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The skeletons seemed so small. He remembered huge ogres. Now they were a fragile bundle of dirty sticks. Beaten with the rain.
Grim and sad. And ominous.
Bruno crouched, and studied Rudy’s mocking grin, or the top half of it, as if it could tell him something. The other men had been shot in the back of the head, execution style. Not Rudy. Tony had wanted to look the guy in the eyes as he pulled the trigger.
Kev appeared, over the rise, and approached the fallen tree upon which Bruno was sitting. He sat next to him. His silence said it all. The sun was down. The clouds were rolling in. Fog wreathed the trees. Night would fall soon. They’d been at it for fourteen hours. This was nuts.
He got that. But it made him so frustrated, he wanted to kill.
“So,” Kev began.
“Don’t,” Bruno snarled. “Don’t start. I know.”
Kev’s eyebrow quirked. “What did you think I was going to say?”
Bruno dropped his head into his hands. “Don’t want to hear it.”
Kev sat there, and didn’t say it. “I just went up onto the bluff,” he remarked, after a while. “Called Edie.”
“Yeah? So?”
“They were eating dinner,” Kev said.
“Oh. Well. Bully for them.”
“Osso buco,” Kev said dreamily. “Rosemary potatoes,insalata Calabrese, with hothouse tomatoes and sweet red onion. Herbed Asiago biscuits. And a nice, fruityprimitivo di Manduria,to wash it all down.”
Bruno looked at the power bar, and spat the gluey, unchewed lump out. “You fucking sadist,” he said. “What did I do to deserve that?”
“It was just for fun. Did I mention the chocolate cream pie?”
“You can’t treat me like this,” Bruno complained. “You said I saved your ass, right? Remember? You owe me.”
Kev’s grin flashed. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“No worries. Nothing’s more humbling than digging up corpses.”
They let that happy thought hang in the air for a while. Kev spoke again. “Edie did a drawing.” His voice was elaborately casual. “For Lily.”
Bruno sat bolt upright. “One of her special ones? No shit?”
“Absolutely none,” Kev said.
He practically bounced with eagerness. After the zombie masters adventure, he was a big believer in Edie’s supernatural abilities. “And? So? What did she see? What did she draw?”
Kev’s mouth twitched. “Your mother-in-law.”
Bruno gaped at him stupidly. “Eh?”
“You heard me,” Kev said. “She drew a portrait of Lily’s mom.”
“But…but…” Bruno trailed off, baffled. “But the woman’s been dead ever since Lily was—”
“Yeah, I know. Weird, isn’t it? Edie was blown away. Lily, too. She couldn’t stop crying, Edie said. It was super intense.”
Bruno stared down at the skeletons. Steam backed up between his ears. He got up, paced, to blow some of it off before his head exploded. “Super-intense,” he said. “Yay for dear old Mom. And completely and totally fucking useless, for all practical purposes. Why couldn’t she have drawn a picture of the bastard who’s doing this to us? Holding up his business card? With GPS coordinates, a Google map?”
Kev looked away to hide his smile, but Bruno sensed it from the shape of the crinkles at his temples. “Sorry,” he said meekly. “The mysterious powers of my magic lady friend cannot be commanded.”
