Graves' end

“Do I look like a bounty hunter to you?” Ingrid sat back against her cushions and spread her white arms out across the back of the red velvet sofa. “Don’t act desperate, Mickey. It’s unattractive.”

“You may command my mercenaries,” he told her. “I’ve got all the human beings you can use.”

“I don’t know, though…” Ingrid said, feigning a frown and hoping she wasn’t hamming it up too much. Not that a nuanced performance wouldn’t be lost on Mickey Hardface anyway. “It’s kind of a tall order. What can I do that all of your bugbabes and moonmaidens couldn’t?”

“Walk the actual with some understanding of its habits and its ways, apparently,” was Caradura’s considered thought on the matter. “You will do this, Ingrid Redstone,” he decreed. “You will do this, or you will become my Queen, regardless of your wishes in this matter, and we’ll try this all again!”

Before Ingrid could respond, Mickey snapped his fingers.

She woke up on the floor outside his office within the Silent Tower. In the very place where Dexter Graves had died, in fact. Died by her hand… sort of. She had managed to bind a tiny spark of him to the lighter he’d dropped, the last object he’d touched, right before he passed on into darkness.

She sat up, looked around, and smoothed her hair. The hall was a lightless ruin once again, with no red carpet rolled out for her now.

“My gods, that took long enough,” she muttered. She looked back at the closed door with Miguel Caradura’s name stenciled on it, and allowed herself a slight, sly smile.

Ahh, Mickey, she thought to herself. Still handsome, ruthless, and stupid. Just the way I like you.

She got up and hurried off, down the decaying hallway, headed toward the stairs.

When Ingrid stepped out onto the street, she found thirteen new gangsters already waiting for her, with six new black cars at their disposal. These guys were younger, rougher, more tattooed and less experienced than the last bunch had been. They mostly wore hooded sweatshirts and dark jeans-a distinct step down from the ugly suits the previous, more competent-looking minions had worn.

They all fell silent upon seeing Ingrid. ‘Rapt’ seemed like the appropriate word. She figured her gown was probably decades out of style (her clothes often were), but it was low-cut and form-fitting, and she didn’t think the men were staring because it looked anachronistic. Her curves and her vibrant red hair never failed to make an impression.

The gang’s defacto leader, a mean-looking, baldheaded bastard in sunglasses, stepped forward. “You ‘Lady Redstone,’ then, lady?” he asked.

“I am,” Ingrid said.

“Yeah, well,” the wiry man with the impenetrable black glasses continued, “I’m Xavier, okay? Miguelito Hardface says we gotta do whatever you say and guard your safety with our lives. That’s the way his boy Winston said it exactly. Guard your safety with our lives, and do anything you say.”

“And report to him my every move, I’m sure,” Ingrid added in a pretty singsong voice, keeping it light so her words wouldn’t sound like too direct a challenge.

Xavier said nothing. Ingrid nodded as if he’d answered, though.

“Very well,” she said, starting down the building’s front steps and heading toward the cars, parting the crowd effortlessly before her. “Allons-y, boys. Let’s go.”

Ingrid motioned for everyone to come along as she padded over to the back of the nearest vehicle on the balls of her still-bare feet. She hadn’t thought to ask Mickey to replace her shoes, but she was still taller than most of her men, even without high heels. She opened her own door and slid into the car’s back seat. Xavier closed the door for her, like a good underling should, and then went around the front to drive.

The engines started up. Ingrid’s car led the pack when they pulled away from the curb, one by one, turning left onto Fountain at the end of the second block.

She thought for a while as prison-tattooed Xavier drove west toward Santa Monica, his eyes hidden behind those imposing black sunglasses. He turned right at Highland, a street name that hadn’t changed in a very long time.

“Uh… Mrs. Redstone?” the unlikely chauffer said, after a few blocks worth of northbound travel, up past Labaig Avenue. “Lady? Where do you want us to, like, take you?”

Ingrid, in the back seat, continued to gaze out her window, in no apparent hurry to answer.

“We could go out to that plant place in the Valley,” Xavier offered. “Where that chick’s supposed to, like, work or something? Winston says he still got three guys out there, so we got a street address now, but I guess they say it don’t look like nobody’s comin’ back there anytime soon.”

“No, I don’t expect they would, would they?” Ingrid said, almost to herself. “But let’s head out there anyway. Maybe I can figure her out by seeing where she operates.”

Xavier nodded. “Whatever you say, lady. Redstone.”

Retrospective No.3 ~ 1910

A century ago…

Old Tomas Delgado nearly shit his britches when Winston Watt’s motor carriage rumbled around the last ridge to the southwest of a vast stretch of grazing land that had once been a part of Rancho los Feliz and into view of the field where the Tree that Grew Below the Hole in the Sky used to be.

That’s right, Tom had to tell himself: used to be. Past tense. Someone else had beaten him to the punch in cutting down the ancient Tree.

Somebody else had thought the unthinkable, and acted upon it. Then they’d done him one better, too. The natural prairie the live oak once dominated was now cleared and graded, and a concrete foundation had been laid down amidst a grid of newly demarcated city streets. A cage of new steel girders towered into the sky, stacked up from exactly the place where the old encino had stood for well more than a thousand years, according to the tales the old people had preserved and passed on.

“Watt, what the fuck is this?” Tom said, aghast, although it was plain enough to him what was happening. These distempered fools were putting up a goddamn skyscraper. Right under the Hole in the Sky, where los Muertos crossed over into the realm of Mictlan. And it already reached higher than the old Tree ever had, even in this early phase of its construction.

Anyone could find their way up there now. Anyone.

“Believe me, it’s not my idea,” Watt muttered, letting his engine stall as he coasted down to a stop in a wheelrutted lot that was stacked high with construction materials and situated across the road from the building- to-be. From the Tree-that-was, that was.

Tom could hardly believe it was gone. The landscape looked wrong without it.

He took a moment to look up at the man-made blight that had replaced the oak-that boxy metal skeleton silhouetted against a darkening sky. Watt, who was far too drunk to be in any sort of a hurry, nodded complacently over his car’s steering wheel while Tom examined the newly-assembled framework that stood before them.

There were no other buildings around here like this one, not for miles. It was going to be at least ten whole stories tall, too, at a minimum. You’d have to travel as far as downtown, to Los Angeles proper, with its theater and business and manufacturing districts, to find a comparably ambitious structure. At least that far, if not all the way to the island of Manhattan.

It looked ridiculous, an incipient skyscraper standing alone in the middle of what was still essentially farmland.

Tom had assumed that if he cut down the Tree, it would take another thousand years for a new one to grow back in its place. The worlds would’ve been safe for at least that long, and his selfish, squandered life might’ve come to have a little meaning yet.

He could never have conceived of a project like this one, though. This incongruous erection out here on the prairie. Not in his wildest dreams or his worst nightmares. He couldn’t imagine an undertaking more dangerous or more foolhardy than this, and he had to wonder just who it was that would set such a thing in motion.

“Tio Tomas!”