Graves' end Page 6

  The drawer he was dredging yielded up an ancient pack of cigarettes wrapped in a clear, rubbery-feeling bag, on which some suburban wit had jotted ‘IN CASE OF APOCALYPSE,’ in bold black ink. Graves figured today came close enough. There was also a cheap-looking plastic lighter in the bag. He felt heartened at first and clicked the ‘bic’ to life, but then he sighed in disappointment at the device’s meager flash of blue-tinged flame.

  “Just ain’t the same, somehow,” he muttered.

  Graves kept the cigarettes but chucked the worthless lighter back into the drawer. It landed on what was obviously a spare set of keys to something, jingling them brightly.

  They were unlike any other keys Graves knew, with chunky plastic bases and strange grooves down their shafts rather than the little cutout mountain ranges he remembered. Graves picked them up, curious about what sort of vehicle they started, or which door around here they might unlock.

  He glanced back out the front window.

  A fancy-looking, carlike thing sat parked out there in the driveway. A tiny, rounded, streamlined capsule that would’ve made a lot more sense with wings than it did on wheels.

  Graves looked again at the keys.

  A minute later the fedora-wearing skeleton closed the fancyass car’s door behind himself, muffling the neighborhood’s sonic backdrop of distant leafblowers and bright birdsong.

  He took in the dashboard, with some trepidation. There were more dials, gauges, and knobs in here than you’d find in a goddamn experimental aircraft. And he’d been in Naval intelligence even before the war, so he knew from whence he spoke (or thought, or recalled, or whatever). In any case, he’d been around a lot of complicated control panels in his day. He thought he’d be able to manage.

  “Still feel like I oughta have a pilot’s license here, though,” Graves said, talking aloud just to hear a human voice-even his own raspy approximation of one-within the unnatural silence of the cushioned cockpit.

  The goddamn grave hadn’t been this quiet.

  “But it’s just a car, right?” he said, reassuring himself. “May look like something outta Jules Verne’s hangover, but it’s still just a car…”

  He put a key in the ignition and started her up. That much, at least, went according to plan. Graves felt heartened. “Okay, then,” he murmured. “Here goes nothin.’”

  He backed successfully out into the road. A dashboard compass swung round to south, and that pleased him, for some reason.

  Pleased him deeply.

  “Yeah, southbound…” he breathed, enraptured by the bobbing of the compass ball within its shiny, fluid-filled globe. It seemed to ease some of the knotted tension in his nonexistent gut, the tension that was nagging at him to go and find his goddamn lighter, wherever the hell it may happen to be. This new sense of direction so thoroughly eclipsed all the rest of the anxiety and astonishment he was feeling in regard to his situation that it was almost like… well, magic.

  Graves would’ve been more impressed, but in truth he barely noticed. He only had eyes for that compass.

  “Okay, that feels right,” he muttered to himself. “Due south. Retrace my steps, find my lighter. Figure the rest out later. I can do that. Yeah. But for now, due south. And awaaay we go…”

  Graves tipped his hat to a stupefied gardener at the corner as he lurched down the street in his commandeered vehicle, following the compass south toward what he remembered to be the farmlands and citrus groves of the northern San Fernando Valley.

  Chapter Five

  Lia emerged from Bag End’s doortube, followed a moment later by her Tom. She was freshly dressed in a knee-length skirt and a light sweater, in deference to the cool November weather. Tom wandered off, still in his cat-form, while Lia wheeled the hatch shut, stretched, and looked around.

  Potter’s Yard was bright green and peaceful in the pure morning light. All clear of ladydemons, as she’d expected it would be. Tzitzimime were nighttime things, drowned out by the sun. They’d be back tonight, she had no doubt, but that was then. There was time. Right now Lia had an appointment to keep, and at it she firmly intended to extricate herself from the situation that had brought those things down on her in the first place.

