Mob Rules

“I can’t find my leg,” a voice whispered.

“I’m dead now.”

“They took my mommy.” A little girl’s voice.

“I want to go, I want to go, I want to go, I want to…”

“I know who you are.” The voice sounded like an old woman. She sounded pissed.

“Help me, Domino. Please, D.”

“Jamal?”

“Help me, D…help me.”

I channeled more juice into the spell, straining until I thought my eyes would pop. I kept feeding the spell, but the juice kept backing up, into me, like blood in a junkie’s syringe. It was so cold it burned.

“Jamal, I’m trying. Talk to me. Just keep talking to me.”

“I can’t…I can’t get back, D. I can’t get back. It’s just dark…ain’t nothing here, Domino…ain’t nothing but the dark.”

“I know, Jamal. Keep trying. I’m here. Keep talking.”

“Domino? Are you there, D? Please don’t leave. Domino, please don’t leave me here.” He was crying, but his voice was growing fainter.

“Jamal, keep talking. I’m here.” I ground my teeth and reached for more juice, but I had so much of the backwash in me I couldn’t push it through and I felt like I was drowning. “Fuck!”

I tried again to force more juice into the spell, but now it was washing back into me faster than I could tap it from the line.

“Jamal! I’m still here. Come back.”

Silence, then a few short bursts of static. Then nothing. I’d lost him.

I shut down the computer and went to the kitchen for a beer. I was buzzing from all the juice I’d flowed. I was also shivering and choking on that grave-cold backwash I sucked down. I collapsed on the sofa and drained the beer.

Whatever was happening with Jamal wasn’t right. Contacting the dead was never a sure thing—if they didn’t want to talk to you, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Jamal obviously wanted to talk, but I couldn’t reach him. Why? The backwash I was eating when I tried to feed the spell—why?

The only explanation was that someone was fighting me. Pushing back at me. While I was flowing juice into the spell, someone was pumping it back into me. Someone stronger than I was.

Someone like Papa Danwe. It might have been Terrence Cole, I supposed, but I doubted the Haitian had a sidekick with enough juice to shut me down like that. It had to be Papa Danwe.

I felt pretty sure after this experience that FriendTrace wasn’t going to get it done. I maybe could have kept flowing juice into the spell a little longer, but I knew the backwash from the Beyond would have killed me before I was able to establish a stable connection with Jamal.

Still, the fact that Papa Danwe was blocking my efforts at communication made me even more determined to succeed. I needed to talk to Jamal. He obviously had something important to say, something the Haitian didn’t want me to find out.

Well, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed. That’s not a spell formula, just a saying that came to mind. If I couldn’t reach Jamal in the Beyond, maybe I could bring him to me.

It was a little after two in the morning, and I still had time. I went down to the garage and put my toolbox and several cans of spray paint in the trunk of my car. Then I drove to Crenshaw, back to Jamal’s apartment.

When I got to his door, I juiced the lock and let myself in. Anton had removed the corpse as ordered. The small apartment was empty and quiet. I set the toolbox on the floor beside the bondage rack and went to work.

The rack was really just two fitted timbers bolted together to form an X. I unbolted and separated them, laying them on the floor side by side. I closed up the toolbox and ran it down to the car, then returned for the first of the timbers. The beams were heavy, but I was able to get them down to the car, one at a time, using a little juice. With the top of the convertible down, they fit in the backseat, more or less. It was something to cling to the next time some prick in a Prius smirked at my vintage Motown gas-guzzler.

I went back to the apartment and stuffed some things from Jamal’s closet into a duffel bag. On the way out, I grabbed the stapler Anton had used with the magazine cover to protect Jamal’s modesty. I went down to my car and drove to the playground where I’d talked to his crew.

There was no one on the playground at that hour, even in Crenshaw. The security lights had likely been broken within hours of being installed, and the concrete was lit only by a feeble moon and the ambient orange glow of the sleeping city.

I hauled the timbers out to midcourt and reassembled the bondage rack. I’d packed some of Jamal’s clothes in the duffel bag, and I took them out and stapled them to the rack. There was a Lakers jersey, jeans and a pair of Nikes. Next, I went to work with the spray paint.

