Dead Men's Boots (52 page)

“We’re a collective,” Todd growled. “Democratic and egalitarian. Everything is fair, and everything is set out nice and clear
in the rules. You spend a year up on top, riding one of the bodies with the influence and the power and the celebrity lifestyle—then
you spend a year as one of the grunts, earning your keep, minding the shop. We don’t trust anyone else to maintain the crematorium
or to guard it. We keep it all in the family.

“But that cuntbubble is as strong as the rest of us put together. He started to write his
own
rules. And because he’s the oldest, we’ve got to go carefully. Time isn’t just money, it’s power, too. We don’t know what
kind of safeguards he put in place for himself back when he was the only one. Just in case of emergencies. He’s never going
to let himself be caught with his pants down. If we did kill him…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but his shrug conveyed his
meaning: that killing Aaron Silver, in flesh or spirit or both, would be the start of something, not the end of it. “So that
was your brief,” he said, coming back to the point. “Not the rest of us. Just Silver. That’s why you went out to Alabama?
Tracing his steps?”

“Looking for information about Kale. She seems to be his weak spot.”

Todd nodded. “Yeah, you’re right there. But the paraphernalia you collected from Chesney—most of that wasn’t anything to do
with Silver. So what was the deal there?”

“I didn’t know what Chesney had,” I temporized. “I had to take a look.”

Todd looked surprised at that—and suspicious. “Then you weren’t working with Gittings?”

I had the feeling of thin ice starting to crack under me. “Not directly,” I said. “Gittings and Langley were the first string.
I was the second. Rourke didn’t activate me until they crashed and burned. And obviously, the first thing I had to do was
to find out how far they’d gotten.”

Todd was staring at me hard. Whatever was going on behind that stare, it wasn’t looking good. “Then how come you spent so
long sniffing around Gittings’s widow?” he demanded.

I pretended to look uncomfortable and abashed. “Me and Carla are old friends,” I said. “Kind of—more than friends once upon
a time. I thought—you know, there wouldn’t be any harm in reminding her of that.”

Todd relaxed slightly, giving me a contemptuous grin. “That’s actually funny, Castor. Groves was stuck inside the house right
there with you, and all you were thinking about was getting your leg over?”

“I know,” I said, adopting a tone of bitter, naked resentment. “I figured it out later. Groves was the one who possessed John,
right?”

“Possessed him, realized the guy’s brain was turning to cheese, shot himself. That was a hairy moment. If you’re in someone
else’s body and he goes into the whole second-childhood thing, what happens to you? Groves didn’t want to stick around and
find out. And he thought he was safe because of the will. Return to sender. But he forgot about the wards on Gittings’s door,
too strong for him. He couldn’t get out of the house. He had to pull that tantrum to get you interested. I wasn’t sure what
to make of you right then. I thought either you’d be useful or we’d end up having to kill you. But it turned out it wasn’t
an either-or kind of proposition.”

“I thought John knew too much about your operation to walk into a trap,” I said, trying to push his expansive mood as far
as I could. “How did you get him?”

Todd seemed to have momentarily forgotten his rule about the man with the knife. He shrugged. “The actual recipe is a trade
secret,” he said. “But we got him the same way we get everyone. He came onto the premises, and we got the drop on him. That’s
what we had in mind for you, of course, on the day we burned Gittings. But your demon bitch walked in, and we had to abort
the mission. We weren’t sure we could take her down, and we didn’t want yet another loose end floating around. That’s the
only reason you walked out of Mount Grace under your own steam. Best-laid plans.

“Listen, this has been illuminating, but I don’t want to draw it out any longer. You want to buy some more time, or are you
all out of revelations?”

He stood up and moved around to one side of me, knife in hand at the level of his waist. I could more or less see the angle
he’d decided to use: an upthrust, probably to my throat, from behind and off to the side to minimize the amount of blood he
got on himself.

