CHAPTER FIVE
Gulcher was getting tired. But there were the cops to deal with before he could rest. Jock was already sacked out in a dressing room, in the tunnels under the casinos; snoring on a cot down the hall from the place they'd stacked the bodies. Six bodies, the ones who'd died in the melee.
Gulcher had always heard there were tunnels under big casinos, used for all kinds of behind-the-scenes business and preparation, but he'd never seen them before. In the case of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino, they were tacky but clean, well-lit underground corridors, the linoleum peeling in some places. The tunnels connected dressing rooms to stages, counting rooms to cashier booths, administration to security.
Gulcher had found an administrator down here, a middle-aged guy with a nice suit. Guy who was now dead. And the suit fit Gulcher pretty good. He wore the sunglasses—they never looked out of place in a casino—and a big smile as he met the cops talking to his security people. There was a plainclothes detective and a uniformed police lieutenant with the three Atlantic City PD cops. One of the cops had a take-out coffee in his hand; the lady cop was chewing gum. The third one kept touching a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, like he couldn't wait to get out and have a smoke. Somehow these casual details were reassuring to Gulcher as he shook hands with the lieutenant. The guy introduced himself. Made sure Gulcher heard the rank. Gulcher told him his own name was Presley. It was a name he'd always liked.
“Hey, thanks for coming over, Lieutenant,” Gulcher said. Saying it loud to be heard over the whistle and yammer and clatter of the slot machines. People were playing again as if there hadn't been a pile of bodies here just about forty minutes ago. And the players he'd taken control of, short those who'd died, were back at it too. Not remembering anything.
“Yeah, we had a rough time with some tweakers,” said Stedley, the casino's head of security. Bulky but slick guy in a tailored suit, immaculate grooming, whitened teeth. He flashed a sharklike smile. “But we took care of 'em long time before your people come. One of our guys got a gash in his scalp—you can see the blood from it.”
Gulcher looked at Stedley in muted wonder. Stedley was so thoroughly Gulcher's man now. Never remembered any other arrangement. To Stedley it was as if he'd always worked for Gulcher. The whisperer, what it could do! It was just f*cking mind-blowing. It was mind-facing, really.
The lieutenant, a middle-aged black man with salt-and-pepper hair and a little mustache, was staring at Gulcher, chewing his lower lip. Maybe starting to recognize him from the APB out on him. But the suit, the situation, and the sunglasses made him unsure. And Gulcher knew he could make him forget about it in a heartbeat.
“We'd have come sooner,” the lady cop said, “but, uh...” She looked maybe Puerto Rican to Gulcher; small and plump but not bad looking for a cop. “But there was an explosion, a gas main went up, a quarter mile to the west—maybe you saw it on the news already. Lot of panic over there.”
Gulcher figured that explosion was the whisperer's doing too.
Or maybe he should say it was Moloch's doing. Wasn't it all Moloch? Somehow, Gulcher didn't like to think about Moloch Baal. Who and what that was.
“Sure, I understand,” Gulcher said. “You guys hadda deal with the explosion, but we had everything here under control. Yeah, it was just some tweakers on crack, or maybe meth. They jumped a couple of my guys. There was a shot fired too, but nobody hurt, and that guy got away. Just ran out. We'll send over some surveillance tape for ya. I sent the guys home, who got jumped. They're bruised up some—didn't need any hospital help. The crackheads, we taught 'em a little lesson, sent 'em on their way. I don't think they'll be back.”
The cops chuckled. Except for the lieutenant, him being a real straight arrow. Opening his mouth maybe to ask Gulcher to take off those sunglasses.
Gulcher was already muttering a couple of names. And there was a squirming in the air around the lieutenant's face.
The lieutenant's eyes glazed over. He yawned. Seemed to frown, as if he was trying to remember something. Then he shrugged. His voice real dull, he said, “Yeah, okay, fellas, well, next time we'll s° want to talk to your witnesses. But I guess it's copa-cetic as is right now. You send over that video, okay?”
“Sure, Lieutenant, no problem.”
The cops were already filing out. Gulcher watched them go, thinking, I took over his mind and made him all sleepy and he just let it go.
This was almost too good to be true. Just a little too good.
