Seth shook crystallized sugar into his coffee, sipped, and winced. “Fuck me. Can’t brew a cuppa in this country worth shite.”
“Just point me at the cemetery,” Jack said. “I’ll do it myself, since you’re feeling delicate.” As the sun rose, gray-yellow like an old bruise through the haze of smog that hung over Bangkok, Jack felt his time of reprieve slipping away, little by little, like sand against skin.
“It doesn’t work like that here,” Seth muttered.
“Explain, then,” Jack snapped. “Because this might be a bloody amusement for you, but this is my life, Seth.
“And who’s fault is that, exactly?” Seth demanded. “You didn’t have to call him, Jackie-boy. You didn’t have to reach out.”
“I suppose you would have had me die.” Jack’s headache began with a renewed vengeance. He wasn’t damply sweating any longer, but cold. Cold like the day he’d lain on the floor of Algernon Treadwell’s tomb and felt the slight warmth of his own blood spread across his chest, his stomach, soaking through his shirt and dribbling onto the stones.
“Yes,” said Seth shortly. “I would have.” He dumped the sludgy coffee down into the drain and slammed his mug onto the porcelain washboard. “But that’s the past and this, unfortunately, is me present so after I find a bite to eat we’ll go see about finding your dead man.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“Hornby couldn’t’ve picked a worse city to die in,” Seth said as they walked down Patpong 2. The road and its citizens lay much subdued in daylight, as the district nursed its hangover. “You got any idea where and when he kicked it?”
“No,” Jack said, spying Trixie unlocking the door of her bar. “But she does.” He raised a hand. “Oi! Luv! Got a minute?”
Trixie smiled when she caught sight of him, but the expression dropped just as quickly when she saw Seth. “I know you. You’re the
Seth puffed up. “Is that what they say about me?”
“And you had the nerve to jump on my back about black magic?” Jack muttered.
“Shaddup,” Seth told him congenially. “Like you’re bein’ fitted for a halo, boy.”
Jack had almost forgotten how much he wanted to punch Seth in the mouth, but the desire came back sharp and twinging between his knuckles. He looked to Trixie instead. “Luv, we need to know how Miles died. And where.”
“He bit it out on Silom Road.” She jerked a thumb. “Got hit by a taxi walking to the train station after his set. About two weeks ago.”
“Happens a lot around here,” Seth said to Jack’s questioning look. “Taxi drivers willy-nilly, drunk tourists pushin’ and shovin’ . . . recipe for a pavement pancake if I ever heard of one.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Trixie pursed her lips. “He took a long time to die. He was still screaming when the corpse collectors got there.”
“Corpse collectors?” Jack cast a glance up and down the street, sunlight diffused by buildings closing in overhead. He wasn’t looking for a pissing contest with a host of necromancers. If they were thick on the ground in Bangkok, he might have to accept his fate with grace and go home. Which was as bloody likely as Seth joining the Riverdance.
“Bangkok doesn’t have a city ambulance service,” Seth explained. “So when there’s a dead bloke lying in the street, whoever can snatch him up first gets the fee from the hospital morgues. Bloody business, that—quite literally.”
“He’s right,” Trixie said. “But Miles died soon enough after that. They probably took him to Patpong Hospital.” She put one hand on her hip. The forearm bit of her tattoo was a pair of dancing geishas, peering from behind their fans. “Why d’you want to know?”
“Pure academic curiosity,” Jack assured her. “Cheers, luv. Who’s playing tonight?”
“Unicorn Euthanasia,” Trixie said, opening the door into the bar. Jack frowned.
“They any good?”
“They’re shit,” Trixie said. “Good luck finding whatever it is you’re looking for, Jack.” She shut the door on him, and the space where she’d been filled up with a poster advertising go-go dancers and free drinks.
“I know a bloke,” Seth said slowly. “At that hospital. He works in . . . well . . . corpse delivery.”
“And?” Jack cast a look at Seth. He’d never remembered the man looking reluctant to plunge into any sort of dealing with the Black, but Seth was tapping his sandal on the road, eyes darting everywhere but Jack.
“And, nothing,” Seth said too quickly. “He’s a skin trader. Knows words, spells. Things for you to use, to bring Hornby back. Which is still a royally shite fucking idea, by the way.”
Jack stopped at the crush of traffic on Silom Road. “I’ll take me chances.” If he opened his sight he could feel it now, the splashes of blood in the gutters, the shrieks of the dying, the mosquito buzz of small engines carrying motorists right on by. Bangkok’s Black was like a pile of corpses—dead at the core but crawling with layer upon layer of new life.
“This way.” Seth walked through the crush of people on the pavement, and Jack followed, riding the small space of his wake. They passed shops, shoppers, tourists, locals, gangsters covered up with tattoos and Buddhist amulets, and housewives haggling over the price of vegetables.
