“Are you seeing what I’m seeing in the back of that car?” the taller and darker-haired of the two men asked.
“I dunno. What’re you seeing?” was the shorter, blond man’s evasive reply.
“I don’t wanna say unless you’re seeing it too,” the first guard said. Something darted across the parking lot behind him and he whirled around, catching the movement in the corner of his eye. “You see that, then?” he demanded.
“What? A cat?”
Graves, too, had seen Lia’s cat, a large black tom, go bounding past the Yard’s main entrance.
“No, it was a guy,” the blond man said. “I saw a guy, like a little old guy! Fast like a freak, though.”
Darkhair nodded and motioned that they should go and check it out. Mr. Blond eased into the Yard, clicking off his gun’s safety, with his partner first covering and then following after him.
A small, bearded man in sunglasses rapped on Graves’ window with the back of his hand as soon as the sentries were out of sight.
Graves, who’d been yanking on the metal dog screen, looked over and finally thought to pull that goddamn glove out of his mouth. “Hey, pal,” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard through the insulating glass. “Lemme outta here, whaddaya say? I’ll owe you the moon and the goddamn stars!”
The little man, who wore a hat and carried a walking stick, opened the door and even held it for him, graciously. Graves jumped out and threw his arms around the liberating stranger, who accepted an embrace from a partially-dressed skeleton with wordless aplomb. “I love ya, man, I really do,” Graves said.
Then he turned and strode into the Yard, just as the gate guards were returning to their post after a fruitless check of the parking lot’s perimeter.
The dark-haired man saw him first. Wide-eyed with horror, he drew a gun with a silencer screwed onto the barrel and unloaded.
Bone chips flew from Graves’ cranium and bullets cracked a few of his ribs, but he incurred no damage that would stop him. He walked right up and twisted the gun out of the shooter’s grip, wrenching the man’s shoulder to drive him to his knees in the same motion. Graves genuflected behind him and shoved his head back viciously, snapping the henchman’s neck over his fleshless femur like a dry twig.
Done. Graves claimed the man’s gun and dumped his slack body aside.
He turned on the second guy, who backed away, dropping his weapon and holding up his hands. “Hey, come on, man, we weren’t gonna hurt nobody,” he said. “We had orders not to-”
The silenced weapon made an anticlimactic sound-sort of a ‘bzzew’-when Graves dropped the sniveling fuck with a perfect shot through his thigh. The man groaned rather than screamed, his face turning purple as veins stood out in the sides of his neck. His eyes rolled back to the whites.
Graves walked up and loomed over the writhing mercenary, training the automatic down at him. “The minute you point guns at my friends is the minute I stop givin’ a shit about your perspective,” he said, although he doubted he was really being heard. “You punched your own ticket, far as I’m concerned.”
The skeletal PI gritted his teeth in grim satisfaction as he drilled the blond man between the eyes with his own partner’s silenced pistol. It made that distinct bzzew! sound again, a little bit louder this time as the baffles inside the suppressor began breaking down under the stress of so many recent firings. It was nowhere near as wrath-of-God satisfying as an unmuffled report from a hand-cannon of this caliber might’ve been, but blood sprayed across the gravel just the same.
Graves spun on his calcaneus bone and headed off into the Yard, hellbent on saving Lia.
Her cat, that old tom, watched him lope away from high up in a pepper tree. Graves caught a flash of bright green eye when he strode past.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lia, crouched behind cover, listened as the three gunmen who were chasing her crept up on the large woodpile at the very back of the Yard. She trusted that Tom was watching over Hannah for her, since she couldn’t see him anywhere.
“Eddie?” one of the men said, only to be shushed by their obvious leader.
“Uh… Miss?” the one called Eddie began, raising his voice to address her, apparently, even though Lia knew they couldn’t have seen her yet. They weren’t looking in the right direction.
The guys he was with both eyeballed Eddie like he sounded asinine, and he shrugged in exasperation. He had sounded asinine, trying to open a dialog under these circumstances, and Lia could tell from his irritated expression that if they had a better opening line to audition, he was more than ready to hear it.
“Listen,” square-faced Eddie continued, speaking up to make himself heard. “We got sent out here by a guy called Mickey Hardface. Maybe you heard that name and maybe not, I dunno, but all he wants to do is talk, okay? Now I apologize for the hostile behavior of the mental defectives I got workin’ under me, and I promise you there is not gonna be any more gunfire. Those are Hardface’s specific orders: nobody gets hurt today.”
“Except you,” Lia said, stepping out from behind the copse of trees that stood beside the men and batting the one called Eddie across the back of his head with her weighty, knot-studded, cherry branch cudgel.
He pitched forward, losing his gun along with his balance. The other two clowns both pointed their weapons and staggered back at the very same time, dancing out of each other’s line of fire.
Lia stepped in to seize Eddie by the throat with both hands before he could regain his feet. She screamed down into his face as she squeezed, with tears of near-psychotic rage streaming down her cheeks, and vines sheathed in rough gray bark twined down her arms to lend an ancient strength to their daughter’s efforts.
Edwin Dane’s face reddened and his eyes bulged grotesquely. Capillaries burst in the whites and bloomed there like tiny red roses. His truest name and certain of his foul memories bloomed similarly into Lia’s mind.
The other two henchmen looked on in abject, uncomprehending terror as green life effloresced all around Lia Flores, sprouting and flourishing at a time-lapse pace. A camellia tree-Lia’s namesake plant as well as her earliest vegetal teacher-shot up from the bare dirt behind her to a height of well over ten feet within a matter of seconds, and its flexible new limbs helped her throttle Eddie Dane until the small bones in his neck crackled and popped like twisted bubblewrap. The sound of it was audible even over the soul-deep scream that blanked out Lia’s conscious mind and empowered her intentions. The earth beneath her feet shook with rage to hear its child’s cry, although Lia herself barely felt it.
All she could think about was Hannah.
Shoots and tendrils grew up through Eddie Dane, piercing and impaling him, rooting him to the ground. His skin roughened into crusty bark, while his limbs shrank and gnarled up into brittle, leafless branches. By the time Lia ran out of breath all that was left of him was a twisted stump that looked a vague bit like a contorted, struggling man.
It was like he’d never even been.
Lia ended her scream and staggered drunkenly when she let go of the stump and stepped aside, panting for air. She fixed the other two men with her raw, red gaze.
They fled, both of them, without another moment of hesitation. One of them actually dropped his gun in his haste to get away. Lia grabbed up her cherry branch and followed after them, flashing murder from her eyes.