Gilded Latten Bones (6 page)

“You didn’t bother to tell me before?”

“I couldn’t tell you what I didn’t know then.”

I got that. “Go see Puddle and Sarge. They might know what he was into.” She didn’t respond. I had just said something dumb. I guessed, “They didn’t know anything.”

“You are correct, sir. Morley walked out of the Grapevine after the late play rush. They never saw him again. And that was all they knew.”

I had no trouble believing it. That was Morley Freaking Dotes, total individualist. “I guess all we can do is be patient and hope he gives us something when he wakes up.”

“You’re a screaming genius, Garrett. I’m so glad Morley and I have you for a friend.”

“I am a special kind of guy.”

15

The sun was up when I awakened. So was the queen of crime, in a good mood despite being caught in the inelegant process of riding a chamber pot. She pointed. “Look there.”

“What am I supposed to notice?”

“We closed the curtains and the window.”

Oh.

The curtains had been pushed aside. The window had been raised four inches. And the sill glistened with more dried slime.

“I never liked the kind of window that slides up and down.”

“I don’t know why I woke up when I did. I don’t care. But when I did I saw what looked like a python oozing through the crack. It was about a yard in. I guess it was headed for Morley.”

I eased over, studied the window close up. That allowed her some dignity at the same time. “A big snake? Really?”

“Not exactly. You saw real giant snakes when you were off in the islands. You probably wouldn’t have been impressed. But that’s what it looked like to me.”

“It went away once it realized you were awake.”

“After I hit it about twenty times with your club.”

The woman was gorgeous and brilliant and evil, but she was no connoisseur of personal-use nonlethal defensive instruments. I carried nothing so mundane as a club.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I hollered. You didn’t even roll over. Then I was busy slamming the slime out of that damned thing.”

“You should’ve poked me with the stick.”

“I was distracted. I didn’t think of that.” And that was right in character. She hardly ever asked for help, even when she had no choice. This thing with Morley was a wonderment.

“All right. Tell me how it happened. In order. Exactly.”

“I told you. There was this snake thing. I pounded on it till it pulled back. The shiny stuff is what it left. And, yes, I know we have to move Morley now because we can’t totally protect him here.”

Morley made a noise. I thought he wanted to say something. I was wrong. He had a problem with phlegm.

“That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” For a few seconds Belinda was the woman she could have been if she had chosen different parents and wasn’t a flaming sociopath.

“You got anybody set up around here besides me?”

“Outside. You’re my inside guy. You’re the one I trust.”

Somebody tapped on the door. I couldn’t help myself. “What’s the password?”

“How about ‘Breakfast,’ nimrod?” That sounded like DeeDee.

Belinda collected my head knocker and got ready to brain an intruder clever enough to mimic DeeDee’s twang.

I cleared the bowl and pitcher off the nightstand. DeeDee parked the tray she carried. She turned on Dotes. “It worked! He looks a thousand percent better. He’s coming back. He’s going to be all right.” She bounced and clapped her hands like a girl younger than Crush, then bolted out.

I asked, “What’s the story there?”

“I don’t know. It may be best that I don’t.”

I hadn’t meant DeeDee’s connection to Morley. I’d meant DeeDee and Hellbore. On reflection, though, there was no reason for Belinda to know anything about employees so far down the food chain that they dealt direct with the folks whose money fueled the Combine engine.

“She brought food enough for us and our childhood invisible friends. Let’s do some damage.” I hadn’t eaten since I left Macunado Street.

DeeDee came back with Crush before we were done. Crush jumped all over me. “You weren’t supposed to eat the cream of wheat!”

“The what?”

“The mush, nimrod! That was for him. The heavy stuff was for you.”

The invisible friends must have gotten that. I hadn’t seen anything I considered part of a hearty breakfast. “The nearest thing to a real breakfast...”

Belinda squeezed my left elbow. She had some grip for a girl. “Garrett, your job is to keep your mouth shut, look pretty, and break the legs of anybody who tries to hurt Morley.”

