Mob Rules (16 page)

It was a good plan, but Adan invited me over instead. It was about ten-thirty when I got to his loft. He'd already had dinner, so we settled on coffee and shared a slice of take-out Washington. We finished the pizza and he let me smoke after I agreed to use my housecleaning spell to kill the odor.

“Tell me about Fred,” I said, tilting my head away from him and blowing a line of smoke into open air.

“You picking a fight, Domino? You just got here.”

“I'm not, but I work for your father and it's my job to look after his interests.”

“And protecting little old me is part of that job?”

“I'm not trying to protect you, Adan. I know you can take
care of yourself.” It was the exact opposite of how I really felt, but I couldn't very well tell him that.

Adan nodded. “He's German, but I think he's older than the country. He says it wasn't really unified when he was alive. He says he was a noble or a prince or something.”

“They always are. You never seem to run across a vampire who came up a peasant.”

Adan laughed. “Well, I told you I met him at the club.”

“Yeah. I figure he hunts there.”

“I think so. Actually, he owns the place. Anyway, we became friends before I knew what he was, and I've never been with him when he…did that. But I've seen him leave with women.”

“And they don't come back.”

“No, sometimes they don't.”

I sank back on the sofa, smoked and thought about my next move. This was tricky. It was possible Adan could help me find the vampire, saving me the trouble of having to search his place. But if I asked the kind of questions I'd have to ask, he'd know what I was planning. Would he help me kill Fred? Or would he throw me out of his apartment?

My gut was telling me that his friendship with Fred didn't run too deep. He'd found out about him after they'd become friends. His father had him juiced-up with protective magic and spell talismans, but he was probably still a little intimidated by the vampire. Maybe he was worried Fred would come after him if he told him to get lost. Maybe I was right, and the spirit had even manipulated him into the friendship.

I just didn't know him well enough to make a read. Some people will remain loyal to a friend or family member no matter what they do. Even if he wasn't thrilled with Fred, that didn't mean he'd be okay with me taking him out. He
might tell
me
to get lost. What I was most worried about, even though I didn't want to admit it, was that he wanted something from the vampire. Adan didn't have the juice to be a sorcerer, and he felt trapped between two worlds as a result. Maybe he saw vampirism as a solution to his identity crisis and he wanted Fred to turn him.

I didn't believe that, but I couldn't be sure. And again, I had to figure the spirit into this, whether it was responsible for the Adan-Fred connection or not. I didn't know all the details of how this thing worked, but it was a fair bet the spirit knew everything Adan did, even when it wasn't actively possessing him. It'd have to. I didn't like it, and I didn't blame him for it, but there was no way I could completely trust Adan, even if he would line up with me against Fred.

I couldn't read his mind, either, as I had with Honey. Even without his father's wards protecting him, I'd like to think I wouldn't have done it. Maybe it was even true.

“Are you going to kill him, Domino?” Adan asked. “Don't lie to me.”

“No,” I lied, “not unless you want me to. You had it right last night—I'm not really in a position to judge him.”

He nodded, but I couldn't tell if he was relieved or disappointed. “I don't like what he does. It disgusts me. But he says he's a different species, that it's natural for his kind to prey on humans just like it's natural for us to eat cattle.”

“Do you buy that?”

“No. I understand why he sees it that way, but I don't think it's the same thing.”

“It's not,” I said. “He's a monster. There's nothing natural about him.”

Adan smiled an uneasy smile. “I told him the exact same thing once.”

“What did he say?”

“He said cattle would have the same opinion of butchers.”

I grunted. It was chilling, but it wasn't a big stretch for me to look at the world the way the vampire did. Maybe when I wasn't paying attention I
did
look at it the same way. I was a hell of a lot closer to human than Fred was, but I had to admit I usually didn't think of myself as one. Maybe it was the gangster thing, or the power magic gave me, but the same rules just didn't seem to apply. I was an outsider, and we made our own rules.

My attention turned from halfhearted moral angst to how I was going to search Adan's apartment without him noticing. He might make a move on me, and I was pretty sure I wanted him to. If I could get him in bed, there might be a shower later or he might fall asleep, and that would give me my chance.

I wasn't real comfortable with that approach. I've done much worse things, but the idea of trying to seduce Adan for any other reason than the honest one didn't sit right. I also had a feeling sex might bring the spirit back out to play, and I wasn't ready to risk my skin just to get laid.