  The memory of insectile legs tickling her skin made it crawl all over again. She couldn’t help but think back on the narrow escape she almost hadn’t made the night before. Tom, who never let her go anywhere ignorant or unprepared, had informed her as best he could about the secret history of that shabby brick building, but now, because of the creatures they’d encountered up there, she might never be able to go out after dark again. That seemed to her like a harsh restriction to live under. No more dinners or drinks or decent music, all of which occurred under the cover of night. If Lia couldn’t do something about this, she feared that her already truncated social life would soon be limited strictly to brunch.

  She sighed. What she’d wanted out of last night’s adventure was not only to learn something new (which she’d accomplished, all right), but also to help someone out, if she could, and she didn’t feel she’d managed that. She hated to admit defeat, but now, in the light of a brand new day, all she really wanted was to put the experience behind her. Jeopardy so physical and consequences so real were not what she was used to dealing with. Black Tom’s tutelage may have led her into some unusual experiences over the last few years (including arming law enforcement officers with information about closed-off places they needed to enter, on an occasion or two), but reviving people’s flagging houseplants was still far more familiar and comfortable territory.

  Lia never advertised her services, exactly, but word still got around. People knew there was a girl in a garden who could do the things that witches did, and would… provided you asked her nicely and really needed the help.

  There were definite limits to her beneficence, however. Lia was neither a saint nor a martyr. She was only herself, and while she might’ve wished there was more she could do in this circumstance, she also knew when to cut her losses. If she and Tom kept poking around, someone was apt to get hurt. Or worse.

  As afraid as she was for herself, though, Lia couldn’t up and quit without doing something to ensure that the person who’d requested her help didn’t fall prey to the mortal threats involved. That wouldn’t have been right, in her book.

  She brushed her fingers through glowing, sunlit foliage as she made her unhurried way across the Yard. The morning’s handful of wholesale buyers were still loading up their small trucks with flats of seedling plants and other landscaping necessities. The last of them would be gone in an hour or so and then the rest of the day would be quiet, with perhaps a little bit of retail business trickling in later on. They’d be closed tomorrow and Wednesday as well, as there wasn’t enough trade in the fall to bother staying open to the general public in the middle of the week.

  Lia liked this time of year, when the weather was crisp and on a normal afternoon there would be little to do beyond the comforting ritual rounds she habitually made in the course of tending to the Yard’s myriad of plants.

  Hannah Potter was busy ringing up a purchase in the office shack. She’d been the sole proprietor of Potter’s Yard since purchasing the abandoned property it now occupied about seven years back. These days she was Lia’s boss and nominal landlord as well as her dearest friend, despite a near thirty year difference in their ages.

  Lia waved to her through the shack’s un-shuttered window and pointed toward her car, implicitly asking if any help was needed before she took off, even though she’d told Hannah yesterday that she had an appointment to keep this morning. They had a part-time crew that came in during their busier seasons and on weekends, but right now, mid-autumn and on a Monday, it was just the two of them.

  Hannah waved back, nodding to indicate that all was under control, and gave her a thumbs up to punctuate it. The canvas gardening glove she had on looked like a big cartoon hand.

  Lia’s black tomcat crouched down beneath a distant rhododendron bush an
d went as still as death (although its eyes remained open), even as Lia slipped in behind the wheel of her Mazda.

  Black Tom appeared in her passenger seat, nodded to his girl, and they drove off together.

  Twenty minutes later they walked into Paty’s, a little coffee shop Lia favored, down near the film studios in Burbank. The restaurant was quiet now between the major mealtime rushes, an hour at which she might normally have come in to sit for a while and snack and read a book, especially on a rainy day. There was little she found cozier than lingering over a warm cup of tea on a gray morning. She wished she was here on that sort of pleasant errand right now.

  But no. Business first.

  Lia spotted her contact waiting in the furthest booth. Alone. Back-to. With a shawl over her blazing red hair. She went over and sat down across from the unmistakable woman, regretting for the first time that she’d chosen to meet at a place she wanted to come back to.

