The 5th Witch Read online

  “You’re driving too French,” said Gayle.

  “What?”

  “I told you that it was time to leave. I told you. Now what are you going to do?”

  He frowned at the clock on the Mustang’s dash. 9:59 P.M. Gayle was right. They were going to be late now, so by the time they reached Santa Barbara, the highway would be rolled up for the night. He put his foot down even harder, and the Mustang topped a hundred miles an hour.

  Another car slammed past, then another and another—more and more of them, until it sounded as if somebody were hurrying in a panic through a huge house, slamming every door behind him.

  As they approached Isla Vista, Dan saw taillights ahead of them, as he always did, and he had to brake, hard.

  “God,” said Gayle, as she always did.

  It was the same in every nightmare, and it had been the same in real life on the night it had happened. A recreational vehicle in two-tone brown, driving at a crawl, with oily black smoke billowing from the back of it. On the rear bumper it bore a sticker that said Jesus Is Suspicious.

  “What do you think that means?” he asked Gayle, just as he had asked her on the evening she was killed. “Do you think they’re trying to say that Jesus kind of, like, suspects something, or do you think they mean that Jesus is acting kind of strange?”

  “Maybe both,” said Gayle.

  “Well, whichever it is, I wish in the name of Jesus this guy would move his wreck of a camper out of my face.”

  He made a signal and pulled out to pass. As he did, a truck came toward them with its lights ablaze and its horn blaring, and Dan had to swerve back in again.

  “Dan—be careful. Please.”

  He blinked at her, still dazzled. “How long do you think I’ve been driving? Eighteen years and only one accident, and that wasn’t my fault. Some Hell’s Angel with a death wish.”

  He pulled out again. The highway ahead looked clear, so he put his foot down.

  The Mustang rumbled louder and louder. Lightning crackled across the sky, and all of a sudden the air was filled with a blizzard of paper and dust and seagulls that thumped against the windshield, leaving it splattered with blood.

  “Dan—!”

  “It’s fine! We’re going to be fine!”

  But then he realized that the camper was being towed by a long black tractor trailer and that it was going to take him much longer to pass than he had calculated. What he had thought to be smoke from the camper was pouring out of the tractor’s exhaust stack and blowing across the highway in front of them so that he could barely see. And still the seagulls thumped against the windshield, bursting apart and spraying blood and feathers.

  Dan, something’s coming the other way.

  He switched on the windshield wipers, and the glass was immediately smeared with two opaque crescents of blood. But he could see the lights approaching, four main headlights and a whole rack of floodlights, and they were growing brighter and brighter at a terrifying rate. A bus maybe, or a truck. He could hear its horn blowing, like three discordant trumpets.

  There was nothing he could do but jam his foot down even harder. They had almost drawn level with the tractor’s front wheel, although their windshield was filled with blinding white light, and Dan thought: I never imagined that I was going to die like this.

  There was a fraction of a second when he believed that it was too late. But then they pulled ahead of the tractor, and he twisted the wheel to the right, and a huge Amoco tanker blasted past them, still blowing its horn, so close that its slipstream sent the seagull feathers whirling up inside the Mustang’s interior.

  “Shit,” he said, looking in his rearview mirror at the tanker’s disappearing taillights.

  And it was then that they collided with the rear end of a truck loaded with scaffolding poles, and one of them smashed through the windshield and hit Gayle directly in the face.

  That was when he always woke up—with that last picture of Gayle in his head. It was so grisly that he would have to limp to the bathroom and lean over the sink, his mouth filling with bile, his stomach muscles clenching and unclenching, his eyes tightly closed until the image faded away.

  Then he would raise his head and stare at himself in the mirror—a lean, haunted face with angular cheekbones and a sharply pointed nose and eyes the color of washed-out denim. Scraggly black hair and an unshaven chin.

  “You again,” he said that morning. “You sorry-looking bastard.”

