Chapter 126
OKAY, I ADMIT it, walking in front of an armed hypersmart fourteen-year-old kid through a graveyard haunted by vampires had me more than a little unnerved. I could see scores of ways this could turn out wrong, and more than half of them had me and Justine never going back to Los Angeles again.
“All right, then,” Roberto said. “Go left.”
I did as he said, walking past mausoleums, aware of the traffic noise and snatches of music coming over the cemetery wall, and something else. Was that crying? Then I lost the sound to a backfiring bus that accelerated away in the neighborhood adjacent to the cemetery.
“Are they here?” Justine asked. “The Harlows?”
Roberto and the other boys said nothing, and I looked all around at the dark outlines of the crypts, wondering again if the Harlows were dead. A sense of futility swept over me then. What had it all been for? Had we exposed the skeletons in the Harlows’ closet only to find where their corpses lay?
Then there they were. Before the flashlight went out I caught a glimpse of fresh graves in front of me, three of them, two mounded over, one yawning.
“Stop,” Roberto said. “Do not move.”
Was this it? Would guns be pressed to the backs of our heads, and then a brilliant flash of light and nothing more but a hole in the ground?
“They deserved it,” a woman’s voice said. “They deserved to die.”
My head twisted about, eyes peering into the shadows in the cemetery, and then spotting her on top of a mausoleum about fifteen feet to our left. She wore a black dress and a hood of some kind.
“Adelita?” Justine said.
“Adelita no longer exists,” she replied bitterly. “She has decided to enter a convent, become someone else, try to find some way to believe in God again.”
“By becoming the Harlows’ killer?” Justine asked.