Vicious Circle

“Friendly—?” He thought this over, looking like he’d sucked on a lemon and discovered that he still had some functional taste buds. He got sullen and defensive. “Hey, don’t you fuck with my head, Castor—it’s not funny. Whatever the hell happened, these killings were geographically clustered, okay? So we’re talking a chemical or bacteriological agent, or something like that—something dispersed in either air or water. I don’t drink water. I don’t metabolize oxygen. There’s no logical way I could be infected.”

I nodded understandingly, mainly to make him shut up. “Nicky, seven murders in one night is one for the record books—but only until some industrious soul takes it up to eight. It’s like every other summer is the hottest summer on record.”

“That’s just because of global warming.”

“Right. And this is because of global rabies. That’s how records work, Nicky: they keep going up because they can’t go down. Anyway, leaving all this bullshit aside for a moment, I’m going to need a favor.”

He didn’t unbend: clearly it hurt his pride that I’d out-paranoided him with my “part of the problem” remark. “I’m not in the mood to do you any favors, Castor. You stamped on my wrist. You realize what I’d have to go through to repair a bone? I got no antibodies. I got no fucking white cells. I’ve just got my own two hands.”

“I brought you a present.”

“Like I care.” I was going to count the seconds, but the pause was too short. “What is it?”

My relationship with Nicky is based on several distinct layers of ruthless pragmatism. Being dead, and risen again in the flesh (I’m avoiding the contentious term “zombie,” which these days the government is calling hate-speech) Nicky doesn’t get about as much as he used to. He prefers to keep his body chilled to a level where the processes of organic decay can be slowed to a manageable minimum. He still has a subtle aroma of formaldehyde and foie gras, but he takes the edge off it with Old Spice aftershave, and since most other dead-alive people I’ve met smell like a freezer full of spoiled meat, that’s quite impressive.

But his limited mobility means that in some respects now he has to rely on the kindness of strangers—those comparatively rare strangers who don’t find the company of the dead uncongenial. So whenever I want something from him, I bring him a little gift to sweeten the deal. He likes fine French reds of hard-to-find vintages (he just inhales the aroma, like one of Yeats’s ghosts) and hen’s-tooth-rare early jazz recordings: getting hold of that stuff without bankrupting myself in the process is an ongoing challenge. Tonight, though, I had a winner. I handed it over without a word—a vulcanite disc in a stiff cardboard sleeve, one side of the label marked up with postage stamps to the value of three cents. Nicky turned it over in his hands, read the recto side of the label and said nothing for a while. Then he said “Fuck, Castor. How big a favor are you looking for?”

It was something a fair bit rarer than a hen’s tooth: a recording of Buddy Bolden, the tragically unhinged trumpeter who—by some accounts, anyway—single-handedly turned New Orleans ragtime into jazz. The A side was “Make Me a Pallet.” There wasn’t any B side, which under the circumstances didn’t really matter. Bolden is popularly supposed to have left no recordings of his work, but I’ve got sources who don’t take no for an answer.

“It’s two favors.”

“Go on.”

“Number one is easy. I want you to get me some background on an accidental death. A girl named Abigail Torrington—time frame somewhere over the summer of last year. She drowned on a school trip. Some other kids died at the same time.”

He sat down at the desk and typed a few of the details down in a notepad program.

“Okay. So far, that’s a Ronco Twenty Golden Greats favor. What makes it a Buddy Bolden favor? Shit, I think you did crack one of my wrist bones, you jumpy bastard.”

“Number two is a bit more open-ended. I’m looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. A man named Dennis Peace.”

“How are you spelling ‘Peace’?”

“Like the kind you’ve got to give a chance to. Guy’s an exorcist, and from what I know already he’s pretty damn good at it. Anything you can get me will trim the odds a bit more in my favor—and believe me when I say I’m taking all the help I can get here.”

“Anything else you can give me? Last known address? Social security number? Known associates?”

I gave him the East Sheen address that Steve Torrington had given me over the phone. “That’s pretty much all I’ve got. Except that he was in a malpractice case a few years back—on the receiving end.” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell him about what had happened when I tried to locate Peace through Abbie’s toys. But that would have entailed a hell of a lot more explanation than I wanted to get into right then.

“I’ll stop by tomorrow,” I said. “You can either give me a progress report or stick an assault rifle up my nose. If you get anything juicy before then, call me, okay?”

“Sure. I’ll call you.”