Shock Warning Read Online Free PDF Page A

relayed the order and gave it parental authority.
    “Nobody move,” she said. “Let Danny handle it.”
    He got out of the car, ready for anything.
    A group of Mexicans, farmworkers, was huddled together, their faces illuminated, flickering in the light of scores of candles, all eyes turned toward an object on the wall . . . muttering to themselves in Spanish. No, not muttering—praying.
    Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen
    And then he saw it. “ Jesús, Maria, ” he gasped

C HAPTER F OUR
    Los Angeles—the La Brea Tar Pits
    The woolly mammoth’s eyes were wide with fear, pleading with him to stretch out and pluck the ten-thousandpound animal from the muck.
    Fat chance: The great beast stood twelve feet tall at the shoulder, with a pair of enormous tusks that could shishkebab an elephant. But, trapped in the seductive, bubbling asphalt, the dumb thing had no place to go but down. Look where ignorance, greed, and hunger got you.
    “You’re in the soup now, buddy,” muttered the man known as Devlin. “Guess that makes two of us.”
    He wiped the sweat from his eyes and glanced around the grounds of what was technically called Hancock Park, although no Angeleno ever called it that. To everybody but foreign tourists reading a map, it was the La Brea Tar Pits, and always would be.
    “Where are you?”
    He was trying to spot the woman—Jacinta, she called herself, like the flower. Hyacinth. No Last Name. Nobody had a last name anymore. Or if they did, they never used it.
    Just him. Devlin. Even though that wasn’t his real name, it was good enough. It would have to be. It had been good enough most of his life.
    It was always fun trying to match a voice with a face. The pretty ones always turned out to be ugly, and once in a while vice versa. The young, old. The hot, not.
    As he scanned the crowd, Devlin could see the towers of Park La Brea across Sixth Street, feel the eternal traffic of Wilshire Boulevard at his back as his gaze roamed across the reeking expanse of major urban America’s only open oil field. “Miracle Mile” if you wanted to go retro-civic-boosterish. He dabbed his brow with a pocket square and replaced his hat on his head. No place like the tar pits in October, if you liked heat. Good thing his suit could breathe, even if he couldn’t.
    It was the usual collection of tourists in shorts, baseball caps, and flip-flops. Devlin shuddered, as he often did in the presence of boobus Americanus in his colorful native costume. You could chart the decline of America strictly by the togs. Beachwear for all occasions. Earringed men and tattooed women. Ten-year-old girls tarted up like hookers and twelve-year-old boys duded out as gangstas. And more butt cracks than a plumbers’ convention.
    In this muck, the mammoth had plenty of company.
    Devlin looked at the time on his cell phone display: oneten in the pyem. In the old days he would have looked at his watch, but who needed watches anymore when you had instant, time-zone-sensitive, satellite-calibrated time on demand?
    For the tenth time he read the signage in front of the sculpted monster: MAMMUTHUS COLUMBI . That was the dying creature’s scientific name. It sounded like the kind of thing any kid with a halfway-decent command of pig latin could make up. Any kid in his day, that was; how many kids today spoke pig latin? Mammuthus my utt-bus . . .
    One-eleven.
    Should he light a cigarette? Only social renegades, rich people, undocumented aliens, and teenage girls smoked in L.A. anymore. Would a carelessly tossed match, caught just so by a breeze, ignite not only the tar pits but the entire latent Wilshire Boulevard oil fields, setting off a chain reaction from the still-functioning oil derrick on the grounds of Beverly Hills High