Graves' end Read online

  The elevator to the left of center dinged and its doors slid apart. Graves stepped out into the hall, leaving the trapdoor hanging open from the carriage’s ceiling behind him.

  The middle elevator’s big doors were still gaping wide, although there was nothing to see through them now but an empty shaft and a snarl of shredded cable. The guy Graves had nicknamed Stan was staring right down into the chasm, looking about as aghast as a man can be. He whipped his head up when Graves strode toward him.

  Before he could get his gun into play, however, Graves flicked a smoldering cigarette butt into his face. The skinny henchman staggered backwards, flailing, and fell right into the open, empty elevator shaft.

  His scream echoed all the way down, until a muffled thud abruptly cut it off.

  Graves didn’t look back, but he grinned an ugly grin as he walked on down the hall. He paused to pick up a still-loaded shotgun one of the now-dead guards had dropped, as a replacement for the one he’d emptied.

  He was about to throw open Miguel Caradura’s office door, the only one down at the far end of the hallway, but he stopped in his tracks at the sound of a woman’s dulcet voice behind him.

  “Dexter.”

  He spun around and Ingrid Redstone stepped out from a recessed doorway, as if into a silver spotlight. She was a vision: in her late twenties, with ivory skin, fox-red hair, and a body to make any man want to run screaming through the streets with his balls in a bucket of ice. Graves found it incredible to think that she’d given birth not too many months ago, as she in no way resembled any matron he’d ever met. Her missing kid was bound to be a looker too, if precedent meant anything. The tall redhead (who was packed into a black satin evening gown even though it wasn’t much past eight in the morning) regarded Graves with troubled blue eyes.

  “You really came,” she said.

  Graves’ face tried to light up with relief and pleasure as he started toward her, but Ingrid’s look of brokenhearted sorrow kept it from doing so. “Ingrid, holy shit, are you okay?” he blurted. “Did they hurt you? How’d you get away?”

  Ingrid shrugged him off when Graves tried to embrace her. “It doesn’t matter, Dexter, there isn’t time,” she said. “You have to get out of here.”

  “We have to get out of here,” he corrected. “Soon as I’ve seen to Caradura.”

  “Dex, no,” Ingrid said, her eyes widening in shock at the very idea. “He’ll kill you. Or something worse. Let’s just go, please, while we still can…”

  She pulled him back toward the elevators by the sleeve of his coat, but Graves stopped and held his ground.

  “Ingrid, listen to me,” he said. “He’s not gonna hurt you, not ever again. You or anybody else. You wanna know how I know?”

  Graves drew a loaded.45 from a shoulder-holster he wore inside his jacket, racked it, and handed it to Ingrid, who took it in spite of herself. She looked down at it, seeming to marvel at its weight and the coldblooded elegance of its engineering.

  “Cause we’re gonna go make sure of it together,” Graves told her. “You’n me, sister. Let’s finish this thing.”

  He turned and marched back toward Caradura’s door, holding Stan’s dropped shotgun at the ready. Ingrid was still looking at the pistol in her hand.

  “I can’t do that, Dex,” she said, and her tone stopped Graves cold. He whirled around to see her pointing his very own gun at him. She looked distressed by what she was doing, but her aim was all too steady. “And I can’t let you.”

  “If this is a comedy act, it needs a lotta work,” he said.

  “Let’s just go, Dexter. Right now. I’ll go with you. But you can’t… You just can’t…”

  “Why are you protecting him?” Graves asked, in a low and ominous growl.

  “I’m not,” Ingrid said. “I’m protecting you.”

  Graves glanced pointedly at his pistol, clutched there in her unwavering hand. “Yeah, how could I have missed that?” he said. “Haven’t felt quite this safe since my time on Okinawa.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “Is it Martin or fuckin’ Lewis that I look like to you?” he snapped. Before Ingrid could respond, he continued: “No, now you listen, sister, I came to get you outta here-”

  “Then let’s go,” Ingrid said, sounding exasperated.

  “But I’m not leaving this place till I know this thing is done. You get me? I am not walking outta this building while Mickey Fuckin’ Hardface is still around to walk this earth!”

  Ingrid cringed at his vehemence, and he relented.

