Bone Gods

a fucking antique but it’ll get the job done.”
    Pete hefted the little Walther and tucked it into the waistband of her denim, smoothing her jacket over it. She might as well have been concealing nothing at all. It wasn’t slick and nickle plated like James Bond’s, but she wasn’t about to get picky over aesthetics. “It shoots?”
    “ ’Course it shoots.” Denny pulled an offended face. “I’d be out of business pretty fucking quick if I sold ornamental shooters.”
    “Fine,” Pete said, taking the gun out and testing the weight and balance. It was a good little piece, and deceptively heavy. “How much?”
    “On the house, provided you never, ever come back here again,” Denny said. “It’s a showy piece, high-end. I sell it to some fucking street hustler, he shoots some fucking boy over some drunken fight, the cops find the original owner and through that whiny little ponce find me. Doing me a favor.” He handed her a box of bullets. “Hollow point. You’ll tear a bloke up with those.”
    “Cheers.” Pete secreted the box in her bag and the Walther back in her waistband. “Bye, Denny.”
    “Oi,” Denny said, when she was on the stoop. “You never did tell me what you want an untraceable piece for, Caldecott. Always figured you were a regular straight arrow. Charged into battle with your baton and a prayer.”
    “Me?” Pete smoothed her shirt over the gun. “No. Straight arrow is something I don’t have the luxury of being any longer.”
    Denny started to say something, but he changed it midstream to, “Where you off to?”
    Pete stepped into the breezeway and zipped her coat against the chill that came with sunset. “I’m off to see a man about a corpse.”

CHAPTER 18
    Whatever else happened, Pete felt calmer having decided on one thing—if Nicholas Naughton came near her again, she was going to put two bullets between his eyes. The sick stomach and itch on the back of her neck she’d felt since Naughton had broken into her flat finally calmed a little.
    She saw the owl sitting on a lightpost soon after she got off the tube in Southwark. It stared at her, unblinking. Pete flicked it off and approached a boy on the corner, shiny red and gold windcheater and iPod marking him as the kind of hustler she needed. “Oi.”
    He looked up at her with bright, speed-contracted pupils. “Wot?”
    “You know a club called Motor?”
    The hustler blinked rapidly at her. “Sure I do, but it ain’t the kind of place you want.”
    Pete had dressed the part, black army jacket, boots, black denim. No copper signals from her. The hustler’s reluctance was, as far as she was concerned, just being contrary. “Why not?”
    “Ain’t for straight folks,” the hustler said. “Now, you want something to taste, I gots crystal, hash, pills, morphine…”
    “Regular little underground Boots, aren’t you?” Pete said. She pulled out a tenner and folded it between her fingers. When the hustler grabbed for it, she snatched it back. “Motor. Where?”
    “Your funeral, ain’t it?” the hustler sighed. He pointed to an abandoned building at the end of the block. “Down in the cellar. You won’t get in, though. Need a password, like one of them skeevy sex clubs.”
    “Thanks for that,” Pete said. “ Time Out should come ’round and interview you, really.”
    The hustler dialed his iPod back up. Pete walked, and the shadow of the owl flicked over her face as it glided away beneath the streetlamps.
    The Hecate could send all the omens she wanted. Pete wasn’t biting. She had far more pressing issues, like how she was going to talk her way into Motor. And trying to ignore the nerves, telling her it was a bad fucking idea in the first place, that she wouldn’t learn anything new, and might get the shit kicked out of her besides.
    A cross faced her when she reached the door the hustler had pointed at, covered over with several layers of racist graffiti and concert posters advertising bands that had last come through London several years previous. OUR LADY OF GOOD COUNSEL had been painted across the facade, but the letters been defaced to GOOD CO N.
    The neon underneath the facade crunched beneath her boots, shattered, and the burn marks spelled out REPENT TO THE LORD, FOR ONLY IN HIM WILL YOU FIND SALVATION.
    The basement level, at the bottom of a narrow set of brick steps, appeared to have staved off vandalism, in the form of a heavy fire door that looked as if it could withstand an IRA