  “Ms. Redstone,” she said, by way of greeting.

  Ingrid looked up.

  She was shockingly gorgeous, in Lia’s opinion, with gleaming copper hair, a porcelain complexion, and curves everywhere you looked. Although she appeared to be just a few years older than Lia herself, she affected a sort of old-Hollywood glamour in her stylistic choices. Retro all the way. It really did work for her, though. Ingrid Redstone was a hard one not to look at. She should’ve been a movie star.

  Black Tom sat down right next to the radiant lady, who failed to acknowledge him. Making himself solid enough to be seen by ordinary folks depleted Tom’s energies fast, so he usually appeared only within the confines of Lia’s trained and receptive mind. She’d long ago taught herself not to focus on him when she was out in public.

  Ingrid smiled through her aura of elegant sadness. She was actually wearing white satin gloves that went all the way up to her elbows. Lia had to imagine she’d also have an ivory cigarette holder secreted away inside her tiny purse.

  “Lia,” Ingrid said. “It’s good to see you again. Please, don’t make me wait. Were you able to find anything?”

  “I–I’m afraid not,” Lia said.

  Ingrid stared at her. It was clearly not the answer she’d expected.

  “Nothing?” she said at last, her tone filled with disbelief. “Nothing at all?”

  Lia looked down at her hands, which were folded on the tabletop. “I’m sorry, no,” she said. “The building was abandoned. Completely empty.”

  “Yes, but-”

  “Listen, Ms. Redstone,” Lia interrupted, before Ingrid could protest further. “I don’t think your brother was ever up there. I don’t think anybody’s been there, not for years and years.”

  “But… no,” Ingrid insisted. “I’m sure-I mean, there wasn’t any sign of him? Any little thing? He’s a smoker, he’s always leaving nasty cigarette butts behind, and he, he was in the Navy… Oh, I don’t know what, but didn’t you see anything?”

  Black Tom raised an eyebrow, but Lia shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she lied.

  Ingrid hung her head, struggling not to cry. Black Tom mimed a clicky-clicky motion, in reference to the cigarette lighter they had indeed found the night before. Lia glared at him for a split second, though she was certain Ingrid couldn’t have seen it.

  “But…” Ingrid’s voice quavered, on the verge of breaking. She took a deep breath, keeping her eyes downcast. “But I know that’s where he was going. He gave me that exact address the last time I saw him.”

  “The lock I jimmied hadn’t been touched in twenty years, probably more,” Lia said, and Black Tom nodded his expert concurrence with that opinion. “And besides, I didn’t see any evidence of the sort of thing you thought your brother was involved in. Believe me, it leaves evidence. If what you’re worried about had happened up there, I would’ve been able to tell.”

  Ingrid nodded, trying to pull herself together. “That’s about what the private investigator said, too. The regular one. I just thought maybe you… someone like you…”

  “I thought so, too,” Lia said. “But there wasn’t anything to see.”

  The disappointment visibly crushed Ingrid’s frail hopes. She choked on a sob before she buried her face in her gloved hands and moaned: “Then he’s just gone, isn’t he?”

  The woman was desolated, her shoulders quaking as she hid her face and fought not to make a public scene. The manager and a busboy were both looking in their direction, aware of Ingrid’s distress though not yet concerned enough to intervene.

  Lia felt sick, but she still had an uncomfortable agenda here. “It-it’s important…” she began carefully, looking at a large, wine-colored garnet that Ingrid wore on a silver chain around her neck, instead of up into her eyes. “I mean, it’s probably best that you don’t, you know… go back there. Or send anyone else.”

  “Oh?” Ingrid said, a touch of suspicion drawing her sable brows together into the slightest hint of a frown.

  “Yeah,” Lia said. Rather lamely, she thought. “It’s just… well, I know it’s hard, but sometimes, if people who get involved in these sorts of things need to disappear… it’s really better to let them.”

