Dead Men's Boots (54 page)

“And why am I going to do that?”

“Because if you don’t, the poor doggy isn’t going to get so much as a bone to gnaw on. If you want to eat tonight, you’ll
do this my way.”

He stared at me in silence for the space of two or three heartbeats. It felt like a lot longer.

“If she offers you tea,” he said at last with a nasty grin, “decline it. Time is short enough as it is.” He turned his back
on me and walked away.

I knocked again and waited. After a minute or so, I rang the bell.

Eventually, the door opened a crack, and Susan stared out. The tears had been shed in the meantime. Her cheeks were wet, and
her face, as she glowered up at me, was full of terrible pain. “You should go away now, Fix,” she said, her voice surprisingly
strong, as though crying had bled some poison out of her. “It’s not right for you to be talking to me after what you did to
Jules. You should have been a better friend to her.”

I opened my mouth to say that it was Juliet who’d broken a table across my back, rather than the other way around, but this
wasn’t the time for scoring cheap points. “I think I can bring her back,” I said again. “If I can come in for a minute, I’ll
explain what I want to do. If you say no, I’ll leave.”

“No. I don’t want you to come in here. Not while I’m alone.”

“Then let me explain out here,” I suggested.

“I don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say.”

“Susan,” I said, making my last pitch, “this is something she needs to know about. She’s done something that might make it…
hard for her to stay here on earth. Or at least here in London. Something that puts her way, way over on the wrong side of
the law. She’s made a choice, and in my opinion, it was the wrong one. It will hurt her.”

“Nothing can hurt her,” Susan said, shaking her head again. I wasn’t sure if it was a boast or a lament.

“Losing you would hurt her, I think. And if she has to do a moonlight flit—if all the exorcists the Met can lay their hands
on are sharpening their knives for her, and she makes the city too hot to hold her—she’ll leave you behind.” I paused to let
that idea sink in, then went in for the kill. “Or do you think you can go and live with her folks for a while?”

A whole cavalcade of emotions crossed Susan’s face. I wanted to look away. Moloch’s words about my having a gift for hurting
people were still hanging in the air. This wouldn’t count as torture at Abu Ghraib, but standing on a doorstep in West London
in the arse end of winter with the rising wind carving sharper edges on my face, that was exactly what it felt like.

Susan was looking at me, shaking her head, rejecting the picture I’d painted, or maybe rejecting me, seeing through my sullied
flesh to my shabby heart and saying no. She stood aside wordlessly and let me come in, then closed the door, locked it, and
bolted it top and bottom. I waited until she was done and let her lead the way into the living room. It was a gesture, a pretense
that she was in control of what was happening. I thought about the aborted dinner party and everything that had happened since,
and I had to struggle against a feeling of shame. Susan was right in spite of everything. I should have been a better friend.

She waved me to a chair with a visible lack of enthusiasm. I stayed standing. I didn’t feel like I had a right to any hospitality.
She sat down herself in one of the armchairs. It was a surprise, and not a happy one, to see a half-empty whiskey bottle and
a half-full glass on the occasional table next to her.

“What I wanted to do,” I explained, “was play the first few notes of an exorcism—an exorcism for Juliet.” Susan’s eyes went
big and wide, and she started to speak, but I hurried on, talking over her. “Not the binding or the sending, Sue—just the
summoning. Juliet said she’d hear that wherever I played it, and come and—” “Rip your throat out” had been her actual words;
I groped for a mealymouthed substitute. “—stop me from finishing.”

Susan glared at me in deep, almost speechless outrage. She was trembling now. “Oh, she’d stop you,” she assured me.

“Believe me, Sue, I’m not underestimating her. I’m hoping I can explain why I’ve come before she cuts in and does something
irrevocable to me. That’s why I want to do it here. I’m thinking maybe she’ll hesitate before doing something really violent
in front of you. She wouldn’t want to hurt or scare you.”

