CHAPTER TEN
Early evening, the same day. On a military transport plane flying over Maine, heading to Long Island.
The big C-l 19D was noisy and uncomfortable, not even designed for passengers. I'm freight, Loraine mused, looking up from her laptop. The plane was mostly used to move armored hydrogen Humvees and small artillery pieces, but the metal floor had grooves where seat supports could be inserted, and seats had been fixed in place, in the echoing whale's belly of the transport; Loraine sat in the front, with a view of the cockpit, the open door showing the two AF pilots, the cloud-mist streaming over the windshield.
She was tired. The plane was drafty and smelled of jet fuel; the trip to the Arctic had tired her out; the revelations on the trip too were a kind of burden to carry. Information that changed the world had a weight of its own. She kept seeing the artifact, in her mind's eye. Dr. Helman had claimed it was all that stood between humanity and chaos.
Helman was sitting on her right, frowningly tapping at a laptop, now and then bobbling his head to himself. On her own laptop she was reviewing the personnel file of a female agent just transferred in, Teresa Caffee; she was supposed to check Caffee out and sign off on her. Any woman was welcome on the team, as far as Loraine was concerned. Only one other woman agent in CCA, in the Washington offices.
She had another window open on the laptop, and she restlessly went back to that page now, to reread a passage from Newton's Cryptojournal that Helman had copied to her. The journal had been written in code, which decrypted into Latin, a language Newton sometimes used for scientific treatises; the cryptographer had rendered the Latin into modern English:
Those of us who twine the cross with the rose have long kept accounts, books of the damned, where is written what could not happen and yet did. Much is mere fancy, and superstition. Witches said to be witches are rarely witches. But in the secret corners of the Hidden Earth, magic bloats like a Plague blister, and many of the legends of the past were not legend. Visitors from the Farther Place now penetrate freely; fairies and the less fair are nightly upon us. Now we see events conspire to an increase, and swarms will rise from the darkness. Powers come upon those with the Blood; some diabolic, some angelic, but none have a place in the new world of men. If God did not want us to contain this chaos, He would not have given us the means: the artifact of the ancients, which Solomon knew, and to which he added his Seals. But it is older than Solomon; it is older than the pyramids. And the [diagrams?] on the Sarmunna [or, Sarmoung] sheepskin tell us how to set about repairing, recommencing its Wall of Force, so that the world is the world of the mind and not of the heart's darkest impulses.
Loraine shivered and closed the excerpt and went back to the personnel file, determined to put it out of her mind for a time. Personnel was busywork, but she was glad to have it. Glad to think about anything but the artifact, for a time; anything but the heart's darkest impulses.
Someone came swaying up from the rear of the aircraft, gripping the backs of a seat to keep his footing in the turbulence: Drake Zweig, in his tight gray suit, tight gray smile on his lipless mouth. Vigorously rubbing his nose, he stood in front of his assigned seating, to the left of her, then let the plane's motion dump him into the seat. “Slam dunk!” he said, grinning at her.
She winced. The phrase slam dunk was not pleasant to people working in the American intelligence community.
He buckled himself in, irritating her by leaning over, glancing at her laptop. “You know that pisser back there, it's smaller than the ones the airlines got. Didn't think they could be made smaller.”
“Uh-huh.” She tapped at the laptop, making notes on Agent Caffee, hoping Zweig would give up talking to her.
“That the file on the new agent?” Zweig asked, craning closer. “Yeah, she worked with some guy who telepaths with dogs and cats, for Christ's sake, how useful is that? But I bet you're glad to have another woman in the agency. Funny there aren't that many—but then again it figures, what with Forsythe having an attitude.”
Loraine glanced at him. “Which attitude?”
“Oh, he doesn't like female agents. Just thinks they're too...they get too emotionally involved. Not coolheaded enough. Got to be chill-chill-chill, like my kid says, to be able to, you know, do the necessary.”
“You've got children?” She hadn't known that.
Sadness drew over his face like a shade drawn over a bright window. “Yeah. Haven't seen the boy in a while. He kind of flaked out on the family, second he turned eighteen.... Anyway”—eager to change the subject—”old Forsythe surprised me, bringing you in. But then maybe it's because of you and that Bleak guy he prizes so much. The whole lure concept...1 dunno why Bleak's such a big deal. I worked around him along the Pakistan border. Half the time he went out, he'd be the only one to come back. What's that about? Well, maybe not half the time, but still...And then he was always giving me shit about my intel sources: 'Not reliable, we could be hurting civilians.' Like that was his job. Not a company man, let me tell you. Thinking he could be relied on to work with Sean—” “Wait—Drake, what did you say about a lure concept? You mean me? I'm the—” “Zweig!” Helman snapped warningly, leaning forward to glare over at Zweig. “You're violating need-to-know.”
