Red Iron Nights (4 page)

I was sure Barking Dog would have inventive things to say about his prison time. Maybe devils from another world were after him now. He’d never rattled anybody from this world enough to get himself locked up. Maybe it was Venageti secret agents. Or the little people. Or the gods themselves. The god gang don’t need excuses to turn malicious.

“I’m going to bed, Chuckles.” I got out before he could change my mind, muttering, “Three marks a day to tail Barking Dog Amato. It can’t be true.”

The foot of the stairs is just a couple steps from the kitchen door. I leaned in to wish Dean a good night. “After you get rid of that cat, start thinking about the floor in the Dead Man’s room, since you two are such good buddies now. It could use sanding and refinishing.”

He looked at me like he was seeing spooks.

I chuckled, headed for bed. He pulled any more stunts, I’d have him in there for three months, sanding and polishing and painting and generally getting himself a good dose of employer vengeance.

I hit my room, shucked my clothes, brooded about having to go to work for about as long as it took me to plop my head into my pillow. Insomnia isn’t one of my shortcomings.

5

There are those, old Dean among them, whose major personality flaw is a compulsion to spring up with the first bird chirp. That’s a dandy habit—if you’ve
got
to get to the worms first. Me, I swore off exotic chow when I parted ways with the Corps. I won’t get into that situation again.

Dean suffers from the delusion that sleeping till noon is a sin. I’ve tried and tried to show him the light, but his brain hardened along with his arteries. He flat won’t admit the truth of my theories. No fool like an old fool.

I made the error of observing that aloud.

Hell, it was barely sunup. You expect me to
think
at that time of night?

I got me a drizzle of ice water down my spine.

I screamed. I cussed. I said stuff to set dear old mom spinning in her grave.

I got up, to no avail. The old boy had him a head start.

I sat on the edge of my bed, put my elbows on my knees and my forehead in my hands. I asked the gods, which I believe in once a week, what I’d done to deserve Dean. Hadn’t I always been one of the good guys? Come on, fellows. Let’s all play a prank on the universe and let true justice reign for a day. Get that old sucker.

I blinked. Between the heels of my hands I glimpsed Dean peeking around the doorframe. “Time to get up, Mr. Garrett. You have to be outside the Al-Khar in two hours. I’ve started breakfast.”

My suggestion about breakfast reversed the traditional alimentary process. He wasn’t impressed.

He clumped downstairs. I groaned vigorously and stumbled to a window. There was barely enough light to see. The city ratmen were banging and clanging their trash carts while they pretended to do something useful. A herd of dwarves hustled past, carrying bundles bigger than they were. They were a sullen, surly, silent gang. See what getting up early does?

Except for dwarves and street sweepers, the thoroughfare was barren. Sane folk were still in bed.

Only impending poverty kept me from easing back into mine.

What the hell? I could turn old Barking Dog into a career. Anybody dumb enough to have him tailed deserved to have his purse looted. Sure be safer than most jobs that come my way.

I prettied myself up and moseyed downstairs. I paused outside the kitchen to put on a heavyweight scowl—though at that time of night, if my rest is disturbed, scowling comes naturally.

Which did me no good. I stepped into the smells of spicy sausages, stewed apples, fresh hot tea, biscuits just out of the oven. I didn’t have a chance.

He won’t cook like that when I’m not working. I’m just hanging around, it’s maybe a bowl of cold porridge developing a crust. If I want fresh tea, I’ve got to put the pot on myself.

What do you do with these work-ethic fanatics? I mean, I don’t mind if he busts his butt working for me—which I’ve never noticed him doing. My problem is, he’s one of those characters who want to redesign the rest of us. His ambition is to see me collapse from overwork, rich, before my thirty-first birthday. I’m going to fool him. That won’t never come. I’m going to stay thirty forever.

I ate. Too much. Dean hummed as he cleaned his pots. He was happy. I was employed. I felt abused, trivialized. Such a vast array of talents and skills wasted trailing a nut case. It was like using a rosewood four-by-four to swat flies.

Dean was of such good cheer about my employment that he forgot to kvetch till I was halfway through my second helping of apples. “You go past the Tate compound to get to the Al-Khar don’t you, Mr. Garrett?”