That didn’t seem to make Susan any happier. Exhausted as I was, and desperate as I was to be moving on and doing what had
to be done before I fell down and passed out and deflated like a punctured balloon, I tried to explain. “There’s a woman,”
I said. “Someone she met. Not—romantically. Met in the line of duty. And this woman needs help, that’s the plain truth. Which
is what Juliet is trying to do. But I don’t think the help that Juliet is giving this woman is what she needs. This is what
we argued about back in Alabama. There’s more to it, but I’m hoping that Juliet will accept a compromise solution if I offer
one.” I shrugged. “That’s it,” I said. “The whole thing. So it’s up to you. I’m going to do this anyway, but if you tell me
not to do it here, I’ll go someplace else.”

Susan picked up her whiskey glass, but she didn’t drink from it. She turned it in her hands and stared into the shallows of
the half-finished drink.

“This woman…” she said. “It’s the woman you were talking about before you went away? The killer?”

Warily, I nodded.

“Who did she kill?”

“Most recently, a middle-aged gay guy who was looking for a bit of rough trade. Before that”—I picked my words with care—“a
lot of people, but mostly people who’d hurt her. Or people she thought might hurt her. She’s ill. Killing is one of the symptoms
of her illness.”

Susan put the glass to her lips and emptied it. She made a sour face. “I’m not good at this,” she said. I was surprised I
hadn’t noticed the slur in her voice at the door. “I don’t even like the taste. I think I’m going to get sick before I get
drunk.”

“Susan—” I began.

She shook her head impatiently. “Play your tune. I want this to be over. I don’t want it in my life anymore.”

I nodded. For the third time tonight, I unshipped my whistle and held it in my hands, ready to play. My mind was fogged by
exhaustion, though, and although I knew the notes I had to play—the notes of a summoning that would have Juliet’s name written
all over it—I couldn’t get my mind into the place where it needed to be. I felt like someone trying to fit his eye to the
lens of a telescope, and screwing up the angle so that all he could see was the magnified reflection of the blood vessels
inside his own eyeball.

I played a note, more or less at random, hoping my sixth sense would kick in and the music would start to flow. It didn’t.
Nothing at all came into my mind, not even a note that would connect to this one in a way that made sense.

I lowered the whistle and stared at it, blinking my eyes back into focus. It was strange, and it was frightening. I’d had
good days and bad days, but I’d never had my knack desert me quite so suddenly and completely. All I wanted to do was the
summoning. It was the easiest part of an exorcism: It made a path, a line of least resistance for the spirit you were looking
for to move through. It was usually easiest if you were close to the spirit, harder the farther away you got, but the only
reason it wouldn’t work at all, wouldn’t even stay in my head long enough to suggest the beginnings of a tune, was if—

“She’s already here,” I said. “Isn’t she?”

“She’s upstairs,” Susan muttered, pointing. “In our bedroom. Or it
was
our bedroom. I don’t know what it is now.” Slowly, deliberately, but still spilling a little on the table, she poured herself
another drink.

I walked past her, wanting to offer some kind of solace but not sure what form it ought to take. Bad friend Felix was on the
prowl again. Good news wasn’t on the agenda.

The main bedroom was dead ahead. Juliet was sitting on the windowsill, legs hugged to her chest, both feet off the ground.
In a way, it was a curiously little-girlish pose. Doug Hunter was tied to the bed by an ad hoc but formidable assemblage of
rope and old leather belts. He seemed calm enough, but it was a bleak, frazzled calm: the calm of someone who’d already tested
himself—or herself, arguably—against the ropes extensively and lost every time. Myriam Kale looked out at me from behind those
bland, pale blue eyes and smiled asymmetrically.

I stopped in the doorway. “Permission to approach,” I said.

Juliet gave me what, in a human woman, would have been an old-fashioned look. “You can come in, Castor,” she said. “I’m not
going to attack you. I’m not going to hold it against you that you were right—or at least not to that extent.”

I walked in, skirting the bed, and stood beside Juliet, looking out through the window. Under the streetlamp opposite, a dark
form waited with its head bowed, endlessly patient—waiting for a banquet that would make up for a century of starvation.

“So how’d you get home?” I asked Juliet, knowing that the one thing I wouldn’t get out of her would be the truth. “Transatlantic
cable? Fishing coracle? Back of a whale? What?”

“The scenic route,” she said. “It’s another one of those things that you wouldn’t understand.”

“Right, right.” I was too tired to rise to the bait. “I’ve been talking to that friend of yours some more. You know, the one
from the old neighborhood.” I nodded at the window, but she didn’t bother to look.

