Faded Steel Heat (2 page)

That earned me a fingernail in the ribs from the nearest beautiful redhead, who observed, “It’s going to be mud if you’re not careful.”

“Just don’t put me in the middle of anything, darling.”

Alyx said, “Nicks is just being Nicks. She can’t help it.”

I said, “Huh?”

“Nicks flirts. She’s been doing it since we were seven. She can’t help it. She doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t realize she’s sending come-on signals. Nicks, for heaven’s sake. You can get in real trouble out here in the world.”

Alyx was right. There’s always trouble if a woman shows she’s willing when she’s not.

I asked, “Did I miss something? Did you spend your whole life in a harem, Nicks?” That isn’t a Karentine thing but the rich do have strange ways. Alyx had been incredibly sheltered as a child.

“Practically.” The Goddamn Parrot flapped over, settled on her wrist like a falcon in a clown suit. “My father has strong ideas about saving me from the world. The Weiders and a few other families are the only people I’ve ever met. Till recently.”

Alyx said, “She’s staying with us, now. Daddy isn’t the big ogre he used to be.”

He never was with his baby. Alyx always got anything she wanted with just a cute pout.

Nicks used a finger to stroke the top of the jungle chicken’s head. The little monster went along enthusiastically. He tilted his head back so she could get a finger under his chin. I’d never seen him take to anyone so wholeheartedly.

I looked to Alyx. I didn’t get anything. What was she doing out of the family fortress herself? Old Man Weider must be losing his grip.

Hell, I knew that already. Didn’t I? Wasn’t that why the toothsome threesome had come? If Max was on top of everything he wouldn’t need help and his baby wouldn’t be out looking for it.

I shrugged. “I’ll find out what I need to know as we go. Let’s visit His Nibs, get comfortable, and talk about it.”

Tinnie stepped back. She glared at me. “Shouldn’t you get dressed first?”

My gal Tinnie, always looking out for my best interest. “Not a bad idea, sweetheart,” though I was perfectly happy dressed the way I was. So what if I was a little rumpled? That was part of my rough charm. “Be right back, my lovelies. If you want tea or anything, you’ll have to help yourselves. Dean’s out shopping. Tinnie, you know where everything is.”

Sneaky Garrett. He will get fresh tea brewed by the very viragos who think they’ ve got him in a clean pin.

I trotted upstairs before Tinnie caught on.

3

I descended the stairway wearing my clotheshorse best only to discover skinny old Dean newly returned. He wrinkled his bony nose, shook his bony head, proceeded into the kitchen. Alyx’s blue eyes twinkled. “You don’t waste much time picking out your clothes, do you?”

Tinnie was in the kitchen. Dean brightened right up. “Miss Tate! This is a pleasant surprise. May I observe that you are looking particularly lovely today?”

“Mr. Creech! You rogue. Of course you may. Somebody ought to notice. Let me help you with that.”

I leaned into the kitchen. Damn! The old boy was being victimized by a hugging redhead.

Life ain’t fair. Not even a little. Me she pokes and pinches.

A crackling sense of amused anticipation grew around me. Somehow the ladies had both wakened my partner and put him in a good mood. That filled me with foreboding. Eclipses and planetary conjunctions are less common than the Dead Man awakening in a good mood when the house is infested with females.

I took a deep breath.

Here we went again.

I led the ladies into the Dead Man’s room, which takes up most of the left-side ground floor of my house, excepting the pantries off the kitchen.

The cuties made themselves right at home. Without asking they dragged chairs out of my office, which is an ambitious closet across the hall from the Dead Man’s room. Tinnie perched on the guest’s chair. Nicks claimed the comfortable one that belongs behind my desk. I would cherish the warmth forever. Meantime, Alyx decorated the chair I usually use when I’m in with the Dead Man. The Goddamn Parrot still perched on Nicks’ hand, nibbling bits of something she offered him. He cooed like a goddamned turtledove.

You might reserve that admiration for Miss Tate. If you were a gentleman.
That was my partner, shoving unwanted advice directly into my head.

“But I’m not. She’s told me so lots of times.” I glared. Alyx and Nicks smiled as though enjoying a private joke. Maybe Old Bones had shared his remarks with the three heartstoppers, not just me.

