Suicide Kings, page 15
Or is she? Why did I have to be the one to deal with that toxin spirit? Why didn’t she have someone she knew deal with it? If she knew who the fuck I was, why not tell me and save me a ton of trouble going in and out of the fucking Zone?
I suppose none of that matters. She didn’t cause my predicament, I did. I started to care about these people. I thought I could help, after the shit I brought down on them when Quetzalcoatl burned the city.
They’re as tight a community as any I’ve seen. They share childcare, take turns cooking, getting groceries, pooling resources. Quite a little sixties hippie commune they got going there. I just wanted to help.
Or maybe I just want what they have. Mage communities are a fucking joke. We’re a bunch of backstabbing narcissists who measure everything by how much magic we can use. That’s like measuring self-worth based on who can piss the farthest. Amanda’s family might sound like an extreme case, but they’re not. They’ve just got some added wrinkles.
The pastor’s making her community work. She’s part of it. She’s not creating a cult of personality, which automatically makes me not trust her. There’s something pretty fucked up when you don’t trust somebody because they might be trustworthy.
I head into Inglewood not far from the church or the Toxic Zone. Peeling billboards that haven’t been replaced in years tell me about the magic of Disneyland, warn me about the dangers of syphilis, beckon me to gamble in Las Vegas.
I stole a beater car decades ago, ugly as fuck. An old Honda with a weird aqua-puke blueish-green paintjob. Couldn’t recall ever seeing one like it. Didn’t really think about until I got on the road. All of a sudden they’re everywhere. Same car, all over the place. I didn’t notice them before, but once my attention was drawn to it, I couldn’t stop seeing the damn things.
The Vegas sign makes me think of that. So do the other signs I go by, an ad for the Bellagio on the side of a bus, the Venetian on a public bike rack, and two benches for some washed-out entertainer showing at the Venetian. I haven’t thought about Vegas in a long time, but now that it has my attention, I can’t stop seeing it.
Maybe. One of the problems with being a mage is we attract magical shit. It sort of seeks us out. I knew one girl whose knack was controlling insects, butterflies mostly. They loved her. She fucking hated them. Couldn’t get rid of the damn things. Butterflies, moths, June bugs. Buzzed around her head like it was a hundred-fifty-watt bulb. She spent more time zapping the fuckers than she did anything else.
That’s what omens are like. They buzz around us whether we see them or not. Or maybe they don’t. That’s the problem. Humans are pattern-matching monkeys. We’ll see dragons in clouds, rabbits in a popcorn ceiling. Am I just noticing it more, or is something trying to draw my attention to it? By the time we’re sure that something’s an omen, it’s usually too late to do anything about it.
I pull into the old Forum parking lot off Manchester. It’s an indoor sports arena and concert venue. Or it used to be. It’s seen better days. It took a hit in the fires, though not as bad as a lot of places. Now it’s more of a backdrop for a huge open-air market that sells everything from brand new washers and dryers to black market weapons.
Was a man, Jack MacFee, I called him a friend a time or two, who used to run a booth at a drive-in-theater-turned-swap-meet before the whole place burned down. He sold New Age tchotchkes to the normals and more useful items to the magic set. He died a month ago. I killed him. It was a mercy, but it’s still a gut punch. He was looking at a few more weeks of life in agonizing pain from the cancer that had spread through his entire body. My way, he went quiet, peaceful, and with family who loved him.
His granddaughter Cassie runs his shop now, relocated to the Forum parking lot. I’ve only seen her once for a few minutes since that day when she asked if I could ease his pain and I said yes.
She made it plain that though it was the best thing to do, she didn’t want to see me after that. Don’t blame her. Well, business is business, and I need something only her grandfather, and now hopefully she, can provide. Finding Cassie’s booth takes a while. She’s moved, and the place has become more of a maze since I saw it a month ago.
