Red Iron Nights gf-6 Read online

  I swished my billy around, trying to avoid seeing those eyes because they were poisonous. They scared hell out of me. Made me feel cold all the way down to my tail-bone. And I don't scare easy.

  I got him a good one upside the head. His grip weakened. That gave me a chance to line up another shot. I let him have it.

  His mouth opened wide, but instead of a scream, butterflies poured out. I mean like about a million and two butterflies, so many the coach was filled. They were all over me. I stumbled back, flailed around. I'd never been bitten by a butterfly, but who knew about the kind that come flapping out of some old geek's mouth?

  Saucerhead pulled the girl away from me, tossed me back like a rag doll, dived in there, and pulled that old guy out. You don't want to get in Saucerhead's way when he's riled. He breaks things.

  The old man's eyes had lost their fire. Saucerhead lifted him with one hand, said, "What the hell you think you're pulling, Gramps?" and tossed him over to ricochet off the same wall that had been Scarface's undoing. Then Tharpe went over and started kicking, one for this guy, one for that, no finesse. I heard ribs crack. I figured I ought to calm him down before he killed somebody, only I couldn't think how. I didn't want to get in his way when he was in that mood. And I still had a flock of soggy butterflies after me.

  Tharpe calmed himself down. He grabbed the old man by the scruff of the neck and pitched him into the coach. The old boy made a sound like a whipped puppy. Tharpe tossed Scarf ace in on top of him, then looked up. There wasn't anybody on the driver's seat, so he just whacked the nearest horse on the rump and yelled.

  The team took off.

  Hunching down against the rain, Tharpe turned to me. "Takes care of those clowns. Hey! What happened to the girl?"

  She was gone.

  "Damned ingrate. There's a broad for you. Hell." He looked up, let the rain fall into his face a moment, then said, "I'm going to get my stuff. Then what say you and me go get drunk and get in a fight?"

  "I thought we just had a fight."

  "Bah. Bunch of candyasses. Wimps. Come on."

  I had no intention of going trouble-hunting. But it did seem like a good idea to get in out of the rain, away from the butterflies. I told you I hadn't used up my ration of sense.

  One of the two thugs was blocking the water flow in the gutter in front of Morley's door. The second came flying out as we started in. "Hey!" Tharpe yelled. "Watch where you're throwing your trash."

  I looked around inside. The girl hadn't gone back in there. Morley and Puddle and I settled down to wonder what it was all about. Saucerhead went off looking for a real challenge.

  3

  I did my best to get my money's worth out of Puddle's keg while Morley and I dissected cabbages and kings and butterflies and the old days that never were that good—though I'd had me a moment now and then. We solved the ills of the world but decided there was nobody in authority with sense enough to implement our program. We were disinclined to take on the job ourselves.

  Women proved a topic of brief duration. Morley's recent luck undershone my own. It was too much to take, seeing that great blob Puddle tipped back in his chair, thumbs hooked in his belt, grinning smugly in regard to his own endeavors.

  The rain continued relentless. At last I had to face facts. I was going to get wet again. I was going to get a lot wet if Dean failed to respond to my pounding and whooping at the door. With set jaw and scant optimism I took my leave of Morley and his establishment. Dotes looked as smug as his man. He was home already.

  I hunched my chin down against my chest and wished I'd had the sense to wear a hat. I wear one so seldom it doesn't occur to me to top myself off when that would be wise. Right away rain started sneaking down the back of my neck.

  I paused where we'd rescued Chodo's mysterious daughter from her more mysterious assailants. There wasn't much light. The rain had swept away most of the evidence. I poked around and was on the verge of deciding half had been my imagination before I found one big bedraggled butterfly. I salvaged the cadaver and carried it as carefully as I could, cradled in my left palm.

  My place is an old red brick house in a once-prosperous stretch of Macunado Street, near Wizard's Reach. The middle-class types have all abandoned ship. Most of the neighboring places have been subdivided and rented to families with herds of kids. Usually when I approach my house I pause to inspect it and reflect on the good fortune that let me survive the case that paid me enough to buy it. But cold rain down the back of the neck has a way of sapping nostalgia.

