Surrly looked up. “I know, my chieftain. And there is an explanation. Outside interference. People who should have known better than to cross us. We had no way to know they’d be this stupid.”
The pitiful remainder of his troupe—he’d somehow allowed over half of his men to get themselves killed, again—huddled in around their boss and nodded their heads dumbly. Apparently, the motley group sought safety in the notion that this was all someone else’s fault.
These stragglers constituted one of the groups present. The other was Starik’s hand-picked Gray Dwarves. There were six of them and they followed him almost everywhere. He had selected them for their mixture of size, strength, cunning, and loyalty. Other, lesser dwarves feared and respected them. But even the Gray Dwarves feared their chieftain.
As well they should.
Starik flexed his hands, spread the fingers, and clenched them into fists. On his right hand, four golden rings, each set with a different colored stone, reflected the morning sunlight in brilliant flashes.
“Surrly,” he said. “The Vampiric Order will not accept an explanation from someone of your lowly, untrustworthy stature. That means I will have to be the one to deliver the news to them. I will have the honor of informing them that a large fraction of their profit margin has vanished into oblivion.”
He paused again to feed his own anger with the lesser dwarf’s barely suppressed squirms. It made him feel better about his own coming humiliation when speaking to their European benefactors. “That makes me look incompetent, Surrly. Am I incompetent?”
The lender shook his head. “No, my chieftain. Far from it. If anything, I’d say you give off such an impression of being strong and capable that the Order will have no choice but to believe you. Especially when you tell them that it was because some idiots betrayed us and screwed us over.”
“That means,” Starik bellowed and the implied thunder in his voice broke into a full storm, “that they will think I somehow allowed these people to fuck us over. Is that what happened? Did I allow this?”
His Gray Dwarves pretended to look at nothing, and the other crew cringed visibly at the sound of his voice. The lender even shot a quick, terrified glance at the enormous hammer resting on his leader’s back.
“No, sir,” Surrly admitted. “It was my mistake. And I will take responsibility for fixing it.”
Starik pretended he didn’t hear this comment and strode slowly past the other dwarf to gaze at the city beyond the waterfront. His connections had yanked the leash of the human police, which simplified matters somewhat, but this was still the type of situation that should never have happened.
He liked to think of himself as a businessman, someone with class to go along with his family’s ancient warrior reputation. That was why he dressed in the finest suits and saw to it that his hair and beard were always impeccably groomed. He also put a tremendous amount of effort into maintaining his composure, even when things like this happened.
Sometimes, though, he failed.
“The Order,” he began, “might be more understanding if we could present them with the culprits who perpetrated this. That way, they could question them, confirm their guilt, and punish them according to their own methods and specifications, which are far crueler than anything known to dwarfdom. Or, barring that, we could at least deliver their heads.”
He turned and allowed his shale-colored gaze to fix on Surrly again. “But because you permitted them to escape, we cannot do that, can we? Not yet.”
“I’ll find them, my chieftain.” The dwarf grunted. “I know who they are. They’re not strangers, and they can’t hide from me.”
Starik took a step closer to him. “Who are they, then?”
The other dwarf looked up and for a moment, his fear ebbed, replaced by anger as he recalled what had happened.
“A human,” he explained, “named Remington Davis. And a werewolf he had with him as hired muscle. That guy was the one who did most of the damage. Davis is a half-assed, wannabe private detective who recently started at Moonlight Detective Agency. He did one minor job for me a few weeks ago, and—”
The leader cut him off. “He’s with Taylor?”
“Uh…” Surrly gulped. “Yes. He is. He may have been acting on his own, though. He seems like the kind of asshole who’s always trying to prove himself and advance his career. The problem ought to go away when he’s taken care of.”
He gestured to the opened shipping container, where a human corpse hung upside down by its ankles.
“Also,” he added, “that moron there—some bottom-feeding dealer—led this Remington character here. He thought he could negotiate a cut of a wholesale purchase while we were in the middle of unloading, for fuck’s sake. I’ll make sure the right people see what we did to him. That ought to get the point across.”
“It’s a start.” Starik grunted. The sight of the dealer’s body made him feel a little better.
“Still,” Surrly continued and sounded frightened again, “we have to consider that Taylor might be onto us.”
He turned his head to the lender.
