Not the whisperer. The whisperer definitely didn't think of Gulcher as “boss.” Which worried Gulcher. No, it was Stedley talking on the intercom.
“I hear you, Stedley, what's up?”
“There's federal agents all around the damn place. Surrounding the casino. FBI, ATF, all kinds of guys. State troopers too, did I mention that?”
“Okay—” Gulcher's mouth was dry but he was almost glad. “Don't do nothing yet.”
“What do you mean, 'Okay, don't do nothing'?” Jock demanded, throwing the money on the table. His eyes were suddenly wild and he was breathing hard. The bonhomie was gone; the paranoia was back. “You bring these guys here? You tradin' me for some deal, that the idea?”
“Cut that tweaky shit out, Jock, goddammit, and get upstairs and help Stedley. You forget we got the whisperer. What happened is obvious. Those greaser Baroni fucks went missing and they musta told somebody where they were going and somebody infiltrated the place, checked it out. Probably ID'd me. But we got the power to turn their little minds around, all right? Now cool your fucking jets.”
Jock was gaping at him, his eyes pinned, but Gulcher just walked away from him, went out to the elevator.
Just before the doors closed, Jock caught up and shoved his way into the elevator, breathing hard.
“Right, okay, we're gonna handle this,” Jock muttered, his eyes darting around.
“Goddammit, Jock.” Gulcher just shook his head. “Just be quiet...I got to contact.”
He closed his eyes. Felt the whisperer there. And no response when he called out to it, inside. It had gone into a sullen silence on him.
“What the fuck?” he muttered, as the doors to the elevator opened. He and Jock stepped out into the main poker room: a cavernous space with rows of green felt card tables. All of the tables empty, no players. Stacks of chips still sitting on the felt, in front of the seats. The big television screens over the room showed ESPN, a horse race, and—the front of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino: a newsbreak shot showing rings of cop cars, staties mostly, some vans Gulcher associated with the FBI, all around the casino. And there were the FBI agents, with their cute little jackets and the letters
FBI
real big across the back. Lots of guns out there too.
“Oh, fuck, Troy,” Jock breathed, gaping up at the screen.
He darted frantic looks around the empty room. The rows of slots chattered and buzzed and dinged from the next room, but they could see through the open doors that no one was playing them. “They already got the players out—so that means—”
“Means we're already here,” said a man, in an Air Force general's uniform, crossing over to them. His hands were held up as if he were surrendering.
The general was a medium-small guy, with a lot of ribbons on his chest; middle-aged, smiling slightly. He didn't look scared at all. “If you have guns, please don't fire 'em.” He had a mild Southern accent, Georgia or Florida. “Look beyond me—you see the sharpshooters, there, among the slot machines?” He paused, half turned, nodded toward the men behind him.
The FBI sharpshooters, four that Gulcher could see, were stepping out into sight—in partial cover from the slot machines. They stood just inside the slot aisles, rifle barrels resting on the warbling, flashing machines, getting a bead on Gulcher and Jock.
“Where's Stedley?” Gulcher asked, for something to say.
Stalling while he tried to contact the whisperer again.
The general lowered his hands, walked slowly, carefully toward them. “Oh, poor, confused Stedley is under arrest. We took him out of the building and the influence he was under simply passed from him. Last thing he remembers is the mornin' you showed up. There was a riot, he says, and then —he woke on up out there, in our custody.” The general stopped just out of Gulcher's reach. Clasped his hands in front of him. Smiled gently.
“Yeah, well...what do you people want?” Gulcher asked, still stalling. “I got a casino to run, here. We're losing money with this interruption. You got a warrant or what?”
Mentally calling,
Whisperer...Moloch...
“Yes, we have a warrant, Mr. Gulcher.”
“Oh, shit,” Jock said. “Troy—they—”
“Shut up, Jock. Okay, so you think you've ID'd me, General Whosis,” Gulcher said.
Whisperer...Moloch...Needyou to step in, this time...you there?
