Dead Men's Boots (30 page)

It was going to be another code, I realized wearily. Another stupid secret message from John to himself that, when decoded,
would probably reveal the secret location of another secret message, and so on to the goddamn crack of doom.

My whiskey arrived, and I studied the sheets as I drank, trying to figure out if there was any way they could be laid on top
of one another or read from an odd angle to yield actual words. It didn’t work: The letters that were present were all D’s,
T’s, and K’s, and they were sprinkled around the page seemingly at random. As far as I could tell, there was nothing there,
which just meant that I was still missing too many jigsaw pieces to guess what the picture was.

Missing pieces. Yeah, there were a lot of those. The other death row souvenirs, for starters—the ones Chesney had swiped for
himself after he heard about John’s death and before I scared the shit out of him by calling him up.

An idea dropped into my head out of nowhere. I was reaching for my phone when I realized that I hadn’t managed to recharge
the god-damn battery. I delved into my pocket instead, fished out my remaining small change, and sifted it for silver. Enough
for a local phone call, surely, and this was very local.

I crossed to the pay phones. It was stupidly late, but hadn’t Chesney’s colleague Smeet said that they worked until ten o’clock?
There was a good chance that Chesney would still be at the lab. Good enough to be worth a try.

I dialed Chesney’s mobile number, the one from John’s matchbook. He picked up on the third ring. “This is Vince,” he said
brightly. “What’s up?”

“Funny you should ask,” I said.

“Castor!” Not so bright suddenly. I seemed to have this effect on him every time we talked.

“Hi, Vince. Working late at the office?”

“Yes.” He sounded surly and defensive. “So?”

“So I was wondering when it would be convenient for me to come over and collect the rest of John’s stuff.”

“What rest? I gave you all there is.”

“Please, Vince.” I did my best to sound world-weary and bored. “Don’t make me read you a fucking itemized list. For one thing,
leather bondage pants would be on it, and I don’t want casual passersby to think I’m some sort of pervert. I’m assuming you
kept the stuff you thought was going to bring the highest prices. I’m also assuming—because I like you and I’d hate to see
pieces of you twisted or broken off—that you’ve still got them. Now, if both of those assumptions are correct, the next word
you say should be ‘yes.’”

A long pause, during which I had to feed the phone the last slender remnants of my small change. “Yes,” Vince said finally,
with flat, tired resignation.

“Good. Thank you. Here’s another question for you.” I tried to keep my tone casual, but this was the big inspiration that
had come to me as I sipped my whiskey, and the real reason why I was calling Chesney now rather than the next morning. I phrased
it as a bluff, because my instinct was to give him as little room to maneuver as possible. “Did you get anything useful out
of the Myriam Kale piece?”

Silence from the other end of the line, which stretched. I waited as long as I could bring myself to, but in the end, I had
to prompt him. “Well?”

“I’m just checking,” Chesney snapped back sullenly. “I gave you the disk, remember? All I’ve got here are the backup files,
and I didn’t index them all that— Oh. Okay. Yeah, here it is. Just a fingerprint. The stain wasn’t blood, it was lipstick
or something. Carnauba wax, lanolin, petrolatum… yeah, it was lipstick. The print’s pretty good, but her print’s on record
anyway. Why?”

I didn’t answer him. The implications blinded and deafened me for a moment or two. Paydirt. It wasn’t just the fact that we
now had the Kale artifact we needed to do a summoning. It was the link: the proof of what had been looking more and more likely
ever since Doug Hunter let slip the word “inscription” when we dropped in on him at Pentonville. John’s dead killers and the
born-again Myriam Kale. Not two things but one. It was hard to imagine what unlikely chain of skulduggery or coincidence could
tie a bunch of East End hard men from the sixties and before to a dead American gangster’s moll surfacing for a last bite
of the cherry in a King’s Cross hotel room, but some massive subterranean chain of cause and effect was there, had to be there,
just out of my line of sight. I felt like I’d been strolling along the banks of Loch Ness and I’d glimpsed one coil of an
unseen monster breaking the water in front of my startled eyes.

“Castor? You still there?” Chesney’s voice brought me out of my trance. “I said, why did you want to know?”

I checked my watch. Okay, it was going to be a tight squeeze. Tighter than tight: I’d turn up at Juliet’s late, and Sue Book
would look at me with reproachful tears in her eyes and a burned casserole in her oven-gloved hands. Then Juliet would rip
out my intestines for making Susan cry.

“Because I need it right now,” I said. “Have it ready for me, okay? I’m at Victoria, so I should be with you inside of ten
minutes.”

“No!” he protested. “I’m not on my own here. Smeet’s in the lab doing a dissection. This is a lousy time.”

“Chesney, I don’t care. I’m coming over.”

“Fuck! Okay, I’ll be waiting on the stairs. Outside the porno studio, yeah? On the first floor?”

“Fine. See you there.”

I hung up and headed for the exit. Belatedly, I realized that I should have called Juliet, too, and told her I was going to
be late. But I could do that on the return arc, and at least then I could tell her, with my hand on my heart, that I was on
my way. And maybe the trophy I’d be bringing back with me would take the edge off her demonic strop.

I left the station and crossed the road, looking behind me by force of habit. No tails, and no sense of a tail—no premonitory
prickling at the back of my neck or the back of my mind. If something dead had been sticking close to me over the past few
days, it was gone now.

I turned into the small cul-de-sac where Nexus Veterinary Pathologists had set up their shingle. I could see from the other
end of the street that their door was standing open, presumably because Vince had already come downstairs and left it ajar
for me.

But hadn’t he said that there was a security guard on at night? The bare foyer beyond the door was brightly lit, and it seemed
to be deserted.