“How?” he asked, his voice again the early rumbling of a coming crescendo of thunder. “How is it that Taylor’s man would have even looked for us to begin with? How, when we only sell our product during the day? How, when—even at times when a shipment arrives at night—we ensure that she is busy elsewhere? Explain this mystery to me, Surrly.”
His subordinate’s shoulders slumped and he spread his hands.
“My chieftain,” he began, “she’d never been hostile to us or, to my knowledge, suspicious of us. We’d worked together before. With that Egyptian bitch consolidating her power lately, I thought if anyone could protect our shipments, well, it would be Taylor. I…may have approached her with a job offer.”
Grayhammer stared. “Oh. Well, that”—he reached back, took his war hammer in both hands, and swung it forward and down—“would fucking explain it, wouldn’t it?”
The hammer pounded into Surrly’s head, shattered it, collapsed it, and continued through it to transfer its excess force to the rest of his broad body. The blow drove so hard that a tremor went through the earth, and the other dwarves almost stumbled as the tiny fragments of the dwarf’s brain and skull rained around them.
“You,” Starik raged, his teeth bared and spittle flying from his mouth, “you fucking idiot! You piece of shit.”
His voice took on a raw, almost hurt tone as he abandoned himself completely to rage and battered again and again at what remained of his victim. The hammer crunched and splattered and destabilized the earth while it effectively reduced the dwarf to little more than paste.
When it was over, his Gray Dwarves had all assumed the usual expression they wore after an execution—faint amusement at seeing an inept traitor get what he deserved combined with a vague sense of relief that it hadn’t been one of them instead.
He stood, half-hunched over the almost liquefied dwarven remains, and caught his breath as his composure returned to him. Finally, he straightened, cleaned the head of his hammer on the sand at his feet, and wiped the remaining chunks of Surrly off his face.
The Grayhammers had lived in the far North of the world even during the coldest epochs and had long had a reputation as fierce warriors. Among their species, some looked up to them as examples of true, pure dwarvenness, noble-savage types possessing a virility which the rest of dwarfdom had lost.
Others merely thought they were cruel and primitive berserkers who no longer had any place in the modern world.
Starik had long dreamed of proving the second group wrong but without disappointing the first. His cartel would achieve levels of success on par with the most sophisticated of modern dwarven merchants but they would still be barbaric when the situation demanded it.
After all, fear and respect were two sides of the same coin.
“Let it be known,” he announced, his voice calm again even though he spoke louder than he had before, “that Surrly wa
s right about one thing. We must find these perpetrators and deal with them.”
One of the Gray Dwarves was the first to speak. “My chieftain. Which option—dead or living—is preferred? You said the Vampiric Order liked to get them alive, but—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Not this time.” He looked out across the waterfront at the dead dwarf’s men, who tried only half-successfully to hide their terror.
“You people,” he went on, “are now all my deputies. Which of you was most familiar with Surrly’s business? His front, I mean.”
A dwarf with a lengthy black mustache stepped forward. “Myself, sir.”
Starik nodded. “You, then, run his lending firm until further notice. The rest of you will join my dwarves on the hunt. Your late boss’s stupidity has threatened to send a message that we can be fucked with. Now, we must send a very different message.”
They all stood in silence and waited for his next words.
“A message that no one—absolutely no one—interferes with our business, makes us look incompetent in front of our benefactors, or insults our honor and intelligence. Not even Taylor. She allowed her pet human to shit where we eat. Now, we make an example of him.”
He put his war hammer over his shoulder, allowed it to loom there behind his flowing mane of hair, and clenched and unclenched his hands. The four rings glimmered.
“Find this stupid human known as Remington Davis and his lycanthropic boyfriend along with him, and kill them both,” the chieftain commanded. “The werewolf goes into the woodchipper. As for the human… We send his head to the Order and his little finger to Taylor.”
When he grinned, his men almost flinched at the sight.
Chapter Thirteen
Por’s Bar, Lower Manhattan, New York
Remington had lied. He hadn’t actually been that tired, or so it seemed once he got back in the car. In fact, he’d felt a strange and powerful urge to detour the teensiest slide over to the lower part of the island and pay a visit to Porrillage.
After the ordeal of finding a parking space, he at least didn’t have to walk far in the cold before he reached the familiar unobtrusive staircase leading down to the basement pub.
Judging by the noise—audible from the other side of the door even before he gave it a push—it was a busy night.
