The 5th Witch Read online

His penis uncurled and began to stiffen. Without taking her tongue out of his mouth, she reached down and encircled his shaft with her fingers, gently rubbing it up and down. He stared into her eyes, even though she was so close that he was unable to focus.

  “You’re real,” he said, with a catch in his throat. “You’re real, and you’re alive.”

  She said nothing, but lay back on the pillow and pulled him after her. She parted her thighs, and her vulva opened like a pale pink fruit, overflowing with juice. She guided him into her, kissing his ears and his hair and nipping at his neck with her teeth.

  This can’t be happening, he thought to himself, as he pushed deep inside her. She’s dead, and her body was cremated. But he could feel her as if she were real—her warmth and her wetness, her quick, soft panting against his shoulder. He could hear the traffic outside, and Wheel of Fortune on somebody’s TV. He knew that he had been dreaming about walking on the ocean, but that had been too odd to be real. This was different. He could even see his pale blue bath towel where he had dropped it on the floor.

  He tried not to climax too soon, but he couldn’t hold back any longer. He made a snuffling sound, and his spine arched, and then he was shaking and shaking and he couldn’t stop. Gayle lightly ran her fingertips up and down his back, so that his nerve endings tingled even more.

  After a while he lifted himself off her and lay beside her. He reached down between her legs, but she took hold of his wrist and said, “Later, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was lovely.”

  He stroked her hair and wound it around his finger. “I need to understand this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were killed, and I went to your funeral.”

  “But here I am.”

  “I know. But what I need to understand is, have you come back? Like, are you some kind of a ghost, like that Patrick Swayze picture?”

  “I hated that movie. It was so sentimental.”

  “Yes, but is that what you are?” He looked around the bedroom. “Or is this like a parallel universe or something?”

  “I don’t know. I feel perfectly normal. Maybe you had a bad dream, that’s all.”

  She kissed him again, quickly, dozens of little butterfly kisses all over his face. Eventually he said, “Whoa, whoa!” and shielded his face with his hand.

  “Don’t you like me kissing you?” she teased.

  “I love you kissing me. But I’m still confused. Tell me this: do you remember driving home from Gus Webber’s wedding?”

  She frowned at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It’s important. I just need to know.”

  “But that was so-o-o long ago.”

  “Yes, it was. Three years and twenty-six days to be precise.”

  “I remember you were very drunk. You were weaving all over the highway.”

  “And?”

  “I was quite drunk, too. You drove me home, and you had to help me into the elevator because I could hardly stand up.”

  “I drove you home?”

  “Sure.”

  “So what happened the next day?”

  “I don’t remember. I expect I stayed in bed with a hangover.”

  “You don’t remember any accident?”

  “Dan…you’re being very strange.” She climbed out of bed and walked across to the window. He hadn’t forgotten how slim and beautiful she was, how pale and radiant her skin could shine. She pulled up the blind, and she was flooded in sunlight, so bright that she almost vanished.

  “Hey,” he protested. “Don’t stand in front of the window. Somebody will see you.”

  She turned, and she smiled. “Then you’ll know for sure that I’m real, won’t you?”

  They dressed, and went out onto the balcony, taking two frosty bottles of stout with them. Gayle was wearing a plain white blouse with short puffy sleeves, and very tight blue jeans, and Greek sandals. No earrings. She had never worn earrings, for some reason that she couldn’t explain.

  He said, “I have to go to the station at three. We had a pretty disastrous night last night…two SWAT teams got wiped out.”

  “That’s terrible. How?”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to say anything about it, not yet.”

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Not even to me?”

  “You wouldn’t want to hear about it anyhow. It was too damned grisly. Listen, I won’t be longer than an hour. Do you want to wait for me here, or are you going to go back to your own apartment?” He hesitated, and then he said, “You do still live in your old apartment?”

  She gave him another of those all-knowing smiles.

  “Stay here,” he said. “We can order Szechuan tonight, like we always used to. And you can sing along to the Scissor Sisters.”

  “When I was a child I had a fever,” she sang, in a high, breathy voice, and laughed.

  Dan went to the bathroom, took a leak, then combed his hair. He looked into his own eyes for an answer to what was happening, but he didn’t have an answer, and he decided that he didn’t really want one. Gayle had come back to him somehow—as a ghost or as a reincarnation of her dead self. Or maybe his life had been diverted onto another spur, like a train.

  He went back out onto the balcony. Gayle’s half-empty bottle of stout was still standing on the glass-topped side table, but there was no sign of Gayle.

  “Gayle?” he called, going back into the living room.

  No answer.

  He checked the bedroom. “Gayle?”

  Still no answer. She had gone. He went to the front door and looked outside, on the steps. Annie was out there with Malkin, sewing some beadwork.

  “Hi, Dan! Everything okay?”

  “I don’t know. Did anybody pass you, just a few moments ago?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Tedescu.”

  “Nobody else?”

  She shook her head. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  He was tempted for a moment to tell her that he had not only seen a ghost, he had made love to her, but he decided against it. It was too confusing, too inexplicable, and too painful, as well.

