He should probably talk to her. Actually, he needed to talk to her. There was plenty to discuss, and he didn’t know how chatty she was going to feel after going to look at a mutilated body. Which he was pretty sure they were about to do.
He’d warned her, of course, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t freak out.
Oh, who was he kidding? She’d probably seen dozens of corpses. Hundreds. She’d probably seen worse than that, given the types of objects she dealt with regularly.
Still, might as well get some information from her. “So, who has a demon-sword?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Lots of people have demon-swords. Do you mean to ask me if I recently procured one for someone, or know of someone who did?”
“You know that’s what I’m asking.”
“I don’t, actually. For somebody who claims not to be a fan of word games, you certainly like to be vague. Try a little precision, Elvis, and—”
“Do not call me Elvis.” He glowered at her, unearthly pale in the dashboard light. “Nobody calls me Elvis.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said, alternating between glaring at her and at the road ahead, “I don’t like it. That’s why not. Because I don’t want anyone to know it, much less use it. That’s why not.”
In a softer tone, she said, “I guess there are a few things you don’t want anyone to know about.”
The count. He knew she was thinking of it just as clearly as if she’d said it out loud, and his grip tightened on the wheel. Damn it. This was why he hadn’t wanted her help. It was one thing for random women—women he knew he’d never see again, women who didn’t care what his name was or what kind of person he was or about almost anything else about him—to see the marks on his chest. Most of them didn’t notice or didn’t comment; the few times he’d been asked, he’d told various bullshit stories. Like that it was the number of times he’d been dealt the ace of spades, or the number of full moons he’d watched rise for luck, or the number of days in a row that he’d made his bed in the morning and would they like to come take a look to check he wasn’t lying?
Kind of lame, maybe, but they’d all worked. And it wasn’t like he was going to tell them the truth: that he kept the marks, and kept adding to them, so he didn’t forget, ever, what he’d done and what he’d keep having to do. So he didn’t forget that no matter what he liked to think of himself, he had less chance of avoiding a pit of fire in the afterlife than he had of discovering the Lost Dutchman Mine under his house.
And so he didn’t forget each and every one of them, and what they were. The things he’d stolen. The women he’d used. The people he’d hurt. The thirteen people whose lives he’d taken—and yeah, they’d deserved it, but that didn’t help that much. He deserved to have to remember them, their faces and their voices and their names. He deserved to have to see the count every time he looked in the mirror, every time he changed clothes or washed himself in the shower, and to remember then that he was not truly a good man, because he did all of those things and would keep doing them. And because something lived inside him that would unleash horror if he let it, that would kill and rape and destroy. Something that might be his real self, for all he knew.
And, of course, because one day he might have a chance to make a real confession and repent for all of it. To be forgiven. He doubted it, but still. If that happened, he didn’t want to leave any stones unturned, so to speak.
“Some things aren’t anybody’s business,” he said, shutting down any line of inquiry Ardeth might have been about to make. “But the demon-sword is. Did you sell one, or not? Do you know who did?”
Those adding-machine eyes were back; he could feel them, calculating how much she trusted him. How much to tell him. Hopefully the answer was “all of it,” because fighting her over every piece of information was already getting old and he’d only known her for three hours.
Part of him—a lot of him—admired her for that. Being able to keep one’s mouth shut was a trait he valued more than almost anything else, and it was pretty clear she was a woman who could keep her mouth shut. Hell, if he weren’t the one who needed the information she was withholding, he’d be thinking she was a rare treasure.
But he was the one who needed the information, and while he understood her wariness, it made things harder for him than they should have been. He hated things being harder than they should have been.
He didn’t say that, though, or try to convince her of anything. He didn’t speak at all. He just met her gaze with as much frankness as he could, inviting her in.
She sighed, dipping her head so that a thick curtain of shining hair fell forward and then flipped back when she looked up again. “Maybe. About a month ago I heard from someone I know—someone I trust—and he said he had a client who was looking for a demon-sword, and could I procure one.”
Please let this go somewhere. “And?”
“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “I mean, I could have. I knew of a couple that I could have acquired, but before I was able to get a plan together and estimate a price, he told me not to. He said they’d found one elsewhere.”
“Okay.” Not great news, but maybe salvageable. “So who was the client?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. We don’t share that sort of information, as a general rule, like who we’re procuring for. I know who my customers are, but we don’t hand out names and contact info to each other. Not unless we want somebody trying to poach our clients.”
“No honor among thieves?”
Her eyes flashed. “Oh, there’s honor. But there are also thieves. Seems to me like you might be familiar with that concept, given the kinds of people you run with. Or has Doretti stopped shaking people down and ordering hits?”
Yeah, he deserved that. He wasn’t going to let it go unchallenged, but he deserved it. “I don’t run with anybody.”
“That’s not how I hear it.”
“Then you hear wrong.”
She raised one eyebrow, a perfect dark line across her luminous skin. “I’m here because of Felix. You’re here because of him.”
“Right now we’re both here because somebody shot at us.”
“And you keep trying to score points off me instead of focusing on that.”
