The older Baroni was looking closely at Gulcher and Jock. “I don't normally handle taking out the trash personally,” Baroni said, fists clenching at his sides. “Junior, he called someone to do it. But you don't get out of here, right now—I'm gonna do it myself.”
“You'll lose a lot of money,” Gulcher said patiently, smiling. “There's a misunderstanding here. I'm pretty sure the board thought they'd consulted you.”
“I leave town a few weeks, I come back, and a couple of con artists—” The older Baroni broke off, staring. “Where the fuck you get that suit?”
“You don't like it?” Gulcher said. “Maybe I should get an ascot. I'm taken by that ascot, boss. You don't see those much anymore. Gold-colored too.”
Jock chuckled at that.
“You making fun of me?” Luciano Baroni's face was beet red. “That suit you're wearing was picked out by me for my head of operations here. It was a gift. I was there when it was tailored. It was part of his fucking bonus!”
“He gave it to me,” Gulcher said, shrugging apologetically. “You want to ask him about it, come on. Follow us. He's here—he'll explain the whole thing. Why we're here, everything. Me and Jock, we're just transitional. Helping out here, for a while, really, “cause your man had some issues.”
“Dad,” the younger Baroni said, “let's take 'em down now. They're some other fucking... organization. Moving in on our shop.”
His father looked at Gulcher, licked his lips. Gulcher knew Baroni was a survivor—with an instinct for danger. And Baroni hesitated, sensing the power in Gulcher. Thinking, probably, he'd wait for his muscle to show up.
Gulcher gestured at the door. “We'll go talk to your primary manager—the man you hired. Right this way, gentlemen.”
The Baronis looked at one another. Then Pop Baroni nodded. “You walk ahead of us. Don't get cute, we're gonna be looking at your back. My son here's a good shot.”
Gulcher made a mock bow and walked out the door, into the underground tunnel. Jock hurrying to catch up. The Baronis followed, a few steps behind.
“We 're ready to kick ass.. just reach out with those other hands,”
said the whisperer, to Gulcher, somewhere deep in his ear.
But Gulcher just didn't want to do that. Not this time. He wanted to do something
himself.
He wanted to do things in a way he understood—
completely
understood. And there was a kick to this. He could hear the Baronis walking a few strides behind him. They could shoot him in the back anytime they wanted. The adrenaline from this roll of the dice made his heart thump. He liked feeling that again.
As they walked along, Jock leaned over, muttered, “Hope you know what you're doing, Troy.”
“Don't call me that, right now. We agreed, I'm Ron Presley, asshole,” Gulcher murmured. He looked back to see the Baronis following with identical scowls on their faces. The junior Baroni looked at him, seemed to be holding up his cell phone. Taking a picture? Lot of good that would do. He turned around again, wondering if they could see the bulge of his gun in his back pocket under the jacket.
“Dad—let's just hold these assholes right here in the hall till our people come. I don't feel good about this,” Ricky Baroni said.
“I'll have Stedley send your bodyguards to us in the Special Works room,” Gulcher called over his shoulder, not quite looking back as he said it.
“What the fuck is Special Works?” the younger Baroni said. “We got no special works around here.”
“Right through here, Mr. Baroni.” Gulcher opened the door to Furnace Room One and went through, Jock right behind him.
When the Baronis came in, they stopped, just inside the door, staring at the pile of dried-out bodies. Just what Gulcher had figured they'd do. Too startled by the sight to keep track of Gulcher. So by the time they realized he had his gun out and pointed at them, they couldn't reach for their own pieces.
They just stared, openmouthed, looking back and forth between Gulcher and the desiccated remains.
There were about thirty bodies, currently, stacked like a pyramid. Except for the clothing, they looked a lot like those dried animals you see hanging in Chinatown shops: brown and shrunken to a little more than half size, looking too small for their clothing. They were really superlight too, you could pick one up with a single hand. They were the corpses of people the whisperer had chosen, as especially susceptible. Moloch picked them—or more likely it was the whisperer; Gulcher had worked out that the whisperer was a spirit who worked for Moloch. The whisperer would pick out these gamblers, the kind no one cared about. And the whisperer would wrap himself around them and get them more tweaky obsessed with gambling than they'd ever been, way beyond gambling fever. And they'd keep on and on, and if they ran out of money, somehow credit would miraculously appear. And they'd play on and on even more. Then they'd simply collapse, without a word. And the “great power” that had come through the wall in the north, to use the whisperer's terminology, fed off their spirits as they left their body and became stronger...and security would be called, would carry the bodies out, and by the time they got them down here, they'd shriveled to this. Some essential something had been taken out of them. And the bodies burned real good in these furnaces, no problem.
