Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  A second. Two. Then I heard the tinny, boppy, tooth-jangling strains of the Crazy Frog sound from right ahead of me.

  The skinny guy’s head jerked in a belated double take. His hand snaked into his jeans pocket to turn off his phone, and he turned to look back at me, locking eyes with me for the first time. He must have had the phone set to vibrate, too—either that or there was no music on his headphones in the first place.

  Abruptly, without warning, he bolted.

  I sprinted after him, instinctively bearing right to cut him off if he headed for the station concourse. If he got inside there with even a few seconds’ lead on me, I’d never see him again.

  But he wasn’t trying for the station. He sprinted straight out across Bridge Place, almost getting sideswiped by a bus, which cost me a second or two as I slowed to let it pass. He plunged into a side street.

  I was almost thirty feet behind him, and by the time I got to the corner of the street, he was already out of sight. I kept running anyway, scanning the street on both sides to see if there were any clues as to where he might have gone. Only one turnoff on the left. I took that and was in time to see him vanish around another corner away up ahead of me.

  Maybe I don’t exercise as much as I should; I know health experts recommend half an hour a day. I did half an hour back in 1999 and then sort of fell behind, what with all that excitement about the new millennium and all. I was already feeling winded when I reached the next corner, while the guy I was chasing seemed to be accelerating, if anything.

  I got a lucky break, though, when a door opened ahead of him and a woman came out into the street leading two children by the hand. They turned toward us, forming a pavement-wide barrier and giving him the choice between trampling them underfoot or making a wide detour. He skidded to a halt, almost slamming into the startled woman, then swerved across the street, past a skip full of someone’s defunct living room furniture, and into an alley.

  I took the hypotenuse and won back enough time to snatch the base unit of a standard lamp from the skip as I passed it. Aerodynamically, it was piss-poor, but this was no time to be picky. Putting on a last, desperate spurt of speed, I held it out beside me like a vaulter’s pole, but then I flung it like a javelin.

  It didn’t have the balance of a javelin, and the heavy end dipped at once toward the ground as it flew. Another couple of feet, and it would have hit the pavement and spun away end over end. But I was riding my luck, and it stayed with me. The shaft went squarely between the guy’s pounding feet, and he tripped, smacking down heavily on the stone slabs.

  He was winded, but he managed to scramble up and limp forward another couple of steps. By that time, I was on him. I knocked him down again with a shoulder charge; then I jumped on top of him, planting one knee in the small of his back to pin him to the ground. He squirmed and tried to get up, but I had the advantage of weight and position.

  “What the fuck!” he spluttered. “Let go of me! Are you frigging insane?”

  “We haven’t met,” I panted, my pulse pounding and my breath coming in ragged hiccups. “Well, except on the phone. But I’m hoping we can be friends. I’m Castor. Who are you?”

  “I’m gonna scream,” the guy snarled, still struggling. He snaked his head around to glare at me, his nose looking like a raptor’s beak. “You think you can do this in broad daylight? Out on the street?”

  “I think,” I said, still breathless, “that you wanted to take—a look at me without—committing yourself. And for some reason, you got cold feet. I told you, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just a friend of John’s.”

  “Then let me up!”

  I did. He looked to be in even worse shape to run again than I was, but I could see that the alley was a dead end. There was nowhere for him to run. I stood up and stepped back, letting him climb slowly to his feet.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him again. “And tell me the goddamn truth. I was in a bad mood when I got here, and it’s not getting any better.”

  He rubbed his knee, favoring me with a sneering grin. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. Sitting there in the café like you’re waiting for a blind date. Should’ve worn a white carnation in your—Chesney,” he added hastily as I took a step toward him. “Vincent. Vincent Chesney.” He threw up his hands to protect himself.

  I grabbed his right hand, much to his surprise, and shook it hard. It probably looked absurdly formal, given the fact that I’d just chased him down like a dog chases a hare, but I didn’t give a damn. I was here to collect information, and one way was as good as another.

