Dead Men's Boots Read Free Page B

to bed with, except that my fear of intimacy and
     her preference for older men had kicked in at about the same time and turned a promising fumble into an awkward conversation
     about micro-limit hold ’em. There’s a line in a Yeats poem where he asks whether your imagination lingers longest on a woman
     you won or a woman you lost. While you’re puzzling over that one, you can maybe give him an estimate on how long a piece of
     string is. If things had worked out differently, Carla and me could have gotten a whole Mrs. Robinson thing going, although
     even in those days, I was less of a Benjamin Braddock and more of a Ratso Rizzo.
    I started the car and pulled away, noticing that the priest followed us with his sad eyes as we drove by. I sympathized up
     to a point. It couldn’t be an easy way to earn a living these days.
    We eased our way out between the pickets, collecting a fair share of abuse and ridicule along the way but no actual missiles
     or threats. Most of the people waving placards and chanting rhythmically were in their teens or early twenties. What did they
     know about death? They hadn’t even gotten all that far with life yet.
    The cemetery was all the way out in Waltham Abbey, and John and Carla lived—or rather, Carla still lived and John didn’t anymore—on
     Aldermans Hill just outside of Southgate, in a flat over a dress shop. It was going to be a long haul, and the Vectra handled
     like a half-swamped raft. Turning in to the traffic, I remembered the half-bottle of metaxa in my inside pocket, fished it
     out one-handed, and passed it across to Carla. She took it without a word, unscrewed the lid, and downed a long swallow. It
     made her shudder; probably it made her eyes water, too, but there were plenty of other explanations available for why she
     rubbed the heel of her hand quickly across her face.
    Looking in the rearview mirror, I noticed that we’d picked up a tail. I swore under my breath. It was one of the vans that
     the Breathers had arrived in—a big high-sided delivery truck that someone must have borrowed from work, deep blue and with
     the words BOWYER’S CLEANING SERVICES written in reverse script over the windscreen—because a good idea is a good idea, even if the emergency services think of
     it first. I didn’t mention it to Carla: I just switched lanes whenever I could to make life harder for them. I was confident
     that I could lose them long before we got back into London.
    “So what was all that shit with the lawyer?” I asked. It sounds tactless, put like that, but I’ve always found anger a good
     corrective to grief. Grief paralyzes you, where a good head of hacked-off biliousness keeps you moving right along, although
     it’s not so great for making you look where you’re going.
    Carla shook her head, as though she didn’t want to talk about it, and I was going to let it lie. But then she took a second
     pull on the brandy bottle, and away she went.
    “John had always said he wanted to be buried at Waltham Abbey, next to his sister, Hailey,” she muttered. “Always. She was
     the only person he ever loved, apart from me. But he wasn’t himself, Fix. Not for months before he died. He wasn’t anyone
     I recognized.” She sighed deeply and a little raggedly. “There’s a condition—EOA, it’s called. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. It
     got John’s dad when he was only forty-eight, and by the time he turned fifty, he couldn’t even dress himself. John was convinced
     that Hailey was starting to get it just before she died, and he was always terrified he was going to go the same way. He tried
     to make me promise once that I’d give him pills if it ever took him. If he ever got to the point where—you know, where there
     was nothing left of him. But I couldn’t, and I told him I couldn’t.
    “Anyway, just because it
can
run in families doesn’t mean it will. You don’t know, do you? There’s no point running halfway to meet trouble. But he’d