  He went back inside and walked around the apartment a second time, even opening the closet doors in case Gayle was being childish and hiding. But she had disappeared.

  He hesitated for a moment, biting his lip. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of Gayle’s old apartment, which he had never had the heart to delete. It rang and rang, but nobody answered. He tried her cell phone number, but that was cut off.

  It was ten of three, and he had to go. He took a felt-tip pen and scrawled a message on the kitchen notice-board: Gayle—if I’m not here by the time you get back, wait for me!! Please!!

  He looked at the message and thought: You’re losing it, fella. You really are. But he didn’t rub it out. Whatever Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass world he had found himself in, he still needed to see Gayle again.

  He collected his wallet and his keys, and drove to the police station for the SWAT debriefing. As he went down the steps, Annie looked up, one eye squinched against the sunlight, and said, “Dan! Come for supper tonight, why don’t you? I’m cooking a stir-fry with orchids in it. They’re very good for the soul.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Hey, muchacho, over here,” said Ernie, beckoning Dan across to the window. The conference room at the West Hollywood police headquarters was crowded with detectives and uniformed officers and support staff, but instead of the usual laughing and banter, there was an awkward silence, punctuated only by coughs and the shuffling of feet.

  Dan elbowed his way along the aisle, and as he did so, several detectives widened their eyes, as if to ask him what the hell was happening. They had all seen the TV news, and they all knew how distorted it must have been. Eighteen cops had been killed in only three or four minutes, including Captain Kromesk
y and Lieutenant Cascarelli, without any of them firing a single shot. Their bodies had been so mangled and so comprehensively ripped apart that it was going to take the coroner’s department weeks to make formal identifications.

  “Everybody’s been pushing me to tell them what really happened,” said Ernie. “The current scuttlebutt is that the SWAT teams were brought down by a pack of killer rottweilers.”

  “And you’ve said—?”

  “Soy una tumba. My lips are sealed. You think I want to lose my pension? Besides, I don’t know what really happened.”

  “Let’s put it this way: They weren’t attacked by any kind of dog, were they? They weren’t attacked by anything you’ve ever seen before. Things from hell, that’s what killed them.”

  Ernie frowned. “You look different.”

  “What do you mean, I look different?”

  “I don’t know. Did something happen today? You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

  “I’ll tell you later, okay?” said Dan, because at that moment Lieutenant Harris walked briskly into the conference room, carrying a clipboard tucked under his arm. Lieutenant Harris was a short, tough-looking man with cropped gray hair that could have been used to polish stainless-steel saucepans. His eyes were pale green with a slightly distracting squint, and his mouth was permanently downturned, as if he believed nothing and approved of nothing and wouldn’t know a frivolous remark if it stung him on the back of the neck.

  Lieutenant Harris waited until the coughing and shuffling had stopped, and then he said, “Last night, during a combined operation on Rosewood Avenue in Silverlake, the Los Angeles Police Department lost eighteen good men. A night of infamy. A night of bloody infamy. Exactly how that disaster occurred remains, for the time being, classified, subject to a full investigation. But I have to warn you that after last night, our lives are never going to be the same again. Last night was this division’s nine-eleven.”

  He gave a signal to a young freckle-faced officer behind him, and the officer switched on a large LCD television screen. At first the screen showed nothing but a bronze LAPD badge with the motto to protect and to serve. But then Chief O’Malley appeared, sitting at a conference table, with Mayor Briggs on one side of him and Deputy Chief Days on the other. An assortment of police commissioners and senior officers stood in the background, looking confused.

  Dan was shocked by Chief O’Malley’s appearance. His face was ashen, and his skin was strangely stretched. His eyes looked as black as two cigarette burns. His mouth appeared almost lipless, and when he spoke his voice was whispery and harsh.

  “Thought the chief was still in the hospital,” said Ernie.

  “He should be. For our sake, as well as his. I seriously don’t like the look of this.”

  Chief O’Malley cleared his throat. “Before I say anything else, I want to express our grief for the eighteen good men who were killed last night and our heartfelt sympathy to their families and their friends. What happened was a terrible and unexpected tragedy, and our only consolation is that all of those men died bravely, and in the line of duty.

  “They went out to protect their community and to serve this great city of ours, and they died, and we shall miss them all.”

  There was a long silence. Chief O’Malley kept running the tip of his tongue around his lips, as if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say next. Deputy Chief Days leaned over to him and whispered something in his ear, and he nodded.

  In a strained voice, he said, “Whether we like it or not, what happened last night marks the end of an era in the LAPD. Last night showed us that times have moved on, and that we can no longer enforce the law by being authoritarian and inflexible. In other words, although we are still a police force, we can no longer police by force.”

  “What?” said Ernie. “What the hell is he saying?”

  “The traditional methods of keeping order in our communities have been left behind. Today, there have been so many changes in social attitudes. We have far greater moral tolerance than we used to. We are much more ethnically mixed. And more and more, people are demanding to take responsibility for their own lives—not according to the hard-and-fast rules that society lays down for them, but according to their own consciences.

