Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

“No, you do not have my permission. Like I said, you have to go. I’m sorry, it’s not because you’ve offended me in any way. I’m just very tired now, and I need to sleep. I hope you’ll take account of my age and do as I ask.”

  “Of course.” I stood up, and Juliet followed my lead. “Thanks for all your help, Miss Seaforth. And I’m sorry if we’ve trespassed on your time. We’ll let ourselves out.”

  Ruth watched us all the way to the door, not moving an inch. I opened the door and stood aside for Juliet to go first, but she waved me through and then didn’t follow. “I’ll be a moment,” she said.

  I turned and stared at her. “What?”

  “I’ll be a moment, Castor. Wait on the porch.” She took the door out of my hand and shut it in my face.

  I think it was all that talk about abusive men that made her so brusque—and as symbolic humiliations went, it was one I could walk away from without a permanent limp, so on the whole, I was cool with it. I sat on the porch swing and waited for Juliet to finish whatever business she had with Ruth that required my not being there.

  She came out about a quarter of an hour later, shot me a look in passing, and walked on down the steps back into the thick, encroaching undergrowth. I jumped to my feet, ran, and caught up with her.

  “Is it this way?” I asked, falling in beside her.

  She didn’t look in my direction or slow down. “Is what this way?”

  “Myriam’s grave.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Then?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  We retraced our steps in silence, back to our bloodied, bowed Cobalt, and I unlocked the doors. When we were inside, we sat in silence for a moment. Then, since Juliet didn’t speak, I started the car and got us out onto the road. There was no way we’d make it all the way back to Birmingham in this undead heap, but we could drive into Brokenshire and then make some calls, see where we had to go to drop it off, and pick ourselves up another ride for the homeward leg of the journey. Best pick another road, though. The one we’d come on was probably still blocked.

  Eighteen

  THE WAITRESS AT THE GOLDEN CAFÉ HAD CLEARLY TAKEN a fancy to Juliet. The fried-chicken platters she brought us were huge even by American standards, which meant that for a Brit like myself, with a delicate constitution, they were a little way short of a suicide note. I picked fastidiously while Juliet talked.

  “The blond man from out of town,” she said. “The one who killed Tyler Seaforth, the first brother.”

  “Yeah.” I ran the conversation through in my mind, placed the reference. “The guy in the ice-cream suit. What about him?”

  “He wasn’t just from out of town. He was from England. London, in fact. That’s why Ruth almost had a heart attack when she heard your accent.”

  That made a lot of sense, now I thought about it. I’d figured at the time that the mention of Myriam had made Ruth weak at the knees, but there couldn’t be many other reasons besides Myriam why strangers would come calling, so that hadn’t made a whole lot of sense. In a different way, though, this didn’t, either.

  “When she told that story,” I said, picking over the logic in my mind, “she didn’t give the impression that she was there when Tyler died. In fact, I’m pretty sure she said she was told about it afterward.”

  Juliet bit through a chicken leg, flesh and bone and all, and crunched down hard. She nodded, mouth full, but I had to wait for elaboration until she’d chewed and swallowed.

  “She wasn’t there,” she said. “But she met this man later. He’d been sent to kill Tyler by Myriam, that’s fairly obvious. Probably he arranged the other deaths, too—Lucas and the other two brothers. Ruth always knew she had a guardian angel, and she knew who it was. But there was no reason why Myriam couldn’t work through proxies.

  “The man came up to the farm on the day of Myriam’s execution, and he introduced himself. Under the circumstances, which I’m sure I don’t need to spell out for you, the fact that he’d helped to beat Tyler Seaforth to death wasn’t much of a barrier to polite conversation. Ruth was much more inclined to kiss his hands than to call the police.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “The name he gave her was Bergson.”

  I almost laughed. “I think that’s a pretty rarefied pun,” I said. “Bergson was a French philosopher back in the thirties. I think he had some idea about a universe of pure spirit. Kind of like Plato, only with a more outrageous accent.”