Oh-oh. When he Misters me he knows I won’t like what he’s got to say. This time he was pretty transparent. “Not today.” He was going to nudge me to make up with Tinnie. Which I wasn’t going to do on account of I’d decided I was done apologizing to women for things I didn’t do. “Tinnie wants to make up, she knows where to find me.”

“But . . . ”

I got up. “Something you need to think about, Dean. Maybe while you’re finding a home for that cat. And that’s what you’ll do if I suddenly find me a wife to manage the house.” That would hold him.

I headed for the front door. I didn’t get there. The Dead Man’s voice rang in my head.
You are leaving without taking adequate precautions, Garrett.

He meant I was leaving the house unarmed. I said, “I’m just going to follow a crazy man. I won’t get into trouble.” Without bothering to go into his room. He doesn’t hear physically.

You never plan to get into trouble. Yet each time you assume that attitude and go out unprepared, you end up wishing you had had the foresight to carry something. Is that not so?

That was uncomfortably close to the truth. I wished it wasn’t. I wished we lived in a more civilized age. But wishing never makes anything so.

I went upstairs, to my closet of unpleasantries, where I keep the tools I use when the tools I prefer, my wits, fail me. I grumbled all the while. And wondered why I resisted good advice. I guess I resented the fact that I hadn’t thought of it myself.

Lessons you don’t want to learn come hard.

TunFaire is not a nice city.

I hit the street in a black humor. I wasn’t going to make the city any nicer.

6

Like most public buildings in this town, the Al-Khar is generations overdue for renovation. It looks like the prisoners could walk through the walls if they wanted.

The Al-Khar was a bad idea from the beginning, a pork-barrel project making somebody rich through cost overruns and corner cutting. The builder used a pale yellow-green stone that absorbed grunge from the air, reacted with it, streaked, turned uglier by the hour, and did not stand up, being too soft. It chipped and flaked, dropping talus all around the prison, leaving the walls with a poxy appearance. In places there’d been mortar decay enough that stones were loose. Since the city hardly ever jailed anybody, there seemed to be no financial provision for prison maintenance.

It was raining still, though now the fall was just a drizzle. Just enough to be a misery. I posted myself under a forlorn lime tree as down-and-out as any alley-dwelling ratman. It didn’t know the season. But its sad branches offered the only shelter around. I recalled my Marine Corps training and faded into my surroundings. Garrett the chameleon. Right.

I was early, not something that happens often. But since I started my exercises I move a little faster, with more energy. Maybe I should go for a mental workout too. Develop some energy and enthusiasm in that direction.

The trouble with me is my work. Investigating exposes you to the slimy underbelly of the world. Being a weak character, I try to make things better, to strike the occasional spark in the darkness. I have a notion my reluctance to work springs from the knowledge that if I do I’ll see more of the world’s dark side, that I’ll butt heads with the Truth, which is that people are cruel and selfish and thoughtless and even the best will sell their mothers at the right time.

The big difference between good guys and bad is the good guys haven’t yet had a fat chance for profiting from going bad.

A bleak world view, unfortunately reinforced by events almost daily.

A bleak view that’s scary because it keeps on telling me my turn is coming.

A bleak street, that dirty cobbled lane past the Al-Khar. Very little traffic. That was true even in good weather. I’ve felt less lonely, less touched by despair, alone in the woods.

The street was a problem professionally as well as emotionally. I didn’t blend in. People would start wondering and maybe remembering—though they wouldn’t come outside. People in this town avoid trouble.

Barking Dog came stomping out of prison, thumbs tucked into his belt. He paused, surveyed the world with a prisoner’s eye.

He was about five-feet-six, sixtyish, chunky, balding, had a brushy graying mustache and ferocious huge eyebrows. His skin was tanned from decades in the elements denouncing conspiracies. Prison hadn’t faded him. His clothes were old and tattered and filthy, the same he’d worn when he’d gone inside. The Al-Khar doesn’t offer uniforms. Barking Dog, so far as I knew, had no relatives to bring him anything.

His gaze swept me. He didn’t react. He raised his face, enjoyed the drizzle, then started moving. I gave him half a block before I followed.

He had a unique way of walking. He was bowlegged. He had arthritis or something. He sort of rolled along, lifting one whole side of his body, swinging it forward, following with the other. I wondered if he hurt much. Prison wouldn’t do wonders for arthritis.

