The 5th Witch (18 page)

“That’s it?” said Dan. “That’s the language that Adam spoke in Paradise?”

“I’m not too sure I’m pronouncing it right.”

“All the same—Jesus. No wonder Eve wanted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Even rap sounds better than that.”

They finished a last glass of chardonnay, then decided to call it a night.

“You can stay here if you’re worried about maggots,” said Dan. “I can sleep on the couch.”

“No…I think I’ll risk it. But I’ll keep the phone close in case I need you. Now we know what we’re up against…I don’t know, I’m beginning to feel more confident. Stronger.”

“Well…don’t hesitate to call if you need me.”

“I won’t.” She kissed him on the lips and looked up at him and smiled. He didn’t exactly know what it was that he saw in her eyes. He had never seen anything like it before in any girl. It was a recognition of her own attractiveness—but it was more than that. It was fearlessness and a farsighted sense of her own personal destiny.

In the early morning, a little after 4:00
A.M
., he felt the sheet lift and somebody climb into bed beside him. A warm, naked body pressed up against his back, and fingers ruffled his hair.

In his half-awake state, he thought at first that it might be Annie, but then he remembered that his apartment door was locked and bolted, and there was no way that she could have gotten in.

He twisted around, and there was Gayle lying next to him, smiling.

“You’re not here,” he said, hoarsely. “You can’t be here.”

“Dan…why are you so determined not to believe in me?”

“Because you’re
dead
. Because—whoever you are, you can’t be Gayle, even if you look like her and sound like her.”

“And
feel
like her?”

“Yes.”

“But if I look like Gayle and sound like Gayle and feel like Gayle, what difference does it make?”

He climbed out of bed and reached for his blue terry bathrobe. It was still damp from last night’s
shower, but he put it on anyway. “Tell me the truth,” he asked her. “Are you a witch?”

“A witch? What kind of a question is that?”

“My friend Annie thinks that you’re a witch impersonating Gayle. She says that witches can take on any shape they want to.”

“Your friend Annie? You should be very cautious about your friend Annie.”

“Oh, yes? And why is that exactly?”

Gayle sat up in bed so that the sheet dropped down and bared her breasts. “Some people are not what they seem to be.”

“Well, nobody could be more qualified to say that than you. Whoever you are—or whatever you are. Are you a ghost?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Dan. Once you’re dead, you’re dead.”

“How can you say that? You were killed in a car wreck and cremated. Yet here you are, sitting on my bed, talking to me.”

“Don’t you want to make love to me?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Didn’t you enjoy it the last time we made love?”

Dan didn’t answer.

Gayle drew the sheet completely back and knelt up on the bed. “Dan, I came here to warn you. I came to protect you.”

“I’m going crazy. That’s it, isn’t it? I’m cracking under the strain.”

She took hold of his hands and pulled him toward her. Then she wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. Yes, she felt like Gayle. She even smelled like Gayle. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him and she hadn’t been killed, after all. Maybe she had finished with him, that was all, and he had rationalized his pain by pretending that she was dead.

What did it matter, so long as she was here?

“So what are you trying to tell me about Annie?” he asked her.

“All I’m saying is…be very careful. Don’t take anything she says for granted.”

Gently but firmly, Dan pried himself free from Gayle’s embrace. “I want to know why.”

Gayle looked at him for a long time without answering. Outside, it was growing increasingly light, and the birds were beginning to twitter.

“Why don’t you make love to me?” she said. “Who knows…it might be the last chance we ever get.”

“Tell me why I need to be cautious about Annie.”

“Because magic is power, and you know what they say. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

She lay back on the bed and opened her legs wide. She reached up to him with both hands.

“Make love to me, Dan. I want you so much.”

Dan looked away. Then he looked back again and tugged loose the belt of his bathrobe.

When he arrived at headquarters, he found Ernie already at his desk, eating a cheese burrito and talking on two phones at once, the receivers tucked under his double chins.

Dan hung his coat over the back of his chair and waited until Ernie had finished. “What’s up, doc?” he asked him.

