Dead Men's Boots (11 page)

“You believe me,” Jan said with a slight tremor in her voice.

I gave a slight grimace. I really didn’t want to lead her on when I knew so little about what I was getting into. “I’m prepared
to believe—for the sake of argument—that there was someone else in that room.” I finished the pint anyway, to fortify me against
the night chill. “And if the someone else turns out to have been the ghost of an American serial killer, then we’re in business.”

Walking home, I got a repeat of the prickling premonitions—the sense of being watched that had dogged me all the way back
from Stoke Newington. But this time I was out in the open on a busy street. I looked around. Plenty of people walking by,
plenty of traffic passing on the road. The feeling was oddly directionless, and there was no way to narrow it down. Reluctantly,
I gave it up. I’d have to pick a better time and a better place.

The Breathers’ van was still parked in the same place: two men sitting in it now, both older than the kid who’d been minding
the shop earlier but not by much. No prickle or itch or tingling spider sense: Whatever I was feeling, whatever was watching
me, it had nothing to do with these tosspots. I shot them a wave as I walked past, which they stoically ignored. I was almost
sorry they didn’t get out and try for a rumble. I would have welcomed the release of tension.

Back at the flat, I dumped my coat over the back of a chair, poured myself a whiskey, and then left it to stand while I picked
out some bluesy chords on my whistle.

The couple next door were no longer coupling, which was good news. But though I’d missed the climax, I hadn’t missed the epilogue,
which as usual was taking the form of a stand-up fight. Sex and violence, always in the same order: They seemed to have a
stripped-down, back-to-basics sort of lifestyle.

I gave up on the music practice after ten minutes or so because the bellowed profanities and the crash of breakables breaking
were throwing me off tempo. I put on one of Ropey’s death-metal CDs instead, not because I like Internal Bleeding—with or
without the capital letters—but out of sheer self-defense.

But the noises of destruction put me in mind of John Gittings’s ghost, and my mood wobbled again. Thinking about John brought
the pocket watch to mind. I went across to my coat and fished it out to check that it was okay. It was a beautiful thing,
all right; you could see even through the black oxidation stains that the filigree work on the silver—a motif of fleurs-de-lys—was
very fine. By a natural extension, I decided to wind it and see if it still worked. That meant taking it out of the outer
case, since with a Savonnette watch, you can’t always get enough of a purchase on the winding stem with the watch nestled
inside its two separate shells.

As I took the watch out of the case, a small piece of paper fell to the floor. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand.
It was the kind of very light, thin blue paper people used for airmail before there was e-mail. It had handwriting on it in
a flowing, cursive script, and it had been folded over on itself several times.

I opened it out, three folds, four, five. When I had it fully open, I found that it was a complete page from a letter—from
the middle of a letter, because there was no superscription and it started in midsentence. I read it with growing and slightly
uneasy fascination.

could get along a bit faster, but its not a good idea to take risks. If they know youve got an idea about whats really happening,
theyll take you out one way or another.

Youll just get the one pass, and its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take backup; take lots
of backup, and warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target. It ends with you dead or them dead, that’s
the only way.

Dont make the mistake of reconasance: the wall isnt a wall, if you take my point. Not really. They can get out further than
that, so they could attack you even when youre a long way out and you think theres nobody anywere near you.

If you go in through the building, you better expect there’ll be heavy security. That may seem like the least of your problems
but dont underestimate it. Remember you can still threaten them. Physically, I mean. If you pull your foot back to kick, a
man is going to cover his balls. I know that sounds crude, but its the only

And that was it—or almost. In the margin, opposite the phrase “Take backup,” someone had scribbled two more words in red biro.

Felix Castor.

I was still staring blankly at those two words when the phone rang. Actually, I became aware that it was ringing—the sound
had been going on for some time underneath Internal Bleeding’s relentless bass beat and the equally unremitting noises of
my neighbors dismantling their flat. Not my mobile; Ropey’s phone. I picked up and said hello by reflex, even though I couldn’t
remember ever giving the number to anyone.

“Mr. Castor?” A man’s voice, slightly breathless and thin—not a voice I recognized.

“Yes.”

“Interurban Couriers. Can you come down and sign for a package?”

“A package?” I echoed, slightly false-footed. “Who from?”

A short pause. “Well, the address is E14, but there’s no name.”

The only guy I knew out that way was Nicky Heath, a data rat who sometimes ran searches for me; but he wasn’t working on anything
for me right then, and he wouldn’t be likely to use a regular courier service. Being both paranoid and dead, he had his own
specialized ways of working.

“Mr. Castor?”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be right down.”

I got up and went to the front door of the flat, unlocked it, and stepped into the corridor. A few steps brought me to the
lifts. I pressed the buttons until I found the one that was currently working—the council tenant’s equivalent of the “find
the lady” game. The lift was on the fifth floor, only three floors below me, but instead of going up, it went down. Someone
else must have pressed the button at the same time.

