(eng) Mike Carey - Felix Castor 03 by Dead Men's Boots

Author:Dead Men's Boots [Boots, Dead Men's]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

It may dent my image of macho, gung-ho capability to say this, but the next morning I felt rough. I’d stayed at Juliet’s long enough to work out the logistics of where we were going to go and who we were going to see, and then I’d made some calls before she could change her mind: one to a travel agent to book a couple of cheap tickets to Birmingham, Alabama, and then another to Nicky to tell him what was up and to ask him if he could work out an itinerary for us. He said he wanted to talk to me before I left, but that was all he’d say.

A third call, to Gary Coldwood, just got me his answering machine. ‘What does something juicy mean?’ I asked it, and hung up.

I had one last errand to run before I could limp off home, and I’d managed to get it done with the minimum of fuss even though it involved a certain amount of blackmail - both the emotional kind and the kind that’s a felony.

When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been me-;bolted, decanted through a pipette and left to stand in the Petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have got me out of bed was the thought of what was going down at the Stanger this morning - and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way rather than Jenna-Jane’s.

The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian workmen’s cottages, then it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former owner - the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right - bequeathed them to the Crown. The interiors were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annexe was built on as demand grew: it seems that lunatics, like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early twenty-first century.

But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic: he’s just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other label that fits. And, after all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus, who took up residence about four years ago and - thanks largely to me - has never gone home again.

It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily: she’s known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.

One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell.

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