'To victory,' Zunin said.
'For honor,' added Kim.
We all put some juice in it, and just like that, an alliance was forged. Five A lot of Angelinos think of South Central as a war zone. Maybe not Baghdad circa 2006, but the kind of place where drive-bys are routine and white folks regularly get dragged out of their cars and curb stomped.
The truth is, South Central is a lot of different towns and neighborhoods, and most of them aren't any worse from day to day than the sprawling trailer parks in the Valley and a whole lot less sleazy than most of Hollywood. Still, much of the God-fearing, law-abiding, and more sheltered citizenry thinks of South Central as a powder keg, even if they never speak of it in polite company. They think of it that way because the fuse has been lit before, in 1965 and again in 1992. A lot of people figure when the Big One finally comes, it won't be a quake-it'll be a meltdown in the hoods and barrios.
I got the same vibe as I drove through the streets of Inglewood that afternoon. It was riot weather in South Central L.A.
People were out on the streets, and not just lounging on porches or lawns, or hanging on the street corners. They were moving in packs with nowhere to go and nothing to do but evil. Most were young males, but not all, and the gang colors, wife-beaters and chinos were joined by nursing whites and work coveralls. They were angry crowds, just a bad wind away from becoming mobs.
The people on the streets didn't know what was driving them, but I could see it easily enough. It was the same thing I was trying to do in Crenshaw. Juice was flowing through the streets like floodwater. It had been building for a while, and it put a hateful edge on everything and everyone in the city.
Humans stir up the potency of magic, but it doesn't really agree with them. Magic sparks up some ancient, animal part of the human brain, makes a person feel like there's something they can't see out there in the dark, something bad, something they should fear. It's not an irrational fear-it's older than rationality, and in this case, it's right on the money.
It's the same kind of unease teetering on violence that slithers through the city when the Santa Ana wind blows that old, dry, baleful juice in from the desert. But what was happening in Inglewood was a hell of a lot worse.
Juice was pounding through the concrete of the city like a bad migraine. I'd have to do more than drive around to see what was pumping it, but I had a pretty good idea anyway. Papa Danwe was into most of the same stuff as Rashan, but maybe a little more, a little worse-a few home invasion and carjacking rings, even some street-level extortion. The Haitian allowed independents to set up on his turf-small-timers like my mom-but he kept most of their take for himself. When they didn't come up with the juice, sometimes it got ugly.
The juice Papa Danwe had put on the street was giving people a bad trip, and it was intensified by the spiking crime and violence that was driving it. A perfect storm of negative energy, both magic and mundane. Riot weather.
At Crenshaw Boulevard and West 88th, a car was burning on the side of the street. A small huddle of people stood around it, staring in apparent confusion. Their eyes were glazed, reflecting the light of the fire, and their arms hung limply at their sides. They didn't speak or even look at each other.
A block south, a group of young men were working at the steel shutters of a pawn shop with crowbars and baseball bats. A small figure was crumpled on the ground near them-an old man or woman, probably the owner of the shop. Alive or dead, I couldn't tell.
I kept driving. To my left, I saw another prostrate form curled into a fetal ball, half on the sidewalk and half in the street. It looked like a homeless man. A fortyish woman in a cheap business suit, purse in one hand and cell phone in the other, was kicking him repeatedly, jabbing her spiked heel into his midsection.
I tore my eyes away from the scene just in time to see a ragged figure stumble into the street in front of my car. Ratty clothes hung from a stick-figure frame. His dark skin was drawn and pale, almost waxy, and his lips were cracked and gray. His Afro was an unkempt tangle atop his head, and he was pulling hair out in clumps. The junkie sprawled across the hood of my car as I slammed on the brakes to keep from running him down.
I got out and pulled the guy away from my car, and he collapsed in the middle of the street. I was trying to decide whether to drag him to the sidewalk when there was a crash behind me. The windshield on the passenger side of my car was shattered, and a brick was lying on the hood. People lined the sidewalk, watching me. Any of them could have thrown the brick. None of them looked like they wanted to be friends. I jumped back in my car and sped away. Fifty feet farther down the street, I stopped and retrieved the brick. I'd run it through Wikipedia and track it back to the thrower if I couldn't buff the fucking scratch out of the hood.
I put the car in gear and cruised slowly down the street, watching as the city went mad. As I approached the signal at West 120th, a patrol cruiser sped through the intersection ahead, making for the nearest on-ramp to the freeway. Running from the storm.
I got on my cell and called Chavez.
'Inglewood's going to burn,' I told him when he answered the phone. 'There's enough juice on the street to feed an army a hundred times the size of anything Papa Danwe has.'
'We've gotten reports from Watts, too, Domino. More of the same. He's flooding the fucking torpedo tubes, chola.'
'And we're flooding ours, only we've got bigger torpedoes.'
'We're getting it done, D.'
'I know you are, Chavez, but I don't want riots in Crenshaw.'
'There's not much we can do about that. We pump up the volume like you want, people are going to wig out. You know how it works.'
'Yeah, we can't prepare for war without amping up the juice, and probably things will go to hell. But we don't have to stand around watching people get killed. We can try to control it.'
'What you want me to do, D?'
'Bring in more soldiers-whatever you need. I want to put more people on the street. Protect civilians, homes, businesses. And put everyone on a shift rotation if you can. We don't want our own guys going ape-shit.'
'It'll be complicated, boss. It might slow things down-'
'Bullshit, Chavez. You need more resources, you tell me. I'll get you what you need. But don't tell me you can't do it.'
'Okay, Domino. I'll make it happen.'
'I know you will. I want to know when everything's in place. Call me.'
I clicked off the cell and tossed it on the seat. I turned left onto El Segundo and kept driving, though I wasn't really sure what I was looking for. I knew Papa Danwe had ramped up his operations, but most of that would be safely hidden from view unless I really went looking for it. Anyway, the juice was all I needed to see.
The juice.
All that juice was pointless unless Papa Danwe could do something with it. Just like our outfit in Crenshaw, the sorcerer needed to channel it, contain it, so it could be tapped when and where he needed it.
I stopped on the side of the street and got out. I dropped a protective spell on the Lincoln. It wouldn't hold up long if people started chucking bricks at it or set it on fire, but it was better than nothing.
It wasn't easy to get at the juice. There was plenty of it, but it wasn't mine, wasn't flowing on my territory. The tags were pulling it out of the air and the asphalt and channeling it somewhere else, for someone else.
I started walking, following the graffiti and the magic that flowed through it like blood through arteries. It didn't take long to see the patterns. All the juice from the surrounding blocks was flowing to a central location, like the drain at the bottom of a swimming pool. Papa Danwe was filling Inglewood with magic and then sucking it dry.
I followed the juice to an old factory that hadn't been used since the American economy had a manufacturing sector. Almost every inch of the grime-darkened brick was covered in layers of intricate tags. A row of large windows, many of them broken out or painted over, extended the length of each side of the building just below the roofline. Back in the day, they'd probably provided what little ventilation the factory enjoyed. Chain-link fencing topped by razor wire surrounded the site. Unlike the sorry excuse for a building, the fence looked new.
I ducked into the dark recess of an empty storefront across the street. 'It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear,' I said. The eye in the sky spell is like my own invisible skycam, and I can even rig it for audio. I sent it flying toward the factory at an altitude of about fifty feet.
When it drew even with the chain-link fence, the eye stopped, like it had run into a wall. That, of course, was exactly what had happened. The factory grounds were warded.
