Mob Rules (7 page)

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.”

“Get whoever you need, but bring them in from EasLos, Pasadena, maybe Santa Monica. Stay at full capacity in the hoods around Crenshaw.”

Chavez was quiet for a few seconds. “You think this thing is gonna escalate, Domino?”

I thought about my instructions to leave the bait in the water. Then I thought about letting my people die without even warning them of the danger. The hell with that, it was lousy bait anyway. I already knew I wasn't going to learn much from another murder scene. Papa Danwe might miss a couple crumbs, but he'd keep the big secrets hidden.

“I don't know for sure, but I think it might. We've lost two guys already. If there has to be a next one, he goes down fighting. Put the word out for everyone to man the battle stations.”

“Consider it done, boss. And Domino?”

“Yeah?”

“You lit up Crenshaw like a five-alarm fire with that shit you did on the playground last night,
chola.
”

“Well, tough shit. I did what I thought I needed to do, and I tried to clean up—”

“No, boss, that's not what I mean. The fucking playground was still glowing this morning. Most of the guys have never seen anything like that, and that includes me. No one really knows what you did out there, but everyone knows you're going all-in for Jamal and Jimmy.”

I wasn't sure what to say, so I didn't say anything.

“The thing is, and I speak for everyone—if it's gonna be war, I'm glad you're on our side.”

 

After I wrapped up the war preparations with Chavez, I called Sonny Kim and Ilya Zunin to arrange a sit-down. Both were lieutenants in their own outfits, more or less my counterparts. Like Terrence Cole, I guess, but unlike Terrence, I'd actually worked with these guys in the past. Relations between our outfits were about as cordial as they got in the L.A. underworld, and I needed to know if they'd come down on our side in a war with Papa Danwe.

We met in a corner booth at a dive bar in Hollywood. Zunin, the Russian, got there first, a little after noon. He was in much better shape than Anton, and his track suit had about three fewer
X
s on the tag.

Zunin slid into the booth and reached across the table to shake my hand. His knuckles, wrists and forearms were decorated with intricate tattoos. There were Orthodox crosses, Russian eagles, Cyrillic characters and a lot of other things I couldn't decipher. More tats curled out of his collar around his neck. The Russian outfits were even more into tattoos than the gangbangers in South Central.

“Domino, is good to see you. You look beautiful, almost as good as Russian girl. I am becoming to be thirsty. We
must drink.” Zunin may have exercised more than Anton, but his English was a lot worse. He flagged down a waitress and ordered a bottle of vodka. The waitress started to protest that they didn't offer bottle service, but she changed her mind when Zunin peeled a couple hundreds off his roll and stuffed them in her apron.

Sonny Kim walked in as the waitress was leaving. He was small, Asian, wearing cheap slacks, a short-sleeved dress shirt and sneakers. He looked about fifty, but I knew he was older.

“Three glasses,” I called to the waitress. Zunin looked over his shoulder and saw Kim, then frowned at me.

“I thought this is private meeting, Domino.”

I stood and shook hands with Kim, gesturing for him to sit by Zunin. I wanted to watch both of them while we talked, and didn't want them watching each other.

“You know Sonny Kim, Ilya,” I said. The two men looked at each other for a moment and then shook hands.

“I asked you both to meet me here because I wish to discuss matters of interest to all of our organizations.”

Kim spoke up. “With respect, Ms. Riley, from what I have heard, the problems you are having are regrettable, but I do not think they concern us.”

“Da,” Zunin said. “Your dead African is no business of ours.” Political correctness hadn't yet reached Russia—at least not the neighborhoods Zunin had come from.

“Two dead,” Kim corrected him. “And the one this morning wasn't African, as you so crudely put it.”

Zunin scowled at him, but then looked to me for confirmation. I nodded.

“That's right. Two unsanctioned and unprovoked attacks on Shanar Rashan's outfit.” I used the boss's full name for
effect. Rashan had more juice than the guys they answered to. I belonged to the stronger outfit. I knew it, and they knew it. The waitress returned and set out our drinks, and that gave them both time to think about it.

“These offenses will not stand, of course,” I continued once the waitress had gone. “There will be a response. In uncertain times like these, Mr. Rashan needs to know who his friends are.”

“Do you know who is the hitter, Domino?” Zunin asked. He was eyeing the vodka bottle, but I was the host and he'd wait for me to pour. He ordered, he paid, but I had to pour the booze in his glass. I decided I'd make him wait for it.

“We know the outfit that's responsible. At this stage, I'd like to know if either of you have heard anything that might be of assistance to us.”

