Graves' end Read online

  Oscar shrugged. “Not really. I’ve been thinking it might go better if I give the work to some of the men I hate, like the ones who get drunk and punch their wives for fun on a Friday night, and then when they’re done just, you know… push ’em through.”

  “That’s coldblooded, mijo,” Tom said. It was also smart, he reflected, and safer than letting rumors of the Hole spread amongst these new people. Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to encourage it out loud.

  “I know it, Tio,” Oscar said, lowering his voice. “But the King’s reach into this world is getting long enough already, I think.”

  Tom looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

  “He has money of his own now,” Oscar said. “Investments, bank accounts. He owns land. He’s got people on a payroll who think he’s completely human, just a weird recluse. Watt handles it all for him, for now, but he’s gonna snap under the pressure soon. He’s wound too tight for it.”

  “Is it that bad already?”

  “Things are moving fast, Tio. The King’s even picked himself out a name to use in the realworld: ‘Miguel Caradura.’”

  “‘Michael Hardface?’” Tom said. “I guess that fits.”

  “I think it was the witch’s idea of something clever,” Oscar said. “He’s working on a face and a body to go along with it. He stands there in the second room wearing a suit to practice looking like a real person. I think he means to hold business meetings and crap like that when the building’s done. He’s already had me drag office things up there so he can start learning to handle them.”

  “Oscar,” Tom said, looking up at the younger man. “Do I have to tell you how bad an idea all this is?”

  “Not really, Tio,” Ramon’s boy said, and Tom felt both relieved and proud of him upon hearing it.

  The curtain came down on his moment of hope when Oscar took a small gun from inside his overalls and pointed it, reluctantly, right at him.

  “But I still have to take you up to the Hole, and watch you go into the second room,” Oz said.

  Tom looked at the gun. “You gonna shoot me? What would be the point of that?”

  Oscar also looked down at the sorry little pistol in his hand, acknowledging the absurdity of it. He put it away, tucking it in at the small of his back. “Not much, I guess,” he said. “You need to give up your flesh of your own free will if you’re to be useful to the King. It’s the deal you made with him. I just need to make sure you honor it.”

  “How come, mijo?” Tom said softly. “What arrangement has he made with you?”

  Oscar’s face creased with shame and sadness. “My son,” he whispered. “The child Connie’s carrying right now, Tio. The King says he won’t call for him when he’s older, if you make good on your promise.”

  Oh. Tom might’ve known. He nodded.

  “Let’s go, then, if we’re going,” he said, and Oscar looked down at his boots, unable to meet Tom’s eyes.

  Part Four: All Souls’ Day, Afternoon

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A century later…

  Graves thought his stolen fancyass car looked made for the driveway Lia instructed him to pull it into. An automatic gate closed behind them as they glided up towards a sprawling, Spanish-style mansion perched on a rocky outcrop high above the city, way up in the exclusive Hollywood Hills. Graves didn’t know what sort of architectural magic kept it up there. Every house they’d passed on the drive up winding, twisting Coldwater Canyon looked like it could’ve gone sliding down the side of its mountain at any second.

  Lia was out of the car almost before it stopped at the top of the circular drive, leaving the passenger door hanging open and dashing up the walkway at a full run. She pounded, urgently rather than politely, on the big house’s carved mahogany front door.

  A smartly-dressed and somewhat nerdish young hipster opened it right away. Lia threw herself into his arms with obvious gratitude. “Riley!” she cried.

  He squeezed her briefly and then appraised her at arm’s length. “Lia,” he said. “You look like hell. Seriously. Your friend’s in the car?”

  Lia nodded and he was on his way down to the drive, without another word. Black Tom, the voiceless little man with the cane and sunglasses, got out of the car on the passenger side, and Graves realized that this Riley person didn’t-and perhaps couldn’t-see him. The same way Miss Hannah couldn’t. That privilege seemed to be reserved for Lia, and now for him as well.

  “What happened, anyway?” Riley was asking of Lia, over his shoulder, as she trotted back down to the car at his heels. “Who’d shoot at you? You’re not in some sort of-whoa.”