“Hey, I wasn't going to say anything else.” Zweig spread his hands as if to say, All right, whatever! And turned his back to Loraine, putting his seat back a little, as if to take a nap, grumbling, “They don't give us any goddamned blankets, even, on these transports. Rather pay my own way and go on a regular commercial flight.”
Lure?Loraine thought about demanding to know what that was about. Then decided that this wasn't the time. She'd talk to Helman alone.
“Loraine,” Helman said softly. “I have something I'd like you to review. Quite another sort of journal entry.”
He handed her a flash stick. “Just insert that into your laptop. The top file in the list...I'd just like you apprised. It'll come clearer later. Or perhaps it's not relevant. To tell you the truth I'm not sure. But I wanted one other set of eyes on it. It's from the general's report of his attempt to...to reach out to the Wilderness...to the Other Side...to gain us, well, allies, amongst UBEs. This was done right before we started to see certain manifestations, like the Gulcher case, not long ago. It's not an accident...1 mean, what happened to Gulcher and...this.”
Puzzled by his manner—a feeling that he was taking a chance, showing this to her even as he'd warned Zweig not to step outside need-to-know parameters—she clicked the wafer-thin flash stick into her laptop and opened the file.
CCA EXPERIMENT #351, NOTES
This is the seventeenth day in my attempts to use ritual magic to contact the Great Powers beyond the Wall of Force. Admittedly experiments of this nature are controversial in the agency. Erlich and Swanson (increasingly a liability, those two) would have us focus on narrowing the gap in the Wall, and controlling those already activated by the increase in AS energies. But suppose we cannot repair the artifact? We must deal with the new reality, and to that end we will need allies. A threat may become an asset, if we learn to control it.
In the course of #E3511 have taken the advice, and some of the formulations, of Eliphas Levi: I have fasted and meditated and honed my mind to single-pointed focus on the summoning. This is how magicians in the past have penetrated Newton's Wall of Force. It can be done, if only passingly. It is like a weak radio signal, coming through the static. But even a weak signal can call a gunship, and a gunship is what we need if we are to overcome our enemies. Today, in Room 32,1 felt the sigils as if the insignia, the names, were all coming alive, like creatures in themselves, like that Kabbalistic idea of letters as living things. The ritual markings were glowing and moving about and I saw a distant place in my mind's eye. Is the stress, my admittedly obsessive focus, making me imagine things? It's not impossible! But I don't think so.
[Another entry, the following day.]
Eureka! I have seen, I have communicated, I have touched the Great Wrath from Outside, the lord of the Wilderness! In contact with it, I have understood it! We see and
think in three dimensions. The fourth-dimensional reality of a UBE is not completely comprehensible to us. But growing up in South Florida, I saw creatures living in lagoons, that also lived outside them, and this is something of that kind: the lagoon is its world; the atmosphere is ours. It can extend part of itself into our world; it can reach through the rift, without quite being here in fullness. It can influence things here. It can send its i own version of what, in this world, we call familiars; “independent pseudopods “ Dr H calls them, or Formless Familiars; and till now they 're theory. But some have been released into our world this day, as a result of my contact with the Great Wrath. It has reached out to our world and we will see those human beings who are congruent with its nature light up with its force. I myself have seen the Great Power reaching for me. I seem to see a circle within a circle, and in that circle is an eye that extends itself, an eye that elongates to contact my forebrain. I drew back, instinctively, in the course ofE351 but this time, today, I will not draw back, I will give It access, so that I can learn Its ways, as the Seminole Indians once did with animal spirits. I will be Its means of knowing this world, and in the course of Its knowing, I will know It in turn. Already I have identified It, have learned the name It was called by the ancients: Moloch!
At first, a giant with the red-eyed head of a bull and a man's body, but all made of hot brass. Whenlsawhim, I heard a slow-thudding drumbeat, and infants screaming in pain, as Moloch reached for me.
And then I saw into him, past the shell imagined by men. I saw his truer form, another being, the single yellow eye within many mouths, mouths that turn one within the next, wheels in wheels.
[The following day's entry had only two lines.]
CCA EXPERIMENT #352, NOTES
Today I am redefined...!
That was the end of the file.
“The phrase 'today I am redefined,'“ Helman said, just loud enough for her to hear over the background grumbling of the big jet. “It puzzles me—what do you think it means? You've read widely in the occult.”
Loraine shrugged. “Hard to say. Makes me think of writing by some of the gnostics. Both notes have that, um, apocalyptic tone. Visionary.”
