The 5th Witch (24 page)

“Seeing is believing, Annie. I’m going back to the station now, and I’m going to check for myself. Why don’t you meet me there?”

“Okay. My friend Sally’s here, so she’ll give me a ride.” She paused for a moment, and then she said, “You
are
all right? You’re not hurt or anything?”

“Physically, no,” he told her, but it was all he could do to hold back his tears.

The station was grim and quiet when he arrived. News of what had happened at West Grove Country Club must have spread through the building already. Annie
was waiting for him by the front desk, wearing pink jeans and a loose long-sleeved T-shirt.

The desk sergeant said, “Detective? Captain Friendly wants to see you up in his office right away.”

“There’s something I have to check on first. Who’s on lockup duty?”

“Manson. He just went for coffee. Is it true what they’re saying about that country club bust?”

Dan nodded.

“Lieutenant Harris?”

“All of them. Ernie, too.”

“Ernie!” said Annie, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh no, not Ernie!”

The desk sergeant said, “Shit, man. I can’t believe it. And they was armed to the frigging teeth.”

“Listen, I’m not supposed to talk about it, not yet.”

“But how did it happen? Don’t tell me those mobsters have
that
much of an army?”

“Oh, they do, believe me.”

Officer Manson came back along the corridor with two Styrofoam cups of coffee.

“It’s true,” said the desk sergeant.

Officer Manson put the cups down on the desk. “Shit,” he said, shaking his head.

“All of them,” said the desk sergeant. “Lieutenant Harris, Ernie Munoz—all of them. Except for Detective Fisher here.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I can’t tell you yet,” Dan said. “Right now, I urgently need to take a look at that old bag lady downstairs.”

“She didn’t have nothing to do with this, did she?”

“I just need to see her, that’s all.”

“Okay, Detective. But you must be some kind of masochist. That woman stinks like a rotten chicken.”

He led Dan and Annie down the stairs and along the
corridor to the end cell. “The sigil’s still in place,” said Annie, wiping her eyes.

“That wax thing?” asked Officer Manson. “I was told to leave it on there, no matter what. Looks like some kind of hex to me.”

“Well, you’re almost right,” said Dan. He slid back the inspection hatch and peered inside the cell. But the witch wasn’t sitting on her bunk. She wasn’t standing in the corner, either.

“She’s not there. I can’t see her, anyhow.”

“Hey, come on—she
must
be there. She was there at five when I gave her a peanut-butter sandwich, and this door hasn’t been opened since. Not by me, not by anybody.”

“Well, let’s take a look.”

Officer Manson fumbled with his keys and unlocked the door. He and Dan stepped into the cell and looked around. The smell was nauseating—worse than rotten chicken, more like rotten chicken stuffed with rotten mackerel heads. Officer Manson said, “Jesus H. Christ,” and clamped his hand over his mouth and nose. Dan felt his mouth flooding with bile.

In one corner of the cell there was a heap of maggots—enough maggots to have made a witch. They squirmed and writhed and tumbled over each other, as if they were trying to climb up the wall.

“What the hell happened to her?” said Officer Manson, behind his hand. “Nobody decomposes that quick. Not even a stinky old bat like her.”

“Let’s just get out of here,” said Dan.

They left the cell and Officer Manson locked the door behind them. “That is totally disgusting. That isn’t
her
, is it?”

Annie nodded. “In a way, that’s what’s left of her.”

“How come she went all maggoty so quick?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“I’d better call the coroner’s department. That’s if they have any MEs to spare.”

Dan and Annie went back upstairs. They walked together to the elevators, but before he pressed the button, Dan said, “You
do
know what happened to her, don’t you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“So are you going to share it with me?”

Annie said, “The witch didn’t escape. She couldn’t have. Instead, she killed herself.”

“She
killed
herself? But I saw her up at West Grove, and she sure wasn’t dead then!”

“That’s because there’s more than one of her. The Quintex. Not only did she have five lives, but unless those five lives were brought to an end by execution or murder or suicide, they would carry on forever. Rebecca Greensmith went to the gallows, as we know. We saw the picture of those men hanging from her legs to make sure she was dead. But that was only one Rebecca Greensmith. The other four must have left Hartford and gone to live secretly elsewhere.”

“Annie, we’re talking three hundred fifty years old.”

“And after everything you’ve witnessed, you don’t think that’s possible? The fourth witch isn’t a descendant of Rebecca Greensmith. She is Rebecca Greensmith.”

