Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,78

and another at the state line. I wasn’t in the mood for escorts.”

“So we’re late,” I said.

“Don’t you fret your pretty head, sweets. You were invited, remember? More importantly, you’ve got the life of the party, the main attraction, right there beneath your ass. We’re not late.”

“So, magician, how are you with dreams?” I asked him and lit a cigarette.

“Better than most. But you don’t need me to tell you what you already know. Now, get your war face on.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

OPEN THE DOOR

When we reached the cemetery at just past two in the morning, the gates were standing wide-open—Howdy! Come right in!—and there was no sign whatsoever of Mount Auburn security. Neither of us was surprised, and at least we wouldn’t have to scale any walls or chain-link fences. Charlee shifted the Porsche into park, letting the engine idle, and we sat in the shadow of the strange Egyptian Revival archways that greet the dead and the grieving and the merely morbidly inclined. Until recently, I had no idea that cemetery is taken from a Greek word that means “a sleeping place.” I certainly didn’t know it that cold November night. And that night, that particular cemetery didn’t feel the least bit like a sleeping place. In fact, it felt totally fucking awake and watchful, thank you very much. The air was, as they say, thick with expectation. Or anticipation. Whichever. Both. I rolled down my window and flicked the butt of my smoke out onto the asphalt, and it bounced away in a shower of sparks. Then I reached for the Browning—Pickman’s gun—still tucked into the waistband of my pants. The weight and solidity of it was, it should go without saying, reassuring.

“Well,” said Charlee, gazing up at the gates, “we were invited.”

I knew, as I’m sure he did, that anyone else passing by the cemetery—anyone who’d not received an invite to the evening’s festivities—would see the gates closed and locked, everything just exactly copacetic. All the little duckies in a row. The spell that made the difference for us was strictly kindergarten motherfuckery, so far as glamours come and go, but sometimes the most elementary tricks are all that’re needed. Keep it simple, stupid. Fuckin’ A.

I started to open my door, but Charlee stopped me.

“No,” he said. “We’ll drive in as far as we can. Just for shits and giggles, right? By the way, did you ever see any of Mr. Pickman’s artful handiwork?”

“Nope,” I replied and lit another cigarette. “Wait. We’re calling that bastard mister now?”

“There’s this one painting,” Charlee said, “it’s titled Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn. Bunch of ghouls squeezed into a mausoleum reading from a Boston guidebook by candlelight, laughing their silly heads off.”

I wasn’t sure I got the joke, but I didn’t say so.

“How long?” I asked him.

“How long what, Quinn?”

“How long since you died, pretty boy? That’s how long what.”

He didn’t reply immediately. Charlee was busy looking up through the windshield at the night sky. When he did answer me, he sounded . . . different, you know? Far away.

“I saw the Doors play the Whisky a Go Go. I was at Woodstock. So, well before your time, girlbaby. Well before your time.”

“So, you ever done anything like this before?”

Charlee shook his head and put the car into gear again. “Not lately,” he replied and let it stand at that.

I exhaled and squinted through my own cigarette smoke.

“Before the fireworks start,” I said, “I want to be clear on something. I’m not here for B. I don’t care how badly they’ve hurt him; that’s not why I’m here.”

“I know that, Quinn. He knows that, too.”

“Just so we’re clear, okay?”

I popped the clip from the 9mm, checked it, and popped it back in.

“I’m also not here because I believe Pickman and his comrades in arms—of whom I’ve actually not seen warty hide nor mangy fucking hair—are necessarily the lesser of two evils.”

“You’re here for her,” he said. “Were it not for Selwyn—”

“How about let’s not get started in on ‘were it not for Selwyn.’ I’m tired of that game.”

“But she’s why you came.”

“Looks like,” I told him, and then I held up the Browning Hi Power. “Please be a sweetheart and tell me this is not our only gun.”

“As it happens . . .” he said and trailed off.

“Oh, you are fucking shitting me.”

“I don’t like guns. B doesn’t like guns, either. But I suspect you’re already aware of that.”

The Porsche crept slowly past the visitors’ center and along