Splintered Read online

  He shrugged. “I guess you already know that.” He shifted, stretching one leg out in front of him. “I knew guys in the service who got a taste for it. Power trip. Cap some guy, and you can feel like a big man for an hour, or whatever. I get that, but it ain’t my thing.”

  “So what’s your thing?’

  He looked away from her, slowly surveying the wreckage around them. “When you’re in a spot where you got to ice somebody, it’s . . . it’s like eating your vegetables. You gotta do it, no matter how bad it tastes. Bad for your health if you don’t. Best get it over with quick and not think too hard on it.”

  Anna waited a moment to see if he had anything to add, but he stayed silent. “That’s it?” she asked. “That’s your expert advice on the subject?”

  “It’s what I got.”

  “I can’t tell if you’d make a worse therapist or inspirational speaker.”

  He laughed quietly. “I imagine I’d be pretty bad at both.”

  “Hey, you recognize any of Van Horn’s crowd?”

  Nail nodded. “T-shirt and cargo pants and the lawyer-looking guy for sure. Might be others.”

  “From the Brotherhood. Mendelsohn’s guys.”

  “Yeah.”

  That confirmed the worst of Anna’s fears on the subject. Nathan Mendelsohn had run a cult known as the Brotherhood of Zagam. He’d also owned the jawbone that Sobell had hired the crew to steal, the goddamn thing that had gotten Tommy killed and come inches away from wiping out the rest of crew and even Sobell himself. Only, in the end, it had turned out that Mendelsohn had been dead awhile, and some guy named Hector had been running his cult the whole time. That guy was still around, somewhere, and so, apparently, were the remnants of the cult. Anna hated to think what they’d do if they recognized her or any of the others. The jawbone had been a precious relic of theirs, and things had gotten considerably fucked-up after the crew stole it. In the end, Genevieve had destroyed the relic in full view of Hector and others. “What’s Van Horn doing with Mendelsohn’s guys?”

  “Sobell’s all tangled up with ’em somehow. Don’t surprise me none.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes longer. Anna felt no fatigue coming on—she felt energized, oddly. It wasn’t a good kind of energy, more that of her brain running a hundred miles an hour, but there was no chance she’d sleep. “Hey, why don’t you crash out for a bit? No sense in both of us being up the rest of the night.”

  “Yeah, all right.” He stood, knees popping, and headed down the short path to the room he’d claimed for himself.

  Sunrise came slow, preceded by an uptick in the distant sound of traffic, honking horns, and sirens. Anna wondered if there was anywhere you could go in L.A. and not hear it. The city’s circulatory system, as clogged and dysfunctional as it was. Omnipresent, like the blood rushing in her ears, like the sound of her own breath. It had its own rhythms, locked tighter to the clock than to the sun or the stars. Today was Thursday, and the commuters had already jammed up the 5. Must be about five thirty, then.

  The sky lightened soon after, and weariness arrived with it, dragging a nice headache behind. This was life now. A few hours of sleep snatched between bone-deep fatigue at the end of the day and the moment not long after when nightmares woke her up. Nights spent tracking Van Horn, and any other time that wasn’t nailed down spent chasing one shitty lead after another, hoping to find someone, anyone, who could help Karyn. So far, that had been an almost laughably varied series of failures, ranging from simply disappointing to expensive and life-threatening. Dodging bullets, trading favors, and bartering for charms, occult concoctions, and spell fragments that she needed Genevieve to interpret for her. All useless so far. One so poisonous she’d had to be rushed to the emergency room for a stomach pump after testing it out on herself. Her nerves were shot. She’d lost weight, too, and as Nail was fond of telling her, she’d been built like a broom handle before.

  This couldn’t go on indefinitely, but she didn’t see what choice she had.

  Five thirty in the morning. Most of her remaining leads would likely be asleep. Fuck ’em.

  She flipped open her phone and got back to work.