  Graves stepped out of the car on the driver’s side, and him, Riley saw.

  Lia’s friend stopped, stunned, and then broke into a grin, his face glowing with genuine wonderment and geekish delight. “Oh, Lia…” he breathed, unconsciously raising a hand to his mouth. His eyes even glistened a little. “Oh. You are… an artist, girl. That is just incredible.” He turned to her. “I could go straight for you if I had to,” he said. “I’m serious. Maybe no oral stuff, y’know, but I can get it up for anyone who can do this.”

  Graves could only stare at him, at a rare loss for words.

  “Riley, my friend is bleeding,” Lia reminded.

  Riley tore his attention away from the skeletal spectacle of Dexter Graves, arisen from the thing that shared his name. “Right!” he said, snapping out of his rapture. “Right, although I don’t really see what you need me for when you can raise the dead…”

  He leaned into the car. Graves looked at Lia across the top of it.

  “Hey, Ms. Potter, I’m Riley, remember? It’s been a while,” Riley said, from inside the cockpit, craning over the passenger seat to greet his patient. “Why don’t you show me where it hurts?”

  “This guy’s a doctor, is he?” Graves muttered.

  “Well, he has a medical degree,” Lia hedged, “but not a license to practice. It’s a long story.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Graves said. “Beats the local veterinarian, I guess.” Then he saw how weary and worried Lia really looked, and felt abashed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She is gonna be fine, you know.”

  Riley helped a wincing Hannah out of the car. Graves stooped down beside her so she could throw her arm across his shoulderblades and let him bear her weight.

  “He’s right, you guys were lucky,” Riley said. “I’ll irrigate this and dress it, and I think I’ve got some antibiotic samples kickin’ around, so she’s gonna be okay.”

  Lia nodded, looking like she could’ve cried from relief. Graves helped Riley help Hannah up toward the house, carefully, taking it slow so as not to pull at Hannah’s wound.

  Lia followed them. After a moment she asked, “Riley… is Steb around?”

  “What’s a steb?” Graves said.

  Riley nodded uneasily. “Upstairs, yeah,” he said in response to Lia. “He oughta be awake soon. He’s been working a weeklong operation, and you know how he gets.”

  “So it’s a bad time to be here, then,” Lia said.

  “Well… there does tend to be that, you know, spillover, when he’s practicing.”

  “No, really, what’s a steb?” Graves asked again. “Is it a guy?”

  “Esteban de Rojo,” Lia said. “Steb.”

  “Her ex,” Riley and Hannah both told him, in unintentional unison.

  “No,” Lia said. Quick to protest, Graves noted. “No. Not my ex. We had an affair, not a relationship. A fling.”

  “Her flingerer, then,” Riley said. “Whatever that means. I don’t know what sort of sick shit you people get up to. I really don’t like to think about it.”

  Graves tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal his jealousy. He knew Hannah felt his spine tightening up. “Well, hey,” he said, way too jovially. “Let’s shake that deadbeat outta bed, is what I say. I’m damn curious to meet the man who can tame our Lia.”

  “Can you guys just stop it?” Lia said. “Please?”
r />   They all looked at her. Her eyes were bloodshot and more than exhausted. Graves thought she looked absolutely spent.

  “Lia…” Riley said, his brow creasing with concern. “Are you really okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Lia said, rubbing at her forehead. “But maybe I could lay down… somewhere… for just a little… little bit…”

  Her knees buckled and she collapsed to the driveway pavement. Graves could see she was unconscious before she hit the ground.

  Riley and the short phantom with the cane were at her side in less than an instant. Graves lurched back over with Miss Hannah draped across his shoulder so that they might help her, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Graves brushed an unconscious Lia’s hair back from her forehead, taking care not to scratch her with his bony fingertips.

  That Riley character and his people had laid her out on a big, comfortable bed in a palatial guest room. It had rough plaster walls with dark wood trim, in the old Mission style, and there was a lush Persian carpet spread out on the red tile floor underfoot. The rug felt soft and rich against Graves’ exposed metatarsals.

