Deciding she hadn’t seen him after all, Graves wandered off to look for Lia.
She had an old waterheater jury-rigged into the Yard’s irrigation apparatus, and a soft cotton bathtowel thrown over a nearby garden bench.
She stepped, naked, into the steamy cascade of water that gushed down from a showerhead on a hose that she’d slung over a wooden arbor, one nestled amidst a bower of fragrant citrus, peach and pear trees. She knew, from Black Tom, that these tall, rooted fruit trees were all holdovers from the Valley’s agricultural past.
Her private outdoor shower was Lia’s very favorite amongst the many perks that came along (in her opinion) with life at Potter’s Yard.
Behind her, Dexter the trenchcoat-wearing skeleton came sauntering out of the unruly foliage that proliferated back here in this far corner of the Yard. He spotted her straightaway, and she saw him duck back behind a juniper shrub, out of the corner of her eye. He peeked out from around his camouflage a couple of moments later, apparently thinking he was being subtle.
Lia smiled. Some gumshoe, she thought.
She was feeling a lot better this morning, after a good, recharging night’s sleep. Improved enough to be feeling a touch… well, playful. Something deep in her core quivered enticingly when she imagined Dexter’s eyes (or his ocular orbits, anyway) drinking in the naked sight of her.
She didn’t think of herself as a necrophile. She’d never performed a peep show for a corpse before, and she’d certainly never expected to. But she was about to do it now, and she felt the strangest combination of surprise and excitement as she contemplated her own imminent behavior.
Lia washed herself, languidly, leisurely, keeping her back to Dex, whom she knew wasn’t going away. She squeezed water from her hair (which looked like a spill of India ink when it was wet), and shook it out. She soaped up a second time just for show, just to let herself glisten amidst the torrent of white waterdiamonds that cascaded down all around her, basking as she did every morning in the warmth and billowing steam, fully aware that every inch of her bare, creamy skin was shining in the glory of the pure morning sun…
While one leering cadaver looked on, with his jawbone hanging open to his sternum.
Graves knew he shouldn’t have been there. He knew he should’ve beaten a retreat already and decided, reluctantly, that he would now actually do so. Before things got weird. He turned away from the scintillating sight before him (with more than a moderate degree of personal difficulty), and ran smack into Hannah, who’d snuck up behind him with a steaming cup of tea in her hand.
Graves shouted and backpedaled, tripping over a stray flowerpot and taking a number of young Japanese maples down with him when he tumbled over backwards, landing hard enough to rattle his bones.
He lay there for a moment, in the dirt, gazing up and feeling dazed. Hannah looked down from one side of his field of vision. Lia, her black hair dripping, did the same from the other. There was nothing but blue sky behind them, piled high with bulging towers of bright white cloud.
“Tea, Dexter?” Hannah asked cheerfully. She and Lia (who’d swaddled herself in a towel) both laughed aloud.
Graves sat up. “Yeah, that’s funny,” he said, exaggerating his perturbation as he retrieved his hat and crammed it back onto his bony head, then got to his feet. “Real funny. What’re you, the vice squad? This a sting operation? You know damn well I got no gut to dump that in,” he accused, pointing imperiously at Hannah’s teacup.
Lia claimed it and sipped from it herself, grinning at him over the rim. He did like being grinned at by her, he had to admit. That chopped-off haircut made her a dead ringer for pretty picture star Louise Brooks, with whom he’d been infatuated since he was about fourteen years old. All the way back in 1929.
He heard the sound of engines somewhere in the near distance, but traffic noises weren’t uncommon around here, and none of them took any particular notice.
“Looks like you’re feeling better this morning, anyway,” Graves observed, automatically tilting a salacious socket down toward Lia’s thighs, which poked out fetchingly from underneath the hem of her abbreviated towel-skirt. He hardly even realized he was doing it.
“I think I just needed to sleep,” she said, stepping close and gently tipping Graves’ chinbone back up so that he had to meet her eyes. “I get twitchy when I’m tired.”
“Well, don’t we all, sister,” he said, feeling dizzily bemused and more than a little embarrassed to’ve been caught so nakedly eyegroping Miss Lia’s gams. You’d think not actually having the offending orbs anymore he’d be able to keep ’em in his goddamn head, but no. Not him. No chance.
At least he couldn’t blush in his current condition.
“Don’t we all…” he repeated, a solid beat too late, just for the sake of having something more to say, and he was gratified when Lia nudged his femur with her terrycloth hip and smiled up at him.
Chapter Nineteen
Black Tom watched over the Yard from the peak of the office shack’s corrugated roof, through his catbody’s sharp green eyes. He was in the habit of giving Lia a bit of space in the mornings, so that she could bathe and see to other personal business in relative privacy.
From where Tom was crouched he could see all the way to each edge of the nursery’s property, and far beyond. To the north of them, the DWP generating station’s four red- amp;-white, candy-striped smokestacks poked up into the blue sky. Closer by, he could easily look out over the locked front gate and down into the empty street outside.
While he was lounging in the early sun and lazily watching the Yard’s perimeter, a large black motorcycle piloted by a tall woman in head-to-toe black leather came rumbling down the road. She surprised Tom when she stopped her bike and let it idle right before the Yard’s front gate. Half a dozen long black cars also pulled up and parked at the curbs on either side of the street.
They didn’t look like landscape designers, who rarely if ever traveled by motorcade. Tom sent a note of concern out toward Lia, just one soft alarm bell. For now. He could feel his girl tiptoeing back toward her bomb shelter with her rubber shower-sandals slapping at her heels, still unclothed except for a towel she’d cinched around herself like a fuzzy white mini-dress.
The black-clad woman killed her engine and swung herself off her bike, then wandered up to the fence. Her henchmen, a full dozen of them, got out of their cars and stood around, waiting for orders.
The leatherclad Amazon took in the eyeball-covered fence, with its multiple rings of Pi digits scorch-tattooed onto the silvery wood. She raised her helmet’s mirrored visor for a better look. None of the henchmen were in a position to see Lyssa’s mad static revealed instead of a face, but Tom was.
Lyssa, Lady Madness, was the unknown biker. Crazy as she was, she’d somehow found her way back out here, and this time she had a different kind of reinforcement in tow: a dozen armed men with money as their motivator, in place of a handful of nightmares. Maybe things looked clearer to her by the light of day, which obviously didn’t force her to retreat from reality as it did in the case of her relation Nyx, or the Tzitzimime.
Tom’s psychic warning bell began to clang in earnest, in time with his catbody’s skyrocketing heart rate.