  Sometimes the impressions I pick up from skin contact are fleeting and ambiguous; other times they’re so sharp and immediate, it’s like a movie with five-point surround sound. Vincent Chesney didn’t have any psychic barriers to speak of, and his emotions arrived in my head unmediated, with almost painful clarity.

  The grin was bravado; underneath it, he was afraid. Afraid of me, mostly, but not just on a physical level. There was something else in the back of his mind—something else at stake.

  I released his hand, and he snatched it back, suspicious and faintly indignant.

  “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. I did want to get a look at you first. What’s wrong with that, man? Calling me in the night. You could have been frigging anybody, seen? I’ve got to watch my back. I’m in a delicate position here.”

  “Are you?” I asked politely. “Why is that, then, Vincent?”

  “Vince.”

  “Question stands.”

  “Okay,” he said again, hesitant, unhappy. “You’ve come for the items, right?” He put the same sort of heavy, loaded stress on the word that the till assistant in a chemist’s would put on “something for the weekend.”

  “The items that John left with you?” I hazarded. Chesney nodded, looking even glummer. “They’re one of the things I’ve come for,” I lied.

  “Well, okay. Yeah. That’s what I thought. It’s just around the corner.”

  The switch from plural to singular threw me. “What is?” I demanded.

  “The place where I work. I can get you the stuff, right? It’s just around the corner. But you’ll have to wait here while I—” He broke off because he could see from the look on my face that I wasn’t going to buy it. “If you come up with me,” he snapped sullenly, “you follow my lead, yeah? I mean, back me up, whatever I say about you. This is gonna look bad enough anyway. I don’t want to lose my frigging job, seen?”

  “I’ll follow your lead,” I promised. I stepped aside and let him walk past me back onto the street. Then I followed him—not back toward Bridge Place but farther south. I was getting my breath back, and Chesney was getting back some of the cocky cool I’d heard in his voice when he picked up the phone the first time.

  “So what are you?” he asked as we walked. “You said you worked with Gittings. Does that make you another ghosthunter? ‘Get thee behind me, Dennis Wheatley’ kind of thing? Nothing wrong with it, mind you. Bit macho, bit paternalistic, not my cup of cocoa, but someone’s got to do it. Is someone you?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed when I’d figured out what the hell he was talking about. “Someone is me.”

  “Well, fine. And you scare up a bit of business by looking at the tea leaves. I get it. Sounded wacko at first. But then you start looking at the evidence, and you think, Whoa, fuck, that’s scary. The same patterns unto the third and fourth generation and all that. And then he died, and I had to wonder.”

  “Wonder what?” I asked, hoping against hope for a coherent sentence.

  “If maybe he got too close to the flame,” he elaborated, pantomiming the flight of a moth with vague gestures. “You know, if he was chasing after this stuff and he went to the source, someone might have taken it personally. That’s what I was scared of. That’s why I put the phone down when you called. I mean, you could have been anybody, as far as I was concerned. You could be one of the really cold geezers with the most to lose, yeah? And someone comes along, wants to buy so
mething with your fingerprints, what are you gonna think? Maybe you just take out a gun and bang. Maybe you even watch the message boards, listen to the wires. Like, who’s this guy going around picking up my leavings? What does he want? Bring his body down here. Most likely not, but hey. You get me?”

  I nodded, but only for the sake of form. Either this guy was assuming I knew a hell of a lot more than I did, or else he always talked like this—in which case I’d have to beat him to death with his own iPod.

  We stopped in front of an anonymous Georgian edifice that had once been someone’s house and was now three sets of offices. I say three because there were three small plaques on the wall next to the door: VITASTAR FILMS; NEXUS VETERINARY PATHOLOGISTS; DEACON LLOYD EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING.

  The door was unlocked, but it opened into a tiny vestibule. The inner door was operated by a swipe-card lock, and Chesney had the card hanging on a chain at his belt. He swiped us through, putting two fingers up at the security camera mounted on the door frame.