  There were also a number of framed movie posters decorating the walls. One eye-catcher advertised a flick called Pulp Fiction and featured the image of a dangerously beautiful woman with Lia-style black hair. Another bore the title Scarface, which Graves figured might refer to Al Capone, ol’ Public Enemy No.1 (although the film’s skinny star, some mug named Pacino, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the pudgy criminal visage he’d seen staring back at him a hundred times from the front pages of newspapers).

  The poster right over Lia’s bed, however, was related to a picture Graves had actually seen before, all the way back in ’46. The Big Sleep, starring Bogart and Bacall. He’d even read the novel it was based on, and it’d given him an idea for something he might do with himself after the war. The paper the poster was printed on had turned brittle and yellowed with age, but the artwork was still vibrant, and long-faced Bogie still looked cool in his floor-length trench and canted hat.

  Graves adjusted the lapels of his own copycat coat, feeling a touch self-conscious about it. He pulled a light blanket up to Lia’s chin and straightened up to go out into the hallway.

  The ghost Lia had said was called Black Tom (after Graves confessed to seeing him on the drive up here) remained at her bedside, sparing the departing skeleton only a momentary glance and a brief nod before he went out the door. Graves felt good about that. He trusted that Lia’s tightlipped and selectively visible pal would come to fetch him at the literal instant anything about her condition changed.

  There were two guards stationed out in the hall, both of them wearing black suits with skinny black ties and holding automatic weapons the like of which Graves had never seen before. One man stood to either side of the bedroom’s arched doorway.

  Graves ignored them, and they returned the favor. His footbones clicked against the corridor’s terracotta tiles.

  He went out into a living room crowded with party people. It had yet another cadre of those blacksuited guards stationed around the doors. The wood-beam ceiling above was vaulted; the room flooded with natural light from high windows. There were big canvases covered in splotches of paint that didn’t look like anything hanging in frames up on the walls. Like someone was excessively proud of their toddler. Music poured from unseen speakers and frenetic images of a longhaired, half naked guitarist flashed too fast to follow across a cinema-sized screen that was set above a fireplace you could’ve barbecued an ox in. Riley’s guests held colorful drinks in their manicured hands while they socialized, many of them showing each other pictures and video clips on tiny personal viewers that somehow doubled as telephones even though they were thinner than a pack of cards. People either wore a lot of black or else wore very little at all. The crowd that had gathered for whatever the hell this was-some sort of a cocktail soiree held in the middle of a weekday afternoon-felt moneyed yet bohemian to Graves, with his plainly outdated point of view…

  But they still weren’t jaded enough not to fall silent when a skeleton in a trenchcoat made an entrance, as he was quietly pleased to notice.

  He felt like a movie star in this room.

  Graves turned to a nearby hipster in a crisp new fedora. He plucked the guy’s hat right off his head and replaced it with the chintzy replica he’d been making do with since his spontaneous exhumation yesterday morning. The kid’s only response was a single gulp, as audible as a sound effect in the hushed, cavernous space.

  “Thanks, pal,” Graves said, adjusting the brim of his newly-acquired skullcozy. “I owe ya one.”

  Graves nodded to Riley on his way across the subdued room. Riley nodded back, and everybody in the joint gaped at him, impressed by his connections.

  Graves went out a sliding glass back door that rumbled on a metal track, shaking his head. “You’d think they never seen a fella that looks good in a hat before,” he muttered to himself, emerging onto a back deck that boasted a predictably spectacular view of the descending foothills. The vast LA basin stretched away beyond that, the city awash in autumn sun.

  Hannah was sitting at a small cafe table at the far end of the deck, taking in the scenery with an unlit cigarette waiting in her hand. Somebody’d dug up a pair of bluejeans and a clean white t-shirt for her to wear, both garments free of bloodstains and bulletholes.

  Graves stepped up beside her and clicked his old Zippo alight. “You gonna fire that thing up or what, sister?”

  Hannah looked up at him, then down at her cigarette. “Oh… no,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “I suppose not. Lia made me quit. A long time ago, actually. She hates these things. Says they dishonor the relationship the old people had with an important plant.”

