We were cruising through the ghetto version of a light industrial area when Moon Dog growled. I saw junk piled high beyond a line of corrugated fencing. A sign on the double chain-link gate read Luther's Salvage.
"This the place?" I asked. Moon Dog chuffed.
I parked on the street and got out of the car. I popped the trunk and fetched the Mossberg pump-action clipped in next to the tire jack. Usually, I don't bother carrying anything heavier than my forty-five, but I was behind enemy lines and the junkyard had the look of a place where a shotgun might keep you out of trouble. I pulled a handful of shells out of a tackle box and dropped them in my jacket pocket.
Then I closed the lid, perched on the trunk with the Mossberg across my knees and waited for dawn. Moon Dog hopped out of the car and sat on his haunches, staring at the junkyard.
"You don't have to go in with me, Moonie," I said. "That's not really what you signed on for. Anyway, once it gets light, Fred won't be much more than a corpse. I guess I can handle it."
Moon Dog turned and looked at me, yellow eyes shining like lanterns. He chuffed and turned back to the junkyard.
Another hour went by like that. The sky brightened, the ghetto went to sleep and the sun came up.
The salvage yard wasn't due to open for another three hours and it was quiet. I spun the B amp;E spell on the padlocked gate, and Moon Dog and I slipped inside. Luther apparently wasn't much on organization, and there was no apparent pattern to the shapeless piles of rusting junk scattered around the yard. Narrow, ragged paths cut between the twisted stacks, and the rising sun painted them orange.
Moon Dog found a path he liked and padded down it, his nose low to the ground. I went after him. We followed a bend around a tangle of rusting rebar and Moon Dog stopped, crouching low and raising his nose to the air. He sniffed and growled.
I don't speak wolf, but I guessed he was telling me we weren't alone. I didn't see the vampire out there taking a sunbath, so I expected we had company of a different sort. I spun the eye in the sky spell, then closed my eyes and pushed it up over our heads about twenty feet.
Up ahead, there was a clearing in the junk piles and a low concrete building squatting in the middle of it. It had a two-tone paint scheme at one time, light blue on the bottom and white on top, but now the building was mostly the color of graffiti. They were juice tags-I recognized some of the patterns from the factory site.
Two bangers were out in front of the building with submachine guns. Two more were lying on the flat roof with AKs. I spun the eye three hundred and sixty degrees and then circled it in a perimeter around the clearing. I spotted three more covering from the junk piles with open lines of sight to the building and the clearing around it.
Even in Watts, armed thugs don't hang out in junkyards at dawn just in case someone shows up for them to shoot at. They were waiting for me. Even if I hadn't known whose turf I was on, the tags and colors would have told me they belonged to Papa Danwe. That fit-Fred knew he had to have protection, and who else could he turn to?
The real question was what I should do about it. I could probably take them all out before they knew I was there, and I could probably do it without killing anyone. On the other hand, cooling things out with Terrence was about the only productive thing I'd really accomplished since this whole thing came down. I didn't really want to fuck it up by shooting in the dark.
"Hang back, Moonie," I said. "I'm going to try to talk these guys out of getting hurt."
I thumbed off the shotgun's safety, dropped it to my side and walked out into the clearing.
It turned out the bangers weren't really guarding the Vampire Fred. What they had working was more in the way of an ambush, and I walked right into it. They let me get about ten feet into the clearing and then they opened fire.
As soon as I saw the two out front raise their submachine guns, I triggered the defensive shield in the gold crucifix I wear around my neck. An invisible, spherical barrier winked into existence around me. Bullets rattled against the shield like hail against a storm window, and the shield spat raw blue energy like electrical discharges as it vaporized them.
The shield doesn't make me bulletproof forever, because I can't draw that much juice from a spell talisman. It gives me about ten seconds, and that's usually more than enough time to deal with a guy who's decided to take a shot at me. Unfortunately, it's not enough time to deal with half a dozen attackers or more.
I squeezed the shotgun to give them something to think about, mostly because it was faster than spinning a spell, then I turned around and ran back the way I'd come. Bullets rained against the shield and kicked up dirt around my feet, and it sounded like someone had lit the fuse on every firecracker in Chinatown.
I got back around to the other side of the junk pile and Moon Dog was nowhere to be seen. That was just as well-a wolf is out of place in a gunfight. I crouched behind an old refrigerator, leaning my back into it and trying not to flinch as a hailstorm of bullets tore into the junk pile behind me. I was considering my best course of action when the first ball of liquid fire exploded above my head and splashed down on me like napalm.
The spell caught too much of my cover or I'd have been dead. It engulfed the refrigerator and the rear half of an old pickup camper that jutted out from the junk pile to my left. Burning droplets spattered against the back of my head and neck and sprayed across my left shoulder and arm. My jacket lit up and I was on fire.
As quickly as my mind registered that I was under magical attack, the spell talisman on my left ring finger activated another shield that was the antimagic analog of the one that saved me from the gunfire. It flared up around me just in time to catch the second, more carefully targeted spell that poured fire down on me in cascading sheets.
I moved. I ran back down the path I'd followed to the clearing, bent low and burning as I went. I took the first fork to the left and kept going until I had another junk pile between me and the clearing. Then I dropped the shotgun, stripped off my jacket and spun a spell to put out the fire that was still nibbling hungrily at my exposed skin.
"God is a scientist, not a magician," I said, and juice coursed through my body. It attacked the fire and killed any other hostile magic that might have been affecting me. As soon as I stopped burning, I used some juice to block the pain and spun my wallflower spell. Then I retrieved the Mossberg, hunkered down and threw up the eye in the sky again.
The two bangers on the roof were still there, their AKs panning back and forth across the clearing. The others had left cover and were fanned out, moving in a ragged skirmish line in my direction. There were a lot more of them than the seven I'd originally spotted. I counted at least a dozen. Most of them had guns, but a few were obviously flowing juice, preparing combat spells.
When they reached the edge of the clearing, the thugs split into two groups, one moving down the path I'd taken, the other a path that would bring them up along my flank. They obviously had a pretty good idea of where I was-there just weren't that many places I could have gone. I was sure they wouldn't be able to see through my wallflower, but with automatic weapons and explosive spells, they wouldn't have to.
I let them come. One group came around the right side of my junk pile, and the other came around the left. When they were all more or less where I needed them to be, I dropped the eye and let the Mossberg slip to the ground. I drew in a breath, reached out and sucked down all the juice I could handle, taking it in until it felt like I was burning again.