Dead Men's Boots (45 page)

“So what did you do?” I asked.

He looked at me as though I’d just done an impersonation of a duck singing the national anthem. “I didn’t do anything,” he
said with an incredulous emphasis. “I still haven’t done anything. I called Gittings to warn him off, but he was already dead
by then. If I needed an illustration of the shit I was potentially in, there it was. These people can kill you and make it
look—not even like an accident, like something you did to yourself. I kept my mouth shut and dug in.”

He sighed. “And I made sure never to go into the crematorium itself from that moment on. I’ve been on the grounds, as you
saw. I’ve unlocked the doors and locked them up again. But I haven’t stepped inside the place itself, and I don’t intend to.
If that sounds irrational, you’ll have to excuse me.”

I said nothing. I was thinking of Doug Hunter and what he’d said when we met about his sprained ankle. That was how they’d
gotten him. He’d sprained his ankle, and because there wasn’t a first-aid kit, he’d gone into “the church next door.” And
when he’d came out, he’d been carrying a beast on his back that turned out to be Myriam Kale. I’d noticed the building site
on Ropery Street. How could I not have made the connection?

No. Covington’s precautions sounded anything but irrational. If anything, he was still taking unwarranted risks walking up
to the door of the goddamn place.

Abruptly, Covington looked at his watch. “Listen, I have to go and check on Lionel,” he said. “Kim will have him cleaned up
now, and she’ll probably be putting him to bed. We have a routine, and he’ll sleep better if he sees me. You can wait if you
want.”

“Can I come along with you?” I asked on an impulse.

There was a definite frosty pause.

“He hasn’t had anything to do with Mount Grace in over a decade,” the blond man said. “There’s nothing he can tell you.”

“There may be things I can tell without talking to him,” I countered.

Covington looked unconvinced. “He’s very frail. And he needs his sleep. I don’t want him upset any more tonight.”

“I won’t ask him any questions,” I promised. “Or even discuss any of this stuff while we’re with him.”

A brusque shrug. “All right. If you insist. Five minutes. Then we’ll leave so that Kim can settle him down. When I tap you
on the shoulder, we go, whether you’re ready or not.”

“Sure,” I agreed.

We walked along more miles of eight-lane corridor, up a staircase that wasn’t the one I’d seen in the front hall, and into
a bedroom that looked more like a hospital ward. Mostly, that was the bed, which was one of those electrically controlled
multiposition efforts for people with mobility problems. But I also noticed the pharmacopeia of pill packets and medicine
bottles on a night table next to the bed, the oxygen cylinder discreetly positioned along one wall, and the flotilla of wheelchairs
parked just inside the door: motorized and manual, folding and solid, solid steel and lightweight aluminum, something for
every occasion. In other respects, it resembled a child’s nursery. There were toys on the floor, including an ancient-looking
Hornby train set with a perfect circle of track, and a bookcase full of very big books with very brightly colored spines.

Kim—the nurse I’d seen earlier—was adjusting the bed as we walked in. Lionel Palance was lying back on the high-banked pillows,
breathing through a nebulizer that a male nurse held to his face. The old man’s gaze rolled over me without seeming to see
me, but his eyes focused on Covington and he smiled. Lionel’s lips moved and made a muffled noise that might have been a greeting.

“Hello, Lionel,” Covington said gently, sitting on the bed. “Taking your medicine. That’s what I like to see.”

The nurse took the nebulizer away and laid it down on the night table.

“Peter,” the old man said in his high, fragile voice. And then, “Taking—my medicine.”

Covington nodded, pantomiming approval. “Yeah, I saw. And Kim’s going to read to you until you go to sleep. The
Just So Stories,
yeah? You’re still on that one?”

“Noddy,”
Kim murmured. “We’re back to
Noddy.
”

Covington winced. “
Noddy’s
too young for him,” he said with an edge in his voice, as though they were parents disagreeing for the thousandth time about
a child they had ambitions for.

Kim wasn’t cowed. “But he likes it,” she said. “It comforts him.”

Covington raised his hands in surrender, I thought more because I was there than because he accepted the argument. “Anyway,”
he said, “you’re going to have your story, and you’re going to go to sleep, aren’t you? You’re going to be good now.”

“All right, Peter,” the old man agreed.

“Good night, Lionel. God bless. See you in the morning, please God.” He recited this quickly, as though it were a formula.

“Good night, Peter,” the old man fluted. “God bless. See you in the morning. Please God.”

Covington stood up and made to move away, but the old man was still looking at him, still trying to speak, although he’d temporarily
run out of breath. “We played hi—hide-and-seek.”

The big blond hunk turned around and looked down at his nominal employer, dwarfed by the ultra-technological bed as he was
by the ultra-luxurious house. Something in Covington’s face changed, and for a moment he looked as though he’d taken a punch
to the jaw. He blinked twice, the second longer than the first. When his eyes opened again, they were wet.

“Yeah,” he said with an effort. “We did, Lionel. We played.”

He walked out of the room quickly, without looking at me. I lingered, listening to the silence. Not really silence: Lionel
Palance’s breathing was hoarse and hesitant and clearly audible, and the two nurses were bustling off to one side of me, Kim
stacking the medications back in the right places on the table while the male nurse bundled up the old man’s soiled pajamas
and put them in a plastic laundry bin. Something beeped in a vaguely emergency-room tone, but I couldn’t see what or where
it was.