  “Ruth didn’t believe that was his real name. The point was that he told her—told her so she knew it was the truth—that he’d worked for Myriam or done favors for her in the past. And he said he was still working on her behalf. He insisted on that: All of this was for Myriam’s sake.

  “He gave Ruth the address and telephone number of the Illinois state penitentiary, and he told her everything she needed to know about claiming Myriam’s body. Ruth had an absolute legal right, he said—all she had to do was exercise it. The body should be brought to the farm, and she should refuse all offers of help with the burial. If anyone asked, she was to say that it was all taken care of. And as soon as she was alone—as soon as the circus of cops and journalists and death junkies was off the premises—she was to call him on a number he gave her.

  “Ruth had her doubts, but she also felt she had good reasons to trust this man. She argued it backward and forward with herself, but in the end, she did what she’d been told. She called him and told him when it was safe to come.

  “He drove out in a flatbed truck with two other men. They loaded the casket onto the truck and tied it down. They covered it with a tarpaulin. Then, just before they left, Ruth screwed up her courage and asked the blond man where they were taking her dead sister. He didn’t want to answer, but she burst into tears and begged him. She was going to be left alone, she told him. More alone than she’d ever been. She didn’t miss her father or her brothers in the slightest, but now Myriam was gone, and Ruth didn’t have anyone. The least he could do was tell her where he was taking her.

  “And in the end he did. ‘To the next life,’ he said.”

  I let a forkful of mashed potato drop back into the mountainous mass I’d scooped it from. “Fuck,” I said blankly. It wasn’t Oscar Wilde, but it expressed my feelings. “What are we talking about here? Gangsters raising gangsters from the dead? Why? Out of professional courtesy? And how could he promise that if he hadn’t done it before? It’s like some kind of fucking resurrectionist assembly line. Dead men pulling themselves up out of the grave by each other’s bootstraps.”

  “You may be exaggerating the scale of this,” Juliet told me coolly. “We still only know for sure about two cases. Kale and the man who was both Aaron Silver and then Les Lathwell.”

  She was right, but it didn’t make me feel much better. “The scary thing is that fingerprint,” I muttered, shoving my plate away still mostly full. “If they’ve found a way to cheat, Juliet—to steal the bodies of the living out from under them, the same way you and your brothers and sisters can—and if they can do it on the money, time after time…”

  “Two big ifs,” Juliet observed. I was barely listening. The same ones as before, John had said to me when I met him in my dream. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

  Shying away from that unpleasant thought, I found another one that had been niggling at me while she spoke. “Did Mr. X say why he was doing all this?” I asked. “I mean, we know from all the available evidence that he wasn’t sleeping with Myriam. He wouldn’t have woken up again. So was he trying to recruit her? Did he owe her a favor? What was in it for him?”

  Juliet impaled me on a cold stare. “Ruth thinks he loved Myriam. Passionately.”

  “Then why was he still alive?”

  “Perhaps he never raped her.”

  “Alastair Barnard never raped her, either,” I pointed out. “If anything, it was the other way around, but he’s still dead. And not because he was an abuser of women. He
was fucking gay.”

  “Married and gay.”

  “Juliet, this isn’t about sexual etiquette. It’s about recidivism. Kale is the worst kind of repeat offender: the kind who won’t stop even when you put twelve thousand volts through them.”

  “And is that still what you want to do, Castor? Stop her?”

  I blinked. “Is that a trick question? Yeah, of course I do.”

  “By exorcising her.”

  “Whatever it takes. I know it’s a lot bigger than that now, but exorcising her is still on the program.”

  “Not for me.”

  The hush that descended over the café had nothing to do with what Juliet had just said. It was one of those statistical blips, the pauses in a couple of dozen conversations all falling at the same point. But it gave her words additional momentum as they sucker-punched me in the gut. And it made me lower my own voice when I answered, as though everyone in the room were listening. “Say how what now?”