  I scampered up the steps and gave the secret knock, bam-bam-bam, as hard as I could while bellowing, "Open up, Dean! I'm going to drown out here." A big flash of lightning. Thunder rattled my teeth in their sockets. The sky lords hadn't been feuding before, just tuning up for another Great Flood. Thunder and lightning suggested they were about to get serious. I pounded and yelled some more. The stoop isn't protected from the weather.

  Maybe my ears were still ringing. I thought I heard something like a kitten crying inside. I knew it couldn't be a cat. I'd given Dean the word about his strays. He wouldn't lapse.

  I heard shuffling and whispering inside. I did some more yelling. "Open this damned door, Dean. It's cold out here." I didn't threaten. Mom Garrett didn't raise no kids dumb enough to lay threats on somebody who could just go back to bed and leave me singing in the rain.

  The door creaked open after a symphony of curses and clanking bolts and rattling chains. Old Dean stood there eyeing me from beneath drooping lids. He looked about two hundred right then. He is around seventy. And real spry for a guy his age.

  If he wasn't going to get out of the way I was going to walk over him. I started moving. He slid aside. I told him, "The cat goes as soon as the rain stops." I tried to sound like it was him or the kitten.

  He started rattling bolts and chains. I stopped. All that hadn't been there before. "What's all the hardware?"

  "I don't feel comfortable living somewhere where all there is is one or two latches to keep the thieves out."

  We needed to have us a talk about assuming and presuming. I knew damned well he didn't buy that hardware out of his own pocket. But now wasn't the time. I wasn't at my best.

  "What's that you've got?"

  I'd forgotten the butterfly. "Drowned butterfly." I took it into my office, a shoe box of a room behind the last door to your left heading back to the kitchen. Dean hobbled after me, bringing a candle. He has decrepitude down to an art. It's amazing how incapacitated he gets when he has a scam running.

  I used his candle to light a lamp. "Go back to bed."

  He glanced at the closed door of the small front room, a door we shut only when there's somebody or something in there we don't want seen. Something was scratching its other side. Dean said, "I'm wide-awake now. I might as well get some work done." He didn't look wideawake. "You plan to be up long?"

  "No. I'm just going to study this bug, then kiss Eleanor good night." Eleanor was a beautiful, sad woman who lived once upon a time. Her portrait hangs behind my desk. I go on like we're into a relationship. That drives Dean buggy.

  I have to balance the scale somehow.

  I settled into my worn leather chair. Like everything else around my place, including the house, it was secondhand. It was just getting adjusted to a new butt. Just getting comfortable, I pushed my accounts aside, spread the butterfly on my desk.

  Dean waited in the doorway till he saw I wouldn't react to the accounts being out. Then he huffed off to the kitchen.

  I popped a quick peek at the last entry, made a face. That didn't look good. But go to work? Gah! Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof.

  Meantime, there was this raggedy old green butterfly. It could've been a beauty before, but now its wings were cracked and chipped and split, bent and washed out. A disaster. I suffered a moment of déjà vu.

  I'd seen its cousins in the islands while I was doing my five years in the Royal Marines. There're a lot in the swamps down there. There's every ki
nd of bug the gods ever imagined, except maybe arctic roaches. Maybe creation was handled by a heavenly committee. In areas where departmental turfs overlapped, the divine functionaries went to competing. And they all for sure dumped their bug-production overruns in those tropical swamps.

  But the heck with the bad old days. I'm all growed-up now. What I had to ask was, what was I doing with the flutterbug in the first place?

  I was definitely, for sure, guaranteed, not even a little bit interested in anything involving dried-up old geezers with stomachs so sour they belched up butterflies. I'd done my good deed for the decade. I'd rescued the maiden fair. It was time to get on with things dearer my heart, like hustling Dean's latest fuzzball charity out my back door.

