Mob Rules (2 page)

Most people don't have the will or the power. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Still, the words of the spell can be just about anything you can memorize. It doesn't have to be some cryptic verse in a dead language. You don't have to invoke the four corners or the forces of earth, air and fire, or any of that stuff. You just want something that makes sense to you, something that will help you stabilize the pattern and flow the juice.

I know dozens of spells, and each one is associated with a famous quotation I've memorized. Other sorcerers use nursery rhymes or hip-hop lyrics, dead languages, invoking the saints, or pagan mumbo-jumbo. Whatever works.

To contact Jamal in the Beyond, I needed some real craft, a spell backed by an easily repeated ritual. Again, the traditionalists use black candles, séances, Ouija boards, that kind of thing.

I use FriendTrace.com.

I sat down at my desk and brought up the Web browser on my laptop, then typed “Jamal” into the search box on the site. I tapped the ley line running under my condo and said, “In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” Then I hit the search button and released the spell.

My laptop went crazy. Random windows opened and closed faster than I could follow, like pop-ups at a porn site. A disharmonic, cacophonous squall blared from the speakers. The screen went black and the sound died. Without the juice, you just get personal ads.

A few seconds passed and a Web page flared to life on the screen. It was one of those slick Flash sites, and I had to stop myself from clicking the Skip Intro option.

Grainy, distorted, black-and-white images appeared, one
after the other. A noose dangling from the twisted branch of a dead tree on a barren field. The indistinct silhouette of a man standing in a backlit doorway. An extreme close-up of a fly feeding on raw flesh. A blood vessel bursting. Jamal's face pressed against the LCD, his mouth open in a silent scream.

The laptop speakers crackled, hissed, and I heard a voice.

“Domino,” it whispered, the word stretching out like a dying man's last breath. It was Jamal's voice.

“I hear you, Jamal. Tell me who did this to you. Tell me who killed you.” The dead usually weren't in the mood for small talk, so you might as well get to the point.

Instead of an answer, the frozen image of Jamal's face was replaced by the Blue Screen of Death as my computer crashed. I shut it down, counted to ten and rebooted.

I tried again, but I wasn't optimistic. A mundane crash wouldn't exactly have been a freak occurrence, but in this case, I knew I'd lost whatever connection I'd had to Jamal. It was so tenuous, I couldn't even be sure I'd really had a connection. It could have been an echo, a psychic afterimage. After three more crashes, I decided to give it a rest.

My effort to contact Jamal had been a form of divination, the difference being that the spell had to reach all the way into the Beyond. I can use a similar ritual to do other kinds of divinations—say, running a check on an ancient magic jar whose juice I'd tasted.

For that, I use Wikipedia.

I brought up the browser again and typed “magic jar” in the site's search box. I conjured up that magical image of the artifact I'd absorbed from the juice in Jamal's apartment and powered up my divination.

The title of the entry was Soul Jar, and it featured a digital
reproduction of an old lithograph. In the photo, a black woman who looked to be about a hundred and twenty years old sat behind a simple wooden table. Her withered hands clutched the clay jar resting on the table in front of her. Four other figures, all black men of various ages, stood behind her. The caption read, “Voodoo Queen Veronique Saint-Germaine, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1849. Saint-Germaine was the soul jar's last known owner.”

I'm pretty good at this stuff. I quickly read through the rest of the entry.

“Ka” was hyperlinked, so I clicked on it and skimmed the new screen that popped up.

I closed the pop-up and went back to the main entry.

I shut down the computer as the spell faded and leaned back in my chair. I had a pretty good idea of the soul jar's current whereabouts. I also knew the identity of its current owner. I recognized one of the men in the photo of Saint-Germaine—a gangster called Papa Danwe. I didn't know him, but I knew of him and I'd seen him a couple times. He apparently hadn't changed much in the last century and a half.

Papa Danwe had come to L.A. in the early 1900s, by way of New Orleans, Haiti and some coastal sandpit in West Africa. I'd heard his first racket had been trading slaves and ivory to French pirates for guns. His outfit was much smaller than Rashan's and we'd never had any trouble before.

It seemed we had trouble now.

