Graves' end

hanging open and dashing up the walkway at a full run. She pounded, urgently rather than politely, on the big house’s carved mahogany front door.

A smartly-dressed and somewhat nerdish young hipster opened it right away. Lia threw herself into his arms with obvious gratitude. “Riley!” she cried.

He squeezed her briefly and then appraised her at arm’s length. “Lia,” he said. “You look like hell. Seriously. Your friend’s in the car?”

Lia nodded and he was on his way down to the drive, without another word. Black Tom, the voiceless little man with the cane and sunglasses, got out of the car on the passenger side, and Graves realized that this Riley person didn’t-and perhaps couldn’t-see him. The same way Miss Hannah couldn’t. That privilege seemed to be reserved for Lia, and now for him as well.

“What happened, anyway?” Riley was asking of Lia, over his shoulder, as she trotted back down to the car at his heels. “Who’d shoot at you? You’re not in some sort of-whoa.”

Graves stepped out of the car on the driver’s side, and him, Riley saw.

Lia’s friend stopped, stunned, and then broke into a grin, his face glowing with genuine wonderment and geekish delight. “Oh, Lia…” he breathed, unconsciously raising a hand to his mouth. His eyes even glistened a little. “Oh. You are… an artist, girl. That is just incredible.” He turned to her. “I could go straight for you if I had to,” he said. “I’m serious. Maybe no oral stuff, y’know, but I can get it up for anyone who can do this.”

Graves could only stare at him, at a rare loss for words.

“Riley, my friend is bleeding,” Lia reminded.

Riley tore his attention away from the skeletal spectacle of Dexter Graves, arisen from the thing that shared his name. “Right!” he said, snapping out of his rapture. “Right, although I don’t really see what you need me for when you can raise the dead…”

He leaned into the car. Graves looked at Lia across the top of it.

“Hey, Ms. Potter, I’m Riley, remember? It’s been a while,” Riley said, from inside the cockpit, craning over the passenger seat to greet his patient. “Why don’t you show me where it hurts?”

“This guy’s a doctor, is he?” Graves muttered.

“Well, he has a medical degree,” Lia hedged, “but not a license to practice. It’s a long story.”

“That’s reassuring,” Graves said. “Beats the local veterinarian, I guess.” Then he saw how weary and worried Lia really looked, and felt abashed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She is gonna be fine, you know.”

Riley helped a wincing Hannah out of the car. Graves stooped down beside her so she could throw her arm across his shoulderblades and let him bear her weight.

“He’s right, you guys were lucky,” Riley said. “I’ll irrigate this and dress it, and I think I’ve got some antibiotic samples kickin’ around, so she’s gonna be okay.”

Lia nodded, looking like she could’ve cried from relief. Graves helped Riley help Hannah up toward the house, carefully, taking it slow so as not to pull at Hannah’s wound.

Lia followed them. After a moment she asked, “Riley… is Steb around?”

“What’s a steb?” Graves said.

Riley nodded uneasily. “Upstairs, yeah,” he said in response to Lia. “He oughta be awake soon. He’s been working a weeklong operation, and you know how he gets.”

“So it’s a bad time to be here, then,” Lia said.

“Well… there does tend to be that, you know, spillover, when he’s practicing.”

“No, really, what’s a steb?” Graves asked again. “Is it a guy?”

“Esteban de Rojo,” Lia said. “Steb.”

“Her ex,” Riley and Hannah both told him, in unintentional unison.

“No,” Lia said. Quick to protest, Graves noted. “No. Not my ex. We had an affair, not a relationship. A fling.”

“Her flingerer, then,” Riley said. “Whatever that means. I don’t know what sort of sick shit you people get up to. I really don’t like to think about it.”

Graves tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal his jealousy. He knew Hannah felt his spine tightening up. “Well, hey,” he said, way too jovially. “Let’s shake that deadbeat outta bed, is what I say. I’m damn curious to meet the man who can tame our Lia.”

“Can you guys just stop it?” Lia said. “Please?”

They all looked at her. Her eyes were bloodshot and more than exhausted. Graves thought she looked absolutely spent.

“Lia…” Riley said, his brow creasing with concern. “Are you really okay?”

“I’m fine,” Lia said, rubbing at her forehead. “But maybe I could lay down… somewhere… for just a little… little bit…”

Her knees buckled and she collapsed to the driveway pavement. Graves could see she was unconscious before she hit the ground.

Riley and the short phantom with the cane were at her side in less than an instant. Graves lurched back over with Miss Hannah draped across his shoulder so that they might help her, too.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

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