Once, a crowd of monks passed, and every woman on the street backed up against the nearest wall, allowing them to pass.
“They can’t touch women,” Seth murmured. “Seems a hellish old lot in life, you ask me.”
“Hellish is a word some bastards use entirely too lightly,” Jack said, watching the monks wend their way down the road. They were the only ones who didn’t have to shove, elbow, and shout to make way.
Jack could think of worse lives.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Patpong Hospital resided in a squat brown building that smelled of sickly-sweet cleaning compounds and buzzed with a nervous system of flickering fluorescent tube lights. The air conditioning made an effort, but the black celluloid strips taped to the vent above the doorway into A&E barely fluttered when Jack passed beneath them.
Seth stomped down a narrow corridor past a nurse’s station crowned by a bouquet of wilted daisies, past rooms filled with patients in steel beds surrounded by white mosquito netting.
Jack thought of spirits, floating above their beds, white and lacy, while the ebb and flow of the Black plucked off pieces of their souls and tossed them on the current.
Seth turned through a swinging door marked in Thai. Jack didn’t have to read the language to know a NO ADMITTANCE sign when he saw one. The smell here was different—cloying, heavier. A smell that wasn’t pretending that life was still possible, just covering up the stench of death. The floor under Jack’s feet ran with cracks and water the color of mud dribbled into rusty drains.
One door sat off the narrow corridor, under a broken light that blinked arcane semaphore in shadow and bright. Morgues around the world were the same—silent, stinking, and filled up with the psychic energy of the dead.
“Be easy in here, yeah?” Seth said. “He’s a bit of a skittish bloke and you don’t speak the language anyway, so don’t go off shouting and pitching a temper fit like you do.”
“I’ll be polite as a vicar at a church picnic,” Jack promised.
In the morgue proper, Jack spied a body lying on the single steel table in the center of the room. He’d been around plenty of dead things—both recently deceased and long-rotted—but seeing the man on the table, half-covered by a sheet as if he were about to receive a shady massage instead of an autopsy, made him itch all over, under the skin. Jack didn’t like corpses, and neither did his stomach.
“Heya,” Seth shouted, knocking on the edge of the table. The man under the sheet jumped, limbs going akimbo at his ministrations.
“Christ,” Jack muttered, turning his back on the corpse.
“’Ey, you were the one who’s so keen to truck with these rotters,” Seth said. “Chin up, little camper. It’s not going to bite you.”
Jack cast a baleful eye at the corpse. “That’s a matter of opinion.”
A figure backed out of a small wash closet on the other side of the morgue. The space was spare, just a steel counter covered in surgical instruments and a black nylon doctor’s bag, the washroom, and a row of freezers near it. A hose dangled from the ceiling, fitted with a spray nozzle for washing bodies. The quiet
“Jao,” Seth said, giving the small pathologist a nod. “Been keeping yourself well, mate?”
Jao looked from Seth to Jack. He fired of a rapid sentence of Thai and Seth spread his hands.
“No, no. He’s a friend. He’s one of us.”
Jack gestured at the dead man on the table. “Hell of a centerpiece, mate. Your work?”
Jao slipped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and picked up a scalpel and forceps, peeling back the skin of the man on the table. His cuts bifurcated tattoos, sutras and dragons tangled together in the hurried flurry that Jack recognized as prison ink.
“So?” he growled finally, hands never pausing as he lifted out a section of sternum that a Stryker saw had separated. “What you want?” Jao wore white at his temples and a scowl on his face like battle scars, and he glared up at Jack from under a thatch of black hair. He resembled more than anything a troll, something small and scuttling that lived under a bridge. Jack knew from hanging about Pete and her work with the Met that it happened when you spent your days prodding dead bodies.
“You had a bloke come in about two weeks ago,” Seth said. “Dead bloke, obviously.
“He was a singer,” Jack supplied. “And talented.”
“Talented, right.” Seth fingered his packet of Silk Cut, tapped out a fag. Jao curled his lip back.
“Ain’t no smoking in the surgery.”
Jack took the fag from Seth’s fingers and stuck it between his own lips, touching his finger to the end. “Brilliant. You see this dead bloke or not?”
“No,” Jao said instantly. He opened the nylon bag and pulled out a bunch of herbs. “We ain’t had nobody here like that.”
The herbs went under the dead man’s skin and Jao rummaged in his supplies until he found a wide-gauge needle and rough cotton thread.
“That’s hawthorn,” Jack said, puffing out a cloud of smoke and breaking off the burning tip of the fag, for later. “Recognize the leaves.” He poked at the pile of herbs in the dead man’s chest cavity. “Not a lot of hawthorn trees in this part of the world, eh, mate?”
Jao slapped his hand away. “Not for touching.”
“I’m really couldn’t give a flying fuck what you’re doing to this poor bastard,” Jack said. “Although according to Seth here, you people got a real problem with ghost sickness. Seems maybe