  “You don’t wanna watch it, then wait here,” he told her, softly. “But don’t stand in my way.”

  With that he turned and started for the door at the end of the hall.

  “Dexter, don’t you go in there,” Ingrid half-warned and half-pleaded, her voice quavering as it rose by an octave or two. “I’m telling you, don’t do it!”

  Graves stopped before Caradura’s door, but he didn’t turn back. He shook his last cigarette out of the pack and lit it with his Zippo, crumpling the empty cellophane in his other hand before tossing it aside. “I gotta do what’s gotta get done, Ing,” he told her. “You go ahead and do the same.”

  He put his hand on the doorknob and the gun went off behind him, explosively loud in the narrow hallway. Graves’ brains blew out his forehead and spattered against the door, obscuring Miguel Caradura’s painted name.

  His last coherent thought was that he really hadn’t seen that coming.

  He stared for a disbelieving moment at the bloody gray matter that now decorated the door’s varnished surface, before his knees buckled and he slumped forward, shot dead. The boneless weight of his collapsing corpse pushed the door open even as it twisted his neck back at an angle that should’ve been painful, so that the last thing his dying eyes registered was Ingrid, still holding the smoking gun she’d used to murder him. Her eyes ticked to the floor when his lighter tumbled from his slackening hand. Graves was barely aware of it, himself. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore, or any other part of his body, either.

  The final image that dissolved from his mind-as his scrambled brain sputtered out its last erratic signals and his vision faded away to black-was one of Ingrid, lovely Ingrid, anguished and sinking down to her knees.

  Some unacknowledged span of time later the bell above the elevator bank dinged and its last undamaged door slid open, disgorging Juan San Martin. There was clotted noseblood all down the front of his expensive, custom-made suit. He looked to Ingrid like a man who’d recently been cracked in the face with a gunbutt.

  He stopped dead as soon as he stepped out of the elevator, taking in the gory scene.

  Ingrid turned away from him. She’d been sitting on the floor and silently weeping, some feet away from Dexter Graves’ cooling corpse. His.45 lay forgotten on the carpet beside her.

  Beyond her, however, and just beyond the detective’s occasionally-twitching body, the door to Miguel Caradura’s office was still standing open, and there didn’t seem to be anything remotely resembling a conventional workspace in there, at the moment.

  Big Juan gulped hard as he confronted the truth that lay behind the visual illusions his boss habitually kept up. Behind Caradura’s door was what appeared to be the inner sanctum of a pre-Columbian Aztec temple: two small, firelit rooms fashioned from stone and brown mud bricks. Torches soaked in pitch flickered on the walls and a round, blood-blackened altar stone dominated the second chamber, hulking in the spot where an executive’s desk might otherwise have stood.

  Ingrid couldn’t be bothered to look, herself. She’d seen it all before.

  Besides which, the cloaked figure of Mictlantecuhtli himself was currently standing in the rough doorway on the furthest side of his altar room, looking out over the miles upon miles of chaparral hills that rolled away under a leaden sky, in sharp contrast to the bright LA morning in 1950 that Ingrid knew was going on outside the Tower even now. She could sense Mickey’s quiet fury, and she didn’t want to risk
making eye contact with him, should he happen to turn around. It was as much as she could do to remain composed already.

  She therefore chose to concentrate on Dexter’s silver cigarette lighter, the last thing he’d held in life, lying where it had landed on the carpet, because looking at his inert body was also more than she could bear.

  She’d never intended for him to follow her. She couldn’t even imagine how he’d ever found this place. But then, Dexter was different. Special. She was appalled by what she’d done to him, but when he turned up the way he had, unannounced and out for blood, she hadn’t known how else to stop him from going through that door.

  Big Juan stepped around Ingrid, grasped Dexter by the ankles, and dragged him back the few inches he needed in order to close the office door again. Ingrid felt him pause for a moment before he did so, presumably taking one last look at Mictlantecuhtli’s shrouded, broad-shouldered back.

  Then he eased the door shut and turned to face Ingrid, clearly at a loss in regards to her. “I–I’ll go get some stuff to clean up the, ah… the mess,” he said lamely.

