Graves' end Page 26

  Graves paced while he interrogated, his bony feet crunching over dead leaves and bits of broken glass. Hannah and Charlie Lurp looked on.

  “This world is what he wants,” Big Juan said, in answer to the walking skeleton’s most fundamental question. “Mictlantecuhtli. He’s obsessed with it. They all are, over there. In love with the flesh. You said ‘fetish’ an’ you were sorta kidding, but that’s really what it’s like. They envy every moment of our stupid little lives.”

  “Daylight’s burnin,’” Graves said. “Cut to the part about the girls.”

  “You mean Ingrid, don’t you? Ingrid Redstone, that singer shot you in the back of the head?”

  “You’re a quick study, you are.”

  “Way it got explained to me, she was gonna be Mictlantecuhtli’s Queen,” Big Juan said. “It was a deal they made: she was gonna give up her life so he could have one. Mictlantecuhtli needed someone with her kinda skills an’ her connection to the earth to break all the way through the wall between worlds an’ take over an incarnation. Guess that’d be where you come in.”

  “Why me?” Graves asked.

  Big Juan shrugged. “I dunno. Why not, I guess? But that Ingrid, she got cold feet. She couldn’t do it to you, even though it woulda ended with her becoming Queen of all Mictlan. She stopped you goin’ in to talk to Hardface the only way she thought she could.”

  Graves was troubled by this interpretation. “What’d Hardface have to say about it?” he asked.

  “I dunno about that either, man,” Big Juan said. “That was it for me, I planted you for Caradura an’ I was out. Stopped operating altogether. El Rey shut his place down afterwards, after you died, so I got a real job an’ had a different life. Learned to bake, opened a shop, sold cakes and donuts for near forty years.”

  “Never even occurred to me you might still be alive,” Graves said.

  “Well, me neither, tell you the truth, but I’m scheduled to hit the century mark next summer,” Juan said, nodding. “Willard Scott’s supposed to say happy birthday on the TV, an’ all that shit.”

  “Runnin’ across you here was pure dumb luck,” Graves said, speaking less to Big Juan than chasing down his own train of thought. He looked to Hannah, and then to Charlie. “What’re the odds of something like this happening, d’you think? All of us being here at the right time and place?”

  “I think it’s what Lia means when she talks about ‘synchronicity,’” Hannah said quietly. “The past and the present harmonizing. Maybe the future, too.”

  “Yeah, that’s how these things like to work,” Big Juan confirmed. “Like maybe it couldnta happened any other way. You get used to it after you been operating for a while.”

  Graves and Hannah and Charlie Lurp all looked back down at him.

  “I do know one more thing,” Juan wheezed. “El Rey didn’t kill that Ingrid to bind her in Mictlan. He wanted that project to work, an’ I guess he still needed a witch.”

  Hannah looked to Graves. “Like Lia,” she murmured.

  “Must not’ve panned out for ’em, though,” Big Juan said.

  “Why do you say?” Graves asked.

  “Because the world’s still the world, amigo,” Big Juan replied. “I can’t imagine it would be if Mictlantecuhtli had got out into it.”

  Graves nodded and extended a hand. He, Hannah and Charlie pitched in to haul Big Juan to his feet, Iwo Jima style. “All right,” Graves said, once the giant was upright again. “I’m calling us square. Go on livin’ out the rest of your different life, Big Juan.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Gracias. I was sorry about what happened to you, man. You coulda killed me that day, but you didn’t. I remember that. And I know you were only there to save that lady. I wouldnta chose to see it work out like it did.”

  “Guess I appreciate that, for what it’s worth.” Graves nodded and looked to Charlie. “Charlie, you wouldn’t happen to have a car, wouldja?”

  “Not no more, but I know where there’s one you can use.”

  “Dexter?” Hannah said. “What are you gonna do?”

  It seemed like it was becoming a standard refrain.

  “I’m thinkin’ it’s time I paid this Hardface a visit,” Graves growled. “Look him square in the sockets and see what sort of personification he is.”