It occurred to me that I might be more clever if I didn't always rely on magic to do anything remotely complicated. I finally gave up and decided I'd have to leave. Once he was safely tucked in bed, I could break in, find what I was looking for and get out with him none the wiser. It would have been a lot easier without having to break in, but I was sure I had the spells I'd need to do it without waking him up.

I stayed for another hour so it wouldn't look suspicious. We went into the living room and turned on the TV, cuddling up on one corner of his large sectional. Maybe I'd get lucky and
he'd fall asleep, but he didn't really seem to be in the mood for channel surfing. The cuddling led to kissing, things started warming up and I had to keep my eyes open to see if Adan's went black.

The first real break in the action, I checked my watch and sighed. “I have to go to work, Adan.”

“Now? It's after midnight.”

“Gangster,” I said and shrugged.

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “Okay, that's cool, if you really have to go.” We got up and he wrapped his arms around my waist.

“Yeah, I really do. Sorry. I mean, really sorry.”

He smiled down at me and kissed the tip of my nose. “Thanks for coming over. This was nice.”

“Yeah, it was,” I said, kissing him again, and then I gently disengaged. He walked me to the door and a long kiss good-night bought my way to freedom.

I sat in my car until the lights went out, first in the living room and then in his bedroom about twenty minutes later. I waited another hour just to be sure. Then I spun my wallflower and nightvision spells, got out of the car and walked back down the street to his building.

“Security is mostly a superstition,” I said, and my B&E spell took down the alarm system and unlocked the door. I went in, shut the door behind me and climbed the stairs.

I stood outside his door for a few minutes and used a little juice to amplify my hearing. The open ductwork in the loft thrummed softly, and I remembered how silent it had been in the machineless world of the Between. I heard Adan in his bedroom loft, his breathing deep and even. I spun the B&E again, opened the door and slipped inside. As in the Between, Rashan's wards recognized me and let me pass.

I started on my left and systematically searched the large, open loft. I checked the pockets of the jackets hanging on the tree by the front door. I searched under the sectional and between the cushions. I rummaged through the DVDs in the rack under the flat-screen TV, and I searched every drawer and cabinet in the kitchen. Nothing.

I made my way over to the stairs leading up to the loft. I didn't like the idea of going up there with Adan sleeping, but not because I was afraid of being caught. I was pretty sure the wallflower would hold. It was too passive for Adan's wards to pick it up. I also knew his father hadn't given him a true seeing charm, or he'd have been able to see the ocean spirits on the beach. No, I didn't like the idea of going up to his bedroom loft because I felt like a fucking stalker.

I climbed the stairs slowly, treading as lightly as I could. The wallflower spell doesn't suppress sound, it just makes it easy to ignore, and I could hear the stairs groan and creak beneath my weight.

I found Adan snuggled in his queen-size bed, lying on his side with the flannel sheets drawn up to his chin like a little boy. He was sleeping deeply, peacefully, and his breathing was the only sound or movement.

I walked toward the bathroom, thinking to begin my search there, and then changed my mind. Even if he wouldn't know I was there, I didn't want to be in the bathroom if Adan woke up and decided to use it. That would push the creepy stalker vibe beyond tolerable limits, and I decided to stay out of there unless I had no other choice.

I crept back across the loft to the desk on the other side of Adan's bed. In the last drawer I checked, at the very back, I found the Vampire Fred's personal card. It proclaimed him Manfred von Hauptman, Proprietor, The Cannibal Club.

I used my witch sight to look at the card and found it dripping with the vampire's black juice. The scent should be strong enough for Moon Dog.

When I turned around, Adan was standing behind me wearing black boxer-briefs. His eyes were black and he was holding an expensive, titanium kitchen knife at his side.

I jumped back, banging into the desk, and fumbled the forty-five out of its holster. Adan just stood there, a flat smile doing ugly things to his face.

“Have you come to give me your skin, lover?” he asked in the same graveyard voice I'd heard the day before.

I brought the heavy gun up and sighted between those empty black, shark eyes. I willed juice and resolve into my arm to hold it steady. The eyes fixed on the stainless-steel barrel, and the motherfucker took a step back.

“Get the fuck out, or your host gets a lobotomy.” I was bluffing, of course. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to pull the trigger on Adan, but I was sure the hollow-points wouldn't make it past his father's wards. I was just hoping the spirit wouldn't know that.

The eyes bore into me. I thumbed the hammer on the forty-five and stared back.

The eyes dropped to the gun again, and the creature took another step back. “Come to me in the spirit world, lover,” he said. “I'll be waiting for you.” Then the eyes cleared and the knife dropped to the floor point-first. It thunked into the hardwood and wobbled.