  I swept the bug cadaver into the trash bucket, leaned back, started thinking how nice it would be to put myself away in my nice soft bed.

  4

  Garrett!

  "Hell!" Every time I forget my so-called partner...

  The Dead Man hangs out in the larger front room that takes up the whole front side of the house opposite my office, an area as big as my office and the small front room together. A lot of space for a guy who hasn't moved since before TunFaire was called TunFaire. I'm thinking about putting him in the basement with the other junk that was here when I moved in.

  I went into his room. A lamp was burning there. That was a surprise. Dean doesn't like going in there. I glanced around suspiciously.

  The room contains only two chairs and two small tables, though the walls are hidden by shelves of books and maps and memorabilia. One chair is mine. The other has a permanent resident.

  If you walk in not knowing what to expect, the Dead Man can be a shock. First, there's just a whole hell of a lot of him. Four hundred and fifty pounds' worth. Second, he's not human, he's Loghyr. Since he's the only one of that tribe I've ever seen, I don't know if he'd set the Loghyr girls swooning, but by my standards he's one homely sucker. Like he was the practice dummy when the guy with the ugly stick was doing his apprenticeship.

  After fat you notice he's got a snoot like an elephant, fourteen inches long. Then you notice that the moths and mice have nibbled him over the years.

  The reason he's called the Dead Man is that he's dead. Somebody stuck a knife in him about four hundred years ago. But Loghyr just don't get in a hurry. His soul, or whatever, is still hanging around in his body.

  I gather you have had an adventure.

  Since he's dead, he can't talk, but he doesn't let that slow him down. He just thinks right into my head. He can also go rummaging around in there, amongst the clutter and spiders, if he wants. Mostly he's courteous enough to keep out unless he's invited.

  I took another look around. The place was too clean. Dean had even dusted the Dead Man.

  Something was up. Those two had gotten their heads together. That was a first. That was scary.

  I'm nothing if not cool. I covered my suspicion perfectly. Knowing it was going to be something I wouldn't like, I decided to get even first.

  The Dead Man made a big mistake when he taught me to remember every little detail of everything when I was working. I started talking about my evening.

  The theoretical basis of our association is I do the legwork and suffer the slings and arrows and thumps on the head and he takes whatever I learn and runs it through his self-proclaimed genius brains and tells me whodunit or where the body is buried or whatever it is I'm trying to find out. That's the theoretical basis. In practice, he's lazier than I am. I have to threaten to burn the house down just to wake him up.

  I was dwelling in lingering detail upon the charms of the strange Miss Contague when suspicion bit him. Garrett!

  He knows me too well. "Yes?" Sweetly.

  What are you doing?

  "Filling you in on some odd occurrences."

  Occurrences, incidentally, of but passing interest. Unless your passions have overcome your brain yet again. You could not possibly be considering involving yourself with those people, could you?

  I thought about lying just to rattle his chain. We do a lot of that, back and forth. It passes the time. But I said, "There are limits to how much I'll let a skirt override my good sense."

  Indeed? I am amazed and surprised. I had concluded that you have no sense at all, good or bad.

  We do get going. Usually it's play, wit and half-wit. It's up to you to guess who's who.

  "One point for you, Old Bones. I'm going to go put myself on the shelf for the night. If Dean explodes in another mad burst of energy and decides to dust you again, tell him he can wake me at noon." I have this thing about mornings. No sane man gets up then. They come too damned early in the day.

  Think about it. All those early birds out there, what do they get? Ulcers. Heart trouble. Caught by homeless cats. But not me. Not old Garrett. I'm going to lean back and relax and loaf my way to immortality.

  I wish you could sleep in. After your valiant rescue job and your heroic attempt to turn a profit off that Puddle creature, you deserve a reward.

  "Why do I get the feeling you're about to stick it to me? Why shouldn't I sleep in? I don't have anything else to do."

  You have to be at the gate of the Al-Khar at eight o'clock.