Ninety-nine percent of my job is pretty simple. I'm a fixer, a problem-solver. I make sure the outfit is operating as it should. When it isn't, I step in and make the necessary adjustments. I have no day-to-day routine, no ongoing managerial responsibilities. It's a nice gig.

This looked like a one-percenter. In the outfit, shit flows uphill but it doesn't flow all the way to the top. It stops with me. Rashan is at the top of the hill, and he never even gets a little on his shoes.

I grabbed a glass and a bottle of wine from the kitchen and curled up on the couch. Most of the problems I have to solve are pretty simple. There's a body, get rid of it. Someone's skimming juice, make so they don't do it anymore. The cops are working too hard, pay them or put the hoodoo on them so they leave us alone. Action, reaction. Most problems have easy solutions.

This wasn't one of those problems. Jamal had been executed by another outfit. It had been an act of war.

Ordinarily, if a rival gangster hit one of our guys, I'd hit
him
and make sure his boss got the message. Problem solved. I wouldn't enjoy it, probably, but I'd do it because that's the way this thing of ours works.

That wasn't going to be a quick fix this time. Even with all the juice and testosterone on the street, L.A.'s underworld is surprisingly peaceful. There's violence, but most of it happens within the outfits, not between them. There's competition, but overt confrontation is rare. No one wants a war.

I was pretty sure Papa Danwe was responsible for Jamal's murder, but I couldn't prove it. My divination spell allowed me to build a pretty strong circumstantial case against the sorcerer. But as powerful as magic is, it also has its limitations. By its very nature, magic is ephemeral, intangible and subjective. My divination might be enough for me, but it wouldn't count as hard evidence to anyone else. Even among sorcerers, “Wikipedia told me so” isn't a compelling enough reason to touch off a gangland war.

I didn't plan on taking Papa Danwe to court, but we would need the support of at least some of the other L.A. outfits if we wanted to make a move against him. We wouldn't need their help, but we would at least need them to stand aside. There were a dozen major outfits in Greater Los Angeles, and plenty of smaller ones, but only a few really had a stake in South Central. Those were the ones that mattered, and they'd be the hardest to convince.

It was also unlikely that Papa Danwe had done the hit himself. It wasn't his style. He'd have a henchman to do the dirty work, though it would have to be someone pretty good.

And finally, while I could connect Papa Danwe to the soul jar, and I could connect the soul jar to Jamal's murder, I didn't have even the glimmer of a clue about motive.

I'm not a detective. Most gangsters have it in them to do a murder, but it's a rare thing if one of them is clever about it. Elaborate plots and cunning schemes are for normal people. A gangster usually kills a guy because someone else told him to and he thinks he's covered. Mistakes get made—gangsters are prone to them—and that's where I step in. There isn't a mystery to solve, just an error to be corrected.

Most of what I knew about detective work came from cop shows and buddy movies. Look for clues. Develop a theory and find a suspect you like. Spend time with the family of your partner, who happens to be only a couple weeks from retirement.

Despite my lack of investigative experience, I wanted the killing to make some sense. It didn't. Why would Papa Danwe be making a move against our outfit? If he was, why did he do it by hitting a guy like Jamal? The kid just didn't merit the attention. Why squeeze him? He didn't have the juice to make
it worthwhile. And why leave him hanging in his apartment? If Papa Danwe was sending a message, we weren't speaking the same language.

If I wanted to answer the “Why Jamal?” question, I needed to connect the kid and Papa Danwe. Maybe Jamal crossed him somehow. Maybe he'd even been working for Papa Danwe on the side and the relationship went sideways. Unless Jamal was a random victim, which seemed unlikely, there would have to be a connection. It sounded like a plan.

I stared at the vintage movie posters hanging on the living-room wall. I stared at the wall. I turned on the TV and turned it off. I had a couple more glasses of wine and fell asleep on the couch.

That night, I dreamed that Jamal was on the balcony outside my condo, trying to jimmy the French doors with a crowbar.

When he wasn't tagging or tying someone up in his apartment, Jamal could usually be found on a playground in Crenshaw, shooting hoops with his homeboys. I parked on the street by the court and went in through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence.