Barking Dog wasn’t in a hurry. He ambled, savoring his freedom. I’d hang out in the rain myself, enjoying it, if I’d been locked up. But I wasn’t terribly empathic at the moment. I muttered and sputtered and grumbled. Such thoughtlessness! Keeping a crack investigator out in the rain.

Wasn’t his fault, though, was it? I started plotting vengeance on the Dead Man.

Always an interesting mental exercise, that. What sanctions can you exercise against somebody who’s been murdered? Aren’t many options left.

Even us masters of the game get sloppy. It’s easy when you don’t feel threatened. I didn’t feel threatened. Barking Dog wasn’t the kind of street bruno I run into ordinarily, somebody big as a house and half as smart and just as easy to shove around. Barking Dog was damned near a little old man. Little old men don’t get violent. Or, if they do, they pay some big, stupid bruno to do it for them.

I strutted around a corner and—oooph! Right in the breadbasket. Lucky for me, Barking Dog was damned near a little old man and little old men don’t get violent.

I folded up, tried to prance away from his follow-up. Wonder of wonders, I made it. He was, after all, damned near a little old man. I gagged and hacked and got my breath back. Meantime, Barking Dog added things up and decided he hadn’t gotten enough oomph on his punch and his best move now was to apply heels and toes vigorously to the cobblestones.

Not unwise tactics, considering the mood I was in all of a sudden.

I got me trundling after him. Lucky me, I’d been working out so I was in good enough shape to come back quickly. Before long I was keeping up, then I started gaining ground. Barking Dog looked back only once. He saved his energy for streaking away.

Me, I started taking corners more carefully.

It didn’t take me long to catch up, grab him by the shoulder, block his futile blows, and force him to sit on somebody’s steps. “What the hell was that for?” I demanded.

He looked at me like I was a fool. Maybe he was right. I hadn’t exercised a lot of wisdom so far. He didn’t answer me.

It didn’t look like he was planning to make a break, so I sat me down beside him, far enough off so he couldn’t cream me with a backhand. “That hurt, guy. How come?”

That look again. “What you take me for, bruno?”

Oh. That hurt more than the whack in the gut. I’m an experienced investigator, not a street thug. “A crazy old man, ain’t got sense enough to get in out of the rain.”

“I’m one with nature. You going to get to it?”

“To what?”

“The threats. The arm-twisting.”

Ha! My turn to do the looking.

“You don’t fool me with that dumb look. Somebody sent you to keep me from telling the truth.”

Craftily I asked, “What truth would that be?”

Craftier, he told me, “If they didn’t tell you, they don’t want you to know. Wouldn’t want to get you in as deep as I am.”

Crazy. And I was sitting there talking to him. In the rain. Downwind. They hadn’t given him a scrubbing before they turned him loose. “No threats. I don’t care what you do.”

He didn’t understand. “Hows come you’re dogging me?”

“To see where you go.” Get him with a new technique. Tell the truth. Confuse him all to hell.

It worked. He was puzzled. “Why?”

“Damned if I know. Guy paid my partner, who took the job without consulting me. Naturally, he’s housebound. So I’m the one out here drowning.”

He believed me, probably because I wasn’t twisting limbs. “Who’d want to know that?” He seemed lost. “Nobody takes me serious. Hardly nobody, anyway.”

I checked to see if we were drawing a crowd. Barking Dog had one voice level, loud. Like he’d been yelling so long, that was all he could do. Too, I wondered what they’d fed him in jail. He had breath like a buzzard. Not to mention he wasn’t appetizing visually, what with his wild eyebrows, mustache, bulbous nose, and buggy eyes. At least he didn’t try to handbill me or want me to sign a petition.

Might as well push my experiment to the limit. “Guy called Bishoff Hullar.”

“Who? I don’t know no Bishoff Hullar.”

“Runs a taxi-dance scam in the Tenderloin.”

He looked at me queer, sure I was lying or crazy. Then he frowned. “A nominee! Of course.”

“Say what?”

“A nominee. A stand-in who hired you for somebody else.” He began nodding, grinning. Somebody was out to get him. He liked that idea. After all these years, somebody was out to get him! Somebody was taking him seriously! He was about to be persecuted!