How could Felix be friends with this irritating woman? “Then let’s focus on it. Who is your friend who had the client who wanted the sword? Who—is something funny here?”
She stifled her grin with obvious difficulty, only to have it stretch across her face again. “Sorry. It just—it sounded like a Sesame Street song or something. ‘Who is the friend who had the client who wanted the sword,’ you know?”
His own smile felt strange. In a good way, though. “I don’t know why she swallowed the fly?”
Her laugh was sweet, surprisingly soft and girlish. He caught a glimpse of what she would look like without the guarded suspicion, without the veneer of toughness that she’d been wearing like another layer of clothing. “Exactly. And his name is Nielsen. Nielsen Pollard. Ever heard of him?”
“Maybe.” The name did ring a bell or two, though he couldn’t recall exactly which ones or why. Eh. If Nielsen was a thief like Ardeth, chances were that his name had come up at some point on some case or from Doretti or whatever else. After all, he’d heard of her, so why wouldn’t he hear of her friends, too? “It’s kind of familiar. Do you think he’d tell us who he got the sword for, if we ask?”
She considered it. “If we pay him enough, he might.”
Finally, a break. He hoped. Almost as big a break as the grocery store ahead. “So how do we get in touch with him? Can you call him, arrange a meeting…?”
“I can try.” She pulled out her phone. “Just give me a minute.”
“No problem,” he said, hitting his blinker. “I’m going to stop at the store up here anyway. You can wait in the car and call him.”
—
Watkins Food-n-M
ore was one of those dingy-looking grocery stores that always smelled like dirty standing water, where half the stock hovered on the edge of its expiration date. They were occasionally interesting to wander around in, since they seemed to acquire their merchandise from a wide variety of eastern European wholesalers and criminal dummy corporations—Speare spotted a display of Windowkleen as he walked in the door, which he knew was nothing more than vinegar and watered-down Windex mixed together and bottled, courtesy of one of Laz’s front businesses—but he rarely actually bought anything from them. The risk of botulism or whatever the hell else was too high.
It wasn’t a bad place to steal from, though, if one was forced to steal. Which he was. It was either slip a Coke into his jacket pocket or watch as the thing inside him attacked Ardeth. Not a difficult decision.
One or two sad sacks, their skin sickly green under the weak fluorescent lights, shuffled up and down the grubby aisles littered with empty boxes and unshelved junk. Hopelessness radiated off them as they inspected dented cans of beans, boxes of generic casserole mixes, or frozen dinners made by companies with names like Eatz-Ryte. It was like a living art exhibit meant to illustrate depression.
But hey, they were probably better people than he was, when it came down to it.
A quick glance showed him the two security cameras that covered the whole space: one on the registers and one in the center of the store. More hung from the ceiling in various places, but he didn’t have to be an expert to see they didn’t work. Good. The beast was really dancing now, the red edges of his vision widening and flickering, his neck and chest growing warm as it started expanding into the rest of his body, getting ready to take over. He had to move fast.
Like everything else in the place, like the bored guy in the stained smock sitting behind the counter skimming through a porno mag—classy—the drinks cooler only half-ass worked. Speare grabbed one warmish Coke, then another, then a third, dropping the first so it landed between his feet. He snatched a fourth off the shelf as he crouched down to get it, shoved that one into his inner jacket pocket, picked up the dropped one, and placed it and the second one back on the shelf. Then he headed for the checkout and paid for one Coke. The clerk barely looked up from his dirty pictures.
The beast roared in satisfaction the second Speare stepped through the doors into the cool desert night. Shoplifting a single Coke wasn’t a mortal sin, really, but the fact that he had enough money in his wallet to pay for it made it a little more serious. It was enough to satisfy the beast for a while, anyway, which was all that mattered at that moment; its shiver of pleasure ran down his spine and radiated through his body, a pleasure he couldn’t help but share even though he hated it.
“Not bad,” Ardeth said, as he sat back down in the car.
“What?” Fuck.
“Your technique,” she said. “The clerk didn’t notice a thing. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have noticed if you’d balanced several of them on your head and just walked out the door, but I think you even would have fooled a clerk who was actually paying attention. I’m impressed.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to answer. How had she seen that? The coolers weren’t visible from the car.
“I went in,” she said, answering the unasked question. “I was going to get myself a drink, but then I realized you were getting one for me. Thanks.”
She plucked the paid-for Coke out of his hand, opened it, and took a long drink. “Ugh, it’s warm.”
“Yeah.” It really was. Or maybe it was something else making the stolen Coke so unpleasant in his mouth when he drank some. Of course she’d seen him steal it; that was just his luck, wasn’t it?
He waited for her to say something about it, to ask him why he’d done it or make some kind of joke. He could feel her wondering, with as much clarity as he would have felt her hand on his arm had she rested it there.
He couldn’t tell her, though—or he didn’t want to, which was pretty much the same thing. It wasn’t her business. It wasn’t anybody’s business.
Besides, what did he care what she thought? Who the hell was she? Sure, she was pretty. And sexy. And smart. She was also kind of an arrogant bitch who didn’t mind hurting people to make up for whatever pain someone else had inflicted on her—normally he’d admire that, but just then it wasn’t a trait he needed to be dealing with. And he had to work with her, for at least a few more days. That mattered more than anything else.