Furnaces. Moloch liked furnaces. Something about people chucking babies in furnaces, for ol' Moloch, thousands of years ago. To please him.
What a guy to be in business with.
The older Baroni was sputtering, “What the hell you do with...these people, they...”
“Your man Teague's here,” Gulcher said. “His ashes anyway. In that furnace. He didn't die like these guys, though. He was kind of resistant, so Stedley took him down.”
Jock added, “You wanted to get with him so now's your chance to mix.” Jock chuckled, pleased with his own wit.
“Dad—!” the junior Baroni yelped, clutching at a gun.
He never got it out. Gulcher shot them both, two bullets in the body mass, one more each in the head. Pow, pow, pow, and pow—down they went. Kind of a bloody mess compared to the dried-out corpses.
Gun smoke tinted the air blue-gray and made Gulcher cough. “Jock—tell Stedley to get down here, cut these two up, feed 'em in there, in the furnace. And that pile of driftwood too, we got too many backed up there.”
“Sure thing, Troy.” Jock seemed in awe—and also worried. “You sure that was smart? If they'd been under the whisperer's control...1 mean, people are gonna look for these guys for sure. They're powerful guys. They were on the phone to their boys.”
“We'll deal with their punks the same way.”
“Yeah, but, Gulcher—you should've—”
“Jock? Shut up. I feel good now. I'm gonna go have a drink. Save me that ascot and that pearl pin, there.”
Gulcher turned around and walked out. Glad to be out of a smoky room piled high with shriveled, mummified gamblers.
And he was sure, just as sure as Jock had been, that he'd made a big goddamn mistake.
***
S
AME DAY, LATE AFTERNOON.
“Sean Bleak was taken,” Coster said. “He was alive, not long ago. Probably still is. I need another drink.”
They were in the kitchen of a two-bedroom bungalow, Bleak and Shoella and Coster, in Hoboken. Birds chirped from the backyard.
There hadn't been any trouble with cops or helicopters or CCA after Bleak had shot down the drone. The chopper hadn't gotten close enough to use the detector before they'd gotten out of range. But some instinct told Bleak he wasn't safe here. What the danger was, he wasn't certain.
Bleak and Shoella were drinking a licorice-flavored Egyptian tea; Coster, on the other side of the table, was drinking straight white rum from a tumbler. The back door was open to let in fresh air and the sound of the birds. The small kitchen looked like any little, cozy American kitchen in an old house, with its old-fashioned white, curvy-cornered gas stove, and the oak kitchen table. It was like any kitchen except for the African masks on the walls—where other people would have had a ceramic image of a cow. One of the masks, Bleak noticed, was a wood-sculpted vulture head, reminiscent of the thing that had destroyed Bursinksy's friend Gleaman, in River Rat's. Another mask was made of straw, with holes for eyes and wide-open mouth; it seemed to gaze at Bleak with an expression of horrified recognition. Some spirit might be hovering around it, one that would become apparent if Bleak looked at the mask long enough. He looked away.
They hadn't told Coster who Bleak was. He hadn't insisted on knowing. Which made Bleak wonder if he knew already. Shoella had told Coster only that it was important a certain someone hear his story.
Miles Davis played from the stereo in the next room,
Bitches Brew,
and the slinky music seemed to ooze into near-visible animal shapes around the corners of the kitchen. “You like my place?” Shoella asked Bleak, her tone faintly enticing.
“This where you live?” Bleak said, thinking it odd she was revealing that to Coster. Was she so confident she could control him?
“I got more than one place. But,
oui.
I didn't want to bring him here.” She shrugged. “Closest place. I'm tired of running and hiding. I have to be near my center of power or I lose some'tin. And this place is near the water.” She looked at Coster. “So you remember, Coster, you make me angry, I will bring a baka loa to eat your brains.”