  Ingrid nodded, avoiding eye contact with the henchman the same way she had with his boss, and Big Juan took this as permission to flee the scene. He managed not to run, but he couldn’t keep the evidence of rubbery relief out of his posture entirely, as Ingrid observed once his back was turned.

  She didn’t know for sure what happened next, but she found she could make some educated guesses. Her dreams that night were filled with her imaginings. The pictures waited in the wings of her mind until she was helplessly asleep in a lonely corner of the Silent Tower and unable to push them aside through conscious effort anymore.

  In them, she watched Big Juan San Martin dump Dexter’s body into the middle of an old, paint-stained dropcloth and bundle him up like so much meat in a burrito. Blood from the bullethole in Dex’s head soaked through the canvas, but it was just one more stain on the Jackson Pollock cloth.

  Even in her sleep Ingrid tried to banish such images, but she couldn’t help seeing Juan turn on his headlights as he rolled down out of a tunnel high up in the hills of Griffith Park. He was driving a bulky black Packard and taking an obscure route out of Hollywood in order to minimize his chances of encountering the police. She pictured him cruising through acres of San Fernando Valley orange groves, with the ripe fruits on the trees glowing like warm coals in the last of the day’s dying light.

  He wended his way through oak-dotted hills on a dirt road as the sky darkened and the first stars began to appear.

  Finally he was out in the roadless desert, miles away from civilization, alone in the flat and ugly scrublands where no sane person would ever want to live, not in a hundred years. His tires kicked up moonlit plumes of pale, dry dust while he looked around for a suitable spot to dig.

  Part Two: All Saints’ Day

  Chapter Four

  Six decades later…

  The Bindercotts’ aged Latina housekeeper was vacuuming, alone, mid-morning, in bitchy Bethany Bindercott’s outgrown frillygirl bedroom. She bumped the noisy vacuum against the leg of Bethie’s canary-yellow dresser, dislodging a baggie of mota that had until now been taped up underneath it.

  Pilar, the housekeeper, shut off her roaring machine and picked up the baggie, considering it in the bright, suddenly silent bedroom.

  Ten minutes later Pilar was parked out on the Bindercotts’ back deck, toking up in the clear autumn sunshine.

  The hills just outside the irrigated housing development in Santa Clarita that her employers called home looked dusty brown and about as dry as kindling. As little as ten years ago, she remembered, this whole area had been a waterless wasteland, fit for little more than the surreptitious disposal of inconvenient corpses.

  On the big green lawn in front of Pilar-right out in the center of Big Bill Bindercott’s personal practice putting green, in fact-something broke through the sod.

  A gopher, maybe? If so, it was a damn big one. Whatever the thing was, it seemed to be forcing its way up from underneath the lush, professionally-tended lawn. Pilar squinted to see better, shading her eyes against the sun’s glare.

  Out on the putting green, skeletal hands and arms emerged from what looked increasingly like a small sinkhole, clawing and scrabbling at the grass around it. A grimy skull popped up, one with a distinctive exit wound above the right eye socket.

  Pilar’s own eyes widened. She looked down at the ineptly-rolled joint in her hand.

  Dexter Graves (or what little remained of him after sixty years in the earth) hauled himself out of his grave and came staggering across the broad back lawn he found himself on, holding his cracked braincase like a drunk wallowing in the throes of crapulence. Up the steps and onto a redwood deck he went, where he stopped, looking down at an older woman in a light-blue uniform with bulky white sneakers on her feet who was parked in an Adirondack chair. A maid, Graves surmised, judging by her attire. The housekeeper was frozen, looking back up at him with a forgotten smoke dangling from her fingertips.

  Must’ve scared the living shit out of her, Graves thought, wandering in from the backyard like this. Hell, he could’ve been anybody! A certain comfort level in the face of wild absurdity had often helped him keep hold of his wits, both during the war and several times thereafter in his current line as a PI, but he knew not everybody could roll with the punches in a similar fashion. He was still a little confused himself after waking up underground, not quite sure of where he was or exactly how he’d gotten here.

  “Estoy muerta?” the maid whispered, looking up at the dirt-encrusted skeleton who wasn’t yet up to speed regarding his own situation. “Usted es la Santa Muerte? Esta esto la Apocalipsis?”

