Dead to Me (19 page)

“Sorry,” Connor said. I could hear the annoyance barely hiding itself behind his apology.

“And don’t apologize!” Gaynor shouted. “It makes you sound weak…”

The belligerent way he handled Connor was something I shouldn’t have found funny, but I couldn’t help laughing, which switched his attention to me. Gaynor turned as fast as a striking snake and crouched down. His manic eyes locked with mine and his earthy smell overwhelmed me, causing the laughter to die on my lips.

“You find that funny, do you?” he asked. His eyes scurried back and forth across my face. I felt the sudden urge to squirm out of my seat and dash as far away from the man as quickly as I could, but with the handrail to my left and Connor to my right, that was impossible.

“No,” I replied, hating the sound of weakness in my own voice, “I don’t find that funny…particularly.”

I turned my head as far as I could to avoid his gaze. I couldn’t explain it rationally, but I wanted nothing more than to make this creature go away.

Yes, creature. Although he looked human, no human moved like he did or could have caused this sensation in me unless it fell under the category of supernatural. It didn’t matter how human it looked, it was still otherworldly—and that meant that it fell within my bailiwick in Other Division to deal with. I so didn’t want to.

“The kid’s new here,” Connor offered. “Give him a break, will ya?”

Gaynor turned his attention back to Connor. I felt my intense discomfort fall away.

The subway train pulled into Lexington Avenue, and the doors slid open. The platform was full of people, but none of them stepped into the car. En masse, they faltered for a moment as if something was repelling them, and then quickly made their way to another car. As the doors slid shut with the familiarbing bong , our car was just as empty as it had been. The train lurched out of the station.

“Twenty won’t buy you much time, ya know,” Gaynor said, twisting the bill in his shriveled but powerful-looking hands. He stood up and tucked the twenty into one of the side pockets of his coverall. He pushed his hat back to an almost impossible angle and scratched at the mad tangle of gray curls covering the front of his head. “Better get crackin’!”

“We’ve come about a wooden fish,” Connor said. He pulled out a pen and picked up the newspaper, sketching a rough image of the item stolen from Irene’s. “It’s about the size of a dinner plate and we think it’s sacred or something. No one at the Department can make head or tail of it. We haven’t come across any references to it in any of our research so far, but it was important enough for a group of cultists to nick it from under our noses.”

“Ahhh,” Gaynor said. He snatched the paper from Connor’s hands. Was that recognition I saw in his eyes—or madness? “No idea what it is, eh?”

“None, I’m afraid.”

Gaynor let out a sigh as he lowered himself to the floor of the train car and arranged himself cross-legged. He sat quietly as he gathered focus. Seconds later, his jaw fell open and his eyes rolled back into his head, reminding me disturbingly of my narcoleptic great-grandfather after Thanksgiving dinner.

The deeper Gaynor fell into a trance, the faster the train rocked and careened beneath Manhattan. The lights of the tunnel flicked by faster and faster outside. I had never been on a train shooting along so fast. I felt a little queasy and decided that if I were ever in Japan, I would avoid their bullet trains at all costs.

“Did we just go express?” I whispered to Connor, but he only shushed me.

The overhead lights flickered out, and the backups sprang to life, giving the car a ghostly glow. Gaynor’s shadow rocked back and forth with the sway of the train, looking as if he might fall over any second. Then his voice exploded over the roar of the train.

“That which you seek,” Gaynor boomed out, “is far more important than you know.”

His voice was no longer his own. It spoke with a calmness and clarity that clashed with his mad beggar appearance. I waited for Gaynor to say more, but he offered nothing else. Several manic moments passed before I couldn’t take it anymore.

“What is it?” I shouted over the din of the rocketing train. “Do you know what the fish is or what it does?”

The words sounded weird even to me, but believe it or not, I had said more foolish things in my time with the Department. I watched Gaynor for any sign of reaction, but he simply rocked back and forth. I assumed from the blank look on his face that the old man simply hadn’t heard me. I leaned forward in the dimly lit car, hoping to catch a glimpse of some sort of reaction. I was inches from his face when his eyes sprang open and a faint blue glow radiated from deep within them.

