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 ground.
“Ingrid, listen to me,” he said. “He’s not gonna hurt you, not ever again. You or anybody else. You wanna know how I know?”
Graves drew a loaded.45 from a shoulder-holster he wore inside his jacket, racked it, and handed it to Ingrid, who took it in spite of herself. She looked down at it, seeming to marvel at its weight and the coldblooded elegance of its engineering.
“Cause we’re gonna go make sure of it together,” Graves told her. “You’n me, sister. Let’s finish this thing.”
He turned and marched back toward Caradura’s door, holding Stan’s dropped shotgun at the ready. Ingrid was still looking at the pistol in her hand.
“I can’t do that, Dex,” she said, and her tone stopped Graves cold. He whirled around to see her pointing his very own gun at him. She looked distressed by what she was doing, but her aim was all too steady. “And I can’t let you.”
“If this is a comedy act, it needs a lotta work,” he said.
“Let’s just go, Dexter. Right now. I’ll go with you. But you can’t… You just can’t…”
“Why are you protecting him?” Graves asked, in a low and ominous growl.
“I’m not,” Ingrid said. “I’m protecting you.”
Graves glanced pointedly at his pistol, clutched there in her unwavering hand. “Yeah, how could I have missed that?” he said. “Haven’t felt quite this safe since my time on Okinawa.”
“Don’t joke.”
“Is it Martin or fuckin’ Lewis that I look like to you?” he snapped. Before Ingrid could respond, he continued: “No, now you listen, sister, I came to get you outta here-”
“Then let’s go,” Ingrid said, sounding exasperated.
“But I’m not leaving this place till I know this thing is done. You get me? I am not walking outta this building while Mickey Fuckin’ Hardface is still around to walk this earth!”
Ingrid cringed at his vehemence, and he relented.
“You don’t wanna watch it, then wait here,” he told her, softly. “But don’t stand in my way.”