  “Sorry, sister,” Graves’ reanimated bones replied, in a predictably gravelly voice. “Never did learn to habla the old es-pan-yol. Wouldn’t mind a puff on that smokestick, though. I have never had a hangover like this before.”

  Graves plucked the hand-rolled cigarette in question from the lady’s fingers and put it between his teeth. He expanded his ribs as if to inhale, but with no lungs to pull air, nothing happened. Graves examined the joint critically while patting around the region where his pockets should’ve been. “Guess it went out,” he said absently. “Don’t know where my lighter got to, either. Hell, I’d hate to lose that thing now…”

  Graves offered the joint back to its original roller. She stared at his skeletal hand. “De nada,” she managed to croak.

  Graves thought she looked sort of shellshocked, for some reason. She had that sort of half-comprehending stare. He shrugged and went to stick the reefer behind an ear that’d turned to dust years ago. It bounced off his collarbone and tumbled to the deck.

  “What the…?” he muttered, turning to look at his reflection in the house’s glass back door. His appearance came as a bit of a shock, to say the least.

  “Holy hell, wouldja look at that?” he shouted, reeling back in bewilderment. He was nothing but a string of bones, literal bones, and the smooth, soil-blackened plate of his forehead was marred by what looked suspiciously like an exit crater. “Geez, no wonder my head feels like it’s got a goddamn hole in it. Now how in the-?”

  He remembered.

  “Oh, yeah. Ingrid.”

  Leaning back in to examine the reflected bullethole in his fleshless brow, he murmured to himself: “How could you, Ing?” He hadn’t known the woman excessively well (certainly not in the biblical sense), but he’d imagined she thought more of him than that.

  Behind him, that hapless housekeeper dumped what she must’ve assessed as a sack of psychotic locoweed out into the bushes. She skirted as wide a berth around Graves as she possibly could and slid a big glass panel in the house’s back wall aside so that she could scurry indoors, leaving the modernistic entryway open in her haste.

  Graves followed after her.

  Crossing a vast family room that had what looked like a mid-sized movie screen mounted up on its most prominent wall, he said: “Listen,
lady, I gotta go find my lighter. It’s important to me. You think maybe I could-”

  But the cleaning woman waved him off without so much as a look back. She was done. Just done. He knew that look, too. She gathered her purse and her jacket from the kitchen and exited right out the front door, closing it quietly behind herself this time around.

  “Oh. Okay. All right,” Graves said after her, feeling affronted.

  He went to the window and watched the house’s custodian drive away in a weird, rusty little car of some sort, one that seemed to have a great big hatch on its back end.

  “Then I guess I can,” he opined, standing alone at the kitchen window.

  Graves ransacked an upstairs closet, tossing clothing aside. Old stuff, winter coats and ugly sweaters, mostly. He came up with two reasonably familiar items: a ragged raincoat and a battered fedora. The hat said ‘Indiana Jones’ around the inside of the band. Graves didn’t know what sort of a name that was supposed to be, but Mr. Jones’ garage-sale candidates were close enough to the clothes he remembered wearing, and he nodded over them in satisfaction.

  Standing in front of the master bedroom’s full-length mirror a little while later (after having hosed the worst of the yard dirt off his bones in the attached bathroom’s shower), Graves stepped into a pair of sweat pants and cinched them all the way down to the fattest part of his spine. He shrugged into his borrowed raincoat, donned his found fedora, and spent some time tilting the brim to his liking.

  With big sunglasses taped to the sides of his skull and his coat collar flipped up, he was almost able to believe he wouldn’t draw much notice.

  Next, he raided the kitchen drawers. He was flying more or less on autopilot now, distracting himself while he figured out how to proceed. He didn’t know why he was up, out of the dirt; he’d just felt a sudden need to be, and acted upon it. There’d been no real thinking involved. He didn’t care to lament his death or mourn his appearance-he just wanted to know why he was back, and how in hell it was possible. He felt almost more upset over the loss of his old Zippo than he did over the loss of his life, as strange as that sounded, even to him. This was nothing if not a weird situation, though. His first responses to it were bound to be a little wonky.