Coster looked at her. “Probably too late for anything to eat my brains, lady.”
“I've seen that loa at work,” Bleak said. “Not something you want to happen to whatever brains you have left.”
Coster nodded ruefully. “Duly noted.” He drank about half his rum off. It was his second glass. Seemed unfazed. The alcoholism didn't appear to be an act.
“You have something to tell my friend?” Shoella prompted. “Something we talked about before. There were two boys...”
“You said there'd be money,” Coster said.
“Shoella,” Bleak said, “this guy is pulling a hustle. He's just a drunk trying to get a free ride.” He stood up, as if to go. “He doesn't know anything.”
Coster looked up at Bleak with red-rimmed eyes. “I know some things. When I look at you, I know you look a hell of a lot like somebody I've met. His name was Sean Bleak. And I know the lady here was asking about my work with an outfit that's pretty interested in finding Sean Bleak's brother. Now, I wonder who that'd be?” Coster made an unpleasant sniggering sound.
So he's wade a guess about who lam,
Bleak thought. But he didn't see any point in confirming it.
“Shoella,” Bleak asked. “You use Yorena? You see into this man's mind?”
Coster didn't seem surprised at the question. Which suggested he might be what he'd told Shoella he was—an ex-CCA agent.
“Looked some,” Shoella said. “But it's hard to see anything clear in a drunken mind.”
“I got
sowe
things clear,” Coster said. “Sean Bleak and Gabriel Bleak. Sean'd be about your age, now. Saw him a few years ago. And he's kind of like you, pal.” Coster pointed a grubby finger at Bleak. “He's a pretty different guy, though, I'd guess, thanyou.”
Bleak stared at him. “What happened, and where'd it happen?”
“Where, was Road's End Ranch, out eastern Oregon. South of Bend a ways, and I need more rum.”
Bleak felt a shock, hearing those place names. They were dead-on.
Shoella got up, went to a cabinet, found a bottle of Bacardi, and poured some into Coster's glass. Then she put it back in the cabinet. He looked at the cabinet and drank more rum.
“What happened?” Bleak said. “And what was your part in it?” He tried to keep the anger that was bubbling up inside him from spilling into his voice. But it occurred to him that he might have a man sitting in the same room with him who had kidnapped his brother. Or helped kidnap him. If any of it was true.
It was easier, almost more comforting, to simply believe that Sean was dead. Coster looked at him, and back at his glass. “I was driving the van. I didn't know what they were gonna do on that little trip. It's one of the reasons I...left the place.”
“You stayed with them long enough to see Sean as an adult,” Bleak pointed out. “If it was really him.” Not sure he believed any of this yet, despite the correct facts about the ranch, the location, the names. CCA knew where he came from, by now.
Coster sighed. “I left the authority the first time soon after they took the kid. Then I was in military intelligence for a while. That was even more depressing. Then I dropped out of that and worked in insurance for like almost ten years. Drinking too much, but doing the job. Then my wife left me, my son died of a drug OD, and CCA contacted me because, they said, there were new developments, they needed a lot of new staff, and I was already briefed on it and they knew I could handle it, which wasn't true. I couldn't handle it. But I went back. Then the dam started to crack— really cracking big-time—and I started to see ghosts myself and my dead kid was appearing to me there and telling me I was doing wrong and—”
“What do you mean, the dam started to crack?” Shoella said.
“The wall in the north. Isn't that what you people call it? I call it the dam. Anyhow...it started to crack a bit before Gabriel here was born. We found a way to trace 'responder signals' from people who reacted to the influx of energy from the Hidden. That's how they found Gabriel and his brother and some others. And they were afraid of that energy, see.” Coster's voice was becoming a mumble. “So they started CCA and they started to look for the source. Some documents turned up...very old documents. Hundreds of years old. About three hundred.”
Coster rubbed his face, seeming confused and exhausted, suddenly, as if he might fall asleep.
“I left again.” He went on, after a moment, “That Sean freaked me out. He's a...Anyhow I had to skate under the radar, since then. And since I always liked a drink...” He said it with a dry-ice sting of irony. “It was easy to slip into skid row, whatever town I was in. Skid row's a good place to hide.” His eyelids drooped.
“Someone put you up to getting in touch with us?” Bleak asked, his voice sharp.