“Rourke isn’t alone,” I said quickly. “There are two other guys. De Niro and Rampling—”

“Don’t fight it, Castor. Under the circumstances, things could be a fuck of a sight worse.”

I was already moving as his hand flashed up. I kicked with my legs, not against him—he hadn’t been stupid enough to bring
himself into range—but against the desk. I pitched out and down as the blade sliced shallowly across my shoulder.

I was hoping the impact would smash the back of the chair. It didn’t. Desperately, I swung myself to the left and then to
the right, sawing with the handcuff chain against the unyielding bars of the chairback. With a muffled exclamation, Todd leaned
in over me, but the bars gave way, and I rolled aside as he reached for me, kicking out again in a one-two bicycling movement
and missing him by a mile but fending him off long enough for me to swivel, get my knees on the ground, and lurch/stumble
back up onto my feet. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, but at least I was in with a chance now.

Or I would have if Todd hadn’t kept the gun in his pocket when he switched to the knife. He stepped back, the gun once again
in his hand. He looked annoyed. “What the fuck did that achieve?” he demanded.

Was it a trick of the light, or was something moving behind him, outside the window? I took a step toward the door, and he
moved in to block, which conveniently blindsided him as far as the window was concerned.

“You’re not going to kill me,” I said, playing for seconds.

“No?” Todd raised a mildly skeptical eyebrow. “How come?”

“The noise,” I said. “Someone will hear. And you’ll have a roomful of dead cats to explain as well as me.”

He aimed at my head, thought better of it, lowered the gun to point it at my stomach: messier and more painful but a safer
shot. “Silencer,” he explained, and pulled the trigger. I was watching his hand, and I dropped as his index finger squeezed,
but he still would have hit me. Even with gravity on my side, I couldn’t outrace a bullet.

But the window exploded inward, and a human figure danced in a blur out of the unfolding storm of broken glass, limbs scything
so quickly that they left stroboscopic afterimages on the air. There was a wet, insinuating crack, and Todd’s arm folded backward
at a point where the human body doesn’t actually have a moving joint. The figure landed and turned without any sense of haste
or even intention. It was like watching someone practice the steps of a dance. The figure kicked Todd in the stomach; the
sound this time was more muffled, but the damage seemed as profound. Todd slid sideways against the desk, crumpling inward
like a flower closing for the night, and then slowly sank down onto his knees.

Moloch straightened his cuffs like a dandy after a duel, staring down with cold amusement at the man he had just crippled.
I gawped at him, confused and uncomprehending.

“Not the savior you were expecting?” the demon demanded, giving me a glance of cold, sardonic amusement. Todd was curled up
almost into a fetal crouch on the floor, absolutely silent, absolutely still. He could even have been dead. The kick to the
stomach was easily hard enough to have ruptured some vital organ.

I struggled up on one knee but then took a breather, my legs trembling. “Not exactly,” I admitted hoarsely. “You told me you’d
had enough of saving my life. I think you said it was my turn to scratch your back, or something to that effect.”

“Yes. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did, Castor. That sad wreckage downstairs”—he kissed his fingers—“perfectly
aged. The spirit filleted and pared from the flesh with great delicacy. I can’t remember when I last ate so well.”

I fought the urge to throw up. Moloch had walked around behind me and was busying himself with the handcuffs. I heard the
links part with a loud, grating clank of metal against metal. Flexing my arms, I discovered that they were free to move, although
the cuffs still hung around my wrists like bracelets, and my right shoulder throbbed agonizingly where Todd’s knife had stabbed
deep into the fleshy part of it.

I stood up a little shakily. “It’s all part of the service,” I said. “At least it is now. I didn’t plan it this way.”

“No,” Moloch agreed. “But I’ve found you to be worth following. Serendipity is your whore. And I thought you’d work a little
harder if you felt you were working without a safety net.”

