Dead Men's s Boots

‘That’s how you knew I was coming?’

He gave a twitch that looked as though it might have started out as an attempt to shake his head. ‘Told us,’ he slurred. His eyes were rolling on different orbits: he was probably in an even worse way than he looked.

‘Who told you?’

‘Friend. Friendly interest. Told us when. Where.’

‘Give me a name,’ I demanded.

‘Don’t – have—’

‘Give me a name or I’ll throw you to the succubus and let her finish you off.’

He whimpered brokenly, ‘A–Ash! Said his name – was Ash!’

‘Someone you’ve used before?’

Shake.

‘Just a call out of the blue? Word to the«ue?ne wise?’

Nod.

‘You can turn around now,’ Juliet said quietly from right behind me. I let the guy drop again, and he twisted away in terror just from the sound of her voice – but he was too weak to move very far.

I stood and looked her up and down. She shot me a look as if challenging me to say something, so I bit back whatever profanity had come to my lips.

She’d done a good job, but it clearly hadn’t come easy.

Her eye was back in place in its socket, and through her ripped shirt I could see that her shoulder was whole again: no tell-tale glint of bare bone. But she held herself stiffly, suggesting that she was still in pain, and she hadn’t healed the rents in her clothes or removed the bloodstains. And that sense of fading I’d got when I’d looked at her on the plane was even stronger now: she looked like a watercolour picture of herself that had been rained on. She wasn’t strong enough yet to take what she’d just done in her stride.

‘Shall we move on?’ she murmured.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

I knelt down beside Schnozzle Durante again and started going through his pockets. He was barely conscious, and in no state to put up any kind of resistance. I found a mobile phone in his trouser pocket, threw it down on the ground and stamped it into shards.

‘It would be easier just to kill him,’ Juliet said, at my shoulder.

‘Why bother if there’s no need?’ I countered.

‘He’s got no wheels, no phone, and he just screwed up what should have been a routine hit. Unless Uncle Sam’s Satanists are a lot more forgiving than the home-grown variety, he’s going to want to go off the radar for a while. Either way, we’ll be done before he gets his act together.’

I walked on, forcing myself not to look back, tensed internally for the insinuatingly liquid smashed-skull noise I’d heard before.