Dan pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut. This was all too much. The fourth witch had been right: all he wanted to do now was forget about the nightmare of reality, and go to sleep and dream. Except that he would probably have that dream about Gayle and the scaffolding pole.

Annie said, “Don’t you understand? That’s why she turns maggoty so quickly. She’s probably full of maggots already, just bursting to get out.”

“Those maggots in your apartment—were
they
her, too?”

“I’m sure of it. She came into my living room and deliberately killed herself so that I would be surrounded by maggots. She hoped that she would intimidate me so much that I would stop trying to find her.”

“That’s kind of extreme. Losing one of her lives, just to scare you off.”

“But that tells me that she’s more scared of
me
than I am of her. It also tells me that I’m much more powerful than I thought I was. She can’t hurt me, Dan, not directly. Otherwise she would have done it by now. And she must have thought that it was worth losing one of her lives, just to get rid of me.”

“Well…that means that she only has two lives left. Unless she’s lost another one that we don’t know about.”

He checked his watch. “Listen, I have to report to the captain, tell him what happened. I don’t know when I’ll be home, but I’ll give you a knock, okay? We need to talk about this a whole lot more.”

Annie gave him a kiss. “I’m so sorry about Ernie,” she said. “You must be devastated.”

“Devastated doesn’t even come close. We were like brothers, Ernie and me.” He kissed her back, and said, “I’ll see you later, okay?”

It was well past 2:30
A.M
. before he made it back to Franklin Avenue. Annie’s lights were out, so he decided not to disturb her. He went up to his own apartment and tugged off his shirt as he walked across the kitchen.

He was exhausted. Apart from the trauma of what had happened at West Grove Country Club, there had been a five-hour debriefing with all of the emergency services, including the police, the Highway Patrol, the fire department, and the FBI.

The LAPD’s press officer announced that there had been several “climate-related” fatalities at the country club and that a “thorough and searching” investigation was under way. Until its findings were complete, there would be no further official comment. Most of the press already knew that the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov had been meeting Giancarlo Guttuso at the country club. After the threats they had received, they were quite happy to report the official version and not dig too deeply into what might really have happened.

Dan went to the fridge, took out a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and drank several large mouthfuls.
Then, burping loudly, he went into the bedroom and stripped off the rest of his clothes. He knew that he needed a shower, but he collapsed facedown on the bed and lay there with his eyes open, feeling as if he had been beaten up by professionals.

“Ernie,” he said out loud. “Ernesto Munoz. Wherever you are, El Gordo, rest in peace.”

He knew that his first call in the morning would be to see Rosa and tell her that she and the boys would never see Ernie again. Why the hell hadn’t Ernie taken Annie’s advice and stayed at home?

He closed his eyes. He slept. He dreamed that he was walking toward the three witches with half a dozen pale
kukurpas
stalking beside him. As he came nearer, the witches drew back, and a figure in a black veil appeared, holding up a staff with a cat’s head on top of it. The figure came gliding toward him, and he was suddenly seized with a terrible sense of dread. He knew, however, that he couldn’t turn and run. He was surrounded by
kukurpas
, and they would rip him to shreds if he tried to escape.

The figure in the black veil came right up to him. It was impossible to see her face, but he could see her eyes glittering through the layers of chiffon. “I have spared you,” she whispered. “I have protected you and taken care of you. There is one favor you can do for me, in return.”

“You killed my friend,” he replied, and his voice was shaking. “I’ll see you in hell before I do you any favors.”

“You don’t understand,” the figure told him. “You look, you see, but you don’t understand. Nothing is what it seems to be.”

“I understand that Ernie’s dead and that you and your fellow bitches were responsible for it.”

The figure lifted her right hand and drew back her veil. It wasn’t Rebecca Greensmith at all: it was Gayle.
She was looking pale but still perfect, and she was smiling at him gently.

“Gayle?
You’re
protecting me?”

“Of course. Who else did you think it was?”

“I don’t know. You’re not a witch, are you?”

She glided right up to him and took hold of his hand. Her fingers were cool, but she didn’t feel as if she were dead. “I’m the memory of somebody who loved you very much.”

He looked down at her. His eyes were filled with tears—not just for her, but for Ernie, too, and all the men who had died that night, and whose wives would be widowed, and whose children would be left without a father.

“Ssh,” said Gayle, and stood on tiptoe so that she could brush his lips with hers. “Life is always full of grief. It is only the end of life that brings peace and understanding and the longest sleep of all.”

Dan was about to kiss her again when he was woken up by his bedside telephone ringing. He scrabbled to pick it up and said, “Whuh? What time is it?”

