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 becalmed 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.”
Graves nodded. He didn’t know what ‘soft wear’ was (like maybe they’d had a lingerie business was the way he interpreted it, that they’d been involved in the garment trade in some fashion), but he didn’t want to interrupt her to clarify.
“Anyway,” Hannah continued, “going into my first full winter there, Lia got very sick. I found her one morning passed out near the spigot behind the office. That old shack off the parking lot, you know? Laying there curled up on the bags of potting soil. I guess at some other point in my life I would’ve called whoever it is you’re supposed to call when you find unconscious teenage squatters on your property, but I didn’t. For whatever reason, I just didn’t. I think maybe I needed to take care as much as Lia needed to receive it. Does that make any sense?”
“Sure it does.”
Hannah nodded. “I’m pretty sure it was just a bad flu, for all that,” she said. “But the fever gave her nightmares and awful hallucinations, and I know she thought she was dying. I fed her soup and kept her warm, nothing much more than that, and when she was better she said her name was Camellia Flores, but I know it’s one she chose. Flores was the name of a foster family she liked when she was younger, before someone had medical complications and she ran away rather than go back into the system. She told me that story once and I could never get her to talk about it again, like it’s gotten hard for her to recall. I don’t know if she even remembers who she was, originally.”
“I grew up kinda the same way,” Graves said quietly, thinking back on it for the first time in a long time. “Joined the Navy soon as they’d let me, just to get the hell outta there.”
Hannah tipped her head, empathizing. “Looking back,” she said, “I think maybe that time was when Lia started to be, well, what she is now. A witch, I guess. An ‘operator.’ And I also think that maybe, for some reason, maybe just because I was there, that I’m a part of that for her. That I mean something to her, beyond being the lady she works for.”
“I know you do,” Graves said. “She’d knock the sun out of the sky rather than see you hurt.”
“She already did nail down the moon.” Hannah’s eyes crinkled with pride and pleasure as she smiled about it.
Graves laughed softly and nodded. He took out his lighter and played with it idly, clicking open the lid and closing it again, as was his habit.
“I guess that’s got to have a story behind it too, doesn’t it?” Hannah asked, tipping her chin at the Zippo. “You came back from the grave to get it, after all.”
Graves considered the old lighter. It glinted, caught there in the frail net of bones that was all that remained of his right hand. “Well, yeah,” he said, “I suppose it does at that. I’m not in the habit of boring nice ladies with old war stories, though.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Hannah said. “I’d like to know.”
Graves looked her in the eye. He hesitated. He’d never told this story to anyone before, nice lady or otherwise, and when he started to speak he found he had to look down at the lighter, instead of at Hannah herself.
“Well…” he began. “A kid named Dave Normoyle tracked me down and gave it to me after the war. Davey. Guess I pulled him outta the water on Easter Morning of 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. That’s what he told me later on, anyway. I wouldn’t have remembered the date, myself.”
He paused, gathering his memories before going on.
“I can’t even describe to you what those days were like, Miss Hannah. The Japanese were using a tactic they called the ‘wind of the spirits,’ the kami-kaze…”
“Their airplanes,” Hannah said softly.
“Yeah, exactly right, their airplanes, crashin’em into the ships, plane after plane after plane. I still say they must’ve gone through thousands, even though I know that sounds like I gotta be exaggerating. Still, though, it’s what I remember. One of ’em hit a deck I was standin’ on, not fifteen feet behind me. Piece of its engine caught me in the ribs and knocked me into the drink before I knew what was going on.”
He looked away toward downtown, feeling troubled by the recollections.
“I remember that, and I remember the dawn,” he said in a voice pitched barely above a whisper. Hannah leaned in close to hear him. “That sunrise, well, it was about as gorgeous as any sunrise I’ve ever seen. Which I guess was sorta the worst part of that morning, in a way.”
He glanced up.