***
THIRTY-SIX HOURS LATER: 7 p.m. in New York City, the Lower East Side. Still light out. Still hot and muggy.
Gabriel Bleak was sitting at a table in a plywood booth covered with off-white acoustic fabric, using a computer with a dicey Internet connection, having paid the shop on East Fourteenth for an hour's time. The acoustic fabric was frayed at the corners, exposing the plywood. The guy sitting in the little booth next to him was playing an online first-person shooter, and he kept muttering to himself, cursing his adversaries under his breath. “Die...die.... Come on and...oh, man, that's bullshit. That's...I'll find your ass when I re-spawn...change ordnance...change to rocket launcher, you want to play like that.... Noobie, using your noob-tube on me, suck this! Suck rockets! Yeah!”
Which made it a little hard for Bleak to concentrate on his e-mail. Mostly just spam. A thank-you note from Lost Boys Bail Bonds. And another client, Get Right Out Bail Bonds, had put him on its e-mail list. It appeared, according to their list spam, that now they also cashed checks. Probably give you a check for catching a skip, then offer to cash it for you in the office and use the check-cashing fees to take back part of what they'd paid you.
Bleak wiped sweat from his forehead. Why couldn't this place get air-conditioning?
He wished he'd persuaded Cronin to use e-mail. They'd talked about it but Cronin said the Internet was “bad for a man who wants to think long thoughts.” He missed Cronin, and he missed Muddy. He worried that the dog was pining for him. There—an e-mail inquiry from Second Chance Bail Bonds. Got a skip for you. Please come to office ASAP. Vince.
Wait. He'd never worked with Second Chance. Who was Vince and how'd he get his e-mail? From the other bail outfits? Surprising, they didn't usually share skip tracers. And the guy acted as if Bleak were supposed to know who he was.
He'd check it out anyway. Not good to get paranoid and he needed the work.
It occurred to Bleak, suddenly, that the CCA could be monitoring his e-mail. So maybe it was good he wasn't communicating with Cronin that way. Time he got out of this place.
He did a disk clean, a few other quick moves to blot out his browsing history, and shut the computer down, suddenly feeling as if he might be arrested, here, at any moment.
Bleak got up, hurried out, blinking in the light spearing from the sun low between the buildings. He shaded his eyes, looked around. Didn't see that agent—rolling her name luxuriantly through his mind: Loraine Sarikosca. Was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment that she wasn't there. Which made no sense at all.
He hurried down East Fourteenth to Avenue A, then downtown, looking for a certain bar where he could get a beer in a cool room and think. A bar with a back way out, where he knew he wouldn't have to bust a hole in a wall if he had to escape.
Maybe we 're all going about this wrong. The ShadowComm—and me too. Maybe we should get lawyers. Challenge CCA right out in the courts. Come out of the closet more.
But he decided that thinking was left over from the days before the terrorist attack on Miami— before President Breslin had invoked National Security Presidential Directive 51, giving his administration special powers in the event of “catastrophic emergency” powers that verged on martial law. The president controlled the courts, now. More than ever. There was still resistance in Congress and on the state level to arrests of just anyone the government designated dangerous... and that resistance, for as long as it lasted, was probably all that kept CCA from pushing law enforcement to put out a general APB on Gabriel Bleak.
It was almost dark when he got to Telly's Tell 'Em Anything. Cool and pleasantly gloomy inside. Only one drinker there, an old man arguing with Telly about politics. Tending bar himself, Telly was a stout Greek with muttonchops and curly gray hair and a red nose; a double shot of ouzo always in one hand, even when he was using the other to pour for a customer. He nodded to Bleak and nodded questioningly at the only draft-beer pull; Bleak gave a thumbs-up and went into the back for a quick pee. The old-fashioned men's room had a metal trough to piss in.
He was just stepping out of the men's room when a dry rustling sound and a creaky call drew his attention to the half-open door to the air shaft. It was where people went to smoke, with a bucket filled with sand and cigarette butts. And poised on the bucket was Yorena, cocking her head, shaking her feathers out.
“What?” Bleak asked.
The bird made a come-with-me motion with its head. A very human motion.
Bleak shook his head. “I just got here. You want to wait, then maybe.”