“I see. Well. Probably not a matter for concern.” Helman glanced over at Zweig, then leaned a little closer to her. “Close the file. Read the second file, on Troy Gulcher. And then—when you've done that—please give me the flash drive back. Do not save these files to your computer...and discuss this with no one else.”
Helman didn't say another word on the trip to Long Island. Loraine watched him from the corner of her eye as he took an orange out of his pocket and incised the peel with one extralong thumbnail, exactingly removing it in an unbroken spiral. Then he frowningly ate the orange, section by section, without spilling a drop of juice. Seeming, to Loraine, haunted by something he couldn't quite bring himself to say.
***
ABOUT THAT TIME, the same evening, Atlantic City.
Gulcher was getting thoroughly sick of the casino. He was even sick of this claustrophobic little room, though it contained ever-growing stacks of money. Jock wanted to pile a van high with that money and just take off. Sooner or later the Baronis' people would come around.
But the whisperer didn't want Gulcher to leave Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino.
“Not yet, “the whisperer had said to him, last night. “You're needed right here. To focus through. The Great Power hasn 't fed enough yet. Still hungry. We will go to other casinos and take those over too; in other parts of the world. Las Vegas. Europe. All be yours, you wait for it.”
He wasn't going to admit he was scared of the whisperer. And Moloch. But how did you argue with a thing like Moloch—or his whisperer? And Moloch was the only reason he wasn't in prison. But he was going stir-crazy in this place.
“Jock,” he said, staring at the piles of money in the counting room, “I can't believe I'm bored with this money, here.”
Jock leaned on a table stacked with cash, grinning. He was f*cked-up again, looked like. “I'm not bored with it. Sure would like to take it with me though.” He reached past the two Chinese guys and took a big, sealed stack of twenties. Tossed it up and caught it.
When would they be able to get out of here? Gulcher tried to call the whisperer, to ask, get some kind of answer. But there was no reply. Hadn't been able to get a response since last night.
“Whisperer,” he muttered. “You there?”
Maybe it was gone. Maybe he was free of it. And maybe that was a good thing. “Boss?” A voice from the air.
Not the whisperer. The whisperer definitely didn't think of Gulcher as “boss.” Which worried Gulcher. No, it was Stedley talking on the intercom.
“I hear you, Stedley, what's up?”
“There's federal agents all around the damn place. Surrounding the casino. FBI, ATF, all kinds of guys. State troopers too, did I mention that?”
“Okay—” Gulcher's mouth was dry but he was almost glad. “Don't do nothing yet.”
“What do you mean, 'Okay, don't do nothing'?” Jock demanded, throwing the money on the table. His eyes were suddenly wild and he was breathing hard. The bonhomie was gone; the paranoia was back. “You bring these guys here? You tradin' me for some deal, that the idea?”
“Cut that tweaky shit out, Jock, goddammit, and get upstairs and help Stedley. You forget we got the whisperer. What happened is obvious. Those greaser Baroni f*cks went missing and they musta told somebody where they were going and somebody infiltrated the place, checked it out. Probably ID'd me. But we got the power to turn their little minds around, all right? Now cool your f*cking jets.”
Jock was gaping at him, his eyes pinned, but Gulcher just walked away from him, went out to the elevator.
Just before the doors closed, Jock caught up and shoved his way into the elevator, breathing hard.
“Right, okay, we're gonna handle this,” Jock muttered, his eyes darting around.
“Goddammit, Jock.” Gulcher just shook his head. “Just be quiet...I got to contact.”
He closed his eyes. Felt the whisperer there. And no response when he called out to it, inside. It had gone into a sullen silence on him.
“What the f*ck?” he muttered, as the doors to the elevator opened. He and Jock stepped out into the main poker room: a cavernous space with rows of green felt card tables. All of the tables empty, no players. Stacks of chips still sitting on the felt, in front of the seats. The big television screens over the room showed ESPN, a horse race, and—the front of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino: a newsbreak shot showing rings of cop cars, staties mostly, some vans Gulcher associated with the FBI, all around the casino. And there were the FBI agents, with their cute little jackets and the letters fbi real big across the back. Lots of guns out there too.
“Oh, f*ck, Troy,” Jock breathed, gaping up at the screen.
He darted frantic looks around the empty room. The rows of slots chattered and buzzed and dinged from the next room, but they could see through the open doors that no one was playing them. “They already got the players out—so that means—”
“Means we're already here,” said a man, in an Air Force general's uniform, crossing over to them. His hands were held up as if he were surrendering.
The general was a medium-small guy, with a lot of ribbons on his chest; middle-aged, smiling slightly. He didn't look scared at all. “If you have guns, please don't fire 'em.” He had a mild Southern accent, Georgia or Florida. “Look beyond me—you see the sharpshooters, there, among the slot machines?” He paused, half turned, nodded toward the men behind him.
