Lia’s tires crunched and popped in the gravel when she pulled into the parking lot at the front of Potter’s Yard. Her headlights splashed across the Yard’s small office shack and penetrated the dense wall of greenery behind it, causing a brief wash of weird, bristling shadows to race away through the orderly ranks of sapling trees.
“Home again, home again,” she muttered, then sighed. Peering through the new web of fissures in her windshield during the drive up through the Valley had given her the beginnings of a headache. She gauged how weary she must’ve looked by the concern she saw reflected in Black Tom’s eyes.
She angled into her accustomed spot near the wooden fence and paused to finger the freshly-punched holes in the roof of her car before getting out. “Shitballs,” she muttered to herself, feeling fairly certain that demon attacks were not going to be covered by her insurance policy.
Black Tom stepped out on the passenger side and inspected the holes in the roof for himself while Lia pulled the Yard’s rattling gate closed along its metal track, then locked it for the night.
All around her, lush and leafy life thrived. There were shrubs, flowers, and mature trees in big wooden bins, as well as a large nursery under green nylon shades, a corrugated-plastic greenhouse, and the tiny cabin that looked to be about a hundred years old, which currently housed the establishment’s cash register. Its wood-plank walls were silvery-gray after years of exposure to the weather, and its glassless windows were shuttered closed for the night. Beyond that lay eight full acres of foliage, plants in hundreds of varieties and sizes.
It all felt still, silent and safe-just the way Lia liked it.
She paused to look back toward her car before she’d gotten more than a few feet down a narrow path that ran between two rows of bushy ficus trees.
Black Tom was just then stooping down as if to pet a large black cat that was lying curled up near the gate, as still as a stone. He lifted the feline’s pointy chin with one gnarled hand and then dissolved into a substance that might have been either light or mist in order to funnel himself right down into the animal’s unblinking eyes, so fast that most people would have been able to tell themselves they hadn’t seen it happen.
“C’mon, already,” Lia said, then vanished down the darkly verdant corridor. The spirit she called Black Tom trotted after her, re-ensconced within the catbody that kept him anchored to this world. The ink-colored kitten had been so young and so close to death when he claimed it years ago that it had no volition of its own today, and would sit motionless wherever he left it for as long as his conscious mind was absent.
The reanimated animal was leading the way by the time they reached the center of the Yard: a clearing where pots, fountains, and a large collection of garden statuary were displayed. What Lia chose to see was a fairy ring made up of crouching gnomes, spitting mermaids, and concrete bodhisattvas, all of them frozen in their nighttime revels by her approach.
Potter’s Yard was a place she dearly loved, especially at night, when it was hushed and lit only by the stars. It felt like a shadowy oasis out here in the middle of the industrial suburbs, one that was always awash in some sort of fecund, flowering life, all year round. She breathed in the familiar olfactory chorus of damp, green, earthy smells, and as always, she felt immediately soothed. She even shivered pleasantly in the chilly air.
Lia knew she couldn’t relax yet, however. She might, in fact, never be able to properly relax again, if she wasn’t careful. Those insect women were out there somewhere still, regrouping, and they might even know her name. If they did, it meant they’d never quit. She didn’t need her Tom to tell her that.
Her eye landed on a number of pale green mantises sitting primly on a palm leaf nearby. They seemed to be watching her. That in itself wasn’t so troubling, but when Lia looked down, she realized that an entire line of tiny red ants trailing across her path had also paused, and every one of them seemed to be staring up at her, too.
Only then did she become aware that the night had gone unnaturally silent around her. There wasn’t a single cricket to be heard.
The ants resumed their usual brisk pace as soon as they knew she’d noticed them.
Lia took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing down the panic that was rising in her chest. She knew what this was, all right: a witch test. An assessment of her comfort level in the face of wild improbability. Her Tom had warned her about such things, but she’d never been the subject of an otherworldly assessment like this one before. The surreal occurrence had happened so quickly that an ordinary person would’ve shaken her head, blinked her eyes, and walked away. Someone who knew the Tzitzimime for what they were, however, was apt to react to unusual bug behavior with stark raving terror, thereby marking her sorry self out as a holder of occult knowledge.
Black Tom quietly confirmed her suspicions about this, mind-to-mind.
The King’s consorts weren’t too bright in their insect forms, so Lia figured it was unlikely that this little lapse on her part would catch their attention. Only a big reaction would alert them. Maybe the distinctive stinger-holes in her car’s roof had helped them to spot this place from above, but human faces all looked more or less alike to them, and it seemed they didn’t know her well enough yet to recognize her by sight alone-which was a good thing. They’d want to be sure to get the right girl, and they wouldn’t pounce until they were certain they had her.
