Dead Men's s Boots

‘She’d much rather put a knife to your windpipe than a tenner in your back pocket. It’s all a matter of nuance.’

Pen looked at me with glum resentment. ‘I’m not appreciating the nuances right now, Fix. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s all I can do to keep up with the logistics. Can you spell me? I haven’t slept since the last time I saw you.’

‘Sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘They’re not going to try anything in broad daylight – especially not if they’re expecting the courts to give them a thumbs-up to throw you out tomorrow.

’

She blinked in slow motion, her shadow-rimmed eyes not wanting to open again once she’d let them close.

‘But you’ll stay?’ she pressed, the words forced out of her. ‘I can’t sleep unless I know someone’s watching. Someone who cares about him.’

It wasn’t what I wanted to do: I was thinking of the fight I had ahead of me; of Myriam Kale riding Doug Hunter back out into the world when I still hadn’t made a single move against the real enemy – when I didn’t even know who or how many they were, and wouldn’t begin to find out until I’d raided Maynard Todd’s office and turned over his files.

Time wasn’t on my side. It was hard to just sit here and feel the odds getting longer.

But I could see that Pen’s natural resilience had reached its limits: she looked brittle, strained, liable to break in pieces at any moment.

‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘Put your head down. I’ll wake you in an hour.’

As things turned out, I gave her four and some odd minutes.

The shadow of the Stanger clinic reached out towards us and then spilled over us while she slept. The Breathers ebbed and flowed, celebrating the oneness of all life, on both sides of the grave, with chants and gestures of defiance that nobody except themselves was listening to.

Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!

I gave them one out of three.

I killed the time while I was waiting by looking over the sheet music again, reading it as Luke/Speedo had told me to, and trying to sound the rhythms – the beats and the pauses, the overlaps and elisions – inside my head.

I was imagining a tune that you could build to clothe that percussive skeleton: trying to translate a symphony for drums into something else. It was hard work, and it sucked me in hypnotically, taking me out of my flesh again into the void where my weird talent operates.