The FBI sharpshooters, four that Gulcher could see, were stepping out into sight—in partial cover from the slot machines. They stood just inside the slot aisles, rifle barrels resting on the warbling, flashing machines, getting a bead on Gulcher and Jock.
“Where's Stedley?” Gulcher asked, for something to say.
Stalling while he tried to contact the whisperer again.
The general lowered his hands, walked slowly, carefully toward them. “Oh, poor, confused Stedley is under arrest. We took him out of the building and the influence he was under simply passed from him. Last thing he remembers is the mornin' you showed up. There was a riot, he says, and then —he woke on up out there, in our custody.” The general stopped just out of Gulcher's reach. Clasped his hands in front of him. Smiled gently.
“Yeah, well...what do you people want?” Gulcher asked, still stalling. “I got a casino to run, here. We're losing money with this interruption. You got a warrant or what?”
Mentally calling, Whisperer...Moloch...
“Yes, we have a warrant, Mr. Gulcher.”
“Oh, shit,” Jock said. “Troy—they—”
“Shut up, Jock. Okay, so you think you've ID'd me, General Whosis,” Gulcher said.
Whisperer...Moloch...Needyou to step in, this time...you there?
“We know exactly who you are, you and your friend here. As for my name, I am General Allan Roger Forsythe. That is, anyway, how I used to be known. And how most people know me. You, sir, you made your mistake when you snuffed out the Baronis. They were part of a big organization. His people knew they were last seen here. And Mr. Baroni's son was smarter than you think. He got a picture of you with his cell phone, sent it to his people, with a little text message: 'Who the f*ck is this guy?' Beard and all, one of them recognized you from the news reports. They thought if they bulled in, you'd shoot their bosses—though I expect you've done that already. What did they do, these professional criminals? They called the police! Just one of those little ironies that make life so darn interestin'. Now, the police, they are under instruction to inform all federal agencies if they run across you. And those agencies are under instruction to inform the CCA. We were duly informed—and here we are.”
“And what the f*ck is the CCA?” Gulcher was aware that Jock was breathing hard, through his mouth.
“I'd rather not explain it all right here. Most of the young men behind me have never heard of it. Maybe none of them have. It's a very special offshoot of our special branches. But believe me—if you come along with me—”
Whisperer...Moloch...
Forsythe's smile broadened yet somehow became colder. His voice softened. “That won't work, Mr. Gulcher. What you're trying to do.”
Gulcher stared. “What'd you say—what I'm trying to do?”
“You called to Moloch,” the general said, with unruffled confidence. “I heard you.” He smoothed his hair, looking around at the empty poker tables as he spoke. “The Gulcher cat was out of the bag when you killed those men and that image was sent, so...the Great Wraith decided to let us take you now. He has ingested a great deal of what he came here for. There was to be wore, but...the timetable too is an issue. Things outside your sphere of awareness have shifted, just this morning—it's been decided he will use you in a different context. Essentially—he sent me to pick you up.” The general put his hands in his pockets, rocked casually on his heels as he went on thoughtfully, “I use 'he' because that's how you think of the Great Wrath. In fact that entity has no definite gender. Some people see Moloch as a female...but Moloch is not so limited.”
“Jesus, Troy,” Jock breathed, an hysterical whine in his voice. “Oh, Jesus and Mary, they're all around us and now they're in our heads, they can read our minds!”
“What the f*ck are you?” Gulcher demanded, glowering at the general.
“I am someone without your talents—but with a special relationship to one of the Great Wrath's servants. His benign promise is...within me. Always. You are not to mention that, within the confines of the CCA. We don't control everyone there, hence not everyone at the authority can be trusted. Now —the one you call the whisperer has conveyed the Great Wrath's decision. You are to join me. To join forces with us. No longer a loose cannon, but a cannon—lashed to our ship. What do you say to that?”
“I say-”
“I say f*ck you!” Jock shouted suddenly, the words accompanied by spittle. “ Whatever the f*ck you are!” He reached into his coat, just barely got the gun out before the sharpshooters' bullets slammed into him, made him stagger four steps backward. He fell flat on his back, twitching, already dead.
“I did warn him,” Forsythe said. “Your friend had very little talent. We can do without him. We'd rather not have to shoot you too. Keep in mind—you won't be going back to prison. You'll be in government custody but...it'll be comfortable. And quite interesting, I promise you.”
Gulcher looked past Forsythe at the sharpshooters.
And very slowly... Gulcher put up his hands. “F*ck it. I'm tired of the noise in this dump. I surrender. Let's go, General.”
