Dead Men's Boots (18 page)

Voices came toward me across a fractal landscape of synesthetically throbbing shadow. They were raised in argument.

Todd telling Juliet that this was a private ceremony and she couldn’t just walk in off the street and interrupt it.

Juliet telling Todd in a calm and neutral tone that if he didn’t step way back out of her face, he was likely to lose some
internal organ that he couldn’t do without. No more from Todd after that.

The foxy priest asking if everyone would please, please sit down again so the cremation could continue. Juliet telling him
that he could go ahead and burn whomever he liked, she hadn’t come along to watch.

Carla asking Juliet who in the hell she was, and Juliet saying it was funny she should ask.

I must have been out for all of ten seconds. Ten seconds was more than enough, though, if Juliet was in a sour mood. It was
lucky for all of us—and probably for Todd most of all—that she’d gotten out of the right side of Susan Book’s bed this morning.

I was lying on the ground, though, and that was a bad sign. If she’d put me down to free up her hands, things could be about
to escalate. I started to sit up, my stomach lurching slightly as gravity sloshed around me like cooling soup.

“Fix, are you all right?” Carla knelt beside me and supported me as I tried to get my upper body vertical.

“I’m fine, Carla,” I said, and it was true that the blood-red haze was fading out to the corners of my eyes. I could think
again without feeling as though my brain were about to explode out of my ears like Silly String. It was obvious I could think,
because I was doing it: I was thinking about Juliet’s legs, which were on a level with my face. Juliet’s legs are long and
shapely, and they deserve are a lot of very serious thought—especially when, as now, they were encased in tight black leather
pants and stiletto-heeled boots. But it wouldn’t help restore dignity to the proceedings if I started howling like a wolf.

I stood up, taking in the rest of her outfit only in peripheral vision. More blacks—her favorite color, and she goes for every
possible shade of it. Her arms and shoulders were bare because her shirt was really only a vest, made out of something almost
diaphanous that allowed you to guess at the shape of the body underneath it. Sometimes, with Juliet, even peripheral vision
was too much.

Todd was taking her in stride, which was an impressive feat. Her threat to eviscerate him had made him stop talking, but he
was staring at her with a cold composure that I still haven’t managed to master. Maybe lawyers are wired differently from
the rest of us.

“Mr. Castor,” he said, “is this a friend of yours?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Juliet, this is Carla Gittings, John’s widow. And Maynard Todd. John’s solicitor. Both of you, Juliet Salazar,
my—associate.”

She gave each of them a glance that you could only call minimal. “You left a message with Sue,” she said to me. “Something
you wanted to ask me about.”

“Yeah, but—” I was about to ask how she’d found me here, but I realized before I got the question out that it was like asking
a dog how it had found a bone it had once buried. Juliet was a predator, and she had my scent—she could find me anytime, anywhere,
without the benefit of my number, my address, or my permission. “I meant… afterward,” I finished lamely, conscious of the
little priest looking at me with bristling resentment. “Could you wait for me outside? I’ll just be another ten minutes or
so.”

Juliet considered, then nodded. “Ten minutes,” she agreed, and she turned and walked out without another word. Again, Juliet
walking out stayed in your mind for a long time after you’d seen it, but I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that I’m
obsessive in any way: It’s a side effect of what she is, that’s all. I tore my eyes away, apologized to Carla, and discovered
with wry amusement that she was still staring at Juliet’s departing back.

The bride forgets it is her marriage morn;

The bridegroom too forgets as I go by.

But this wasn’t a wedding, it was a funeral, and I’d disrupted it more than enough. We went back to our seats. I looked across
at the coffin, and listened, too—listened on the frequencies that the living don’t use all that much. Nothing. The dead still
kept up their cricket-chirping from the garden of remembrance, but from John, there wasn’t so much as a tinker’s fart. I had
my answer now, at any rate: John’s vengeful ghost had anchored itself in his flesh again and come along with us for the ride.
But if I’d been hoping that falling in with his plans for the afterlife would sweeten his disposition, it looked as though
I’d been mistaken.

