At any rate, collecting extra names was a good place to start.
Lia checked the list of voicemail messages waiting on her phone as she drove. There were quite a number of missed calls, as she tended to leave the ringer off. Many of them were from a number identified as belonging to ATLAS RECOVERY ASSOCIATES.
Lia hit the reply button. Moments later a voice chirped in her ear: “Atlas Debt Recovery, is this Ms. Camellia Flores speaking?”
“Yeah, you guys called me, I think?”
“Yes, Ms. Flores, we’ve left a number of messages,” the bill collector said, managing to sound both solicitous and judgmental at the very same time. “I’m Marco, by the way. Is it all right if I call you Cammie?”
“It sure is, Marco,” Lia said.
“Good, Cammie. Thank you. Well, then, were you aware that you still owe-”
“Y’know,” Lia said, losing interest in his spiel now that her goal in calling back had been achieved. “This isn’t really the best time after all. Call ya back.”
“Cammie, wait!” Marco cried, with real desperation straining his voice. “Camellia, Ms. Flores, please, it’s
Lia folded up her phone as she came to a red light at Magnolia.
Glancing in her rearview mirror, she noticed two plain, almost identical black cars idling amidst the ranks of traffic that had lined up behind her at the light. They looked like a pair of unmarked police cars, although she somehow didn’t think that was what they were.
“Have they been following us?” she asked of Black Tom. He looked in their Mazda’s side mirror and raised an eyebrow.
Something about those cars made her nervous. Just in case, just to see, she turned right without signaling and headed east on Chandler, where a two-lane bike path had replaced the train tracks that once ran down the middle of the extra-broad street. She was going out of her way to see if they’d follow.
They followed, all right. Both cars.
“
Tom faded into a state of semi-solidity in the back seat of the closest of those two black cars when it rolled to a stop behind Lia at the next red light. There were two shaved-headed men sitting up front, and neither of the stalkers noticed his silent appearance. He reached out and put a hand over each of their faces.
They dropped into sleep so swiftly that it looked as though Tom had pulled their power cords. He dipped into their undefended minds, ascertaining that they and others like them were, as far as they knew, on the payroll of a powerful ‘businessman’ they never expected to meet. Even their dealings with his lieutenants were transacted mostly by phone. When they dared to whisper about their boss, the name they used was ‘Mickey Hardface.’
Or, in Spanish, ‘Miguel Caradura.’ The very name Tom and Lia had seen stenciled on the door to what he’d called
This was getting serious, then. The nocturnal Tzitzimime, worse than useless when it came to numbers and addresses, must at least have furnished el Rey with a description of Lia’s car and the general area they’d chased her to last night. He couldn’t tell when or where they’d picked up their current tails, only that it must have been within the last few minutes, since departing from the coffee shop. His sentiments fell somewhere between a hope and an assumption that their pursuers hadn’t seen Lia meeting with Ingrid Redstone, the woman who’d asked her to help find a missing member of her family. A relation claimed by Mictlantecuhtli wasn’t one the lady would enjoy seeing again, although even if Tom could have told her so he doubted it would’ve brought much comfort. He had to admit that Lia might be right, that the lovely Miss Redstone was better off being encouraged to walk away. He presumed she’d be all right as long as she did so.
A left-turn arrow flashed green in front of them and Lia drove on. The second black car followed after her, although the one Tom was in did not. Traffic piled up behind it, and it wasn’t half a minute before an angry horn sounded, waking the pair of napping henchmen in the front seats with a violent start. The driver stomped on the gas, taking the turn onto Vineland a hair’s breadth ahead of oncoming traffic while he scanned for Lia, and promptly plowed them right into the tailgate of a pickup truck that was making a slow turn at the end of the next block.
Lia’s little car was long gone, the goons noted in dismay. They exchanged an uneasy look as two big, angry rednecks stepped out of the truck they’d collided with and started toward them, displaying prison tattoos along with an unfriendly attitude.
Feeling satisfied with his work on a deeply personal level, Black Tom moved on.
Lia’s car picked up speed as she headed up Vineland. The remaining pursuer followed, tailing her much more aggressively now and cutting people off to do it.
Black Tom poked his head out from under the front end of this second black sedan, as though he were somehow clinging to its undercarriage. Neither his clothes nor his gray-streaked hair moved in the breeze generated by the car’s momentum. Even his hat stayed firmly planted atop his head, as if wind resistance meant nothing to him at all. Which, in fact, it didn’t.
Tom reached up the black car’s grille, found the hood release, and popped it. The hood flew up, blocking the entire windshield and obscuring the occupants’ view of the road. Tom heard two grown men yelp in surprise from inside the car.
The unseen driver slammed on the brakes. Tom became diffuse, letting his awareness rise up above the scene while the vehicle he’d been hovering under fishtailed to a stop in the middle of the road, snarling traffic in both directions. Horns blared. Curses were shouted. Both lanes clogged up, making the street impassable. The man in the dark sedan’s passenger seat jumped out to slam the hood closed, but Lia had already zipped through the next light up the street as it changed from yellow to red, and was gone.
She bumped fists with Black Tom as soon as he re-appeared in the seat beside her and they made their getaway, leaving busy Vineland just above Burbank before heading further north on Lankershim.
Some little bit of time later they pulled into the lot at Potter’s Yard. Lia parked next to a gleaming new BMW, a sporty little thing, and eyed it as she got out. It probably belonged to some production manager looking to rent plants at a later date, she guessed. She couldn’t imagine anyone stuffing sacks of fertilizer into that trunk, or cramming potted seedlings into that luxurious back seat.
Lia’s black cat blinked at the sound of her car door closing-a sound its sensitive ears registered and recognized even from the distant, shady pocket of the property where Tom had left it earlier. The cat shook its head and stretched as the ex-necromancer’s wandering mind reassumed control of its nervous system, his ghost relaxing into its skin after the strange, yoga-like exertion involved in sending himself out.
Comfortably planted back in the only body he had left to call his own, Tom trotted off to greet his girl.
He ran up as Lia was crossing the parking lot. Her mental image of ‘Black Tom’ had vanished from the passenger seat at the instant the cat awoke, which Lia accepted as a matter of course. She didn’t even think about such things anymore. She crouched down to pet the cat, her Tom in any form, while he purred and nuzzled at her ankles, making her feel at home.
This, she thought, returning to the checklist in her mind, was the third and final thing she required for her planned operation: a place to go to ground. A base of operations, a place to protect and be protected by.
This, right here, Potter’s Yard, was hers. Her roots were here (at least those she’d set down for herself, with Tom’s assistance), and by nightfall she intended to have the place hexed up so tight Saint Anthony himself would never be able to find her. Nothing was going to track her back here, not ever again. Not if she had anything to say about it.
She looked up at the sky before she started across to the office shack. There were still a few hours left