He went back in the main room, found his beer waiting for him, and quickly drank half of it.
So Shoella wanted to see him. Sending Yorena was safer than e-mail. He was trying not to think about the CCA threat; didn't want it to consume his life. Figured he could dodge them till they got interested in someone else. But that was probably what this call by Shoella was about: CCA.
Bleak paid, left a tip, and headed out the front door. Long shadows slanted across from the west side of the street. A group of young tourists, in shorts, walked along talking excitedly in German. They seemed to be taking pictures of some of the elaborate neopsychedelic graffiti on the walls of the old buildings.
Bleak started to step into a doorway—and was driven back by the strong reek of urine. He went a little farther down, found a cleaner doorway, and went to stand just inside, waiting.
He only had to wait about a minute. A flapping, a shadow over the dirty sidewalk, and he knew that Yorena was there.
“Okay,” Bleak muttered, “take me to her.” The shadow wheeled and darted to the downtown direction. He followed, glancing up to see the familiar flickering in and out of view about two stories up. Pigeons and crows scattered to get out of its way; one pigeon was two slow; the familiar veered, struck, and the bird fell, spiraling and trailing feathers, to smack bloodily onto the sidewalk. Pigeon Lady would not be pleased.
He stepped over the dead bird and followed the shadow downtown.
***
IT WAS DARK WHEN Bleak got to the Battery area, at the lower tip of the island of Manhattan, and he was getting footsore. He was aware of Yorena flying overhead, but couldn't see the familiar. He wasn't surprised at meeting Shoella here; he knew she liked to stay close to running water; close to rivers and the sea. She felt powerful there. He drew power from running water too, but he suspected Shoella needed it more.
That's where he found her, on the walk overlooking the water, just beyond a small park at Battery Place. She was standing in a cone of darkness where there should have been light—a line of lampposts paced down the walkway, following the railing, the lamps all lit up, except the one she stood under, the only one that wasn't working. He looked up at the light fixture and saw that the lamp glass was blocked off; it was covered with black butterflies and moths, a living swarm of the creatures summoned by Shoella that kept most of its light muffled.
She was a thin dark figure in the oasis of shadow. Yorena flew to Shoella's shoulder, the creature nestling her head in the wildness of Shoella's black hair as Bleak walked up and leaned against the other side of the post. Behind them, lights twinkled from high metal-and-glass buildings; before them, the river surged and hissed.
“Well?” he asked, enjoying the cooling breeze off the water.
“Lots of things, cher darlin',” Shoella said, her voice grave. “There's a spiritual blackout, you feel?”
“Something of the sort. Last night. As I was going to sleep, I usually get a hit of the Hidden—like the big picture, out a certain distance, a few hundred miles.” She nodded. Knowing what he meant. “And?” “And there were a lot of blank spots.” “Hey, where you staying anyway—not that boat?”
“No, in the city.” He became aware that Yorena, sitting wings-folded on Shoella's shoulder, was watching him narrowly; seemed to be listening closely. He found it annoying. “There's a hotel I know, where they don't ask me for a credit card, and there they don't have tweakers making noise in the hall, and there's no bedbugs and I even have my own bathroom. Clean linen. Lot of old-time junkies there, but they're pretty quiet, they're on the methadone.”
She turned to her feathered familiar. “'Blank spots,' he says, Yorena!” Shoella looked back at him, her head cocked like the bird's. “There's great holes in the Hidden, in the Northeast, holes you could drive a truck through, Gabriel. The Hidden is there—always, everywhere!—but there are places you can't see into it, now. Big places. This is new. And it is tres persistent over to Atlantic City way.”
“Yeah. But then Jersey's always a spiritual blackout.”
“Hey! Not funny! Everyone got to bash Jersey. They take good care of me, many good people in New Jersey. Now—this blackout...there is something else there. While some places are black, other places are shining with a volcano light. Yorena, you are hurting my shoulder again.” She shrugged Yorena away; the bird flew to the railing overlooking the river and hunched sullenly to watch them.
When Bleak looked at the creature, she snapped her beak at him.
“Your bird, if that's what it is, is getting on my nerves, Shoella.” He added, in a mild, speculative tone, “I wonder if she would taste good roasted.”
