Graves' end

“Ma’am, this vehicle was reported stolen yesterday afternoon, so unless you can produce some ID and a good explanation, I’m gonna have to ask you to put your hands behind your back.”

Lia did as she was told, and the cuffs closed around her wrists with two decisive clicks. A few do-it-yourself shoppers watched the sorry drama from beside their parked SUVs, but all of the day laborers gathered around the hardware store had scattered when lapolicia arrived.

Shitballs, Lia thought.

She was fucked and she knew it.

The tall cop guided her to a seat on a concrete block at the front of a parking spot. She was cuffed tight. Black Tom could’ve let her loose in an eyeblink, but he wasn’t available right now.

The officer paused to jot down some notes. Lia noticed a small black tattoo in the shape of a dog on the back of his left hand when he flipped open his notebook.

She felt a small kindling of hope.

“Hey. Blackdog,” she said.

The cop slowly turned his head. “What did you say?”

“Your tattoo,” Lia said. “You’re a Blackdog.”

“And what would you know about that?”

“Before you call this in or whatever,” Lia begged, “will you do me one favor? Will you call Frank Chudabala for me? Captain Chudabala? Please?”

“And what would you want me to tell him?” the cop asked.

“Tell him Lia la brujachica needs the Blackdogs,” she said. “Tell him I’ve fallen down a well.”

The young patrolman didn’t stop frowning, but he did pull a personal cellphone out of his pocket and dialed it, never once taking his mirror-covered eyes off of Lia.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Ingrid Redstone stood in the door of the Yard’s ancient office shack, leafing through a dog-eared paperback copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker she always carried in her purse and waiting as the day grew long. Her gangsters hung around their cars out in the gravel parking lot, most of them smoking nasty, chemical-scented, factory-rolled cigarettes. A bit of a surprise, that was, really. At least to Ingrid. It’d seemed to her that people didn’t do that so much anymore, in this baffling new madhouse of an era.

The twenty-first century had been on for over a decade already, if you could believe it. The fateful events of 1950 seemed like they’d happened a few short months ago (which, for Ingrid, they sort of had).

The important thing was that Dexter was really back, in this time and place, after sixty years in the dirt.

Ingrid was quietly awed by the idea. He wouldn’t be quite alive again, yet, but he was above ground at least. Walking the earth. Hearing his voice over the wireless telephone had finally made it real for her.

She’d been sure (well, pretty sure) that he wouldn’t die all the way when she shot him in the head so far back along this new timeline. Dexter was different, due in part to the feelings she had for him and the protective net of hexwork she’d once wrapped him up in, quite without his knowledge. He was special. She’d gambled that Mictlan would have no authority to draw him in if and when he ‘died’ in the realworld. She’d bet that he, his soul or whatever, would stay with his bones for as long as they lasted. The only way Dexter Graves would ever cross the threshold between the rooms was by agreement, as an act of his own free will.

It was good to see her theory finally borne out. The stakes on that wager had been so very high, and they remained so now, really. Her whole plan could still go wrong in any number of ways.

Ingrid had many regrets when it came to Dexter, not the least of which was that she’d never been able to tell him the truth about herself. She’d never gotten to know him as well as she might’ve liked. It had simply been too dangerous. She hadn’t dared to let him meet the King-not when he might’ve taken Mickey up on the offer she knew he intended to make. Dexter had still been raw from the experience of war as of the winter’s day in 1950 on which he’d expired. Physically healed from his wounds, yes, but still ungrounded, adrift and in need of an emotional reconstruction he had no idea how to perform. The escape from remorse the King would’ve promised might have sounded all too enticing to a man in that precarious frame of mind. A man with little to nothing anchoring him to the ongoing life of his world.

Shooting him had been easier than facing the consequences, ultimately.

But Mickey found out about him anyway, of course. Mickey’s influence in this world was limited, to say the least, but even so, he had his spies everywhere.

If she’d just run away when she first realized that the cons outweighed the pros when it came to being Mickey’s Queen, if she’d just left the city and put as much distance between herself and the building Mickey’d erected for her as she possibly could… then none of this would’ve happened.

But she’d exited the otherworld into 1950 instead, and that hadn’t been enough distance in either time or space. Mickey’s Tzitzimime tracked her easily across the years and he sent a new man (a big fellow called Juan, the son of architect Oscar San Martin in fact) to fetch her back to him. She might’ve done better if she’d just stayed when she was and put more miles between them, like maybe the span of a continent or an ocean.

Now Dexter was yet another pawn in her long chess game with Death.

That Mickey’d been willing to make a deal at all, that he’d given her this chance to find an understudy for her role in this production, was an indication of how desperately he coveted what Dexter and Lia, together, might be able to do for him.

Her King was only diplomatic when he absolutely had to be.

Still, Ingrid’s upper hand could only be played for so much advantage here. Turning up another operator like herself-an initiate of the eternal cycles of generation and decay, one thoroughly schooled in the mysteries of the tripartite plane of being-had proved difficult enough that Mickey’d missed out on the entire twentieth century while Ingrid searched, and questioned people, and tracked down leads across any number of decades. All he had were the tales and memories that trickled into Mictlan along with the dead, and he was pissed about what he heard. He mourned Studio 54, and bemoaned his missed opportunity to attend a thing called ‘Woodstock.’ Burning Man was still on his agenda, even though he’d heard by ‘now’ that it was becoming too commercial.

Commitment to a timeline was a new and frustrating experience for the King.

Witches of Ingrid’s caliber were rare and independent creatures, though, clever and wary of those who sought them out. Not easy to track down, and less so to set up. Ingrid had taken a good long while to find Mickey his girl. She’d been sure to. She bought time by obfuscating the issue and doing what she could to cover her tracks, but her King’s patience was far from endless. She’d finally had to deliver her discovery, Lia Flores, little Camellia Flower herself, here in the second decade of the mindbendingly distant twenty-first century.

That Dexter Graves was up and ambulatory was proof that the first phase of her operation had succeeded. Lia had picked up that lighter, the link to Dexter, despite her protestations to the contrary. Her touch had sparked Ingrid’s long-dormant hex to life, and Dexter’s bones along with it. Lia’s abilities must have been the full equivalent of Ingrid’s own, or else the enchanted symbol would not have awakened for her. Had Ingrid ever returned for the lighter herself during the intervening sixty years, she would’ve been right back on Mickey’s hook.

She sighed, thinking about it.

She couldn’t help but identify with Lia, this young operator she’d uncovered, and she didn’t want to see her hurt, above all things. Lia’s basic affinities seemed to be vegetal rather than mineral, like Ingrid’s own, but they still had an amazing amount in common.

That knowledge made her wistful. Equals in her field had, in Ingrid’s experience, been few and far between. It took a fortitude few possessed to live full-time in the actual, when the real was the only world most people would let themselves believe in. The otherworld could be scary, since it was but partially mapped and minimally understood. Daunting as it was, though, most folks at least acknowledged its existence as a metaphor or a frivolous fantasyscape, if nothing more.