I stood perfectly still, holding my breath. Adan looked right through me, then turned and looked around. He saw the knife and jumped back. He backed into a corner near the bed, panic draining the color from his face, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

“What the fuck?” he whispered, his terrified eyes darting around the room. “Is somebody there? What's going on?” He moved forward, bent down and tore the knife out of the floor. Gripping it tightly in one hand, he checked the bathroom and the closet. I didn't move.

Finally, he crept downstairs. I heard him moving around the apartment, turning on every light in the place. He walked over to the front door, and I cursed myself for leaving it unlocked. I heard him lock the door and draw the chain, and then I heard him breathing heavily again.

Adan didn't come back upstairs. After a few minutes, he stopped searching the loft, and I heard him settle onto the sofa. I waited another fifteen minutes or so, and then crept to the edge of the loft and looked down. He was sitting on the couch, holding the knife at his side. I watched him like that for more than an hour before he finally fell asleep.

Moving as slowly and quietly as I could, every nerve on edge, I reached out with the juice and covered the nick left by the knife in the hardwood. My housecleaning spell wouldn't fix it, and I just had to hope the cosmetic job would hold up to scrutiny. I went downstairs and got the hell out of there, reversing the B&E spell to lock up behind me.

I was shaking as I drove out to Santa Monica. I could have used a little juice to make it all go away, but I just tightened my jaw and choked it down.

I found Moon Dog on the pier and we retreated to a low cinderblock building on the carnival side that was presently serving as his home. The building might have once been a concession stand or souvenir shop, but now it was just an unused storeroom. The security guys let Moonie crash there and even threw him a few bucks to watch the place. I guess he was cheaper than keeping a Doberman.

I handed Moon Dog the vampire's personal card. He sniffed at it, rubbed it against his nose, dabbed it against his tongue. Finally he nodded and handed the card back to me.

“Yeah, I think this will work. When I track, it's mostly the smell of the juice I'm following, and this has plenty on it. Probably gets his dinner all hot and bothered. I'll have to shift to track him, though.”

“How's this going to work? You need me to drive you around, or can you track him on your own?”

Moonie shrugged. “I can probably pick up the scent anywhere in L.A. But if he's a ways off and you want me to find him before dawn, I'll need a lift. I move faster doggie-style
than I do in the chair, but it'll still take a while if I have to hump it across town.”

“How will I know?”

“Well, if I run off you know I don't need a ride.”

“Okay, and how will I know where to go if I have to drive you?”

“Just drive, babe. One bark means next right, two means next left, three means turn around. If I lick my balls, that means stop.”

“Jesus, Moonie.”

“I'm just fucking with you, Domino. If I growl, that means stop.”

I nodded.

“I can, though, lick my balls.”

“Too much information, Moonie.”

“Okay, babe, time to unleash the beast within.”

I nodded and went outside for a smoke. I'd seen Moon Dog shift before, and it didn't bother me, much, but he would have to ditch his clothes. It turns out a naked sixty-year-old double-amputee bum is a far more horrific sight than the shapeshifting process.

Inside the building, clothes were discarded, the wheelchair creaked, skin stretched, bones popped and hair sprouted faster than Honey's cannabis plants. It took a couple minutes.

Moon Dog nosed open the steel door of the building and padded outside. In the movies, werewolves are always pony-size monsters with six-inch fangs and hell in their eyes. Moonie looked like a wolf. He was large for a wolf—probably a buck-twenty, buck-thirty—but he was still a wolf. He'd have been a popular attraction at the zoo, but he wouldn't have sent people away screaming. He was black, with a silver ruff and muzzle, and his eyes were a shining lupine-yellow.

He looked up at me and his tongue lolled out one side of his mouth. I crouched and offered him the card, and he sniffed at it. Then he raised his head and sniffed at the air. He turned in circles a couple times and then sank down on his belly, looking at me, and whined.

“Okay, you need a ride I guess,” I said.

Moonie chuffed.

I got my car and brought it around. Moon Dog loped over and vaulted into the car. Just a girl and her wolf out for an early-morning drive.

I headed east on Santa Monica Boulevard. Moon Dog sat in the passenger seat, head out facing into the wind, tongue flapping like a wet flag. There wasn't much traffic at this time of the night, and we made good time. After about fifteen minutes, Moonie barked twice and I pulled into the left lane and stopped at the light. A young woman on a crotch-rocket wearing bright blue leathers pulled up beside us. She raised the visor on her full-face helmet.