The Forum Lot, as it’s known now, isn’t too far from the edge of the Toxic Zone. Close enough to remember it’s there, far enough to not have to think about it too hard. With that hard edge blocking the east, and nowhere else big enough or open enough that wasn’t razed in the fires, it’s become the main place to hawk your wares. One part carnival, one part Bartertown, it’s a lifeline for a lot of people. Things previously taken for granted have become essential survival tools.
It isn’t that L.A. hasn’t recovered from the fires, it’s that it hasn’t recovered equally, which nobody with half a brain expected it to. The same people getting screwed before are still getting screwed, only worse.
I haven’t seen how the last five years have played out, but from what I’ve heard it’s been a nightmare. Violence, food and water shortages, vigilantism, rampant crime. Not enough manpower to police the city so people started doing it themselves. You can imagine how well that’s worked out. Though let’s be honest, the police would have done a hell of a lot worse.
L.A. used to be a bunch of towns that got swallowed up and turned into neighborhoods. Now a lot of them have reverted. Some have put up their own walls and have their own security. The city’s broken along the lines you would expect. Rich white neighborhoods on one side of a wall, poor Black and brown neighborhoods on the other.
The Toxic Zone makes it all worse. It’s stuck over where the majority of Blacks and Latinos lived before the fires. The racial implications haven’t been lost on anyone, not even the mages. I’ve heard of fights breaking out between mages who say they’re doing everything they can to fix it and those who think they’re stalling because that way they can kill more black and brown people. It’s not that simple, and at the same time, it is.
But for all that, the Forum Lot holds together. Only place I know with more than a few thousand people that doesn’t have a weekly double-digit body count. People don’t just work here, they live here too, and any racial strife seems swallowed up in a sea of every ethnicity in L.A.
I’m sure it’ll go to shit soon, these things always do. But for now I can’t go ten feet without seeing every shade of skin color there is. I pass food stalls with smells of every cuisine in the world, though some of their ingredients might be a little suspect. People sell electronics, clothes, medication, appliances, scrap. Only things not blatantly out in the open are guns, but if you want a grenade launcher, I can point you to three different dealers within fifty feet of each other.
Cassie’s booth is near the Forum building itself. It’s partitioned off from everyone else by big, blue tarp walls. She has a couple long tables out front as counter space and a big tent in the back. If she’s kept up the store philosophy, she sells anything and everything, with a specialty in hard-to-find magic reagents, knickknacks, and the occasional “How The Fuck Did You Get Your Hands On That?”
Parked to the right is a bright green 1963 Buick Invicta. Thing shines in the sun with a mirror polish. She loves that car. Almost as much as she loved her grandfather.
She’s got help now. I go up to a woman at the table who’s reorganizing a large jewelry display. There’s a family resemblance and the age is about right that she’s probably Cassie’s mom.
“Hi,” I say. “Looking for Cassie. Need a specialty item that Jack had at one time. Was wondering if she still had it.”
“Specialty item?” she says, confused. Ah. Might not be in on the real family business.
“Cassie would know.”
“Sure. She’s in the tent. I’ll just go back and—” Her face goes a little blank and then brightens up. “I’m sorry, can I help you?”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Cassie says, coming up behind her. “I got this.”
MacFee’s granddaughter has his eyes, but that’s about it. MacFee was a bear of a man. Big bones wrapped in big meat, a massive red beard that spilled down his chest. Cassie’s slender, lean-muscled. Her mohawk is swept down one side of her otherwise shaved skull.
“Okay, honey,” the woman says. She looks a little confused and then smiles, goes to the other end of the table, and starts reorganizing, Cassie’s eyes on her filled with concern.
“I take it she’s not up to speed on the family business?” The tent is also a portal to a warehouse up in Lancaster where MacFee kept all his special merchandise. I can see where she wouldn’t want anyone to wander in there.