Perhaps I blushed, slightly. Tinnie sure grinned.

The Dead Man resides in a huge wooden chair at the heart of the biggest room in the house. Usually the room isn’t lighted. In his present state he doesn’t need light. But the ladies did and had brought lamps in from other rooms.

They shouldn’t have bothered.

The Dead Man isn’t pretty. That’s partly because he isn’t really a man. He hails from a rare species called Loghyr who resemble humans only vaguely. He goes four hundred plus pounds, though the vermin keep nibbling off bits so he’s probably dropped a few. He’s uglier than your sister’s last husband and has a snoot like an elephant. It hangs about fourteen inches long. I’ve never seen a live Loghyr so don’t know how they use that.

He was called the Dead Man when I met him, ages ago. One of those clever street names, picked up on account of he has been dead for four hundred years. Somebody stuck a knife in him way back when, probably while he was taking one of his six-month siestas. He’s never bothered to explain.

But he is Loghyr and Loghyr do nothing hastily. They especially don’t get into a rush about giving up the ghost. I hear four hundred years is far from a record stall.

Nobody knows much about the Loghyr. The Dead Man will babble on for weeks without dropping a hint himself.

I leaned against a set of shelves loaded with souvenirs from old cases and knickknacks the Dead Man likes to grab with a thought and send swooping around if he feels that will rattle a visitor already distressed by his less than appetizing appearance.

Could you not have selected clothing less threadbare? In business it is important to present a businesslike appearance.

Him too? Steel yourself, Garrett. It’s teak on Tommy Tucker time with you in the coveted role of Tommy in the brown-bottomed slit trench. “That’s how we’ll justify my fee.”

Fee?

“Money? Gold and silver and copper. That stuff we use to buy beans for me and Dean and keep the leaky roof from leaking on your head? You recall your days in that ruin on Wizard’s Reach? With the roof half-gone and the snow blowing in?”

The women looked at me weirdly. Which meant that they were getting only my half of the conversation. But their imaginations were perking.

Of course. You must maintain a businesslike approach
 —
if not a businesslike appearance. But, perhaps, you have overlooked the fact that we have a retainer arrangement with Mr. Weider and are, therefore, expected to provide our services against fees already paid.

“You got a point.” The Weider retainer had seen me through numerous dry spells. “Hey, Alyx. Before we worry about anything else, are you here for your dad or you?”

“I’m not sure. He didn’t send me but he asked Manvil if they should think about calling you in. This thing will affect the brewery. He might’ve sent me if it ever occurred to him that a daughter could do something productive. I think he hasn’t sent for you just because he’s embarrassed to admit that he can’t handle everything himself. He’s still hoping he can get by without you but I think it’s been too late for that for days.”

I didn’t have a clue what it was all about yet. I glanced at Nicks.

Alyx told me, “Nicks is in it because my brother is in it and they’re engaged and she’s worried.”

What a cruel world it is where a beauty like Nicks wastes herself on a creature like Ty Weider. Though Nicks did not appear excited by her impending nuptials.

She is not. But she does not have the heart to disappoint two sets of parents who have had this alliance planned for twenty years. She has found ways to delay it several times. Now her time has run out.

“And Tinnie?”

“She’s my friend, Garrett. She’s just here to lend emotional support.”

A wise man would not now insist on subjecting all things to a rigorous scrutiny, Garrett.

I have lived with His Nibs so long that even his obscurantisms and obfuscations have begun to make sense. This time he was hanging a codicil on the rule about not looking too closely at politics, sausage manufacture, or the teeth of gift horses. Tinnie was here. I should enjoy that, not go picking the scabs off sores.

“All right. I still don’t have a clue. Start at the beginning and tell me everything, Alyx. Even if it doesn’t seem important.”

“Okay. It’s The Call.”

I sighed.

It would be.

Already I knew I wasn’t going to like any of this.

4

I asked, “What are they doing? Strong-arm stuff? Extortion?”

“Tinnie says you call it protection.”

I glanced at the professional redhead, so silent of late. At the moment she wasn’t into her favorite role deeply. “They tried it with my uncle, too.” She smiled nastily.

