A clear lubricant was leaking from the crumpled metal carapace of the beetlelike UAV.
Ought to just leave.
He couldn't resist. Chance to find out something—and maybe discourage this kind of surveillance.
He walked over to the UAV, knelt by it, held a hand close to its hot metal hull. Closed his eyes. Reached out invisibly, incorporating the field of the Hidden in his probe of the UAV; tracing back to its source.
He saw people in a room, a marine guard, a man wearing glasses covertly glancing at the woman...
The woman.
She drew his attention. He couldn't focus on the others. But he saw her—and projected an image to her, through the Hidden. It would look like an apparition of Gabriel Bleak, to her, appearing in front of the little TV monitor they'd used for the UAV. He saw her gasp, a hand to her mouth.
He said, Agent Sarikosca... Loraine... Why lend your eyes to a vulture? Loraine...
Strange, wanting to call her by her first name. Loraine. He seemed to see her disembodied, then, a soul rising up before him, a woman-shape becoming a star...flaring...unable to stop herself from reaching out.
Bleak felt a delicious sense of contact flood his lower being-he had an immediate and uncomfortable hardness at the contact. He felt the woman's shock at the unexpected intimacy and couldn't conceal his own.
He snapped back into himself, cutting the connection. Had to adjust his pants a little before hurrying to the fire escape that led down to a side street.
He hadn't expected so electric a response—not from a woman with no power in the Hidden. He had learned that, if he chose, he could use the Hidden to enhance his ability to seduce and excite a woman—but he'd also learned that it frightened them. They felt debauched, frightened of him, so he'd stopped doing it, except, once, with a ShadowComm girl—someone too erratic to continue seeing. But this contact with Loraine—something extraordinary. He'd never felt anything like it.
The shadow of a bird rippled over him as he climbed down the fire escape, the ladder's metal warm under his hands.
Yorena.
He glanced up, saw Shoella's familiar dart over, and down, when the creature was sure she had his attention. Free to engage him now that the drone was gone.
The choppers would be here soon, Bleak guessed. Yorena knew that and wanted him away from here before CCA arrived.
He continued down the ladder—and heard the choppers thumping the air by the time he'd reached the ground. But they were still far enough away he could get undercover.
Yorena flew across the street—a residential street, back here, away from the main street with its merchants—and into a narrow walkway between two old brick apartment buildings.
Bleak ran across the street, making someone in a small Toyota honk at him irritably. He slipped 112 quickly into the shady walkway. A couple of covered garbage cans stood along the passage, but the walkway was neatly kept, broom marks in the dust on the concrete.
He ran through to the next street, coming out between two houses. He had to vault over a short metal-mesh fence, then saw Yorena swoop down into the open back of what looked like an old-fashioned bread delivery truck double-parked next to an old Cadillac; the idling truck, its rear doors standing open, had been painted over, by hand, with a thick coat of gray. He only hesitated a moment, then hurried to the small truck and climbed in the back, closed the door behind him. Kind of regretted closing the door—there was an acrid smell back here, made worse by the hot closeness.
What he was smelling was Yorena and a bum; mostly the bum. Cleaning its wings, Yorena perched facing him on the back of the front passenger-side seat. The man was squatting on the scratched-up white-painted steel floor, behind the driver.
The guy smelled of booze and unwashed clothing. Pretty obvious he'd been in those jeans and that stained blue shirt for a long time. He had rotting sneakers and a three-day growth of red-brown beard and flicking brown eyes and a stub nose and moons of dirt under his fingernails. His hands trembled on his knees as he looked balefully at Bleak from under shaggy red-brown brows.
A spiky corona of short dreadlocks flared over the driver's seat—Shoella put the little truck in gear, hurried it down the street, making her passengers brace on floor and walls; the big raptor rocked with the motion of the vehicle, fluttering her wings.
Bleak sat back against a thin metal wall. “You would be Mr. Coster?”
“That's who I am,” the bum said, his voice a slurred rumble. “Who you?”
Bleak ignored the question. He noticed a brown smudge on the floor of the truck. “This a blood spot, back here, Shoella?”
