The aura of the place made her nauseous. Like a fish tank when the gravel has been stirred; the psychic atmosphere was muddy, murky, and tainted.
"Can I help you?"
Dressed all m black, he appeared from between two rows of high bookshelves. He had meant to surprise, even frighten her; she locked down her startled reflex before it could betray her. With eyes half-lidded and feigned boredom she said, "I suppose you might. I was told I could find a copy of Crowley"s Moonchild here "
He could have posed for a recruiting poster for the SS; though middle-aged, he was in superb physical condition, from his black-booted feet to his blond crewcut. Blue eyes, pale as watered milk, seemed to bore right through to her soul. She strengthened her shields a bit as she felt him probe at her. This was the kind of creature High Priest Azarel only dreamed of being.His eyes narrowed as she resisted his probing. "Are we playing games, little lady?" he asked in a near-whisper. "I know what you are."
She dropped all pretense. Since he"d seen through the act, perhaps she could startle truth out of him with bluntness. "No games, not today. Not unless you had anything to do with three dead kids."
"Those children on the news last night?" He shook his head. "We don"t do children. Only consenting adults here, white-knight lady. We don"t kill, either; that isn"t the Way."
She got a flash, then from him, there was no doubt of it; it reeked of his aura full of emotions.
First of fear (another"s), then of s.e.xual arousal, then fear (his own). Then a picture, carried to her by the emotion, and a name. A woman And she heard herself saying, "Then what happened to Dana Grotern last week?"
Oh h.e.l.l, she thought belatedly, as his cool surface vanished. That"s torn it! Some day I am going to have to put a governor on my mouth!
"That was an accident, b.i.t.c.h " the man was snarling, "but I doubt that much matters to you "
She put up full shields just in time; he hit her with a psi-bolt that would have knocked Mark to the ground. She gave a little with it, judging his strength, then recovered. She had his measure now; if this was his best, then he was far below her level of expertise.
The first bolt was followed by two more, equally ineffective; she could see them hitting her outermost shields and dissipating in a shower of sparks.
He wasn"t slow on the uptake, though, not this one; after three levinbolts it was obvious that she was stronger than he so he rushed her, hands poised to strike, his multiple shadows cast by the many overhead lights rushing crazily with him.
Tai Kwon Do, she recognized with the back of her mind. The front was preparing to meet his attack.
She ducked under and around the strike; she made her own, felt her foot connect solidly, the side kick making her miss a breath.
Bad form sensei would have your hide, fool! Tighten up; balance, center your ki, dammit But she did send him reeling into his own bookshelves with sore ribs. The shelves went over in a crash of splintering wood; he went with them. Using the momentum of the kick, she spun around to face him as he scrambled up out of the wreckage of books and wood. Unfortunately, since he"d been moving in the direction of the kick, she hadn"t done him any real damage.
He circled her warily, his boot-soles making scuffing sounds on the linoleum as he moved, looking for an opening. Behind her she heard the street door slam open, and then close; she heard the sound of running feet she went alert for an attack from behind, then recognized Mark"s step, and dismissed the need for wariness in that direction.
But Mark stopped just outside the combat area.
There was no further sound from him; after a moment, she realized there wasn"t going to be.
That creep! He"s going to stand around and watch! I"ll kill him!
She gave Jorden a sucker-opening. He took it. This time he wasn"t moving in the direction of the force; but even as she delivered a neat chop (Good! Solid!) that must have numbed his arm to the shoulder, he got in an unexpected blow of his own. He missed her throat, but got her eye with the side of the hand, thank the G.o.ds, not a thrust.
Agh!
She hissed in pain; her head rocked back. She danced away, her sneakers squeaking on the floor; seeing stars, and getting mad. She felt the blood rushing to her face, making her flush with outrage, and making her eye throb.
Lock it down; you know what the sensei says. The one who brings anger into the circle is the one who will lose....
