Witch Hunt(17)
I raked my hands through my sweaty hair, leaned on my knees. I was all right. I was still here, even if Erin wasn’t. There was still time to get justice for her. All I needed was the manila folder on Suzy’s coffee table and some time. I checked the clock on the wall. Bad news was, Cat had only allowed me to sleep for two hours, and my eyeballs felt drier than granite and everything still hurt from yesterday. Good news was that Suzy was still asleep.
I got dressed, donned my jacket, and was almost ready to go when I saw the phone light up on the table near the sofa.
It was Suzy’s work phone.
Ignoring my whispering conscience, I flipped it open. It was from the OPA, not a boyfriend. She had gotten a standard tracker text—an alert telling her that a suspect in her current case had been sighted. It contained a series of digits that would translate to coordinates once decoded. I scribbled the number in my notebook before deleting the message from her phone.
The first four digits attached to the code were the same as the serial number on my manila folder. It proved what I already suspected: someone else had been given the Stonecrow case.
And that someone was Suzy.
What the hell? I’d told her that I wanted to talk to this Stonecrow witch, and she’d just told me to blow town. Suzy should have told me that she had the inside track on locating Stonecrow. On the bright side, now I wasn’t going to have to search very hard to find Stonecrow. The morning was already looking up.
I gave Cat a rub, got out the door.
The witch wasn’t going to catch herself.
Working for the OPA, you don’t get out on your own until you’ve already been walked around a few times on a short leash. Aside from the mandatory ride-along every agent has to do with the union , there’s also a six-month probationary period where you get all the baby cases: kids slaughtering the pet cat to try to raise the dead, snake oil salesmen, housewives trying to emulate spells on Charmed and accidentally summoning demons. All the stuff that has no malicious intent and no victim but still has to get cleaned up.
Shady Groves Cemetery was the number one site of these bullshit cases. It was right next to a high school on the outskirts of the city, so that was where most complaints of lurking “Satanists” (emo teenagers without enough extracurriculars) got reported.
I’d been on so many somnolent stakeouts at Shady Groves that I had the layout memorized. It was up on a hill. Parking lot on the south side, school on the west side, bodies all up under the trees. The mausoleums and Victorian-era statues are the real tourist draw. The place has more creepy buildings than a small town in Louisiana.
If Stonecrow was the real deal, then she wasn’t a big player. Because that was where the tracker text was sending me: Shady Groves Cemetery. The little leagues. Training wheels for people who want to be necromancers.
So I didn’t bother preparing before heading over. I didn’t borrow Suzy’s kitchen to brew a magic neutralization potion. I didn’t get ropes or other restraints. I did take the gun—figured that’d keep my ass covered well enough if Stonecrow turned out to be hostile. I might even be able to shoot someone with it if they stood still long enough for me to get my bearings.
In retrospect, it wasn’t one of my best plans. Mostly because I had no plan at all.
I hit Shady Groves Cemetery about an hour before dawn. Even at four in the morning, Los Angeles traffic blows monkey balls. It was stop and go the entire way—mostly stop.
Eventually, Shady Groves came out of the predawn gloom. I didn’t park the stolen Toyota in the parking lot, since it would be visible from the graves. I took it up a frontage road around back. The tires thumped along for a couple hundred yards, bouncing me around like dice in a cup.
I could have picked a better car to steal. As in, maybe one with any suspension whatsoever.
Then I heard a thump and a hiss, the Toyota sagged on one side, and suspension was suddenly the least of my problems.
“Of course,” I muttered, killing the engine and getting out to look, even though I already knew what I was going to see. I’d blown a tire on a sharp rock that had been invisible in the darkness. Guess that was just my luck that week.
I kicked the tire. My short, illicit affair with the Tercel was over.
I found my way through the bushes to a section of chain-link that had been cut away long before I ever started working with the OPA. It was probably one of my trainee predecessors that did it; all of us have been through Shady Groves during our probationary periods, and I can think of at least one or two fat-assed agents that would have gotten sick of having to climb.
Pushing through the bushes, I beat away the snarls of metal and stumbled into the cemetery.