“Most of them don’t know. This is just to get her out of the house. With Granddad gone . . .” She seems to remember who she’s talking to and her eyes go hard, voice curt. “What do you want?” She doesn’t want me here. I don’t want to be here. We’re both equally unhappy with the situation.
“I’m looking for an item Jack had for tracking ghosts.” One eyebrow ticks up a notch.
“Isn’t that the sort of thing you already do? What do you need that for?”
“For something it’s not meant for,” I say. If it were Jack, I might feel comfortable telling him. He was someone who took confidentiality seriously. That’s why people did business with him. I’ve met Cassie once.
“Brass disk about the width of one of those mini-CDs. Splits in half on a hinge,” I say. “One side has a compass, the other side has a gauge for distance. Should be a button on one side.”
“Huh. Gimme a minute.” She heads into the tent. I people-watch as I wait. Haggling, bartering, paying through the nose and thinking they got a great deal. People adjust to a new normal by throwing the skin of the old on top of it.
“Got it,” Cassie says, stepping out of the tent with a hinged brass disk in her hand. She comes to the table and cracks it open.
The compass is spinning like mad and the gauge is springing back and forth across the chart. Time to see if this thing actually works. Like Cassie said, tracking ghosts is the sort of thing I can already do on my own.
The Forum Lot has some Wanderers in it, but the Forum building itself is packed with Haunts. The building didn’t take a lot of fire damage, but there was a church service meeting inside at the time. Some three thousand or so people went to meet their maker from smoke inhalation.
I pick up the device and point it at the building. The compass goes a little more steady, sweeping in a narrower range, but there’s still too much background noise. Or it just doesn’t work.
I focus my attention on a nearby Haunt in the parking lot not far from the booth. The compass needle snaps to a stop and the gauge shows me that it’s about twenty feet away. I press the button on the side, triggering some mechanism inside. I hope this isn’t really a grenade.
I move a few feet to the right and left, a few steps closer to the Haunt, a few steps further away. The needle and distance gauge stay locked on the ghost.
“Mind if I check this out for a few minutes?”
“Knock yourself out,” she says, and heads back into the tent. I walk through the crowd focusing on Haunts, Wanderers, the occasional Echo. It seems to track whatever I’ve got my attention on. I press the button and it stays locked on until I press it again.
Neat trick, and might be what I need, but maybe not as useful as it sounds. I don’t see how anyone but a necromancer could use it easily, and we can pretty much track a ghost like a bloodhound. Another mage could cast a spell to see ghosts and track them from there, I suppose, but it’d be kind of a pain in the ass.
Still, might come in handy. I’m hoping I can repurpose it to track Werther’s soul outside the estate. No idea if I can, but it’s the only thing I can think of right now. If I can lock in on him from inside the estate pocket-universe and then come back out again, theoretically it could stay targeted on him and lead me to the location, if there is one, of his soul. Maybe.
Cassie’s behind the counter when I get back, talking to another customer. I see her slip a Hand of Glory into a bag under the table and hand it to the man who looks furtively back and forth before taking it and scurrying back into the crowd. I step into his place and set the brass disk on the counter.
“What do you want for it?” I say.
“Nothing,” she says. “Take it.”
“That’s not how this works,” I say, surprised she’s offering it to me for free. “I know you don’t want to see me. I don’t want you to have to see me. If you never want me here again, you want me to just walk away, no problem. But if this is a transaction, then it’s a transaction. Money, goods, favors, whatever. But I can’t just take it.”
“You’ve already paid,” she says, not looking at me. “For life.”
“I—”
“No,” she says, pitching her voice lower. “You’re paid up. My dad died of the same cancer. I know what the end was going to look like. Granddad had friends and people who helped him live through it, sure, but you saved him from . . . You just saved him, all right? You need anything I can get, just tell me. I’ll get it.”
Now she looks at me. There are tears in those eyes, but there’s fire, too. I can argue with her, walk away, or take the deal, but I know she won’t change her mind.
