The 5th Witch (21 page)

Ernie had his mouth full of empanada, but he
pointed at Rosa and said, “Whatever you see, don’t tell me what it is. I don’t want to know.”

Annie reached across the table and took hold of both of Rosa’s hands. She stared into Rosa’s eyes for nearly a minute, while Rosa sat with a shy little smile on her face. At last Annie said, “I’m sorry. I don’t see anything about Ernie. All I see is you and your sons. They’re all grown up and very handsome, and you’re standing in a beautiful garden someplace.”

“Then you
must
be getting promoted,” said Rosa excitedly. “More money. A house of our own. I always wanted a garden, all my life.”

“I told you I didn’t want to know,” Ernie protested.

“But you don’t know
when
, Ernesto, do you? It will still be a surprise when it happens.”

“Okay, but not so much.” In spite of this show of annoyance, Dan could tell that Ernie was secretly pleased. He had talked for years of gaining a promotion, so that he could have more influence over the way that the Hispanic community was policed, and he had been studying almost every night since April for his sergeant’s exam.

“Congratulations, man,” said Dan. “I always knew you had it in you.”

Annie said nothing, but gave Ernie a pat on his hairy forearm and smiled.

When they had finished eating, Rosa went inside to wash the plates and tidy the kitchen, and they sat for a while on the balcony, talking about what had happened up at Ben Burrows’s house that morning.

“Raining, inside the hallway,” said Ernie. “And lightning. And thunder. I never thought I’d ever see such a thing.”

“And all those goddamned centipedes,” said Dan.

“And those rats,
muchacho
. Where did she get those rats from?”

Annie said, “Out of some nearby sewer, most likely. Like I said before, witches can’t
create
things like rats or toads or centipedes, but they can move almost anything from one place to another, whether it’s living or not. Including themselves.”

“We still don’t know what her name is or where she comes from,” said Ernie.

“Not for sure, no. But I’m ninety-nine percent convinced that she’s a direct descendant of Rebecca Greensmith. The pictures in those old books, they’re not usually very reliable when it comes to likenesses. I’ve seen pictures of Cotton Mather that make him look like somebody’s nutty old grandma. But this woman and the woman in the Hartford witch-trial picture—they look so much alike they
must
be related somehow.”

“I’m going to interrogate her when we get back to the station,” said Dan. “Maybe you could come along and give me some magical support.”

“Of course,” said Annie. “I was going to suggest it anyhow. You never know what tricks she might try to pull on you.”

They said good-bye to Rosa. Annie gave Rosa the warmest of hugs, and Ernie said, “Looks like those two have made friends.”

“Annie’s a great girl. And so’s Rosa. Maybe when this is over, we should all go out to dinner together. Spago.”

“Let’s deal with those witches first. I’m not having
my
hands nailed to the table with no knife and no fork.”

Newton Ridley was the custody officer that afternoon. As he waddled down the stairs that led to the cells, jingling his keys, he looked back over his shoulder and said, “Maybe
you
can get her to shut up, because I can’t.”

“What’s she been doing?”

“Making this yelping noise. On and on for hours. Sounds like a dog that can’t get out of the house to do its business.”

They heard her as soon as they reached the bottom of the staircase. A high, weird, ululating howl, which made Dan feel as if his scalp were shrinking. It was both frightening and depressing, and Officer Ridley was right: it sounded more like an animal in distress than a human being.

A man’s voice shouted drunkenly from one of the cells, “Shut the hell up, will you? Just shut up! You’re driving me nuts!”

They reached the witch’s cell. The wax sigil was still in place, with its forklike symbols, and Annie touched it with her fingertips as if to reassure herself that it was firmly fixed.

“She’s singing a spell,” she said.

“You call that singing?”

“Well, it’s singing of a sort. It’s a charm to get herself out of there.”

“Don’t sound charming to me.”

“Technically, it
is
charming. The word
charming
originally meant
singing
. In the Middle Ages, women weren’t allowed to sing in church in case they cast a spell on their menfolk. Don’t worry—the charm isn’t working, the sigil is keeping her sealed inside.”

Officer Ridley slid back the inspection panel. “She’s just sitting on her bunk, rocking herself back and forth like a loony. She’s been doing that nonstop since I came on duty.”

“Is it safe for us to go in?” Dan asked Annie. “She won’t be able to escape or anything?”

Annie peered in through the inspection panel. “She’s still restrained. There’s nothing she can do to us while her wrists and her ankles are still bound together.”

“Okay,” said Dan. “Let’s go in and have a little q-and-a session.”

“Rather you than me, Detective,” said Officer Ridley, and unlocked the cell door for him.

The smell of the witch was even stronger than it had been before, and now it had a sourness about it, too, like turned milk. As Dan and Annie entered her cell, the witch turned and glared up at them. Her raggedy cloak had been taken away from her, and now she was wearing a plain orange smock that laced up at the back. The front was already stained dark with spittle.

“So, how it’s going?” Dan asked her. “They keeping you fed and watered?”

