Colt Lightweight Commander, checked the magazine in the grip. Full. I slipped a second loaded magazine into my pocket. Feeling a tad more secure, I racked the action, snapped on the safety, and slid the gun into my waistband holster.
I dug up my Magna-Lite and flicked it on. The batteries still worked. Good.
I reset the answering machine and locked up. Ann was still standing in front of the doors when I reached the elevator. Her face had relaxed into a calm mask. Her purse lay loosely clutched in her hand. Somehow, her nylons had survived the ordeals and the barefoot walk unscathed. Just like Hollywood, I thought as I touched her shoulder lightly.
"Here's where we split up, Blondie."
She opened her eyes. "What?"
"Head over to Auberge. I'll meet you at the Cafe of the Angels when I'm finished downstairs. Get a room at the Hotel Libya if I'm late."
"No," she said, "I'm going with you."
"Look, sister, I happen to have a contractual immunity to radiation-I think. You're not so blessed."
"I-"
"You've got spunk. Just let a little common sense sink in." I let the doors close. When I sighed, it sounded just like the aging motor that lowered us slowly down.
"Angel, there's a time to flex your self-confidence and a time to play it wise. Assassins are some of the most cautious people around. Always cross at the green after looking both ways and overhead." I smiled. It didn't do any good.
"I'll guard your back." Her gaze was as cold as the polar wind. Her hand whipped something out of her purse. It glinted even in the diffused elevator light. She held it up to me.
The blade was as long as my hand, double-edged and vehemently sharp. The rainbow-tempered steel narrowed to a nasty point at the tip. The smooth black hilt was contoured and intricately carved to provide a sure grip. She held it as if she knew when to use it, and how.
"What did you say your job is at the Bautista Corporation?"
"Assistant comptroller," she said.
"Are your bookkeepers that difficult to keep in line?"
"The lady's got to protect herself. Lasers are too finicky, guns are too troublesome to maintain properly. Besides"-she lowered the knife-"there aren't many white knights around to save distressed damsels anymore." She laughed. Her face glowed with life again, like the moon coming out from behind an eclipse.
"The lady with a dagger, eh? Where were you thirty years ago? You'd have made a great comrade-or enemy." That did it. I was getting wistful. A sure sign of my dotage. I clammed up.
She looked embarrassed for a moment, then smiled as gently as a sea breeze at dawn. She slid the toadsticker back into its sheath in her handbag. It must have weighed half a kilo.
The elevator doors opened on the lobby-the farthest the car could descend. Some of Old Downtown's elite sprawled about the tattered chairs and piles of rags. The less drunken ones tried to argue about the recent inclement weather. Their conclusions were more elegant and metaphysical than mine, so I stopped listening and headed for the exit facing Flower. Ann followed.
"All right, sweetheart." I stepped through a hole in one of the glass panels that served as the doorway. "You're a free woman above the age of consent. I can see there's only one way to keep you from risking your neck-and I've never decked a woman before. Come on."
That sounded good. I nodded toward the subway-style stairs down to the Plaza. I looked tough. The image satisfied me. No need to let her know that I was as scared as a little kid caught in a war zone. The part that bothered me was that I hadn't been drafted-I'd volunteered.
There were two entrances to the Plaza on Flower. The one nearer Sixth Street was still buried under the rubble from the South Tower. The one by North was only marginally more accessible-years of neglect had not made the way any safer. Winds had pushed dirt and trash down the stairs to fill the bottom to thigh height.
I switched on the Magna-Lite. A white oval of illumination spilled across the quadruple doors. The glass panel of one had been smashed long ago. A mound of rubbish flowed through it to form an alluvial fan inside the Plaza.
I wrapped my fingers around the exposed edge of the glass. The butt of my flashlight tapped firmly against it. A large piece broke away on the second try with no more than a loud snap. A few extra swings cleared an opening wide enough for me to step through.
"Careful," I said in offering my hand to Ann. "Scars aren't fashionable this year."
She made it through easily. The steps beyond the door were cluttered with debris. Bits of broken masonry and pulverized tile covered the stairway in a rough, unstable blanket.
"I was here once," Ann whispered like a kid in church, "before they blew it up."
I nodded in the darkness and took a tentative step downward. It was like tiptoeing on castanets. I took the next step even slower.
"Why'd they do it?"
"Huh?" I tried to keep the torch beam steady for both of us. The steps were part of a broken escalator-we walked down it as slowly as debutantes at a coming-out party. I grasped the handrail just as the little sign on my left commanded. Gritty dust covered everything. A dank, sickening smell soaked the air, like the odor of dead lilacs in a forgotten tenement where someone lonely had died. Water dripped in a corner.
"The terrorists." She guided her feet carefully between mounds of rubble. "Why'd they blow up the towers?"
"Why ask me? I'm no expert." We'd made it halfway down the escalator. The air grew even thicker-a humid presence that clung like stale fog.
"Aren't you part of the whole terrorist scene?"
My foot jerked, sending a blue square of tile skittering down the steps. It ended its clattering descent with a weak splash.
Great-the Plaza's flooded. I wasn't considering that problem at the moment. I didn't want to be down there, with or without Ann, and she'd just hit a sore spot.
"What I do is the exact opposite of terrorism." If a whisperer can snarl, I almost snarled. "Terrorists kill innocents and noncombatants to create fear. They hope to use that fear to gain or keep power. They're always wrong. That's where I come in. Sure, I take pay from ruling class statists and secret conspiracies-yet I've managed to interrupt the careers of far more ambitious generals and would-be tyrants than anyone else in the business. I've never killed anyone who didn't clearly demonstrate that he'd had it coming. I've kept the world safe for… well, for whatever. I've stopped a dozen wars before they reached the shooting stage. And yes," I hissed, "I've assassinated terrorists of every political stripe. I've even taken the trouble to determine the consequences of my actions."
I paused to fume silently. At the bottom of the stairs, something splashed and slithered. Ann said nothing.
"I can say that I've consistently been on the right side, because killing tyrants for any reason is always a net good."
She smiled without mirth. "Is that why you took the contract on god?"
A shadow drifted at the base of the escalator. I wasn't sure whether it was the result of my wavering light beam or not. I stopped. My hand reached out to squeeze Ann's wrist for silence.
The shadow moved again, even though I held the beam as steady as a corpse's smile. Slowly I lifted it, playing the ellipse of white across the first level of the Plaza. A thin layer of water covered the floor. The blast years ago had imparted a distinct tilt to the mall, dropping it away from us in a gradual slope. I wondered how deep it might be a few hundred yards ahead.
I'd worry about that later. It was the thing a few feet in front of us that occupied my immediate concern.
The shadow stopped moving, even though my Magna-Lite hadn't. It took a deep, rattling breath as the pool of light approached. I flicked my wrist up-it didn't look as if it would scare easily. The thing stood in the clear white light.
A thing that had once been human.