“Fat fucking chance, dude.”
“Gio, don’t be an idiot —there’s nothing more you can do for me. And remember, if you can sense Danny, Danny can sense you. If you encounter him, he won’t hesitate to collect you.”
“I ain’t leaving you.”
“Damn it, Gio, don’t you get it? I’ve been using you. No matter what happens tonight, things aren’t going to end well for you. Stopping Danny won’t change that. The best you can hope to do is extend the time you’ve got. Because once it’s done, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“You think I don’t know you’ve been using me? Shit, Sam, that’s all anybody ever does. We use each other to get ahead. To pass the time. To cure the boredom, kill the pain. Half the time, ain’t even nothing wrong with that. Shit, you see this lady here? A daily dose of her, and I feel like a better man than I got any right to. I done my share of nasty shit, Sam; you know it as well as I do. You think I don’t know how this’ll end for me? Some part of me’s suspected all my life. Truth is, I don’t mind.” He took Theresa’s hand in his own and smiled, his eyes wet with tears that wouldn’t fall. “Just knowing there’s a heaven’s good enough. But if you think I’ve come this far to give up now, you’re fucking nuts.”
Theresa laughed. “Baby, if you ain’t noticed, fucking nuts is our boy Sam’s specialty.” Then, to me: “But he’s right. We see this through.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, but she raised a hand to stop me.
“I go where my man goes.”
Great, I thought. The cops are closing in, and I’m off to stop a modern Deluge with a blind chick and a dude who needs a breather when he climbs a flight of stairs.
This should go well.
“OK, first we’ve got to find a way in.”
Turns out, there wasn’t one. Sure, the fence had a gate and all —one of those slidey deals with rollers and a track, big enough to drive a dump truck through, but it was fastened with a chain as thick as my arm, from which dangled a stainless steel padlock the size and shape of a child’s lunchbox. Disc tumblers, not pins, which meant I’d need an hour and a decent set of tools to pop the fucking thing.
“Hold this,” I said, handing Gio the sawed-off. “I’m going over.”
“The hell you are,” he said. “That barbed wire’s gonna tear you all to shit —and no way the two of us’re gonna be able to follow.”
“Speak for yourself, Tons of Fun,” said Theresa.
“Oh, excuse me,” Gio shot back. “I’m sure you’d scale the fence just fine once I point you at it.”
I eyed the barbed wire, the crows wing-to-wing atop it. “Give me your shirt to toss over it, and I’ll be fine.”
“You kidding me? I ain’t giving you my shirt. Then I’m standing here half-naked with a fucking shotgun when the fuzz shows up. Ain’t you ever seen an episode of Cops? It’s always the shirtless dude who gets arrested.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, boys —quit arguing!”
Theresa, who’d been feeling around the fence while we two bickered, grabbed the shotgun from Gio and made for the gate. Before I could shout at her to stop —that lock’d stop a load of buckshot without so much as getting scratched —she unloaded two quick blasts. They pierced the night like thunder, and set the crowd screaming. I only hoped the echoes were enough to mask its origin. Somehow, though, I doubted it.
But she hadn’t shot the lock. She’d shot the metal track the gate’s rollers were seated on. Ripped a hole clean through it. Then she grabbed the corner of the gate and pulled. Freed of its track, the gate swung outward until the chain halted it, leaving a triangle three feet wide at its base to squeeze through.
“You boys wanna hurry this along? We don’t have much time until the cops get wise.”
We crawled through the narrow aperture. Theresa first, then me. Gio was last, and it’s a damn good thing —the opening was so narrow, we had to grab his arms and pull. Once he was through, we yanked the gate back into place. Maybe it’d take our pursuers a couple minutes to realize where we’d gone.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take Danny that long to figure it out.
“Sam?” he called down from somewhere high above —the voice unfamiliar but the accent unmistakable. “Sam, is that you? So nice of you to stop by, mate! Of course, if you hoped to get the drop on me, you’d have done better to leave the Giordano soul at home —I can sense his presence, after all. You may as well have draped yourself in Christmas lights —but then, subtlety never was your strongest suit. I’d suggest you both turn your arses around and bugger off while you can. As I understand it, this ritual can get a little… unpleasant for those nearby.”
Son of a bitch. I was hoping to approach the place unnoticed —to get the jump on Danny before he ever knew what hit him —but thanks to the fucking coppers’ interference, it looked like subterfuge was off the table. I guess the lesson is, if you plan on sneaking up on somebody, don’t leave a trail of mayhem half a continent wide in your wake. That, or never stop for breakfast at Rosita’s.
Once we’d cleared the gate, we’d taken refuge between a pile of cinderblocks and a heap of warped, discarded lumber, which served to shield us from the building and the street both. From our hidey-hole, I shouted back, “Don’t do this, Danny! It’s not too late!”
“Would that that were true, old friend. But I fear it’s been too late for quite some time.”
“I’m coming up!” I said.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you. You’ll find the path is not without protection.”
I took the shotgun back from Theresa, popped the floodlight nearest us. Night engulfed our quarter of the building’s lot.
“Come on,” I said.
We ran toward the building at a crouch. I kept my eyes on the ground ahead of me, scanning the uneven, sun-baked dirt for obstacles that might trip up Theresa, who ran with one hand on Gio’s back. Halfway to the unfinished, plastic-clad first floor, a line of pale gray dust cut across the earth. It stretched out to either side of us, and wended its way around the building in a ragged circle.
Alder ash, I assumed. Part of an ancient Celtic rite intended to shield those inside from the underworld’s reach. Explained why the crows were keeping their distance. I scuffed my feet along the dirt to break the circle as we crossed the threshold.
When the circle was broken, the crows atop the fence took flight as one, and lighted on the skeletal building frame.
“A-a-ah! It’s impolite to crash a bloke’s party, Sam, and doubly so for bringing unwelcome guests with you. And in your case, I fear, the penalties are steep.”
The floodlights surrounding the building cut out just as we pushed aside the opaque plastic sheeting and ducked into the building. The sudden darkness was stifling. A hand out to halt Gio and Theresa, I crouched low against a concrete support, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
The structure was scarcely more than a shell. Steel girders and molded concrete provided a sketch of the building the architect had intended —the building it would likely never become —but it was absent any touch of warmth or light. The floor was a vast slab of concrete, broken here and there with squares of black both large and small —no doubt to run conduits for plumbing, wiring, air conditioning and the like through. In our case, they were simply pitfalls to be avoided, lest this mission of ours end with us bleeding out in a basement courtesy of a compound fracture.
The elevator shaft was empty —a square column of concrete stretching from floor to ceiling in the center of the massive lobby, its doorless passageway a deeper dark among the shadows. There wasn’t even so much as a cable running up it one could climb —not that Gio could have, anyway. That left no way up but the stairs.