He swigged his stolen Coke, started the car, and sped through the parking lot, back onto the lonely road outside.
“I couldn’t reach Nielsen,” she said, ruining the peaceful ride almost as soon as he reached cruising speed. “I left a message. Hopefully he’ll call back.”
“Good.”
“You know,” she said, “you haven’t really told me any of the details here, except that somebody’s been killed with a demon-sword. Do you know why? That might be a way to track down the killer, too.”
“It might be.” Majowski said to park where East Washington turned into Los Feliz, and to walk past the first little ridge to find him and the body. The turn was visible in the near distance. “We’ll know more when we see who the victim is this time, I guess. But I don’t know what their plan is.”
“Fallerstein?”
It should have surprised him, but he was beginning to suspect there was no such thing as a surprise when it came to her. “What makes you say that?”
She gave him a flat, oh-come-on look. “You work for Doretti—”
“I do not.”
“With Doretti, fine. Come on, I’m not stupid. This doesn’t seem like the kind of case someone like you would normally handle, so I figure you’re working this for Doretti, or with him, which means it’s probably about Theodore Bryant. And it also means the most obvious suspect is Doretti’s chief rival, and that would be Fallerstein. Right?”
She paid more attention than he’d thought. He couldn’t decide if that made her even more interesting or if it made him even more suspicious. Probably both. “Except Fallerstein’s bound by the same agreements everyone else is. No ritual murders, no magics to kill people. He shouldn’t know how to use a demon-sword.”
“He was bound by it,” she said. “With Hardin gone, we don’t know if anyone’s sticking to that anymore.”
“Doretti is.”
“As far as you know.”
He bit back the sharp reply he wanted to make. So she didn’t like Laz, so what? Not everyone did. There was no rule that said she had to. “As far as I know,” he said. “Yes. And I haven’t heard of Fallerstein deciding not to stick to it, either. Have you?”
“I haven’t. I don’t usually pay attention to that kind of shit, though. I can ask around. It’d be good if we could figure out what the killer’s doing with the demon-sword, though. It’ll help.”
“Actually,” he said, “I was hoping you might have some ideas. You probably know more about the sword than I do, in general.” That was true, too. He knew more about them than the average guy in his business or in Doretti’s, but Ardeth was a thief. She wasn’t bound by the agreement that the organized Legacy Families had made, and she dealt with occult artifacts and items regularly.
If his deference to her knowledge and experience pleased her, she didn’t show it. “I probably do, yeah. But most of what I know about them has to do with soul stuff, not body parts. Like, the soul can be cut up or destroyed, or parts of it retained, or certain memories or skills can be. Maybe someone’s doing some weird kind of sacrifices? Somebody planning a major crime of some sort, and they have to burn certain parts or something?”
“It’s as good a theory as any right now.” He slid the car onto the shoulder and cut the ignition. The sound of insects filled the air; the mountain looming to the right of them gleamed in the moonlight. He reached for the door handle, glancing back at her as he did. “The problem is, what crime are they planning to commit? Why Theodore? What are they up to?”
“I guess we’ll find out.??
? She opened her door the second after he opened his. They exited the car in unison, and the sound of the doors closing again echoed off the rocks.
Majowski’s cruiser came into view as soon as they crossed the low hill that separated the street from the vacant land ahead. At least Speare assumed it was Majowski’s cruiser; not only could he not imagine that some other cop had decided it was a good place to hang out for a while, and not only had Majowski specifically said he was there alone, but it was clearly Majowski’s voice emanating from the cruiser’s open windows, singing—of all things—Abba’s “Fernando,” in a fairly ridiculous falsetto.
The singing came to an abrupt halt when Speare and Ardeth were about fifteen feet away from the car. The door flew open.
“Hey,” Majowski said. “Glad you could make it.” His once-over of Ardeth was quick, but Speare saw it just the same. Annoyance flared in his chest.
“Glad you’re having such a good time while you wait,” he said, shoving that annoyance out of the way. He’d think about it later. Or not.
“What was I supposed to do?” Majowski asked. He turned back to Ardeth. “Hi. I’m Chuck.”
She smiled. A brighter, more genuine-looking smile than she’d given him, he noticed. What was that about? “Ardeth.”
“Ardeth what?” Majowski whipped out a notepad. “Got any ID?”
Oh, no. Speare took a step to his right, half-blocking her from Majowski’s line of vision. His eyes narrowed. He was the one who’d brought Ardeth along, and given what she did for a living, odds were very good that the LVMPD at least wanted to have a chat with her. He couldn’t let that happen to her—wouldn’t let that happen to her. Majowski would leave her the hell alone, or else. “I’m her ID, and that’s all you—”
Majowski held up his hands. “Jesus, relax. I’m kidding, man.”
“Oh.” Well, didn’t he feel stupid. And what had possessed him—other than the beast, of course—that he’d been so irritated and defensive in the first place? No, he didn’t want her getting taken in for questioning, but only because he needed her help and it would be an inconvenience. “Sorry.”