LITMIR.BIZ

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      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

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