  His doorbell chimed. He kept staring at himself in the mirror until the bell chimed again. Then he shuffled into the living room and called out, “Who is it? As if I didn’t know!”

  “It’s Annie! You were shouting in your sleep again. I brought you something.”

  Dan went over to the front door and opened it. A girl was standing on the balcony outside, holding a tumbler covered by a beaded cloth. She was slightly Hispanic looking, with glossy black hair and wide brown eyes and pouting lips that made her look sulkier than she really was. She was wearing a green silk head-scarf, a patchwork dress, and a necklace made of big brown wooden beads. Her hands and her feet were decorated with henna designs.

  “Oh God, Annie,” said Dan. “Not the myrtle tea.”

  “Myrtle tea is the best thing for bad dreams.”

  “I know. But it also tastes like tomcat piss.”

  “You’ve been doing it much more lately. Shouting. Well, screaming, to be truthful.”

  “It’s a bad dream, that’s all. I’ll get over it.”

  “It’s been three years now, Dan—longer—and you’re getting worse.”

  He went back into the living room, and Annie followed him.

  “It’s still hot,” she said. “You should try to drink it while it’s hot.”

  “Why? I don’t like hot tomcat piss any better than I like cold tomcat piss.”

  Annie put the glass on the kitchenette counter. “Tomorrow I’ll make you up some more essence of nettle. That should help.”

  “Annie—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I can’t get over it. What then?”

  She went up to him and laid her hand over his heart. He was six-foot-one and she was only five-foot-four, but there was no doubt who was comforting whom. “She’s still here, Dan. You won’t ever get over what happened. But for your own sake, you have to accept it. You can’t go on blaming yourself for the rest of your life.”

  “Maybe you can mix me up some hemlock.”

  “Don’t joke. Hemlock would give you a horrible death. It swells the lining of your throat so that you can’t breathe.”

  “Is that less horrible than being hit in the face with a scaffolding pole?”

  “It’s one hell of a lot slower.”

  He went to 25 Degrees for lunch, in the Hotel Roosevelt on Sunset, and took his usual stool at the corner of the bar. He ordered the three-cheese sandwich and a Bloody Mary, and sat popping olives into his mouth and looking around the diner to see who was ensconced in the big, circular leather booths.

  25 Degrees was glitzy but casual, and there was always a watchable mix of directors, agents, tourists, and chiselers, as well as out-of-work actors saving money by sharing a burger and a milkshake among three of them.

  “Late again, Detective,” said Pedro, the smooth-faced barman, looking up at the clock. It was a joke between them. It meant that Dan was starting to drink early for today but late for yesterday.

  “Slept badly,” said Dan. He spat out a small handful of olive pits.

  “You know what the cure for that is?”

  “I have a terrible feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Always go to bed with a very ugly woman, so that you pretend to sleep. You close your eyes, you breathe deep, you don’t do none of that tossing and turning—and before you know it, zonk, you really are asleep.”

  “Well, thanks for the advice. But I don’t know any very ugly women.”

  “Hey—you can borrow my wife.”

 
Dan was halfway through his cheese sandwich when his cell phone warbled.

  “Dan? It’s Ernie Munoz.”

  “Ernie, I’m off duty this week, remember.”

  “I know. But we just lost three guys from the Narcotics squad. Cusack, Knudsen, and Fusco.”

  “Jesus. When did this happen?”

  “About forty-five minutes ago and in highly frigging peculiar circumstances. They were outside the Palm on Santa Monica, surveilling Jean-Christophe Artisson. Their vehicle caught fire, and all three of them got cremated.”

  “When you say ‘caught fire’…?”

  “Eyewitnesses say that it just went up like the Fourth of July. The poor bastards tried to get out, but for some reason they couldn’t.”

  “They weren’t attacked? Firebombed or anything like that?”

  “There was some woman standing nearby, and apparently she was making gestures at them, but nobody saw exactly what happened.”

  “Gestures?”

  “Don’t ask me. That’s all the witness said, gestures.”