“You think we have something to do with it?” If Zunin was offended, he wasn't showing it. His pale eyes were steady and utterly devoid of emotion.

“Not at all, Ilya. Mr. Rashan has long valued the friendship of your organization.”

“We have learned of the murders, of course,” said Kim, “and something of their nature. There are many secrets in the underworld, Ms. Riley, but sometimes fewer than we might wish.”

Your spies are everywhere, in other words.
I didn't hold it against him. If he didn't know what had happened, I'd have lost some respect for him. He'd scored a couple points on Zunin when he revealed that he already knew about the second hit.

“So you've learned nothing else about these events, Sonny?”

“Sadly, that is correct. To be completely frank, Ms. Riley, we were not just surprised, we were shocked.”

“No one is wanting war, Domino,” said Zunin. “And what else could this mean? Is very bad.”

“Mr. Rashan doesn't want a war, Ilya. But if it comes to that, what is your organization's position?”

Zunin remained silent, staring at me with those cold blue eyes. I knew he was thinking it through, playing through scenarios in his mind. In the underworld, there are no real friendships between the outfits. But that doesn't mean there aren't mutually beneficial alliances, however temporary.

Kim cleared his throat. “Speaking for my organization, we consider Mr. Rashan our honored friend. We will treat any attack on your outfit as an attack on our own, and we are confident Mr. Rashan will prevail if conflict cannot be averted.”

That was probably the opposite of the calculation Kim was really making. If there was a war, he believed Rashan was likely to win, and that's why his outfit would back us. It was good enough for me.

“We are friends with Rashan longer than the Koreans,” Zunin said, sparing a cold glance at Kim. “We stand with you, Domino.”

“Mr. Rashan will be very pleased to learn of your support and friendship,” I said, speaking to both of them. “It is greatly prized and will be richly rewarded.”

I poured the shots and we raised our glasses.

“To friendship,” I toasted.

“To victory,” Zunin said.

“For honor,” added Kim.

We all put some juice in it, and just like that, an alliance was forged.

A lot of Angelinos think of South Central as a war zone. Maybe not Baghdad circa 2006, but the kind of place where drive-bys are routine and white folks regularly get dragged out of their cars and curb stomped.

The truth is, South Central is a lot of different towns and neighborhoods, and most of them aren't any worse from day to day than the sprawling trailer parks in the Valley and a whole lot less sleazy than most of Hollywood. Still, much of the God-fearing, law-abiding, and more sheltered citizenry thinks of South Central as a powder keg, even if they never speak of it in polite company. They think of it that way because the fuse has been lit before, in 1965 and again in 1992. A lot of people figure when the Big One finally comes, it won't be a quake—it'll be a meltdown in the hoods and barrios.

I got the same vibe as I drove through the streets of Inglewood that afternoon. It was riot weather in South Central L.A.

People were out on the streets, and not just lounging on porches or lawns, or hanging on the street corners. They were moving in packs with nowhere to go and nothing to do but
evil. Most were young males, but not all, and the gang colors, wife-beaters and chinos were joined by nursing whites and work coveralls. They were angry crowds, just a bad wind away from becoming mobs.

The people on the streets didn't know what was driving them, but I could see it easily enough. It was the same thing I was trying to do in Crenshaw. Juice was flowing through the streets like floodwater. It had been building for a while, and it put a hateful edge on everything and everyone in the city.

Humans stir up the potency of magic, but it doesn't really agree with them. Magic sparks up some ancient, animal part of the human brain, makes a person feel like there's something they can't see out there in the dark, something bad, something they should fear. It's not an irrational fear—it's older than rationality, and in this case, it's right on the money.

It's the same kind of unease teetering on violence that slithers through the city when the Santa Ana wind blows that old, dry, baleful juice in from the desert. But what was happening in Inglewood was a hell of a lot worse.

Juice was pounding through the concrete of the city like a bad migraine. I'd have to do more than drive around to see what was pumping it, but I had a pretty good idea anyway. Papa Danwe was into most of the same stuff as Rashan, but maybe a little more, a little worse—a few home invasion and carjacking rings, even some street-level extortion. The Haitian allowed independents to set up on his turf—small-timers like my mom—but he kept most of their take for himself. When they didn't come up with the juice, sometimes it got ugly.

The juice Papa Danwe had put on the street was giving people a bad trip, and it was intensified by the spiking crime
and violence that was driving it. A perfect storm of negative energy, both magic and mundane. Riot weather.

At Crenshaw Boulevard and West 88th, a car was burning on the side of the street. A small huddle of people stood around it, staring in apparent confusion. Their eyes were glazed, reflecting the light of the fire, and their arms hung limply at their sides. They didn't speak or even look at each other.