  “I came here to Los Angeles determined as always to impose a law-enforcement regime of zero tolerance. Never give an inch. Period. But I recognize now that this highly diverse community can make no forward progress if a stone wall is set up in its path. The way ahead is to trust the good people of Los Angeles to keep their own city in order. From now on, the name of our policing policy is symbiosis—that is, living together for our mutual benefit with each part of our society assisting the others.

  “It’s like the Egyptian plover, a bird that lives on the backs of crocodiles in the Nile, feeding on parasitic insects that infest the crocodiles’ skin. The Egyptian plover protects the crocodiles from ill health, but at the same time it’s protected itself because its natural predators don’t dare to come too close to the crocodiles’ jaws.”

  “Crocodiles?” said Ernie in bewilderment. “What in the name of God is he talking about?”

  Chief O’Malley poured himself a glass of water, and they could hear the carafe rattling against the tumbler.

  “Look at him,” said Dan. “He’s terrified.”

  Next to him, Sergeant Kennedy was shaking his head. “I thought that O’Malley was supposed to be one of the hardest cops in history. O’Malley the Mallet, that’s what they used to call him.”

  That’s before Michelange DuPriz crammed his stomach with toads, thought Dan. That’s before bufotenine turned him into a zombie—afraid of everyone and everything, especially the manbo who controls him. But he could see that, in a different way, Deputy Chief Days was equally unnerved. Deputy Chief Days had seen that the human body could be turned into finely chopped tomato in a matter of minutes.

  Deputy Chief Days leaned toward the microphone and said, “Chief O’Malley and I have assembled a committee of influential citizens to discuss the reorganization of law enforcement. I’d like to introduce them to you.”

  The camera slowly panned to the left—and there, standing on one side of the LAPD conference room were Orestes “The White Ghost” Vasquez, with Lida Siado; Vasili Krylov, with Miska; and Jean-Christophe “The Zombie” Artisson, with Michelange DuPriz; and twenty or thirty bodyguards and henchmen. All were soberly dressed in black, except Orestes Vasquez, who wore a white double-breasted suit with a black armband.

  There was a roaring shout of disbelief from the assembled policemen. “No way, man! Those slimeballs? What the hell is he thinking, man? They’re killers! Krylov? That sack of shit? Vasquez? He’s got to be out of his frigging mind!”

  Lieutenant Harris banged his fist on the table for order, but when the policemen saw Chief O’Malley rise from his seat and walk around to shake hands with Vasquez and Krylov and Artisson, the shouting crescendoed, and they began to stamp their feet and hammer on the desks.

  Chief O’Malley was saying something, but his voice was drowned out. It was only when Lieutenant Harris bellowed, “Shut the hell up! You may not like it, but you need to frigging listen!” that the policemen finally quieted down.

  Chief O’Malley was saying, “…these three men all have reputations some of you may find questionable. I am not going to pretend that over the years they haven’t had their names linked with various activities, such as drug running, prostitution, and arms dealing.

  “But in this new age of mutuality, who better to police the narcotics trade than people who know every dealer and every connection from here to Bogotá? Who better to ensure the safety and health of sex workers than people who have been running brothels for decades? These men have unparalleled influence in every field of criminal activity, and if we work with them rather than against them, we can harness that influence to make Los Angeles one of the most civilized cities in the world.

  “I give you symbiosis, ladies and gentlemen. I gi
ve you the law enforcement of the future.”

  There was more shouting and more stamping. Lieutenant Harris stood with his head bowed waiting for everybody to calm down. Dan could only think of what his father had said. Nothing good can come out of this, if witches have teamed up with mobsters. Well, they had, and in a matter of days they had used their magic to undermine everything the LAPD stood for.

  Ernie said, “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know, El Gordo. Maybe we could team up with Jimmy ‘The Rat’ Pescano and Ruben ‘Scrappy’ Villa—go out working the streets together?”

  “The guys—they’re not going to tolerate this. Look at them now.”

  “If the guys don’t tolerate this, they’re going to wind up the same way as those SWAT teams. Ground beef. Or maybe worse.”

  “You will have to warn them, muchacho. Otherwise, there could be many more killings.”

  “I intend to, when they simmer down.”

  Dan looked back at the TV screen. Although he couldn’t hear what they were saying, it was obvious that Chief O’Malley was having an intense conversation with Vasili Krylov. But he could also tell by their body language that Krylov was talking in his most bombastic Russian way and making demands, and that Chief O’Malley was agreeing with him and making concessions. In the background, Mayor Briggs, usually such a mountainous presence, was standing alone with his hand pressed over his mouth, as if he had forgotten where he was.

  “Okay, everybody,” shouted Lieutenant Harris. “Let’s put a sock in it. We need to discuss where we’re going to go from here.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Sergeant Kennedy demanded. “The only place we need to go from here is round to the Parker Center and blow those three scumbags away.”

  “Kennedy, use your intelligence. Something serious has happened, and the chief is clearly under extreme pressure. It’s not for us to second guess our superiors. All we can do is shut up and assess the situation before we go in with all guns blazing.”