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.
