He could hardly believe it himself, but when he looked into his heart, he found that it was true.
Tom looked over at Watt as the man hoisted himself up into the Model T’s driver’s seat. He hardly looked capable of operating the Ford’s elaborate controls. Tom wanted to offer to drive, but he’d never piloted an auto- mobile before in his life, and besides, he couldn’t now claim to be less intoxicated than Watt without tipping his hand, could he?
If the Englishman killed them on the road, well… then Tom figured he’d just arrive in the King’s realm a little ahead of schedule.
But if they happened to survive the drive, then he might yet have his chance to turn the tables.
Part Three: All Souls’ Day, Morning
Chapter Eighteen
A tall, female figure in head-to-toe black leather stood at a scenic viewpoint off Mulholland Drive and gazed out over the San Fernando Valley as it yawned and stretched away below her in the day’s clear new light. She had her helmet’s mirrored visor down, obscuring her face from view. The rising sun’s reflection burned across the silvered plastic in a hot white stripe.
She raised a divining rod in her right hand and flicked it with her left index finger. The rod spun wildly, like a compass needle near a magnet, round and round.
Then, with unnatural suddenness, it pulled to indicate north/northeast, and froze there.
The concealed woman nodded, zipped the rod into a breast pocket, and swung a leg over a hulking black motorcycle that was parked at the side of the road. When she kickstarted her ride and roared off a total of six big black cars trailed after her, snaking down the winding road that ran through Laurel Canyon.
Fifteen minutes later, the same woman and her six-car retinue growled to a stop for a red light at Laurel and Sherman Way, nearly halfway across the Valley’s flat floor.
The foothills a few miles back had seemed a lot more affluent and pretty, in her opinion. Up here it was all blank-faced warehouses and construction-supply outlets with little knots of hopeful laborers milling around outside their parking lots. Cheery, accordion-based Mexican music blared from a nearby pickup truck that was also caught at the red.
The leatherclad, helmeted biker took her divining rod from her breast pocket and flicked it again, repeating her wayfinding operation while the six black sedans that made up her ominous entourage settled in behind her. The rod spun, then froze, pointing in a more easterly direction.
They were getting close now.
The concealed woman nodded and zipped the rod back into her pocket. She glanced over at the pickup truck that was idling next to her, raised her visor for just a flash, and the men inside the cab promptly turned their music down.
The red light changed to a green and the woman continued traveling north into the Valley, following the rod and leading her menacing procession of nondescript cars forward.
Dexter Graves popped his skull up through Bag End’s already-open hatch. It was a lovely morning, bright and cool and full of birdsong. There were savory breakfast smells on the breeze.
Graves climbed up out of the tube and into the sun, glad to be, well, if not exactly
Of which he remembered surprisingly little, he found, when he stopped and gave it some thought. He had a hazy, disjointed memory of being burritoed up in a paint-spattered dropcloth then hauled out to a desert grave by Big Juan San Martin, Hardface’s enforcer, whom he now regretted not shooting back when he had the chance. After that, it was like his mind had shut down in the face of unending blackness, boredom and immobility, and it hadn’t stirred again until that driving compulsion to find his lighter roused him yesterday morning. Why
After a few agreeable minutes of wandering through the dew-bejeweled plant life and feeling the grasses underfoot tickle his toebones, Graves spotted Miss Hannah some way off through the greenery. She was standing in a little clearing filled with garden furniture, making bacon and eggs on a portable hotplate she’d dragged up from Lia’s bunker, as well as tea with an electric kettle.
She didn’t seem to see him.
Graves heard water start to run somewhere in the distance and he turned his skull in the direction of the sound, too curious about what Miss Lia might be getting up to not to check into it before he started a conversation with Hannah. She glanced up before she began setting out Lia’s mismatched plates, an instant after Graves stepped behind the cover of a potted tree. Maybe she saw him, and maybe she didn’t. Either way, she smiled a tiny smile and continued to busy herself with pleasant morning chores.
Deciding she hadn’t seen him after all, Graves wandered off to look for Lia.
She had an old waterheater jury-rigged into the Yard’s irrigation apparatus, and a soft cotton bathtowel thrown over a nearby garden bench.
She stepped, naked, into the steamy cascade of water that gushed down from a showerhead on a hose that she’d slung over a wooden arbor, one nestled amidst a bower of fragrant citrus, peach and pear trees. She knew, from Black Tom, that these tall, rooted fruit trees were all holdovers from the Valley’s agricultural past.
Her private outdoor shower was Lia’s very favorite amongst the many perks that came along (in her opinion) with life at Potter’s Yard.
Behind her, Dexter the trenchcoat-wearing skeleton came sauntering out of the unruly foliage that proliferated back here in this far corner of the Yard. He spotted her straightaway, and she saw him duck back behind a juniper shrub, out of the corner of her eye. He peeked out from around his camouflage a couple of moments later, apparently thinking he was being subtle.
Lia smiled.
She was feeling a lot better this morning, after a good, recharging night’s sleep. Improved enough to be feeling a touch… well, playful. Something deep in her core quivered enticingly when she imagined Dexter’s eyes (or his ocular orbits, anyway) drinking in the naked sight of her.
She didn’t think of herself as a necrophile. She’d never performed a peep show for a corpse before, and she’d certainly never expected to. But she was about to do it now, and she felt the strangest combination of surprise and excitement as she contemplated her own imminent behavior.
Lia washed herself, languidly, leisurely, keeping her back to Dex, whom she knew wasn’t going away. She squeezed water from her hair (which looked like a spill of India ink when it was wet), and shook it out. She soaped up a second time just for show, just to let herself glisten amidst the torrent of white waterdiamonds that cascaded down all around her, basking as she did every morning in the warmth and billowing steam, fully aware that every inch of her bare, creamy skin was shining in the glory of the pure morning sun…
While one leering cadaver looked on, with his jawbone hanging open to his sternum.
Graves knew he shouldn’t have been there. He knew he should’ve beaten a retreat already and decided, reluctantly, that he would now actually do so. Before things got weird. He turned away from the scintillating sight before him (with more than a moderate degree of personal difficulty), and ran smack into Hannah, who’d snuck up behind him with a steaming cup of tea in her hand.
Graves shouted and backpedaled, tripping over a stray flowerpot and taking a number of young Japanese maples down with him when he tumbled over backwards, landing hard enough to rattle his bones.
He lay there for a moment, in the dirt, gazing up and feeling dazed. Hannah looked down from one side of his