  Graves and Hannah waited in the small staff parking lot behind the nursing home while Charlie Lurp and Big Juan San Martin shuffled around to the front of it. Juan needed to refresh his tiny oxygen tank. Charlie returned alone after less than ten minutes, slipping surreptitiously out a back door that banged shut anyhow when he turned to rest his weight on his walker. Graves and Hannah hurried over. Charlie thumped the hood of another fancy modern car (a Jaguar, this time) that was parked in a spot with a sign reading ‘RESERVED FOR DR. WALSH.’

  “Doc locks hisself up in his office to look at that internet porn and sample the pharmaceuticals on most afternoons, but he leaves his keys in his jacket on the coat rack,” Charlie said, holding up a jingling ring on a leather tab embossed with the Jaguar logo. “So this ain’t gonna be missed for at least a couple of hours.”

  “Ahh, thank you there, Charlie old pal,” Graves said, accepting the stolen keys from the wobbly old man. Back in the war, Charlie’d had a knack for acquiring whatever a guy might happen to need, from a bottle of whisky or an extra carton of cigarettes on up to a jeep or a box of grenades. Graves was glad to know he was still getting up to his old tricks. “If I get through this I’m comin’ back here,” he promised. “We’ll play a game of chess ourselves.”

  “Just like that weird old movie,” Charlie grinned. “I’d like that, Dex, I really would.”

  They shook hands, holding them clasped together for a long and meaningful moment. Charlie’s frail bones were almost as prominent as Graves’ own. Then they broke contact, and the skeleton got into the new car with Hannah.

  Graves saluted his old (now elderly) friend and Hannah waved as he backed them out of Dr. Walsh’s parking spot and pulled onto the street, heading east down Ventura, in the direction of the Cahuenga Pass. Charlie Lurp shambled out to the sidewalk and watched them go, with his withered chest puffed up and pride shining in his eyes. Graves glanced up to see him receding in the rearview mirror.

  It didn’t take them long to get over the hill and down into the streets of Hollywood, now that they had wheels. Even after sixty years Graves was able to find the old Silent Tower, the Office of the King, without too much circling around. Today it looked derelict: besmirched by graffiti, with many of its windows broken out and covered over with plywood. It had been in good repair and apparently a part of the regular world, the last time he saw it.

  Now it looked like the world had passed it by.

  Graves still didn’t know why Ingrid had chosen to involve him in any of this (him of all people, involved so deep that he’d crawled back out of his grave to play his part), but he figured he’d come to the one place in all the worlds where he might be able to pose that question and actually demand an answer.

  He and Hannah got out of their stolen Jaguar. Graves held out the keys. “Here, take the unauthorized requisition back to where we got it before old Charlie gets in trouble, willya?”

  “Forget it, Dexter,” Hannah said flatly.

  “Miss Lia’ll kill me if I let anything happen to you,” Graves said, laying it out there with no further pretense.

  “That Ingrid person apparently beat her to it, so what are you afraid of?”

  Graves looked up at the old, ill-maintained building. “Last time I walked in there, I didn’t walk back out,” he said. “I’m not ready to see that happen to you.”

  “Then we’ll make sure it doesn’t,” Hannah said. “But you can’t ask me to stand by when Lia’s in trouble and there might be something I can do. Isn’t that why we came here? To see if we can help without getting close to Ingrid? If you’re going in there, Dexter, then I am too.”

  Her mind was made up and she would not be dissuaded. T
hat much was abundantly clear.

  Graves loved her for it.

  “Mrs. Potter, for a lady, you’ve sure got some balls,” he said. “Brass ones, if that ain’t too crude.”

  “Mr. Graves, it’s the sweetest of compliments, coming from you.”

  Graves nodded and kicked the building’s front door open almost casually, the same as last time. Then he and Hannah strode on in together.

  As they entered the broken-down lobby, through those old double-doors that still hung askew after Graves’ long-ago fight with Big Juan, the lights came on and the foyer restored itself to greet them.

  Hannah seemed quietly awed by the special effects. Graves refused to be impressed.

  A pristine elevator car descended into the gaping shaft and the bell dinged. They got in when the doors opened.

