Mob Rules

“I am loath to launch a war against a rival organization unless it is absolutely necessary. One doesn’t get as old as I am by courting violent conflict impulsively.”

“I get that, boss. I’m not Sonny Corleone. We need a measured response, but we do need to respond.”

“What I am suggesting, Dominica, is that there is precious little to be gained for either Papa Danwe or myself from a war between our organizations.”

“The Haitian obviously thinks he has something to gain.”

“Perhaps. Very well, find out what Papa Danwe is up to. You have my blessing to act directly against his interests and his organization, but make every effort to do so in a proportional way.”

Seeing how the Haitian was responsible for two murders and a magical attack against me, that would give me plenty of leeway.

“I’m on it, boss. What else?”

“We can begin making certain preparations, quietly. For example, if there is to be war, we need to know which of the others will stand with us. We also need to know where we are vulnerable, should Papa Danwe launch an overt attack.”

Rashan got up and went into a back room, returning with a rolled-up parchment. He spread it out on the table. It was a map of Greater Los Angeles and looked hand-painted, almost archaic. Rashan touched an area in South Central and it expanded above the table into a three-dimensional image, like the holograms in sci-fi movies and CNN.

“This is Crenshaw. It is the area where our territory borders most closely with Papa Danwe’s.”

“Which just happens to be where Jamal lived and worked.” A thought occurred to me. “What about Jimmy Lee, also Crenshaw?”

Rashan shook his head. “No. Jimmy Lee lived in Chinatown and did most of his work in East L.A.—your old stomping grounds, Dominica.”

“Well, maybe Papa Danwe is making a move on both Crenshaw and EasLos.” I looked at the map. It was a stretch.

“Perhaps you will find out. However, I think it’s clear that the most likely place for Papa Danwe to attack is here, in Crenshaw.”

“I’ll tell Chavez to beef up the security there. We can put more guys on the street, get some surveillance up.”

“Tell him also to get the taggers working. He can bring in help from other neighborhoods if he needs it. I want all our rackets working at full capacity, and I want enough tags that we can channel the juice anywhere in Crenshaw at a moment’s notice.”

“What about police? The increased activity is going to be obvious to anyone who looks. We don’t need Five-oh getting in the way, taking guys off the street.”

“Leave that to me. I’ll make sure that Vice and the Task Force stay away from Crenshaw. There may be elevated patrol activity, but our people can handle uniforms.”

“We’ll deal with it, boss.”

“Good. I know you’ll be busy, but I’d also like you to make contact with the Russians and the Koreans.” Rashan touched two more locations on the map: one south of Crenshaw and the other northwest, near Santa Monica.

I nodded, looking at the map. We could handle Papa Danwe, but we needed to make sure our flanks were secure. If the Haitian wanted a war, it sounded a lot less insane if he had support from other outfits in the area.

“You want me to put out the word for the guys to go to the mattresses?”

“I think not. Everyone will have heard about the killings by now, but I don’t want any special precautions to be taken. Unfortunately, I think we need to leave the bait in the water to draw out our fish.”

Rashan was a pretty nice guy, but whenever I forgot that he was also a cold, calculating, mobbed-up Sumerian sorcerer, he said something like that to remind me.

“Okay,” I said, “what about Lee?”

“The body was removed immediately. Even in L.A., the authorities will eventually notice a corpse floating in a canal. Ringo is down at the bar—he can give you directions if you’d like to investigate the scene.”

“Yeah, but I probably won’t find anything more than I did at Jamal’s apartment.”

“Is there anything else you wish to report?”

I thought about Adan. I could tell Rashan I’d met his son at the club and I wanted to date him. I could tell him about the Vampire Fred. I could tell him Adan had seen some of Papa Danwe’s boys at the club where Jamal had been hanging out. He probably deserved to know.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

“Very well, then, Dominica. I will leave you to continue your inquiries.”

The old man turned away. I left him there watching the stage, and my sins of omission chased me from the club.

I drove out to the place where Jimmy Lee’s body was dumped, one of the many concrete runoffs that crisscross Los Angeles County. It was in Hollywood, near the reservoir. It wasn’t outfit territory—most of the tags on the sloping concrete walls were mundane Crips-and-Bloods or Mexican Mafia shit.

I didn’t know exactly where the body had been found, or even if it had been found in the same spot it was dumped, so I just scanned the area with my witch sight. At the bottom of the spillway, tangled in some debris, I spotted a bedspread stained with Jimmy Lee’s juice. I guessed it had been on Jimmy’s bed the night before, and the killer had wrapped his corpse in it.

I waded down into the shallow, stagnant water and inspected the cover. Not all of the juice on the bedspread was Jimmy’s—it was black and it didn’t smell human. I leaned in and tasted it. Mostly it tasted like filthy canal water, but I was able to get a little magic from it.

I got an image of a tall, slender man in dark clothes scrambling down the side of the canal. Jimmy’s corpse was wrapped in the bedspread and slung over the man’s shoulder. The guy didn’t seem to be struggling much under the weight. It was impressive because he was injured, bleeding black juice into the cloth of the bedspread. Maybe one of Jimmy’s wards had gotten a piece of the bastard.