“I smelled him,” she said. “You should be more careful around demons, Castor. It’s only safe so long as they need you.”

“Now you tell me.” I turned to look at the figure on the bed. Doug Hunter grinned and thrust his hips toward me in a suggestive
mime. “So how’s Myriam?” I asked.

“She’s falling apart. She always does, apparently. She begged them not to bring her back after the last time, but they did
anyway. But this time they gave her a man’s body because they thought it might help her control the urges.”

“They being…?”

Juliet shrugged, shook her head. “She’s not rational for very long at a time now. That’s more or less all I got. She talks
about Lesley, mainly. Lesley Lathwell. And
to
him some of the time. She tells him that she loves him. That she’ll kill him. That she wants him to kill her. She talks about
something called inscription a lot, too. She doesn’t want it, she won’t accept it, she didn’t mean to miss it. And then she
cries. Or swears. Or bites her tongue and spits blood over the sheets.”

“Back in the remand wing,” I said, “they had Doug on antipsychotics. A mild prescription to keep him stabilized. I don’t suppose
you brought any out with you?” Juliet looked at me. “No. I know. Not the way your mind works. And I never thought to mention
it to you when you were flinging me around the diner. Pity. It actually would have been a better line than ‘I’ll hunt you
down and kill you like a dog.’ That seemed to upset you.”

“Can we get some more of the medicine from a doctor?”

“Not without taking Doug to
see
a doctor. And if we do that, we’re all ending up in Pentonville.”

“I’m not going home,” Myriam Kale said from the bed, speaking out of Doug Hunter’s throat as though from the bottom of a deep
pit. Her voice sounded hoarse and agonized. “You can’t make me go home. He’ll come and get me. He’ll take me out of there.
He’s my home now. I walked in the quiet night on the side of the road, and I came back, and it was all still there. The blood
on the seats. It still smells of it.”

“Then what?” Juliet said. “I thought of calling Coldwood, but I don’t want to get Susan in trouble. If Hunter is found in
her house—”

“It’s not just Susan,” I pointed out, fighting the urge to look at my watch. Time was against us. We had to move. But Juliet
could only be invited, not coerced. “It’s you, too. You busted Hunter out of jail. You never walked in front of a camera,
but there aren’t that many people around who could have done what you did. The only thing that’s saved you so far is that
Gary Coldwood is in the hospital, and he’s the one who knows where you live.”

She seemed surprised at this news. “In the hospital? What happened to him?”

“I set him on this thing after someone tried to kill me. I thought maybe he could shake the tree better than I could, but
they just trashed his career and broke his legs instead. Juliet, we have to sort this out. Not only Myriam Kale but all of
it. Mount Grace, the reincarnation racket, the whole thing.”

“Let me go,” Myriam Kale suggested from the bed, staring at me with wide, insane eyes. “I’ll blow you, mister. I’ll blow you
and I’ll swallow. Best you’ve ever had.”

Juliet frowned. “Mount Grace? The crematorium? How is any of this connected to Mount Grace?”

I brought her up to speed as quickly as I could, starting with John’s funeral and covering all the main fixtures since. When
I got to Moloch’s part in recent events, she drew back her teeth in a snarl. And when I suggested that she might want to come
along with us for a little breaking and entering and wholesale slaughter, she shook her head in somber wonder. “Fight alongside
the demon?” she demanded.

“Essentially, yeah,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “If you’ve got a rodent problem, you need a terrier. Best estimate,
there are around two hundred of these bastards. Could you take them all by yourself?”

“No. The ones in the flesh would be easy meat for me. The ghosts… I don’t believe they’d respond to me in the necessary way.”

“Right. And I could exorcise the ghosts, but it’s murderously hard. I already played that tune once tonight, and it was like
taking a beating from a bunch of guys with baseball bats. The chances are that it wouldn’t be enough, not by itself. These
guys are tough. Some of them have cheated the grave for a hundred years. I think I could punch their spirits out of the bodies
they’ve borrowed, but I seriously doubt I could push them all the way off the mortal plane. They’d still be around, and they’d
still be dangerous—they’d be gunning for me, and it’s odds on they’d get me. But Moloch is a specialized predator. He’d be
there with his knife and fork to finish the job. See, the three of us together can—”