The Price Read online

  “Did you get enough to eat?” Ma asked.

  I groaned. “For the next week, I think.”

  She pursed her lips. For the first time, I saw incipient, wavery old lady lines around her mouth. “You don’t look like you’re getting enough to eat.”

  I supposed that was my cue. “I’ve been—I’ve been sick.”

  “Too sick to call, I guess.”

  “Sara, let him talk.” Ma’s words weren’t surprising—she couldn’t help but speak her mind, I knew, and she had to say something to vent—but Dad’s interruption was unheard-of. They exchanged a look, and she took his hand. Things had gotten strange in my absence, it appeared.

  “Yeah, actually. Too sick to call. I spent a lot of time unconscious. I think I almost died.”

  “What happened?” Dad asked.

  “I’m, uh, I’ve been involved in some pretty bad stuff.” That was both lame and obvious, and neither of my parents dignified it. They waited. I inspected my fingernails while the clock ticked. “I went after the guy who—who burned the shop.” Who did this to you, I almost said. But who was that? There was culpability to go around, and I didn’t feel up to that discussion.

  “And?” Ma prompted.

  “He’s . . .” Why hadn’t I thought this out earlier? I was flying without eyes or instruments here. Was I really going to tell a nice old Catholic couple that I’d gone on what was effectively a killing spree?

  “You killed him.” Ma’s voice was flat, totally unreadable. I read an accusation in it anyway.

  “I didn’t . . .” Jesus, why couldn’t I finish a sentence? “I didn’t kill him,” I said. It was a dodge, though, and I knew it. “I found him. And, yeah. I got him killed.”

  “Mortal sin,” Ma said.

  I nodded, though I privately thought that getting Kelsen’s head perforated barely ranked on my mounting catalogue of mortal sins. Witchcraft, I was pretty sure, was higher on the list, to say nothing of the people I had personally killed. I didn’t see any reason to tell Ma that, though. This was hard enough.

  “And then?”

  “I got . . . hurt. I was basically in a coma.” Another lie. This business of squaring up with the parents wasn’t turning out to be all that square. Still, how would I even begin to explain my actual affliction? You see, I got caught up in some kind of hideous magical backlash as a result of summoning unspeakable horrors from Hell. What, you don’t believe me? How about a demonstration? Not a productive line of discussion, I didn’t guess.

  Concern swam in Dad’s eyes, anger in Ma’s. Whether it was protective anger at those who put me in that state or a more direct anger at me personally, I couldn’t tell. Knowing Ma, both. Things couldn’t have changed that much.

  “I’m in some really bad shit,” I said, eliciting a glare from Ma. “Stuff, I mean. Thing is, I . . . I really want out.” There. I’d said it aloud. Made it that much more real. My breath came faster, and I let the words spill out. “I don’t know how it’s gonna work. Once they got you, they got you for life. But I’m working on it. I never wanted any of this.” There, I was bawling again. Pathetic, but I couldn’t stop it. I saw Dad start to get up to comfort me, and Ma put her hand on his lap, gently pushing him back down. As usual, Ma knew the score. I didn’t deserve comfort, and Dad wasn’t the guy to give it to me, anyway. Right then, I thought I’d shoot myself if he told me he forgave me.

  “We’ll help you if we can,” Ma said softly. “We don’t have much money, but if there’s anything you need . . .”

  There it was. The big opportunity. And somehow, I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t work up the nerve yet to tell my folks that I wanted them to drop everything, kick over their half-rebuilt life, and go into hiding with me.

  After I talk with the feds. Yeah. That made sense. Hell, I didn’t even know the score yet. One more day.

  “Thanks. I don’t really know what I need, I guess.” I tried on a smile. “But if I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

  My folks nodded. From there, we moved to somewhat lighter topics. They caught me up on the family goings-on. Dad had been diligent about paying his insurance, so the new building going up in the old shop’s place was his new shop. Things were going to be a little tight, moneywise, until it was open and doing business, but they’d manage. I offered to help, but Ma wasn’t having any of it. “I won’t take a dime of your money until you have a job,” she said, and I believed her. She’d panhandle first.

