Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(35)

“What do you mean?”

“There are a lot of very obvious questions about our world that nobody around here seems to want to ask.”

“Like why we don’t expand the town?” suggested Benny.

“Uh-huh.”

“And … why don’t we try and—what’s the word?—reclaim what we lost. I know. Since we got back I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”

“I’ll bet you have. You’re Tom’s brother after all.”

“Okay, now what about that? After what happened, I guess my opinion about Tom has changed a bit.”

“But … ?”

“But I still don’t understand why everyone thinks Tom is so tough. He’s even on one of the Zombie Cards.”

“You haven’t seem him in action?”

“All I saw was him do was hog-tie one skinny zom.”

“That’s it?”

“Sure. He ran away from the three bounty hunters.”

“‘Ran away,’” echoed the artist, looking amused. “Tom Imura, running away.” He suddenly threw his head back and laughed for a whole minute, his thin body shaking, tears gathering in

the corners of his eyes. He slapped the tabletop over and over again until the cold coffee in Benny’s cup jumped and spilled.

“Holy crap, kid.” Sacchetto gasped when he could talk. “God! I haven’t laughed that hard since Mayor Kirsch’s outdoor shower blew away in the Santa Ana, leaving him standing stark naked

with soap dripping off his—”

“What’s so freaking funny?” interrupted Benny.

The artist held up his hands in a “sorry” gesture, palms out. “It’s just that anyone who knows your brother, I mean, really knows him, is going to react the same way if you tell them

that Tom Imura was afraid of anything.”

“He ran away. …”

“He ran away because you were there, kid. Believe me, if he’d been alone …” He left the rest unsaid.

“You don’t live with him,” Benny said irritably. “You don’t know what I know. You don’t know what I’ve seen.”


Sacchetto shrugged. “That pretty much goes both ways. You don’t know what I know. Or what I’ve seen.”

They sat there for half a minute, both of them re-evaluating things and trying to find a doorway back into the conversation.

Finally, the artist said, “The Lost Girl. My end of the bargain.”

“The Lost Girl,” Benny agreed. “Tell me that she’s real.”

“She’s real.”

Benny closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked down at the card. “Tell me she’s alive.”

“That I can’t say for sure,” said Sacchetto, but when Benny looked up at him, his eyes filling with dread, the artist shook his head. “No, I mean that I can’t say for sure how she is

today, this minute. But she was alive and well a couple of months ago.”

“How do you know?” demanded Benny.

“Because I saw her,” said the artist.

“You … saw her?”

“Once, just for a minute. Maybe half a minute, but yeah, I saw her out in the Ruin, and I came back and painted her. Tom helped me remember a few details, but that card there … That’s her

to a tee.”

“You were with Tom when you saw her?”

Sacchetto paused, his fingers beating a tattoo on the tabletop. “Look, I know I promised to tell you, and I will, but I think I’m only going to tell you some of it. The rest … Well, maybe

you better hear that from your brother.”

“From Tom? Why?”

The artist cleared his throat. “Because Tom’s been hunting her for five years.”





17


THE ARTIST POURED HIMSELF A THIRD CUP OF COFFEE, THOUGHT ABOUT IT, then got up and fetched a bottle of bourbon from a cupboard and poured a healthy shot into his cup. He didn’t offer the

bottle to Benny, who was fine with that. The stuff smelled like old socks.

“I grew up in Canada,” Sacchetto said. “Toronto. I came to the States when I was fresh out of art school, and for a while I made money doing quick portraits of tourists on the boardwalk

in Venice Beach. Then I took a couple of courses in forensic art, and landed a job working for the Los Angeles Police Department. You know, doing sketches of runaways, of suspects. That sort

of stuff. I was always good at asking the right questions, so I could get inside the head of a witness to a crime or a family member who was looking for someone. And I never forget a face. I

was in a police station on First Night. Lots of cops around me, lots of guns. It’s how I survived.”

Benny didn’t know how this was going to relate to the Lost Girl, but the artist was in gear now, and he didn’t want to interrupt the man’s flow. He placed the card on the table between

them, and sat back to listen.

Sacchetto sipped his spiked coffee, hissed, and plunged back in.

“You grew up after, kid, so all you know about is this world. The world after. And I know you’ve probably learned a lot about the world before the Fall in school or from hearing people