Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  Outside of the movies, I’d never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and carefully put the pieces away in the sculpted foam receptacles of a sleek black suitcase. I assumed it happened, but with no personal experience to go on, I had to take it on trust. But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves. When the light clicked on, that was what I was looking at.

  The room was full of cats, and they were all asleep: on the floor, on the furniture, on the shelves, covering every surface in sight. The deep vibration was caused by their combined synchronous purring. I took an involuntary step backward, recoiling from the implications of what I was seeing. And in that queasy moment, as I hovered on the cusp of a decision, a cat in the center of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique rolltop escritoire, opened its eyes.

  Then the cats around it did, too, and their neighbors and so forth, out from the center in a spreading wave, like one vast creature sending a single instruction via an old and creaky nervous system that took its own sweet time getting the message through.

  A hundred or more cats stared at me, with ancient and inscrutable malevolence in their eyes. It was deeply, viscerally nasty, but there was worse to come. The Persian mewled on a rising tone, and the cats on either side of it pressed in and nuzzled its cheeks as if to comfort it. But that gentle contact became a firmer pressure, held for too long, and the flesh and fur of the three cats’ faces started to run together into a repulsive, amorphous mass. The bodies followed, and more cats were crowding in, jumping down from dusty shelves full of old books of legal precedents or leaping up from the floor to join the press.

  With a single muttered “Fuck!” I pulled my coat wide open and hooked my whistle out of the inside pocket. It occurred to me fleetingly to back out and bolt the door again, but what good would that do? When these cats coalesced into the creature they were going to become, doors weren’t going to hold it.

  The three cats in the center were gone now. The spherical mound of pulpy flesh they’d become had a rudimentary face. The mound rose from the desk as more cats added themselves to the base of it, deliquescing more quickly all the time as though the process were gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the stops and started to play.

  I’d long ago forgotten the tune I’d composed to get the drop on Scrub the last time we’d met, and I couldn’t be sure that this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn the name and shape. Like Juliet said, if one werewolf could organize itself as a colony creature, then probably they all could if they got the inspiration.

  I had one thing going for me, and one thing only. As the loup-garou in front of me assembled itself by inches and ounces, the sense of it grew stronger in my second sight, or rather my second hearing. The tune of the loup-garou strengthened and strengthened, became more vivid and inescapable from moment to moment. I let the plangent notes fill me, and then I let them ooze out of me through my lungs and my throat and my fingertips and the fragile piece of molded metal in my hands.

  The coagulating mass in front of me roared in anger. It was much bigger already, and its disconcertingly liquid substance spilled down from the desk onto the floor, allowing the remaining cats a much bigger surface area to adhere to and be absorbed into. A stumpy appendage reached out toward me and developed blisters on its outer surface. The blisters grew into recognizable fingers that opened and closed spasmodically. Rapier claws grew out from the fingertips.

  I was fighting panic now. I wanted to hurry, but the logic of the tune was pulling me in the opposite direction, making me slow down, hold the notes as long as I could, and let them glide out into the room on a descending scale. The tower of matter quivered, ripples chasing one another across its surface. Each ripple was like the pass of a magician’s hand, leaving behind first fur, then bare, disquietingly pink flesh, then fur again. The limbs were forced out from the main mass like meat from a mincing machine, and as soon as the legs were able to stand, they began to lurch toward me. The face rose and was extruded from the top of the tower like an obscene bubble, the flesh below it crimping and narrowing, creating a head and neck by default. It was all of a piece, the eyes the same color and texture as the flesh of the face, but they were starting to clear as I watched. The face leered, and my panic grew.

  But the tune was right, and I was wrong. Slow and steady, note upon skirling note, it laid itself on the nascent thing in front of me like chains. It was working. The only question was whether it was working fast enough to keep me from being eaten alive. The loup-garou slowed, its back bent as though under a heavy weight, but it didn’t stop. It took another step forward, the clutch of scimitars at the end of its arm flexing and clashing in front of my face. Its toothless mouth gaped open and grew fangs that solidified from doughy pink to gleaming white. I lurched back involuntarily, and the door frame banged my left elbow, almost knocking the whistle out of my hands. That would have been the end of the story, but I recovered with only a brief slur on one note of the tune.

  A morbid paralysis was seizing the loup-garou, but it was coming from the feet on up. Its upper body still had a lot of flexibility, and it leaned forward, aiming a raking slash at my throat. I ducked back on my trailing foot, and the wicked claws turned the front of my coat into confetti. A sharp pain and a rush of warmth down my chest told me that at least one had drawn blood. Shuffling like a blind man, I backed out onto the landing an inch at a time until the wooden stair rail was pressing against the small of my back and I knew there was nowhere else to run. My options had narrowed to two: play or die.

  I played, forcing the other option out of my mind. The loup-garou’s legs buckled, and it crashed down onto its knees, but it was still trying to reach me. When the claws of the thing’s outstretched arm slashed at my ankle, I ducked to the side and kicked it away. The loup-garou roared again, but the sound had a sloughing, sucking fall to it. It was the sound of something falling apart from the inside out.

