Dead Men's Boots (7 page)

Pen looked distressed. “But, Your Honor—” she interjected.

The magistrate raised a hand to forestall her. “I’m sympathetic to your position, Miss Bruckner. You clearly believe that
you have Rafael Ditko’s best interests at heart. But power of attorney would give you very wide-ranging rights over his estate
and over any future decisions about his treatment. The safeguards have to be there, and they have to be observed. I’m sorry.
But for what it’s worth, I think you have a strong case. You should get yourself proper representation and do whatever it
takes to prepare a full legal argument. My judgment, in the meantime, will focus on the makeup of the review panel.”

He stood up, taking the clerk by surprise so that his “All rise” sounded a little panicked.

The magistrate gathered up his papers. “These proceedings are adjourned for three days,” he said, “and will resume on Thursday,
in the afternoon session. Make a note, Mr. Farrier, if you please.”

He swept out of the room without a backward glance.

Jenna-Jane put on her jacket while Pen stood there looking like she’d lost a pound and found a plague sore. I knew what was
going through her mind: With the power-of-attorney ploy kicked into the long grass, we had to shoot down Jenna-Jane’s stooges
on the review panel or the whole thing would go through on the nod. On the other hand, the Honorable Mr. Runcie—pompous and
self-satisfied though he definitely was—struck me as being nobody’s fool. I still felt like we were in with a chance.

There were exits on both sides of the courtroom, so it had to be deliberate that Jenna-Jane took the longer route and paused
in front of Pen on her way out. “I’m so sorry, Pamela,” she said, looking limpidly sincere. “I want you to know that if Rafi
is given into my care, all of the resources of the unit will be brought to bear on him. If it’s possible to make him well
again, we’ll do it.”

Pen stared at her in stunned silence for a moment. Then she drew back her arm in a staccato movement, fist clenched. But I
was already moving, and I stepped in before she could bring it forward again, sliding between the two of them with my back
to Pen. Felix Castor, human shield.

“Jenna-Jane,” I said, “you’re a sight for sore eyes. Actually, let me rephrase that. My eyes are scabbing over just from looking
at you. I’m carrying a voice recorder, so why don’t you stop prejudicing your case and go play with your ECT machines?”

“Felix.” Jenna-Jane shook her head with mock exasperation. “You’re determined to hate me, but I have only respect and admiration
for you. I’m hoping to welcome you back on board someday. There’s going to be a war, and I want you on my side. I’m determined
on it. Perhaps your friend Rafi might actually be the bridge that brings us together.”

“You mean you’re going to lay him down on the ground and trample on him?” I said. “Tell it to the court.”

She raised her hands in surrender and walked on. I turned to Pen, who was trembling like a tuning fork. “Well, that went as
well as could be expected,” I said.

“Fuck off, Fix,” Pen answered, her eyes welling up with tears and instantly overflowing. “Fuck off and don’t talk to me.”

She turned her back and stalked away along the seats, tripping at one point over somebody’s briefcase and then kicking it
out of her way as she righted herself. It wasn’t a dramatic exit, but it did the job.

What’s that old Groucho Marx line? No, never mind: “I’ve got plenty of enemies. But if they ever start to thin out, most of
my friends are right there in the wings ready to audition.”

There’s going to be a war.
Jenna-Jane Mulbridge actually believes that shit, and she isn’t the only one.

The dead rose again only because they were running ahead of the demons, the theory went, and now the demons had started to
appear. There was a gaping hole in the walls of Creation: Hell was throwing its legions into the breach, and so far our side
not only didn’t have an army, it didn’t even have a poster with a pointing finger on it.

The first and greatest of the exorcists, Peckham Steiner, had believed, too, and toward the end of his life, he’d devoted
his personal fortune to the building of defenses that would give the living a fighting chance in that war when it was finally
declared: the Thames Collective, a barracks for ghostbreakers on running water, where the dead and the damned couldn’t walk;
the safe houses, protected by ramparts of water, earth, and air, which I’d assumed were an urban legend until I’d actually
seen one and figured out how it worked; a dozen wacky schemes full of customized craziness in every flavor you can think of.
It was classic paranoid stuff, but at this point in my life, I was finding it a lot harder to laugh it off.

If there was a war coming, then Rafi Ditko was conquered territory. Playing around with black magic, he’d opened up a door
to hell inside his own soul, and something—a big, bad bastard of a something that called itself Asmodeus—had stepped through.
Now Rafi was locked up in a ten-by-ten cell in a mental hospital, because the law hadn’t caught up with the facts yet, and
the only diagnosis that fitted his symptoms was schizophrenia. And the cell was lined with silver because—law or no law—you
had to do what worked. Silver weakened Asmodeus and kept him from asserting full control over Rafi most of the time. The tunes
I played to him had the same effect, pushing the demon down further into Rafi’s hindbrain and giving his conscious mind a
bit more wriggle room.

Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. After answering a panicked
phone call from his girlfriend, Ginny, I found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but
this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that
Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.

And then a few months ago, when I’d had the chance to sever the connection permanently, I’d backed off because the price—letting
Asmodeus loose on earth—had seemed too high. I still think I was right, but I’d never been able to explain it so that Pen
understood. Actually, I’d never managed to get more than two words out before she either decked me or walked away.