I could do two out of three blindfolded but the mouth thing has been a lifelong challenge.

“Belinda, silence is too hard.” I was always chock-full of words that want to be free. Some even coagulate into rational... somethings.

16

Good thing Crush and DeeDee were dedicated to Morley’s welfare. I was still wondering if I had what it took to feed him when they finished that and got to work dealing with the consequences of giving an unconscious man food and drink.

He needed bathing. His bed needed changed. I opened the window to the max during the process.

Belinda said, “You have to get more water into him. He’s hot but he isn’t sweating the way he should.”

What would she know about dark elf fevers and sweats? Shrug. I have made a point, lately, of not hearing anything interesting about Miss Contague.

Some would say that I’d made a point of not hearing anything interesting about anybody who lacks red hair.

I wondered how Tinnie was doing.

I said, “My gut is full. While you’re all here I’m going to look around outside.”

Belinda gave me a dire look.

“Fear not. I won’t make a run for it.” I reclaimed my stick and got out, just to stretch my legs.

Belinda’s watchers were easy to find. They all recognized me. They had been with her when she collected me on Factory Slide. They had nothing to report. Two were so bored they would have talked about anything with anybody.

The last one, though, had nothing to say. He had seen something interesting. Something interesting had seen him, too. He looked like he was napping at the top of a stairwell to a cellar. He had been dead long enough to cool down.

A few years ago that would not have moved me. Back then every night produced its crop of corpses for morning harvest. But our great city is fraught, entangled in the throes of change. Casually created cadavers have become uncommon. Director Relway’s winnows have been harsh.

I considered the scene with time-dulled mind and senses. This was not one of Belinda’s coach crew. He had not died fighting so had not been alarmed by the approach of whoever did him in.

I crossed over to the wall beneath Morley’s window.

That was redbrick. It glistened. There was dried something on the cobblestones, too. A pile of goat scat marbles lay a few feet south of the glisten. Flies were feasting.

I marveled at all the quiet. Senior management at Fire and Ice had to know the true names of some well-placed clients.

True names weren’t just useful in the sorcery game, they were invaluable in politics and the blackmail game. Even the passive sort that assures localized maintenance of public works and a useful police presence. Or absence.

The streets were in perfect repair. Night lamps were in place and unbroken. There wasn’t a red top in sight.

There wasn’t anyone in sight. Which explained why a dead man could cool down without an uproar.

I made a second round of Belinda’s watchers. Then I went back to report.

DeeDee and Crush had finished. I met them in the hallway. I found Belinda seated on the edge of Morley’s bed, holding his hand. She started, pulled away, looked slightly guilty.

I ignored that. “He does look like he’s coming back.”

“You don’t look good. What happened?”

“Somebody killed your man who was watching the window. You want to see, look to your right, far side, at the top of that cellar well about forty feet along.”

Belinda looked. “Oh. I see him now. Looks like he’s sleeping.”

“Which is why nobody noticed till I tried to wake him up.”

Belinda went from concerned to grim in a heartbeat. She nodded but just stared at the dead man. Bodies and parts thereof would begin skewing Director Relway’s violent crimes statistics real soon.

“Let me guess. Those idiots never saw a thing.”

“No. They did. But I had to ask twice. They only thought they hadn’t seen anything. Once they heard that a friend was dead they remembered an old woman with a goat cart passing through, headed toward downtown.”

“What’s the kicker? I’m in no mood for guessing games.”

“It took her over an hour to get from the guy in the north to the guy in the south. It should have taken five minutes. The guy who saw her first said he heard her going. The man on the south side said he never heard anything. Bam. She was there. She scared him. He says her cart smelled.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“There wasn’t a cart out there when I looked. After I hit that thing with your club.”

I got up to the window. “If it was next to the wall you wouldn’t have seen it.”

“I’ll go get writing stuff.”

“Uh...”

She was ahead of me. “I need to send a note to Pular Singe. An offer of employment.”

“But...” I didn’t want my little ratgirl involved in something deadly. Not again.