  The face, now fully formed, stared at me with indelible hatred. It was Scrub’s face at first, then another wave crossed the surface of that flesh ocean, and it was the face of Leonard the copyboy. Struggling to form words, it spewed out blood and black bile. A few fragments of sound bubbled through the liquid decay. “C-Cas-Cast—”

  The eyes became opaque again, and the fluid in the gaping mouth congealed all at once into something that looked as shiny and vitreous as setting tar. The loup-garou was probably dead by this point, but strange movements from this or that part of the massive, slumped body made me wary of stepping in close to check. I left it there, sprawled on the landing like something huge and unwanted left out for the dustman.

  Maynard Todd’s office was on the next turn of the stairs; I knew it when I saw the light already on. I didn’t see anything particularly to be gained by subtlety. My fight with Scrub had made enough noise to wake the dead, assuming there were any more of them around, so anybody in there knew I was coming. I could always turn and walk away, but that didn’t seem like an option. So I pushed the door wide and went on in.

  Todd was sitting at his desk, the chair tilted back slightly so that he could lean on the shelves behind him. The gun in his hand was pointing at my chest, and his posture was completely relaxed.

  “Mr. Castor,” he said, pushing the chair on the client side of the desk out toward me with his foot. “How is it that you can never rely on religious cultists even to get a simple murder right? Take away their pentagrams and their mystic sigils, they’re like little kids. I was very disappointed to hear that you’d survived your little trip to Alabama. But I try to treat every setback as an opportunity. Come on in and sit down.”

  I walked into the room, but I didn’t take the chair. So long as I was standing, there was a chance I might get the drop on him at some point. Sitting down, I was dead meat. “Working late,” I commented.

  His gaze flicked the corner of the room. Looking in that direction myself, I saw a foldout bed. �
��I sleep here these days,” Todd said, sounding a little flat and resigned. “Mrs. Todd has filed divorce papers. She says I’m not the man she married. And you know what? She has a point. I asked you to sit down, Mr. Castor. A bullet through your kneecap would force the issue.”

  I sat down. I wondered why he hadn’t killed me already, if that was the plan. Maybe because he was worried about getting blood on the carpet. If that was it, his night was going to be ruined when he saw what was on the second-floor landing.

  “You’ve come a long way in a short while,” Todd went on. “That’s a tribute to your detective skills.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Except that you’re not a detective.” Todd’s tone hardened, and he gave me a look of actual dislike. “You’re just a man who gets rid of unwanted ghosts. One step up from a backstreet abortionist. What they do at the start of the life cycle, you do at the end. And like them, you’re doing it for the money. You don’t have either the brains or the motivation to figure us out.”

  I didn’t bother to give him an answer, because he didn’t seem to need one. There was a photo of a beautiful if slightly austere-looking brunette on his desk. I picked it up and inspected it thoughtfully. “So who did Mrs. Todd marry?” I asked.

  “An ambulance chaser with a death wish.”

  “Whereas you—?”

  “I’m nobody you’ve heard of. The way I see it, if a criminal gets a name for himself, it’s because he’s stupid enough to get noticed. But this isn’t a conversation we’re having here, Mr. Castor. It may look like one, but that’s only because it’s hard to shake off the veneer of civilization. I’m a bit out of practice when it comes to actually hurting people. That was a conscious decision on our part—switching over to legitimate enterprises as far as possible—but it’s got its drawbacks. You lose the professional edge.” He leaned forward, putting the front legs of his chair back on the carpet, and stood up. “To tell you the truth,” he said, coming around the desk, “back in Mile End, I always preferred a knife to a gun. So I’ll probably start with a knife, if that’s all right with you. Just while I’m easing myself back in. You get more control that way, too. It would annoy me if you bled to death or went into shock before you tell me what I need to know.”

  Aha. So that was how it was. I tensed as he approached, looking for a window of opportunity into which I could shove a low blow or a kick to the balls. But he stayed carefully out of my reach as he rummaged in his pocket. I expected his hand to come out with a knife in it, but it didn’t. He was holding a sturdy, slightly scuffed pair of police handcuffs. That was worse news, in a way.

  “Pass your hands through the bars of the chairback,” Todd ordered me.

  “Tell me what you need to know,” I temporized, meeting his cold, stern gaze. “Maybe we can do this the easy way.”

  Todd shook his head. “The hard way is the way I know,” he said. “And I tend to rely on the product more if I’ve squeezed it out myself, so to speak. Last time of asking, Mr. Castor.”

  I hesitated. There were ways of slipping out of handcuffs, but it helped if the guy putting them on you was a bit of a dim bulb. Play along or lose a kneecap? I made the call and did as I was told, not liking it much. Unfortunately, Todd was skilled and careful. He pressed hard, closing the cuffs as far as the ratchets would let him, and even though I clenched my fists and tensed the muscles of my forearms in the best traditions of Ian Fleming, I could feel that there was no leeway. I was firmly attached to the chair, and the only ways out were springing the lock on the cuffs—possible only with a pick—or smashing the chair to kindling. It didn’t seem that likely that Todd would sit still for either.