I worked for Willard Tate once. He was a tough old buzzard with a herd of relatives willing to do whatever he told them. He wouldn’t be threatened. “He sent them packing?”

Tinnie grinned. “You know Uncle Willard. Of course he did. Dared them to come back, too.”

“That might not have been too bright. Some human rights gangs are pretty wicked. Alyx. No. Both of you. Was it The Call specifically?”

The Call
 
—
as in “call to arms”
 
—
is Marengo North English’s gang and is the biggest, loudest, best financed, and most vigorously political of the war veterans’ groups. The Call includes a lot of wealthy, powerful men unhappy with the direction Karenta is drifting. As far as I knew The Call only raised funds by donation. But they might extend their reach if rowdier, more radical groups began to attract more recruits.

North English has a big ego and a personal agenda that’s never been clear.

Alyx said, “Yeah. No. I don’t know. They talked to Ty. He claimed he knew some of them. He said they told him Welder’s has to contribute five percent of gross receipts to the cause. And we’ll have to get rid of any employees who aren’t human.”

Ty is Alyx’s brother. One of three, all older than she is. Two of those three didn’t make it back from the Cantard in one piece. The other one didn’t make it back at all. I don’t like Ty Weider, though for no concrete reason. Maybe it’s his relentless bitterness. Though he has a right to be bitter. He gave up a leg for Karenta. The kingdom hasn’t given him much in return.

Ty is not unique. Far from it. Just look down any street. But he belongs to a family with wealth and influence. “Why would they take a run at Ty instead of your dad?”

“Daddy doesn’t spend much time with the business anymore. Momma is lots sicker. He stays with her. He only goes to the brewery maybe every other day and then mostly he only stays for a little while, talking to people he’s known a long time.”

“So Ty is more likely to bump into the public.” I glanced at the Dead Man. Was he mining the unspoken side of this? He didn’t send me a clue. That suggested Alyx was being as forthright as she knew how.

“Yes. But Mr. Heldermach and Mr. Klees are still in charge.”

“Of course.” Because Ty Weider is no brewmaster and not much of an executive. Because nobody at the brewery likes Ty. Because Heldermach and Klees are more than Weider employees. They are more nearly junior partners. Their investment in the brewery is skill and knowledge. Both operated their own breweries before consolidating with Weider.

The Weider empire isn’t just the big brewery downtown, it’s a combine of smaller places scattered throughout the city. Most were struggling when Weider took over and rooted out the inefficiencies and bad brewing policies that kept them from prospering.

The best brewmasters and best recipes stayed on.

“Mr. Heldermach and Mr. Klees were there when The Call talked to Ty.”

“They were?” I glanced at the Dead Man. He did not contradict Alyx.

Surprise, surprise. The moment she’d mentioned Ty as interlocuter I set a new conclusion-jumping distance record, figuring Ty for trying to scam his own dad.

I’m convinced Ty was at least marginally involved in the skimming operation whose breakup endeared me to Old Man Weider back when. That involved barrels of beer vanishing into thin air and becoming pure profit for those enterprising characters who used that method to reduce overhead in the tavern business. I spent months posing as a worker to unearth what I had. I never nailed Ty. What evidence I did find was all circumstantial and could have been explained away as easily by stupidity and gullibility as by evil intent. I never mentioned him to his father
 
—
which, maybe, was one of the services Weider had expected.

Whatever Ty’s role, I closed the brewery’s bleeding belly wound without any scandal. And I’ve kept the stitches from tearing loose again. For which the old man has been more than necessarily grateful. He’s kept me on that retainer ever since and even sends the occasional lonely keg of Reserve Dark over to spend the holidays.

Though the Dead Man would have explored any thoughts in the area already, I asked, “What do you think about Ty, Alex?”

“I try to make allowances. We all do. Because of his leg.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“But?”

“Hmmm?”

“I hear a but. A reservation?”

Alyx glanced at Nicks. She looked like she thought she had said too much already. I glared at the Dead Man.

Bingo!
She is concerned about Miss Nicholas’ feelings, Garrett.

“Huh? Why?” I blurted.

The Dead Man seemed amused. He is whenever I stick my foot into my mouth, though I hadn’t gotten a good taste of dirty old leather yet here.