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Advance Praise for CAMERON HALEY
“Mob Rules is exciting and fresh, with a complex and conflicted heroine who grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. This book will make you fall in love with urban fantasy all over again!”
—Diana Rowland, author of Mark of the Demon
“Mob Rules is an exciting, gritty urban fantasy that stands out in a crowd. Very original, with a compelling plot and an intricately developed fantasy world that on the surface looks very much like our own.”
—Jenna Black, author of The Devil’s Due
“Gangsters and vampires, ghosts and sorcerers, and the mean streets of L.A. Add to the mix a woman who can definitely take care of herself, a plot full of twists and some clever magic, and you’ve got Mob Rules. And a whole lot of fun.”
—John Levitt, author of the Dog Days series
Stay tuned for more Domino Riley in Harvest Moon an anthology also featuring New York Times bestselling authors Mercedes Lackey and Michelle Sagara.
THE BURNING MAN WAS AN ANGLO,
tall, black hair slicked back, dark eyes glittering at me under narrow eyebrows. He gestured to the remaining chair and I sat down.
“Welcome, Miss Riley,” he said, and offered his hand. I leaned up out of my chair and reached across the desk to shake it. It started burning and I let go. The flames just licked at him at first, then they caught and began to devour his fine old suit.
“Pay no attention to the special effects, Miss Riley. I assure you it’s quite beyond my control. A bit of a nuisance, really.” The fire had eaten away his clothes and was working on his flesh, blackening it and peeling it away from his bones. I forced myself to watch. I gave a little nod to let him know it didn’t bother me if it didn’t bother him.
“Tell us what we can do for you, Miss Riley.”
“I need a gun. I heard you were the man to see.”
Mob Rules
Book One: The Underworld Cycle
Cameron Haley
For Mashenka
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Acknowledgments
One
Jamal James had been skinned and crucified on the home-built bondage rack in his living room.
I knew what to expect before I walked into his one-bedroom dump in Crenshaw. Phone calls had been made, orders had been issued and I was prepared for what I’d find. I told myself the thing on the rack was just a corpse, and the part of me made on the street believed it. The rest of me ran inside and locked the doors.
Anton Shevakov waddled up next to me, rubbing his hands nervously. “Domino, damn, I’m glad you’re here. I sit on couch for hour staring at this fucking fillet.” A lot of Russian gangsters used their accents to sound hard, but Anton whined enough to dull the effect.
“A fillet is boneless,” I said. “Jamal is skinless.”
Anton looked from me to the corpse. “Anyway, I’m just glad you’re here. It is lonely time for me sitting with him.” He sighed and shook his head. “We were going to get the doughnuts.”
Anton was fat. He’d come to L.A. from Moscow in 1992 and hadn’t stopped eating since. The guys in the outfit called him Heavy Chevy. I wasn’t one of the guys, so I called him Anton.
I looked at the body. It was naked, of course—really naked—but a piece of paper was covering the groin. I looked closer. It was a magazine.
“Anton, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is stapled to his body.”
“Just cover,” Anton said, motioning to the coverless magazine on the coffee table. “Jesus, Domino, I’m tired of looking at dick.”
“Well, take the damn thing off. I need to see Jamal like you found him.”
He moved to the body and paused to consider. Then he shrugged and jerked the magazine cover from the body, returning it to the coffee table. I approached the bondage rack and examined the corpse more closely.
From the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet, Jamal’s body was just muscle and bone. Not much fat—he’d been in excellent shape, lean and sculpted like an NBA small forward. Railroad spikes had been driven through his wrists and ankles into the thick wooden beams of the bondage rack. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see. No blood. No empty birthday suit lying around.
“You search the apartment?”
“Yeah, nothing.”
“Any juice?”
“I didn’t find the unusual magic, but Domino, it’s not strong point.” Like most low-level soldiers in the outfit, Anton’s strong point was mostly blowing things up. Even in that, his talent was modest. If something went down, he was usually better off with a gun. “What are you going to do?”
“Object reading. See if I can pick up anything from the stiff, the room.” I shrugged. “I’ll look for residual juice, just to be sure.”
“So you think it was hit?”
“Magic is about the only way you could peel a guy like this and not leave any blood. There’s an old Mongolian ritual—you hang a guy upside down by his toes and make an incision like this…” I traced a line across the top of one shoulder, around my head and across the top of my other shoulder. “You open the top of him like that, hocus-pocus, and he just slides out of his skin like a greased hand from a glove.”
“Jesus,” Anton swore and crossed himself. “And the guy is alive when you take his skin?”
“Yeah, depending on how good you are and how hard you want to work at it, you could keep him alive awhile.”
Anton looked at the corpse and shuddered. “But why do Jamal like this? To squeeze him?”
“I don’t see why. Jamal didn’t have much juice to squeeze. The ritual would burn more than you could get out of him.”
Jamal had been good at what he did, but he didn’t have the kind of magic that would make someone think about stealing it. Still, you didn’t see a ritual execution like this very often. When you did, the guy usually got squeezed. If you just needed him dead, a bullet in the ear was a lot less trouble.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s what I’m here to find out. First, tell me what happened.”
