Graves' end

“Where’s Caradura?” the detective asked, getting to it without preamble.

Juan, dazed, his nose bleeding freely from its two collisions with the door, reluctantly pointed upwards. Graves looked across the foyer. There were three elevators and a door marked ‘STAIRS.’ He nodded, and then looked back down at Big Juan. “Good talk, amigo,” he said.

Graves flipped the shotgun upside down and whacked Juan San Martin decisively in the face with the stock. The fat henchman’s eyes rolled back to the whites, and then he lay still. Graves didn’t like to kill people if he didn’t have to (although if he did have to, he could make his peace with it). He’d figured gunplay might be a part of this deal-he just hadn’t expected so much of it so soon.

Graves lit another cigarette while his elevator car noiselessly ascended, using his silver Zippo with the gold US Navy insignia on its side.

Now this, to say the least, was not how he would’ve chosen to spend his day. His PI work tended to be staid and predictable. Embezzlement, infidelity-those were his normal bread and butter. Cheating husbands and crooked beancounters. Stakeouts and papertrails. A snore sometimes, sure, but frankly, Dex Graves had worked the need for thrilling heroics out of his system back in the war.

The only thing was, he’d recently shared a cup of joe at an all-nite diner with a woman he knew, an occasional singer at his local watering hole, and she’d chosen that moment to confide in him. At least in part. It seemed she’d had an affair with a shadowy underworld character named Mickey Caradura, given birth to his baby in secret, and then put the kid up for adoption to keep it safe from its psychopath father. After all the regrets and second thoughts settled in, however, she’d gone and tracked her baby down again, through whatever orphanage had taken it in, and Hardface had somehow gotten wise. Now that he knew the kid existed, Caradura meant to claim and raise it as his heir. Ingrid (that was the mother’s name) told Graves she was planning to go and talk with her former fiance, to try and convince him to leave the child alone. Then last night she hadn’t shown up for her set at the joint where Graves liked to listen to her sing, and it didn’t take a mathematician to put two and two together. He didn’t even know this Ingrid person all that well, but he’d grown up an orphan himself, and he’d be damned if he was going to let any kid get snatched away from a mom who cared about it.

So here he fucking was, despite all his better judgment.

Still, he was in it to win it now, as somebody once said. Not in the name of action or glory or any other idiot ideal, but because he was the only person in any position to clean up this shit. The proper authorities wouldn’t even try to touch the mysterious man called Hardface, and that was a fact.

In it to win it, then, Graves reminded himself, and to hell with the goddamn odds. That philosophy might not’ve been designed to maximize longevity, but it had somehow carried him through the Pacific Theater just the same. The guys he’d served with had even come to call him ‘Death-Proof Dexter,’ in honor of his uncanny ability to dodge the Reaper time and time again. It was as though he were drawing from a Tarot deck with no Death card, only Jokers. And now he was gambling on that odd imperviousness once again. He could only hope he hadn’t played his lucky streak out yet.

So musing, he cast a glance up at the trapdoor in the car’s roof.

A moment later, the bell over the middle of the three elevators dinged. The doors slid open onto a top-floor hallway, and another waiting pair of Mickey Hardface’s enforcers unloaded their sawed-off shotguns into the car. They each got off three or four noisy rounds before realizing there was nobody in there.

The pudgy palooka in charge (the man was nowhere near as hefty as Juan San Martin, but still) raised a hand to signal a cease-fire, and then he crept up to the car while the second clown covered him. It looked as though they expected Graves to be hiding inside the door. The fat guy darted in with his gun at the ready, but there was nothing to see. No Graves.

“Look out! Above you!” the taller, skinnier mug shouted. So he was the functioning half of this dyad’s brain. As a pair they reminded Graves of an unwholesome Laurel and Hardy.

‘Ollie’ complied with his partner’s directive just in time to see Graves’ face and hat dart back from the edge of the open trapdoor in the elevator car’s paneled ceiling.

Ollie jumped, grabbed the portal’s lip, and started to pull himself up. ‘Stan’ scrambled to boost him. “Get up there, already,” Stan squealed, sounding keyed up with murderous excitement. “Get him, he’s trapped up there!”

Up in the dark and narrow elevator shaft, Graves jumped across to the top of the next car, catching hold of the taut, greasy cables it dangled from for balance. There was no way he could see of escaping this vertical tunnel, not with another armed man waiting out in the hall. As Ollie began cramming his well-fed bulk up through the middle car’s trap, he craned his sweaty, porcine face up towards Graves and grinned.

“Give it up now, why dontcha?” Ollie said. “Ain’t no place left to go-”

“But down,” Graves supplied, as inspiration struck him and he blasted the elevator cables above the fat man’s head with the one shell he had remaining in his shotgun.

They twanged and frayed dramatically, down to a thread.

The elevator car lurched and skinny Stan had sense enough to dive back out of it, into the hallway. Graves heard him shouting. Ollie had one single instant in which to favor him with a look of horrified dismay before the last steel strand holding his perch aloft snapped and the car fell away, noiselessly, down into the engulfing darkness below it.

Some seconds later Graves heard a decisive crunch. He nodded in satisfaction, pried open the new trapdoor at his feet, and dropped down into the next wood-paneled carriage over from the one in which he’d ascended, absorbing the impact with a bend of his knees.

The elevator to the left of center dinged and its doors slid apart. Graves stepped out into the hall, leaving the trapdoor hanging open from the carriage’s ceiling behind him.

The middle elevator’s big doors were still gaping wide, although there was nothing to see through them now but an empty shaft and a snarl of shredded cable. The guy Graves had nicknamed Stan was staring right down into the chasm, looking about as aghast as a man can be. He whipped his head up when Graves strode toward him.

Before he could get his gun into play, however, Graves flicked a smoldering cigarette butt into his face. The skinny henchman staggered backwards, flailing, and fell right into the open, empty elevator shaft.

His scream echoed all the way down, until a muffled thud abruptly cut it off.

Graves didn’t look back, but he grinned an ugly grin as he walked on down the hall. He paused to pick up a still-loaded shotgun one of the now-dead guards had dropped, as a replacement for the one he’d emptied.

He was about to throw open Miguel Caradura’s office door, the only one down at the far end of the hallway, but he stopped in his tracks at the sound of a woman’s dulcet voice behind him.

“Dexter.”

He spun around and Ingrid Redstone stepped out from a recessed doorway, as if into a silver spotlight. She was a vision: in her late twenties, with ivory skin, fox-red hair, and a body to make any man want to run screaming through the streets with his balls in a bucket of ice. Graves found it incredible to think that she’d given birth not too many months ago, as she in no way resembled any matron he’d ever met. Her missing kid was bound to be a looker too, if precedent meant anything. The tall redhead (who was packed into a black satin evening gown even though it wasn’t much past eight in the morning) regarded Graves with troubled blue eyes.

“You really came,” she said.

Graves’ face tried to light up with relief and pleasure as he started toward her, but Ingrid’s look of brokenhearted sorrow kept it from doing so. “Ingrid, holy shit, are you okay?” he blurted. “Did they hurt you? How’d you get away?”

Ingrid shrugged him off when Graves tried to embrace her. “It doesn’t matter, Dexter, there isn’t time,” she said. “You have to get out of here.”

“We have to get out of here,” he corrected. “Soon as I’ve seen to Caradura.”

“Dex, no,” Ingrid said, her eyes widening in shock at the very idea. “He’ll kill you. Or something worse. Let’s just go, please, while we still can…”

She pulled him back toward the elevators by the sleeve of his coat, but Graves stopped and held his