“That which lies within is not for me to know,” he said.

As the train car sped and shook, one of the ceiling vents came loose and clanged noisily to the floor beside us. Connor leaned toward Gaynor.

“Whatcan you tell us?” he asked.

“That which you seek…” Gaynor’s lifeless face said. “Its true purpose is known to only a few, but only one will lead you to it. Follow the Vegas trail and all will become clear.”

The overhead fluorescents flickered to life, and the lightning speed of the car finally started to slow until it resumed its normal pace. The old man’s head slumped forward onto his chest. He was drained from whatever force had been working through him. Connor looked bored, but I wasn’t.

Consulting this type of wild oracle was new to me. It had been a lot more nerve-wracking and exciting than the pamphlet back at the office—So You Want to Channel the Powers—made it out to be.

Gaynor came to and adjusted his hat before scooping his coffee cup up off the floor. He leapt to his feet.

When he turned toward the door as the train pulled into the next station, I stood and barked, “Hey! What did you say about Vegas? What’s that got to do with anything?”

Gaynor coughed his earthy cough and glanced over at Connor. “Did I say something about Vegas?”

Connor nodded.

Gaynor shrugged. “Beats me,” he said before brushing aside my hands. “You might want to keep yer kid here in line. He might last longer.”

With a final cackle, Gaynor turned toward the exit. As the doors slid open, he looked back over his shoulder and winked at me.

“Smile, kid, it won’t mess up your hair.”

The old man shuffled off the train and disappeared into the crowd. His earthy scent faded as people pushed and shoved to get on, stepping over the dislodged ventilation cover lying on the floor.

“What thehell was that all about?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Connor said.

“I’m out twenty dollars!”

“Expense it,” he said flatly.

“But—”

“Look,” Connor said, using a hushed tone now that the car was jam-packed with people. “Stop griping about the money, kid. Do you realize what you just witnessed? The fact that we can even connect with something, someone, like that is a miracle, in and of itself. Call it an act of God if it helps you sleep at night. All Ido know is that he and his kind have been able to help us in the past.”

“Hiskind ?” I asked.

Connor shook his head. “Didn’t you ever read the classics in school? All the way back to the Greeks, there have been those who had some kind of cable modem connection to a higher power. Seers, oracles, call them what you like…and every last one of them is as cryptic as theSunday Times crossword puzzle.” He looked down at the seat between us. “Actually, the son of a bitch stole my crossword puzzle…”

The doors dinged closed and the train took off beneath the city once again.

“So,” I said, “it’s up to us to figure out what the Vegas trail is. I really don’t think the Department’s going to okay an impromptu trip to Nevada for either of us. Not that I wouldn’t welcome the change of scenery…”

“I’ll ask Quimbley,” Connor said, “but I suspect he’ll be about as receptive to that as the Sectarians were to our request for the wooden fish.”

14

“I really shouldn’t be cavorting with the enemy,” the Sectarian Defense League’s Jane said with a vicious smile from across the table. “But that’s what us cultists are all about, right? Embracing temptation and not always doing the right thing?”

I was as surprised as anyone to be sitting at Mesa Grill across the table from Faisal Bane’s right-hand woman, but Dave Davidson had arranged a little reconciliatory powwow between the D.E.A. and the Sectarians. Since I had been the one who had rashly taken my bat to their reception desk, Connor thought it fitting that I had to lie in the bed I had made for myself.

Negotiation wasn’t really my strong point (hence the bat incident), and in coming to this dinner, I hadn’t known what to expect. Faisal Bane’s personal-assistant-in-Darkness had negotiated that she at least get a decent dinner out of the meeting—courtesy of my rapidly dwindling expense account, of course. Mesa Grill didn’t come cheap.

