Street Magic

inscrutability he said, "Got a pen?"
    She handed him the one from her message pad silently and he scribbled on the back of a Boots receipt. "Go here and get me the
Grimoire de Spiritus
, Hatchett's
Dictionary of Unfriendly Entities
, and the black briefcase that's hidden behind the LP of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Understand?"
    Pete looked at the Bayswater address. "Why do you need some dodgy books and a briefcase? Can't you do what you did with Bridget?"
    "This
is
what I did for Bridget… well, most of it at any rate. Look, do you want to find the sodding brats with all their vital parts or not?"
    Pete sighed and ran water over her cigarette to extinguish it. "All right. Back in an hour."

----
Chapter Fourteen

    The address belonged to a set of flats thin and sooty as a Victorian chimney sweep. The crinkled moon face of an old woman stared at Pete from the second floor before a sad floral-sprigged curtain twitched shut.
    Pete climbed five flights that smelled of smoke and too many cabbage dinners until she found the door to number 57. She'd expected a shriveled old man, a gnome with a Gandalf hairdo and a sage twinkle in his eye, so the large Rastafarian who opened the door raised her eyebrow. Just a little, though.
    He looked Pete up and down, flashing a gold front tooth. "May I 'elp you?"
    "I…" said Pete. Then, with a thrust of her chin, "Jack Winter sent me."
    "Jack Winter," said the Rasta. It came out soft and heavy with thought.
Jahck
. Pete desperately hoped that the man wasn't someone Jack had managed to get after him during the time he'd been away.
    "He asked me to get some books for him," Pete elaborated. "And a briefcase."
    A grin split the Rasta's face. "You much more beautiful than the last one who come around on Jack Winter's orders, miss. Come you in."
    Pete stepped over the threshold, feeling inexplicably comfortable when she did so. The flat was spare of furniture and had only one rag rug on the scarred floor. The narrow windows were leaded and let in a weak trickle of light. What the flat did have was a proliferation of oddities that would cause P. T. Barnum to spasm with joy—jars and boxes on the wall-to-wall cases, books piled to Pete's chin in the corner, books on every surface, along with rows and rows of vinyl records and an old '78 turntable. Connor had listened to Elton John's early albums on his. It was in the hospital room when he died, needle ready to drop on "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road."
    "What he send you for? You want tea maybe, and a sausage roll?" asked the Rasta, peering at Pete around the doorjamb leading deeper into the flat.
    "No, no, thank you," she said. "In a bit of a hurry, you know."
    "Have your look, then." He gestured at the bookshelves. "I have business to attend to."
    "I… well, thanks," Pete called as she heard a door close deeper in the flat. After a moment a luxurious scent, dark and secret-tinged as a lover's trysting place under ancient trees, drifted into the main room.
    Pete found the books easily enough, and after digging through a pile of LPs on the bookcase found a scratched copy of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Behind it, sitting dusty and patient as a faithful retainer on the shelf, was a plain black briefcase. Something rattled like knucklebones when Pete picked it up, and she decided not to get unduly curious until she had her privacy.
    She straightened up and found herself face-to-face with a head in a jar. It looked like it had been in the jar for at least a hundred years. The skin was sallow and pickled, and the eyes gazed at nothing through their cataract film. "You bloody owe me, Jack," Pete muttered. She shouted, "Got everything, thanks!" to the silent flat. No one answered before she took her leave, but she could swear the head was grinning at her.

----
Chapter Fifteen

    She called, "I'm back," to the silence of the flat when she opened her door again. Jack was sacked out on the sofa, his blond head dipped to his chest, light tremors running through his shoulders all the way down to the tips of his fingers.
    Pete dumped the books and the briefcase on the floor by her front door and hurried over, kneeling down. "Jack? Jack, what's wrong?"
    "Her wrists are bleeding and bleeding," Jack muttered. "It's sliding down her arms in little red rivers, swirling away down the pipes, and we're all drinking it, we're all watching and waiting for her to raise the blade and cut again."
    Pete grasped his shoulders, giving a shake. "It's not real, Jack." She would have