“That was Frank Quinlan from Narcotics. He’s been surveilling Uncle Horrible. He has video footage of him handing over drug money to the Karim brothers, and he’s picked up some real incriminating chatter from his cell phone.”

“Uncle Horrible” was the nickname used by Raoul Truchaud, who was one of the Zombie’s top lieutenants. Other members of the gang had equally bizarre noms de guerre, such as “Dried Meat” and “Grandfather Smoke.”

“Anything that fingers the Zombie himself?”

“You bet. You remember that UPS heist at LAX last October? Uncle Horrible directly implicated the Zombie in that. He also made it one hundred percent clear that it was the Zombie who ordered the Fellini Building to be torched. And he said that the Zombie paid
Marc Bailly ten big ones to put a bullet in George Maskell. There’s more than enough evidence to pull him in. And Uncle Horrible. And a few more of those Haitian dirtbags.”

At that moment, Lieutenant Harris came in. He was unshaven, and his shirt was crumpled. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night.

“I’ve just had the ATF on the phone. Apparently they’ve hacked into one of Vasili Krylov’s computers and uncovered a massive counterfeiting operation—designer goods mainly, but liquor, too. And the Colombian police have sent us information about a major cocaine shipment delivered to Orestes Vasquez three days ago. They gave us names, locations, everything we need.”

Dan said, “And all this means what?”

“It means that we can bust all three of those bastards simultaneously.”

“We’re going to bust them?”

“Why not? They think this new symbiosis thing has given them some kind of immunity from the law. Well, not as far as
I’m
concerned it hasn’t. And because they’ve gotten so goddamned overconfident, they’ve given us more prima facie evidence than we’ve ever had on them before.”

“But come on, Lieutenant—what happened at the Vasquez house, that could happen all over again.”

Lieutenant Harris picked up Ernie’s coffee mug and took a large swallow. He grimaced and said, “Sweet Jesus, Ernie!” because Ernie always took three spoonfuls of sugar. But then he said, “Listen, Dan, we still don’t know what killed those SWAT teams, not for sure. The ME hasn’t even half completed his autopsies. And there’s a high degree of risk with every bust. Chief O’Malley may have lost his nerve, but not me.”

“Lieutenant, it was the witches,” Dan insisted. “If we try to arrest those guys, I promise you, they’ll rip our guys into shreds. Or worse.”

“Jesus Christ, Dan. I can’t run this division on superstition.”

“But like I told you before, sir, this is
real
. Even by themselves, those three women have the ability to wipe out every single one of us. Burn us, tear us apart, shake us so hard that our heads fly off. But not only that, there’s a fourth witch.”

“A fourth witch?” said Lieutenant Harris, folding his arms. “Go on. This gets better.”

“As far as we can make out, she’s a descendant of the single most powerful witch ever known in America, Rebecca Greensmith. She’s acting like a source of energy—like a battery charger. Every time one of those three other witches casts a spell, she gives them a huge boost of additional power. That power makes their magic a hundred times more devastating than it would be normally.”

Lieutenant Harris was staring down at the floor. “Do you know where she is, this fourth witch?”

“Yes, I think we can locate her. My friend has a way of tracking witches.”

Lieutenant Harris still didn’t look up. “And what you’re trying to tell me is that without this fourth witch, the other three witches wouldn’t be so dangerous?”

“I’m pretty sure of that, yes, sir.”

Lieutenant Harris at last raised his eyes. “What do you think I ought to do, Dan? Relieve you of duty on grounds of suspected insanity, or let you hunt down this witch and bring her in?”

“If I were you, sir, I’d err on the side of caution.”

“Meaning?”

“I’d say to myself, ‘Detective Fisher sounds as if he’s gone nuts. But if he
hasn’t
gone nuts, then I’d be risking
a whole lot of men’s lives by trying to arrest the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov all at the same time. So I’ll give Detective Fisher a chance to put this old hag out of action, and then I’ll decide what I’m going to do next.’”

“That’s what you’d say to yourself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what do you think, Detective Munoz?”

“I saw those SWAT teams, sir. They was all chopped liver. I never saw nothing like that, never. It gives me such a stupendous nightmare.”

