[The Ghost in Bone] by Mike Carey

Author:Mike Carey [Carey, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781645241331
Google: QqXEzwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1645241335
Barnesnoble: 1645241335
Goodreads: 123503592
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2023-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

8

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“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Trudie cried out when she saw my blood-soaked coat and limping gait. “Fix, what have you been up to? Bathroom! Now!”

When I peeled my coat off my wound was just starting to bleed again. Trudie anointed it with TCP, careful to get it into all the nooks and crannies. I’m no stoic so I did a fair amount of gasping and yelping, but to be honest I was more dismayed by the damage to the paletot. It had been with me through the trials and tribulations of the last twenty years, but the sleeve was beyond repair. Maybe I could cut them both off and turn it into a very long, very heavy T-shirt.

“Do you want me to stitch this up?” Trudie asked me. She didn’t mean the sleeve, she meant my arm. One of the disciplines she’d picked up back when she was part of a front-line paramilitary unit was field medicine, and she’d kept her skills up to date with regular practice—which if you look at it from the wrong angle was a damning indictment of our shared lifestyle. I accepted the offer with thanks. Not only was Trudie’s make-do-and-mend quicker than a visit to St Thomas’s or UCH, there was also no danger that the police would get involved on the back end. I’d promised my new employer not to make too many waves. If I broke the promise this early in the game there was no way I was getting back into Brierley, and I wasn’t prepared to let this drop on account of an open wound—or even a tragically truncated overcoat.

While Trudie stitched I filled her in on the various events of the evening, not just the ambush but the conversations with Coldwood and Juliet that had book-ended it. Being intent on her work she didn’t answer, only nodding from time to time or frowning in thought.

“So you don’t think it’s as simple as Ustinov getting out before the water’s too hot?” she asked me when she’d finished and tied off.

I flexed my arm, admiring the neatness of her handiwork and the not-bleeding-any-more. “It’s still possible,” I admitted. “But if someone dropped the man’s suitcase off in Romania to make a false trail, it has to be a different someone who paid those guys to roll me. I mean, there’s no point pulling the wool over my eyes if I’m dead. And they weren’t low-rent thugs, either. They were no match for Juliet, obviously, but they knew what they were doing. Enough to pick that fight with me in the Angel so nobody would look past the obvious.”

“Which is proof that there’s something beyond the obvious to look at.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, yeah. And even if there isn’t there’s still matins. Which was already scaring the shit out of me even before Juliet weighed in.”

Trudie was putting her sewing kit away, but I could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was as tense as I was.

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