Anton spread his hands helplessly. “I was to go with Jamal to shooting gallery in the Jungle. He needs to check tags, make sure they still put out. I go just in case.”
Jamal had been a tagger, a graffiti artist who used his craft to tap into the juice—the magical charge—of various places like buildings, freeway overpasses and buses. Anywhere he could lay down his tags and where there was juice to tap.
The derelict hotel in Baldwin Village where junkies went to shoot up was a well-known juice box. The place reeked of pain, hunger, desperation and despair. It was bad mojo, but it was still mojo. Jamal’s tags were the straw in the juice box. Shanar Rashan, the boss of our outfit, had his lips on the straw.
Like every boss of every outfit in the world’s major cities, Shanar Rashan was a powerful sorcerer, probably the strongest in Southern California. The LAPD thought he was Turkish. He was actually Sumerian. Rashan had been in L.A. for almost eighty years, building his organization, expanding his territory and his control of the city’s juice, though he’d used many names in that time. The investigations into his activities always seemed to hit the wall. The detectives and task forces inevitably lost interest and stuck the file in the back of a drawer before moving on to something else. Rashan had become more an urban legend than a wanted criminal.
When I drifted into the outfit as a teenager, Rashan noticed me. Unofficially adopted me, became my mentor. I already knew a lot of craft. I’d picked up a bit from my mother, a lot more from the street. But I was raw, unpolished. Rashan taught me discipline, control, finesse. When I was twenty-seven years old, he made me his youngest lieutenant. For the past eight years, I’d been his go-to girl.
And that’s why I caught the last phone call when the body of an executed gangbanger turned up. One of my gangbangers. One of Rashan’s soldiers.
“So I come here,” Anton continued, “knock on door, no answer, and so on and so on. I have key and I don’t want to stand in heat all day, so I unlock door and go in. I find Jamal hanging with no fucking skin. After I look around, make sure no one is here, I call Rafael.”
The outfit didn’t really have a rigid chain of command, but it did have a pecking order. It was based on how much juice you had and how close to the boss you were. Rafael Chavez sat a little higher in that pecking order than street-level soldiers like Anton and Jamal, a little lower than me. He’d been two phone calls from Rashan, and Rashan had thrown it to me.
“How do you know it’s Jamal?” I asked.
“Who else would it be?” That kind of limited imagination was one reason Anton would always be a low-level soldier. He didn’t have the head to be anything more. He didn’t have the juice. He never would.
You can’t get a good ID on a guy when he’s been skinned, but Anton was probably right. My instincts told me it was Jamal hanging there. Most of him anyway. If it wasn’t, I’d find out soon enough.
Witch sight involves staring at something long enough for your eyeballs to dry out. It’s like looking at one of those optical illusions. You look at the pattern, then you look through it, past it, and pretty soon there’s a picture of Jesus.
The only thing supernatural about magic is that most people don’t believe in it, don’t even notice it’s all around them. It’s as natural, as much a part of the world, as electricity. A rare few can see magic if they know how to look.
I stood by the door of the apartment and looked. I looked into the room, all the way in, past light, and color, and contrast and shape. I looked behind the visible to the magic that flowed beneath.
I looked first at the bondage rack. I saw the natural juice of the wood, no longer flowing, just pooling in the lumber and slowly evaporating. I saw the juice that soaked into the rack from the pleasure and pain of those who had occupied it.
I didn’t think Jamal had really been into the BDSM scene. Most likely he’d been using the rack and its associated activities as a tool. He’d been trying to tap more juice, learn to harness and control it. He’d wanted to get stronger, and he’d been working out. The bondage rack was his magical Bowflex.
There was quite a lot of juice in the rack, but none of it smelled like the murder. If this had been a ritual execution, the wood should have been dripping with the black magic of the spell used to kill Jamal. If I could have gotten a taste of that juice, I could have identified the ritual. Because magic is personal, I might have been able to identify the sorcerer who performed it. Failing that, I might have been able to use the juice to recreate the murder, just as Jamal had experienced it. It wouldn’t have been pleasant, but I might have gotten a look at the killer, might have been able to learn something useful from the details of the ritual.
But I didn’t get any of that, because the juice just wasn’t there. The rack had been cleaned. Scrubbed. On the surface, what I got was mostly the pain and terror of the victim. I also got the brute fact of his death, which stained the wood like mildew on bathroom tile. Deeper still I found only the old juice that had soaked all the way into the wood and the natural juice that had been there since it was a sapling.
I found enough juice in the corpse to confirm that it was Jamal, but I didn’t find nearly enough of it. A person’s magic clung to the body after death, evaporating at a measured rate until there was nothing left. This was especially true with sorcerers. If you knew how old a sorcerer’s corpse was, you could get a pretty accurate idea of how powerful he’d been by how much juice was left in the body. In the old days, graves and tombs were even violated to get at the juice trapped in the moldering corpses of powerful sorcerers.