The tags Jamal had laid down all over the playground were designed to tap the juice of the place. There was a fair amount of it, and Jamal had done good work. I’d be able to get plenty of power, and best of all, in a way it would be Jamal’s juice I was flowing. I just needed to hook up his tags to the ritual I was building.

I used the spray paint to lay down a circle around the bondage rack. When the circle was complete, I grabbed a detailer out of the toolbox and began stenciling symbols into the painted line of the circle and the wood of the bondage rack. Ordinarily I’m not really into symbol work, but in this case I was just copying Jamal’s tags, in miniature. When I was finished, I scrounged up some broken boards and garbage and built a fire in front of the rack. Once the fire was blazing, I stripped off my clothes and started dancing naked around the circle.

It was a little pagan, more than a little ridiculous, and not the way I usually roll, but sometimes the oldest magic requires the oldest methods. The fire and the nude dancing would attract spirits. Jamal’s tags, the rack and the clothes stapled to it would ensure that the ritual called more loudly to Jamal than to anything else out there in the Beyond.

If the summoning ritual was successful, Jamal’s shade would be pulled out of the Beyond to fill his clothes and be bound to the rack. Once bound, I was pretty sure I could hold him there long enough to find out who killed him, and why. Even Papa Danwe wouldn’t be able to stop me. At least, not before I got what I needed.

I started chanting as I danced naked around the summoning circle. For hard-core necromantic work, you can’t beat Lovecraft. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die,” I chanted, over and over. I chanted quietly. If anyone saw me doing this shit, I’d never live it down.

I tapped Jamal’s tags and started flowing juice into the ritual. The symbols stenciled into the paint and the wood began to glow orange, matching the dancing light of the fire. The juice flowed around the circle and into the rack, then punched through into the Beyond.

It started to pull. A cold wind blew in from nowhere, and Jamal’s shirt and pants began to swell, filling out. A hazy, insubstantial form began to take shape.

Then a huge dog, like hell’s own mastiff, burst out of the fire and crashed into me. I went down under the weight of the beast and tumbled onto the rough concrete. The surface did cruel things to my naked body, but I barely noticed. I was too busy trying to keep the creature’s massive jaws away from my throat.

The beast loomed over me, pressing me down into the court. Then it lifted its head and howled. The sound sent goose bumps percolating across my bruised and bleeding skin. An answering howl split the night, then another, and another.

“Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly,” I said, spinning a close-combat spell in my mind.

Nothing happened.

“That’s bad,” I said.

My summoning spell was still active. It shouldn’t have been, but it was drawing all the juice I could flow into the circle, into the Beyond. Unless I could flow some juice into a new spell, I’d just be babbling stupid quotations while the dog ate me. I triggered the repulsion spell in my pinkie ring, but I’d drained all the juice from it when I hit the Vampire Fred.

I cursed and struggled, trying to beat the mastiff down with my fists, but it was pinning my arms to the cracked concrete. Its jaws were wide, drool spattered my face, and its breath smelled like the worm-ridden intestinal tract of a moldering corpse. Maybe even worse. I got one arm free and slammed it into the beast’s jaws as it went for my throat again.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another of the creatures slouching through the shadows on the other side of the playground.

With my left forearm still in the creature’s mouth, I grabbed an ear with my right hand and pressed my thumb into its eye. I pressed hard, and tried to put a little juice into it. I didn’t have enough to power a spell, but I thought, maybe…

The beast’s eye exploded. Raw magic, pulsing bloodred, sprayed from the wound, spattering the side of my face. I pushed against the creature and it leaped away, howling.

I heard a low growl and turned in time to get my arm up as another creature lunged at me. I was trying for a kind of stiff-arm move, but it probably looked like I was cowering and trying to shield my head from the thing’s gaping jaws. Again, I fought to divert some juice from the summoning spell into the blow.

My arm thrust into the creature’s chest, pushing all the way through it and out its back. The beast’s momentum carried it into me and we went down.

I didn’t have to push this one off of me, because the creature was disintegrating. Writhing, crimson energy burned away its flesh as it howled, and in seconds it was nothing but a smoking grease spot on the court. Tendrils of smoke curled from the concrete and were pulled toward the circle, into the fire, vanishing in the flames. I felt that cold wind on my skin again, and now it seemed to be pulled from every direction at once into the center of my summoning circle.