“You believe in these witches, too?”

Ernie crossed himself—twice.

“Okay,” said Lieutenant Harris. “But I can’t postpone these collars, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. The captain’s had Mayor Briggs on the phone, too. He was at Spago yesterday evening, when those three hoodlums caused all of that pandemonium. He said he felt totally helpless—humiliated.”

“Oh, I see. We’re going to sacrifice God knows how many officers, just to save hizzoner’s dignity?”

“It’s not only that. It’s
our
dignity too, the LAPD. We need to take some action.”

“Lieutenant, this isn’t a question of politics. This is a question of saving officers’ lives.”

“I’m sorry, Dan. But I will make you a concession. Maybe I’m as nuts as you are, but you and Detective Munoz can carry on hunting down these witches of yours. All I ask is that you make a case against them that will stand up in court.”

“How about giving us twenty-four hours’ grace before you go in?”

“No can do, Dan. The warrants are on their way to us already. Our information is that the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov will be meeting at the West Grove Country Club at seven this evening.
Apparently they’ll be having a friendly little discussion with Giancarlo Guttuso. Guttuso is more than a bit peeved that our three merry mobsters are starting to muscle in on his narcotics trade.”

“I wouldn’t bet on Guttuso’s chances of getting any concessions out of those three,” said Dan. “In fact I’ll bet that by the end of the evening they’ll probably have him puking up live iguanas. Or worse.”

“What could be worse than puking up live iguanas?” asked Ernie.

“Puking up long-dead ones.”

“So where do we start?” asked Ernie, as they climbed into Dan’s SUV.

“We ask my friend Annie Conjure to find this fourth witch for us.”

“Conjure? That’s her real name?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But her mother was seriously into witchcraft and her grandmother before her.”

“My grandmother could tell fortunes,” said Ernie. “She used these strange old cards with devils and angels on them and people with heads like animals. They used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid. I was always worried that I would wake up one morning with a goat’s head instead of my own.”

When they parked outside Dan’s apartment building on Franklin Avenue, they could see Annie in the backyard, pegging up pink and yellow sheets. She was wearing nothing but a man’s shirt made of pale blue denim. Malkin was jumping all around her, trying to catch the drops of water as they fell on the bricks.

“Hi, Dan,” said Annie, with one eye closed against the sunshine. “Hi, Ernie. How’s it going?”

“Good news and bad news,” Dan told her. “The bad news is, we have less than nine hours to find the fourth
witch. If we don’t, God knows what’s going to happen. Another massacre.”

He explained what had happened as they climbed the steps to Annie’s apartment. “How about it?” Dan asked her. “Do you think you can find this witch for us?”

“I think so, if I’m careful. Come on in.”

They followed Annie into her living room. There were seven sticks of incense burning in a copper vase, and the whole apartment smelled of musk, like a Hindu temple.

Annie said, “I’ve been looking up Enochian magic. I’ve found all of the sacred texts and all of the keys for calling the angels. I’ve also found the whole incantation for binding a witch—the same incantation that the Reverend Whiting must have used to capture Rebecca Greensmith.”

A large leather-bound book lay open on the coffee table. On the right-hand page was a detailed hand-colored engraving of five naked women in a wood at night. They were all wearing extraordinary hats—one was embellished with ivy, one woven out of willow branches. The third had upright horns like a bull, while the fourth had curled horns like a ram. The fifth woman wore a monstrously large tricorn, from which dozens of dead mice were hanging from hooks.

Behind these five women, hidden in darkest shadow, reared a huge black serpent with yellow eyes.

“Satan,” said Annie. “Satan in the guise of seduction and corruption and ultimate knowledge.”

Ernie crossed himself again, three times.

“Is this Rebecca Greensmith’s coven?” asked Dan.

Annie shook her head. “These five women are
all
Rebecca Greensmith, manifesting herself in five different bodies at once—The Quintex. But it also proves that
she was involved in Satanic magic, as opposed to Native American magic, say, or Nganga, or Xorguinéria.”