On the credit side, that last attack, if it was an attack, had spent him. As the priest pressed the switch, John Gittings
rolled in his sustainable hardwood casket through the furnace doors into eternity without valediction. What happened next
would be a combination of the banal and the unknowable. His body would burn; the rest of him would start out on a different
journey, and there were no maps or roadside services. I was obscurely sorry that my last goodbye to him had taken the form
of a psychic wrestling match. Even sorrier, maybe, that he’d had me on the ropes.

When it was all over, I asked Carla if she’d be okay going back without me. She was easy on that score, because she’d already
decided to cut loose and take a cab. She found a little of Todd’s company went a long way, and it didn’t help at all to know
that he was going out of his way to be friendly. From her point of view, he’d still played a major part in the nightmare of
the last few days, and he stuck in her craw no matter what.

I gave her a hug, promised to be back in touch the next day to see how she was, and headed for the door. Todd ran an intercept,
and I stopped because otherwise I’d have had to trample him. He gave me a firm handshake and a hard, speculative glance.

“Thanks for all your help, Mr. Castor,” he said.

“My pleasure.”

“You feeling okay now?”

“I’m fine.”

“Nervous condition?”

“Something like that.” I pushed on past him. I liked the man well enough, but I wasn’t interested in talking about it right
then.

Juliet was leaning against the wall in between the Lion of Saint Mark and the Eagle of Saint John, looking like the odd one
out in a police lineup. She checked her watch meaningfully as I appeared. It was kind of cute. It wasn’t like she gives a
damn about time in the days, hours, and minutes sense, but it was exactly the sort of human mannerism that fascinated her—and
watching her reproducing it was like hearing someone talk in a sexy foreign accent.

“Pushed for time?” I asked.

“I’ve got other places to be, yes,” she confirmed, kicking off from the wall and falling in beside me. “I came all the way
over here because Sue said you sounded worried. She thought it might be something urgent. If it’s not, just tell me. I’ll
go back to where I belong, and you can send me a letter.”

“Where you belong?” I raised an eyebrow. That’s something of a loaded proposition when you’re an earthbound demon.

“You know what I mean.”

We walked down the steps and out into bright, clear winter sunlight. The clouds had rolled away while we were inside, and
the day had taken on an entirely different cast. I welcomed it with something like relief.

“It’s about a crime scene you read for Gary Coldwood,” I said as we walked down the curved drive back toward the street. Silence
from the gardens. The dead were in communion, maybe welcoming a newbie into their hallowed ranks.

“Alastair Barnard,” Juliet said.

“Lucky guess.”

“Gary called me. He said you were taking an interest in the case, and he reminded me that I’d signed a confidentiality agreement
with the Met when I took their retainer.”

“Good money?”

“You did it for three years, Castor. I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

“So he told you not to talk to me?”

“Not in so many words. But he’s concerned about doing things by the book. He has a past association with you, and you’ve taken
on a commission from somebody—the accused man’s wife?—who has a real interest in sabotaging his case. He doesn’t want to make
life difficult for you, but he doesn’t trust you overmuch.”

I laughed at that. “He’s right not to,” I admitted. “But I like the delicate nuances there. He’s saying that he
could
make life hard for me if he wanted to.”

Juliet shrugged. “He’s a policeman.”

“Say ‘cop,’” I suggested.

“Why?”

“Just say it. For me.”

“All right. He’s a cop.”

“Better. It’s like looking at your watch when you want to say you’re in a hurry. It sounds more authentic.”

She shot me a sardonic glance. “Thank you, Castor.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

We came out through the gates onto the street, the noise from the building site making further talk impossible for a few moments.
As we turned right and back up toward the main drag, a very tall and very lean man in a full-length tan Driza-Bone coat walked
right in between us. Juliet kept on going, but I swerved to avoid a collision and was struck by the guy’s pungent smell, which
sat oddly with the way he looked and walked.