  Chapter 2

  Enoch Sobell looked up from his desk and frowned. He recognized the woman standing in front of him, but he couldn’t remember from where. She was about fifty, dressed in a conservative blue suit, and her face was all creases and sharp angles, as if it had been hacked out of a stump with a machete. Her burned-in scowl and ramrod-straight bearing made him want to start humming the Marines’ Hymn. She stood directly in front of his desk at the exact center, not in the least awed by the high ceiling, the dozen or so pedestals in alcoves showcasing a fraction of Sobell’s collection of ancient and unusual objects, or Sobell himself.

  “Has there been an election?” Sobell asked. “I seem to remember the mayor being somewhat taller. Male as well.”

  The woman said nothing, but he thought her scowl intensified. Call that a victory, then. “Would you care to have a seat? Perhaps I can get you something to drink?”

  “The mayor is very busy.”

  “No drink, then?”

  “He’s likely to be busy for the foreseeable future.”

  Sobell leaned back. He tapped his fingers on the arms of his chair in a kind of low-key drumroll. His mouth tightened. “Hmm.” The woman showed no signs of impatience, and he got the impression she’d stand there, impassive, until he died of old age if she had to. “Hmm.” Well, one didn’t get to his position in life without trying to make a few friends, even if some of them were detestable. “I’m sorry. I think we’ve started off poorly. I’m Enoch Sobell. I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of making your acquaintance.”

  “Denise Watterson.” She produced a business card from her jacket pocket and offered it to him. “Trask, Hopper, and Watterson.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like a law firm.”

  “It is.”

  “Pardon my thickheadedness, but you’re not with the mayor’s office, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps I’m being sued, then? Except that one doesn’t usually employ a named partner at a prestigious law firm in the capacity of a process server. What is going on here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I represent Mayor Vargas’s interests in a number of areas. I have recommended to him, in light of recent events, that he terminate all contact with you.”

  “You’re what, then? His consigliere?”

  To her credit, she didn’t even blink. Tough customer. Sobell had to respect that, even as annoying as it was.

  He sighed. “Madam, I have known Ramon for fifteen years. I’ve used every legal device imaginable to donate the maximum amounts possible to his reelection campaigns. You can check that. It’s a matter of public record. We have had several successful business partnerships. You can check . . . some of that. Now I invite him over for a couple of drinks and pleasant conversation, and he sends a polite but none-too-friendly attorney to cut ties with me? I find that hard to believe. Or at least in very poor taste.”

  “Was that a question?”

  “Has Ramon Vargas’s head grown so big he won’t deign to do any of his own dirty work anymore?”

  “Mr. Sobell. There was a massacre in your office building. Nineteen bodies were carted out of here while the news cameras rolled.”

  “Nineteen, eh?”

  “Two police officers were killed just outside.”

  “Perhaps if we devoted more resources to keeping down gang violence in our fair city . . .”

  “Nobody, least of all you, believes this was a random act of gang violence.”

  “Not random, no. I was targeted for being such a staunch supporter of local law enforcement.”

  Still no sign of a crack. Well, she did do this for a living after all.

  “There are also eyewitness accounts of a man matching your description fleeing from a firefight in East
L.A.”

  “Slander. Who are these so-called eyewitnesses? I’ll have my attorney file the appropriate defamation suits immediately. I wouldn’t be caught dead in East L.A.”

  “I’m not here to recount the evidence or listen to all the reasons why you’re innocent.”

  “Just to deliver a message, is that correct?”

  “It is.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

  He’d thought Watterson was at maximum humorlessness before, but her face hardened and a little muscle bunched at the corner of her jaw. “I hope you’re not suggesting the mayor has ties to organized crime.”

  “Heavens no.”

  “Good. If you have further questions, you have my card. As I mentioned before, the mayor is extremely busy.”

  “Too busy to take my calls for, ah, how did you put it? ‘The foreseeable future.’”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Just as well, I suppose. I’ve long thought he was soft on gang violence. That Henderson fellow, though, seems like just the man to clean up our increasingly violent and dangerous streets.” The words were a mistake, Sobell thought as soon as he said them. Threats just made him look weak, and surely Watterson was comfortable dealing with them. That was what she would have expected. I’m slipping.