“Pick him up,” I said, pointing at Todd. “Put him in the chair.” Moloch nodded amiably, bent down, and hauled the lawyer to
his feet. Todd wasn’t dead; he wasn’t even unconscious. But his face was deathly pale, and he screamed when Moloch lifted
him, flailing with his good arm as his bad one dangled loosely at an impossible angle.

Moloch dropped Todd into the chair, then looked inquiringly at me. I’d crossed to the shattered window, and I was drinking
in great gulps of the clean night air. I’d supped full with horrors, but it wasn’t even midnight yet, and I had darker work
still to do.

“See if you can find some rope,” I muttered without looking round. “He probably won’t stay upright any other way.”

The sheet music had taken a bit of damage when Scrub-slash-Leonard took that last wild swipe at my chest and almost laid my
insides open to the world. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, though. I laid it out on the desk and smoothed it down with the flat
of my hand. Todd watched me with a shell-shocked lack of curiosity, his injured arm lashed across his chest, the other tied
behind him. It turned out that the room where Scrub had been stowed contained a builder’s drum of rope—about two hundred feet,
unstarted. Moloch had used all of it to secure Todd to the chair, virtually weaving a cocoon around him and leaving very little
of him still in view, apart from his pale face.

I sat myself on the desk, more or less where Todd had been sitting during my interrogation. Moloch stood over by the window
with his back to us, letting me make my play with no interruptions. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in this side of things.

“You started a sentence earlier,” I reminded Todd. “You were there when I something-or-other. How was that going to end?”

“I forget,” Todd said with a sneer that sounded convincing despite the slight slur in his voice. He had to be in a lot of
pain. And it was going to get worse before it got better.

“Okay. Doesn’t matter,” I reassured him. “Todd, I broke in here tonight to look through your files and get the lowdown on
the Mount Grace posse. But since you’re here in the flesh—even if it isn’t exactly your flesh—there’s another favor you can
do me. It’s going to be ugly, and it’s going to be messy, and at the end of it, I don’t know what kind of shape you’ll be
in, but it won’t be good. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little bit sick just thinking about it, but I’ll do it if I
have to. Because if it works, it could save my life later tonight. So I figure I’ll cut you a deal. Tell me about the setup
at the crematorium. About inscription night. How many people are going to be there. What sort of defenses they’ll have laid
on. When it will all get started and when’s the best time to go in. Tell me what to expect and I’ll leave it at that. I’ll
walk out the door, and the cleaners will find you in the morning.”

Todd glanced up at me again from under half-lidded eyes. The pain of his injured arm seemed to have driven him into mild shock;
either that or he was controlling it with some kind of meditation technique, because there was something otherworldly about
his calm. He breathed out through his nostrils, conveying a world of contempt. “You bluff badly, Castor,” he murmured. “I’m
a dead man already, so death doesn’t scare me. And I’ve got powerful friends. Torture me and kill me, I’ll just come back.”

“If you’re dead, I can send you on your way,” I countered. “That’s what I do.” Moloch perked up at that and looked around
at me with a feral smile. The idea of catching Todd’s soul on the wing seemed to be a turn-on for him.

“You,” I said, pointing a finger at Moloch, “stay out of this or our deal’s canceled. Try to take this one soul now, and you’ll
lose your chance of eating all the others. You understand me?”

Moloch’s answer came from between bared teeth. “Yes.”

“Okay, then.” I turned to Todd again. “You know what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t you. I’m an exorcist. I have the power
to bind and break you.”

This time he managed a faint, sickly smile. “Do you?”

“Funny you should ask,” I said deadpan. “Normally, if I’m this close to a ghost, no matter what it’s wearing, I get a ping
on my radar. When I met you and Scrub—sorry, I mean Leonard—downstairs here, I got nothing. And every time I’ve seen you outside
this building, nothing all over again. You’ve got good camouflage, I have to say. I’d love to know how it’s done. But then
I guess you’ve been in the game long enough to have figured out a lot of the angles.”