When he got to the bottom, the man flipped the bound corpse into the water and climbed quickly back up to where a pair of headlights marked a waiting car. I had the sense that someone else was standing there, a silhouette by the open driver’s door.

That was all I got. I considered taking the blanket with me, but I didn’t really want to fish it out of the canal, and I didn’t really want to ride around with physical evidence of a homicide in my car. I crab-walked my way up from the canal and returned to my Lincoln.

I hadn’t seen enough to identify anyone—certainly not the figure standing by the car, and not even the guy carrying Jimmy’s body. I knew who the guy was just the same—I recognized the juice. It was the Vampire Fred. Call it a hunch, paranoia or wishful thinking, but I’d known when I saw him at the Cannibal Club that I’d connect him to the murders.

The problem was that he couldn’t actually be the killer. The murderer had definitely been a sorcerer, and a pretty accomplished one. The vampire might be many things, but a sorcerer he was not. I’d known that the first time I saw him. The only juice he had was what he got from sucking blood out of people’s throats.

So the Vampire Fred was an accomplice. The figure standing by the car had probably been Papa Danwe. I was a little surprised the Haitian would take a personal interest in disposing of dead bodies. The figure might have been Terrence Cole, the henchman, but I didn’t think it was large enough.

So why was Papa Danwe using a vampire as an accomplice? Vampires could occasionally be useful as straight muscle, but that’s about it. If the Haitian needed someone to dump dead bodies for him, surely he had plenty of worthy candidates in his own outfit.

Vampires are somewhat resistant to a sorcerer’s subtler magics. I couldn’t probe Fred’s thoughts the way I could if he’d been human. If you knew you were going up against other sorcerers, that would be a pretty strong qualification in an accomplice.

I drove into Chinatown and let myself into Jimmy Lee’s apartment. One of the wards on the front door had been discharged, and I found a little more of Fred’s juice there, staining the wood and the hallway carpet. Jimmy had definitely put up more of a fight than Jamal. Good for him. It occurred to me that the killer hadn’t cleaned up the vampire’s juice. For that matter, he’d missed the stain on the floor of Jamal’s apartment, the one left by the soul jar.

Why? If he was good enough to scrub away all traces of his ritual magic, why not clean up the rest of the mess? I tried to think about it like he would. If I were the killer, all I really cared about was protecting my own identity and the details of my rituals. I didn’t want anyone to find out who I was, and I didn’t want anyone to find out why I’d chosen to squeeze Jamal and Jimmy Lee. Those were the big secrets, and as long as they stayed that way, I was covered.

Papa Danwe had really screwed the pooch when he left the stain from the soul jar, though. I’d been able to use that juice to identify the artifact, and I’d been able to connect the soul jar to the Haitian. This in itself wasn’t hard to believe—gangsters screw up all the time—but it seemed out of character for a cunning son of a bitch like Papa Danwe. Maybe he could only clean up his own magic. That was a lot more than I could do. Maybe he didn’t clean up the juice from the soul jar, or the juice that leaked out of the vampire when the ward popped him, simply because he couldn’t.

It occurred to me that he might have wanted me to find the stain and track the soul jar, but that idea didn’t lead me anywhere useful and I put it away. Clues had been hard to come by, and the soul jar had been the biggest one I got. I wasn’t a detective, but I knew I could paralyze myself if I started to second-guess all my leads.

But why had Papa Danwe left Jamal hanging in his apartment, and then made a feeble attempt to dispose of Jimmy Lee’s body by dumping him in a canal? I felt like I was in a poker game where I was sure I was being outplayed, but I wasn’t sure exactly how or what I should do to escape the trap.

I searched the rest of Jimmy’s apartment, but I didn’t find anything more than I’d found at Jamal’s. Maybe a real investigator would have had more luck, like those forensics experts on TV. Fingerprints, fibers—there could be all kinds of evidence that I had no way to find, and no way to analyze if I did find them. Not for the first time, it occurred to me how limited magic was, especially when dealing with another sorcerer who knew how to cover his tracks and block me at every turn.

I found myself wondering, again, if I was in over my head. Rashan obviously trusted me to handle this situation, but why? I had to admit it really wasn’t magic that was limited—it was me. Rashan could probably step in, get involved and take care of this little problem in the time it would take me to drive back to my condo from Chinatown.

So why didn’t he?

When it came right down to it, what use did Rashan really have for someone like me? I had a habit of looking down on people lower in the organization than me, but the truth was that guys like Jamal and Jimmy Lee at least had a specialty. There was one thing they did better than just about anyone else. They were specialists, and they’d found a niche for themselves.

What was my niche? I was just Rashan’s gofer. It was my job to clean up the messes Rashan couldn’t be bothered with. Okay, fine, I could live with that. Where I grew up, people didn’t count on having any kind of job—or any kind of future—at all. I knew I had it pretty good, and I was grateful for the opportunities Rashan had given me.