“We know exactly who you are, you and your friend here. As for my name, I am General Allan Roger Forsythe. That is, anyway, how I used to be known. And how most people know me. You, sir, you made your mistake when you snuffed out the Baronis. They were part of a big organization. His people knew they were last seen here. And Mr. Baroni's son was smarter than you think. He got a picture of you with his cell phone, sent it to his people, with a little text message: 'Who the fuck is this guy?' Beard and all, one of them recognized you from the news reports. They thought if they bulled in, you'd shoot their bosses—though I expect you've done that already. What did they do, these professional criminals? They called the police! Just one of those little ironies that make life so darn interestin'. Now, the police, they are under instruction to inform all federal agencies if they run across you. And those agencies are under instruction to inform the CCA. We were duly informed—and here we are.”
“And what the fuck is the CCA?” Gulcher was aware that Jock was breathing hard, through his mouth.
“I'd rather not explain it all right here. Most of the young men behind me have never heard of it. Maybe none of them have. It's a very special offshoot of our special branches. But believe me—if you come along with me—”
Whisperer...Moloch...
Forsythe's smile broadened yet somehow became colder. His voice softened. “That won't work, Mr. Gulcher. What you're trying to do.”
Gulcher stared. “What'd you say—what I'm trying to do?”
“You called to Moloch,” the general said, with unruffled confidence. “I heard you.” He smoothed his hair, looking around at the empty poker tables as he spoke. “The Gulcher cat was out of the bag when you killed those men and that image was sent, so...the Great Wraith decided to let us take you now. He has ingested a great deal of what he came here for. There was to be
wore,
but...the timetable too is an issue. Things outside your sphere of awareness have shifted, just this morning—it's been decided he will use you in a different context. Essentially—he sent me to pick you up.” The general put his hands in his pockets, rocked casually on his heels as he went on thoughtfully, “I use 'he' because that's how you think of the Great Wrath. In fact that entity has no definite gender. Some people see Moloch as a female...but Moloch is not so limited.”
“Jesus, Troy,” Jock breathed, an hysterical whine in his voice. “Oh, Jesus and Mary, they're all around us and now they're in our heads, they can read our minds!”
“What the fuck
are
you?” Gulcher demanded, glowering at the general.
“I am someone without your talents—but with a special relationship to one of the Great Wrath's servants. His benign promise is...within me. Always. You are not to mention that, within the confines of the CCA. We don't control everyone there, hence not everyone at the authority can be trusted. Now —the one you call the whisperer has conveyed the Great Wrath's decision. You are to join me. To join forces with us. No longer a loose cannon, but a cannon—lashed to our ship. What do you say to that?”
“I say-”
“I say
fuck you!”
Jock shouted suddenly, the words accompanied by spittle. “
Whatever the
fuck you are!” He reached into his coat, just barely got the gun out before the sharpshooters' bullets slammed into him, made him stagger four steps backward. He fell flat on his back, twitching, already dead.
“I
did warn
him,” Forsythe said. “Your friend had very little talent. We can do without him. We'd rather not have to shoot you too. Keep in mind—you won't be going back to prison. You'll be in government custody but...it'll be comfortable. And quite interesting, I promise you.”
Gulcher looked past Forsythe at the sharpshooters.
And very slowly... Gulcher put up his hands. “Fuck it. I'm tired of the noise in this dump. I surrender. Let's go, General.”
***
THE NEXT MORNING. A rooftop in Harlem.
The sun was just breaking above the upper edges of the buildings to the east. Bleak put on a pair of sunglasses and crossed the brownstone's roof to a cornice overlooking the street. He put a booted foot on the cornice and leaned as far forward as he could, taking in the street scene below.
Some blocks south of the rooftop, the Apollo Theatre was still operating, and small shops and soul-food restaurants and old-time record stores bustled on 125th—but much of Harlem had become increasingly gentrified. Rents had doubled, many old brownstone and limestone buildings had gone condo. Chic little bookstore/ coffee shops and galleries and crepe shops with small tables on the sidewalk had cropped up, causing longtime residents to shake their heads and mutter in disgust.
But Bleak was in a remoter Harlem, a short distance from the Harlem River, a relatively untamed neighborhood. A high school across the street, abandoned for lack of funding, was crawling with arcanely psychedelic graffiti. Turfies in sloppy pants and hooded windbreakers, or wearing the new, shiny Slick Up athletic pants, which were finally replacing the low-belt droop, were congregating in clumps next to a tall metal-mesh fence separating the street from the school's cracked and weedy basketball court, where the hoops had long since been pulled off the backboards. Long shadows stretched from fire hydrants and people. A UPS truck rumbled by. There was a line of parked cars, two of them abandoned and burned out. Parked SUVs and vans looked like brightly colored rectangles from up here.