  At the end of the evening, I kissed Dad good night, and Ma walked me to the door. Surprisingly, she followed me out into the hall and closed the door behind us. I read a determined sort of sorrow in the set of her eyes and the lines on her forehead.

  “Your father won’t say this, but I will,” she said. “When you’re clear of your problems, you can come stay here anytime you want. Anytime. But don’t come back here, Jimmy, if you think your troubles might come looking for you. I can’t watch him go through that again. I won’t go through it again. Do you understand me?”

  “Yeah, Ma. I get it.”

  “Good. We’ll see you at Mass.” She kissed my cheek, and sent me out into the night.

  Chapter 24. Basement

  I walked down the steps from my parents’ apartment feeling like I’d taken a shit on their doorstep. Don’t come back here, Jimmy, if you think your troubles might come looking for you. And that was all that really needed to be said. When did my troubles not come looking for me? I’d invited them into my life with a wide-open door and given them gift baskets to welcome them—wads of folded hundred-dollar bills to some, gnawed-off bits of my soul to others, enough to persuade them all to stay, in any case.

  Don’t come back here, Jimmy. It was a fair sentence, less than I deserved. I still felt like human pond scum. What happened to home being where they have to take you in? What kind of person can destroy even that welcome?

  And how was I supposed to tell my parents I wanted them to abandon everything now? Could I even be sure my troubles wouldn’t come looking for me after the feds found a place to stash us? Actually, no. I was certain they would come looking.

  I stepped out of the front door of the apartment into a cool summer breeze, perfect late evening. I should have known right then that things were about to go right to shit.

  “You’re late,” a voice said.

  The flame was in my hand seemingly before I willed it, the incantation half-complete on my lips, and then I recognized the cocky figure slouching against the wall. I almost roasted him anyway. So much for carrying a gun, I thought.

  “Lazzaro, you prick.”

  “What happened to ‘Frankie’? C’mon, we’re pals here.” He nodded toward my hand. “Easy with the fire, there. Wouldn’t want any accidents.”

  Don’t come back here, Jimmy, if you think your troubles might come looking for you. And here was Frankie fucking Lazzaro, smoking a cigarette and standing outside the very building. How long had he been waiting? If anything, the urge to torch him swelled, but I stifled it, somehow. I said a word of negation, and the flame went out. It left a burned smell in the air, where a couple of hairs had been singed.

  “Don’t you ever fucking come here again, Frankie. You got that?”

  He shrugged. “Where was I supposed to go? You weren’t home. Come on, we got work to do.”

  “What are you talking about? The only work I have to do is try to get a good night’s sleep.” It would be work, too.

  “Not tonight,” he said with a grin so nasty it could peel paint. “Remember? You’ll want to see this, trust me.”

  “You know, once you’ve seen one baseball bat go upside some sad sack’s head, you’ve seen ’em all.”

  The little weasel actually rubbed his hands together. “That ain’t the kind of business we got tonight.” He lowered his voice, so that the words barely drifted to me on the wind. “Some of the shit I salvaged from Kelsen’s place—you gotta see it.”

  The wind stopped, the temperature fell, and the blood dropped out of my head
like somebody’d opened my jugular. At least, it felt that way.

  “I thought his place burned,” I said cautiously. Hadn’t I lit the fire myself?

  “Not so bad. I saved most of the stuff, and I can guess at the rest.” His voice dropped further, to the faintest whisper. “And I got the stuff from Benedict’s mystery box. It all makes sense, when you put it together.”

  I studied his eyes, wondering if I could actually see the madness there, or if my mind was doing a paint-by-numbers on him. “I don’t know if you oughta be messing with that shit.”

  “Funny guy. Come on—you’ll want to see this. Plus, I need some help.” A heartbeat’s pause. “It’s a two-man ritual.”

