They shook hands, holding them clasped together for a long and meaningful moment. Charlie’s frail bones were almost as prominent as Graves’ own. Then they broke contact, and the skeleton got into the new car with Hannah.
Graves saluted his old (now elderly) friend and Hannah waved as he backed them out of Dr. Walsh’s parking spot and pulled onto the street, heading east down Ventura, in the direction of the Cahuenga Pass. Charlie Lurp shambled out to the sidewalk and watched them go, with his withered chest puffed up and pride shining in his eyes. Graves glanced up to see him receding in the rearview mirror.
It didn’t take them long to get over the hill and down into the streets of Hollywood, now that they had wheels. Even after sixty years Graves was able to find the old Silent Tower, the Office of the King, without too much circling around. Today it looked derelict: besmirched by graffiti, with many of its windows broken out and covered over with plywood. It had been in good repair and apparently a part of the regular world, the last time he saw it.
Now it looked like the world had passed it by.
Graves still didn’t know why Ingrid had chosen to involve him in any of this (him of all people, involved so deep that he’d crawled back out of his grave to play his part), but he figured he’d come to the one place in all the worlds where he might be able to pose that question and actually demand an answer.
He and Hannah got out of their stolen Jaguar. Graves held out the keys. “Here, take the unauthorized requisition back to where we got it before old Charlie gets in trouble, willya?”
“Forget it, Dexter,” Hannah said flatly.
“Miss Lia’ll kill me if I let anything happen to you,” Graves said, laying it out there with no further pretense.
“That Ingrid person apparently beat her to it, so what are you afraid of?”
Graves looked up at the old, ill-maintained building. “Last time I walked in there, I didn’t walk back out,” he said. “I’m not ready to see that happen to you.”
“Then we’ll make sure it doesn’t,” Hannah said. “But you can’t ask me to stand by when Lia’s in trouble and there might be something I can do. Isn’t that why we came here? To see if we can help without getting close to Ingrid? If you’re going in there, Dexter, then I am too.”
Her mind was made up and she would not be dissuaded. That much was abundantly clear.
Graves loved her for it.
“Mrs. Potter, for a lady, you’ve sure got some balls,” he said. “Brass ones, if that ain’t too crude.”
“Mr. Graves, it’s the sweetest of compliments, coming from you.”
Graves nodded and kicked the building’s front door open almost casually, the same as last time. Then he and Hannah strode on in together.
As they entered the broken-down lobby, through those old double-doors that still hung askew after Graves’ long-ago fight with Big Juan, the lights came on and the foyer restored itself to greet them.
Hannah seemed quietly awed by the special effects. Graves refused to be impressed.
A pristine elevator car descended into the gaping shaft and the bell dinged. They got in when the doors opened.
“This floor: notions, housewares, and self-repairing lightbulbs,” Graves said in a mocking, nasal voice. The elevator doors slid closed and the car started to rise. “Next floor,” he continued, “Aztec hell. And we’re up, up and away…”
Chapter Forty-Three
Ingrid came to attention at the sound of an engine just outside the fence, and she set aside the book she hadn’t really been reading.
Some distance away, Mickey’s man ‘Xavier’ readied himself as well. She saw him from the corner of her eye.
A small, metal cylinder came sailing over the fence to land in the middle of the parking lot. All of the gangsters looked at it quizzically. Only Ingrid caught on in time to turn away and cover her ears before the police flash-bang grenade went off as advertised. (She didn’t know what in hell the device
Stunned gangsters fumbled with guns and scrambled for cover while a coordinated team of six LAPD officers poured into the lot, wearing riot helmets with protective visors and carrying clear plastic shields. They took out three of Hardface’s hired men straightaway with handheld devices that delivered an electrical jolt, and then cuffed them.
The unit’s apparent leader downed that idiot ‘Top Shelf’ with a nonchalant punch to the face as he and Lia strode into the Yard, right behind the initial wave of cops.
Xavier ran for it, Ingrid saw, vanishing into the thick cover provided by the Yard’s vegetation, as did the dozen or so other gangbangers still at large.
The cops gave chase.
“That one, Ben,” Lia said, spotting Ingrid and pointing her out from across the parking lot. “Over there.”
Lia looked on as Ben Leonard drew his weapon, trained it on Ingrid Redstone’s leg-and then realized that the.9mm in his hand had somehow turned into nothing more than a red plastic water pistol. A toy. No cop was armed with anything else, to their very great dismay. Lia saw it as clearly as they did. The guns might still have worked if they’d tried them (Ingrid’s trick must’ve been perceptual, Lia figured, hypnotic, something easier to accomplish than an act of physical transmogrification), but none of the Blackdogs questioned the evidence of their senses enough to make the experiment. They were disarmed, for all intents and purposes.
Gunfire nonetheless broke out deeper in the Yard. Ben threw his shiny toy pistol aside and powered after Ingrid, vanishing into the greenery.
Lia followed after him.
Chapter Forty-Four
When the bell above the sliding door rang, Graves and Hannah stepped out of the elevator. The Silent Tower’s top floor hallway was pristine and ready for them. To Graves, it seemed not to have changed one iota since the last day of his natural life, all the way back in 1950.
They walked up to the office door. The coat of Graves’ blood that obscured Miguel Caradura’s name looked as red and fresh as if it had just been sprayed there in the wake of a high-velocity projectile. Graves paused to contemplate it.
“Here’s as far as I got on my last visit,” he said. “Never did make it through that door.”
“Are you ready, Dexter?” Hannah asked, looking over at him.
“As I’ll ever be, I guess.”
Together, Graves and Hannah pushed open the office door, which had once been a mere Hole in the Sky, although neither of them knew it.
The King’s office was immaculate, elegant, and timelessly appointed. There were traces of Art Deco in the space’s design, as well as evidence of the post-war trends toward bolder colors and straighter lines that had been starting to assert themselves when Graves died. There was a lot of polished wood, not to
