by Glen Cook
“No. Maybe going at it the long way around, telling you to think about growing up.” I hoped she wouldn’t be one chuko who fought that.
She sat down on somebody’s steps. The moonlight was in her face. She was pretty under the grime. She could even be a heart stopper if she wanted to be. First she’d have to come to terms with her past and decide she wanted to attack the future. If she kept drifting she’d be another burned-out whore living off garbage in fifteen years, brutalized by anyone who wanted to bother, protected by no one.
I sat down beside her. She seemed to want to talk. I didn’t say anything. I’d said enough to make her defensive.
“Nobody watching your place anymore, Garrett. Vampires or anybody else.”
“Probably pulled out when they heard about Snowball and Doc.”
“Uhm?”
“The kingpin had them put to sleep.”
She didn’t say anything while that sank in. Then, “Why?”
“Chodo doesn’t like people who don’t listen. He put it out to lay off me and they didn’t.”
“Why would he look out for you?”
“He thinks he owes me.”
“You get to meet a lot of people, don’t you?”
“Sometimes. Usually they turn out to be the kind I wish I didn’t know. There are some bad people in this world.”
She was quiet for a while. She had something on her mind. “I met some of those today, Garrett.”
“Oh?”
“Those guys you said to run a Murphy on. I used Clea because she can get a statue excited. They almost killed her.” She got graphic with her account of the torture of a thirteen-year-old.
“I’m sorry, Maya. I had no idea they were... What can I do?”
“Nothing. We take care of our own.”
I had a bad feeling. “And the two Smiths?” The Doom wouldn’t have been kind.
She mulled over how much to admit. “We were going to cut them, Garrett.” That was a mark of the Doom. “Only somebody already did it.”
“What?”
“Both of them. Somebody took all their business oaf. They’ll have to squat like women.”
This was getting weird. They don’t make eunuchs anymore, even as a criminal punishment.
“So we just broke their legs.”
“Remind me not to get on the bad side of the Doom. Did you find out anything?”
“Garrett, if those guys weren’t walking around they wouldn’t exist. They didn’t have anything but their clothes. You should see the woman at the Blue Bottle. A cow.”
“Weirder and weirder, Maya. What do you think?”
“I don’t, Garrett. You do that.” “Eh?”
“You said do a Murphy on two guys watching that place. Tonight you go strolling over there with Tawny Dawn Gill, she gives you a peck on the cheek, I figure you’re working for her and you know what’s doing.”
“I didn’t even know that name. She told me it was Jill Craight. You know her?”
“She was in the Doom when they took me in. Never told the truth when a lie would do. Had a different name every week. Toni Baccarat. Willi Gold. Brandy Diamond. Cinnamon Steele. Hester Podegill. That’s the only one that sounded dumb enough to be real. She lied all the time about who her family was and the famous people she knew and all the stuff she’d done. She mostly hung out with the younger girls because everybody else had her figured out and wouldn’t listen to her shit.”
“Hold on. Hester Podegill?”
“Yeah. One of her thousand and one names.” She looked at me odd.
There were Podegills off in a back room of my mind. Neighbors in the old days. Bunch of daughters. A couple of them turned up pregnant at thirteen. I began to recall the talk and the way people had shunned the parents... Third floor, that’s where they’d lived. And the little one, a blonde named Hester, would have been about ten when I left for the Marines.
But the Podegills were dead.
The only letter my brother wrote in his life he wrote to tell me how the Podegills died in a fire. The tragedy really broke him up. He’d had it bad for one of the girls.
That letter had taken two years to catch up to me. By the time it did my brother had been in the Cantard a year himself. He’s still down there. Like a lot of others, he won’t be coming home.
Maya asked, “That name mean something to you, Garrett?”
“It reminded me of my brother. I haven’t thought about him for a long time.”
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“I don’t now. He was killed at Flat Hat Mesa. Ask me sometime and I’ll show you the medal they gave my mother. She put it in a box with the ones for her father, her two brothers, and my father. My father got it when I was four and Mikey was two. I used to be able to remember Dad’s face if I tried hard. I can’t anymore.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. “I never thought about you having a family. Where’s your mom now?”
“Gone. After they gave her Mikey’s medal she just gave up. Nothing to live for anymore.”
“But you —”
“There’s another medal in that box. It has my name on it. The Marines delivered it four days before the Army delivered Mikey’s.”
“Why? You weren’t dead.”
“They thought I was. My outfit was on an island the Venageti invaded. They claimed they killed us all. Actually, we were out in a swamp, living on cattails and bugs and crocodile eggs while we picked them off. Mom was gone before the news got back after Karenta recaptured the island.”
“That’s sad. I’m sorry. It isn’t fair.”
“Life isn’t fair, Maya. I’ve learned to live with it. Mostly, I don’t think about it. I don’t let it shape me or drive me.”
She grunted. I was getting preachy and she was getting ready to respond the way kids always do. We’d been sitting there no more than ten minutes but it seemed a lot longer.
“Somebody’s coming,” she said coldly.
