Vicious Circle

Mike Carey

Hachette

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright Š 2006 by Mike Carey

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

First eBook Edition: July 2008

ISBN: 978-0-446-53760-5

Contents

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Also by Mike Carey

The Devil You Know

Alphabetically, to Ben, Davey, and Lou;

chronologically, to Lou, Davey, and Ben.

They won’t stay where I put them anyway,

thank God, so either way is fine.

May the world be good enough for them.

Acknowledgments

In the UK edition of this book I thanked my editor, Darren, my agent, Meg, publicist George Walkley, desk editor Gabriella Nemeth, copy editor Nick Austin, and my wife, Lin, all of whom played crucial roles in its creation. I’m thanking them again now, but this time with a Damon Runyon–style New York accent.

And because the American edition has been through an entirely different alchemical process, I’d also like to thank Grand Central Publishing editor Jaime Levine and publicist extraordinaire Lisa Sciambra, both for making the U.S. edition happen and for all of their heroic efforts during my recent ten-city U.S. book tour (which included keeping me alive and sane). They go into the box labeled “people I feel privileged to have met.” So do Charlotte Oria, Claire Friedman and her totally amazing family (Jeff, Jeremy, and Jacob), James Sime and Kirsten Baldock, Tad Williams, Richard Morgan, Chris Golden, Alan and Jude of Borderlands, Kristine and Jeannie and their colleagues at the Encino Barnes and Noble, and Doselle Young (whom I also have to thank for one of the most memorable games of pool I’ve ever lost).

Sometimes I love this job.

One

THE INCENSE STICK BURNED WITH AN ORANGE FLAME AND smelled of Cannabis sativa. In Southern Africa it grows wild: you can walk through fields of it, waist-high, the five-fronded leaves caressing you like little hands. But in London, where I live, it’s mostly encountered in the form of black, compacted lumps of soft, flaky resin. A lot of the magic’s gone by then.

Det. Sgt. Gary Coldwood gave me a downright hostile look through the tendrils of the smoke, which curled lazily up through the cavernous interior of the warehouse, the sweet smell dissipating along the aisles of sour dust. The warehouse was on the Edgware Road, on the ragged hinterlands of an old industrial estate: judging from the smashed windows outside and the rows and rows of empty shelves inside, it had been abandoned for a good few years—but Coldwood had invited me to join him and a few uniformed friends for a legally authorized search, so it was a fair bet that appearances were deceptive.

“Have you finished arsing around, Castor?” he asked, fanning the smoke irritably away from his face. I don’t know if all this tact and diplomacy is something he was born with or if he just learned it at cop school.

I nodded distantly. “Almost,” I said. “I have to intone the mantra another dozen or so times.”

Well, Jesus, you know? It was Saturday night, and I already had a heap of my own shit to cope with. When the Met calls, I answer, because they pay on the nose, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And anyway, I figure that if you give them a little showmanship they’ll be more impressed when you come up with the goods. Look, boys, I say in my own devious way, this is magic: it has to be, because it’s got smoke and mirrors. So far, Coldwood’s the only cop who’s ever called me on it, and that’s probably why we get along so well: I respect a man who can smell the bullshit through the incense.

But tonight he was in a bad mood. He hadn’t found a dead body in the warehouse, and that meant he didn’t know what he was dealing with just yet. Could be a murder, could just be their man doing a runner; and if it was a murder, that could be either a golden opportunity or six months of covert surveillance going up in aromatic smoke. So he wanted answers, and that made him less than usually tolerant of my sense of theater.