***
THE NEXT MORNING. A rooftop in Harlem.
The sun was just breaking above the upper edges of the buildings to the east. Bleak put on a pair of sunglasses and crossed the brownstone's roof to a cornice overlooking the street. He put a booted foot on the cornice and leaned as far forward as he could, taking in the street scene below.
Some blocks south of the rooftop, the Apollo Theatre was still operating, and small shops and soul-food restaurants and old-time record stores bustled on 125th—but much of Harlem had become increasingly gentrified. Rents had doubled, many old brownstone and limestone buildings had gone condo. Chic little bookstore/ coffee shops and galleries and crepe shops with small tables on the sidewalk had cropped up, causing longtime residents to shake their heads and mutter in disgust.
But Bleak was in a remoter Harlem, a short distance from the Harlem River, a relatively untamed neighborhood. A high school across the street, abandoned for lack of funding, was crawling with arcanely psychedelic graffiti. Turfies in sloppy pants and hooded windbreakers, or wearing the new, shiny Slick Up athletic pants, which were finally replacing the low-belt droop, were congregating in clumps next to a tall metal-mesh fence separating the street from the school's cracked and weedy basketball court, where the hoops had long since been pulled off the backboards. Long shadows stretched from fire hydrants and people. A UPS truck rumbled by. There was a line of parked cars, two of them abandoned and burned out. Parked SUVs and vans looked like brightly colored rectangles from up here.
No telling who might be in those vans.
Bleak glanced up at the sky. Choppers out west but none coming his way. A few gulls flashing in the early-morning light. None of the telltale hard glint of camera drones. He felt no one watching him, at that moment.
He hoped he was safe from CCA here. He had made the deal to collar the skip over a phone that couldn't be traced to him; made the arrangement for them to transfer the bounty, the usual 10 percent of the bail bond, to one of Shoella's accounts, when he turned the skip over to NYPD. He was to drop off the perp “at any police precinct.” The CCA couldn't be covering them all. He'd sensed puzzlement about his refusal to come to the bail bonds office in person, but they'd made the deal.
“Vince” at Second Chance had told him a private detective had made some inquiries and all he'd come up with was this building, the last place anyone had seen the skip, one Lucille Donella Rhione,
wanted on a failure-to-appear. Bleak had seen her mug shot in an e-mail: a bottle-blond, lamp-tanned, scowling woman who, according to the bondsman, “likes to stuff her boobs into stretch-fabric tank tops and her ass into really tight stretchy leggings.” She had skipped out after her aunt, the bail “custodian,” put up a pile of money. Lucille was said to be in the company of a violence-prone white drug dealer who liked to call himself Gandalf. Nothing else much was known about him, except sometimes he came to this building to pick up crystal, which he sold somewhere in the Bronx. And he? carried a gun. His aggressive unpredictability was the reason the private eye had dropped the case. “Said we weren't paying him enough to deal with Gandalf.”
Normally Bleak would have hired two or three guys to help him collar the skip. A couple of burly bodyguards to uptown Big Money worked with Bleak in their spare time. But he didn't want them here with the possibility of CCA coming around at any moment. He was going to have to go it alone this time.
Bleak wasn't telepathic, and his precognitive ability was fitful; but everyone who could actively connect with the Hidden had some psychic capacity. His own clairvoyance was fairly minor—his greatest talents lay in manipulation of the Hidden's energy field, and contact with its entities—but when he focused on Lucille Rhione's picture and reached out into the Hidden, he'd got a mental picture of this building. When he'd come to the address he'd been given—there was the building. So the private eye's information had been good: the Hidden seemed to hint the skip was going to be here soon. Maybe tomorrow.
Which was now today. But so far he hadn't seen any white people approach the building.
He paced along the cornices, watching the mix down below, watching the skies for drones between times. Waiting. Thinking things through. Remembering the strange shock when he'd had the psychic contact with Agent Sarikosca. Loraine Sarikosca.
Her name was Loraine...like a character in an old black-and-white movie. Fascinating sound to it... Loraine...
Bleak shook his head. Why was he thinking that? What was up with him?
He needed to get bounty, pick up Muddy, and Cronin if he'd go, reclaim his boat, and get out of town for a while. Head south along the coast in the cabin cruiser, out of state. Find some way to contact Sean without giving himself up to CCA.
If Sean was really alive.
Wouldn't he feel it, if Sean was alive? He'd never really tried to contact Sean's spirit, assuming the boy had been quickly reincarnated. And he'd shied away from the emotional shock that would go with even trying.
Could he contact him now? But Sean was connected with CCA. If he contacted him now, he'd risk putting them in touch with him.