Jamal hadn’t been a powerful sorcerer, but even a civilian’s corpse would have more juice than remained in the kid’s body. The skinless corpse was like a desiccated husk, sucked almost dry of the magic that had made Jamal a valuable if limited member of our outfit. He had been squeezed.
Whoever had done the ritual was good. It was complex magic, and most sorcerers—guys like Jamal and Anton—didn’t have the craft for it. But the really impressive part was the way the killer had scrubbed away the magic after the deed was done. It isn’t easy to clean up magic with magic. It would have been simpler just to obscure it, contaminate it—stir in enough random juice that you couldn’t get anything useful from it. Instead the murderer had wiped away every magical trace of the ritual spell that killed my guy.
I let my gaze pan around the small living room, and my luck turned. The carpet in front of the bondage rack was stained with black juice. I knelt by the stain and touched it. It was roughly circular, about two feet in diameter, cold to the touch, damp and sticky.
I dug my fingers into the stained carpet and reached out for the juice, tapping it, allowing it to flow into me. I leaned down and tasted it.
The juice began to resolve itself into a pattern in the part of my mind or soul that makes me a sorcerer. The black stain had been left by a small rectangular box. I didn’t get any sense of exact dimensions—it just doesn’t work that way—but it was about the size of a normal cookie jar, maybe a little smaller. From the taste and texture of the juice, it was probably made of clay or ceramic. It was very old and somewhat crudely formed. I could see symbols, like hieroglyphs, carved into its sides, though I had no sense of their meaning.
Mixed in with the box’s juice, I tasted faint notes of living human magic. Most of it was very old, and there was no way I could identify it. Some of that juice was fresher, though. It was Jamal’s.
I stood up and caught myself rubbing my hands on my jeans, as if it could somehow rid me of the black juice that had soaked into my skin. I let my gaze slip back to the mundane world.
“You find anything?” Anton asked.
“I’m not sure. The killer cleaned up after himself. It’s definitely Jamal, and I think he was squeezed. I might have a line on the murder weapon.”
“What do you do next?”
I thought about it a moment and shrugged. “I’m leaving. I can try to contact Jamal, but I’m not going to do it here.”
Anton’s eyes widened. Even guys who had been around the game a while got a little creeped out by necromancy. “Tell him I’m sorry about it, Domino. Tell him I wish I got here sooner.” Anton crossed himself again. “Tell him goodbye.”
“Well, I’ll try to get Jamal to talk to me. Probably I won’t be able to say anything to him at all. If I do, I’ll tell him for you.”
As touching as Anton’s request might have been, I knew his real motivation wasn’t just the bonds of friendship. He and Jamal hadn’t been that close. He was mostly worried that Jamal would blame him and stick around to haunt his ass.
Anton gestured at the corpse. “What about…?”
“Get rid of it. Clean the place. It’s dark and this is Crenshaw. Shouldn’t be much trouble.”
It wouldn’t be real messy, either, given the complete lack of blood. I took one last look at the skinned corpse hanging on the rack, and I was still glad I didn’t have to do it.
“And Anton,” I added, “put the word out. Tell everyone to stay sharp.”
In the underworld, you never find just one skinned and crucified corpse.
I can speak with the dead. It comes up in my business. Gangsters with interesting stories to tell are often deceased. Jamal’s corpse didn’t have much to say, but his shade might. Once you’ve killed a guy it’s not easy to keep him from talking. It’s not a foolproof spell—sometimes the dead don’t want to talk—but I had decent odds to contact Jamal. He hadn’t been dead long, and I didn’t expect him to be happy about getting murdered.
Most spellcraft is just will and power. You tap into a source of juice and manipulate it using a pattern you’ve learned. The spell is the pattern, a kind of cookie-cutter template you channel the juice through so it does what you want it to. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. You have to be able to create and sustain a complex, multidimensional mental and spiritual pattern, and you have to be able to tap and channel enough juice to produce the result you want.
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.
This item is one example of a class of artifacts known as soul jars. Crafted in Egypt during the Old Kingdom period (c. 2650 to 2150 BCE), the artifacts were designed to contain the ka of the exalted dead.
“Ka” was hyperlinked, so I clicked on it and skimmed the new screen that popped up.
While ka is commonly translated as “soul,” to the ancient Egyptians it more properly represented a person’s magical essence.
I closed the pop-up and went back to the main entry.
This soul jar was crafted for Pharaoh Bakare (c. 2500 BCE), who desired that the priests of his inner circle would continue to lend him their power in the afterlife. The priests were ritually executed at the pharaoh’s funeral ceremony. Their magical power was contained within the soul jar and their bodies were mummified. The mummies and the soul jar were entombed with the dead king.
Like many artifacts, Bakare’s soul jar faded from history for many hundreds of years. It reappeared when a French knight returning from Crusade brought it back to Europe from the Holy Land. It disappeared again, only to emerge in Haiti, and later in New Orleans, in the possession of Veronique Saint-Germaine.
The voodoo queen was murdered in 1854, the apparent victim of infighting within the occult underground of antebellum New Orleans. The current whereabouts of Bakare’s soul jar are unknown.
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.
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