  “What about the Zombie? Was he anyplace close? Him or any of his goons?”

  “Unh-hunh. The Zombie was inside the restaurant, ordering the tuna. A couple of his goons were standing outside the door, but they were at least fifty yards away when the car went up.”

  “They couldn’t have planted a timing device?”

  “If they did, nobody saw them do it. But here’s the thing. Speedy Lebrun was inside the restaurant, too, wearing a wire. He was supposed to talk to the Zombie about the Fellini fire—get some kind of confession. When the car went up, he made a run for it, but before he’d even gone a block, he dropped down dead on the sidewalk.”

  “What the hell? Somebody shot him?”

  “Not so far as we can tell. He didn’t have no visible bullet holes in him, and there was no blood on the sidewalk. Maybe it was a heart attack.”

  Dan was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “Okay, Ernie. I’ll meet you down there. Give me five.”

  He tipped back the dregs of his Bloody Mary, folded his sandwich into a napkin, and climbed down from his stool.

  “Hey, Detective!” called the barman. “What time do you want my wife to come around?”

  Dan gave him a dismissive backhanded wave, like Columbo, and walked out of the diner onto the street, taking another bite of his sandwich as he went.

  Chapter Three

  Almost at the same time, five men and a woman entered the reception area of Peale, Kravitz, and Wolfe, entertainment lawyers, on the thirty-fourth floor of Century Park East.

  The men were all wide shouldered, with faces that looked as if they had been roughly sandblasted out of reddish-brown granite, but they were all immaculately dressed in tailored suits, colorful silk neckties, and highly polished shoes. The woman was in her mid-thirties, with feathery white-blond hair. She was wearing a balloon-shaped dress of bright yellow satin, very short, and very high platform shoes.

  The reception area was walled with mirrors so that everything was multiplied three times over—the frondy tropical plants in their cube-shaped marble urns, the modern stainless-steel statuettes representing art and music and acting, and the six people making their way to the wide marble reception desk.

  The elegant black receptionist was pecking with inch-long fingernails at her computer keyboard. “If you’d care to wait, gentlemen—ma’am—I’ll be with you in just a second.”

  One of the men leaned forward a little. He had iron-gray hair tied in a pigtail, a broken nose, and two fistfuls of heavy silver rings. “We do not care to wait,” he told her in a hoarse Russian accent, almost as if he were pretending to be the villain in a James Bond picture. “You will be with us now.”

  The receptionist said, “I’m sorry, sir, I really have to log in this calendar entry.”

  “You do not have to log in anything,” the man replied. He turned to the woman in the yellow dress and said, “Miska!”

  The woman in the yellow dress flapped her hand as if she were throwing something at the receptionist’s PC. There was a sharp crackling sound, and the screen instantly went blank. Baffled, the receptionist rattled at her keyboard, but the PC remained dead.

  “We wish to speak to Mr. Morton Kravitz,” said the man with the pigtail.

  The receptionist was bending under her desk to see if her computer had somehow come unplugged.

  “I said, we wish to speak to Mr. Morton Kravitz, and we wish to speak to him now.”

  The receptionist reemerged, looking flustered. “Mr. Kravitz? I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Kravitz never sees anybody without an appointment.”

  “Mr. Kravitz—he is here, yes?”

  “Yes, sir, he is, but he’s in a meeting with clients right now, and like I said, he never sees anybody without an appointment.”

  “He will see us. Where is his office?”

  “This way,” said the woman in the yellow dress, without any hesitation. She pointed to the turquoise-carpeted corridor on the right-hand side of the reception area. She circled around the receptionist’s desk, and the five men began to follow her.

  “Stop!” said the receptionist, rising to her feet. “You can’t just walk in!”

  “Of course we can.”

  “No, no. You hold it right there. I’m calling security!”

  “Of course you will call nobody.”

  “You want to bet?”