Could Sean be watching him, psychically, for CCA? No. He'd sense it...probably.
Bleak, like other ShadowComm, had ways of keeping psychic surveillance off. When he used the Hidden, he created a mental pulse of psychic white noise, immediately afterward, that blurred the trace of it. He instinctively kept a kind of psychic camouflage around his own emanation. But it didn't always work. There had been the psychic surveillance that had brought the UAV. Krasnoff. And what if—
He never finished the thought. A blond head was bobbing along the sidewalk, below, a woman walking beside a man with a bald head, small, round dark glasses, and a black goatee. The girl in a clinging tank top and stretchy leggings; the guy wore a hoodie, the hood back now, and jeans. Lucille and Gandalf.
Warm to be wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. Kind of funny too that they were out this early, two people in “the life” of drug dealing—and who knew what else.
They walked up to the building, and Bleak drew back, wishing he had his crew with him. This was where he missed them.
There was someone he might use, though. Bleak closed his eyes and pictured a certain man in repairman's coveralls, with GREG sewed on the breast. Greg Berne... Greg Berne...
Greg the Ghost appeared almost immediately; he was there before Bleak opened his eyes to check. He wasn't transparent—but he was suspended a foot over the roof. He had his hands in the pockets of his coveralls.
“Man, you should work for a search-engine company or something,” Bleak told him. “You're fast.”
“I was just thinking about you, and then I heard you calling,” Greg told him. “And here I am. Any news for me?”
“I kind of got a police detective, guy named Roseland, interested in your case. I got a feeling he might look into reopening the whole thing.”
“That Mormon kid, Braithwaite—I think he killed someone else,” Greg said, gazing out across the city with a kind of dreamy sadness. “I was following him for a while, and then I lost him.... Sometimes, see, I gotta go and kinda curl up in the Hidden for a while and, what you call it, recharge... and when I came back to where I left him, he was gone. But the paramedics, they was taking a dead girl out on a stretcher, in the same block, and I heard 'em say she was strangled.”
“Where was this?”
“Manhattan. East Ninety-fifth and Second Avenue.”
“I'll find some way to tell Roseland that murder might be connected to the ones they tried to hang on you.”
“Thanks, soldier. But, hey—don't use the words hang and you around me, makes me feel sick. Considering how I died.” Greg wasn't smiling. Wasn't joking.
It was always interesting to Bleak that ghosts could feel sick—even though they had no physical bodies, exactly. “Okay, sorry. So how about doing something for me, Greg?”
“Sure as shit would try, there, Sarge.”
“Two people just went into this building...” Bleak described them and gave their names. “I need you to tell me where exactly they're going, how many people in the place, what the scene is. If there's a window on a fire escape, and if it's locked.”
“I got you. Let me have a look.”
Greg sank vertically into the roof, neither slowly nor quickly, as if taking an elevator down.
How do I pull this off? Bleak wondered. It was the woman he needed to take in. But it was the guy he had to worry about. Bleak had a gun with him—he didn't like to even carry them on a skip trace, preferring, as most professionals did, the element of surprise, a couple of burly helpers, and handcuffs. He could maybe use the gun to get the bald Gandalf to surrender, if he got the drop on him —and if the guy resisted, he could knock him cold, then grab the girl and cuff her. He had pepper spray, could use that on her if she struggled.... He didn't want to have to throw an energy bullet and ruin his cover. “Bleak?”
It sounded like a voice coming out of the air, to Bleak, but someone without his gifts would have heard nothing but a sigh on the wind, at most.
“Yeah, Greg, I'm here.” Saying it out loud. To the wind.
“They're sitting in a top-floor apartment almost right under you, six oh three. I was in the room, watching 'em. They 've been up all night, them two, from what they were saying. So this is like the end of the night for 'em, ya see. They 're doing lines of speed. Guy they 're buying it from, he don't seem like he wants to use it himself. He just watches them and seems to think they're kinda funny. The girls missing a couple teeth—them meth heads lose their teeth from the shit. Let's see—oh, yeah, the back window on the fire escape—it's painted shut. Wait, I'm coming up there.”
Greg ascended partway into view, up to his waist in the roof. He brushed at his face. “I always think, when I go through a wall, that I'm gonna get bugs and cobwebs on my face. Course I don't, but—”
“Greg—could you do one more thing for me? I'm going down to the hall outside the apartment. They're getting toasted in there. When they're toasted, they'll pop out of the toaster and come out into the hall. I need to know when they're about to head for the door. You see any guns on them so far?”
“I was looking, the hoodie guy might have one under his sweatshirt in front, but I dunno, Sarge. Couldn't tell for certain.”