If she made a wrong move, though, every bug hidden away within the greenery of Potter’s Yard would be on her in the space of a heartbeat.
She forced herself to giggle aloud, as if chiding herself for imagining she’d seen a thing that simply couldn’t be, before stepping casually over the ant superhighway and moving on, ignoring the attentive cluster of mantises who rubbed their tiny, greedy hands together. Tom hugged close to her ankles until they reached the very back of the Yard.
Lia knew the only thing she could do now was seal herself in and hang on till daylight. Tzitzimime were insidious things by nature, and they’d get in through vents or under doors-at any place a tiny bug or a point of light could. Hiding out from them was a tall order. Fortunately, she happened to be prepared for just this sort of thing.
The nursery’s rear storage corner was packed with pots, planks, bags of soil, and a small forklift. There was also a big, upended concrete cylinder that could’ve been some sort of a well, all of it situated behind a low chainlink fence with a gate marked ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY.’
Lia was relieved to hear the crickets start up again behind her after three points of light that might almost have been mistaken for shooting stars departed from the Yard, rising up into the night sky like meteors in reverse. It meant the Tzitzimime had moved on in confusion, and that she had a moment or two before they’d come around to thinking she might have been their prey after all. But a moment was all she needed in order to drop out of sight.
Lia scooped her tomcat up and tucked him inside her coat. She hurried over to the wide concrete tube that seemed to be planted in the earth, swung her legs over the lip, and climbed down a steel ladder bolted to the inside of it.
Some feet below ground level was a hatch. Lia turned a big spoked wheel to unseal it, then pulled it open and climbed on down, letting the hatch door slam shut after her with an ear-hammering metallic clang. She spun a second wheel, a less-corroded twin to the exterior one, in the opposite direction now that she was inside and underground. There was a bolt that locked the hatch in place and Lia threw it, battening herself in for the remainder of the night.
Lights buzzed and flickered to life when she hit a wall switch before climbing down the ladder’s last few rungs and into her home of the last ten years. She thought of it as Bag End, her hobbit hole, buried deep in the sheltering earth. Old signage on the unpainted walls indicated that the big concrete bunker had originally been intended for use as a bomb shelter.
Lia opened her peacoat, letting her tomcat out. She dumped the coat over the back of a chair and kicked off her Chuck Taylors as she picked her way over to the dark corner of the room that housed her bed.
The furnishings she twisted past were all cleverly repurposed objects. There was a dented surgical crash cart for a dresser, while a pharmacist’s cabinet with cracked, chickenwire-embedded glass doors served as an overcrowded bookcase. Her table was a carved mahogany door she’d topped with a salvaged slab of green-edged glass. There were pictures, toys, and bits of statuary all over the place. Many things that looked alive, as Lia was an animist by inclination and therefore always felt a need to make objects with personality feel welcome when they showed up, wanting to spend a part of their long, strange lives with her. As a result her place felt funky, weird and witchy, although it was undeniably cozy, too.
Lia stopped by her bed and took the tarnished, Navy-crested Zippo from her pocket. She considered it for a long moment before setting it on a wooden shelf stuffed with secondhand books, wondering who might’ve owned it before her and how they’d come to leave it outside an office belonging to the Aztec God of the Dead.
She didn’t imagine the antique’s previous steward was apt to come looking for it, in any case.
Lia flopped down onto her futon, fully clothed, on top of the covers. Tom curled up next to her and purred loudly. Within minutes they were both asleep.
Ignored and unnoticed, the dead man’s lighter warmed up by gradual degrees, until its case smoldered in an ominous shade of orange. Slight curls of smoke rose from the shelf it sat on.
Now that its dormant magic had been kindled by a witch’s touch, the heated anchor on its side pulsed like the slow and steady beat of a living heart-bumpbump, bumpbump-as it silently called out to its former owner.
Retrospective No.1 ~ 1950
Six decades ago…
Dexter Graves lit a cigarette, snapped his lighter shut, then tipped the brim of his fedora back so he could look all the way up the tall front of an old, brick office building located on the southern edge of Hollywood. A few of the local oldtimers still called it the Silent Tower, though Graves had never learned why. The sky was clear and blue above it, and the structure itself was as silent as a tomb, lacking identifying signage of any kind. It was in obvious use and good repair, however, despite its half-century of wear and weathering. Most of its neighbors were newer by decades, and in truth next to nobody remembered its name anymore. Graves had done a fair bit of digging before turning it up himself. At thirteen stories high, the Tower must’ve been one of the first tall buildings erected in this area, back in its day, but the public records regarding it were as sketchy on that score as they were on any number of others.
