Graves hooked his fingerbones through the unbendable metal screen that penned him into the car’s back seat while the two front gate guards looked at one another uneasily, then peered back in through the car’s windshield, doing precious little to conceal their stupefaction. You’d think they’d never seen a skeleton get manhandled by a crazy lady before. Their voices were faint, muffled by the heavy window glass, but Graves could hear them. He felt like a zoo animal in a goddamn cage.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing in the back of that car?” the taller and darker-haired of the two men asked.
“I dunno. What’re you seeing?” was the shorter, blond man’s evasive reply.
“I don’t wanna say unless you’re seeing it too,” the first guard said. Something darted across the parking lot behind him and he whirled around, catching the movement in the corner of his eye. “You see that, then?” he demanded.
“What? A cat?”
Graves, too, had seen Lia’s cat, a large black tom, go bounding past the Yard’s main entrance.
“No, it was a guy,” the blond man said. “I saw a guy, like a little old guy! Fast like a freak, though.”
Darkhair nodded and motioned that they should go and check it out. Mr. Blond eased into the Yard, clicking off his gun’s safety, with his partner first covering and then following after him.
A small, bearded man in sunglasses rapped on Graves’ window with the back of his hand as soon as the sentries were out of sight.
Graves, who’d been yanking on the metal dog screen, looked over and finally thought to pull that goddamn glove out of his mouth. “Hey, pal,” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard through the insulating glass. “Lemme outta here, whaddaya say? I’ll owe you the moon and the goddamn stars!”
The little man, who wore a hat and carried a walking stick, opened the door and even held it for him, graciously. Graves jumped out and threw his arms around the liberating stranger, who accepted an embrace from a partially-dressed skeleton with wordless aplomb. “I love ya, man, I really do,” Graves said.
Then he turned and strode into the Yard, just as the gate guards were returning to their post after a fruitless check of the parking lot’s perimeter.
The dark-haired man saw him first. Wide-eyed with horror, he drew a gun with a silencer screwed onto the barrel and unloaded.
Bone chips flew from Graves’ cranium and bullets cracked a few of his ribs, but he incurred no damage that would stop him. He walked right up and twisted the gun out of the shooter’s grip, wrenching the man’s shoulder to drive him to his knees in the same motion. Graves genuflected behind him and shoved his head back viciously, snapping the henchman’s neck over his fleshless femur like a dry twig.
Done. Graves claimed the man’s gun and dumped his slack body aside.
He turned on the second guy, who backed away, dropping his weapon and holding up his hands. “Hey, come on, man, we weren’t gonna hurt nobody,” he said. “We had orders not to-”
The silenced weapon made an anticlimactic sound-sort of a ‘bzzew’-when Graves dropped the sniveling fuck with a perfect shot through his thigh. The man groaned rather than screamed, his face turning purple as veins stood out in the sides of his neck. His eyes rolled back to the whites.
Graves walked up and loomed over the writhing mercenary, training the automatic down at him. “The minute you point guns at my friends is the minute I stop givin’ a shit about your perspective,” he said, although he doubted he was really being heard. “You punched your own ticket, far as I’m concerned.”
The skeletal PI gritted his teeth in grim satisfaction as he drilled the blond man between the eyes with his own partner’s silenced pistol. It made that distinct bzzew! sound again, a little bit louder this time as the baffles inside the suppressor began breaking down under the stress of so many recent firings. It was nowhere near as wrath-of-God satisfying as an unmuffled report from a hand-cannon of this caliber might’ve been, but blood sprayed across the gravel just the same.
Graves spun on his calcaneus bone and headed off into the Yard, hellbent on saving Lia.
Her cat, that old tom, watched him lope away from high up in a pepper tree. Graves caught a flash of bright green eye when he strode past.