  Lazzaro had stirred up so many unwelcome thoughts in my head, it was barely possible to keep track of them. Lazzaro, running loose with a stack of Kelsen’s research. Lazzaro, hanging around my parents’ place. An invitation to a ritual, some kind of deep magic, no doubt, and my stomach tingled at the thought of it. What was he fucking with? How bad was it? Why was it so important that I help him? I was tired, and my emotions were tangled up from seeing my folks, and I was low on sleep and sense and patience, and I couldn’t quite tell the shape of the bad thing forming here . . . but I couldn’t leave it alone, either.

  “Okay,” I said. “After you.”

  He smiled with genuine joy. That itself was terrifying.

  Lazzaro walked to his car, and I followed. He kept up a ceaseless chatter during the drive, giving me his unvarnished version of the current state of things.

  “It’s a fuckin’ mess. I mean, we got some guys up from Providence, muscle mostly, and it helps, but there just ain’t enough of us. The Russians—well, you’d think they wouldn’t be shit anymore, after the way you took down the old man, but his son’s tryin’ to hold the thing together, and he’s doin’ just enough to be a pain in our ass. Then the goddamn triads moved in. I mean, what the fuck? Where the fuck did they come from? One day I’m shaking down a bookie on Tenth, and the next day I’m getting the shit kicked out of me by a coupla chinks I never saw before in my life. Oh, and the Irish? You wouldn’t believe this shit, but . . .”

  It went on and on, an endless litany of crimes and countercrimes, neatly sorted by ethnic slur. He was right about one thing—it was a fucking mess. Our war had seemingly done little more than create a power vacuum that sucked in every gang and criminal with delusions of grandeur on the East Coast. To hear Lazzaro speak, he wanted to waste every last one of them. Charming.

  “You smell something burning?” I asked.

  “No. And, goddammit, would you quit looking back there? Nobody’s followin’ us. I got it covered. Jesus.”

  I hadn’t been checking to see if we were being followed, at least not in the way Lazzaro meant. I couldn’t shake the feeling there was someone watching us, that something blackened and horrible lurked in the back seat, waiting for me to drop my guard, and I kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. There was nothing, though.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I just need some sleep.” I needed to get away from Lazzaro. He’d made my skin crawl ever since the party. I had the feeling that one day I’d be on the receiving end of his depredations. You know a forty-five can take a man’s hand off at the wrist? . . . He screamed like a little bitch. One day soon, if I wasn’t extremely careful.

  He pulled the car into the driveway of an old, white two-story house, the only thing standing for half a block in every direction. Plywood was nailed over the windows, and the roof sagged badly. One lonely streetlight cast black shadows over the porch and the front door.

  “It’s a crack house,” I said.

  “It’s not a fuckin’ crack house. Just abandoned.” He killed the engine and got out of the car.

  We approached. This place had a bad, bad vibe to it, and the very wood seemed to sing dark hymns to me. There was magic here, though. The air seemed saturated with it. Something terrible had happened in this place, something that had drawn demons and evil spirits and Christ knew what else from all over, until they’d soaked into the frame of the building itself.

  I stepped onto the creaking porch, and two figures rose from the shadows and loomed above me.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, backing away and stumbling down the stairs. Lazzaro grabbed my arm to steady me.

  “Chill out, man. It’s just George and Patsy. I told ’em to keep an eye on the place.”

  Sure enough, Big George stepped forward. “Little jumpy tonight, big guy,” he said.

  Big guy. Ha-ha. “Yeah, well. I’m not sleeping too great lately.” God, this place was bad. Couldn’t Lazzaro feel it? Hell, couldn’t Big George? The stink off it alone, muck and decay and something like rotting tomatoes, should have been enough to convince everybody to leave it the fuck alone.

  “Can we see what we came to see and get out of here?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure. It’s in the basement.”

  Of course. I didn’t think my stomach was going to put up with actually going in the house at all, and the basement would be even worse. I made one last attempt to get out of this. “This place looks like it’s going to fall down on us, we go in there.”

  “It’s been here a hundred years or so. It’ll last one more night.”

  “You know, that’s true on every night but one. Fucking thing’s gotta fall in eventually.”

  “Come on, you pussy.”