  Juliet twitched her shoulders in a chillingly offhand shrug. “Mallisham’s account of Kale’s life has made me see what she’s doing in a different light. She only murders men. She was destroyed by men, and now she gives some of the pain back. I sympathize. More. I find a certain elegance in it.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I don’t,” I said. “Where’s the elegance in a random murder spree spanning half a century? Getting your own back on the men who abused you is one thing. Carving your way through the whole male gender is another.”

  I could see from Juliet’s expression that this little speech hadn’t made the slightest dent in her. With an unpleasant going-down-in-a-lift feeling in my stomach, I saw where this was going. If Juliet enlisted in Myriam Kale’s cause, things could get messy. So messy I didn’t want to think about it.

  “What about your rep?” I asked her, changing tack. “You said it was a big thing to you to deliver as promised. Doug Hunter didn’t kill Barnard. We know that now. He was possessed.”

  “It was his hand that held the hammer.”

  “But not his mind that decided to. Like you said, you were paid to uncover the truth about what happened in that hotel room. Are you going to stop halfway because you’re suddenly a cheerleader for the real murderer? And what about the others, Mr. X and his friends? All the other fun-loving criminals who’ve been buried in coffins fitted with sliding doors? They’re all men, apart from Myriam. They may have been using her in some game of their own. They’ve certainly left her to carry the can for this latest killing.”

  Juliet had gone back to eating. She was listening to me, but I wasn’t having any impact. I was unnerved by the masklike impassivity in her face. Normally, Juliet didn’t bother to disguise her feelings, because her feelings came out like water from a high-pressure hose. Right there and then I couldn’t read her at all. And I had just the one shot left in my locker.

  “You think she’s happy?” I asked.

  Juliet set down the nub end of bone that was all that was left of her chicken leg. Her eyes pierced mine. “What?”

  “Kale. Do you think she’s happy? Because she didn’t look happy to me, staring out from behind Doug Hunter’s face. One prison inside another prison, that’s how I saw it. She looked like someone stuck in a bad dream that she couldn’t wake up from. And Jan said she used to hear Doug crying at night for hours—”

  “All right.” Juliet’s tone was cold, clipped. “So?”

  “So carry on working with me. Let’s at least find out what the fuck is really going on and where Myriam comes into it. Maybe find out what she really wants. What’s keeping her walking, and killing, and raping forty years after she fried. Then you can decide what you want to do.”

  I looked up to find the waitress standing at my shoulder with the menus. She stared at me with big, startled eyes. She must have heard most of that last speech.

  “Umm—you want any coffee or dessert?” she blurted. “Or should I just—?” She mimed turning around and walking away.

  “I think we’re good,” I said. “Thanks. Just the bill.”

  The waitress fled, and Juliet stood, moving with a slight stiffness that suggested she still wasn’t fully recovered from her earlier evisceration.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “But I take the point. Perhaps she isn’t happy. And perhaps that is my responsibility, at least partly, since I provided some of the evidence that Coldwood used to arrest her.”

  Jumping up myself, I caught her wrist. “Juliet, no,” I said, appalled. “I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not what Myriam needs at all. She’s trapped in a loop. She’s still getting revenge for things that were done to her half a century ago. You’re thinking of her as some kind of demon, but she’s not. She’s not like you. Alive or dead, she’s human, and for humans, there’s a law that always applies—action and reaction. What you do sticks to you and becomes a part of you. The more she kills, the more lost and fucked up she’s going to get.”

  “Let go of my hand, Castor.”

  “Then tell me you’re not going to go and bust Doug Hunter out of jail.”

  “I’ll do what I think is best.”

  She was still staring at me. I did my best to lock on to those midnight-black eyes without falling into them and collapsing in a heap on the floor.