  “This floor: notions, housewares, and self-repairing lightbulbs,” Graves said in a mocking, nasal voice. The elevator doors slid closed and the car started to rise. “Next floor,” he continued, “Aztec hell. And we’re up, up and away…”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Ingrid came to attention at the sound of an engine just outside the fence, and she set aside the book she hadn’t really been reading.

  Some distance away, Mickey’s man ‘Xavier’ readied himself as well. She saw him from the corner of her eye.

  A small, metal cylinder came sailing over the fence to land in the middle of the parking lot. All of the gangsters looked at it quizzically. Only Ingrid caught on in time to turn away and cover her ears before the police flash-bang grenade went off as advertised. (She didn’t know what in hell the device was, not by any contemporary name, although the intention behind it seemed plain enough.)

  Stunned gangsters fumbled with guns and scrambled for cover while a coordinated team of six LAPD officers poured into the lot, wearing riot helmets with protective visors and carrying clear plastic shields. They took out three of Hardface’s hired men straightaway with handheld devices that delivered an electrical jolt, and then cuffed them.

  The unit’s apparent leader downed that idiot ‘Top Shelf’ with a nonchalant punch to the face as he and Lia strode into the Yard, right behind the initial wave of cops.

  Xavier ran for it, Ingrid saw, vanishing into the thick cover provided by the Yard’s vegetation, as did the dozen or so other gangbangers still at large.

  The cops gave chase.

  “That one, Ben,” Lia said, spotting Ingrid and pointing her out from across the parking lot. “Over there.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake! Ingrid thought. She spat and made a hex sign in the air before turning to flee, wondering how in the hell Lia had managed this.

  Lia looked on as Ben Leonard drew his weapon, trained it on Ingrid Redstone’s leg-and then realized that the.9mm in his hand had somehow turned into nothing more than a red plastic water pistol. A toy. No cop was armed with anything else, to their very great dismay. Lia saw it as clearly as they did. The guns might still have worked if they’d tried them (Ingrid’s trick must’ve been perceptual, Lia figured, hypnotic, something easier to accomplish than an act of physical transmogrification), but none of the Blackdogs questioned the evidence of their senses enough to make the experiment. They were disarmed, for all intents and purposes.

  Gunfire nonetheless broke out deeper in the Yard. Ben threw his shiny toy pistol aside and powered after Ingrid, vanishing into the greenery.

  Lia followed after him.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  When the bell above the sliding door rang, Graves and Hannah stepped out of the elevator. The Silent Tower’s top floor hallway was pristine and ready for them. To Graves, it seemed not to have changed one iota since the last day of his natural life, all the way back in 1950.

  They walked up to the office door. The coat of Graves’ blood that obscured Miguel Caradura’s name looked as red and fresh as if it had just been sprayed there in the wake of a high-velocity projectile. Graves paused to contemplate it.

  “Here’s as far as I got on my last visit,” he said. “Never did make it through that door.”

  “Are you ready, Dexter?” Hannah asked, looking over at him.

  “As I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  Together, Graves and Hannah pushed open the office door, which had once been a mere Hole in the Sky, although neither of them knew it.

  The King’s office was immaculate, elegant, and timelessly appointed. There were traces of Art Deco in the space’s design, as well as evidence of the post-war trends toward bolder colors and straighter lines that had been starting to assert themselves when Graves died. There was a lot of polished wood, not to mention a few very modern touches, such as a flat-screened television setup mounted on the wall like a framed painting. Graves got a sense that this room was supposed to feel like it could’ve been anywhen in the twentieth century, stylistically speaking.

  In the suite’s second chamber, the freshly-flayed figure of Mictlantecuhtli sat behind his desk, in his robes, watching another, smaller flatscreen while snacking on human hearts. A pile of them glistened on a silver tray beside him. He washed them down with what smelled like blood (hot blood, from a steaming skullmug), like it was morning coffee.

  He rose and turned to greet his guests when they stepped into the first room.

  Graves moved forward to meet him at the threshold. Except for their different costumes (Graves’ coat and fedora versus Mictlantecuhtli’s reaper robes), the two skeletons might’ve been mirror images facing each other through the doorless doorway between the chambers.