Pen—Pamela Elisa Bruckner—is Rafi’s ex-lover and my ex-landlady. Ex-friend. Ex- a whole lot of other things, one way and another.
And what made relations between us even more strained was that this whole business at the Stanger kept throwing us together.
The Stanger’s director, Webb, had been trying to divest himself of Rafi ever since an incident about six months before in
which the demon inside him had cut loose and almost killed two nurses. Now he’d formed an unholy alliance with Jenna-Jane
to get rid of him, effectively gifting him to the MOU at Paddington. And the MOU was a concentration camp for the undead,
where Jenna-Jane talked about clinical care and pastoral responsibility while she performed experiments on her helpless charges
that were increasingly sadistic and extreme. She was desperate to get her hands on Rafi because her menagerie—replete with
ghosts and zombies and werewolves and one poor bastard who thought he was a vampire—didn’t include a demon yet. So Pen and
I had to work together to clog Jenna-Jane’s works with spanners, whether we liked it or not.

Meanwhile, the war—if it was a war—was still in the “cold” phase. Maybe that’s only to be expected when the enemy is the dead.

I’d had more than enough of the legal profession to last me for one day, but a promise is a promise, even if your arm is halfway
up your back while you’re giving it. I could have called, but I needed to pick up some silver amalgam from a dental supplier
in Manor House, so Stoke Newington was almost on my way.

The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay turned out to be in a converted Victorian court built in chocolate-colored brick, on
the corner of a slightly drab row of terraces from a later era. There were window boxes on either side of the door, painted
bright blue, but they contained nothing except bare soil. No flowers at this time of year.

The front door was pretty bare, too—no wards, no sigils, no come-nots or stay-nots. Maybe the evil dead avoided lawyers out
of professional courtesy, like sharks are supposed to do. I walked in off the street and found myself in a small reception
area that, judging from its modest dimensions, must originally have been the front hall of a house. A wide, elbowed staircase
took up a good half of the available space, and what was left was dominated by a large, venerable-looking photocopier. The
inspection covers had been removed from the machine and were stacked up against the wall. An enormously fat, enormously pale
bald man was on his knees in front of it, one hand thrust into its innards up to the elbow, looking like a vet trying to assist
with a difficult birth. He glanced up at me as I entered, and then he kept on staring as if trying to place the face. He had
a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and his half-open mouth hung down at the corners like a melting clock in a painting by Salvador
Dalí. A young brunette sitting at the reception desk under the stairs watched him work with more attention than a busted photocopier
seemed to merit. Maybe it was a slow day.

“I’m here to speak to Mr. Todd,” I said to the brunette, as she pulled her attention away from the exhibition of mechanical
midwifery. “I called earlier. Felix Castor.”

She ran her finger down the very full columns of a double-width appointment book. “Felix Castor,” she confirmed. “Yes. Please
take a seat.”

There were several, so I took the one farthest away from Mr. Fix-it, picked up yesterday’s
Times
, and started to flick through it as the receptionist called upstairs. I glanced across at the fat man once, out of the corner
of my eye. He was still on his knees and still looking at me, although when I caught him at it, he dropped his gaze to the
ground with a slight grimace and went back to the job.

“Any luck, Leonard?” the receptionist asked.

The man shook his head glumly. “There’s no jam,” he said in a higher voice than I would have expected, a voice that had a
slight fluting quality to it, as though the big man had swallowed that weird little device that gives Mr. Punch his voice.
“I think it’s one of the rollers come off its bracket.” He leaned forward and reached into the machine—with both arms this
time. It shifted on its base and creaked ominously.

“Mr. Castor.” I looked up. Todd was coming down the stairs, hand outstretched. He had on a different suit—mid-blue instead
of gray, with a subtle dogtooth. Maybe he had one for every day of the week. I stood, and we shook.

Shaking hands is always a little jump into the unknown for me. The same morbid sensitivity that makes me good at sensing the
presence of the dead sometimes allows me to pick up superficial psychic impressions through skin-to-skin contact. Nothing
this time, though, or at least nothing revealing. Maynard Todd exuded only a cool aura of self-possession as immaculate as
his tailoring.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. Then he looked past me, and his expression shifted into a slightly perplexed frown. “Uh—Leonard,
are you sure you know what you’re doing there?”

“Yes,” Leonard grunted tersely.

I could see Todd thinking about taking the discussion a stage further, and then I could see him giving up on the idea. He
turned to the receptionist instead. “Carol,” he said, “call the service number.”

“Yes, Mr. Todd.”

“I can fix it,” said Leonard, not looking around.

“Come on upstairs,” Todd said to me, ignoring Leonard’s answer. “You want some tea or coffee?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and followed him back up the wide staircase. When we turned around the elbow of the stairs, Leonard was
still on his knees, intent on his veterinary duties.

“John Gittings,” Todd said, glancing back down at me as we walked. “That’s what you called about, right?”

“Right,” I agreed.

“And I saw you at the funeral.”

“Right again.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I thought so. You were the one who stepped in when the natives were getting restless. Thanks for that.”