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 the kitchen and curled up on the couch. Most of the problems I have to solve are pretty simple. There's a body, get rid of it. Someone's skimming juice, make so they don't do it anymore. The cops are working too hard, pay them or put the hoodoo on them so they leave us alone. Action, reaction. Most problems have easy solutions.

This wasn't one of those problems. Jamal had been executed by another outfit. It had been an act of war.

Ordinarily, if a rival gangster hit one of our guys, I'd hit him and make sure his boss got the message. Problem solved. I wouldn't enjoy it, probably, but I'd do it because that's the way this thing of ours works.

That wasn't going to be a quick fix this time. Even with all the juice and testosterone on the street, L.A.'s underworld is surprisingly peaceful. There's violence, but most of it happens within the outfits, not between them. There's competition, but overt confrontation is rare. No one wants a war.

I was pretty sure Papa Danwe was responsible for Jamal's murder, but I couldn't prove it. My divination spell allowed me to build a pretty strong circumstantial case against the sorcerer. But as powerful as magic is, it also has its limitations. By its very nature, magic is ephemeral, intangible and subjective. My divination might be enough for me, but it wouldn't count as hard evidence to anyone else. Even among sorcerers, "Wikipedia told me so" isn't a compelling enough reason to touch off a gangland war.

I didn't plan on taking Papa Danwe to court, but we would need the support of at least some of the other L.A. outfits if we wanted to make a move against him. We wouldn't need their help, but we would at least need them to stand aside. There were a dozen major outfits in Greater Los Angeles, and plenty of smaller ones, but only a few really had a stake in South Central. Those were the ones that mattered, and they'd be the hardest to convince.

It was also unlikely that Papa Danwe had done the hit himself. It wasn't his style. He'd have a henchman to do the dirty work, though it would have to be someone pretty good.

And finally, while I could connect Papa Danwe to the soul jar, and I could connect the soul jar to Jamal's murder, I didn't have even the glimmer of a clue about motive.

I'm not a detective. Most gangsters have it in them to do a murder, but it's a rare thing if one of them is clever about it. Elaborate plots and cunning schemes are for normal people. A gangster usually kills a guy because someone else told him to and he thinks he's covered. Mistakes get made-gangsters are prone to them-and that's where I step in. There isn't a mystery to solve, just an error to be corrected.

Most of what I knew about detective work came from cop shows and buddy movies. Look for clues. Develop a theory and find a suspect you like. Spend time with the family of your partner, who happens to be only a couple weeks from retirement.