“Morning, son! It’s just gone seven-thirty. I thought you would have been up by now and working out.”

“Dad, what the hell do you want?”

“I hear there’s been some funny stuff going on.”

“Funny stuff?” Dan sat up in bed and ruffled his hair.

“That’s right. Funny stuff. Like the sky going inky black and the wind getting up and police officers getting killed.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I’m seventy-seven years old, Dan, I have plenty of friends. In fact, I had a call from Jake Harriman at CNN. He and I go way back. He wanted to know if we were talking black magic here. Strictly off the record. Apparently, the media have been told that it was a freak electric storm.”

“I can’t tell you anything, Dad. I’m sorry.”

His father cleared his throat. “This is something to do with these witches you were telling me about, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m not allowed to say.”

“Dan—you listen to me—I may be getting on in years, but I’m not stupid. I was years in the business, and like I told you before, I knew some genuine practitioners of voodoo and hoodoo and who-knows-who-do. I’ve seen people who can work black magic, and I know that it’s real.”

Dan took a deep breath, and then he said, “Okay. It was those witches. About a hundred officers got killed, including my partner Ernie Munoz.”

Briefly, haltingly, he told his father about Rebecca Greensmith and her five lives, and what the four witches had done up at West Grove Country Club.

“Come see me,” said his father.

“What?”

“You heard me. Come see me just as soon as you can. And bring that Annie Conjure along with you.”

“Dad—”

“For once in your life, Dan, don’t argue with me. You lost your partner. I don’t want to lose
you
.”

“Okay,” Dan conceded. “I’ll see you around eleven.”

He filled the coffeemaker, and then he took a shower. As he came back into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around his waist, the TV news was showing pictures of downtown L. A. and bodies lying in the street.

“Early this morning, seven members of the Eighty-third Street Gangster Crips were found dead in the street in what police could only describe as ‘mysterious circumstances.’ All the victims suffered broken necks.

“The Eighty-third Street Gangster Crips, known as the Eight-Tray, have been notorious since 1979 for
their drug trafficking, particularly, in recent years, their selling of highly addictive crack cocaine.

“They have made huge profits out of their drug business, and they have been involved in almost constant gang warfare with several other Crip sets, especially the Rollin’ 60s. But eyewitness accounts of this morning’s carnage indicate that rival Crip gangs may
not
have been responsible for the deaths of these seven young men.”

A black youth appeared on the screen, with his back to the camera so that he could not be identified. He said, “They was standing on the sidewalk together outside of the Bubble Club when they just went kind of jerky and dropped down dead. At first we thought that maybe some other gang was shooting at us with silencers or something, but there wasn’t nobody there.”

Another youth said, “I was talking to my friend Eazy-P in front of this store window, and I swear I seen some white dude in a suit come up behind him and grab him round the neck and kind of twist his head around. Eazy-P’s head twisted around for real and I heard his neck break, but when I turn around there was no white dude there. Like, you can’t have your neck broke by a reflection, can you?”

The news anchorwoman added, “Whoever was responsible for these inexplicable fatalities, the Eighty-third Street Gangster Crips released a surprise statement about an hour ago saying that they would no longer involve themselves in any kind of drug trafficking. An LAPD spokesperson gave this statement ‘a cautious welcome.’”

Dan poured himself a cup of black coffee. It looked as if Vasili Krylov wasn’t wasting any time in expanding his drug empire. The crack cocaine industry in south Los Angeles was worth millions. He wondered
which Crip set would be next on Miska Vedma’s hit list—the Grape Street Crips or the PJ Crips. If it wasn’t simply a case of one bunch of drug traffickers being taken over by another, he would have given it a “cautious welcome,” too.

He dressed and went downstairs to see Annie. He found her in her kitchen wearing a Doris Day–style blouse with the collar turned up and pale green capris. She was boiling a sticky green liquid in a saucepan, while Malkin was sitting on the windowsill, trying frantically to catch a mosquito.

“That smells interesting.”

“Sea holly. Some people call it erengoes. It’s an aphrodisiac. You boil it in sugar until it caramelizes. I sell boxes and boxes of it, especially at my book circle.”

She came up to him and laid her hands on his shoulders. “I just needed to do something normal. I was so upset by last night, I couldn’t sleep.”

Dan grimaced. “I have to go see Rosa. I don’t know what I’m going to say to her. Maybe you could come along. A woman’s touch, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure. I can bring her something to calm her down, too—some white bean and orange cake.”

