“Sure,” George said, his mind racing. He pulled out the Garage Closed sign, figuring that at this point the roads would be too blocked for anybody to get in, and set it in front of the particle board they’d mounted to cover the shot-out window.
And then he got to work.
ERNIE STILLwalked the desert at night. Sometimes, when Crullers was out on a mission, or sometimes even when he was there, in their bed, sleeping peacefully because he was so happy tohavea bed, and the cats, and the night over his eyes.
The desert gave Ernie peace.
It also gave him this place he’d found once, back when he’d been living with Sonny and Ace, and Crullers had been so confused in his own heart that he hadn’t known how to claim Ernie’s. It was a good ten-mile hike from Ace and Sonny’s, but as he’d discovered, it was only about half a mile from the road that led out to the military base where Lee and Jason and their covert group of monster hunters, as they named themselves, made their home.
The pit—about fifty meters wide and maybe twenty deep—looked like somebody had tried to quarry for rock there, but the granite deposit had run out quickly. There were a number of wrecked vehicles at the bottom of it, many of them burned out, many of them half covered in rock and gravel from the piles of it up on the ledge.
Jai had procured (Stolen? Ernie was pretty sure it was stolen) a small backhoe to shovel dirt and gravel in after they’d torched a vehicle and sent it to the bottom of the pit.
He wasn’t sure if Lee and Jason had any idea how many bodies he and Jai had hidden there, but Officer Daily, who had bugs in his brain, was certainly not the first.
The extra gallon of gasoline—and the rag stuffed in the gas tank and lit as Ernie shoved the thing over the edge in neutral—made for a satisfying whoosh and boom as it hit the ground and blew, but Ernie was quick to push mounds and mounds of gravel and dirt over the same edge, until the black smoke stopped rising and hopefully, the body in the back, in the place where the cops usually stored their weapons, was covered.
Nobody had ever come out here before, but then, Ernie wasn’t sure how much Lee knew about his involvement when Ernie and Jai were left in charge of the garage and things went awry.
It could be that Lee and Jason just kept people away, which Ernie wasn’t sure how to feel about. It wasn’t that he thought of himself as a serial killer or mob muscle, but, well, his hands weren’t clean of blood.
Lee knew that about him, though. In fact he’d told Ernie on more than one occasion that it gave him peace, because he knew his Club Boy would be safer if he could protect himself.
Still, by the time he’d plodded the half mile to the road and then set out to the south, where he knew he’d meet Jason and Cotton, he was relieved to see that the black smoke had already started to dissipate in the sky. It was getting toward lunch, he thought vaguely, and he wondered if it was awful that he was hungry.
Suddenly all he wanted to do was make fried chicken and chips, with big glasses of lemonade. Something hearty and filling—comfort food at its best.
He’d become so lost in the dream of food, making food for his friends, food for his lover, food for them all together, healthy and happy, that he almost had a heart attack when Jason and Cotton, coming north from the base, zoomed up from behind him.
“Ernie?” Jason said, his voice having the dubious note in it whenever Ernie’s “witchiness” was calling the shots. “What are you doing here?”
“Unimportant,” Ernie said, his voice so weary it dragged. With an effort that felt like he was an old man in a walker trying a trick from his youth, Ernie hopped in the back of the little red Mazda and said, “Victoriana Hospital. Have you heard anything?”
“In surgery,” Jason said grimly, shifting the car roughly, making Ernie yearn for Ace. Ace was hurt, he knew. So hurt. “Ace, Eric, even Jai, who needs his arm and shoulder set. Apparently George jimmy-rigged a saline drip using collapsible water bottles and boiled water, salt, and sugar. Amal called us and said it was the only reason Ace and Eric made it to the hospital.”
George, who had tried so hard not to be afraid of the blood on his hands—so funny that it was the blood he knew about that had saved them.
“And our package?” Ernie asked. All this blood, all this pain, all this sacrifice. Had it been good?
“The phone hit the airwaves before the dust had settled from the massive car wreck that took out every police vehicle for three counties,” Jason said with a grunt. “Lee and Brady are in transit. They should be nearing the FBI field office in LA in the next hour.”
“Good,” Ernie said. He closed his eyes, feeling the last of his control on his psyche fading out.Lee, did we do good? Was it worth it?
And his brain, like it sometimes did, found exactly who he needed, even when he was far away.
Yeah, Club Boy. We were fucking heroes.
Tell me when you’re home.
Love you, Club Boy. Let go.
So Ernie did.
AN HOURlater, the motorcycle came to a smooth and abrupt stop in front of a great glass building in downtown LA. Brady, who had been holding his breath as Lee Burton piloted that thing like an invisible bat in a mechanical hell, tried not to let his knees buckle as he swung off the back.
“Gun,” said Burton over Bluetooth. Besides relaying news he’d gotten from the disaster zone they’d left in their wake, it was one of the few things he’d said. Brady passed his gun over, no questions asked, still reeling from the list of injuries, of car crashes, of heroism and blood that Burton had been able to glean from whatever had been going on inhisears during that terrifying ride.
“Good,” Burton said. “Helmet and your personal phone.”