I relaxed after inspecting my third glass of wine in a row for any obvious signs of poisoning before taking a sip. It worked its magic over me, the sound of craptastic light jazz mixed with the pretheater crowd around us. I found the idea of breaking bread with the enemy terribly uncomfortable. Especially when the enemy’s tight black top left little to the imagination.

Jane’s casual dinner outfit was far more appealing than the clipboard and business attire I had last seen her in. Even her face seemed less harsh with her blond cascade of hair no longer pulled back into a bun. It softened her features immeasurably.

Jane looked down at my hands. “Nice gloves.”

I didn’t want to really get into my psychometry with the enemy, so I quickly changed the subject.

“You don’t strike me as the cultist type,” I said. I attacked the chile releno before me. It was true. Cute, flirty, and sassy didn’t really fit the cultist mold I had read about in the pamphlets circulating the office—and that’s what Jane had proved to be over the appetizers.

“Is there a type?” she asked coyly as she poked around the greens and blue corn chips on her plate.

“Well, I don’t want to sound like we stereotype,” I said, “but we do a fair amount of profiling. There are plenty of telltale warning signs of cultism. Ritualistic tattoos or scarification, nocturnal goings-on, joining the church of Scientology. You just don’t fit the bill.”

Her smile widened as if she was relishing her evilness, but then her face crumbled. “It’s that obvious, is it?”

I nodded.

“Look,” I said openly. “I’m not here in any capacity except to smooth things over in the City Hall sense, but you’re totally not what I had expected the Sectarians to send. How does someone like you even fall in with that crowd?”

“Same way I expect people fall in with yours,” she said defensively. When I refused to take umbrage at her words, she softened and continued. “Actually, it all happened a bit oddly, really. Months before coming to work at the Sectarian Defense League, I had been temping, doing all kinds of meaningless jobs for a host of ridiculous companies. Answering phones for law firms, cutting fabric swatches in the Fashion District, hole punching countless binders, playing hours of Solitaire and Minesweeper.”

It sounded wretched. “It sounds wretched,” I said.

“It was okay, honestly. Being a temp is all about being an outsider. It gave me freedom. I never grew too attached to any one job, no matter how promising it might seem, because I knew full well that the next day I’d probably be working in an advertising office sorting headshots for a coffee commercial.”

She stopped going a mile a minute, and averted her eyes back to her food, smiling apologetically.

“Maybe this is a bit more ‘Dear Diary’ than you’d like to hear over dinner,” she said shyly.

“No,” I encouraged her, “go on.” Hopefully the wine and letting her guard down might lead to me finding out something useful.

“My whole life I’ve felt like an outsider,” she said, leaning in and lowering her voice, “until the job with the Sectarians came along. Shandra, my handler—handler—geesh, I sound like I worked for the CIA! Anyway, she said there was a new client trying out our temp agency, a potential cash cow. So it was important for me to make a good first impression. ‘A happy client is a repeat client,’ she said. I wasn’t even sure what a Sectarian was, but I knew it was important to Shandra and that was good enough for me. So here I am.”

“Unbelievable,” I said.

I found it ludicrous that a temp had risen so easily to become the right-hand woman to one of the most dangerous cultists in the Tri-State Area. I could be with my department for years and never come that close to the seat of power! It didn’t seem fair that she had garnered such a lofty position by sheer chance. That type of job should have gone to someone like the old badass version of me. I used to have evil down pat.

“So they just jobbered you into a cultists’ rights organization and threw you headlong into evil?”

Jane laughed, covering her mouth. “Oh, no! The first week was a bit boring actually. A lot of filing, transferring of calls, typical office stuff, and then there was the incident where Mr. Bane’s original assistant director—a horror show of a woman—just disappeared. Not much of a loss if you ask me. I didn’t care for her from the start, honestly.”

“Why? Was shetoo evil?” I asked. I wondered if the forces of Darkness got all snippy with each other around the water cooler.

“No, Mr. Snarky,” Jane said, “but as Mr. Bane’s go-to girl, she knew she could be a condescending bitch and get away with it.” She blushed. “Then one day, she was just…gone.”