As I waited for it to make its stately way back up the stack, I listened—since there wasn’t any other choice—to the shouting
and swearing echoing from farther up the corridor. It amazed me that the other residents on this floor weren’t poking their
heads out to add their own shouts of protest to the overall row. Judging by their prurient interest in my comings and goings,
it couldn’t be out of an exaggerated regard for other people’s privacy.

Something snapped in me at long last, and I walked back up the corridor to give my psychopathic neighbors’ door a dyspeptic
kick. “Turn it in, for Christ’s sake,” I shouted. “If you want to kill each other, use poison or something.”

A door opened at my back, and I turned to find the woman in number 83 glaring at me.

“Noise was getting to me,” I said by way of explanation. She just went on glaring. “Sorry,” I added. She slammed her door
shut in my face. While I was still staring at the
NO CIRCULARS
sign, I heard a ping from back the way I’d come, followed by a muffled thump: the lift warning bell and the sound of the
doors opening.

I jogged down the corridor, determined to catch the lift before it changed its mind. I stepped inside, found it empty, and
pressed G. Just as the doors started to close, I saw through the narrowing gap the front door of Ropey’s flat standing open.
In the five minutes that I was downstairs, the neighbors could have the TV, the stereo, and the three-piece suite. Irritably,
I hit
DOOR OPEN
with my free hand, and the doors froze, jerked, froze, with about a foot of clearance to spare.

But before the doors could make up their mind whether to close again or slide all the way open, the entire lift lurched, the
floor tilting violently. Taken by surprise, I staggered and almost lost my footing. From above me came a sound of rending
metal.

I had half a second to react. As the lift shuddered and lurched again, grinding against the wall of the shaft with a sickening
squeal, I fought the yawing motion, barely keeping my feet under me, and flung myself through the half-open doors back into
the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me. I snapped my head around to look behind me and saw the lift drop like
several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft. Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the
threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was sheared off clean,
and my ankle was wrenched so agonizingly that I thought for a moment my foot had gone, too. I didn’t scream, exactly, but
my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch—I think we’re probably just talking semantics.

This time all the doors along the corridor opened, and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what the noise was about.
Well, all except one. My neighbors stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene
names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.

As I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: Well,
fuck,
that was close. But it was followed by another thought in a different register.

All right, you bastards, you called it.

Let’s dance.

    
Five

I
TOOK THE STAIRS THREE AT A TIME, LIMPING ONLY slightly, until the last flight, which I cleared in a couple of frenzied bunny
hops.

In the block’s front lobby, to the right of the door, was a full-size red fire extinguisher. The damn thing weighed a good
forty pounds. I hefted it in both hands, kicked the door open, and walked out onto the street.

The blue van was still there. I trudged around to the front of it, peered in. The light from a streetlamp shone full on the
glass, so all I could see was a couple of dim, more or less human shapes inside. But one of them, the one in the driver’s
seat, gave a visible start of surprise as he saw me hefting the fire extinguisher. Maybe in the dark he mistook it for a bright
red field mortar.

That was what it became a second later when I flung it at the van’s windscreen.

It didn’t go through—not quite—but it made a noise like a roc’s egg hitting a concrete floor, and the entire windscreen became
instantly opaque as the shatterproof glass gave up the ghost and sagged inward, transformed into a lattice of a million fingertip-size
fragments.

The driver’s and passenger’s doors flew open simultaneously, and the two men leaped out onto the street, howling with rage.
They were young and they were fast. When it came to handling themselves in a fight, though, their education had been sadly
neglected. The first guy to reach me, the one coming from the passenger side, threw a punch that he might as well have put
in the post with a second-class stamp. I sidestepped it and kicked him in the crotch. He folded in on his pain, his universe
shrinking to a few cubic inches of intimate agony.

By that time, the gent from the driver’s side had come to join us. He got my elbow in his face while he was still bringing
his guard up. Then I barged him and tripped him, landing heavily on top of him with my knee on his chest in case he had any
more fight left in him.

He didn’t. He made a noise like the last gasp from an untied party balloon, then opened and closed his mouth a few times without
managing to get out another sound.

I had my fist raised to deliver a knockout—which, with the assistance of the pavement, was virtually assured—but I hesitated.
These guys had folded so quickly, it was frankly embarrassing. In my mind’s eye, I’d had an image of Lou Beddows’s bat-wielding
thugs, which was why I’d gone in so hard and so fast. Belatedly, I began to wonder if this time I’d gotten the wrong end of
the baseball bat.

I reached into the guy’s corduroy jacket and searched the inside pockets, coming up with his wallet on the first pass. Flicking
it open, I found an NUS card in the name of Stephen Bass of University College, London. Wolves in sheep’s clothing? How hard
could it be to fake an NUS card?

A glance over my shoulder showed me that the first guy—the one whose sex life was likely to be theoretical for the next few
weeks—was still down. The one I was kneeling on was trying to speak again, but only the first syllable—“My—my—my—”—was making
it out as he gulped for air.