As soon as the little-used street in front of it was entirely clear of both pedestrian and motor traffic, Graves ambled across with perfect nonchalance, making a low-key beeline for the building’s front door. He drew a leather wallet that bristled with lockpicking rakes from his trenchcoat’s inside pocket, meaning to admit himself to the so-called Silent Tower on his own recognizance. He was aces at getting in where he hadn’t been invited. But then the only tension bar in his entire goddamn pick set broke off as soon as he leveraged it against the lock’s sturdy tumblers, and that was it for the subtle approach. Graves snarled a curse, glanced around, then just kicked the door right the hell in.
He dove for the deck when a startled thug stationed in the front hall reflexively unloaded a shotgun in his direction, and a burst of jamb shrapnel filled the air.
The wild blast tore the fedora from Graves’ head, but he managed to tackle the gunman around the knees (aided greatly by gravity and luck), and took him down to the polished parquet floor. The scattergun discharged a second time, causing jagged chunks of ceiling plaster to rain down on the guard’s undefended head. He was knocked senseless.
Graves stood up and dusted off his coat, taking his good luck in stride. He claimed his adversary’s plaster-dusty hat to replace his own, shook it off, and put it on his head. Then he picked up the man’s shotgun, cocked it, and pushed forward before nerves could get the better of him. He knew full well that he wouldn’t get another chance at this. Not now. But he had reason to believe that a lady of his acquaintance was being held here against her will, and that was the sort of thing Dex Graves wouldn’t let slide.
He heard footfalls and ducked behind a potted palm situated outside a fancy set of double-doors at the end of the hall. A bare instant later three new thugs in big-shouldered suits burst through them at a full run, but failed to see him.
Graves was grinning when he darted through the swinging doors, wholly unnoticed by the trio of Johnny-come-latelys-only to run smack into a man he recognized as Juan San Martin, Miguel ‘Mickey Hardface’ Caradura’s chief enforcer. Big Juan, as they called him, was an ugly mountain of muscle overlaid with flab and wrapped in dark blue pinstripes. They’d never met before, but Graves knew better than to mount an assault on somebody else’s turf without doing his homework.
Big Juan grabbed hold of Graves’ shotgun before he could bring it into play. With his other hand he hoisted Graves up by his shirtfront and hurled him back through the double doors, separating him from the weapon. Big Juan raised the gun as Graves tumbled ass over tits back down the hallway he’d just escaped. The doors banged off the walls and bounced shut again, catching Big Juan’s shotgun barrel between them. The noise made the troop of lackeys who were almost out the front entrance realize they’d missed their quarry, and they came running back in Graves’ direction at full tilt.
Graves hurled himself against the double-doors, down near floor level, pinning Big Juan’s gunbarrel between them. He clamped his hands over his ears (as well as over the brim of his fedora) a split-second before Juan let off a deafening, double-barreled blast, scant inches above his head.
Big Juan’s blind shotgun barrage splattered the fastest of the three returning goons right out of commission. Graves winced and the other two men dove aside, out of the line of fire.
He reached up, grabbed hold of the trapped gunbarrel with both hands, and yanked on it viciously, with all the force he could apply. He felt an unbalanced Big Juan topple face-first into the closed doors, and heard him bellow when his nose made solid, crunching contact with the heavy planes of polished wood.
In the instant after he felt the impact and heard Juan’s resultant shout, Graves was able to rip the shotgun right out of the big man’s hands with a second, well-timed pull. San Martin grunted, stumbling to his knees as the doors swung open before him.
Graves kicked one of them hard, whacking Big Juan square in the face with it for a second time. The human mound fell backwards into the foyer as Graves whirled, cocking the shotgun he’d recaptured from his oversized adversary, and fired twice after the two henchmen who were caught in the front hallway.
The swinging doors fell shut.
An instant later they banged open again and Graves strode into the foyer. Big Juan looked up as Graves loomed over him and trained the shotgun’s long barrel right down between his eyes.
“Where’s Caradura?” the detective asked, getting to it without preamble.
Juan, dazed, his nose bleeding freely from its two collisions with the door, reluctantly pointed upwards. Graves looked across the foyer. There were three elevators and a door marked ‘STAIRS.’ He nodded, and then looked back down at Big Juan. “Good talk, amigo,” he said.
Graves flipped the shotgun upside down and whacked Juan San Martin decisively in the face with the stock. The fat henchman’s eyes rolled back to the whites, and then he lay still. Graves didn’t like to kill people if he didn’t have to (although if he did have to, he could make his peace with it). He’d figured gunplay might be a part of this deal-he just hadn’t expected so much of it so soon.