No telling who might be in those vans.
Bleak glanced up at the sky. Choppers out west but none coming his way. A few gulls flashing in the early-morning light. None of the telltale hard glint of camera drones. He felt no one watching him, at that moment.
He hoped he was safe from CCA here. He had made the deal to collar the skip over a phone that couldn't be traced to him; made the arrangement for them to transfer the bounty, the usual 10 percent of the bail bond, to one of Shoella's accounts, when he turned the skip over to NYPD. He was to drop off the perp “at any police precinct.” The CCA couldn't be covering them
all.
He'd sensed puzzlement about his refusal to come to the bail bonds office in person, but they'd made the deal.
“Vince” at Second Chance had told him a private detective had made some inquiries and all he'd come up with was this building, the last place anyone had seen the skip, one Lucille Donella Rhione,
wanted on a failure-to-appear. Bleak had seen her mug shot in an e-mail: a bottle-blond, lamp-tanned, scowling woman who, according to the bondsman, “likes to stuff her boobs into stretch-fabric tank tops and her ass into really tight stretchy leggings.” She had skipped out after her aunt, the bail “custodian,” put up a pile of money. Lucille was said to be in the company of a violence-prone white drug dealer who liked to call himself Gandalf. Nothing else much was known about him, except sometimes he came to this building to pick up crystal, which he sold somewhere in the Bronx. And he? carried a gun. His aggressive unpredictability was the reason the private eye had dropped the case. “Said we weren't paying him enough to deal with Gandalf.”
Normally Bleak would have hired two or three guys to help him collar the skip. A couple of burly bodyguards to uptown Big Money worked with Bleak in their spare time. But he didn't want them here with the possibility of CCA coming around at any moment. He was going to have to go it alone this time.
Bleak wasn't telepathic, and his precognitive ability was fitful; but everyone who could actively connect with the Hidden had some psychic capacity. His own clairvoyance was fairly minor—his greatest talents lay in manipulation of the Hidden's energy field, and contact with its entities—but when he focused on Lucille Rhione's picture and reached out into the Hidden, he'd got a mental picture of this building. When he'd come to the address he'd been given—there was the building. So the private eye's information had been good: the Hidden seemed to hint the skip was going to be here soon.
Maybe tomorrow.
Which was now today. But so far he hadn't seen any white people approach the building.
He paced along the cornices, watching the mix down below, watching the skies for drones between times. Waiting. Thinking things through. Remembering the strange shock when he'd had the psychic contact with Agent Sarikosca. Loraine Sarikosca.
Her name was Loraine...like a character in an old black-and-white movie. Fascinating sound to it... Loraine...
Bleak shook his head. Why was he thinking that? What was up with him?
He needed to get bounty, pick up Muddy, and Cronin if he'd go, reclaim his boat, and get out of town for a while. Head south along the coast in the cabin cruiser, out of state. Find some way to contact Sean without giving himself up to CCA.
If Sean was really alive.
Wouldn't he
feel
it, if Sean was alive? He'd never really tried to contact Sean's spirit, assuming the boy had been quickly reincarnated. And he'd shied away from the emotional shock that would go with even trying.
Could he contact him now? But Sean was connected with CCA. If he contacted him now, he'd risk putting them in touch with him.
Could Sean be watching him, psychically, for CCA? No. He'd sense it...probably.
Bleak, like other ShadowComm, had ways of keeping psychic surveillance off. When he used the Hidden, he created a mental pulse of psychic white noise, immediately afterward, that blurred the trace of it. He instinctively kept a kind of psychic camouflage around his own emanation. But it didn't always work. There had been the psychic surveillance that had brought the UAV.
Krasnoff.
And what if—
He never finished the thought. A blond head was bobbing along the sidewalk, below, a woman walking beside a man with a bald head, small, round dark glasses, and a black goatee. The girl in a clinging tank top and stretchy leggings; the guy wore a hoodie, the hood back now, and jeans. Lucille and Gandalf.