There were seven guys playing full-court, all of them young black males. The oldest might have been twenty-five. A few girlfriends and hangers-on lounged courtside on the cracked concrete. They leaned against the fence and watched the game. They passed a blunt around and smoked. The court and both backboards were decorated with tags Jamal had put down.

The game stopped as soon as my car pulled up, and everyone was watching me as I stepped through the fence. The guy holding the ball walked toward me. He was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-pound horse named Marcus. He'd come off the bench on a full-ride at UCLA for two years. He would have started his junior year at power forward, but he got collared for dealing crack and lost his scholarship.

“Yo, Domino,” he called. “We need a skin.”

It was going around. “You've got four skins and three shirts, Marcus.”

“Nah, D, Shawan gonna go shirts.” He nodded to one of the brothers. The kid jogged over to his gym bag and dropped a tank top over his head.

I was always a skin. Watching a five-foot-seven Mexican-Irish girl in her thirties trying to play ball with these guys wasn't enough entertainment. Jamal's boys always needed me to go shirtless. I'd learned a somewhat embarrassing lesson the first time this happened, so I was wearing a sports bra.

I stripped to the waist and handed my jacket and shirt to Marcus's girlfriend, a young twentysomething with an elaborately styled weave and gold fingernails. She smiled and folded them neatly in her lap. I passed her the shoulder holster with the forty-five and she tucked it under my jacket.

“Don't take Marcus money, Domino,” she whispered. “We got rent.”

“Yo, D, you been workin' out?” Marcus asked, laughing and elbowing the kid named Shawan. “You lookin' ripped, girl!”

“My people weren't bred to pick cotton.” Casual sexism and racism were social etiquette in Crenshaw. I hear it makes some people uncomfortable.

“Nah, that's right. Your peeps bred skinny to crawl under the fence.” Everyone laughed.

“I'm only half-Mexican,” I said, and gave up the straight line. “My dad was Irish.”

“Someone get this skinny bitch a potato,” said Shawan. The game was delayed another couple minutes so he could be congratulated for his wit with chest-bumps and fist-pounds.

“Okay, Shawan, I got you. Bitch.” I'd been cheating on the playground since kindergarten. This time, I only used enough
juice to make sure Shawan didn't score and to throw down a two-handed jam in his face on an alley-oop from our point guard. Skins still lost, and I coughed up my twenty so Marcus could make his rent. After the game, I joined them along the fence for Red Bull and weed.

“So what you doing, D?” asked Marcus. “You come down here just to give your money to us poor black folks?”

“Yeah, Marcus, I don't pay taxes and I was worried your welfare check might bounce.”

“Fuck that, D. I got a job.”

Marcus, like most of the guys on the court, was a part-time criminal. No juice, no serious gang affiliation and no real connection with our thing. They were the handymen of Crenshaw's ghetto economy. If a small-time rock-slinger turned up dead or incarcerated and his boss needed someone to fill in, he'd have a ready labor pool waiting at the playground.

“Actually, I was just wondering if you knew what Jamal has been up to.”

“You ain't seen him, neither, huh?” said Marcus. “Word is he got a new ho.” Marcus's girlfriend scowled and drove an elbow into his ribs.

“Sorry, baby,” he said.

“You know who she is?”

“Nah, girl, like I said, we ain't even seen the brother. The woman, you know, that's just what he said she said and whatnot.”

“Any new friends, besides the woman, I mean?”

Heads shook.

“Maybe you've seen some new faces hanging around. Maybe some guys in Papa Danwe's outfit.”

“Nah, D, Papa Danwe got most of Inglewood and Watts,
but he don't got Crenshaw. Everyone know Crenshaw belong to the Turk.”

Rashan was known as the Turk on the street, at least by those who didn't know him well. The outfit's turf is shaped like a crescent, running from Santa Monica around the southern edge of downtown, up through East L.A. and reaching into Pasadena. Rashan controlled Crenshaw, but there was only a nebulous border separating his territory from Papa Danwe's turf.

“All right, you give me a call if you hear anything else.” Nods all around.

“Jamal in some kinda trouble, D?” Marcus asked.

“I think y'all might need to recruit another player,” I said. “Jamal won't be going skins anytime soon.”

