Dead Men's Boots (32 page)

Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. “If one were can make that transition—from monad to gestalt—then presumably others
can, too.”

“Presumably. Most of them—ow!—
don’t,
though. It would help to know, because if it
is
Scrub, I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.”

“I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,” Susan said, looking up from her work. “But they’re nasty, ragged wounds. It would be really
easy for them to get infected.”

I nodded. I’d been there, and I wasn’t likely to forget. But at least my tetanus shots were up to date this time. “Go for
it, Sue,” I muttered, trying hard to dismiss the specter of Larry Tallowhill from my thoughts.

As Susan moved from cleaning the wounds to dressing them, I told them both about what had happened at Nexus. Susan was pale
by the time I’d finished, but Juliet seemed moved in a different way.

“Moloch,” she said. She spat, very precisely, onto the floor. Without a word, Susan Book took a piece of toilet tissue and
wiped up the mess.

“Yeah. He told me he knew you. Asked me to pass on his best wishes—with a broad hint that he didn’t really mean it.”

“He doesn’t,” said Juliet, her teeth showing in a genteel snarl. She usually managed to rein herself in around Susan, who
frightened easily, but clearly, the mention of Moloch’s name had touched Juliet at a level below the pretensions of civilization.
“I left my mark on him once, a long time ago. But it goes further than that. His kind and mine—we were old enemies even before
the great project.”

“Before the what?”

Juliet seemed to remember herself. “Nothing,” she said, a little too quickly. “I was remembering things that happened before
you were born. Let’s just say that his kin are cats and mine are dogs. Or vice versa. Where the succubi and incubi settle
and build their houses, the
shedim
can’t live. He’d love to hurt me if he thought he could. But what is he doing on Reth Adoma?”

“You know,” I groused, “if you keep doing this, I’m going to ask for a simultaneous translation. What is he doing
where
?”

“On earth. Among the living. There’s nothing he can eat here. He’ll starve if he stays too long.”

“He looked like he was halfway there already,” I agreed. “At least that’s how he looked when I first met him a few days ago.
Today he looked a fair bit sleeker. And he was strong enough to make this loupgarou run for cover.”

Juliet frowned, her eyes slightly unfocused as she followed a train of thought she didn’t bother to voice. To be honest, I
didn’t want her to. It was hard to think of hell as a place, and even harder to think of her walking there. It had a whiff
of bad Bible stories and undigested metaphors.

“This is bigger than we thought,” she said, looking at me again. “Something—something important, perhaps—is at stake here.
Something has brought him up through the gates and made him stay long enough to weave a body for himself. I think—”

The pause lengthened.

“What?” I prompted. “What do you think?”

She shrugged dismissively. “Nothing. So you think Kale might have been involved somehow in John Gittings’s death?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Not directly, obviously. He killed himself. But the big case he was working on—the one he kept
saying was going to get him into the history books—had something to do with dead killers. And now we know that Kale was on
his list.”

Juliet thought about this. “And the problem with Kale is that she isn’t dead enough,” she finished, voicing my own thoughts.
“Are there any urban legends about the great East End gangsters coming back from the grave?”

“None that I’ve heard. Maybe it’s a foreign-exchange kind of thing. Kale does London and the Krays do Chicago.”

Juliet nodded. “It’s possible,” she mused. “But it goes against everything we know about the dead. And it raises far more
questions than it answers.”

“I meant it as a joke,” I said.

“Then you should have smiled.”

“I’ve finished,” Susan said, standing up and inspecting her handiwork with profound and obvious misgivings. “But you should
probably go to a hospital as soon as you can, Felix, and let a doctor take a look at you.”

“I will,” I lied. “Thanks, Sue. You’re an angel of mercy.” Living with a sex demon, I added in my mind. Life throws you some
funny curves.

“I saved you some ratatouille,” Susan said, embarrassed. “You can eat it on a tray, if you like.”

Downstairs in the living room, I ate and drank and began to feel less like a piece of windblown trash. The room had changed
a lot since I’d been there last. Then it had still been full of Susan’s late mother’s ornaments and antimacassars and framed
samplers like a mock-up of a room in a museum of Victoriana. Now it was kind of minimalist, with red Chinese calligraphy hung
on white-painted walls. I knew enough about Juliet’s tastes to recognize them here, and I wondered how Susan felt about the
changed ambience. She seemed comfortable enough.

“So how’s work?” I asked her. “Juliet said you’re kind of snowed under.” She’d been the verger at a church in West London
when she’d met Juliet, but she’d bailed out when they started living together and gone back to her old career as a librarian.
It was a principled decision based more on the fact that she was in a same-sex relationship than on her shacking up with a
demon. The modern Anglican church regards hell as a state of mind and doesn’t officially believe in demons (unlike the Catholics,
who hunt them with papally blessed flamethrowers), but it still has problems with church officers who are openly gay. As an
atheist with issues, I have to say I love that shit.

Susan smiled, genuinely pleased to be asked. “No, I’m fine, really,” she said. “I’m enjoying it. It’s a little hard sometimes,
because I’m trying to do a lot of ambitious things on no money. But it’s lovely to be working with children. They’re so open-minded
and spontaneous. And you’d be amazed how many children’s authors will do readings for the fun of it. We had Antony Johnston
in last week. He wrote the graphic-novel version of
Stormbreaker
. And he was wonderful. Very funny and very… whatever the opposite of precious is. Very matter-of-fact about what he does.
We got the biggest audience we’ve ever had.”