With an effort she shoved her anger back into its proper compartment, felt herself cool, and faced off her opponent again. He was grinning with satisfaction at having scored; she locked down another surge of anger called up by that insolent grin. She could feel her eye starting to swell, the tissues puffing and the vision out of that eye narrowing to a slit.
Dammit, that hurts.
That hurt and that loss of vision would put her at a little disadvantage.
Not as much as he thinks, though.... I wonder if I can sucker him twice? Well, nothing ventured She faltered a little, shaking her head, though it made her eye hurt and throb to do so, feigning that she was having trouble seeing. The second time she did so, he rushed her; exactly the way she wanted him to.
She ducked, came up in low-line foot to the stomach he folded around it, then started to unfold then she executed a spin, and foot to the crotch.
Both hits were clean; felt absolutely solid, and looked textbook pure as she connected. She felt a little more redeemed for getting the black eye.
As he bent over, mouth open in a silent scream, she finished him off with a chop to the base of the neck.
Forgive your unworthy pupil, sensei. I don"t want to kill him, sensei I just want to hurt him. I want to hurt him a lot. I want him to know what it feels like to be hurt instead of inflicting the hurt.
He went down on his face and didn"t get up again.
From behind her came the sound of applause.
"Thanks a bunch, Magnum," Di said sourly, as Mark applauded the end of the fight. "You"re always there when I need you."
"You were doing okay," he replied with a grin, still leaning against the bookshelf. "It didn"t look to me like you needed help."
"This ain"t chopped liver," she retorted, gingerly touching the edges of her rapidly blackening eye.
"Ah this is going to be a bad one. Put the cuffs on that jerk and go call the office, huh?"
He pulled the cuffs out of his back pocket and walked over to bestraddle the body on the floor.
"What"re we charging him with?" he asked, bending over the unconscious p.o.r.n peddler and snapping the cuffs on his wrists, locking them behind his back.
"a.s.sault, for one; he came after me. I"ll be perfectly happy to press charges. You might even get him on a.s.sault with a deadly I don"t know how they view martial arts in this state, and he"s had more than a bit of Tae Kwon Do. I"ve got more than that to pin on him, though. You might want to talk to your friends in Vice; there"ll be a gal named Dana Grotern in a coma in one of the hospitals he put her there. She was playing M to his S last week, when they had a little accident. Seems he didn"t bother to find out she had allergies before he gagged her. She was choking, he thought she was acting."
"Huh," Mark said, shaking his head as he gave Jorden a quick pat-down. "Yeah, we look hard enough, we can probably find enough to get him on that. Any link to our cult?" He stood up.
Di"s eye was becoming rather impressive. "No, worse luck. This lot follows standard Crowley, right out of the book. I got some empathic flashes from him, and I"d know the signs of that backwards and blindfolded. It ain"t our bunch."
"Okay, I"ll get on the horn, then I"ll take you back to Aunt Nita. You look like you could use some TLC.".
"And I"ll tell her," Di replied, both amused and annoyed, "That you are the one who did this to me!"
Crazy Jake followed Timbuktoo into the no-man"s land of the old railyard with a mixture of hope and disbelief. Timbuktoo claimed he"d found this stash "Cases, man, cases! Just waitin"! Man, I"m tellin" you, cases!"
It was a b.u.m"s dream Jake just hoped it wasn"t a dream.
Timbuk said he"d found this stash of wine in the culvert under the abandoned S&P rail line. He"d spent last night trying to empty it by himself, but reason and guilt had got the better of him, and tonight he"d invited some friends to help him polish it off. Crazy Jake, Tonto, old Dusty, and Pete.
Certainly Timbuk had been somewhere last night; he hadn"t shown up to panhandle the Johns on p.o.r.n row, and he hadn"t shown up at the mission to crash. And he smelled like a distillery right now; his walk unsteady, his hands waving expansively as he talked.
Jake didn"t have a thin dime to his name, and he was starting to get the shakes. Before too long he"d start seeing them snakes. He shuffled along last in line, and hoped that Timbuk wasn"t seeing snakes of his own; he needed a good snort, needed it bad.
They trudged single file down the abandoned right-of-way, weeds higher than their heads in places.