  “Okay,” he said, straightening only after he’d tugged on each of my arms and satisfied himself that my hands didn’t have enough free play to reach my coat or trouser pockets. He didn’t bother to search me. Probably he surmised, rightly, that there was nothing I was carrying that could trump a .38.

  He went back around the desk, opened the top drawer, and took out a very serious piece of ironmongery. The blade was only four or five inches long, but it was curiously shaped, with a slight thickening an inch below the point and an asymmetrical profile. The grip was of black polymerized rubber. This was a knife designed for lethal use in difficult circumstances: a weapon of very intimate and individual destruction.

  “You’ve come a long way from Mile End,” I said, for something to say.

  “Oh, yes,” Todd agreed, testing the edge of the blade on the ball of his thumb. “But it’s an easy commute. You’re about to find out how easy.”

  “You think I was stupid enough to walk in here alone?”

  “Well, you arrived alone, so yes. That’s exactly what I think. If I’m wrong, I may end up being seriously embarrassed. But let’s look on the bright side: I’m not wrong, and that’s not going to happen.” He ambled back around to my side of the desk, where he half sat, half leaned against it. The posture of a man settling in for the long haul. “So who are you working for?” he asked.

  I wasn’t interested in misdirection or strategy. I just wanted to find an answer that would keep me from getting carved up for as long as possible. The longer I stalled, the better the chance that something might come up that I could use against Todd. Okay, I was clutching at straws. I knew how bad the situation was, but hope—even pathetic, bargain-basement hope—springs eternal.

  “A woman named Janine Hunter,” I said. “Her old man’s up on a murder charge, and she—”

  The tip of the knife dipped, flicked across my cheek. Something warm and wet spilled down over my face, and I was tasting my own blood.

  “Janine,” Todd said. “Yes. We know about Janine.” He sounded so detached, I thought he might be on the verge of wandering away and finding something better to do with his time. “She works reasonably well as a cover story. Full marks for effort there. But what I want to know, obviously, is who told you about us. About Mount Grace, and Lionel Palance, and the whole operation. The way we come back. We saw it happen with Gittings, and then we saw it again with you. A little bit of fumbling around for effect, and then you go right to where the answers are. Because someone’s driving from the backseat. That’s the name I need, Mr. Castor. Confession is going to be good for your soul. And for—let’s say—your left eye.” To add emphasis to the words, he held the knife in front of my eyes and showed me my own blood on the blade. “Then your right, after a very short interval for reflection.”

  So the truth wouldn’t do, I thought. I’d have to fall back on bullshit. “I don’t know his name,” I said. “We only talked over the phone.”

  “Then how did he pay you? I’ve checked your bank account. There’s even less action going on there than in your love life. So there must have been a meeting. Describe him for me.”

  It’s meant to be harder to lie to someone if you’re making eye contact with him. I made myself stare Todd straight in the face, so he didn’t run away with any ideas about my reliability as an informant.

  “He’ll kill me,” I said.

  Todd shook his head. “No,” he reassured me. “He won’t. I’ll kill you as soon as I’ve got all the details straight. So don’t worry about him. Worry about me and about how messy this will get if you start being coy. What does he look like, our man? Details. As many as you can give me.”

  I bowed my head as if I was giving in to the inevitable. “Tall,” I said. “Taller than me. About my age, maybe a little older. Wore a suit even more expensive than yours. Had a beard. Not full—trimmed. A guy who cares about his appearance.”

  “Eyes?”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  “Hair?”

  “Blond.”

  I could see only the lower half of Todd’s body from this position, but even so, he couldn’t mask a slight stiffening in his posture—a coming to attention. Either he hadn’t been expecting that, or it had confirmed his worst fears.

  “Build?” he said. He was trying to sound as bored and disengaged as he w
as before, but it rang false now. Interesting. It would be nice to live long enough to find out what that meant.

  “He was heavyset,” I said. “A bit of a brawler. But an upper-class brawler, obviously. None of your street trash.”

  “Look at me,” Todd snapped. I raised my head again. Todd pointed the knife at my left eye. “I was there when you—” he started to say, but then he obviously had second thoughts. “Accent?” he demanded brusquely.

  “Like yours. Cultured, you know, but only the one coat of paint. Something else showing through.”

  “Is that right?” He smiled the way a shark smiles. “You saw through me, did you, Castor? Right, right. You’re way too sharp for the likes of me.”

  The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone: check. Ear: check.

  “What did you call him?” he asked in the same conversational tone. “This cultured prizefighter?”

  My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. “Louie,” I said, thinking of Louis Cyphre in the movie Angel Heart. What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay, he’ll show a little more class. “Louie… Rourke.”

  “And how did he contact you?”

  I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for me yet. “I told you—by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous, but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle. The money would be good—really good—and he’d give me all the information I needed to pull it off safely.”