“Okay. Maybe when he stands up you'd see it.”
“You got it. Anything I can do. Meet you down there”—he began to sink into the roof again, saluting, army-style, as he went down—”Sergeant Bleak.” Bleak returned the salute, then went to the roof doorway.
He padded down the stairs to the sixth floor, slipped quietly through the hall to the doorway, passing a small black girl carrying a bag of groceries; the little girl looked at him curiously but hurried past. Bleak found the apartment, the metal door thickly painted in dull red, the number 603 stenciled on it in black. Old jimmy marks scarred the door's lock. He looked at the elevator, which creaked noisily as someone used it, and the stairway, about twenty paces back, and decided they'd probably use the stairway. Tweakers going downstairs were too impatient to wait for a slow old elevator.
“Bleak? You hear me?”
“Yeah,” Bleak muttered.
“They'regoing to the door. “
“Just those two, no one going with them?”
“Right. And when the bald guy stood up, I did see a gun in his waistband. Man, I wish I could pick up a baseball bat or something, I'd back you up. I'd—”
“You've done a great job for me, Greg,” Bleak murmured softly, hurrying to the stairway. “Nothing else needed.”
“He looked kind of bulky, there, Bleak. I was thinking— “ “Quiet, I've got to concentrate,” Bleak whispered.
He heard the door open, down the hall behind him, and walked casually into the stairway as if he were on the way out of the building himself. The stairwell was dusty, unevenly lit, graffiti-tagged, and painted the same fleshy beige. He walked down to the next landing, around the stairwell's turn, down two steps...and waited.
He heard them coming, Lucille Rhione and her old man. Bleak drew his gun, but didn't put his finger on the trigger. He held the gun like a club—but so he could get to the trigger fast if he needed it —and had the cuffs ready in his left hand.
He had a “this isn't going to go very well” feeling—something that came from the Hidden, not from his own nervousness, and that feeling usually turned out to be right.
They were chattering as they came to the stairwell, started clumping down toward him, the girl saying, “We cash out, we can get a better camera, hire them hos from Georgie's, they'll do a video, we can get that into Skyline distrib—”
My, my, Bleak thought. Entrepreneurs. In cheap porn.
And the bald Gandalf, his scalp tattooed with an intricately knotted Celtic symbol, was talking really fast. “Don't be getting too much ahead, I don't know if we're getting outta this, those people got us out of the shit-house set this up, some f*cking weirdos, why should I trust them? I got an ounce of shit on me, maybe this is just a f*cking setup, maybe it's to get us busted, and Jerry upstairs too, maybe he—”
What does he mean “those people got us out”? Bleak wondered, but it was too late to wonder any more than that, they were coming to his landing, and he was pointing his gun at Gandalf.
“Freeze right there,” Bleak said, stepping in closer. “I'm here for Lucille, I have a warrant, she's wanted for failure-to-appear. She's coming with me—”
“Gan-dalllllf?” the woman squealed. “They never said he'd be in here with us, like this—”
“It is some kinda f*cking setup, they said he wouldn't have a gun,” Gandalf chattered, snarling. And pulling his gun as he said it.
Bleak brought his own gun barrel down on Gandalf s bald head—but the guy was hyperalert with methedrine and he jerked back at the last split second, Bleak's gun barrel hitting him glancinglyjust above the left eye, knocking his sunglasses off, creasing his scalp enough to make blood spurt, but with no solid impact, so that Bleak knew that Gandalf wasn't going down yet.
“Gan-dalllllffl.” the girl shrieked, scrambling back. “They said he-”
Staggering for balance, Gandalf showed snaggly, yellow teeth in an animal grimace, his eyes looking as steely as the studs piercing his upper lip and brow. He raised his gun, a black Glock nine.
Oh, shit, Bleak thought, as Gandalf raised the gun, I've got no choice. Not really even having time to think the words, except oh, shit—just realizing it.
He had no time to reach into the Hidden for an energy bullet, or to condense the field, turn the drug dealer's bullet. He had only one option.
His hand found the trigger and he fired directly into the center of that sweatshirt, the middle of Gandalf's chest—Bleak's gun roared, the Rhione woman screamed, and Gandalf was knocked backward with the impact of the shot, slung awkwardly against the iron handrail. The Glock fired, but because Gandalf was off-balance, the shot went wild, ricocheting behind Bleak. The drug dealer's little, round-lensed sunglasses had fallen on the steps. Bleak shifted his stance, kicked the Glock from Gandalf's hand, and swung his own gun at the cowering, crying woman. She scrambled away from him backward. As if he were a horror-movie monster.