 

I left Crenshaw and drove back to civilization. I took Santa Monica Boulevard into Beverly Hills. I've always liked Beverly Hills. The outfits exist by virtue of the fact that most people don't pay any attention to what's going on around them. It's charming. No other place has reached Beverly Hills's level of clueless perfection, with the possible exception of Vegas.

A vampire can walk down Rodeo Drive, window-shopping and pausing for the occasional snack, and no one will even notice as long as he's wearing the right suit. A sorcerer would have to turn a demon loose in Gucci to attract attention.

The art opening was like any other of its kind. When I walked in, the gallery was bustling with the young, rich and fashionable in-crowd. This was L.A., though, so everyone had two out of three working—they were all faking the third.

I was there to meet an associate, a connected probation officer on the outfit's payroll. His name was Tommy Barrow and he was twenty-nine years old. He used his secondary
income, drug connections and gangster stories to circulate with the art-opening crowd and chase women who were out of his league.

I spotted him standing by an abstract painting in animated conversation with a salon blonde. Her swimsuit-model body and pouting lips advertised one of the many nearby clinics.

“Hi, Tommy,” I said. “Who's your friend?” The blonde wore a diamond-and-ruby pendant that nestled in her prodigious cleavage. A red arrow painted on her chest wouldn't have drawn more attention to her neckline.

“Sandy, this is Domino, a friend of ours,” Tommy said, his voice low and conspiratorial.

Sandy's tastefully decorated face brightened and the pouty lips stretched into a sunny smile. “Oh, so you work for Tommy in, you know, the business?”

I looked at Tommy and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged apologetically. “Not exactly,” I said. “You could say we answer to the same boss.”

“Oh, I see,” Sandy said. “Can I ask what you do, or would you have to kill me?” She giggled, bringing a delicate and bejeweled hand to her mouth but making sure I could still see her perfectly straight and whitened teeth. In the outfit, I didn't get any real sexism from the guys and I didn't deal with cattiness from the girls. I had juice, and that's all that mattered on the street. I only ran into that kind of shit from civilians.

I laughed, turning from her to Tommy, and then back to her. I put the smile away. “I wouldn't have to.”

She stopped in midgiggle, and I could almost hear the little wheels in her head turning as she tried to figure out if I was joking or not.

Tommy laughed loudly and put his hand on my arm. “That's
a good one, Domino! Sandy, why don't you run along so we can talk business?”

Sandy lit up again and the smile reappeared. “Oh, okay!” she bubbled. “It was nice to meet you, Domino.” She bounced away and I turned my attention to the painting on the wall, some kind of abstract brown swirl on a yellow background.

“Looks like shit.”

“It is,” Tommy said, following my gaze to the painting. “Dog, I think.”

I looked closer. It was. The artist had lacquered it to the canvas.

“Let's go outside for a smoke.”

Tommy nodded, grinning. “Those things will kill you, Domino.”

I have a purification spell that rules that out, but I didn't mention it. It's the kind of thing that pisses people off. They don't really mind if you smoke as long as it kills you. Out on the sidewalk, I drew a Camel and lit up.

Tommy immediately began scanning the area for attractive female pedestrians. “So what can I do for you, Domino?”

“Jamal is dead,” I said. Tommy's gaze immediately snapped back to me. I wouldn't be able to keep the murder a secret, and Tommy would need to know eventually.

“When? How?” Tommy asked. His store-bought tan had lost a little color.

“Last night. Probably a hit.”

“Jesus. Who did it?”

“Hard to say. Jamal isn't talking.”

“How did he die? Where did you find him?” Tommy was fishing for all the details that would allow him to spin a good insider report to impress his friends.

“Skinned and crucified in his apartment, magical ritual. Squeezed.”

Tommy let out a low whistle. “Damn. Hell of a way to go.”

“Yeah, Tommy, not the best.”

“So what do you want from me? You want me to call it in?”

“No, just report him AWOL the next time he comes up on your schedule. I don't need a police investigation, even if it is half-assed.”

Tommy nodded.

“What I really need is information. I already ran Jamal's homeboys through the paces. They don't know much.”