Jake could remember when nothing would grow on the right-of-way. He could remember b.u.mming on the S&P freighters that had come roaring out of here under great clouds of steam. He could even remember back to where all the b.u.mming had started, the Big One, the Great Depression. Kids these days didn"t know what a real depression was. A real depression was not walking too close to tall buildings, "cause somebody might be taking a notion to jump. A real depression was meeting bankers on the b.u.m. A real depression was finding a kid dead of starvation "bout once a day along the line. n.o.body starved in the US of A these days, unless they were too d.a.m.nfool stubborn to get help. A lot of folks starved back then. A lot of folks froze to death, up north, Chi-town way, where Jake came from.
Nowadays, someone froze, it made national news.
The weeds rustled, and out of habit Jake started, looking over his shoulder. He scolded himself afterward. No railroad bulls, not here, not these days. n.o.body here but five worn-out old b.u.ms, hoping for a boozy miracle.
"Down here " hissed Timbuk through the gap in his teeth, and he led his buddies on a skidding slide down the top of the embankment and into the culvert. The weeds crackled and snapped as the others plowed through them as best they could.
It was dry down here this time of year. Dry and sheltered from the cold winds. Of course, the weather had been real weird this year; hot as summer, it was, hot as h.e.l.l. But you never knew when the weather was going to turn, and when it did, it was no bad thing to have a tidy shelter lined up.
Especially nowadays. All these kids, all this fallout from the itty-bitty depression they were having now. These kids, they were taking the good spots away from the regulars; taking the bridges, the underpa.s.ses in town. And they were too healthy, too young to fight. It wasn"t fair. It wasn"t any d.a.m.ned fair. An old b.u.m oughtn"t to have to fight for the place he"d always been able to claim as his own. An old b.u.m hadn"t ought to turn up at the mission to find all the beds gone.
Jake was last; he slid down the slippery gra.s.s to land beside the feet of the other four. They were staring at the darkness beneath the culvert, jaws dropping. Jake"s eyes followed theirs, and he felt his jaw drop in imitation of his fellows.
"Ho-lee s.h.i.t " he mumbled, gazing with benumbed satisfaction at what was under the plastic tarp that Timbuktoo was holding up. Timbuk was grinning from ear to ear, the gap in the front of his mouth wide enough to drive a truck through, his whole body saying "didn"t I tell you?"
"What I tell you guys, huh?" he crowed. "What I tell you?"
"Timbuk, ol" buddy you were not wrong," Dusty hacked.
Beneath the plastic tarp were cardboard boxes, each one holding twelve big beautiful bottles of vino.
It was gonna be a cracklin" rosie night for sure. There were Jake counted six, seven, eight cases. And that didn"t include the case already opened, that Timbuk had started on last night.
"Oh man" Jake said reverently. "Oh, man!"
"Help yourselves, boys," Timbuk said magnanimously. "Drinks is on me."
Before Timbuk could change his mind, Jake had a case open and had grabbed up four bottles.
Twist-off caps too oh man, the livin" don"t get any easier than this. He found himself a nice, comfortable spot in the culvert, opened the first bottle, and poured it down his throat as fast as he could gulp. The shakes were hitting pretty good, and he had to steady his bottle with both hands but he didn"t spill a drop, nossir. He waited for the booze to hit; as soon as he stopped shaking, he relaxed into his chosen spot and began sipping at his second bottle.
The third brought a pleasant buzz to his thoughts. The fourth brought oblivion.
So he never saw the five barbarically clad figures step into the culvert to see what their baited trap had caught this time.
Pablo tossed back his beer and waited, sullenly, for the stranger to speak. He couldn"t see the man"s face in the shadows of the smoky bar; he had no idea who he was talking to. The note with the folded bill had just said that he wanted to talk, not what about.
But fifty bucks buys a lot of attention in the barrio.