“Just come with me, Lucille,” Bleak said. “No one's going to hurt you. We'll call an ambulance for—”
“F*cking vulture!” Gandalf snarled, kicking Bleak's left knee, knocking him off-balance.
Bleak started to fall, managed to partly catch himself on the other railing with the heel of his gun hand. He braced and used his left foot to kick the dealer in the face. Felt bone and cartilage crunching.
Gandalf yipped in pain and recoiled. Bleak got his feet under him, realizing that Gandalf had a military-grade bulletproof vest on. Where'd he get it? Not unthinkable a dealer would have one, but they were scarcely “standard issue.”
The dealer was clutching his bloodied nose, crimson streaming between his fingers, but he had picked up the Glock with his other hand, was swinging it toward Bleak—grinning bloodily—Bleak had no choice but to bring his own pistol around and shoot Gandalf in the head. One shot, a single round, in the forehead.
The dealer's head snapped back, his eyes crossed, and he sagged, instantly lifeless.
Lucille Rhione's scream was long and piercing.
“F*ck. Okay, well, Lucille, that was self-defense,” Bleak added, the words sounding false even to him.
It was self-defense, he told himself; he knew he'd be dead if he hadn't done it. He had a strong connection to the After, like everyone who lived with an awareness of the Hidden—but he also had the survival instincts every human being had.
He stood over the dealer's still twitching body. Then realized Lucille was crawling up the stairs, sobbing as she went. Dragging a long-strapped purse along the stairs after her, bump bump bump.
“Hold it, Lucille. I'm sorry I had to shoot your old man, but you've still got to...”
She had to do what? Should he let her go? If he turned her in, he'd have to explain about this shooting.
“They're coming,” she sobbed. “And they're gonna get your ass and I'll tell 'em you killed him, you f*cking pig.”
I should have come at the guy from behind, stuck a gun to his head—but the girl might've taken off running.
Then it struck Bleak that she'd said, They're coming. And Gandalf had said something about someone getting them “out of the shit-house.” “Who's coming, Lucille?”
But Bleak knew. He could hear the choppers churning the air over the building now. Lucille was no bail skip. She'd already been in jail. CCA had got her out and used Second Chance Bail Bonds to lure him here...and to keep him busy. “Lucille, you dumb bitch,” Gandalf snarled.
The woman climbing the stairs on all fours stopped, lifted her head, like a dog hearing a distant call. “Gandalf?”
Bleak saw him then. Gandalf was standing on the stairs—no, he was floating a foot above the stairs—right next to Lucille Rhione. Looking just as he had in life, except he was missing the gun. But he had his hand held up, pointing at Bleak as if there were a gun in it. He probably thought there was.
Lucille looked around, not seeing him. Her voice rose in pitch. Her lips quivered. “Gan-dallllllf?”
She could tear her dead boyfriend, Bleak realized—her intuition stimulated by the intensity of the moment—but she couldn't see him.
“I'm gonna kill you, you f*cking bounty vulture!” the ghost of Gandalf snarled.
“You're a dead guy yourself, man,” Bleak pointed out wearily. “You're not in a position to kill anyone.”
Should he try the street or try to get away on the roofs? There was one way he might make the roofs work....
“I was just going to close a major deal, I was getting it all together, I had the shit to pay for everything. “
“You got some money from CCA, and you bought some dope, and you thought you were going to become the Porn King,” Bleak said, starting up the stairs. “But they would have killed you, or gotten rid of you somehow. Probably put you two away in some nut house somewhere. Keep you quiet about this operation. So it wouldn't have worked out, Gandalf, or whatever your name was when you were a living a*shole instead of a dead one.”
Bleak took two steps at once to get past Lucille—and the snarling ghost leaped at him. Roaring right for his eyes, mouth open, to take a bite of his face.
The way someone else would have tensed the muscles of their stomach to absorb a blow, Bleak intensified the field of the Hidden around himself, and the ghost bounced off, spiraled away, howling, swirled around, started to come back at him.
Then Greg was there, stepping out of the wall—and hit the ghost in the face. Purple sparks flew from the psychic impact, and Gandalf squealed and retreated, whimpering, babbling madly, into a corner.
“Thanks, Greg,” Bleak said, hurrying up the stairs. The ghost of Gandalf couldn't really have hurt Bleak—but he could have temporarily blinded him. Tormented him. “I should have listened to you, Greg, you tried to tell me he had some bulkiness about him, should've figured from that there was a vest. Which would have been a clue. Been good if I'd paid attention.”
Bleak banged the roof door open, ran out into the bright sunlight. And saw three choppers flying overhead—and two CCA agents climbing onto the roof from a fire escape. One of them he recognized as Drake Zweig.
And nine or ten more were on adjacent roofs. Closing in on him.