  “I see,” Ingrid said, sitting back and dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin. “Well. We never did properly discuss your, ah… compensation. For your efforts. Did we?”

  Lia uncomfortably waved off the suggestion of money. “Just move on,” she said. “For your own sake. That’s all I ask.”

  Ingrid seemed about to protest, but then she crumbled and nodded in miserable resignation.

  Lia got up. “I wish there was more I could do,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Ingrid replied. “Anyway.”

  Lia nodded and hurried out of the restaurant.

  Black Tom lingered on in the booth next to Ingrid, watching Lia go.

  Ingrid sat there, quietly weeping, until Tom eventually got up and left her, too. If her tears were insincere, he thought, then she was one hell of an actress.

  Around the next block, he walked up to Lia’s vehicle as she was unlocking it. She looked at him across the roof. He looked back benignly.

  “Shut up,” she told him. Then she got into the car. Impassive, Black Tom did likewise (without going to the bother of opening a door).

  Inside the Mazda, where people were less likely to notice her talking to herself (not that it made much of an impression anymore, since the advent of cellphones and Bluetooth earpieces), she turned to Black Tom and said: “What do you want me to do? Really?”

  Black Tom, predictably, said nothing.

  “The important thing is that nobody else goes up there, isn’t it?”

  Black Tom shrugged and Lia grew quiet, thinking about it. “What’s up in that office is beyond us,” she murmured. “You know that better than anyone.”

  Black Tom conceded the point with the barest of nods.

  “And we need to look out for us, too, don’t we?”

  Black Tom nodded again.

  “Well, then? That’s what I’m doing.”

  Tom nodded a third time, but with much less certainty. It was still affirmation enough for Lia. She started up the car.

  When they drove past the restaurant, headed westbound down Riverside, Tom glimpsed Ingrid through the establishment’s big front windows. Just a flash of her, like a snapshot. The astonishing redhead was still sitting in their booth, dialing a cellphone and raising it to her ear.

  Then she was behind them, and gone from sight.

  Chapter Six

  Dexter Graves blew past a cop in his stolen car, doing ninety down the 170, racing in the direction indicated by the dashboard compass like his life-ironically-depended on it.

  The instrument was on the fritz, Graves had already realized, spinning around with no regard for true north, and yet it somehow seemed to be leading him on. He couldn’t question it; he didn’t have the time. Interpreting the compass’s directives required all his concentration. When he saw police lights flashing in his rearview mirror he dutifully pulled ov
er, more irritated by the interruption than anything else.

  An imposing CHP officer got out of the cruiser behind him and sauntered up to Graves’ open window. “Please remove your hat and eyewear, sir,” the officer said in a bored, no-nonsense tone, as he flipped open his ticket pad and portentously clicked a ballpoint pen.

  Graves’ distracted, six-decade-dead skeleton complied with the order.

  The cop had no immediate response to the sight that confronted him when he looked up from his pad. He seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. Graves waited, cocking his skull at a quizzical angle. In his weirdly-consuming frenzy to find his lighter he’d almost forgotten what state he was in, physically speaking, and he couldn’t even imagine what this must look like to an officer of the law.

  “You know what?” the cop said, after a long, long pause. “No. Nuh-uh, no way, just no. Not today. Fuck this.”

  He walked stiffly back to his car, got in, and drove away. Graves shrugged, put his hat back on, and zoomed back onto the highway himself.

  He exited at Roscoe Boulevard and headed east into an area he remembered as North Hollywood, a small incorporated city within the Valley’s patchwork of communities that bore no legal or geographical affiliation whatsoever with its better-known namesake on the far side of the Hills. In Graves’ day the area had been a thriving business center and transportation hub, serviced by a Red Car line that ran down to that other Hollywood, as well as by regular rail to Union Station, downtown. The old groves to its north had even then been giving way to housing or industry, and now, today, they were pretty much gone. So was most of the area’s vivacity and that early sense of promise.