  “Maybe you should call him,” she said. With that, she left.

  He sat, hands folded and his elbows on his desk, watching the closed door she’d exited through. He felt oddly . . . soiled, somehow. It was the office, he thought. The office used to be his nerve center, the place from which all his considerable power radiated out through the city and even beyond. Gresser and the Brotherhood had befouled that, Gresser when he’d moved in and taken Sobell’s chair and his identity through the power of that accursed jawbone, and the Brotherhood when they’d flocked to the man and then perpetrated a slaughter here. For Watterson to come in and rub his face in it seemed to him to be practically obscene.

  He reached for the phone to dial his assistant, and the light for her extension flashed on even before he touched the handset. He picked up the phone in the middle of the first ring. “Ms. Ely, excellent timing. Please send up some of the custodial staff. We’re going to move my office down to the forty-eighth.”

  “Sir, the FBI is here. They have a search warrant.”

  “Excuse me?” The police had already been through the place, top to bottom, after the event Ms. Watterson had characterized as a massacre.

  “A search warrant. They’re demanding access immediately.”

  “They’ve waved credentials at you, then?” Sobell said, mostly to buy a few moments’ thought.

  “Yes, sir. Special Agent Gina Elliot. I’ve verified her with the Los Angeles division.”

  Sobell suppressed a sigh. “Splendid,” he said, with all the good cheer he could fake. “Have her meet me at the bar. And can you call Erica Tran and tell her to get here as soon as possible?”

  “Right away.”

  A dozen questions sprang to mind, but Ms. Ely would have answers to none of them. There had to be an angle here, some reason the issue had escalated to the federal level, some reason beyond the LAPD’s rank incompetence that they’d need to take another swing at a basic search rather than simply going through the records from the previous search.

  “Thank you, Ms. Ely.”

  Sobell left his office and walked toward the stairs at a leisurely pace, fretting. Special Agent Elliot, hmm? That didn’t sound good. Not at all. The police were already up in his knickers enough—they tended to go a little berserk when one of their own bought the farm, so to speak. Hence contacting the mayor’s office. Ramon could call them off with a phone call, but evidently Sobell was too dirty now even for Ramon Vargas to touch. Sobell supposed he ought to be angry about that, but it was mostly just vexing. That was how this worked, after all, and he’d been shut out by better men than the mayor dozens of times. Either he’d get through this and the mayor would likely find himself out of office the next time around, or he wouldn’t, and the mayor would have been correct all along. Best to be a big boy and acknowledge that this was standard operating procedure. Expecting a politician to stand by you in a hurricane like this would have been like expecting a viper not to bite you when you poked it. I knew it was a snake when I picked it up, Sobell thought.

  The most vexing thing about all this was that it was a giant distraction. The cult, the massacre in his building, the death of his most trusted lieutenant, Joe Gresser, and now the invasive probing of law enforcement—it was all a big fucking sideshow, unpleasant by-products generated on the way to achieving his real goal. The jawbone had been a catalyst, nothing more. The plan had been simple enough: While Mendelsohn’s ridiculous cult was dealing with the patsies Sobell had sent in to steal their precious relic, they’d leave their pet demon untended, and Sobell would take the opportunity to go bargain with the creature.

  It had all worked, sort of, but it had all gone more than a little sour, too. The demon hadn’t been able to help him with his central problem, that of his imminent demise. By appearances, Sobell seemed a smartly dressed, fit man in his mid-forties, fifty at the oldest, with blandly handsome features and distinguished salt-and-pepper hair, but the truth was that, after centuries of magically extended life, his body was wearing out. He was dying. He was also beyond the point of being able to use magic to wring a few more years out. At bottom, magic was a deal with demons, and if you used enough of it over a long enough period, it eroded your mind or your soul—your defenses, in any case—and left you wide-open to what was, inevitably, terminal demonic possession. He’d hoped to bargain for more life, but the demon hadn’t been able to help him. All it had done was point him back toward the last demon he’d bargained with, a detestable little worm called Forcas, and then give him a few weak tips on how to find the creature.