“Okay,” Tommy said, thinking hard. “Like what? I was his PO. It was my job to keep him out of Chino. I guess I knew Jamal about as well as anyone.” For once, I didn't think Tommy was exaggerating, at least not much. A probation officer was the closest most outfit guys ever came to a confessional. Jamal probably told Tommy Barrow things he'd never tell his friends or family.

“I need to know if he was up to anything unusual. Maybe he had something going on the side, maybe he made a new enemy.”

Tommy shook his head. “Far as I know, Jamal was a stand-up guy. The outfit was his life, and he wouldn't try to run something under the radar. He thought he had a future with the outfit…and more to the point, he didn't think he had a future without it.”

That fit with what I knew about the kid. He was smarter than most, and ambitious. It wasn't exactly helping me connect him to Papa Danwe, though.

“Any new habits? New friends?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, after a moment biting his lip. “He was hanging out at the Cannibal Club. He had this thing he was trying with bondage and that kind of stuff, to work on his craft. He said it was a good place to find girls who were into that.”

The Cannibal Club was a nightspot in Hollywood that was popular with the black leather and porcelain fangs crowd. It was hard to picture Jamal there, and once you did it was a funny picture. Hollywood wasn't Papa Danwe's turf—none of the outfits controlled it. Still, maybe Papa Danwe had something working at the club. Maybe Jamal had gotten in the way.

“What about family?” I asked. It bothered me that I hadn't thought about it before. Jamal had been a person before he'd been a corpse and a problem for me to solve.

Tommy shook his head. “You know the story. Father split, mother OD'd when Jamal was fifteen.”

“Okay,” I said. “You got anything else?”

“I don't think so, Domino. If I remember anything, I'll let you know.”

“Do that. Have fun with Sandy. You make a great couple.” I guess I can be a little catty, too, sometimes. I flipped my cigarette into the street, drawing a contemptuous sniff from a middle-aged woman in a white dress, saucer-size sunglasses and a ridiculous hat. I smiled at her and tapped a little juice, vaporizing the butt where it lay on the asphalt. She didn't even notice.

 

About eleven o'clock that night, I left my condo and drove into Hollywood. It was a Saturday night, and as usual, traffic was a bitch. Fortunately I have a spell that allows me to weave through even the worst snarls with a little lane-jockeying.

Technically, the incantation I think of as the traffic spell is chaos magic—the old school would call it a luck spell. It's one of my favorites. It's subtle, and practical and complex enough that most sorcerers can't manage it. In simple terms, it isolates and adjusts probability lines such that you just happen to find an open route through even the heaviest traffic. I surfed the probability waves through the Hollywood night and found the club on Sunset Boulevard.

I pulled up out front and spun my parking spell, muttering the words of the incantation. “Any place worth its salt has a parking problem.” I eased my car into a spot right by the door of the club just as a yellow Honda tuner pulled out. What luck.

There was a line of pasty, black-clad kids winding around the block, but sorcerers don't wait in lines any more than we settle for lousy parking or sit in traffic jams. I walked up to the bouncer and smiled.

“I'm on the list,” I said. I wasn't. I didn't even know if there was a list. The bouncer's meaty, clean-shaven head didn't even budge as he checked me out from behind his wraparound sunglasses.

I reached out and touched the juice, channeling it through my imagination and rearranging it according to the pattern I'd learned.

“I have with me two gods,” I said. “Persuasion and Compulsion.” I released the magic and let it wash over him. Behind the sunglasses, the bouncer blinked.

“Oh,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass, “you're on the list.”

I met the chorus of protests from the waiting kids with a smile and a little shrug. “I'm on the list,” I said.

Metal detector, pat down, cover charge and then I was inside and heading to the nearest bar.

The Cannibal Club was black decor, chain-link fencing, head-splitting techno-industrial you can dance to, blacklight and the smell of sweat and patchouli. It was teenagers and twentysomethings in black leather, black rubber, black nylon, black vinyl and black velvet. It was body piercings and tattoos, black hair dye and white clown makeup. Flat-panel monitors offered a live feed of the writhing, thrashing, swaying bodies on the dance floor. An electronic ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screens announced that sunrise was at 5:41 a.m.