Free Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey Page A

back out onto the street. Nothing and nobody in sight. I’d
     have been surprised if there had been, after the early warning I’d just given out. As ambushes went, it was a sod of a long
     way from the Little Big Horn. And as if to confirm the futility of the endeavor, the extrasensory prickle faded out again
     into nothingness.
    Which, for something so liminal and barely there to start with, wasn’t a long haul at all.

    I was about to say that I went home, but when I use that word, I still think of Pen’s creepy old place on Turnpike Lane, with
     its Noah’s ark freighting of rats and ravens and its Mobius strip architecture (it’s built into the side of a hill, so the
     ground floor at the back becomes a basement at the front).
    Now, though—just for a few weeks or maybe a month—I was living in a flat in a high-rise block along the Wood Green High Road:
     high enough up in the stack so I could look out of my window and see the Centrepoint Tower giving me the finger across the
     length of London.
    It belonged to a friend of a friend, a guy named Ronald “Ropey” Doyle, who’d gone back to the Republic of Ireland to deal
     with some family crisis and didn’t want to lose his place on the council housing list while he was away. He needed a sitting
     tenant who could pretend to be him if the need arose, and I needed a place to dump my stuff until I came up with a better
     idea. It seemed like a sweet deal.
    It became less sweet when the lights went out and I discovered all the utilities were on a meter, and it soured altogether
     the first time the lift broke down. The flat itself smelled of root vegetables, and when it rained, the walls wept discolored
     tears that left brown-edged tracks down the paintwork. The decor ran to black leather and three-inch-deep orange shag pile.
     But to give it its due, it had four walls and a ceiling. Beggars can’t be choosers.
    Tonight, though, walking down Lordship Lane from Wood Green tube, I felt a definite desire to be somewhere else. If anything,
     that feeling only increased when I turned onto Vincent Street and saw what was parked in front of the block: a high-sided
     blue van with BOWYER’S CLEANING SERVICES written in reverse over the windscreen.
    Son of a bitch! I’d been solid-gold certain I’d ditched the Breathers on the M25. Now it seemed that they’d not only stayed
     with me all the way to Southgate, they’d planted a walking tail on me when I left Carla’s and came home by tube. They knew
     where I lived. Taken in conjunction with Louise Beddows’s tales of ambushes and punishment beatings, it wasn’t a happy thought.
     More than anything, it made me ashamed. How could I have let myself be rolled up by a shower of amateurs? Normally, my instincts
     were better than that.
    There was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the van. The fractured sodium glare of a streetlamp was splattered over the
     curve of the windscreen, so that all I could see of him was an outline, immobile and sinister. I couldn’t even tell if he
     was looking at me. I fought the urge to wrench the door open and have it out with him there and then. The back of the van
     was probably stuffed three deep with his mates.
    An even nicer surprise was waiting for me when I got up to the flat. Someone had painted across the door in thick, still-dripping
     black paint the words EXORCIST EQUALS DISEASED EQUALS DECEASED. I stared at it in dead silence for about half a minute, considering my options. It wasn’t my front door, of course, it was
     Ropey’s, but still, I was living behind it, and it was my arse he’d want to kick when he saw this. But was it worth getting
     my head used as a baseball? On balance, probably not. I’d wait until the odds were more in my favor, and then I’d put these
     little fuckups through some changes.
    The first thing I did when I got inside was to call Carla and tell her Todd’s idea about the wake. She was iffy at first,
     but she talked herself into it.