I raised myself to one knee and looked for the next attacker. The creature I had wounded was circling the battle warily, looking for an opening with its remaining eye and brushing at the other with a massive, taloned paw. The other two beasts were preparing to eat me.

They came at me from opposite directions, crouching low and baring fangs the length of my hand. There was no way I could keep both of them off me. I still couldn’t grab enough juice to spin a spell.

I was screwed.

I had just enough time to fumble my gun out of the shoulder holster and squeeze off a wild shot as the creatures pounced. The shot missed.

The beasts hurtled through the air toward me, and then seemed to stretch out in midflight, their squat, powerful bodies pulled into impossibly elongated shapes. They sailed over my head, yelping in frustration, and incandescent red energy began to devour them as they were pulled into the circle. A moment later, what was left of their bodies vanished into the flames.

I spotted One Eye slouching around the edge of the court, its form rippling and contorting grotesquely as it fought against the pull of the Beyond. I took careful aim and put a bullet in its good eye. Crimson juice sprayed across the concrete and the chain-link fence. The beast seemed to collapse in on itself, and the stuff that flowed into the fire looked more like glowing red plasma than flesh.

In an instant, the wind died, the fire went out and the playground was quiet and still. My connection to the summoning spell was severed, and Jamal’s clothes hung empty and motionless on the bondage rack. It was over, and I’d failed. Again.

I didn’t think I had another summoning spell in me. I also couldn’t see myself driving home with Jamal’s bondage rack in the back of my car. Besides, I was hurt, and scared shitless, and I didn’t want to take the damn thing apart again. I had my juice back, so I spun up a ball of fusion fire and torched the rack. Next, I ran my housecleaning spell over the circle I’d painted on the basketball court. It left a dark smudge on the concrete, but at least all the spooky arcane stuff was obscured. Jamal’s homeboys would have a hell of a mess to clean up before their next pickup game.

I stuffed my toolbox and paint cans in the duffel bag, threw it in the trunk and got the hell out of Dodge. As I drove home, I chain-smoked and tried to make some sense of what had happened.

My summoning spell had worked. I’d reached out into the Beyond and started pulling Jamal’s spirit back into the corporeal world. But somehow, Papa Danwe must have used the ritual as a beacon to sic those ghost dogs on me. They’d used my ritual as a bridge, but they hadn’t been confined to my circle.

This time, I knew it had to be the Haitian. Terrence was probably doing the grunt work, but no way could he spin that kind of juju. Papa Danwe had used my own spell against me, my own juice, and I’d have been puppy chow if the Beyond hadn’t chosen to reclaim its own. I reached two conclusions by the time I got home.

First, even if there had been no formal declaration, my outfit was at war. Second, I was way out of my league.

Four

I was planning to report in to Rashan when I woke up that morning. Or afternoon—it’d been a late night. But Rashan beat me to it. I got a call at a little after eight o’clock summoning me to a meeting at his strip club, the Men’s Room.

Rashan was the smartest person I’d ever known. Maybe the guy was Sumerian, but his English was perfect. No accent, huge vocabulary—he always sounded more like an Ivy League professor than a gangster.

Despite all that, he missed some of the nuances of the language that are second nature to a native speaker. When Rashan had chosen a name for the strip club where his office was located, I’d pointed out that, technically, the men’s room was where you put your urinals. I’d suggested the Men’s Club, the Men’s Place…Pussy Galore would have been an improvement.

Rashan wouldn’t budge. He liked the name, and that was the end of the discussion. Most of the clientele probably didn’t notice anyway. For whatever reason, though, the boss’s linguistic blind spot seemed to be at its blindest when it came to naming conventions. I was just glad the outfit didn’t have a name, like a street gang. It would have been embarrassing.

I parked my car in the front row of the lot—I had my own space, so I didn’t have to use the parking spell. Despite the name, the Men’s Room was a nice place. Tasteful, at least by the standards of the pole-dancing industry. The club was closed but a girl was dancing onstage, probably for the boss’s benefit. I made my way to the back stairway and ascended to Rashan’s second-floor office. It had the traditional glass wall looking out over the bar, and I found my boss sitting at a table and watching the main stage with gray, almost colorless eyes.