  And that was really all there was to be said about it. Lazzaro’s latest atrocity, whatever it was, was inside. If I wanted to know what he was up to, I’d have to go in and find out.

  Big George went over, put his hand on the doorknob, and pulled. The door opened with a banshee’s wail of a creak, and the stink rolled out like a warm breath to engulf us. Lazzaro got out his flashlight. By its light, I could see wet, slick, swollen floorboards, dingy cobwebs, and trails of rat shit. The floorboards sagged and groaned under Lazzaro’s weight.

  I followed him deeper into the house, and I swear I could feel every ounce of its bulk looming over my head, waiting to do something evil.

  The basement stairs were beyond rotten, held up with a Satanic prayer and a black miracle, but we went down. They descended a long way, curving around the outer edge of the house, or maybe even past that.

  After twenty or thirty steps, I looked uneasily behind me. The stairway yawned, black and ominous. I felt like I was being watched from the shadows back there, and it was with an effort that I turned away. Ahead, a flickering orange light beckoned us forward, toward whatever private dungeon Lazzaro was taking me to. There was a nasty burning smell in the air. Man, I hate torches.

  “Lazzaro, this place is bad news. We should get out of here.” And, just maybe, burn it to the fucking ground. Gasoline—now there’s some magic for you. A few gallons of gas and a tiny spark turns into a raging conflagration. Easy as falling off a bridge.

  “You drag things out of Hell to do your dirty work, and you’re afraid of a little crack house?”

  I forced my clenched fists to open and took a deep breath. “Prick,” I muttered.

  “I heard that,” he said, and I should have known right then, from the way the torchlight reflected in his narrowed eyes, that it was time to tell him where he could stuff it.

  But he started walking and I followed. The stairs ended in just the sort of room I figured they would—stone, about thirty feet square and complete with more torches in little alcoves and braziers of some burning liquid that stank worse than the torches. There was a table on the far end loaded with a bunch of chalk and other paraphernalia.

  I sighed and took off my jacket. Lazzaro was already playing with the chalk, drawing something on the big slab that made up the center of the floor, copying from a little book he’d pulled out of his pocket.

  “Benedict would not like this,” I said, feigning irritation, but I may as well have been spot-welded to the floor. The drawing was fascinating. It was barely begun, and it already made my eyes water and my teeth hurt. I wouldn’t have touched it.
Lazzaro was way out over his skis.

  “Yeah, right. He’s so fuckin’ out of it he wouldn’t care if I did it on his living room floor.”

  “What’s it do?”

  Lazzaro grinned without looking up from his work. “Good things, man. Only good things.”

  I moved closer and squinted. I didn’t recognize the binding that wove all of it together, but I knew a few of the component diagrams—the midnight sigil, the Revelation skein, and Michael’s Sword, for starters—and I could make some guesses. “That sure doesn’t look like good things.” It looked like real rain-of-fire stuff, in fact.

  “Let’s just say that you’re going to help me solve a lot of our problems tonight. A whole lot of them.” He wrote names along the outer edge. At each, he pulled a plastic Baggie out of his pocket, checked it, and pulled something I couldn’t see from the Baggie. A hair, I guessed. That would do it. He deposited the invisible something in a circle near each name. He was about done, and now I could hear a faint, oily buzzing every time I looked at the drawing, like a distant swarm of fist-sized flies.

  “You’re going to kill yourself,” I said. “Or start a war.”

  “I’m gonna end a war, before it can even get started. It’ll be even better than what you did to Old Man Chebyshev.”

  “Jesus. I don’t know if I’m up for that kind of thing again.”

  “I believe it. You know, I thought you were dead when we found you? There was blood everywhere.” He grinned. “This’ll be much cleaner.”

  I ground my teeth. “This is stupid, man. Remember what Benedict said—death magic is bad news. If you wanna tempt fate, we can go whack a priest or something.”

  That feverish grin of his widened. “Don’t worry, Jimmy. I won’t show you up too bad.” He pointed at the clear area at the center of the diagram. “Just light one of the candles and put it on a Scythe symbol each time I nod. There will be thirteen, all told.”