“Two conditions,” I say. “Sometimes, third parties have to be involved. Specialty items you just can’t pick up. I pay those expenses.”
“Fair enough,” she says. “The other?”
“It goes both ways. You need a hand with something I can help with, you call me. I owed Jack. And now I owe you.”
“No, you—”
“Yes, I do. Deal?” I put out my hand to shake, she takes it.
“Deal,” she says. “You want a bag for that?”
“I’m good,” I say, picking up the disk and sliding it into my messenger bag. “Thank you.”
“Now go before I have to make my mom forget shit again,” she says.
“Gone.” I turn around and walk away like I’m just another customer.
* * *
—
I spend the next two hours driving around the area alternately checking the compass on different ghosts and looking for signs of an El Cucuy or a Baba Yaga.
I try the compass on the Haunts, Wanderers, and Echoes scattered around. Five years after the fires and there are still so many it’s sometimes hard for me to differentiate all of them. Two or three years on most of them would have deteriorated. But then thousands of them weren’t created in one night, either.
The compass seems to work best on Haunts, possibly because they’re stationary, and Echoes it doesn’t pick up at all. It locks onto Wanderers immediately, though it can’t keep track of them unless they stay in close range, and if they move into a cluster of other ghosts then both needles go batshit and start spinning wildly. Sometimes the disk can find them again and lock back on, but there’s still the problem of distance.
Triggering it is easy enough. I see a ghost and think about tracking it, and it homes in on them. But I’ve been in this area enough times that I’ve gotten the names of some of the Haunts and Wanderers, and when I try to focus on one of them by name, the compass does nothing.
If I have to see a ghost in order to track it, I don’t know how it’s going to do my any good. I can’t see Attila’s soul. Unless the tether is part of it?
I don’t get why anyone would make this. If a ghost has to be seen to be tracked, then the only people who could use the device easily would be necromancers. But like Cassie pointed out, tracking ghosts is the sort of thing we already do.
So if this is going to be at all useful, then it needs to be able to lock onto a ghost I can’t see. But then, how do I know which one it’s targeting and whether it’s the one I was thinking of?
I need a ghost I know, or at least know about. There’s the White Lady in Griffith Park. She shows up whenever there’s a brush fire out there. She’s been getting a workout lately. There’s the Knickerbocker Hotel just north of Hollywood Boulevard. Place is brimming over with ghosts like turds in a backed-up toilet bowl. I know a few of them.
I need something closer. Not as far as Long Beach. Somewhere in the South Bay. Then it comes to me.
In April of 1992, four LAPD officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King were acquitted despite video showing them beating the shit out of the guy in a clear case of police brutality. The response was the ’92 L.A. riots. More than sixty people died, over a thousand buildings burned. Smoke got so thick LAX had to shut down because they couldn’t guide planes in for a landing. More than twenty years later Quetzalcoatl would swing by, say “Hold my beer,” and show everybody how it’s really done, but at the time it was huge.
One of the people who died, Omar Saleh, was a Jordanian immigrant whose charred body was found two days later in a burnt-out house in West Adams. Smoke inhalation killed him and then the fire cooked him.
At least that’s what it was supposed to look like. Hear Omar tell it, he was drugged, tossed into a corner, and set on fire to make it look like he was a victim of the riots, instead of the asshole cousin who was banging his wife and wanted the corner liquor store Omar’d started about twenty years before.
He left a Haunt, a surprisingly cogent one. Most ghosts can barely remember one moment to the next, but Omar’s sharp. And pissed. His cousin got everything. The store, the house, his wife, his three kids. If he could have somehow gotten out of that house and over to our side he’d have chewed through his cousin like a starving shark on a diver with a papercut.
But fate beat him to it. I checked on the cousin and found out he’d pissed off the wrong people and pretty much shared the same fate Omar did. Only with several hours on the receiving end of a baseball bat first. I’ve never seen a ghost so happy as when I told him that.