  “I can’t let you,” I said simply. “Listen, when we met for the first time, when you seduced me and almost swallowed me whole, I was—imprinted. I heard you as a tune. I can’t forget that music now, because I hear it every fucking day, whether you’re with me or not. If you set Myriam Kale free, more people are going to die the way Barnard died, and it’s a squalid, horrible way to die. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll play you out, Juliet. I’ll do it. I’ll exorcise you.”

  She didn’t answer. For a moment we stood, my hand holding her wrist across the table, a frozen tableau.

  Then she snatched her hand free, brought it up and around almost faster than I could see it, and slapped me hard across the face.

  Actually, “hard” isn’t an adequate word. I felt the impact and then heard the sound. The impact was something like crashing through your windscreen at fifty and hitting a brick wall—except that since it was the wall rather than me that was moving, I went pinwheeling backward through the air. The sound was like a gunshot, sharp and clear and very, very loud.

  Nothing else was clear, though. All at once, for no very good reason that my dazed mind could grab hold of, I was on my back in the wreckage of someone else’s table, splinters of wood and porcelain still falling in slow motion through the still air, and a ringing in my ears like a million Munchkins celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch.

  Equally abruptly, I was yanked to my feet again, and Juliet was holding me one-handed up close to her own lithe, unyielding body. It was somewhere I often fantasized about being, but the agonizing pain in my back and shoulders and the vicelike grip of her fingers around my throat took an awful lot of the fun out of it.

  “You’ll have to bind me before you can break me,” she said. “Let’s see who’s quicker, Castor. Because I’ll hear the first note of that tune, however far away you are when you play it, and I’ll rip your throat out before you get to the second.”

  This time the silence all around us was real—everyone frozen in unnatural, off-balance postures as though terrified of attracting Juliet’s attention by a sound or a movement. I struggled to speak, managed to choke out a few words. “We—going Dutch—this time?”

  With a wince of disgust, she let me drop. My legs wouldn’t hold me, so I fell in a heap on the floor. Through eyes canted at ninety degrees to the vertical, I saw her turn and stalk out of the café. After a few seconds more of enjoying the luxury of breathing, I rolled over onto hands and knees and picked myself up.

  Nobody approached me. They just watched expectantly with the rapt anticipation of people who’d just called the cops and were keen to see what happened when they arrived. I threw down a couple of twenties for the meal, nodded my thanks to the wai
tress, and limped out the door.

  The Cobalt made it all the way back to Birmingham, raising sparks from the asphalt for the last ten miles or so. I was amazed not to be pulled over on the way, but by the time I climbed out of the car in the airport car park, I’d realized why that was. Juliet sucked in people’s gazes and held them so completely that nobody in the Golden Café had registered me at all. When the cops finally arrived and took statements, I was willing to bet, most of the descriptions would include some variation on “just this guy.”

  There was paperwork to be filled out on the car, but surprisingly few recriminations. I invented a story about a collision with a concrete bollard. The clerk at the counter transcribed it faithfully and made me sign the form. There was an excess of a hundred dollars that I paid without a murmur. It seemed like the least I could do.

  Then I was sitting in the departure lounge again, waiting for the next plane to Heathrow while the huge bruise on the right side of my face spread and deepened. I found myself wondering how Juliet was going to get back. I was pretty damn sure she wouldn’t leave the ground, but I had no idea what she’d do instead. Or whether it would be faster or slower than a transatlantic flight.

  By the time I landed at Heathrow, I was thinking straight again, so the first thing I did was to get to a phone and make the call I should have made from the States. It didn’t do me a lot of good, though—at Pentonville, the highest I could get up the chain of command was the night duty officer, and something in his tone told me that he wasn’t taking me seriously.

  “A woman?” he kept on repeating every time I let him get a word in edgeways.

  “No,” I repeated with the brittle, strained patience you keep in reserve until you need it to deal with morons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. “She looks like a woman. But she’s actually a demon. A succubus.”

  “A demon. Right.” I was getting the same strained patience bouncing right back at me, and I wasn’t enjoying it much. “And who’s she coming to visit again?”