“Yeah.” She turned a sharp left so that Bleak had to brace himself. “I had to do a ritual in the backs of the truck. Couldn't do it at home, neighbors get funny about it. Had to cut the head off a chicken back there.”
“The loas you talk to really care about blood sacrifices?”
“They care about what we expect them to care about. Thousands of years, people kill animals for them, pour drinks for them, dab perfume for them—the loas get to like it. Maybe they eat up a little of that life energy that gets out, when we cut the head off a chicken, I don't know. But, truth to tell, when they get to know you, they don't care you kill the chicken or pig for them, no,
cher darlin’
.”
“But you're still cutting off heads.”
“Was a loa I didn't know before. What do you care, you're not a vegetarian. You don't think down at the slaughterhouse they cut off heads of animals before they skin 'em for you? Look out the back, you see that helicopter?”
He went to the back window of the truck, squinted up at the sky. “Can't see one. Can't see much though. They had a drone after me.”
“Yorena told me. One of those little flying machines with the cameras.”
“Yeah. One of those little machines. I shot it down but they had me located, so...1 guess the chopper was already on its way.”
“But I think we lost them. We fittin' to go to a house they don't know.”
“I need a drink,” Coster said, the way an injured man would say, “Get me to a doctor.”
“We got rum at my place for you,” Shoella said.
Bleak looked at Coster and thought,
Can this man really tell me anything about my brother? Was a man like that ever really in a position to know anything useful?
It seemed unlikely. But could Coster simply be hustling Shoella for drinks? For money? And just making stuff up? That wasn't likely.
Hard to put a hustle over on Shoella. Unless she wanted it to happen.
As if sensing he was thinking about her mistress, Yorena cocked her head and looked sullenly at Bleak. And Shoella turned another corner.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
I
should feel on top of the world here,
Gulcher thought.
But I almost feel like I'm back in prison.
Where he was, really, was in a luxury suite on the top floor of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino. He was lying full dressed on the bed, watching the big-screen, high-definition TV. And seeing his own face, his barefaced mug shot, flickering across it. Good thing he'd grown the neat, carefully clipped black beard. But still—his face was out there, and Jock's too: Watch out for these escapees from prison, believed to be involved in the prison riot that left more than a dozen dead. In prison for second-degree murder, history of drug dealing, fencing, pimping, blah blah blah.
He was feeling down. He wasn't sure if the on-a-high feeling the whisperer had brought him was gone or, like a drug feeling you got used to, just become a dull part of the background of the trip you were on.
He changed the channel. There was what's his name, President Breslin, the old guy who said we
might just
have to do a “later, later” on the general election. Hell, what did Gulcher care? He never voted anyway.
He changed the TV to the Home Shopping Network. Always found this channel comforting. Maybe because his wife, Luella, liked to watch it. He ever found Luella, he was going to have to kill her, just as a matter of honor, but sometimes it was nice to think about the good times they'd had before she met that bearded-weirdo California pot dealer and run off. On TV, a sexy blonde with hair that was artfully sticking up all over her head—like someone had paid a lot of money to make it look messy in a cool way—was selling “Rolex-style” watches. She kept saying she wished she weren't working for the channel, she'd love to buy one of these herself, they were so great and so inexpensive.
“Sure,” Gulcher said, out loud. “I'll take two of those and your ass along with 'em.”
He'd dipped into the casino women. A couple of the cuter, younger cleaning women had been accommodating. He hadn't needed the whisperer—just the magic of $1,000 to each broad. He had luxury, he had access to all that money in the cash room, nobody ever questioned him, but Gulcher still felt trapped here. He left here, he'd leave the protection of this place. He was hiding out here, but ns hiding in plain sight. He didn't understand it completely, but he knew he was shielded. At least for now.