Belinda set a brisk pace when she had a goal. She returned with the essentials for letter writing before I finished inventorying improvements in Morley’s condition.

“I brought extra paper. I’ll write a letter of my own, for Singe to pass on to John Stretch. I may have work to subcontract.”

She was in the red zone. Somebody was going to get hurt.

I hoped that wouldn’t be her. Or Morley. Or, especially, me.

“I should send a note to Tinnie, too.”

17

I did write a letter. It seemed futile once I finished. I didn’t have it delivered. Tinnie knew what was going on. Anything I said wouldn’t change her mind.

My dearly beloved had become fixed in her attitudes. She didn’t let facts get in the way of her making up her mind. My friends thought that was my fault. Tinnie and I had a long history. When I stood up on my hind legs she would pack the attitude in. But I did let stuff slide because it was easier to go along.

I was supposed to be guarding someone, not known to be alive, in a hideout where nobody would think to look. The engineer of the hidery hadn’t been successful. Somebody had tried the window already. A guard had lost his life. Then, scarcely an hour after Belinda went away, the last person I expected to see ambled into the room.

DeeDee and Crush were with me, DeeDee worshipping Morley with her too-young eyes, while Crush plotted some means of getting the best of her mother once Morley came around.

I got into weird stuff but not this kind of weird, where a mother looks younger than her daughter and acts it, both of them being professional ladies, fiercely competitive, and desperately eager for positive feedback from a man claimed by a bad woman from far above them in the food chain.

I finished nailing the window shut. “Most excellent, Garrett. A job well-done.” I heard the soft scrape of a foot on hallway carpet. I turned.

Deal Relway came in. The Director himself. The terrible swift sword of the law, older and more worn than when last I saw him. I had heard that he never left the Al-Khar anymore. Too many outsiders wanted to break his bones.

He was a little guy, and ugly. Sometime way back an impudent dwarf had taken a climb through the family tree, plucking forbidden fruit. Additional members of the Other Races had contributed over the generations.

Relway’s minions were too efficient. He had arrived with no more warning than his shoe brushing the nap of the carpet. He looked around, said, “About what I expected. You ladies finish what you’re doing and go.”

They had no idea who he was. I told them, “It’s all right. He’s no enemy.”

Frowning, unsure, they drifted out into a house saturated with red tops.

Relway studied Morley. “Hard to believe.”

“Bad luck can catch up with anybody. What brings you in out of the smoke?”

“The hope that I might learn something helpful in dealing with a problem that’s been nagging me almost since you dropped out.” His tone and mannerisms were casual. He was more comfortable than when last I had seen him.

“You do understand where you are? Whose place you’ve entered without invitation?”

“Not something that concerns me. Her interests and mine coincide right now. Down the road I’ll probably shut her down.”

“It’s good to be confident. But you, sir, are going to die young. And when you do you’ll refuse to believe that it could happen to you.”

Relway was neither devastated nor confused. I kind of felt sorry for him. I didn’t know what I was talking about, either.

“You’ve been out of action for a while, Garrett. The paradigms have shifted.”

“Many casualties? Much property damage?” I wasn’t sure what a paradigm was. He didn’t look likely to explain. “Good for you. But what about right here, right now?”

“Let us readjust and reassess. At the moment I have no interest in what Mr. Dotes may be doing with his life. I’m even disinterested in the fell Miss Contague. I
am
interested in making contact with whoever or whatever was responsible for Mr. Dotes’ condition.”

“Why is that?”

“I am pledged to protect King and Crown. Something out there means to attack both. Your friend may have stumbled into it.”

So. He felt threatened because he wasn’t on top of everything happening in our marvelous city.

We talked, though not about much of consequence. Half an hour later we parted, me thinking that neither of us had profited, till I realized just how far out of trim I was.

He had learned plenty by listening to what I didn’t say. As in not asking what he had learned from Jimmy Two Steps. I must know already, despite being holed up here, seeing no outsider but Belinda.