The witch continued to howl and rock herself backward and forward.

“I guess you must know by now that this charm of yours isn’t going to work. You’ve met your match, ma’am. Admit it.”

The witch suddenly stopped howling and stared at Annie with contempt. “
You think this chit of a girl is any
match for
me?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarser than ever. “
You have no idea what you have let loose, either
of you
.”

Dan said, “If you give us some help here, things will go a whole lot easier on you. I can promise you that.”

“
The only help you need is a helping hand to hell
.”

“You understand the seriousness of the charges against you? Even if you’re not looking at the death penalty, you’re looking at several lifetimes locked up in Valley State.”

“
You really think that frightens me?
”

“Come on,” said Dan, trying to sound reasonable. “All you have to do is tell us your name and where you come from.”

“
You know who I am, and you know where I come from
.”

“Yes, but just for the record.”

The witch stared at him without saying anything, and for the first time in his life Dan felt serious dread.

“Okay, you don’t want to talk. I’ll come back later.”

“
It will do you no good, I promise you. And as for
her—” She waved her bony-fingered hand at Annie and said, “—
she thinks she knows the craft, but she knows nothing. If
she could truly see the future, she would cut her wrists with
a broken piss-
bottle
.”

Annie didn’t answer, but gave the witch a surprisingly indulgent smile.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Dan. “Maybe a few more hours in here will make her see some sense. Besides, we have some more witches to catch, don’t we?”

The witch started to chuckle, and more strings of saliva slid from her lips.

“I’ll tell you something,” said Dan. “You really do have a serious drool issue.”

At that, the witch twisted her head around and spat
directly in his face. Dan pulled out a crumpled Kleenex and wiped off the spittle in disgust, but it was clinging and viscous, and it was like trying to disentangle himself from a very wet spiderweb.

“
Do you know what happens if a witch spits on you?
” The witch grinned. “
This young girl will tell you. You
will never marry, you will never have children, and you
will never be happy for the rest of your life
.”

Dan took Annie’s arm, and they pressed the buzzer for Officer Ridley to let them out. The witch gave them one last mocking look, and then she went back to her rocking and her ululating.

As they walked back along the corridor, Dan kept on furiously rubbing at his face. “
Yuck!
Is it true what she said?”

“About never marrying and never having children and never being happy? Oh, it will be if the curse is never lifted. But most curses can be lifted. I can lift it for you myself with a little angelica and some rose of Jericho. Oh, and maybe some rue.”

“Get anything out of her?” asked Officer Ridley. “Apart from spit, I mean.”

“Are you kidding me? If I hadn’t seen for myself what she’s capable of doing, I would have put her down as a total nutjob.”

But Annie said, “The most important thing is she’s sealed up in here, so she can’t share her power with the other three. Once we’ve caught them all, and sealed
them
up, too, their sisterhood will be broken up forever. I’m not saying they’ll ever be completely harmless. They’re witches, after all. But they won’t be able to take over a whole city again.”

They climbed the stairs. The whole station was bustling, officers hurrying in all directions, carrying helmets and carbines and shrugging themselves into Point Blank Body Armor. It was ten after six, and the
operation to arrest the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov was already under way. Outside they could hear engines starting, and there was a smell of exhaust fumes in the warm early-evening air.

“I should come with you,” said Annie. “I could give you some protection in case anything goes wrong.”

“We can’t have civilians on a bust. Much too dangerous—and distracting, too.”

“What about the staff at the country club?”

“Guttuso’s booked one of their private dining rooms. He always does. He doesn’t like to be seen in public these days, and he’s always worried about somebody taking a potshot at him. We’re going to evacuate all the waiters before we go in and move them well back out of the firing line. Now maybe you’d better get home. You have a hungry kitten who needs feeding.”

“Dan—”

“Look, don’t worry. At least I have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to be up against. And I’ll have my cell phone with me. If I need any magical advice, I’ll call you.”

“It’s not that. It’s Ernie.”

Dan had taken out his gun and was checking it to make sure it was clean and fully loaded. “Ernie? What about him?”

“When I read Rosa’s fortune…I told her that I saw her and the boys standing in a beautiful garden.”

“That’s right. And?”

“What I didn’t tell her was that the garden was a cemetery, with headstones, and that Ernie wasn’t there. Rosa was a widow.”

Dan slowly holstered his gun and frowned at her. “Ernie was
dead?
Like, how far into the future are we talking about?”

“I’m not sure. It upset me, so I didn’t want to continue. All I can tell you is that the boys looked much
more grown up than they do now, maybe fifteen or sixteen—but who knows? Ernie might have been dead for years and they were visiting his grave.”

“Shit,” said Dan. Then, “Listen, when you read somebody’s fortune, does it always come true? What I mean is—is there any way of changing it?”

“I think it’s unavoidable. You can’t alter the future any more than you can alter the past.”

“Is there any way of finding out when he’s going to die? If we go find him, could we do it now?”

“We could try. But I can’t tell his fortune unless he wants me to.”