The clothes were okay; loose white suit, like about any other dude. The color of the hand holding the beer bottle which was all he could see of the man was okay. Of course he wouldn"t have gotten past the door of this bar if he hadn"t looked like he fit. Pablo remembered last year, when some yuppie gringo reporter had tried to get in. Broken jaw don"t do a dude much good on the six o"clock news.
Maybe the man was in dope, looking for runners, dealers, protection. He didn"t smell like "cop" to Pablo. But if the man was new in dope, Pablo was going to think hard about turning him down. The big boys wouldn"t deal nice with somebody pushing in on their turf.
Then again, maybe Pablo would deal with him. There was a power about this man a power Pablo wished he had. This man could hold your attention just by sitting there drinking a beer. Somehow Pablo knew that when the man spoke, he would listen. He would have to. Like a puma, the man was; like a jaguar. Which was a good sign; Pablo"s gang was the Jaguars.
"I hear," the man spoke at last, "that you hombres think you"re pretty good, you Jaguars. I hear other people think the same."
Pablo had been right about the voice. It was deep; you felt it as much as heard it. It was a voice that could issue a command and be obeyed without an argument. It was a voice that would put chicks on their knees. Power, said the voice to the back of Pablo"s head. I have Power. More Power than you dream.
"We"re okay," Pablo shrugged, not indulging in any of the usual bulls.h.i.t. You didn"t bulls.h.i.t a man like this one. "We got a good turf, and we hold it."
"I hear you don"t take anybody but Mestizo."
"You hear right." He toyed with the beer bottle, making little wet rings linking together into a chain on the tabletop.
"You got a reason?" the man asked and Pablo knew he"d have to tell him.
"We"re the first people; we were here before anybody," he said, becoming more pa.s.sionate with each word. "Everything we had got stolen from us; first by the Spanish, then the whites. So we"re takin" some of that back, the Jaguars. Takin" back what"s ours by right."
"So." The man leaned forward, and Pablo got a good look at him. He nearly died of envy. The man looked like a movie star, a statue, a G.o.d! That manner, that voice and now that face! What couldn"t he, Pablo, do with a combination like that?
"I hear pa.s.sion in you, hombre. I hear a heart, I hear guts. I hear a warrior. Tell me something, man you interested in doing something about this, something real? Something big?"
Oh man give me a chance Pablo thought, and said, as level and cool as he could, "Try me. Try us."
The man smiled; predator"s smile, jaguar"s smile. "You ready to go back to the old G.o.ds the warrior"s G.o.ds? You ready to give them what they need? You gotta pay for power, hombre. You think you can come up with the coin? Warrior"s coin?"
Pablo nodded, but before he could answer, the man rolled on, his own words hot beneath the ice-cool of his tone.
"You think you can handle yourself smart be a warrior and deal with the new world? You think you can deal in the big time? You think you can handle more than a gang?"
"Like?"
"Like maybe an army?"
Tuf couldn"t figure out where he was. One minute he"d been following this chick oh man, that had been an armful, long black hair, round and soft in all the right places, a come-on look in her eyes, and a promising wiggle to her hips the next minute, bonk.
No idea who hit him; never saw them. Now he was waking up cold and confused, and G.o.d knew where.
It looked like a warehouse, or something. He was just about bare-a.s.s naked except for a single strip of cloth. He was lying on cold cement, and his head hurt like h.e.l.l.
Whatever it was, wherever he was, the building was empty; there was real dim light coming from a couple of exit signs, but that was it. Enough to hint at a high ceiling, far-off walls. The echoes when he moved told him empty.He started to get to his feet, and found that one of his ankles was tied to a support beam. He tried to get the knots undone, but they were too tight, and he didn"t have anything to cut the rope with. He swore and struggled, but only succeeded in ripping one of his fingernails off.
Suddenly light.
Blinding light from a fixture directly over his head struck him with an almost physical blow. The light was so bright that it threw everything outside the circle it delineated into absolute darkness. Tuf cringed, and shaded his eyes, but with no result; he couldn"t see the rest of his surroundings anymore.
Footsteps; sound of bare feet scuffing against cement. Into the circle of light stepped an old enemy.