15
Somebody was Jill Craight looking like she’d seen a zombie and his seven brothers. She would have run past us if I hadn’t said, “Jill?”
She squeaked and jumped. Then she recognized me. “Garrett. I was coming to see you. I didn’t know where else to turn.” Her voice squeaked. She looked at Maya but didn’t recognize her.
“What’s the trouble?”
Jill gulped air. “There’s... There are dead men in my apartment. Three of them. What should I do?”
I got up. “Let’s go look.”
Maya bounced up and invited herself along. Jill was too rattled to care. I figured she’d be safer tagging along than wandering around alone.
Near the door to Jill’s building I spied something I’d missed when the light was poorer — blood. The women didn’t notice.
I found more spots inside, small, nothing to grab the attention if you weren’t looking. I noted that the building was in better shape than its contemporaries.
Lamps on the landings lighted the stairs. I caught sounds of life as we stole to the second-floor landing, first a woman’s laughter sudden as the shattering of a glass, then sounds of a woman either having one heck of a good time or fighting a bad bellyache.
There were four doors down the second-floor hall from which the sounds came. There had been four on the first. The apartments couldn’t be big, sound not much retarded. How come the place wasn’t an overturned anthill if three guys had gotten killed?
Because Jill lived higher on the hog. Her floor was class, only two larger apartments. “Who lives across the way?”
Jill pushed her door open. “Nobody right now. It’s empty.”
“Wait.” I wanted to go in first just to be sure. I checked the door. The lock was designed to keep the honest folks out. Anyone with a little know-how could get past it.
So somebody with no knowledge had used a wrecking bar for a key. And nobody had heard that?
People do tend to mind their own business.
The room appeared untouched. It
was a lot classier than a Jill Craight could afford. I’d seen less luxury in places on the Hill.
Jill Craight had a sugar daddy. Or she had something heavy on somebody with a lot to lose, which could be an explanation for somebody watching and trying to get in. Maybe she had a piece of deadly physical evidence.
A trail of blood led to a door standing two inches ajar. It opened on a room eight-feet by eight, jammed with stuff. That’s all you could call it. Stuff. Jill was a pack rat.
Sprawled amid the plunder was a body, blond, middle twenties, still marked by that weathered look you pick up in the Cantard. He might have been handsome. Now he just looked surprised and uncomfortable. And very dead.
“Know who he was?” I asked.
Jill said, “No.” Maya shook her head. I frowned. Maya let go of the silver doohickey she was about to pocket.
“I’d guess he walked in on somebody who was digging through your stuff and both of them were surprised.” I stepped over the dead man to a door.
The room beyond was where Jill slept and maybe paid her rent. It had that look.
There were two more stiffs in there, and blood all over, like somebody lugged in buckets and threw it around. It looked like several men had chased the guy from the walk-in while more had headed him off at the bedroom door, which opened on a hallway. Both bodies were near the door.
Maybe if you’re a Crask, or Sadler, or even Morley Dotes, you get so the red messes don’t touch you. It took me a minute to get my brain moving, judging the splash patterns and the way things were kicked around. I went over to eyeball the dead men.
I don’t know how long it was. A while. Jill touched my arm. “Garret? Are you all right?” There wasn’t any ice in her eyes. For a moment the woman behind the masks looked out, humanly concerned.
“I’m all right.” As all right as I could be looking at a guy I’d had over to supper less than thirty hours ago.
What the hell was Pokey doing in Jill’s apartment in the first place, let alone getting himself killed there? He’d given the job to Saucerhead and Jill had fired Tharpe before he’d gotten started.
I went to the bed, picked a clean spot, and sat down. I had some thinking to do.
Pokey had been less of a close friend than a professional acquaintance I respected. And he hadn’t been working for me when he’d gotten it. I didn’t owe him. But something got me on a level where there isn’t any common sense.
I wanted whoever had done it.
Maya spoke for the first time. “Garrett,” was all she said but her tone told me it was important.
She was in the walk-in, squatting by the dead man. I joined her. Jill stayed in the doorway, paying attention to Maya for the first time. She did not look happy.
“What?”
“Pull his pants down.”
“Say what?”
“Just do it, Garrett.”
Maya was too serious to answer with a wisecrack. I did it, turning a pretty shade of pink. “Hunh?”
He’d been surgically and thoroughly desexed. He’d healed but the scar tissue was still a virulent purple. It had been done since his return from the Cantard.
I scrunched up like I had spiders stomping on my naked skin.
Jill said, “That’s sick.”
I agreed. I agreed just a whole hell of a lot. That mess of scars gave me the heebie-jeebies.
I didn’t want to, but I went and checked the other one.
He was older. His scars had lost their color long ago.
I went back to my place on the bed. After a while, I told Jill, “You can’t stay here. Somebody will come to clean up.”
“You think I could stay here with this? Are you crazy?’’
“You got anywhere to go?”
“No.”
I sighed. It figured. “What about your friend?”
“I don’t know how to get a hold of him. He finds me.”