“What difference does that make? It’s all magic, isn’t it?”

“Not at all. Every kind of magic has different rituals and different spells and completely different chemistry. A spell that works on a Christian wouldn’t necessarily have any effect on a Muslim. For instance, if you made up a charm bag to put a spell on a Christian, you would fill it with dried teasels and recently extracted teeth, to create quarrels; and ferns, to bring on thunder and lightning and heavy rain. Ferns used to be called the devil’s brushes. And you’d probably add blackberry thorns, because the devil once fell into a blackberry bush, and spat on it because he was so angry.

“But if you were making a voodoo charm bag, you would put graveyard dust into it and beads and dead spiders and the coins from a corpse’s eyes.”

“
Brrrr!
” said Ernie. “This stuff gives me the holy creeps.”

“Me too,” Annie admitted. “But if we’re going to go looking for this fourth witch, we have to be properly prepared. You wouldn’t go looking for a dangerous gunman without wearing body armor, would you?”

“You kidding me? I wouldn’t go looking for a dangerous gunman, period.”

“How are you going to find her?” asked Dan. “Salt and needles, like you did before?”

“No…she tasted the salt, and she felt the needle pricking her, and that’s how she knew we were looking for her. If we try that again, she’ll be long gone before we get to where she is, or—even worse—she’ll be waiting for us.”

She picked up a heavy brass compass engraved with a variety of runic symbols and opened the lid. “I borrowed
this from a friend of mine. She works for that occult bookstore on Melrose, you know it? The Bodhi Tree. It used to belong to one of her customers who was a clairvoyant, but who knows where
she
got it from.

“It’s a witch compass. If you look under the glass you can see that it’s filled with salt. The pointer is a needle that was supposed to have been used to sew the shroud of St. Francis of Assisi. It will always swing toward the nearest witch, or anybody who’s had physical contact with the devil.”

“Hey, right now it’s pointing at
you
. You haven’t been doing the wild thing with his Satanic Majesty, have you?”

“It can sense my occult aura, that’s all. It’s really responsive to any supernatural vibrations. You wait till we take it outside.”

Dan said, “You don’t have to do this, you know. It could be very dangerous.”

Annie looked up at him, and again he caught that expression in her eyes.

“Okay,” he conceded. “But I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks. If you suspect that something’s going wrong—anything at all—you get the hell out. You understand me?”

“But not before you warn us first,” Ernie put in. “I don’t want to end up like mush.”

Annie said, “Give me ten minutes to get dressed and to make up all the stuff we’re going to need. Help yourself to a brewski, if you want.”

She left them in the living room. Ernie looked around at her wands and her astrological charts and her three-barred cross with an expression of deep misgiving. He returned to the book on the coffee table and studied it for almost a minute, tugging at his mustache. “Satan, huh? I always thought that Satan was just a story. A bogeyman my mother invented to stop
me from stealing her
chalupas
. You think he really looks like this? Like a snake?”

“I don’t know, dude. I never believed in him either.”

“You think we’re making ourselves look like ass-holes?”

“I think we’re the only ones who aren’t.”

Annie came out onto the sidewalk. She was still wearing the blue denim shirt, but she had put on a pair of yellow capris now, and she had a soft brown leather satchel slung across her shoulder. She was holding the witch compass in her left hand and a short dry stick in the other, tipped with a pinecone.

“What’s that?” Dan asked her, tossing away his half-smoked cigarette.

“It used to belong to my grandmother. It’s a thyrsus, the magic wand used by Benandanti.”

“Ben and Anti?” said Ernie. “Who were they?”

“Benandanti, one word. It literally means ‘good walkers.’ They were Italian shamans who used to fight evil spirits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their wands were made of fennel stalks and pinecones, like this one. If we
do
find our witch, we’re going to need it.”

“So? Pretty powerful piece of stick, huh?”

“Wands in themselves don’t have any power at all. But they concentrate the power of the person who uses them. I guess they’re like guns, in a way. On its own, a gun is just an inanimate object. Wands are the same.”

“But that’s a good-quality wand? Like a Smith & Wesson wand?”