“
Stormbreaker
being?” I prompted, feeling a little lost.

“It’s one of the best-selling children’s books of the last decade, Felix,” Susan chided me schoolmarmishly.

“Oh,
that Stormbreaker
,” I bluffed.

“They made a movie of it.”

“Not a patch on the book.”

“You don’t need to work,” Juliet said to Susan, putting a broom handle through the spokes of my small talk.

There was an awkward pause.

“I like to work, Jules,” Susan said.

Juliet met that statement with a cold deadpan. “Why?”

Susan didn’t seem very happy with the question. Generally, anything that looked like an argument looming in the distance made
her run for cover, but this time she stood her ground. “Because it’s part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned
house for you and warmed your bed, then—well, I’d be a very boring person. And then you’d want to see other people, and then
you’d leave me. And then I’d kill myself.”

Juliet considered. “Yes,” she said at last. “I can see the logic. I’ve never been romantically infatuated with anyone before,
so it’s difficult right now to see how my feelings for you could change. But there’s plenty of evidence from human relationships,
so you’re probably right. Go on.”

But Susan couldn’t. She forgot what she’d been saying, tried to start again, floundered into silence. For the first time in
many, many months, I felt sorry enough for her to forget how much I envied her. I changed the subject by main force, swiveling
it back around in the direction of shoptalk, and ended up regaling both of them with some of my favorite ghost stories. Most
had happened to other people, not me, but I stretched the truth to pretty good effect. The moment passed. The tears that I’d
seen in Sue Book’s eyes never actually fell.

“Moloch said I should go to the source,” I told Juliet when I was a fair way into my fourth glass of Glen acetone.

“Did he?” Juliet’s tone sounded hard and cold. But when Susan topped up her glass, she reached out to touch her hand for a
moment: a very delicate touch, expressing both affection and something a little more proprietorial. After what had passed
between them earlier, it was a healing touch—or something close. “And did he say what he meant by that?”

I shook my head. “No,” I admitted. “He didn’t. But I’ve got some ideas of my own. Have you got anything tomorrow afternoon?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s something happening in the morning over in Muswell Hill—something I want to be around for. But I’m free after that,
and I was wondering how you’d feel about leaning on some people while I ask them a whole bunch of leading questions.”

“Which people?”

“I’ll know when I see them,” I said evasively.

Juliet rolled her eyes. “Where?” she demanded. “Where do they live?”

I swirled the brandy in my glass, studiously avoiding her eyes. “Alabama,” I said.

    
Fifteen

I
T MAY DENT MY IMAGE OF MACHO, GUNG HO CAPABILITY to say this, but the next morning I felt rough. I’d stayed at Juliet’s long
enough to work out the logistics of where we were going to go and who we were going to see, and then I’d made some calls before
she could change her mind: one to a travel agent to book a couple of cheap tickets to Birmingham, Alabama, and another to
Nicky to tell him what was up and ask if he could work out an itinerary for us. He said he wanted to talk to me before I left,
but that was all he’d say.

A third call, to Gary Coldwood, got me his answering machine. “What does something juicy mean?” I asked it, and hung up.

I had one last errand to run before I could limp off home, and I’d managed to get it done with the minimum of fuss even though
it involved a certain amount of blackmail—both the emotional kind and the kind that’s a felony.

When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been melted, decanted through a pipette, and left to stand in the
petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have gotten me out of bed was the thought
of what was going down at the Stanger this morning—and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way
rather than Jenna-Jane’s.

The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian
workmen’s cottages before it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former
owner—the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right—bequeathed them to the crown. The interiors
were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annex was built on as demand grew. It seems that lunatics,
like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early-twenty-first century.

But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic; he is just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other
label that fit. After all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus,
who took up residence about four years ago and—thanks largely to me—has never gone home again.

It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to
the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily. She’d known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions
about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.

One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell. I gestured
a question at him, thumb up and then down.

He shrugged massively. “He’s quiet,” he said. “Kind of. Had a rowdy night, and I guess he’s resting now. Still wide awake,
though.” He was unlocking the door as he spoke, but he paused with his hand on the handle to look me full in the eye. “You’re
not gonna like what they’ve done to him,” he warned me. “Try to keep your cool, okay?”

“Okay.”

He swung the door open, and I stepped in, announcing my arrival with an echoing clang because the floor inside Rafi’s cell
is bare metal: steel, mostly, but with a lot of silver in the mix, too. I know because I paid for it to be installed—cost
a small fortune, but worth it because for at least some of the time, it keeps Rafi’s passenger from getting too frisky.

Friskiness didn’t seem to be an issue right now. In preparation for transit, Webb had Rafi trussed up tighter than a Christmas
turkey.

They’d built—or perhaps Jenna-Jane had supplied—a massive steel frame, about seven feet high by four feet wide, standing on
three sets of wheels like a mobile dress rack. The resemblance didn’t end there, either: Rafi was hanging inside this construction
in an all-over-body straitjacket fitted with a dozen or more steel hoops to which lengths of elasticated cable had been attached.
Like a spider trussed in his own web, he dangled at the center of the frame on a slight diagonal, his face the only part of
him that was visible. I would have expected that face to be livid with demonic rage, but it was a near-perfect blank, the
eyes—all pupil, no white—staring at me and through me.