  The receptionist reached for her telephone. None of the six tried to stop her. Yet, as she started to punch the number, there was movement in the mirrored wall behind her. The reflection of the woman in the yellow dress covered her face with both hands so that only her eyes looked out from between her fingers. And then two of the reflected men walked around the reflected reception desk, and one seized the reflected receptionist by her hair, twisting her head around.

  The real receptionist’s head was twisted around, too, and she dropped her telephone and shrilled out, “Aaahh—ahhhh—ahhhhh!”

  But none of the real men was anywhere near her, and she appeared to be staggering and bending her head to one side by herself, as if she were having an epileptic fit.

  One of the reflected men caught hold of her wrists and wrenched her arms behind her back. The other reflected man kept hold of her hair and slammed her head onto the marble desk, facedown.

  Even though there appeared to be nobody holding her, the real receptionist slammed her head down, too, and her nose broke with a crack like a turkey’s wishbone.

  The reflected man hit her head against the desk again and again, seven or eight times. The knocking of her forehead against the marble changed to a crunch as her skull was fractured, and then the crunch changed to a slushier sound. Blood sprayed across the desk, then pinkish lumps of brain.

  Eventually, the reflected man lifted her head and looked dispassionately at her red, smashed face. Her real self levitated as if she were a life-size marionette. She stared at the woman and the five men, her eyes wild, even though she was dead. Then she dropped back onto the desk.

  “What did I say?” asked the man with the pigtail. “I said of course to call nobody.”

  The six of them pushed their way into Morton Kravitz’s office.

  Morton Kravitz himself was sitting at the end of an oval mahogany table, a tall patrician man wearing a red-and-white striped shirt and red suspenders. He had an orange suntan and a gray hairpiece that sat too high on his head, as if he were hiding his wallet underneath it.

  Three other entertainment lawyers were sitting around the table—Russ Pepper, a big, gingery-haired man in a yellow sport coat; Dominic Serrantino, who had black slicked-back hair and a nose like a predatory hawk; and Grace Trilling, a hard-faced brunette with lip gloss the color of freshly spilled blood and a black Rick Owens jacket.

  “Sorry, people,” said Morton Kravitz. “Think you took a wrong turn somewhere.” He smiled expansively and said to his companions, “That’s the trouble with having such goddamned labyrinthine offices. We ought to
give our clients a handful of beans when they come in to reception, so they can find their way back.”

  “Of course this is the correct room,” said the man with the pigtail. “You are Mr. Morton Kravitz?”

  “That’s right. But I regret that I can’t see you without a prior appointment, my friend, and some idea of why you want to consult me. I only handle corporate business, not personal.”

  “You handle Coastal Productions, yes?”

  Morton Kravitz looked uneasy. “I’m sorry, but I’m right in the middle of a very important meeting here, and I can’t just—”

  “You can. I assure you. I am Vasili Krylov.”

  “Oh. I see. I’m sorry, Mr. Krylov, I didn’t recognize you. The last time I saw you—well, you looked altogether different. You were sporting a—kind of a luxuriant mustache, if I recall?”

  Dominic Serrantino blinked in obvious anxiety. “Mort, I think we need to call security.”

  “You call nobody,” said Vasili Krylov. “If you call somebody, that will be the last somebody you ever call.”

  Russ Pepper stood up and said, “Come on, Mort—this is intolerable! You can’t just let this guy waltz into your office without so much as by your leave.”

  He flipped open his cell phone, but Morton Kravitz laid a hand on his arm and said, “Don’t, Russ. Just don’t. This gentleman is Vasili Krylov.”

  “I don’t care if he’s frigging Tchaikovsky.”

  “You like Tchaikovsky?” asked Vasili Krylov. He turned his head like a shark that has just tasted blood in the water.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I ask you, sir, if you like Tchaikovsky.”

  Russ Pepper was confused. He looked to Morton Kravitz for some indication of how to respond, since Morton Kravitz obviously knew who this man was and Pepper didn’t.

  Morton Kravitz said, “It’s okay, Russ. Just sit down, okay?”