A block south, a group of young men were working at the steel shutters of a pawn shop with crowbars and baseball bats. A small figure was crumpled on the ground near them—an old man or woman, probably the owner of the shop. Alive or dead, I couldn't tell.

I kept driving. To my left, I saw another prostrate form curled into a fetal ball, half on the sidewalk and half in the street. It looked like a homeless man. A fortyish woman in a cheap business suit, purse in one hand and cell phone in the other, was kicking him repeatedly, jabbing her spiked heel into his midsection.

I tore my eyes away from the scene just in time to see a ragged figure stumble into the street in front of my car. Ratty clothes hung from a stick-figure frame. His dark skin was drawn and pale, almost waxy, and his lips were cracked and gray. His Afro was an unkempt tangle atop his head, and he was pulling hair out in clumps. The junkie sprawled across the hood of my car as I slammed on the brakes to keep from running him down.

I got out and pulled the guy away from my car, and he collapsed in the middle of the street. I was trying to decide whether to drag him to the sidewalk when there was a crash behind me. The windshield on the passenger side of my car was shattered, and a brick was lying on the hood. People lined the sidewalk, watching me. Any of them could have
thrown the brick. None of them looked like they wanted to be friends. I jumped back in my car and sped away. Fifty feet farther down the street, I stopped and retrieved the brick. I'd run it through Wikipedia and track it back to the thrower if I couldn't buff the fucking scratch out of the hood.

I put the car in gear and cruised slowly down the street, watching as the city went mad. As I approached the signal at West 120th, a patrol cruiser sped through the intersection ahead, making for the nearest on-ramp to the freeway. Running from the storm.

I got on my cell and called Chavez.

“Inglewood's going to burn,” I told him when he answered the phone. “There's enough juice on the street to feed an army a hundred times the size of anything Papa Danwe has.”

“We've gotten reports from Watts, too, Domino. More of the same. He's flooding the fucking torpedo tubes,
chola
.”

“And we're flooding ours, only we've got bigger torpedoes.”

“We're getting it done, D.”

“I know you are, Chavez, but I don't want riots in Crenshaw.”

“There's not much we can do about that. We pump up the volume like you want, people are going to wig out. You know how it works.”

“Yeah, we can't prepare for war without amping up the juice, and probably things will go to hell. But we don't have to stand around watching people get killed. We can try to control it.”

“What you want me to do, D?”

“Bring in more soldiers—whatever you need. I want to put more people on the street. Protect civilians, homes, businesses.
And put everyone on a shift rotation if you can. We don't want our own guys going ape-shit.”

“It'll be complicated, boss. It might slow things down—”

“Bullshit, Chavez. You need more resources, you tell me. I'll get you what you need. But don't tell me you can't do it.”

“Okay, Domino. I'll make it happen.”

“I know you will. I want to know when everything's in place. Call me.”

I clicked off the cell and tossed it on the seat. I turned left onto El Segundo and kept driving, though I wasn't really sure what I was looking for. I knew Papa Danwe had ramped up his operations, but most of that would be safely hidden from view unless I really went looking for it. Anyway, the juice was all I needed to see.

The juice.

All that juice was pointless unless Papa Danwe could do something with it. Just like our outfit in Crenshaw, the sorcerer needed to channel it, contain it, so it could be tapped when and where he needed it.

I stopped on the side of the street and got out. I dropped a protective spell on the Lincoln. It wouldn't hold up long if people started chucking bricks at it or set it on fire, but it was better than nothing.

It wasn't easy to get at the juice. There was plenty of it, but it wasn't mine, wasn't flowing on my territory. The tags were pulling it out of the air and the asphalt and channeling it somewhere else, for someone else.

I started walking, following the graffiti and the magic that flowed through it like blood through arteries. It didn't take long to see the patterns. All the juice from the surrounding blocks was flowing to a central location, like the drain at the
bottom of a swimming pool. Papa Danwe was filling Inglewood with magic and then sucking it dry.

I followed the juice to an old factory that hadn't been used since the American economy had a manufacturing sector. Almost every inch of the grime-darkened brick was covered in layers of intricate tags. A row of large windows, many of them broken out or painted over, extended the length of each side of the building just below the roofline. Back in the day, they'd probably provided what little ventilation the factory enjoyed. Chain-link fencing topped by razor wire surrounded the site. Unlike the sorry excuse for a building, the fence looked new.

I ducked into the dark recess of an empty storefront across the street. “It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear,” I said. The eye in the sky spell is like my own invisible skycam, and I can even rig it for audio. I sent it flying toward the factory at an altitude of about fifty feet.

