Read Online Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey - Free Book Online Page A

the fat man once, out of the corner
     of my eye. He was still on his knees and still looking at me, although when I caught him at it, he dropped his gaze to the
     ground with a slight grimace and went back to the job.
    “Any luck, Leonard?” the receptionist asked.
    The man shook his head glumly. “There’s no jam,” he said in a higher voice than I would have expected, a voice that had a
     slight fluting quality to it, as though the big man had swallowed that weird little device that gives Mr. Punch his voice.
     “I think it’s one of the rollers come off its bracket.” He leaned forward and reached into the machine—with both arms this
     time. It shifted on its base and creaked ominously.
    “Mr. Castor.” I looked up. Todd was coming down the stairs, hand outstretched. He had on a different suit—mid-blue instead
     of gray, with a subtle dogtooth. Maybe he had one for every day of the week. I stood, and we shook.
    Shaking hands is always a little jump into the unknown for me. The same morbid sensitivity that makes me good at sensing the
     presence of the dead sometimes allows me to pick up superficial psychic impressions through skin-to-skin contact. Nothing
     this time, though, or at least nothing revealing. Maynard Todd exuded only a cool aura of self-possession as immaculate as
     his tailoring.
    “Thanks for coming,” he said. Then he looked past me, and his expression shifted into a slightly perplexed frown. “Uh—Leonard,
     are you sure you know what you’re doing there?”
    “Yes,” Leonard grunted tersely.
    I could see Todd thinking about taking the discussion a stage further, and then I could see him giving up on the idea. He
     turned to the receptionist instead. “Carol,” he said, “call the service number.”
    “Yes, Mr. Todd.”
    “I can fix it,” said Leonard, not looking around.
    “Come on upstairs,” Todd said to me, ignoring Leonard’s answer. “You want some tea or coffee?”
    “I’m fine,” I said, and followed him back up the wide staircase. When we turned around the elbow of the stairs, Leonard was
     still on his knees, intent on his veterinary duties.
    “John Gittings,” Todd said, glancing back down at me as we walked. “That’s what you called about, right?”
    “Right,” I agreed.
    “And I saw you at the funeral.”
    “Right again.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, I thought so. You were the one who stepped in when the natives were getting restless. Thanks for that.”
    I didn’t answer. It would have sounded a bit graceless to say that I was more worried about Reggie and Greg picking up an
     assault charge than I was about his well-being.
    The stairwell went up and up, and I lost count of how many turns we took before we got to Todd’s office. It was surprisingly
     small, but then the courts had been the lower end of Victorian working-class housing: They meted out space as though it were
     gold. Todd indicated a chair as he walked around to the far side of the desk and pulled open the blinds, which looked onto
     the court’s central light well and so didn’t make much difference to the gray luminescence filtering into the room. It looked
     like the kind of place where you’d need the desk lamp on at noon on midsummer’s day.
    As he sat down, Todd flicked open a green hanging file that was already on his desk. It contained a thick wodge of papers.
     I took the chair opposite him.
    “John Gittings,” he said again, flicking through the documents on top of the file with quick, practiced hands. “I’ve been
     thinking about this one.”
    “Have you?” I asked, for form’s sake.
    Todd nodded. “About Mrs. Gittings’s feelings on the matter, I mean,” he clarified. “I’m going to go ahead and get the exhumation
     order, like I said. Have John disinterred and taken to Mount Grace for cremation. I don’t have any choice about that.”
    “I’m sure.”
    He must have caught the sardonic edge in my tone, because he gave me a slightly injured