“She is one of my favorites,” he said, nodding to the dusky-skinned young beauty of pleasantly indeterminate race. “Look at that ass.”

I looked. It was a nice enough ass. “Jesus, boss, you’re old enough to be her long-dead ancestor.”

Rashan laughed and motioned for me to sit down. “You know,” he said, “my people understood the importance of naked dancing girls. It is a sign of this country’s bankrupt culture that you’ve made it into something sleazy.”

“I have nothing against naked dancing girls. Or boys.” My attention drifted to the stage again. “I think it’s the brass poles and disco lights that make it seem sleazy. And maybe the bills tucked in their G-strings. The patrons are a little questionable, the music the girls pick doesn’t help and perhaps—”

“Dominica, tell me what you’ve learned about Jamal,” Rashan interrupted. Rashan always used my real name. I didn’t care for it much.

If you can mentally take a deep breath, I sucked in a cerebral lungful. “It was a hit.”

“Go on,” Rashan said.

“You know about the skinning and crucifixion already. Jamal had been squeezed. The strange thing was, there were no traces of the ritual on him or at the scene. It was like the hitter scrubbed the place when he was done.”

Rashan frowned. “If Jamal was squeezed, it must have been a sorcerer. That suggests another outfit.”

I nodded.

“Tell me what you know about the ritual.”

“That’s what I’m saying, boss, the place was clean.”

“And yet, you were able to learn something.”

It’s hard to play coy with a Sumerian sorcerer. “Yeah,” I said, “the hitter used an artifact in the ritual. It left a mark that wasn’t cleaned up. I was able to get a taste of the juice and find out a little about it.” I told him about the soul jar and what I’d learned about it from my divination spell.

Rashan steepled his fingers and tapped them against his black, neatly trimmed goatee. “Veronique Saint-Germaine. I remember her. She was the strongest sorcerer in the Old South. There were more famous voodoo queens in New Orleans during that period, but only because Saint-Germaine didn’t work the tourists from New York, Boston and Paris.”

“Based on the New Orleans angle and an old photograph I got with my spell, I thought there might be a connection to Papa Danwe.”

“Indeed there is. Papa Danwe was one of Saint-Germaine’s inner circle. He’d come to New Orleans with her from Haiti, after the slave revolt. He murdered her in 1854.”

“Knew she was murdered, didn’t know Papa Danwe did it.”

Rashan shrugged. “It was something everyone knew and no one could prove. Not that anyone would have done anything about it anyway. Survival of the fittest.”

“So I figure, we can put the soul jar at the scene of Jamal’s murder. We can connect Papa Danwe to the jar’s previous owner. He’s got the juice, so he had the means and opportunity.”

“Your theory is tenuous and circumstantial at best,” Rashan said. I started to protest, but he waved me off. “That doesn’t mean you’re not right.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense. Jamal was good at what he did, but his talents were pretty much limited to tagging. I can’t see how he had enough juice that the Haitian would get anything from squeezing him.”

Rashan shook his head. “There are very few instances in which you would squeeze a sorcerer for power. Any sorcerer strong enough to do it wouldn’t gain anything from doing it, just as you suggest. The usual exception is a group of sorcerers or coven that works together to squeeze a more powerful magician and divides the spoils amongst themselves. In any event, there are much easier ways to acquire power.” Rashan gestured expansively at the strip club. The club was a juice box, and like I said before, Rashan’s lips were on the straw.

“Then what’s the point of squeezing a guy? I guess I wouldn’t call it common, exactly, but it does happen. Everyone knows about it.”

“You squeeze a guy not to procure power in the abstract. As you say, Jamal had precious little of that. You squeeze him to steal his specific power, his unique arcane talent and craft. You take another sorcerer’s juice, it isn’t like taking it from a tag or a line. It’s his juice. You squeeze him to make it yours.”

This was all news to me. “So, Jamal was a tagger. You’re saying Papa Danwe squeezed him to steal his way of doing graffiti magic.”

Rashan nodded. “There can be no other explanation.”

“But why? Jamal was good, okay, but he’s not the only tagger in town. It seems like it’d be a lot easier to just recruit a guy, even if he needed a little training. Why take the risk of hitting a connected guy?”