When it drew even with the chain-link fence, the eye stopped, like it had run into a wall. That, of course, was exactly what had happened. The factory grounds were warded.

Even so, the eye allowed me to see plenty from the edge of the site. The first thing that caught my attention was the metal tower extending from the roof of the building, maybe a radio antenna or satellite tower. Like the fence, the tower looked new and the unpainted metal dully reflected the sunlight. There were no power lines leading to the tower that I could see, but there did seem to be some kind of gadgetry at the top. I zoomed the eye in as far as it would go but still couldn't make out any details.

I couldn't see magic through the eye, but I could sense the ley line running under the factory, and I could feel something
pulling at that magic, drawing it up through the earth to the surface.

I could also see that the entire site inside the fence was crawling with gangbangers. Papa Danwe had thugs out front, guarding the gate in the fence. There were patrols moving along the perimeter of the fence and the walls of the factory. There must have been at least thirty outfit guys in there, and those were just the ones I could see. They were armed to the teeth, in broad daylight. Even in Inglewood, that kind of thing draws attention. Clearly Papa Danwe felt the time for subtlety had passed.

I had no idea what this place was, but I knew I didn't like it. I also knew I'd have to get a better look at it, and that meant getting inside. I dropped the eye and spun my wallflower spell. It wouldn't make me invisible in any physical sense, but I'd go unnoticed by the gangbangers as long as I didn't get too close.

The warding spell was encircling the factory site, forming a massive cylinder of invisible force. The spell was powered by a small portion of the juice flowing into the site, tied into the graffiti network in four places—north, south, east and west—along its perimeter.

The ward was solid work, but it wasn't the kind of first-rate craft I would have expected from Papa Danwe. More likely, one of his henchmen had constructed the spell. That was good, because it meant I had a shot at disabling it. The simple approach would be brute force. If I hit the ward with enough chaos magic to undermine its structural integrity, it would come apart like a spiderweb in a strong wind.

Of course, the simple approach would be really stupid. It would drop the whole barrier and it would probably set off alarms. It would likely alert all the gangbangers that they were
under attack. And while it would be simple, it wouldn't be easy. It would take a lot of juice, and I wasn't sure there was much left that wasn't already being pumped into the factory.

The easy approach was to pull the plug. If I severed each of the four connections between the warding spell and the graffiti network that was feeding it, I could probably drop the whole thing. I didn't really want to do that, either. In a best case scenario, it might be interpreted as a failure rather than an attack, but I didn't think the best case scenario was very likely.

Fortunately I had another option. I went around to the east side of the building and crept up to the fence. A gangbanger stood on the other side about thirty feet away from me. He had a MAC-10 slung over his shoulder, and his rings, gold chains and even some of his tats were juiced. He didn't look to be a particularly strong sorcerer, but he was prepared.

The gangbanger looked right through my wallflower spell as I went to work on the ward. The endpoint of the graffiti network charging the spell was a telephone pole about ten feet outside the fence. It was layered in tags, grabbing juice from the incoming flow and rerouting it into the spell. It was decent work, but I couldn't help noticing it wasn't as elegant or efficient as the tags Jamal had put down. Some of the juice was bleeding out of the glyphs, evaporating into the air. I started pulling in that lost energy to power my spell.

The chaos magic I hit the graffiti node with was about as complicated as a typical computer virus. It infiltrated the arcane structure of the tag and overrode it with conflicting instructions. It wasn't sophisticated enough to actually reprogram the tag. It just made it stop working.

The warding spell was still taking in juice from three of the four points, so it didn't go down. But the loss of one of
the graffiti nodes was enough to weaken it at the point of failure. I spun my levitation spell and floated over the fence, punched through the compromised barrier with a little juice and landed inside.

I crept up to the building, being careful to keep as much distance as possible between me and the gangbanger on guard duty. I dodged a roaming patrol and approached the wall of the building, angling for a side door that didn't look like it saw a lot of traffic. I peered at the door with my witch sight and saw that it, too, was warded. The protective spells were being fed by the tags laid down on the brick walls around the door, and I used the same chaos magic I'd used on the perimeter ward to defeat them. I waited until another patrol went by, then I spun my B&E spell, opened the door and slipped inside.

Whatever the factory had manufactured at one time, all of the machinery had been torn out and removed. What was left was essentially one huge, high-ceilinged space the size of a modest airplane hangar. There were another dozen or so gangbangers inside, but most of them were lounging on cots that had been lined up along the walls, or sitting at folding tables eating, playing cards and generally wasting time. Whatever this place was, it seemed Papa Danwe's boys planned to stay a while.