Of course he would. Nobody’s husband wanted his mistress turning up on his doorstep. Had he given her his real name? “Put together what you’ll need for a few days.” Now I had to make a choice. I wanted to track the guys who had gotten away. They’d left a bloody trail. But somebody ought to walk Jill over to my place.
I glanced at Maya, looking bad in her colors. She said, “No way, Garrett. I’m sticking with you.”
Hell, it was bad enough having the ones my own age read my mind. Now kids were going to start, too?
Jill said, “I can make it from here to your place, Garrett.”
I didn’t argue. She wasn’t high on my list of favorite people. “You have a lantern around here?”
She told me where to find one.
16
It was quiet out, but it wasn’t trouble quiet. There just wasn’t anybody around.
It was after midnight but that doesn’t make much difference most places. The day people go to bed, then the goblins and kobolds and ratmen and whatnot come out to do the night work. I guess it just wasn’t their kind of neighborhood.
I opened the lantern’s shutter and looked for blood spots. They got harder to see as they dried.
Maya asked, “How come all the lights in her place, Garrett? She must have had twenty lamps burning.”
“You got me.” It had been bright in there. I hadn’t paid attention, though. “Guess they wanted to see what they were doing.”
“She done pretty good since she left the Doom.”
“If you say so.” Was she going to chatter at me all night?
“You don’t think so?”
“Is that your goal in life? To have some guy keep you in an apartment full of dead men? Those guys came with whatever is going on in her life.”
She had to think about that. I finally got some quiet.
It didn’t last. “You notice she had real glass windows in that fancy sitting room?”
“Yeah.” That I’d noticed. Real glass is expensive. I know. I’ve had to replace a few panes. Those had impressed me.
“The other apartment had them, too.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So somebody was watching us from there when we left.”
“Oh?” Interesting. “What did he look like?”
“I couldn’t even tell if it was a he. All I saw was a face. It was only there for a second. Plain luck I saw it.”
I grunted, not giving her my complete attention. The trail was getting harder to follow, like maybe the guy doing the bleeding had had most of the juice squeezed out. The going was getting slower.
The trail led into an alley so narrow a horseman would lose his knees if he tried to get through. It was not an inviting place. I shone the light in but couldn’t see anything.
“You’re not gong in there, are you?”
“Sure I am.” I fished out my brass knuckles. I hadn’t brought my favorite head-knocker. It hadn’t seemed appropriate dress for a dinner date.
“Is that smart?”
“No. Smart would be to throw you in first and see what eats you.” Either Maya had begun to wear or I was getting crabby. “How come you’re following me around, anyway?”
“So I can learn the trade. So I can find out what kind of man you are. You put on a good show but nobody is that decent. There’s something weird about you. I want to find out what it is.”
Maya was wearing real thin. Weird! No woman had called me that before. “Why’s that?”
“I’m thinking about marrying you.”
“Hoo!” I went into that alley without throwing rocks first. There was nothing in there that scared me now.
I found the dead guy ten paces into the darkness. Somebody had set him down with his back against a building, had made him comfortable, then had gone on, presumably to get help. He’d bled to death there.
I squatted, checked him out. Maya held the lantern.
He was still dead. He didn’t have anything to tell me. I figured he was even less happy about the situation than I was. But he wasn’t complaining.
I took the lantern and moved on
.
There was more blood, but not much.
Poke had put him up a hell of a fight.
The trail petered out in the next street. I gave it my best look but couldn’t take it any farther.
Maya asked, “What’re you going to do now?”
“Hire a specialist.” I started walking. She caught up. I asked, “Doesn’t any of this bother you?” She’d stayed cooler than Jill Craight.
“I’ve been on the street five years, Garrett. Only things that bother me are the ones people try to do to me.”
She wasn’t that tough, but she was getting there. And that was a shame.
17
Sometimes it seems Morley’s place never closes. It does, but only during those hours of the dawn and morning when only the most twisted are up and about. Noon to first light the place serves its strange clientele.
It had thinned out, but forty pairs of eyes watched us from the entrance to the serving counter, eyes more puzzled than hostile.
Wedge was behind the counter. Of all Morley’s henchmen he’s the most courteous. “Evening, Garrett.” He nodded to Maya. “Miss.” Just as though she didn’t look like death on a stick and smell like it, too.
“Morley still up?”
“He’s got company.” The way he said it told me the company wasn’t business.
“That resolution didn’t last long.”
Wedge flashed me a smile. “Were you in the pool?”
“No.” They would, that bunch.
Wedge went to the speaking tube, talked and listened, talked and listened, then came back. “He’ll be a while. Said have dinner while you wait. On the house.”
Ugh.
Maya said, “That sounds great,” before I could turn him down. “I could eat a horse.”
I grumbled, “You won’t eat one here. Horseweed, horse fennel, horseradish, horse clover, yeah, but...”
Wedge yelled into the back for two specials, then leaned on the counter. “What you need, Garrett? Maybe I can save you some time.”
I glanced at Maya. She smiled. She knew damned well Wedge was being nice because I had a woman along.
How do they get that way so young?
“I need a stalker, Wedge. A good one. I’m trying to track a guy.”