Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(111)

He’d gone over so much dirt, particularly the dirt packed around Rudy’s bones. First with the metal detector. Then sifting each individual handful. He’d gone over it and over it. His fingertips were sore.

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 t 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, fruity primitivo di Manduria to wash it all down.”

Bruno looked at the energy bar and spat the gluey, unchewed lump out. “You f*cking 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.

Bruno 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 f*cking 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 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.”

“Great!” Bruno yelled it toward the sky. “Just great! The spirits from beyond rouse themselves to contact us, and what do I get? A picture of my late future mother-in-law! I need a f*cking break!”

He punctuated the statement with a violent kick aimed at a chunk of rotten log that had been lying on some of the bones. They’d been forced to excavate it, hoist the thing out. It split into two pieces, rotten as a sponge, but the blow still sent a jarring thwang-g-g-g of pain shuddering up his leg. He shook the sore foot, feeling stupid.

Kev, being a genius and all, was smart enough to grasp that now was not the time for more bullshit. He picked up a metal detector and went back to his piece of dirt. God, how Bruno loved the guy for that.

Sean, too, soldiered grimly on. Raking the mud they had displaced so they could search it again. The men’s movements were heavy with exhaustion. Davy and Con were out circling. Nobody said a word. He realized, with a heavy feeling in his guts, that he, Bruno Ranieri, had to be the one to call it quits. It was his life at stake, his locket, his dead mamma, his skeletal ogres, his girlfriend in danger. They were deferring to him. Nobody wanted to let him down.

The weight of the responsibility made him feel vaguely sick.

He checked his watch. Two minutes left of the ten-minute break he was allowing himself. He closed his eyes, saw mudstained skeletons dancing, leering. An elusive glint of gold. He forced himself to think it through again. It could have fallen out of Rudy’s pocket at any point in his rough journey here. It could have been dug up by an animal, carried off by a magpie or a squirrel who mistook it for a new kind of nut.