Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

He stood up and moved around to one side of me, knife in hand at the level of his waist. I could more or less see the angle he’d decided to use: an upthrust, probably to my throat, from behind and off to the side to minimise the amount of blood he got on himself.

‘Rourke isn’t alone,’ I said quickly. ‘There are two other guys. De Niro and Rampling . . .’

‘Don’t fight it, Castor. Under the circumstances, things could be a fuck of a sight worse.’

I was already moving as his hand flashed up. I kicked with my legs, not against him – he hadn’t been stupid enough to bring himself into range – but against the desk. I pitched out and down, the blade slicing shallowly across my shoulder.

I was hoping the impact would smash the back of the chair. It didn’t. Desperately I swung myself to the left and then to the right, sawing with the handcuff chain against the unyielding bars of the chair-back. With a muffled exclamation, Todd leaned in over me, but the chair-back shattered into loose kindling and I rolled aside as he reached for me, kicking out again in a one-two bicycling movement and missing him by a mile but fending him off for long enough for me to swivel, get my knees on the ground and lurch/stumble back up onto my feet. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, but at least I was in with a chance now.

Or I would have been, if Todd hadn’t kept the gun in his pocket when he switched to the knife. He stepped back now, the gun once again in his hand. He looked annoyed.

‘What the fuck did that achieve?’ he demanded.

Was it a trick of the light or was something moving behind him, outside the window? I took a step towards the door and he moved in to block me, which conveniently blind-sided him as far as the window was concerned.

‘You’re not going to kill me,’ I said, playing for seconds.

‘No?’ Todd raised a mildly sceptical eyebrow. ‘How come?’

‘The noise,’ I said. ‘Someone will hear. And you’ll have a roomful of dead cats to explain as well as me.’

He aimed at my head, thought better of it, and lowered the gun to point it at my stomach: messier and more painful, but a safer shot.

‘Silencer,’ he explained, and pulled the trigger. I was watching his hand and I dropped as his index finger squeezed, but he would still have hit me. Even with gravity on my side I can’t outrace a bullet.

But the window exploded inwards, and a human figure danced in a blur out of the unfolding storm of broken glass, limbs scything so quickly that they left stroboscopic after-images on the air. There was a wet, insinuating crack, and Todd’s arm folded backwards at a point where the human body doesn’t actually have a moving joint. The figure landed and turned, without any sense of haste or even of intention. It was more like watching someone practise the steps of a dance than anything else. It kicked Todd in the stomach: the sound this time was more muffled, but the damage seemed just as profound. Todd slid sideways against the desk, crumpling inwards like a flower closing for the night, and then slowly sank down onto his knees.

Moloch straightened his cuffs like a dandy after a duel, staring down with cold amusement at the man he had just crippled. I gawped at him, confused and uncomprehending.

‘Not the saviour you were expecting?’ the demon demanded, giving me a glance of cold, sardonic amusement. Todd was curled up almost into a foetal crouch on the floor, absolutely silent, absolutely still. He could even have been dead: the kick to the stomach was easily hard enough to have ruptured some vital organ.

I struggled up on one knee again, but then took a breather, my legs trembling. ‘Not exactly,’ I admitted hoarsely. ‘You told me you’d had enough of saving my life. I think you said it was my turn to scratch your back, or something to that effect.’

‘Yes. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did, Castor. That sad wreckage downstairs –’ he kissed his fingers. ‘– perfectly aged. The spirit filleted and pared from the flesh with great delicacy. I can’t remember when I last ate so well.’

I fought the urge to throw up. Moloch had walked around behind me and was busying himself with the handcuffs. I heard the links part with a loud, grating clank of metal against metal. Flexing my arms, I discovered that they were now free to move, although the cuffs still hung around my wrists like bracelets – and my right shoulder throbbed agonisingly where Todd’s knife had stabbed into the fleshy part of it

I stood up, a little shakily. ‘Well, it’s all part of the service,’ I said. ‘At least, it is now. I didn’t plan it this way.’

‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘But I’ve found you to be worth following. Serendipity is your whore. And I thought you’d work a little harder if you felt you were working without a safety net.’

‘Pick him up,’ I said, pointing at Todd. ‘Put him in the chair.’ Moloch nodded amiably, bent down and hauled the lawyer to his feet. Todd wasn’t dead: he wasn’t even unconscious. But his face was deathly pale and he screamed when Moloch lifted him, flailing with his good arm as his bad one dangled loosely, at an impossible angle.

Moloch dropped him into the chair, then looked inquiringly at me. I’d crossed to the shattered window, and I was drinking in great gulps of the clean night air. I’d supped full with horrors, but it wasn’t even midnight yet and I had darker work still to do.

‘See if you can find some rope,’ I muttered, without looking round. ‘He probably won’t stay upright any other way.’

The sheet music had taken a bit of damage when Scrub-slash-Leonard had taken that last wild swipe at my chest and almost laid my insides open to the world. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, though. I laid it out on the desk and smoothed it down with the flat of my hand. Todd watched me with a shell-shocked lack of curiosity, his injured arm lashed across his chest, the other tied behind him. It turned out that the room where Scrub had been stowed contained a builder’s drum of rope – about two hundred feet, unstarted. Moloch had used all of it to secure Todd to the chair, virtually weaving a cocoon around him and leaving very little of him still in view apart from his pale face.

I sat myself on the desk, more or less where Todd had been sitting during my interrogation. Moloch stood over by the window with his back to us, letting me make my play with no interruptions. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in this side of things.

‘You started a sentence earlier,’ I reminded Todd. ‘You were there when I something-or-other. How was that going to end?’

‘I forget,’ Todd said, with a sneer that sounded convincing despite the slight slur in his voice. He had to be in a lot of pain. And it was going to get worse before it got better.

‘Okay. Doesn’t matter,’ I reassured him. ‘Todd, I broke in here tonight to look through your files and get the lowdown on the Mount Grace posse. But since you’re here, in the flesh – even if it isn’t exactly your flesh – there’s another favour you can do me. It’s going to be ugly and it’s going to be messy and at the end of it I don’t know what kind of shape you’ll be in but it won’t be good. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little bit sick just thinking about it, but I’ll do it if I have to. Because if it works it could save my life later tonight. So I figure I’ll cut you a deal. Tell me about the set-up at the crematorium. About Inscription Night. How many people are going to be there. What sort of defences they’ll have laid on. When it will all get started, and when’s the best time to go in. Tell me what to expect, and I’ll leave it at that. I’ll walk out the door and the cleaners will find you in the morning.’