Yorena fluttered her wings and made an outraged squawking. “Ignore him, Yorena,” Shoella said. “He'sjust tryin' to get a rise out y'alls.”
Bleak contemplated Shoella a moment. “What did you say—some places shining with...volcano light? What do you mean?”
“So I call it. A nasty hot-red light. Like the light from hell! It only comes through sometimes. Comes and goes. Mostly those places, all under a blackout.”
“You're under a blackout yourself.” He looked up at the blotted-out streetlamp—glanced at the shadow around them.
“It was that helicopter, that come looking for us.” She looked pensively at the city, her eyes searching the sky over the buildings. “That why I put up the umbrella here. Helicopters looking for me make me nervous, cher darlin’. Don't like to be seen easy from up above now.” She looked at him, a; leaned a little closer. “You know that there is a 'wall,' in the north, as some calls it—that thing that keeps the Hidden...hidden? What keeps it quiet?”
“I've had that feeling.” Bleak thought of the “wall” impression he'd had that day soon after his thirteenth birthday, on the ranch. There was ShadowComm lore about “the wall in the north.” Without the unknown force from the north, which kept the Hidden muted—a force all Shadow Community felt —they would be swamped by the energies of the Hidden, would constantly see its inhabitants all around them as easily as seeing trees and cars; could see the demon known as the Lord of the Flies as easily as houseflies. And that way lay madness.
“Now the wall in the north begins to break open,” Shoella muttered, frowning at the water beyond the rail. “Much more is coming to us. Maybe we can adapt. But other things come through. Things from the Big Outside. From the Wilderness! And there are some bad people who might be powered up.... And you and me, we have to sort through all this. We are stronger together, Gabriel Bleak.”
She broke off, but looked at him, her lips parted...as if she was considering opening up. He suspected he knew what was on her mind. The tenderness in her eyes cued him. He'd felt it through the Hidden, more than once—her feelings for him. And she felt his for her. Only, hers were rooted in emotion. With him, it was just desire. And he was instinctively sure it wouldn't work out, in the end, because of that disparity. Besides—the one other time he'd had some kind of intimacy with a ShadowComm girl, Corinne Mendez, long vanished from sight, she'd fled to the West Coast over the affair. It'd been dangerous, what he'd had with Corinne. A bad kind of explosiveness. Shoella felt even more volatile.
So when Shoella seemed about to make that suggestion—he changed the subject. “You ever wonder what makes this 'wall in the north,' in the first place?” Bleak asked quickly, looking up at the dark fluttering on the streetlight. The black butterflies and dark moths muted the light the way the wall in the north muted the Hidden. ? Shoella looked at him. Licked her lips. Shrugged away the unspoken.
“Yes, I've wondered. But I don't know who made it, cher darlin'. Who knows? Pigeon Lady is wise and she don't know. 'It comes from the north,' she says, 'like the northern lights, it comes from the north.' Scribbler—perhaps he knows. But he scribbles riddles.”
“If the wall is weakening more, then there shouldn't be a spiritual blackout...we should see more than we do.”
“That blackout comes from a thing that came through the wall in the north. It creates a darkness in the Hidden to conceal itself—like octopus ink, ya feel?”
“Maybe. Why you telling me this? You think I know something about it?”
“Maybe it is connected to this CCA raid. The wall begins to weaken. The power grows. Things come through—and CCA comes after you. Maybe a connection, cher darlin'. Maybe you learned something about that. You keep your distance from us—don't always talk to us.”
He shrugged. “I don't know what it means. The agent didn't tell me much. I'm just keeping my head down.”
She hesitated. “There was something else to tell you. Another reason I called you here tonight.” She sighed. “The bon Dieu knows if it's something I should speak of. But I feel...”
Bleak glanced at her; saw her lick her lips nervously. He had the sense that she was about to cross a line, of some sort; to cross a bridge and burn it behind her.
“Go on,” he said.
“You grew up in Oregon—the east of Oregon, yes?”
“Until I was about thirteen.”
“Your brother. You had a brother, yes?”
He felt an icy shock go through him. After a moment he realized she was waiting for him to say it. “Yeah. Gone. Dead. As a toddler.” “How did he die?”
