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of a cocktail soiree held in the middle of a weekday afternoon-felt moneyed yet bohemian to Graves, with his plainly outdated point of view…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
“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
“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
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
“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.”
