This meant something. She was sure of it.
She was looking critically at the inert black cat when Xavier crept up behind her. “So,” he said out of nowhere. “You think they gonna come, or what?”
Ingrid turned, startled, but kept it cool. She betrayed nothing. She fixed Mickey’s footsoldier with a contemptuous gaze of a sort that usually made men feel self-conscious, to say the least. Xavier had sidled up a lot closer than she might’ve expected. She looked him up and down dismissively, then looked at the cat again, and grinned. “You know, I have a feeling they will,” she said.
Ingrid tucked the animal under her arm and strutted off, through a thicket of potted palms, pointedly ignoring Xavier as he watched her walk away.
He lingered, waiting to make sure Ingrid was really gone. After the Red Witch wandered out of earshot, he fell to his knees and ripped his own face off, gasping. ‘Xavier’ was nothing more than a disguise. While he caught his breath, Winston, the King’s skeletal servant, looked disdainfully down at the floppy face in his hand.
“Bloody hell, I forgot how hot these things can be,” he muttered, his voice and manner changed completely from those of his crudely-drawn character. As if servitude weren’t enough, the final indignity was that he was now being forced to act, like some vagabond gypsy player prancing for coins on a rickety stage.
He looked again at his false face, which was stubble-scalped and marked with a teardrop tattoo at the corner of the left eye. It’d been flayed off a recent arrival in Mictlan mere hours ago. It felt moist, and smelled meaty.
“How do the living tolerate it?” Winston wondered aloud.
He heard a rustling in the oleander behind him and threw his face back on. It shrink-wrapped down onto the bones of his skull. He still had no eyes (the ones that came with a fresh face were impractical, as they tended to deflate or turn cloudy so quickly; and besides, the King prized them as jewelry), but he covered up that fact with his sunglasses and got to his feet before two of the gunmen he’d enlisted ‘rolled up on him,’ to employ the vernacular of the day. He recognized them as Top Shelf (aka Reggie White) and his shadow Andrej Mirovic (known amongst his confederates as the Silent Soviet, due to his lack of English). Winston had hand-picked each member of this crew himself.
“Dude, what you doin’ back up in here, anyways?” Top Shelf said. “Takin’ a leak?”
“Yeah, why,” Winston shot back, dropping into character as Xavier once again. “You wanna watch?”
Top Shelf snorted in contempt and wandered off in the direction Ingrid had gone, with quiet Mirovic trailing along behind him. Winston stared after them through Xavier’s dark lenses.
“Wankers,” he muttered.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lia got out of bed. Nobody saw her. Nobody was looking in her direction. She was still fully dressed, except for her shoes. She suspected her hair was mussed and she smoothed it self-consciously, probably not doing it any good.
“Dexter?” Hannah said, breaking the silence that filled the guest room at Casa de Rojo. She still hadn’t folded up Lia’s phone, although its screen had gone black. “What are you gonna do?”
“You’re gonna tell me how you can possibly know Ingrid Redstone, for starters,” Lia said, from behind them.
There was a mass turn. Hannah, Dexter, Riley and Black Tom all wheeled around. Hannah ran over and hugged her, hard. “Lia, honey!” she exclaimed. “How are you? You fainted dead away, we were so scared-”
“I did not faint, don’t you say that,” Lia admonished her. Hannah let her go and she slipped back into her shoes. “I never faint. I don’t want to be a girl who faints.” She turned to Graves. “Dexter?”
“What, how did I know Ingrid?” he said. “I met her back in the ’40s, before I… well, you know. She was a singer in a bar I spent kind of a lot of time in back then. She’s gotta be into her nineties by now.”
“If she is, she’s got a great plastic surgeon,” Lia said. “I saw her yesterday morning, and there’s no way she’s more than thirty years old.”
Dexter looked confused. “But that’s not possible,” he said.
“Says the Crypt Keeper,” Riley piped up.
Dex glared at him like he meant to rejoin with something snotty, but then relented. “Yeah, good point,” he admitted. Then: “Lia, she said there’s things we need to know. She said I’m here, somehow, because of you.”
“Not to the best of my knowledge,” Lia said. “And I do think I’d notice. What am I, reanimating in my sleep?” She frowned. “But I guess I did find your lighter in a place she sent me to…”
“Can you undo it?” Dexter asked. “Whatever it is she did to me that’s hurting you?”
Lia shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is. This’s beyond me.”
“That Ingrid woman didn’t seem to think so,” Hannah said.
“No,” Lia agreed reluctantly. “No, I guess she didn’t.” She looked up at Dexter. “So, Dex. We gonna go talk to her, or what?”
“Hell no, we’re not gonna go talk to her!” Dexter said. “You know how to spell ‘trap,’ sister? That’d be I-N-G, uh,” — he thought about it- “R-I-D.”
“But what about all those ‘things we need to know?’” Lia asked.
“That’s a bluff,” Dex said. “She’s bluffing. It’s bullshit.”
“What if it’s not, Dexter?” Hannah asked quietly.
Hannah and Dexter exchanged a private glance, and Lia knew they were both thinking of her. She must still have looked pretty worn out. She hadn’t really expected that three hours of sleep would erase those dark, haunted circles from underneath her eyes.
“If that’s the case,” Dexter reassured Hannah, “then we’ll find out what she knows some other way. But playing by Ingrid’s rules is not gonna be the smart move, here, I’m tellin’ you. I’m getting a notion she’s a better tactician than I ever knew.”
“You guys are welcome here for as long as you need,” Riley said. “We’re defended. Let ’em come.”
“Thank you, Riley,” Lia said, touching his arm affectionately. “But I don’t think that’s really gonna work.”
“Why not?” Dexter and Hannah said together.
“It’s nice here,” Dex elaborated. “Swanky.”
“And safe,” Hannah supplied.
“You’ll see, if we hang around long enough,” Lia told them. “Riley, can I have a drink of water? Maybe a sandwich or something, before Steb wakes up? I don’t know if I can handle him today.”
“Of course you can,” Riley said. “You can have roast duck and chilled caviar, if you like.”
“PB amp;J’ll be fine.”
Hannah meekly raised her hand. “I might try the duck and caviar.”
“Come on,” Riley said. “We just restocked the kitchen.”
They all filed out into the hall, except for Black Tom. Lia noticed, but she figured he’d be along directly. He wasn’t her shadow, after all.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Graves realized that Casa de Rojo’s party people had come to terms with his mementomori presence much more readily than most crowds would have. The decayed Dick Tracy, Riley, and Hannah hung out amongst them in the main hall and talked amidst their chatter while Lia finished off her snack: two sandwiches, a banana, and a glass of sweet iced tea.
Hannah nibbled at a leg of crispy duck and sipped from a glass of champagne.
Truth be told, Graves was almost as startled and captivated by Riley’s guests as they were by him, now that he had a chance to look them over. He’d gotten used to the idea that Hannah and Miss Lia wore dungarees all the time, and he figured it had to do with their soil-centric line of work out at Potter’s Yard. (Although Lia’s pants didn’t quite fit, like she’d bought them in the wrong size. They showed off her belly button and a good two inches of skin below that. Not that Graves meant to complain about it, mind you). But the women in this room, as well as some of the men, all wore jeans that barely covered their pubic bones, if not ‘skirts’ that seemed to be little more than narrow bands of fabric stretched taut around slender hips. Shapely legs and plumped-up breasts bulged everywhere he looked, like a part of the decor, and these kids were about as tattooed as a tribe of South Seas savages. Graves had known career Navy men who didn’t sport as much ink as any random twenty-year-old girl at this party, which had apparently been going on for some number of days already.