  “Nobody there,” he said dismissively, and it was true that the security desk in the hall was deserted. “There’s a guard comes on at nights, but he never checks the camera footage. It’s just pour encourager les cretins. Most of this shit is. If I wanted to fake the swipe reader, I could do it with an old bus pass.”

  We ascended the stairs with Chesney in the lead. The first landing was Vitastar Films, but we kept on going. “Porn,” said Chesney, who seemed to have taken on the role of tour guide. “You get one girl and ten guys standing outside here every Monday morning. I think they put out a lot of bukkake titles.” He pronounced the word “buck cake,” which had the side effect of making it seem a lot more wholesome than it was. I thought of the Waltons. Then tried hard not to.

  The second landing was Nexus Veterinary Pathologists. The door was open, and Chesney walked inside. There was no receptionist’s desk, as such. The room was big and open-plan, and it had a vaguely unpleasant chemical smell. A cluster of chairs in the near corner was a token gesture toward a waiting room; the rest of the space was taken up with glass-fronted storage cupboards, steel lockers, and uniform olive-green filing cabinets. Against the wall off on my left were three different-sized desks, like the bowls of porridge in “Goldilocks.” The biggest had a brass nameplate that read JOHN J. MORETON, MSC, DAP.

  A young Asian woman in a white medical coat was squatting on her haunches on the far side of the room, stacking bottles on the lower shelves of one of the cupboards. It was too far to read the labels on the bottles, but the HAZCHEM sign on the box she was taking them out of was clear enough. Right next to her was a closed door plated with dull gray metal and marked NO ADMITTANCE TO GENERAL PUBLIC.

  She looked around as we came in, and she gave Chesney a severe frown. “Thanks, Vince,” she said, in a flat Brummie accent. “That’s half my bloody lunch hour out the window. Why’ve you got mud on your knees?”

  “Sorry, Smeet,” said Chesney. “I got held up.”

  The girl looked from him to me as if she expected either an introduction or an explanation. “Mr. Farnsworth,” Chesney said after too long a pause. “He brought a poodle in last year, yeah? Before my time. And now there’s another one from the same litter who’s got the same kind of tumor, or it might be a different one, so he needs another copy of the report for his insurance claim because there’s a clause about genetic predisposition. I said I’d dig one out for him.”

  Smeet nodded. She’d already lost interest, I think maybe at “Farnsworth.” Chesney had done a good job of making me sound too boring to live. She pointed at the box, which was still half full of bottles. “You can finish those off,” she said bluntly. “I’m not even supposed to handle them until I get my B2 through.”

  “Yeah, no worries,” said Chesney, throwing his jacket down on top of one of the filing cabinets. “You go ahead. Take a full hour if you want. Morpork won’t be back until four, will he? Not if he’s at one of those RSPCA thrashes.”

  He went to one of the filing cabinets, opened the top drawer, and started to rummage around without much conviction. His acting stank, and Smeet was taking her time getting ready—taking off the white coat and hanging it on a rack behind one of the desks, then putting various items from the desktop into her handbag.

  “Busy?” I asked her, just to draw her attention away from Chesney.

  “Busy?” she echoed. “Yes, we are. We’re working until ten o’clock most nights. Bird flu is our main money spinner at this point in time. Rabies has been a niche market since the pet passport came along, but bird flu was a very timely replacement. It’s even outselling canine thrombocythemia. I’d say, on average, Vince gets to do the parrot sketch from Monty Python once every other day.”

  She was done loading her handbag, and she hit the high road without looking back, deftly snatching up a brown suede jacket from the same rack and putting it on as she headed for the door. One hand raised for silence, Chesney listened to her footsteps as they receded down the stairs.

  “Bitch,” he said with feeling when the front door two floors below us slammed to. He shut the file drawer with unnecessary force, opened the bottom one, and took a box from it with a certain amount of care. It was about the size of a shoe box but made of wood with a hinged lid. It was painted in green and gold to resemble an oversize Golden Virginia tobacco tin. “She’d report me in a minute, you know? I have to do everything on the sly. Come into my parlor and I’ll give you the stuff. Happy to get rid of it, to be honest.”