As if he had been cued for a stage appearance, Ernie appeared through the jostling crowds of officers. “Hey,
muchacho!
How did you get on with Endora?”

“She spat on me, put a curse on me, and told us we were a couple of know-nothing losers, but apart from that—great.”

“You ready to roll?”

“Sure. But there’s something I wanted to ask you first. I know you weren’t too happy about Annie telling your fortune for you—not in front of Rosa—but maybe you could let her do it now.”

Ernie blinked at him. “You want Annie to tell my fortune? Why?”

“For fun. But she also can tell if you need to take any special precautions.”

“Special precautions? You mean this evening? While we’re doing this bust?”

“Not necessarily. Just, you know, in general. After all, you have Carlo and Sancho to think of, as well as Rosa.”

“What do you mean by special precautions?”

“Well, like maybe wearing body armor.”

“Are
you
wearing body armor?”

“No…but we’re not front line, are we? It won’t be us kicking the doors down.”

“So, if
you’re
not wearing body armor, why should I?”

“Because you should. That’s all I can tell you. Better yet, why don’t you tell the lieutenant you’re sick? Go home. Drink lots of Corona. Play dominos with your boys.”

Ernie turned to Annie. His expression was very serious. “When you were telling Rosa’s fortune, did you see something?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Ernie. I can’t be sure. But I think it would be a good idea if I told
your
fortune, too, so that you know what to look out for, and when.”

“No. I told you before. If each day is not a surprise, then what is the point in living at all? This is a dangerous job we do. Any day we could get hurt or maybe killed. I know that. I could die from eating too many burritos. I could die from a Russian space satellite falling on my head. It’s not up to me what happens. It’s up to God.”

“El Gordo,” Dan appealed. “You’re making no sense, man. Look, suppose you stepped off the curb and there was a truck barreling toward you at sixty miles an hour, and I shouted, ‘Look out!’ Would you carry on walking because it wasn’t my responsibility to stop you from getting squished, it was God’s?”

“I don’t care. You don’t tell my fortune. That’s it. That’s my decision, okay?”

“Okay, if you won’t do it, you won’t do it. But if you get killed, don’t come whining to me.”

They drove out of the police station and headed west on Sunset. The sun was dazzling, so Dan put on his mirrored sunglasses. Ernie had sat on his sunglasses last week, and so he had a monstrous lump of grubby
Band-Aid right between his eyes to hold them together.

They made up an informal motorcade. Ahead of them there were five squad cars, and behind them came two black SWAT vans.

“I’d love to know how the captain got himself the green light for this little caper,” said Dan. “I thought the chief wanted us to leave these sleazebags to their own devices.”

He stopped for a red traffic signal and watched appreciatively as a girl with very long blond hair and a very short checkered skirt crossed the road in front of them.

“Now
there’s
the kind of woman I should be chasing tonight,” he said, raising his sunglasses and giving the girl his special toothy grin. “Not some crabby old gang of witches.” The girl turned around as she reached the opposite side of the road and gave him the finger.

Ernie shook his head. “If I were you,
muchacho
, I would stick to witches. And don’t grin like that. It’s terrible.”

“What do you mean? It never fails, that grin.”

“Sure. It never fails to make you look like you just arrived from the Ozarks.”

They followed the squad cars as they turned up Laurel Canyon. After a while, Ernie said, “From what I was hearing back at the station, the chief is pretty much a basket case. Stays in his office all day and won’t talk to nobody. Scared of his own reflection, that’s what they say. The only reason they haven’t replaced him is because Artisson and Vasquez and Krylov have insisted that he stay. Deputy Chief Days isn’t much better, but he seems to have gotten at least one of his balls back.”

They drove along Mulholland until they reached
the entrance to West Grove Country Club. Two sandstone pillars supported a wrought-iron arch with the club’s insignia in the center of it—a coronet and two crossed golf clubs. Beyond the arch, a red asphalt drive curved up toward a collection of low, art-deco style buildings. The main clubhouse had an entrance like a 1930s movie theater, and the steps that led up to it were built on top of a reflecting pool with ducks and a fountain.

To the left of the clubhouse, around a shady courtyard, there was a complex of conference rooms and private dining rooms. It was in here that the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov were meeting with Giancarlo Guttuso.

Dan parked at an angle outside the country club entrance and climbed out of his SUV. Lieutenant Harris was already there, talking to the SWAT commander—a squat barrel-chested man with a prickly ginger mustache.

“Looks like we’re dead on schedule,” said Lieutenant Harris. “We have twenty-seven plainclothes officers inside the club, posing as members and guests, and they’ve gradually been extracting all the civilians and most of the staff. The last of them will be coming out any minute now.

“We have another thirty-six officers dressed as waiters and kitchen staff, and as soon as the place is clear, they’ll split up into teams of six. Six of them will go for each of the witches, and six of them will go for each of the mobsters. We have another team to get Guttuso and his bodyguards out of there. Detective Scott’s in charge of that because Guttuso knows him and trusts him.”