“Two connected guys,” Rashan corrected, “which is why I called you in. Jimmy Lee’s body was found floating in a storm runoff this morning.”

I’d been expecting another body to turn up, but I hadn’t been expecting it so soon. “Damn,” I said. “No skin?” Rashan nodded.

“I don’t know this guy, boss. What was his thing? Another tagger?”

“No. Jimmy Lee was a warder—defensive magic. He designed protections, locks, alarms, minor defensive spells, that kind of thing.”

I arched my eyebrows. “Important stuff?”

Rashan shook his head. “No, in that respect, Jimmy Lee was rather like Jamal. A valuable asset, but not a critical one.”

“It’s a pattern,” I said. “Jamal was a tagger. He tapped and flowed juice on the outfit’s territory. Jimmy Lee was a defensive guy. Put the two together. Papa Danwe is going after our defenses. He’s making a move.”

“It is the beginning of a pattern, Dominica. Tragically I expect there will be more bodies, and with each one, more of the pattern will be revealed.”

“Both of the victims’ names begin with J,” I suggested. “Jamal’s last name is James and Jimmy is short for James.”

Rashan just looked at me.

“Okay, but I’m on the right track, yeah? The first part, I mean. What other reason could there be to hit Jamal and Jimmy Lee, two guys with those specific talents?”

“The problem with your hypothesis is that it overestimates the importance of the deceased. I have a lot of taggers and warders in the outfit. As far as our operational security is concerned, they will not be missed. These were low-level guys. Jamal’s tags weren’t responsible for tapping a significant amount of juice. Jimmy Lee’s wards were not protecting anything of great importance.”

“So it still doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not yet. Truly, it’s not a bad plan, in principle. If you could squeeze assets in critical positions, and if you could move quickly enough that your enemy couldn’t react in time, it’s not a bad way to initiate hostilities against a rival outfit.”

“But that’s not what’s happening here. Papa Danwe is hitting low-level guys. He doesn’t seem to be in any big hurry about it, either. If I were doing it, I’d hit them all at once, or one right after the other, at least. I wouldn’t take my time about it.”

“Just so. Which is why I suggested you have discovered only part of the pattern.”

“Okay, but whatever it is, the fact remains that Papa Danwe has given us time to react. So what’s our play?”

“First, tell me about Jamal. I assume you’ve made an effort to contact him.”

“Yeah, but the Haitian is blocking me.” I told him about my efforts to reach Jamal, and my attempt the night before to summon his ghost from the Beyond.

“If Papa Danwe did, in fact, send those creatures to kill you, perhaps his plan is unfolding more quickly than we imagined.”

“Any idea what they were? You ever know the Haitian to use something like that before?”

Rashan shrugged. “Just about every culture on earth, living or dead, has some kind of ghost dog or hellhound. In the north of England, they were called barghests, or town ghosts, and they were thought to stalk lone travelers at night. They are denizens of the Beyond, and for that reason they are usually associated with death and appear as minions or messengers of the underworld.”

“Well, yeah, I got that much from Wikipedia.”

Rashan arched his eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Dominica, I am old but I am not a scholar. If you think it might aid you to know more about them, I encourage you to pursue it.”

“The point is, I haven’t been able to contact Jamal, and it’s pretty obvious Papa Danwe doesn’t want me to. But what’s the point of keeping Jamal quiet if the Haitian has to launch overt attacks against the outfit—against me—to do it?”

“It seems likely that Papa Danwe isn’t aware that you’ve connected him to Jamal’s murder. If he prevents you from contacting Jamal he keeps that connection hidden, from his point of view. And, after all, you have no real evidence that he was responsible for the attack on you.”

“It was him.”

“Have you found any other connections between Jamal and Papa Danwe, besides the murder?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think Jamal was working both sides. If Papa Danwe needed Jamal’s craft for something, maybe he was trying to recruit him. When Jamal wouldn’t go for it, they squeezed him.”

“It fits what little we know, but of course, we don’t know enough. The question remains, for what purpose did Papa Danwe want Jamal?”

“Does it really matter, boss? Papa Danwe hit Jamal and Jimmy Lee. He probably means to squeeze more of our people. He sent those ghost dogs after me. He’s making a move. Shouldn’t we start hitting back?”