Not really silence, but then I wasn’t really listening, at least to any of that stuff. I was listening to Lionel—to the rhythm
of his soul and self, the music I’d play if I ever wanted to summon him or send him away.

It was very faint, but it was there. More to the point, it was right: The key and the tone and the chords and the pace and
the nuance all felt like they belonged there. He was himself, not a ghost riding flesh it had no claim to; not a demon playing
with a meat puppet. Just a frail old man living out his last days in a second childhood, surrounded by all the luxuries that
money could buy.

And yet he was part of all this, part of whatever was happening at Mount Grace. How could he not be when he was the owner
of the place? Covington had said that Palance hadn’t had anything to do with the crematorium for over a decade, but we were
looking at events that had played out for over a century, so a few years more or less were no more than a drop in the ocean.

I couldn’t question Palance, obviously, and it looked like I’d gotten all I was going to get from Covington. But I knew beyond
any doubt that when I finally got the full story of Mount Grace and the born-again killers, it would turn out to be Palance’s
story, too. And—less than a conviction, but a very strong feeling—it was going to be a story lacking a happily-ever-after
ending.

I backed quietly out of the room and rejoined Covington on the landing. There was nothing in his face or manner to indicate
that he’d been moved or upset a few minutes earlier. He was cold and functional, almost brusque.

“What do you think you’ll do?” he asked me as we walked back down the stairs. “I mean, you came here for a reason, didn’t
you? You’re looking into this, and it’s not just because you want John’s widow to have closure.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I came here for a reason. Too many people have died, Covington. Three more yesterday. I’m going to Mount
Grace, and since I’m going to be outnumbered a hundred to one, I’m taking the reconnaissance pretty fucking seriously.”

“It won’t be enough,” he said flatly. “Whatever you find out, and however you play it, you’re not going to be able to do it
alone.”

“Are you offering to help?” I asked.

He laughed without the smallest trace of humor. “No. Absolutely not. I’m just saying, that’s all. No point putting the gun
in your mouth if suicide’s not what you’re after. Get yourself some backup—expert help. Maybe some other people in your profession.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I muttered. “Is there anything you can do from this end? Get me a plan of the building, maybe.
And a list of who’s been cremated there over the past fifty or sixty years, say.”

“It might be possible. But I’d have to ask Todd, and I doubt he’d cooperate. He doesn’t like me very much.”

“Todd the lawyer?”

“Todd the lawyer, Todd the son, and Todd the holy ghost. Todd the president of the board of trustees.”

Chunk chunk chunk.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll ask him myself.”

I walked down to the North Circular, hoping to catch another cab, but the night bus came along first, and I rode it around
to New Southgate, all alone for most of the way but sharing it with a small crowd of friendly drunks on the last stretch.
Their old man, anachronistically enough, said follow the van. I wanted to invite them to jump
under
a fucking van, but they were mostly big drunks, so I closed my eyes and let the crumbling brickwork of the wall of sound
break over me.

Half past two in the morning. I walked down toward Wood Green with my head aching. Most of that was from where Juliet had
done the laying on of hands, but some of it was from what Nicky and Covington had told me. I’d have to go to Mount Grace,
but if I walked in off the street, I’d be outgunned and easy meat. After all, I had no idea what I’d be facing there or even
if they’d know I was coming. I had to map the terrain, and I didn’t know how.

I was bone-weary and not my usual happy-go-lucky self as I got back to the block and trudged up the endless stairs—lifts were
all still out, inevitably—to Ropey’s flat. Maybe the tiredness was why I didn’t notice that the door unlocked on a single
turn of the key, when I’d double-locked it on my way out, as I always did.

But as soon as I stepped over the threshold, I knew even in the pitch dark that I wasn’t alone. My scalp prickled, and then
the rest of me, too. I was being watched in the dark by something that was neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.

I stepped hastily away from the door so I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the light from the corridor outside, but whatever
was in here had dark-adapted eyes already, and it could pick me off at leisure if that was what it wanted. Slowly, silently,
I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel, and it was starting to
resolve into notes—fragmented, for now, but the links would come if I could stay alive long enough.

“You might as well turn on the light,” said a dry, brittle, utterly inhuman voice. “If I was going to rip your throat out,
I’d have done it as soon as you walked in.”

I didn’t need to turn on the light. That voice was imprinted on my mind almost as powerfully as Juliet’s scent.

“Moloch,” I snarled.

A faint snicker ratcheted out of the darkness like a rusty thumbscrew being laboriously turned.

“I thought it was time we pooled our resources,” the demon said.

    
Twenty

I
TURNED ON THE LIGHT, SHRUGGED OFF MY COAT, AND threw it over the back of the sofa, then stepped out of my shoes as I advanced
into the room. I managed to do all of this stuff fairly matter-of-factly. After all, like the fiend-in-the-shape-of-a-man
said, he’d already had an open goal and refused to take the shot. Whatever this turned out to be, it wasn’t a straightforward
ambush.

“So how was your trip?” Moloch asked in the same tone of metal grinding against bone.

I made a so-so gesture. “Too many satanists,” I said.

He nodded sympathetically, but his smile showed way too many teeth to be reassuring. “Our little fifth column. Yes. If it’s
any consolation, they all get eaten in the end.”