I was a little wary as I approached the door and stepped inside. I’m prolific with threats, but I didn’t want to get Vince
disciplined or sacked if there was nothing to be gained by it.

The security post was empty, but the monitor behind the counter was switched on, showing a stretch of empty stairwell. Perhaps
the guard was on his rounds.

Or perhaps not. As I came past the security post, heading for the stairs, I caught a glimpse of something dark behind the
counter, close to the ground. It was a slicked mass of hair, the top of a man’s head. I stopped and leaned over the counter,
looking out and down.

The guard was lying on the floor, his back propped against the rear wall of his narrow domain. It was hard to see his face
because his head was bowed forward onto his chest, but the sheer amount of blood dribbling down onto his torso and spreading
across the floor around him suggested there might not be that much face left to see.

Still dribbling. Still spreading.

This had only just happened.

The urge to run away from danger is one of the hallmarks of sanity, and I like to think I’m as sane as the next man, although
in London that’s probably not saying very much. There were two reasons why I sprinted up the stairs rather than back out into
the street. One was the conviction—maybe unreasonable—that whoever had done this was the same whoever who’d tried to drop
me down a lift shaft; the other was that I wanted answers, and sticking my head into the lion’s mouth seemed to be the only
way I was going to get them.

The thought that Vince and Smeet might still be alive up there occurred to me as I hit the first landing, so I can’t say it
was part of the initial impetus that launched me. Maybe it kept me moving as I took the next flight, running toward the door
of the vet’s office, which was not only open but off its hinges.

I slowed on the threshold as a wave of stink hit me—hot, sharp animal pheromones, so pungent they thickened the air. A loup-garou:
It had to be. Nothing natural smells like that. I reached inside my coat for my tin whistle, turning slowly as I advanced
into the room to minimize the chances of an attack from behind. But whatever it was, this thing would probably be quick and
ruthless. The guard downstairs had died at his post and seemed to have fallen where he stood, with no sign of struggle or
flight.

There were plenty of signs of struggle up here, though. The lab had been trashed with spectacular thoroughness and violence,
desks and cabinets upended and thrown around the room, splintered shelves sagging and bleeding books and files onto the floor.
Broken glass crunched under my feet as I circled.

I saw Vince first. Or to be more correct, I saw his head staring blindly down at me from the coatstand onto which it had been
embedded. A trickle of blood traced a thin straight line from the corner of his mouth to his chin, and his expression was
one of mild consternation and puzzlement. The rest of his body was a good few feet away, under a ruptured radiator against
which it had been thrown with casual violence.

A second after that, I caught sight of Smeet. She was crouched underneath the only desk that was still upright, and both of
her hands, balled into fists, were pressed to her mouth. Her impossibly wide eyes were staring at me in uncomprehending shock.
It took me a moment to understand that she was still alive.

“It’s okay,” I said inanely, going against all the evidence. Before I could think of anything stupider to add, the lights
went out, plunging the room into absolute blackness.

There was a sound in the darkness a few feet away from me. A hiss? Yeah, let’s call it a hiss. That probably makes you think
of snakes, but this wasn’t like a snake. It was the kind of hiss that a big carnivore—say, a tiger—makes involuntarily when
it opens its jaws as wide as they’ll go.

It wasn’t a very comforting sound to hear right then.

    
Fourteen

T
HE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO CASTOR, CHAPTER 1, VERSE 1: When in doubt, duck.

I threw myself forward into the debris, and something went over my head fast enough that I felt the wind of its passing.

I landed heavily on splintered wood and broken glass, cutting my hands as I threw them out to break my fall. There was a rending
crash as my attacker made his own involuntary touchdown away to my right. Then I rolled, coming up on one knee to bring my
whistle to my lips and blow a shrieking discord.

It was a place marker, really, nothing more than that. I didn’t know this were-thing well enough yet to play a tailor-made
tune for him. But loup-garous are more vulnerable than ghosts and demons in one respect, precisely because they’re composites:
human souls holding animal flesh in an immaterial full nelson. All you need to do to weaken them is to slide a crowbar between
the human and the animal and start working it loose.

That is, assuming they’ll sit still and let you.

The unseen thing I was fighting roared, basso profundo, and the floor shook, or maybe that was just me. There was a swirl
of motion and a scrabbling, as of claws on polished wood.

I was planning to duck again, but I didn’t get that far. Something very solid made contact with my left shoulder, knocking
me sprawling and sending the whistle flying out of my hands into the dark.

I would have used my momentum to roll, getting some distance from the thing, but some overturned piece of furniture was right
behind me. I hit it hard, went arse over tip, and came down headfirst on the far side of it. What with the odd angle and the
force of the impact, I couldn’t stop my head from hitting the floor hard. Lights danced behind my eyes, and I fought against
unconsciousness with fierce desperation, because if I blacked out for even a second, this was over.

I groped in the blackness for a weapon, knowing that I wasn’t going to find one that would work, knowing that I’d need luck,
light, and backup to make a dent in this thing, and that none of them were likely to come my way.

But something came to hand: something rounded, with the texture of wood. The leg of a chair or a desk, maybe. Whatever it
was, it was all I had, and it’s a poor workman who picks a fight with his tools. I heard that scrabbling sound again, from
right in front of me, as my unseen assailant scaled whatever it was I’d fallen over. I made myself wait for an agonizing second
and then brought my makeshift club up with all the strength I had left, two-handed, with a silent prayer that the thing would
be jumping down on me as the club came up. Its own speed and weight would give the blow a lot more heft than I could.

The shock jarred my arms right up to the shoulder. Something went crunch, and then the thing bellowed in agony even as its
weight came down on me. I felt claws pierce my shoulder, and I yelled, too, kicking and rolling to try to get out from under
it before it recovered from the pain and the shock.