I went on a few more steps, then stopped dead. Something about both the smell and the circumstances triggered a small avalanche
in my memory: the tramp who’d accosted me on the street outside Todd’s office. He’d looked very different, but he had the
same rancid sweat-and-sickness stink about him. There couldn’t be two smells that bad in the world: They’d have to meet and
fight it out to the death.

I turned and looked back, but the guy was already out of sight, which was interesting, because the only place he could have
gone was in through the crematorium gates. As Juliet stared at me, bewildered, I sprinted back the way we’d come, rounded
the nearer gatepost, and stared up the long, clear drive. There was no one in sight.

“Did you leave something behind?” Juliet asked.

I shook my head as I went back to join her. “Nothing I need right now,” I said. “It’ll keep. Okay, you already did pretending
that you’re worried about the time. You want to go pretend you need to eat?”

She nodded. “Certainly.” She put her hand in her pocket and drew it out with something small and dark glinting between her
fingers. She pressed it with her thumb, and the car that was standing beside her on the pavement—a very jaunty-looking little
number that was wasp yellow and sleek and elongated at the front end in a way that suggested a great amount of discreetly
stabled horsepower—made a self-satisfied warbling sound. Juliet opened the door. “Get in,” she said.

I stared incredulously at this transport of delight. I’m not a car fetishist by any means, but I know something way out of
my price range when I see it. The badge on the hood bore the distinctive trident logo of Maserati—a sweet little touch for
a demon’s wheels. It had a very low center of gravity, the sculpted cowling underneath the front bumper almost touching the
road. It had the look of a car that might have Gransport in its name, and maybe Spyder, too.

“Is there something wrong, Castor?” Juliet asked with an edge of impatience.

“No,” I assured her. “No, I’m fine. It’s just—you can
drive
now?”

“Obviously. I’ve been living among human beings for over a year. I’m not intimidated by your technologies.”

“And—you drive
this
?”

“It was a gift,” Juliet said simply, sliding in behind the wheel with the sinuous grace of a cat curling up to sleep.

I didn’t ask. But don’t think I didn’t want to know.

    
Nine

I
T’S PROBABLY NOT A GREAT IDEA TO KID JULIET ABOUT her diet, considering I once came close to being an item on it. And what
I said about pretending that she needs to eat wasn’t even strictly accurate, because she can take a certain amount of nourishment
and even pleasure from things that you and I would call food. It’s just that when you strip away all the niceties and get
down to basics, the fuel that drives her best—the stuff she’s made to run on—is the flesh and blood and souls of sexually
aroused men. Her jaw-droppingly good looks are an adaptive mechanism along the lines of the sweet liquid in the calyx of a
pitcher plant that tempts bees and wasps with its scent and then digests them when they fall into it.

Of course, knowing that doesn’t make me want her any less. Most of the time, it’s hard not to feel that being devoured in
the middle of coitus would be a price worth paying for Juliet’s undivided attention. But it’s no damn good. Men make her hungry
in all the wrong ways. Now she’s discovered a way to keep her sex life and her nutritional needs apart, and she says she’s
sticking to it.

“How’s Susan?” I asked her, probing the wound—mine, obviously, not hers—as she cut her twelve-ounce steak into two pieces
and filled her mouth with one of them. The trip here had been rough going—Juliet drove with a focused aggression that made
most road-rage incidents seem like brief, contemplative interludes, and she punished the sleek, overpowered sports car as
though it had done her some terrible harm—but it didn’t seem to have dented her appetite at all. We’d driven more or less
at random, it seemed to me, but always bearing west until we finally fetched up in the ragged borders of King’s Cross, where
we stopped at a bistro called something like Fontaine’s or Fontanelle’s or something equally Euro-gastric. I’d gone for pasta;
Juliet, as usual, was interested only in large slabs of animal flesh.