Free Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey Page B

I said I’d call him and tell him it was a goer.
    A pregnant pause at the other end of the line, punctuated in the middle by a muffled sob. “Fix?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Could you—could you come over and be here with me? When they bring John’s body back?”
    I thought about that one for all of two seconds. “I’d love to, Carla,” I lied, “but I can’t. I’ve got too much work on. I’ll
     have my mobile with me, though. If the geist— I mean, if John gets overexcited, call me and I’ll come over and play him to
     sleep again.”
    I hung up before she could find another angle to come at me from. A second call to Todd’s office got me the answerphone, and
     I left a message there. That ought to have left me feeling off the twin hooks of guilt and duty and feeling a little better.
    It didn’t, though. I prowled around the flat, irritable and unsettled, wanting to pick a fight that I could win but not able
     to think of one right then. The wind was still high, and the noise it made as it broke on the northeast corner of the block
     was like a howl of pain sampled and played back through some aeolian synthesizer. It made me think about the late John Gittings,
     prowling invisibly around his own living room like a trapped animal. Worse still, the couple next door were in the throes
     of noisy passion, which meant they’d be swearing and throwing things at each other sometime within the next hour.
    I felt the call of the wild, so I put my coat back on and went down to the Lord Nelson. Let the Breathers follow me in if
     they wanted to. If they did, they were going out through the fucking window.
    Okay, “the call of the wild” is relative, because this is Wood Green we’re talking about; but you’ve got to love a pub that’s
     painted like a fire engine, even if the beer is shit. And the alternative was Yates’s Wine Lodge, which for someone born in
     Liverpool arouses deep atavistic impulses of fear and suspicion.
    It wasn’t a football night, so the place was quiet. Quiet felt like what my nerves needed right then. A bunch of students
     were playing pool for pints over in the corner, and Mike Skinner was talking about his love life on the jukebox. I waited
     at the bar while Paul put a new barrel on, then, when he came over, I nodded toward the IPA pump. “Usual,” I said.
    “Someone wants to meet you, Fix,” he said as he pulled the pint.
    “What sort of someone?”
    “Woman.”
    “Young? Old? Nun? Policewoman?”
    “See for yourself.”
    As he handed me the pint, he nodded, barely perceptibly, off to my right. I handed him a fiver, took a sip on the beer, and
     casually took a glance in that direction.
    There was a woman sitting by herself at a table off to one side of the door, dressed in a smart cutaway jacket over shirt
     and slacks, the whole outfit built around a motif of rust red and black. Something about her look reminded me of Carla: the
     intangible suggestion of widows’ weeds, which was odd and unsettling because this woman couldn’t have been over thirty. Dark
     brown hair in a tightly curled perm, bronzed eyelids, and metallic highlights on her lips. She was staring at the wall, but
     I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing it. The gin and tonic in front of her hadn’t been touched.
    I could have played coy, but I was curious about how she’d tracked me down here and what she wanted; and maybe I jumped at
     the chance of a distraction from the thoughts that were weighing on my own mind right then. I crossed to the table and gave
     her a nod as she turned to stare at me. “Paul said you were asking after me,” I said.
    She sat bolt upright, roused from whatever reverie she’d been in. “Felix Castor?”
    “That’s me.”
    “I’m Janine. Jan. Jan Hunter.” She put out a hand and I shook it. “I got your name from Cheryl Telemaque. She said you’re
     good. I’d like to hire you.”
    “Okay if I sit down?” I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me