“An accident. With a tractor. Or something.” “His name was Sean?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her. He had mentioned Oregon to her—but he hadn't told anyone about Sean. No one except Cronin. “You get a familiar to tell you that? Something probe my mind when I was asleep, maybe?”
“No, Gabriel. No.” Her voice was low and earnest—more personal than usual. She put a hand on the lamppost between them as if using it to make a connection with him. “I have been trying to find out? what makes the wall over the Hidden—and what is changing it. I found a man who worked for a military agency. MK Omega, the agency was called. Small, elite, this thing. He is not so elite now: a lush, this man, always drinking. He talks, sure, about some things, if you buy him drinks. I met with him this morning. Something he said—I had to tell you. He say something bothered him, about this Omega group. He was part of a team that took a child, kidnapped it away. They took a boy, Sean his name was.”
The name Sean sent an electric chill through Bleak.
“Out in eastern Oregon,” Shoella went on, her voice softly sympathetic. “They didn't take his brother, Gabriel—they wanted Gabriel to be...what did this man say... 'a control'! That's what he called it. 'Experiment control.' Monitoring him sometimes, he say. See how he develops out in the world. This Gabriel could see the Hidden.”
Bleak swallowed hard. He didn't argue.
She nodded to herself. “They lost track of this Gabriel for a time—but the boy they took, he's still with them somehow. He's alive—and he's with them.”
“That's not...” Bleak's mouth was dry. “That's not necessarily him...not necessarily us, that he's talking about.”
“He remembered the family's last name. A strange name, he said. Bleak.”
And hearing his own name, Bleak felt disoriented, almost sick. He should be happy, shouldn't he, to hear that, if this man was not lying, Sean might be alive?
But he felt like a child who'd found a secret room in the back of his closet, with something ugly hanging back there... something dangling by a noose, turning slowly in the shadows... something still alive.
Why did he feel that way about it? He should be ashamed of himself for feeling that way— shouldn't he?
“So—you want to meet him?” He looked at her, startled. “Who?”
“The man—Coster, his name is. This Coster says he knows what happened to your brother. You want to meet the man?”
Did he? After the run-in with the CCA—did he want to meet someone connected with them? Didn't seem wise.
And—there was that sick feeling. Maybe there was a reason for it. *
No. That was just some leftover childhood feeling of horror—his brother vanished, and he reacted. Buried feelings, that kind of thing.
He looked skeptically at Shoella. “How'd you find out about this Coster, exactly?”
“I went to Scribbler, to ask questions about the wall in the north. He could not see much. Because the wall blocks it. But Scribbler, he saw this Coster—scribbled his name, the name of a city shelter. And I found him...Yorena found him...at a shelter, up by Times Square—he's homeless, this man.”
Bleak nodded. Scribbler. A ShadowComm seer who scribbled on paper for hours, mostly nonsense. And then suddenly there it would be, a secret amidst the nonsense.
“What did Coster know about the wall in the north?”
“He wouldn't tell me much about that—said he wanted to talk to you. Said he wanted to say he was sorry he was any part of that... of taking of your brother.” “So he's talkative when he's drunk...but then he's not?” She looked at him curiously. “What are you saying?”
“I don't know. Just—makes me wonder. A talkative drunk...and yet a careful one. Kind of contradictory.”
She shrugged. “He talked for a while. But then...that one question, it scared him.” She scratched in her dreads, looked out over the river. “And so? Do you want to meet this Coster?”
“I don't know.” Bleak went to the railing, felt its cold metal under his hands. Watched the reflected lights dancing on the dark water.
No. He didn't want to meet Coster, not really. He knew instinctively it was dangerous. Yet he'd always wondered about Sean.
Maybe he'd always known that Sean was out there somewhere. Maybe he'd always felt it on some level.
But it was a level he stayed away from. It was someplace painful. And he suspected that behind it lay one more betrayal by his parents.
If Sean is alive, he told himself, you've got to know it. He's your brother.
And never knowing the truth would gnaw at his insides. Always. He'd always know he'd blown off a chance at the truth.
So he made himself say, “Yeah. Yeah, I want to meet Coster.”