  “Dexter Graves,” Mictlantecuhtli said. His voice was deep and sonorous. “Our moment arrives.”

  “Yep,” Graves confirmed. “Greetings and salutations.”

  “Come,” Mictlantecuhtli said, “and walk beside me as my guest, and see what I have summoned you to offer. Bring your soul, but leave your body at the door. I shall then have no power to prevent your resuming it as you desire, upon my unbreakable word.”

  Mictlantecuhtli made a gesture, and Graves stepped forward. His bones and clothes fell into a heap at the threshold when his ghost stepped through the doorway, which neatly separated it from his mortal remains. Lia’d done the same thing to him yesterday afternoon, so the sensation was not unfamiliar. This time his unrestricted spirit was free to move around, and he had to admit he preferred it that way.

  Having crossed into the inner sanctum, Graves’ unencumbered ghost-form raised its eyebrows at the instantaneous changes he noticed all around him. It was like a painted veil had been yanked away. The modern-day office trappings he’d seen through the door had all disappeared. In their place were dim torchlight that flickered off of mud-brick walls, and a bloodcaked stone altar where the desk had previously been.

  Mictlantecuhtli had also changed, into what Graves guessed was supposed to be ‘Miguel Caradura,’ also known as Mickey Hardface. The tall skeleton in a cowl had become a living man, a muscular and dark-complected one, with black hair and small, knowing eyes. After that, the anthropomorphic illusion fell apart a little bit. The Aztec King’s attire consisted of a modern-day suit that might’ve looked pretty sharp if he hadn’t gone and further adorned it with a headdress made from a skull and a fan of long feathers, hammered golden cuffs that he wore over his coat sleeves, and a necklace of what appeared to be semi-fresh human eyeballs looped twice across his broad, pin-striped chest.

  Graves looked back at Hannah, who was still standing behind him in the outer office, which hadn’t changed at all, it seemed.

  “Your guest may wait,” Caradura said. “I have provided magazines.”

  “That sit all right with you, Miss Hannah?” Graves wondered if the inner sanctum was still an inner office from Hannah’s point of view, and if Caradura still looked like fleshless Mictlantecuhtli. He guessed that he’d still be the same gray ghost of himself, in either case. His bones, coat and hat were out there on the carpeted floor, but he felt like he’d be able to get back into them when he wanted to. Felt it instinctually, and he�
�d learned long ago to trust his gut.

  “Oh, I’ll be all right,” Hannah said, in answer to his question. “Besides, I have a weird sense I wouldn’t be able to walk through that doorway and survive. Feels like looking over the edge of a tall building.”

  “You are likely correct, Lady,” Mictlantecuhtli told her. “Only an initiated practitioner of ancient earth magicks could hope to cross that threshold and retain her living flesh.”

  “So there, you see?” Hannah said. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll just park it here and catch up on which celebrities are screwing.”

  “Very good, Lady,” Mictlantecuhtli said, but he was Caradura again when he turned around to address Graves’ ghost.

  “Come,” he said, in his grandly booming voice. “Let us walk, and talk, and hold palaver, Dexter Graves.”

  Miguel Caradura guided the ghost past the altar and toward the rough door in the second chamber’s far wall, the one that opened onto the undiscovered realm beyond the rooms. Graves glanced back one last time to see Hannah finding a seat, then making a sour face when she picked up one of those magazines Caradura had mentioned. It, like all of the others fanned out on the low table in front of her, was brittle and faded, dating from the 1940s.

  Graves turned away from Hannah to follow the King and found himself stepping outside onto the top of an enormous Aztec pyramid, one every inch as tall as the skyscraper that stood in its place on the other side of reality. He paused to admire the view.

  There was a leaden sky above, and an endless chaparral plain below. The landscape was dotted with twisted, leafless, and black-trunked oaks. Slow mists rolled between the trees, billowing in ways that suggested the shapes of people or buildings or vehicles for an instant or two, before the breeze pulled them apart again.

  “So this is Hell,” Graves declared thoughtfully. He’d seen some things in his day, but this took the goddamn cake. “I was told I should expect something warmer.”