  He opened the door that the general public couldn’t pass through and went inside. Following him, I found myself in a room that fitted my preconceptions of a pathology lab pretty much to the letter. There was a massive operating table in the center, with a swiveling light array above it on a double-articulated metal arm. White tiles on the walls and floor and gleaming white porcelain sinks inset into white work surfaces with kidney-shaped steel dishes stacked ready to hand. I’d always wondered why those dishes were so popular in medical circles, given that the only internal organ that’s kidney-shaped is the kidney. The chemical smell was a lot stronger here, bordering on the eye-watering, but Chesney didn’t seem to notice it. He closed the door behind us and then drew a bolt across. That struck me as overkill, given that we were alone in the place.

  “Okay,” he said again. It seemed to be his favorite word, unless the repetitions were just a sign of frayed nerves.

  He set the wooden box down on the operating table, swinging the swivel-mounted light array out of the way with his left hand. He flashed me a significant glance but undercut it by opening his mouth again. “We are controlling transmission,” he said in a heavy cod-American accent. “Do not adjust your set. The Twilight Zone, yeah? That’s where this stuff belongs.”

  Chesney was quoting the opening credits of The Outer Limits, but this didn’t seem like the time to split hairs. He opened the box and started to unpack its contents. On top of the pile was a CD marked CD+RW and scrawled over in black marker with the single word FINAL. Underneath were a dozen or more resealable plastic bags of the type that the police use for physical evidence. They held a slightly surreal variety of objects: a penknife; a Matchbox toy car; a big commemoration crown piece from some forgotten royal event; a playing card—ace of spades—that someone had signed illegibly; a fountain pen; a pair of pliers; a glass paperweight; a tie pin; and unsettlingly, in this innocuous company, a bullet.

  “I’m not paranoid,” Chesney assured me, as if anxious to dispel a specific rumor. “I just hid the stuff because I knew bloody well Smeet would blow the whistle on me if she found it. I’m not supposed to use the lab for private stuff, seen? It’s a hanging offense, and my boss doesn’t need much of an excuse right now.”

  I looked through the weird stuff in the bags, turning up a few more surprises—a toy soldier that looked really old, the paint flaking off it to reveal bare metal underneath; and a Woodbine cigarette packet that had been signed like the playing card. The name in this case was Jimmy Rick, or m
aybe Pick, and it didn’t mean a thing to me.

  “And these were all John’s things?” I asked, making sure I had this right.

  “Yeah.” Chesney nodded. He was looking at me very closely, trying to read my reactions. “Worth a bob or two,” he observed slightly wistfully.

  Which told me all I needed to know about his weird behavior on the phone and his skittishness today. When he heard about John’s death, he must have thought Christmas had come two months late.

  “Yeah, probably,” I agreed. “I imagine there’s people out there who’d eat this stuff up.”

  Chesney nodded eagerly. “Yeah, and I could shift it for you. John more or less promised I could have the lot once he was done with it. He always said this was about the data, seen? Not about the items. He wasn’t a ghoul or a pervert or anything. It was just something he was interested in—his own private Idaho kind of thing. I never thought anyone would come round asking after this stuff.”

  “And the stuff is valuable because of who it used to belong to?” I demanded, making sure I’d gotten the right end of this increasingly shitty stick.

  Chesney looked blank. I don’t think it had occurred to him until then that I was flying blind, but it was a little too late to decide to be coy. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Obviously. They’re—you know—” He hesitated, presumably looking for a polite turn of phrase.

  “Death row souvenirs,” I finished. It was the words “ghoul” and “pervert” in the same sentence that had clinched it for me. Well, those and the fact that I’d just asked Nicky to find me something exactly like this: some banal object made magical and precious by the fact that it had once been in the hands of a killer. Big thrill. I’d been in the hands of killers so many times it wasn’t even funny, and nobody was looking to sell me on eBay. Maybe that was a blessing, though. It’s probably best not to have too clear a picture of your market value.