“Nice dog,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. Moon Dog chuffed at her.

“What's his name?”

“Moon Dog.”

“That's cute,” she said and smiled. Moonie whined. “What kind of dog is he?”

“Mutt.”

Moon Dog swiveled his head around and looked at me. He growled.

The woman laughed. “He doesn't like that.”

“He thinks he's a wolf.”

“Aw, is she mean to you, puppy?” the woman crooned. Moon Dog whined and lowered his head.

“Don't feel sorry for him,” I said. “He can lick his own balls.”

The woman glared at me. “Bitch,” she said. She smiled at Moonie, the light changed and she sped off, riding a wheelie down to the next light.

Moon Dog glowered at me and bared his teeth.

I shrugged. “See? Women just aren't that impressed with the ball-licking.”

We got on the Harbor Freeway and drove into Watts. We exited at East Century and took a right on Compton and a left on East 108th. We drove past the graffiti-clad security doors of storefronts locked down for the night. We drove past rusted-out cars on blocks and brothers drinking forties around trashcan bonfires. I wasn't surprised we were heading deep into Papa Danwe's territory. It was late, and while the Haitian's juice was still raising hell in the streets, most of the civilians had retreated to their homes and barred the doors to wait for morning.

We were cruising through the ghetto version of a light industrial area when Moon Dog growled. I saw junk piled high beyond a line of corrugated fencing. A sign on the double chain-link gate read Luther's Salvage.

“This the place?” I asked. Moon Dog chuffed.

I parked on the street and got out of the car. I popped the trunk and fetched the Mossberg pump-action clipped in next to the tire jack. Usually, I don't bother carrying anything heavier than my forty-five, but I was behind enemy lines and the junkyard had the look of a place where a shotgun might keep you out of trouble. I pulled a handful of shells out of a tackle box and dropped them in my jacket pocket.

Then I closed the lid, perched on the trunk with the Mossberg across my knees and waited for dawn. Moon Dog
hopped out of the car and sat on his haunches, staring at the junkyard.

“You don't have to go in with me, Moonie,” I said. “That's not really what you signed on for. Anyway, once it gets light, Fred won't be much more than a corpse. I guess I can handle it.”

Moon Dog turned and looked at me, yellow eyes shining like lanterns. He chuffed and turned back to the junkyard.

Another hour went by like that. The sky brightened, the ghetto went to sleep and the sun came up.

The salvage yard wasn't due to open for another three hours and it was quiet. I spun the B&E spell on the padlocked gate, and Moon Dog and I slipped inside. Luther apparently wasn't much on organization, and there was no apparent pattern to the shapeless piles of rusting junk scattered around the yard. Narrow, ragged paths cut between the twisted stacks, and the rising sun painted them orange.

Moon Dog found a path he liked and padded down it, his nose low to the ground. I went after him. We followed a bend around a tangle of rusting rebar and Moon Dog stopped, crouching low and raising his nose to the air. He sniffed and growled.

I don't speak wolf, but I guessed he was telling me we weren't alone. I didn't see the vampire out there taking a sunbath, so I expected we had company of a different sort. I spun the eye in the sky spell, then closed my eyes and pushed it up over our heads about twenty feet.

Up ahead, there was a clearing in the junk piles and a low concrete building squatting in the middle of it. It had a two-tone paint scheme at one time, light blue on the bottom and white on top, but now the building was mostly the color
of graffiti. They were juice tags—I recognized some of the patterns from the factory site.

Two bangers were out in front of the building with submachine guns. Two more were lying on the flat roof with AKs. I spun the eye three hundred and sixty degrees and then circled it in a perimeter around the clearing. I spotted three more covering from the junk piles with open lines of sight to the building and the clearing around it.

Even in Watts, armed thugs don't hang out in junkyards at dawn just in case someone shows up for them to shoot at. They were waiting for me. Even if I hadn't known whose turf I was on, the tags and colors would have told me they belonged to Papa Danwe. That fit—Fred knew he had to have protection, and who else could he turn to?

The real question was what I should do about it. I could probably take them all out before they knew I was there, and I could probably do it without killing anyone. On the other hand, cooling things out with Terrence was about the only productive thing I'd really accomplished since this whole thing came down. I didn't really want to fuck it up by shooting in the dark.

“Hang back, Moonie,” I said. “I'm going to try to talk these guys out of getting hurt.”

I thumbed off the shotgun's safety, dropped it to my side and walked out into the clearing.

