Dead Men's s Boots

You’re way too sharp for the liÓhar821kes of me.’

The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone: check. Ear: check.

‘What did you call him?’ he asked, in the same conversational tone. ‘You must’ve had some moniker for him, this cultured prizefighter?’

My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. ‘Louie,’ I said, thinking of Louie Cypher in the movie Angel Heart.

What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay he’ll show a little more class. ‘Louie . . . Rourke.’

‘And how did he contact you?’

I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for me yet. ‘I told you – by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous, but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle.

The money would be good – really good – and he’d give me all the information I needed to pull it off safely.’

Todd wiped the blade of the knife on his own palm and inspected the smear of blood it left there. Then he looked at me again.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just bought yourself another five minutes of life. Tell me about that. About how this . . . Rourke prepped you. What he already knew about us.’

‘Why do you care?’ I demanded. A dangerous light flared behind Todd’s eyes.

It was a calculated risk: I needed a few seconds to think through the moves I’d made along the way and to scrape together an answer that might convince him. Well, I got the few seconds, but it’s like they say: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Todd swung the knife a little more recklessly, and blood poured down from my forehead into my eyes. There are a lot of blood vessels in your forehead, and they bleed promiscuously: my eyes were glued shut in an instant. Todd opened them again with his thumbs on my eyelids. I blinked through the blood, up into his wide eyes.

‘I care, you fucking imbecile, because it’s him I want to get my hands on,’ he snarled. ‘Not you. What the fuck do you matter? You’re dead already. You tell me enough to get my hands on this guy who’s calling himself Rourke and you get to die a little bit cleaner, that’s all. That’s what your life has come down to, Castor. You should probably have been a watchmaker.