Dan said, “I had a call from my dad this morning. He wants to me to visit him, and he’d like you to come along. I think he has some angle on how we can deal with these witches.”

“In that case, what are we waiting for? Hey, Malkin—leave that poor mosquito alone. Even insects have a right to life. Well, apart from maggots.”

They spent more than an hour and a half with Rosa. She trembled, but she didn’t shed a single tear. All the same, Dan could tell how deeply shocked she was. The crying would come later, when they had left. The crying would probably go on for the rest of her life.

At about a quarter of eleven, Rosa’s cousin Carilla came around, a gentle young woman with wavy black hair and a dark crimson dress. She was just as shocked as Rosa to hear that Ernie had been killed, but she told Dan and Annie that she would take Rosa to stay with her aunt for a while, and collect Carlo and Sancho from school.

“That was pretty grim,” said Annie, as they drove to Pasadena.

“Tell me about it. Poor Rosa. I don’t know how she’s going to manage without Ernie. They first met when they were in high school.” He paused, and then he said, “I don’t know how
I’m
going to manage without Ernie.”

Dan’s father was sitting out on his balcony when they arrived at the Stage Performers’ Retirement Home, feeding millet to his canary. He was wearing a maroon-and-green striped bathrobe, and a maroon-spotted cravat.

“So this is Annie! You told me how clever she was, but you didn’t tell me how pretty she was!”

“I didn’t want you getting ideas, you old dog.”

They sat down together in white basketwork chairs, and Dan’s father rang his bell for fruit juice and sodas. “That was a hell of a business last night. At least they haven’t been stupid enough to send in the National Guard.”

“They don’t have a clue what to do,” Dan told him. “I think the governor wanted to send in the troops, but the mayor warned him not to. The mayor’s seen those witches in action first hand, and I think he’d prefer to negotiate.”

“Wise man. No good trying to put a fire out with gasoline.”

Dan watched him feeding his canary for a while. Then he said, “So…you’ve thought of a way we can get rid of these witches?”

“I think so. I said I
think
so. I can’t give you any guarantee, but it’s worth a try. It mainly depends on how much of a risk you’re prepared to take and how proficient this young lady is at working any kind of genuine magic.”

“Like I told you, Dad, Annie managed to catch at least
one
Rebecca Greensmith out of the four of them. And we think that Annie may possess some kind of magical power that even
she
isn’t aware of, because Rebecca Greensmith seems pretty damn anxious to put her out of the picture.”

“All the same,” said Dan’s father, “I wouldn’t like anything to happen to you.
Either
of you.”

“I don’t think that any of the witches can do me any harm,” Annie reassured him. “Not directly, anyhow. And I think I have a duty to try to stop them. It was what my grandmother and my mother would have expected of me. Being able to work magic—it’s not just a parlor trick. It’s a calling.”

“You mean, unlike sawing women in half and pulling bunches of chrysanthemums out of your ass.”

Annie smiled. “I didn’t mean that at all, Mr. Fisher. I know what a great illusionist you are.”

Dan’s father shrugged. “Thanks for the compliment. But you and me both know that it’s trickery and not genuine magic.”

“So what’s the deal for getting rid of the witches?” asked Dan.

“Part trickery and part genuine magic. I was giving it all some serious thought, when it suddenly came back to me the time I spent in New Orleans, back in the early 1960s, playing at the Saenger Theater on North Rampart Street. Backstage I got talking to a healer and a shaman named Dr. Henry, who showed me one or two tricks in exchange for one or two tricks of mine. The cut-your-own-head-off trick, that was nifty.

“I was curious about voodoo, and Dr. Henry told me that he had broken up a coven of voodoo witches in the mid-1950s in Terrebonne Parish, west of New Orleans. There were seven of them, so he said, and they were kicking up all kinds of trouble, setting fire to people’s houses and stealing money and jewelry, and if anybody tried to stop them the witches would stop their hearts with a pendulum or choke them on their own blood.

“This Dr. Henry was unofficially asked by the local sheriff to see what he could do to get rid of these witches. So he took his stage assistant, who was a very pretty girl called Emmeline, if I recall correctly, and they hunted this coven down one at a time. That was the secret, he said. Pick them off individual-like, because together they have a combined power that is far too much for any one person to overcome.”

“So what did he do?” asked Dan.

“He and Emmeline followed each of the witches until they got them alone. Then Emmeline would distract the witch with one of her conjuring tricks, while Dr. Henry would work a voodoo spell on her. I don’t see any reason why you and Annie here couldn’t do the same—except that you could do the distracting, while Annie worked the spell.”