“The great power has busted through the weak part in the wail up north,”
the whisperer had said, when Gulcher lay there, alone in the night, trying to figure it all out. Having access to his mind, it was starting to talk to him in Gulcher's own lingo. “The wall still works, for now anyway, but while it was weakened, the great power came through. You follow? In this place, where the addicts are getting their buzz, the great power finds a safe place to hole up from the spirits of light. He can suck up energy from
the addicts, power it can use to grow, and to keep himself hid. Get it? Some are gonna get sucked dry, but only those no one gives a shit about.
AH you have to do is dispose of the bodies.”
“' All you have to do is dispose of the bodies,'“ Gulcher muttered, remembering. “Oh, is that all? Dispose of a pile of bodies.” A job he'd delayed, by storing them downstairs. But what bothered him more was the sense that he had no control over any of this. That he was just a pawn, shoved around on some kind of invisible chessboard, by invisible hands, in a game between invisible players. He didn't like it. He had powers he didn't understand. From things he didn't understand. In the old days, there were guns, there was money, there were drugs, there was pussy, and there was hiding what you did from the cops. Those things he understood. But this—
Someone knocked sharply on the door to the suite. Gulcher took his pistol from the bedside table, got up, went to flatten against the wall by the door, gun ready.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Troy, man, it's me, Jock.”
Gulcher relaxed, opened the door. Jock looked a little drunk, and a little wired, both. “You getting high,Jock?”
“What you care if I get high, Gulcher? Shit, we got more important stuff to worry about than do I get high.”
Gulcher wasn't sure why he didn't want Jock to get high. He just felt like everything here was balanced on some kind of wire and anything could push it over into chaos and he'd lose all control of it. If he
had any
control of it. He wondered, suddenly, why the whisperer needed him at all, now that this great power had “come through.” But it did need him, somehow. Something about “just the right people” in bodies “belonging to the dense layers of this world.” Gulcher doubted he'd ever understand it all and he wasn't sure he wanted to.
“So, spit it out, Jock, what's the more important stuff we got to worry about? The cops onto me being here?”
“Not yet. But maybe these people are going to call 'em on us—or maybe call their fucking
paisanos.”
“What people, for fuck's sake?”
“The owners of the casino are here. Luciano Baroni and Ricky Baroni.”
“Yeah? I've heard of those pricks. Most casinos, what I see, are owned by Arab guys or Donald Chump or whatever, these days. They're the real owners, huh?”
“What, you didn't know that? I looked it up first time I was in the casino office.”
“You're very goddamn efficient, Jock, make somebody a nice secretary. Where are these greasers now?”
Turned out the Baronis were in the basement, in a room off one of those tunnels; in the cash-counting room, talking to the accountants.
Gulcher and Jock found them there in the windowless, low-ceilinged, harshly lit room, standing next to a table stacked with bound bundles of cash. Both of the Baronis were red-faced, the accountants looking sleepy and vague. The accountants were under the whisperer's control, pretty much sleepy and vague whenever they were in the casino.
The older Baroni, with the white hair and the heavy black eyebrows and the jowls, was unbuttoning the jacket of his charcoal-colored silk suit with one hand, as he talked to the accountants. “What do you mean, the new management...”
The younger Baroni was holding a cell phone to his ear. “I know Pop told you no bodyguards in the casino, but that's because security here is supposed to be already working for me, but now we need you to get your ass over here—” A bit taller, his hair thick and black and curly, the younger Baroni wore a powder blue suit, replete with a matching blue tie.
Gulcher noticed that Papa Baroni wore a gold-colored ascot with a little pearl pin in the middle of it. “Pop” was taking off his sunglasses with one hand, using them to gesture angrily at the money as he talked to the two accountants. “We make a lot of our money off you Asian guys, crazy about the card rooms, and you're good with numbers, but you're putting me off the whole fucking Chinese race, here, with this. How can you say that the management just got changed and no one consulted us? We're the fucking owners, here. We're—” He broke off, seeing Gulcher. “Who's this?”
“I'm your new management,” Gulcher said mildly. “Ron Presley. Board of directors appointed me. Transitional.”
The younger Baroni snapped his cell phone shut so vigorously it made a report that caused the accountants to jump a little and look at one another. “Board of directors? They've got no say without us!”