I had nothing to complain about, personally, I just had to wonder if I hadn’t outlived my usefulness as far as this situation was concerned. Papa Danwe, or a sorcerer connected to him, had hit two of our guys. For all practical purposes, we were at war. More of my people were probably going to die, and I couldn’t even figure out why they were being killed.

I realized what really bothered me was that their deaths would be on me. It came as something of a surprise. I’d killed before and I’d do it again. I wasn’t one of the good guys and I didn’t pretend to be. At the end of the day, I could live with myself and that’s all that really mattered.

But having someone die, someone close to you, one of your fellow soldiers, because you were too weak or too stupid to stop it…that was a lot worse than killing someone who had it coming. I thought about what Adan had said after our argument about the Vampire Fred.

“The difference between a strong man and a weak man is that the strong man will do anything, even kill, to remain strong,” he had said. “The weak man will do anything, even die, to remain weak.”

Those were the rules of the underworld. Mob rules. Good and bad, right and wrong—those are problems for other people, normal people. Strong or weak? That was the question that mattered for a gangster. Survive. Pick a side and do whatever it takes to win.

That was the crux of all my self-doubt. That was the meat on the bone. I was losing, and I knew it, and every other player in the underworld would know it, too. I was being tested, and I was coming up short. And then where would I be? What would I be? I knew the answer.

I’d be just another victim.

I resolved that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going out like that. I wasn’t afraid of dying—I’d had to make peace with that possibility on the street, before I even hooked up with the outfit. There was really only one thing I was afraid of, and that was being the helpless little girl.

So maybe I was out of my league. Maybe Papa Danwe had more experience, more moves and more juice. Maybe I’d be dead long before I figured out what was going on. If the Haitian was smarter and stronger than me, I was going down, and that’s the way it should be. Welcome to the underworld.

But I didn’t have to make it easy. I could make it hurt.

On the drive home, I got on my cell and started mobilizing for war. I told Rafael Chavez to crank things up to eleven. I wanted Crenshaw buzzing with juice, and that meant putting our criminal operations into overdrive.

There’s really only one source of magic in the world—the world itself, the earth, like the ley line that runs under my condo. That’s why territory is important to the outfits. The more you control, the more and better access you have to the rivers of power flowing through the world.

That power can be amplified by human activity, though, and nothing amps up the juice like hedonistic human activity. The outfit caters to that, cultivates it and takes some off the top of every transaction. Sex, drugs and gambling are the three pillars of the trade and always have been. It’s what we do best, and people can never get enough of it. The rest of the organizational infrastructure, like Jamal’s tags or the juice boxes, is maintained in support of those core rackets.

A sorcerer can’t change the natural supply of magic in the world. She can expand her territory to control more of it, and she can find new and better ways to tap, reroute and harness it, but she can’t fundamentally increase or decrease the quantity of natural juice in the universe. It isn’t physics, but they do share some of the same rules. A sorcerer can control the human-modulated potency and geographical distribution of the juice, but it’s labor intensive and requires organization. That’s why there are outfits. Turning up the juice in Crenshaw was a matter of ramping up the supply of extralegal self-gratification on the street—more sex, more drugs, more gambling. People would do the rest.

All of this would require manpower. The soldiers and gang associates could work overtime, but we’d need to bring in more guys from the other neighborhoods, too. I gave the orders and delegated all the boring managerial shit to Chavez. He promised to get things rolling right away, but cautioned me that it would take time for some of our operations to get up to speed.

“We need this done yesterday, Chavez. What’s the problem?”

“Drugs. After we run through current inventories, our timetable is going to depend on suppliers. Then, you don’t get any juice just putting drugs on the street. It takes a couple days for the extra supply to work its way down. People gotta buy ’em and use ’em, then you get your juice.”

“Okay, Chavez, I see that.” Sometimes I think I should spend more time on the street, overseeing day-to-day operations. Maybe then I wouldn’t sound like an amateur. “Just make it happen as quickly as possible. Overpay for the product and give the shit away if you have to. Just make sure both ends know it’s a temporary arrangement.”

Our tags were the next order of business. The extra juice wouldn’t mean anything unless it was accessible to us and could be channeled wherever we might need it. That’s where graffiti magic came in. Rashan had authorized a major infrastructure project, and we needed taggers on the street expanding the network throughout the city. Anyone who’s been to Crenshaw knows there’s lots of graffiti already, but we didn’t have full coverage and the increased flow of juice through the grid was going to cause bottlenecks and blackouts.

This was an easier problem to solve, and it just reinforced how replaceable Jamal was, and how meaningless his murder seemed as a result. Chavez told me we had twenty-seven taggers working in Crenshaw. He wanted to double that number, bringing in people from the surrounding neighborhoods. That’s a lot of kids with spray cans and some juice. Jamal just wouldn’t have made that big a difference.

“The only trick with the taggers is we need to move ’em out there fast,” Chavez said. “There’s no point turning up the juice if we can’t do anything with it. We need the tags in place before everything else starts jumping.”

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