“You see,” he continued, averting his eyesockets before Hannah could ask him for clarification. “It, well… it hurt me, frankly, to think about how things like the dawn go on being beautiful for reasons all their own, even when you’re right in the middle of learning firsthand the ugly truth about how easily people can, you know… get themselves broken.”
Hannah nodded, thinking back to a thunderstorm she’d once watched from a hospital room window, now more than a dozen years in her past-a fact she could scarcely believe. Lightning bolts had forked and clashed all night long. She’d had little to do but watch them sear the sky while she sat there helplessly, feigning calm and waiting hour by hour as a cancer crushed the final drops of life from the wasted remnant of her husband, her Warren, whom she’d married in the spring of 1980 and had truly loved every day thereafter with every last ounce of her soul.
The memory of that spectacular storm hurt worse than the bandaged bulletgroove in her side. She thought she understood what Dex was saying.
“Things like the dawn don’t care how messy and painful and scary it gets when people break,” he said, directing his words toward his lighter. “I remember thinking, while I was floatin’ in the blue, half-drowned and losing blood and dumb-lucky to’ve grabbed hold of a liferaft myself, that that old sun comin’ up on the far horizon there wouldn’t mind if I bucked convention and did something a little bit different that morning, like saving one little life. Hell, why not, I figured. As if it could matter anyway, one life, when so many others were comin’ to bad ends all around me, but Davey Normoyle was the closest body still twitching in the water, so he got hauled aboard. And then I don’t remember so much after that, for a time.”
When Graves chanced a look up at Hannah she was rapt, her eyes full of gentle sympathy. Almost more than he could bear. He turned away again, looking out over the view, although he barely registered it by now. The eye of memory was doing all his seeing for him.
“Wasn’t till a few years after that he finally tracked me down,” Graves said. “I didn’t really know the kid. I was in the intelligence service, moving all around the Pacific theater during the war, so he wasn’t on my ship or anything like that. But I guess I must’ve told him my name at some point, ’cause he found me later on through a buddy of mine. Charlie Lurp, up here in Los Angeles. Just a couple of months before I, y’know, died. Davey by then had a missus and a baby girl and a life he was glad to be living, which I guess he thought he owed to me instead of to a shellshocked whim that happened to hit me one weird morning. But he was serious about it. Said an angel or some such shit came in a dream and told him that really, he’d been slated to buy it in the surf that day, and his life had been returned to him for the sole purpose of giving this particular lighter to me, Dex Graves.”
Graves shrugged, examining the thing. It looked old, but otherwise unremarkable.
“He came up from San Diego to do it, even. Begged me to take the damn thing. Said the angel told him that if I didn’t then he would have died that day. That he would’ve gone under before I ever found him and his happy life would be erased, nothing more than a dream before drowning. Crazy, sure, but hey, war is. Guess I don’t mind telling you I wasn’t always the world’s cheeriest fella after I came back myself. So of course I took it. I was glad for the gift. I let it remind me that something I did one time, whatever my reasons, made a difference for somebody. And I needed that.” He fixed Hannah with his empty sockets. “Like you needed to help out Miss Lia, I suspect.”
“Yeah,” Hannah said. “Just like, I’d think.”
She took and squeezed Graves’ bony hand. He squeezed back, kind of hard, but she held on.
She felt sure that she could trust this man (or whatever he was), this Dexter Graves, to watch out for her Lia, come what may.
He knew the true value of things.
“So, there’s the tale, anyhow,” Graves said, feeling a little awkward by the time he was ready to let Miss Hannah take her hand back. “What it means to me. Wouldn’t have guessed it’d be enough to drag a dead man outta the dirt, but hey, like the poet once said: I guess there’s more between heaven’n earth.”
“Hey, uh… guys?” Riley said from behind them.
They both looked over, their moment gone. Graves put the lighter away.
“Not to interrupt the sharing, which I think is really sweet, but-”
Graves stood up. “Is she awake?”
“No, not yet,” Riley said. “But her cellphone keeps ringing.”