“Yeah,” I said looking back through the open door. I saw a mischievous glint in the crow’s eyes.
“Oh, nothing!” he said. “You’ll figure it out. Tell Dwayne I said hi.”
“Yeah, you tell the Maven I said fuck off.” Again the machine gun laugh and then a quick “caw, caw” of excitement over the new treasure; then Lou was airborne with the ring. He flew away from the brooding, still-hidden sun.
I called Dragon in the cab headed to West Sixty-Ninth. I told her the address. “That’s 6-Pacc territory,” she said. “A bunch of different gangs have carved that area up, Ballard. You’re walking into the E/S 62 Crips’ house. If any of their buddies want to join in killing your ass, you could have half a dozen gangs on you. You want me to meet you there?”
“No,” I replied. “You get everything set up, and get our final destination locked down. We’ll meet you there.”
“You sure you don’t want me to at least contact some other members of the order to…”
“No fucking Nightwise,” I said, sharper than I had intended. I rubbed my face, felt the scruff of my beard shadow, and felt very old and very tired. All of my cheats were coming undone. I fumbled around to see if I still had any more drugs from my fans, eschewing the weed in my present condition, or another hit of speed from the bartender. Nope. I was tapped out, not even a fucking cigarette. “The last fucking thing I need is the goddamned Maven or some of her robots up my ass about getting out of her fucking town.”
Dragon chuckled. “It’s hard to believe you used to be her golden boy.”
“Fuck her,” I said. “‘Her fucking town’, bullshit. It’s my fucking town.”
“I’ll be sure to bring a tape measure,” Dragon said. “If she shows, you two can have a pissing contest, and I’ll see who gets greater distance.” She hung up. I groaned a little and laid my head back; it was starting to throb.
It was a quarter to six when the cab dropped me off a half-block from the address and took off like a bat out of hell. I walked, hell, weaved a bit down the sidewalk. There was a flare again; my venerable, damaged, cranky, unresponsive nervous system couldn’t ignore the presence of power, real power close by, too close. I spun and tried to think of some kind of a defensive charm, something simple, but my brain was flat. There was nothing there, and the power I had felt was gone, just like in the bar. I tried to convince myself I was getting paranoid. I kept swearing off coke and speed, and this was one of the myriad reasons why. But the never-sleeping, rat-brained bastard in me knew better. That was not a paranoid shiver; that was someone in the fucking Life messing with me. I quickened my pace and headed for the address Lou had given me for Dwayne.
There were about a dozen expensive cars parked on the street and in the narrow drive around the shitty-looking house on Sixty-Ninth. Urban ghosts, men standing around on street corners, huddled, all sporting Crips blue, eyed me as I walked up to the door. I had their attention. They started to come up but then they whispered to each other and glided back into the darkness. I looked around to see what had chased them off, and that was when I noticed the bloody streaks of fingerprints, of a partial handprint on the slightly ajar door.
I tried to clear my skull of all the shit I had poured in there and managed to push out some of my fatigue and the fuzz of the drugs and booze. I pushed the door open and found a severed hand greeting me on the floor in a pool of fresh blood. I stepped around it. There was a dead man on the stairwell that went to the second floor. He had a pistol in the one hand he still had attached. I smelled no cordite; I didn’t think he had gotten a chance to get a round off.
To my right was a large room that may have been designed as a living room. If it was, then some serious cosmic irony was on display. Dead men were everywhere, at least a dozen. Unfired guns, thousands of dollars in loose bills, and cooling bodies carpeted the floor. Overturned card tables and broken laptop computers were scattered around the room; one laptop still showed a spreadsheet program on its blood-smeared screen. There was a dead man impaled to the smashed plasterboard wall with a folded metal chair. Next to him was a whiteboard that was sectioned off into a grid with names and odds. Painted over the grid in blood were the words, “Second warning, next I get SRS.” The impaled man had a loaded Uzi machine gun lying at his feet. No spent shells on the floor anywhere, no stray bullet holes this kind of firepower produced. I heard a scraping noise farther back in the house, and I moved over the dead toward the sound.
The next room back was a dining room. It was adjacent to a kitchen. The room smelled the way I imagined Hell would smell. A musty, wet-animal scent, the stink of loosed bowel mixed with blood and fear-piss. There were more dead here, a lot—bodies stacked on bodies. More impotent guns, more cash discarded as casually as the lives had been. At the center of the room was a makeshift arena, made up of doors turned sideways and connected to hinges so they could be folded up. There were two dogs, a chocolate pit bull and a reddish-brown Rottweiler mix, in the center of the arena. The Rottweiler was dead, his throat torn out. His body was crisscrossed with old scars. The pit was struggling to keep breathing, his eyes