It turned out the bangers weren't really guarding the Vampire Fred. What they had working was more in the way of an ambush, and I walked right into it. They let me get about ten feet into the clearing and then they opened fire.

As soon as I saw the two out front raise their submachine guns, I triggered the defensive shield in the gold crucifix I wear around my neck. An invisible, spherical barrier winked
into existence around me. Bullets rattled against the shield like hail against a storm window, and the shield spat raw blue energy like electrical discharges as it vaporized them.

The shield doesn't make me bulletproof forever, because I can't draw that much juice from a spell talisman. It gives me about ten seconds, and that's usually more than enough time to deal with a guy who's decided to take a shot at me. Unfortunately, it's not enough time to deal with half a dozen attackers or more.

I squeezed the shotgun to give them something to think about, mostly because it was faster than spinning a spell, then I turned around and ran back the way I'd come. Bullets rained against the shield and kicked up dirt around my feet, and it sounded like someone had lit the fuse on every firecracker in Chinatown.

I got back around to the other side of the junk pile and Moon Dog was nowhere to be seen. That was just as well—a wolf is out of place in a gunfight. I crouched behind an old refrigerator, leaning my back into it and trying not to flinch as a hailstorm of bullets tore into the junk pile behind me. I was considering my best course of action when the first ball of liquid fire exploded above my head and splashed down on me like napalm.

The spell caught too much of my cover or I'd have been dead. It engulfed the refrigerator and the rear half of an old pickup camper that jutted out from the junk pile to my left. Burning droplets spattered against the back of my head and neck and sprayed across my left shoulder and arm. My jacket lit up and I was on fire.

As quickly as my mind registered that I was under magical attack, the spell talisman on my left ring finger activated another shield that was the antimagic analog of the one that
saved me from the gunfire. It flared up around me just in time to catch the second, more carefully targeted spell that poured fire down on me in cascading sheets.

I moved. I ran back down the path I'd followed to the clearing, bent low and burning as I went. I took the first fork to the left and kept going until I had another junk pile between me and the clearing. Then I dropped the shotgun, stripped off my jacket and spun a spell to put out the fire that was still nibbling hungrily at my exposed skin.

“God is a scientist, not a magician,” I said, and juice coursed through my body. It attacked the fire and killed any other hostile magic that might have been affecting me. As soon as I stopped burning, I used some juice to block the pain and spun my wallflower spell. Then I retrieved the Mossberg, hunkered down and threw up the eye in the sky again.

The two bangers on the roof were still there, their AKs panning back and forth across the clearing. The others had left cover and were fanned out, moving in a ragged skirmish line in my direction. There were a lot more of them than the seven I'd originally spotted. I counted at least a dozen. Most of them had guns, but a few were obviously flowing juice, preparing combat spells.

When they reached the edge of the clearing, the thugs split into two groups, one moving down the path I'd taken, the other a path that would bring them up along my flank. They obviously had a pretty good idea of where I was—there just weren't that many places I could have gone. I was sure they wouldn't be able to see through my wallflower, but with automatic weapons and explosive spells, they wouldn't have to.

I let them come. One group came around the right side of my junk pile, and the other came around the left. When they
were all more or less where I needed them to be, I dropped the eye and let the Mossberg slip to the ground. I drew in a breath, reached out and sucked down all the juice I could handle, taking it in until it felt like I was burning again.

“To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” I said. Sometimes you have to quote the rulebook to produce the most fundamental physical effects.

The spell was essentially the same magic that was in the repulsion talisman I'd used at the Cannibal Club—the one that had turned Fred around and thrown him into the flower shop. This time, though, I spun the repulsion field into a vertical plane, like a wall about ten feet high and thirty feet long. I positioned this wall of repulsive force so that it neatly bisected the junk pile the bangers were flanking.

When the sheet of arcane energy snapped into place, the thousands of pounds of twisted, rusting metal to either side of it had to move. There was the hellish sound of a suspension bridge collapsing in an earthquake as the junk pile parted like the Red Sea, and the paths to either side of it were buried in a crashing avalanche of wreckage and debris.

I picked up the shotgun, pumped a shell into the chamber and dropped the wallflower, then I walked toward the clearing along the new path that had been cleared through the middle of the junk pile. There were screams and moans from buried survivors, but I tried not to hear them.

I wasn't sure if the gangbangers with the AKs had seen enough or if they would open fire, so I spun up another defensive shield. I needn't have bothered, because Moon Dog had seized on these new developments as an opportunity to get involved in the fight.