  The only thread that had seemed promising from the demon’s cryptic messages had been a simple image, that of a man Sobell had known years ago: Edgar Van Horn. But before Sobell had been able to follow up on any of that, the situation with the cult had exploded, and all the other dominoes he’d unheedingly kicked on the way had fallen. In the end, he’d been lucky to survive—had, in fact, taken a bullet to the head, a deep graze that still sported a crusty finger-wide scab along the right side of his forehead. Ironically enough, he’d been shot by the new leader of poor dead Nathan Mendelsohn’s cult, a man named Hector Martel, who, in all likelihood, was harboring the very demon Sobell sought. But by the time Sobell had put all those pieces together, Martel had vanished, and things had gotten very complicated indeed.

  That left him with Van Horn. Sobell needed to be working on the Van Horn problem and offering whatever small assistance he could to Anna Ruiz’s crew, his latest reluctant allies. If there was anything worth getting dirty over, Van Horn was it. Dealing with law enforcement was simply a nuisance. A worrisome, vexing nuisance that had now ascended to an entirely new level.

  He descended the spiral staircase to the forty-eighth floor. Most of this story was open, scattered structural columns the only things obscuring the view of the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor was marble, and the bar was well stocked, and all in all, it was a hell of a place to host a soiree of an evening, not that he’d felt much like partying lately. Even debauchery couldn’t keep his mind off his more pressing problems for more than a few minutes. The situation was dire indeed.

  He wasn’t sure moving his office down here was the best idea he’d ever had, but it had to be better than leaving it where it was.

  The black woman standing by the bar wore the customary dour FBI suit, and her hair, pulled back in a bun so severe it seemed to stretch the skin of her forehead, did nothing to soften her image. Sharp eyes met his gaze through rectangular lenses mounted in a pair of black designer frames. She seemed a spiritual counterpart to Sobell’s earlier visitor, and he got the impressions from her stance and the set of her jaw that she was eager for a fi
ght.

  “Would you like to have a seat?” Sobell asked. “This may be a business meeting, but we can at least be civilized about it. Would you like some water? Coffee? Something with a little more kick?”

  “This isn’t business,” she said.

  Sobell smiled. “I’m Enoch Sobell.”

  “Special Agent Gina Elliot. FBI.”

  “That’s what Ms. Ely tells me. How can I help you?” Sobell took a seat on the next barstool.

  She brandished some paper at him. “This is a search warrant.”

  “So I’m given to understand.” He folded his hands on the bar and did his best to look sincere. “What is this about?”

  “A lot of people died here a little while back.”

  “Upstairs, actually. It’s all very tragic and horrible, but I think you’ll find the local authorities have my complete statement on the matter. I’m not sure what else I could add.”

  “We think those bodies might be just the tip of the iceberg, Mr. Sobell.”

  “An iceberg of bodies? What a needlessly gruesome metaphor.” Special Agent Elliot, Sobell was glad to see, wasn’t quite the consummate stone-faced professional that Watterson was. A sort of guarded curiosity opened her face—she wasn’t charmed by him, he didn’t believe that for an instant, but she was interested. In him, in everything around them. Each time she moved her head or shifted position, her eyes did a quick sweep of the room, checking the walls, the corners, the ceiling. The movements carried nothing of the kind of security paranoia he might have expected—just that curiosity.

  He wondered if she was here for a bribe. That didn’t quite feel right, but something was off here. “I assure you, the police have been all up and down and through this building, and if they’ve found a hidden cache of corpses, they have yet to inform me about it.” He cocked his head as though an idea had suddenly occurred to him. “Unless that’s what you’re here for.”

  “I’m here because your man, Joseph Gresser, appears to have had his hand in virtually every type of criminal enterprise on the books, and new ones besides.”