  Graves shut his lighter and pocketed it. He sat down in the chair opposite Hannah’s. “I guess she’d be the one to know about that,” he said.

  Hannah nodded and shrugged, still contemplating the efficient nicotine delivery device trapped between her first two fingers. “She says the same about teabags, though. And it can still calm me down to hold one of these things, sometimes.”

  “Sure it can,” Graves said. “Gives those nervous hands something to do. I getcha. I sorta think that’s the whole reason I ever took it up in the first place. My hands were nervous a lot, back in the war.”

  Hannah nodded. They looked at the view together. The sun was warm, the breeze cool. Tall clouds marched across a crisp blue sky, casting large pools of shadow onto the landscape below. The tower-clusters of Century City and downtown jutted up in the southeastern distance like strange crystal formations. They both could smell the ocean on the winds that gusted in from the west. It would rain in the next few days. Graves could feel that in his bones-not that he could expect to feel it anyplace else.

  “Doctor Ironic says it looks like she’s just exhausted, by the by,” Graves said, feeling no need to state that he was talking about Lia. She was right up at the forefront of both their minds. “Needs some rest. Guess it’s no big wonder why.”

  “That’s his full name?” Hannah said. “Riley Ironic?”

  “What he’s got that pack of sycophants in there callin’ him, anyway. Don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling, myself.” Graves huffed in frustration, and Hannah glanced across the table at him. “Miss Hannah, who the hell are these nutcakes?” he asked, searching her face for answers. “This place is just plain weird.”

  “I’ve heard Lia call them ‘operators,’ I think,” Hannah told him. “Operators for hire. Steb, I know, does his thing for gangsters and smugglers and such, for a lot of money. As you can see. Riley said he likes to have people around to help him celebrate when he finishes a job. So they’re sort of like Lia, I guess… to varying degrees.”

  “Riiight,” Graves said. “Widely varying, I’d say. If a dozen of those clowns in there are worth one Lia, I’ll eat my fine new hat.”

  Hannah nodded her agreement and looked back out at the b
ecalmed view. “Still, it’s good of them to help us out.”

  “That it is, sister, that it is,” Graves agreed. “So. What kinda history’s she got with this ‘Stub’ creature, anyhow?”

  “It’s Steb, Dexter, and she dumped him, if that’s what you’re wondering. Three years back.”

  “Won’t say it hadn’t crossed my mind,” Graves confessed. He supposed he was doing a piss-poor job of concealing his envy. “You’ve known her for quite a little while there yourself, haven’t you?” he asked.

  “Since she was about sixteen or so, yeah. Going on… god, almost ten years now, I guess.”

  “Wow,” Graves said, genuinely impressed. “Don’t think I ever knew anybody for a full ten years, ’cept for some of the guys I was in the service with. How’d you two, y’know, link up?”

  “That’s a story too,” Hannah said.

  “I’m all, well, not ears,” Graves said, touching the side of his skull. “Sound holes, maybe. Words still go in there, though.”

  Hannah smiled. “Actually, Lia was already living there when I bought the Yard,” she said. “It’d been empty for a long while before I took it over. Many years. Lia’d gotten into that old bomb shelter all by herself, somehow, and the place was so overgrown that I didn’t even know it was there. She was growing vegetables for food and marijuana for pocket money. She wasn’t ambitious about it, she was just… there. Doing her thing in that little back corner. She actually hid from me for almost a year while I was getting the place ready to open, thinking I’d throw her out if I knew.”

  “Reasonable worry,” Graves said. “Guess I didn’t realize that place was yours.”

  “Oh yes, all mine,” Hannah said, turning wistful. “I–I had a husband once, Dexter,” she explained. “His name was Warren, and he was good to me. He had insurance. A lot of it. After he was, you know, gone, I wanted to do something different. Warren was a software developer, and I’d been a project manager at the company he founded right from the very beginning. It was our life together, and after twenty years I needed something that was just opposite, I guess. Something that would be healing and soothing, so the Yard’s what I bought with all that money. Plants, life, earthiness, you know? Roots.”