Ingrid turned away from the inked-up creep, grimacing. She looked to Tom like she knew this conversation was going poorly, but she couldn’t say more with that baldheaded lurker so plainly listening in. Tom guessed that all of this would get back to el Rey, then. Everything the man heard. So Ingrid had to choose her words with care, and hope they’d play the way she needed them to, for both of the audiences who’d receive them.
Tom could tell when somebody was working both sides of an angle. He didn’t yet know why she was doing it, however. Couldn’t fathom it. Nor could he reach out to communicate with her from inside her hex. Not without the benefit of a voice he could raise.
“Trust doesn’t apply when you take away somebody’s options,” Lia said darkly, from the speaker on Ingrid’s little phone. “But you win, Ingrid. I’m coming. I can’t do anything else.”
“Just do it soon,” Ingrid said. “Please.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s already late, and there won’t be a damn thing we can do after dark.”
Black Tom looked on calmly as Ingrid broke the connection, appearing frustrated and pensive. She turned on the henchman with the dark glasses, away from Tom, and snapped: “It’s hard to work with a fucking audience, you know.”
The tattooed man said nothing, but he stepped creepily back into the foliage and out of sight.
Ingrid looked back to Black Tom, who raised an eyebrow at her.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Lia folded up her phone, scowling and thinking. “She’s an operator,” she said, meaning Ingrid. She, Hannah and Dexter were standing on the shoulder of Mulholland Drive, where Lia had paced back and forth during the call. “She’s like me. I guess maybe better than me. I think I’m still aging at a normal rate.” She looked to Dex. “She’s bound my Tom the way I did you, yesterday, Dexter.”
“How do you know?” Hannah asked, having never seen Black Tom out of his catbody before. She’d parked their car at a scenic overlook, though none of them had eyes for the view. “How did you know?”
“Normally I see him, or at least I feel him,” Lia said. “He’s always with me, in one way or another. And now he’s not.”
“Always?” Hannah said, thinking about it. “Always always? Does he look like a cat?”
“No, he mostly looks like a man,” Lia said. “Like he looked when he was alive. He was an operator too, years and years ago. His patron was Mictlantecuhtli. That’s how I know about the Tzitzimime and all that stuff, from him. But he skipped out on the deal they made when he died and escaped into another body. A cat’s body. My cat’s like his tenth or twelfth ride. So if Ingrid’s aligned with Mictlantecuhtli, and it’s pretty clear by now she is, then Tom’s in real danger.”
“What’s a Mictlantecuhtli?” Dex asked. “Like an imported beer or something?”
“He’s the Aztec personification of Death, Dexter,” Lia said shortly. “The King of the Realm of the Dead. You’ve heard him called Miguel Caradura or Mickey Hardface, I guess.”
“Hey,” Hannah said, as a weird thought occurred to her. “Does that mean the Aztecs had the right religion, then? Lia?”
“It means everything that can be dreamed or imagined lives a life in the otherworld,” Lia said.
Dexter looked thoughtful. “Ingrid told me Hardface was just a mobster,” he recalled. “Or at least implied it. She was pretty vague, but I chalked that up to her being scared for her life. She said she got mixed up with Caradura, said he was crazy and threatenin’ to kidnap her off to Mexico or someplace and force her to marry him, if she wouldn’t tell him where to find a baby of his she’d given up to get adopted.” He paused, touching the ragged exit hole above his eye socket. “Then she went and shot me through the head when I was trying to rescue her from that.”
“Hannah, give me the keys,” Lia said.
Hannah did so without hesitation. Lia went to the car that was parked some yards behind them. Dexter followed after her.
“Lia, we are not goin’ out there. Not without a plan,” he said.
Lia opened the driver’s side door, but stopped and stared at him over the top of the stolen BMW before she got in. A soft tone chimed to remind her the door was ajar. She looked to Hannah, too, who was visibly frightened.
“You’re right,” Lia said, coming to a decision, although it still fell pretty far short of anything that might be called a plan. She’d hoped to have more time up at Esteban’s extravagant estate to formulate one, but it hadn’t been in the cards, and all she could do now was trust in her instincts. “It is too dangerous for us all to go out there. That’s why I’m going, and you’re staying here.”
“Lia, no!” Dex shouted.
She ducked into the car, shut her door, and hit the locks. Dexter saw the plastic nub drop down into the passenger-side doorframe, but he scrabbled at the handle anyway, scratching up the paint with his calcified fingertips.
Lia downed the electric window just enough to be heard when she spoke. “I have to go, Dexter,” she explained. “I owe it to Black Tom. You guys walk down to the park on Coldwater and wait for me there, or call a cab and go to Hannah’s house. I’ll find you when this is finished.”
“Dammit, Lia, don’t be stupid,” Dexter snarled, pounding on the tinted window like he meant to smash it in. He might even manage it, with a few more blows. “Take me with you, at least! I’m not breakable like you are.”
“I don’t know what you are, or why you are, but Ingrid does,” Lia said, leaning across the passenger seat to look up into Dexter’s empty sockets, which were like a pair of shadowed caves underneath the brim of his fedora. “None of us are safe if she gets anywhere near you, is what I think.”
“Lia, I swear to whoever you want, you can trust me,” Dexter said, abandoning his assault on the window glass. She didn’t doubt that he meant it. His voice was so earnest it practically broke her heart. But it didn’t change the facts.
“I’m trusting you to take care of Hannah, Dexter. Please do that for me.”
Dex nodded helplessly, agreeing that he would of course do that in any case, while still trying to organize an argument. Hannah crowded in beside him, stooping to peer through the chipped passenger window. “Lia, don’t do this,” she said. “Don’t go back there alone.”
“Hannah, she has my Tom.”
“Then let us at least come with you,” Han pleaded, echoing Dexter. “Maybe we can help.”
Lia shook her head, eyeing a fresh red spot of blood on the side of Hannah’s borrowed white t-shirt, which had seeped through the bandage beneath. “I can’t have you hurt on my account. Not any more than you already have been. I can’t, Hannah. Please try to understand that I have to do this, and I can only do it alone.”
She stomped the accelerator before either of them could wedge another word in. She knew she wouldn’t have withstood another round of protestations. Her wheels spun on the loose dirt of the shoulder before catching pavement. Dexter took one last parting shot at the passenger window with his bony fist, and this time he managed to crack it down the middle, but he was too late.
Hannah yelled and ran after the sportscar as it shot down the snaking length of blacktop that led back down to the Valley, still begging her not to leave them at the very top of her lungs.
Lia glanced back in the rearview mirror in time to see Dexter catch her friend when she stumbled and almost fell into the shallow depression at the side of the road, clutching once again at the bleeding wound in her side.
Retrospective No.4 ~ 1910
A century ago…
Oscar closed the metal gate across the front of the platform and advised Tom to hold on before he started the construction elevator’s noisy gasoline engine. The lift rattled and clattered as it carried them up toward the Hole in the Sky. The Hole that would be enclosed by an office at the top of a thirteen-story building within a matter of months. Maybe before the year 1910 had run itself out.