Graves lit another cigarette while his elevator car noiselessly ascended, using his silver Zippo with the gold US Navy insignia on its side.
Now this, to say the least, was not how he would’ve chosen to spend his day. His PI work tended to be staid and predictable. Embezzlement, infidelity-those were his normal bread and butter. Cheating husbands and crooked beancounters. Stakeouts and papertrails. A snore sometimes, sure, but frankly, Dex Graves had worked the need for thrilling heroics out of his system back in the war.
The only thing was, he’d recently shared a cup of joe at an all-nite diner with a woman he knew, an occasional singer at his local watering hole, and she’d chosen that moment to confide in him. At least in part. It seemed she’d had an affair with a shadowy underworld character named Mickey Caradura, given birth to his baby in secret, and then put the kid up for adoption to keep it safe from its psychopath father. After all the regrets and second thoughts settled in, however, she’d gone and tracked her baby down again, through whatever orphanage had taken it in, and Hardface had somehow gotten wise. Now that he knew the kid existed, Caradura meant to claim and raise it as his heir. Ingrid (that was the mother’s name) told Graves she was planning to go and talk with her former fiance, to try and convince him to leave the child alone. Then last night she hadn’t shown up for her set at the joint where Graves liked to listen to her sing, and it didn’t take a mathematician to put two and two together. He didn’t even know this Ingrid person all that well, but he’d grown up an orphan himself, and he’d be damned if he was going to let any kid get snatched away from a mom who cared about it.
So here he fucking was, despite all his better judgment.
Still, he was in it to win it now, as somebody once said. Not in the name of action or glory or any other idiot ideal, but because he was the only person in any position to clean up this shit. The proper authorities wouldn’t even try to touch the mysterious man called Hardface, and that was a fact.
In it to win it, then, Graves reminded himself, and to hell with the goddamn odds. That philosophy might not’ve been designed to maximize longevity, but it had somehow carried him through the Pacific Theater just the same. The guys he’d served with had even come to call him ‘Death-Proof Dexter,’ in honor of his uncanny ability to dodge the Reaper time and time again. It was as though he were drawing from a Tarot deck with no Death card, only Jokers. And now he was gambling on that odd imperviousness once again. He could only hope he hadn’t played his lucky streak out yet.
So musing, he cast a glance up at the trapdoor in the car’s roof.
A moment later, the bell over the middle of the three elevators dinged. The doors slid open onto a top-floor hallway, and another waiting pair of Mickey Hardface’s enforcers unloaded their sawed-off shotguns into the car. They each got off three or four noisy rounds before realizing there was nobody in there.
The pudgy palooka in charge (the man was nowhere near as hefty as Juan San Martin, but still) raised a hand to signal a cease-fire, and then he crept up to the car while the second clown covered him. It looked as though they expected Graves to be hiding inside the door. The fat guy darted in with his gun at the ready, but there was nothing to see. No Graves.
“Look out! Above you!” the taller, skinnier mug shouted. So he was the functioning half of this dyad’s brain. As a pair they reminded Graves of an unwholesome Laurel and Hardy.
‘Ollie’ complied with his partner’s directive just in time to see Graves’ face and hat dart back from the edge of the open trapdoor in the elevator car’s paneled ceiling.
Ollie jumped, grabbed the portal’s lip, and started to pull himself up. ‘Stan’ scrambled to boost him. “Get up there, already,” Stan squealed, sounding keyed up with murderous excitement. “Get him, he’s trapped up there!”
Up in the dark and narrow elevator shaft, Graves jumped across to the top of the next car, catching hold of the taut, greasy cables it dangled from for balance. There was no way he could see of escaping this vertical tunnel, not with another armed man waiting out in the hall. As Ollie began cramming his well-fed bulk up through the middle car’s trap, he craned his sweaty, porcine face up towards Graves and grinned.
“Give it up now, why dontcha?” Ollie said. “Ain’t no place left to go-”
“But down,” Graves supplied, as inspiration struck him and he blasted the elevator cables above the fat man’s head with the one shell he had remaining in his shotgun.
They twanged and frayed dramatically, down to a thread.
The elevator car lurched and skinny Stan had sense enough to dive back out of it, into the hallway. Graves heard him shouting. Ollie had one single instant in which to favor him with a look of horrified dismay before the last steel strand holding his perch aloft snapped and the car fell away, noiselessly, down into the engulfing darkness below it.
Some seconds later Graves heard a decisive crunch. He nodded in satisfaction, pried open the new trapdoor at his feet, and dropped down into the next wood-paneled carriage over from the one in which he’d ascended, absorbing the impact with a bend of his knees.
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.