  "Say what?" The Al-Khar is the city prison. TunFaire is notoriously short on law enforcement and justice, but once in a while some clown is so clumsy he stumbles into the arms of the Watch. Once in a while some brain-damage case actually gets himself some time. "What the hell for? There's people up there don't like me."

  If you were to avoid every place where someone does not like you, you would have to leave town in order to find room to breathe. You will be there because you have to tail a man who is to be released at eight.

  I had it scoped out. Him and Dean had found me work on account of they were worried about our dwindling funds. The brass-bottomed nerve! They were both getting big-headed. But sometimes it helps to play dumb. I'm a past master at playing dumb. I'm so good I fool myself sometimes. "What would I want to do that for?"

  Three marks a day and expenses. It should take only a modicum of creativity to shift our household budget into the latter category.

  I got down and peered under his chair. There were still a couple little sacks down there. "We aren't broke yet." That's where we keep our cash. There's no place safer. Any thief who gets past the Dead Man is somebody so bad I don't want to mess with him anyway. "If I kick Dean and his cat out and cook for myself, that'd be beer money for months."

  Garrett.

  "Yeah. Yeah." It really was getting time to hustle up some money. Only I didn't like the idea of jobs being handed to me. I'm the senior partner in this chicken outfit. The boss. Har. "Tell me about it. And while you're doing that, put one of your spare brains to work thinking about who keeps a roof over whose ungrateful head."

  Phsaw! Do not be petty. This is the ideal job. A simple tail. The client simply wishes to trace the movements of the convict.

  "Right! So this clown makes me, leads me into an alley, practices the latest dance steps on my face... "

  This man is not violent. Nor should he expect to be followed. It is easy money, Garrett. Take it.

  "If it's that easy, why me? Why not Saucerhead? He always needs work." I sent a lot his way.

  We need the money. Get some rest. You will be rising early.

  "Maybe." How come it's me that has to get out and do the hustling? "But first, how about you drop me one or two more hints here? Like maybe a description. Just in case more than one guy graduates from college tomorrow. Like maybe the initials of the guy who's hiring me. So I can practice my deducing and figure out who I'm supposed to report to."

  The client is one Bishoff Hullar...

  "Oh, great. You got me working for a sleazy taxi-dance operator from the Tenderloin. Bring me down in the world, why don't you? I used to play with real villains, like Chodo and his boys. Who do I follow? Somebody who stiffed one of his girls? And why?"

  The target is one Barking Dog
Amato. A colorful name...

  "Gods! Barking Dog? You got to be kidding."

  You know him?

  "Not personally. I know who he is. I thought everybody over ten knew Barking Dog Amato."

  I do not get out much anymore.

  I resisted temptation. He'd want me to be his wheels. "Barking Dog Amato. AKA Crackpot Amato. Given name, Kropotkin F. Amato. I don't know what the F stands for. Probably Fruitcake. The man's a total loony. Spends all his time hanging around the Chancery steps with a brass megaphone, yelling about how the powers that be swindled his ancestors. He's got a whole roadshow he hauls around, signs and banners and displays. He hands out broadsides to anybody who gets close enough to let him shove one at him. He's got conspiracy theories that boggle master conspiracy theorists. He can connect anything up with anything and produce a diabolical plot to rule the world or fleece Kropotkin Amato of his birthright. He's big on the Emperor being behind everything."

  The empire that preceded the Karentine state fell ages ago, but there's still an imperial family hanging around awaiting the call. Its only influence on today's world is it provides some small funding for the Bledsoe charity hospital. Nobody but Barking Dog could imagine them being secret masters of anything.

  Interesting.

  "Entertaining. In small doses. But if you get too close you'll get grabbed and told the whole story of how his noble family got defrauded of its title and estates. Hell. His father was a butcher down on Winterslight. His mother was some kind of breed out of the Bustee. The only conspiracy that victimized him was the one that got us all. Conscription and the war. He started his barking after they mustered him out."

  Then the man is harmless, a deluded fool?

  "That'd cover it. As harmless, deluded, and foolish as they come. One of our more entertaining street characters. Which is why they let him hang out with his megaphone."