Vicious Circle

Gwillam went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “You were ahead of us at the Collective,” he said. “That was . . . impressive. Do you have any other leads on where Peace is hiding the girl?”

Well, I had about a half of one, and I was keeping it to myself. I got a hand up on the crash barrier and began to lever myself back up onto my feet. My teeth were clenched shut with the effort, so of course I couldn’t answer Gwillam’s question.

He sighed again, sounding like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“If I tell you to find your reverse gear and back out of this—say until you hit China—is there any chance that you’ll do it?”

It’s probably a sin to lie to a priest, and I’ve got enough sins on my conscience already without going out looking for new ones. I just shook my head once: more than once would have been pushing it, given that I’d only just got myself back on the vertical.

“I didn’t think so,” said Gwillam sadly. “But I’m telling you anyway. It’s by way of being an acknowledgment of what you did tonight. A professional courtesy, let’s say. It’s the last you’re going to get. Good night, Castor—and good-bye.”

He made the sign of the cross over me—not threateningly, or ironically, but deadpan serious. Then he signed to the two werewolves and they fell in to either side of him as he walked back to the car.

As they drove away Zucker misjudged the angle—or maybe, got it exactly right—and scraped along the passenger side of Matt’s Civic with a sound like the shriek of a neutered elephant. Then he accelerated into the eastbound traffic and within a few seconds their taillights had merged with the rest of the river.

* * *

Imelda Probert, better known as the Ice-Maker, lives in a squalid little third-floor flat in Peckham, in a block whose brickwork has been painted black in some sort of abortive experiment with stealth technology. The door off the street is boarded up, so you go in around the side through a yard that’s like an urban elephants’ graveyard, strewn with the rusting, wheelless hulks of expired cars. It’s something of a conundrum, given how much hard cash the Ice-Maker must pull down, week in and week out. After all, she offers a specialized and much sought-after service. But then again, I guess by the same token she doesn’t have to worry about bringing in the passing trade: people who need her, find her.

Before I went in, I checked an additional piece of equipment that I’d picked up along the way. It was a sprig of myrtle, borrowed from a graveyard. Myrtle for May: if I’d been on the ball, I should have had some already, then I wouldn’t have to shinny up cemetery walls after midnight. I whispered a blessing to it, feeling like a fraud as I always do when I’m mucking about with things that laypeople would call magic.

The stairwell smelled of piss and stale beer—two stages in a conjugation that usually ends with “dead-drunk guy facedown in his own vomit.” But I didn’t meet anybody on the way up, and when I knocked on the door on the third floor—the only door that wasn’t covered over with plywood and nailed shut—the sound echoed through the building with telling hollowness.

After a few seconds, the door was opened by a skinny black girl of about sixteen or so, whose eyes were each, individually, bigger than her whole face. I only knew she was a girl by the pigtails: the hard, hatchet face was one-size-fits-all, and the black jeans and manga-chick T-shirt were unisex.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Friend of Nicky’s,” I told her.

She frowned at me with truculent suspicion. “You got a pulse?”

I checked. “I do, but it’s running kind of slow. Is that a deal-breaker?”

She swiveled her head and looked behind her into the flat. “Mom,” she called. “There’s a live man out here.”

“Is he police?” a much deeper voice answered from somewhere inside. “If he’s police, Lisa, you tell him to go fuck himself because I paid already.”

The moppet turned her face to me again. “Mom says if you’re police, you can—”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it. I’m not police. The name’s Castor. If Nicky Heath is in there, I’m here to see him and give him a ride home.”

She called out over her shoulder, keeping her eyes on me this time in case I tried to steal something. It would have had to be the door or one of the walls: there was nothing else on the landing, not even carpet to cover the warped floorboards. “He says he’s Castor and he’s gonna give Nicky a ride.”

“Oh, Castor.” There was edgy disapproval in the voice, and I knew exactly why. “Yeah, you show him into the parlor, Lisa. He can just hold his horses until I’m done here.”