He cleared the threshold and stepped in. The lighting was dim, the music was low enough to faintly be heard under the chatter of voices, and someone at the pool table careened a group of balls into each other as he entered.
Remy approached the bar and planted himself on a stool.
“Por!” he exclaimed. “How’s your night going, my man?”
The bartender, also the proprietor, appeared from behind a shelf carrying another patron’s drink, some elaborate poofy cocktail.
“Remy,” he grunted. “About like any other night. I assume you’re having a rough one if you’re here.”
Porrillage was tall enough that he could pass for a little person, and gnomes had physiognomy that was only subtly different from humans, anyway, so he was usually safe if any of the uninitiated stumbled onto him. His clientele, though, mostly seemed to consist of either preternaturals or those humans who had dealings with them.
“Correct,” he said. “It’s been one hell of a long goddamn day. I’m thinking a nice scotch on the rocks. Basic, but effective. A single, since I need to drive myself, sadly.”
The gnome climbed the step he’d constructed behind the bar and handed the cocktail to a woman whom Remy suspected was a dryad since she appeared to have baby tree-branches growing from her shoulders and leaves sprouting in her hair.
“One scotch on the rocks, comin’ right up.” Por leapt down and went to work.
Remy tapped his hands on the bar’s surface and looked around while he waited for his drink. He was relieved to see that there weren’t any dwarves around tonight.
It disturbed him to think that Surrly and his crew were now the proverbial bad guys. He’d always thought of dwarves as lovable, tough, jolly types who could be relied on to do the right thing. Evidently, they were as fallible as humans.
Or vampires.
Por placed a glass in front of him. “Muchas gracias,” he quipped, and immediately went to work on the alcohol.
He’d drunk about half of it when he turned toward the dryad woman. “Do you come here often? That’s a nice…uh, spring look you have going, by the way. It’s kind of refreshing in January.”
The woman stared at him, bug-eyed. “I am sorry,” she replied in a slow, wispy accent. “I do not talk much.”
Remy shrugged. “Mkay, then.” He pivoted away from her.
Por passed him and seemed almost to hesitate for a second as if he expected to be met with some comment. When nothing happened, he continued to check on another customer at the far end of the bar.
On his return, he glanced at Remington and asked, “No conversation tonight? You don’t feel like telling me about all your problems and how they’re someone else’s fault? You must be really wiped out.”
“Yeah, I am,” he grumbled. “Plus, you know, the usual Taylor issues.”
The gnome chuckled and turned away to wipe a couple of glasses.
Remy drained the remainder of his scotch as he watched the other patrons. The alcohol mingled with his tangled emotions and the dim vibe of the bar itself.
“Hey, Por,” he said and swirled the ice cubes around the otherwise empty glass. “Change of plans. I’ll need another scotch. Single, again, don’t worry. And I’ll take an Uber home and have someone pick my car up in the morning or something. It won’t be towed, right? I can’t remember if that’s how we did things before.”
Although he studied him with a little suspicion, the gnome took his glass, suddenly produced a bottle, and refilled it. He didn’t bother to add more ice since the majority from the first round was still unmelted.
The investigator accepted it and sipped the first quarter. His thoughts wandered to the disagreement he’d had with his business partner.
He saw that Por was still roughly in his field of vision, which probably meant the gnome was listening, so he went on. “Let me tell you, it’s completely goddamn unfair, and it gets even more unfair the more I think about it. Who does Taylor think she is?”
The proprietor, half-coughing as he exhaled, ventured a quick response. “I’d say she thinks she’s the same person that most of New York thinks she is.”
“Well,” he drawled, “I don’t know exactly what that means, but she isn’t my frickin’ mother. Where does she get the authority to make major life decisions on my behalf, as if I don’t have the volition to do so myself? ‘Now Remington, I hereby order you to live where I tell you to live.’ That’s almost literally what she said. Almost.”
Por seemed to be only half-listening, but he assumed it was only since he was busy. He ought to hire more bartenders. Especially for nights like tonight.
The gnome ducked out of sight to retrieve more ingredients. When he returned, Remy resumed his spiel.
“I haven’t shared a place with anyone since I was in college. I’ve been my own man ever since I graduated. Someone like me belongs in a private penthouse, not someone else’s guest room. At least, not on a long-term basis.”
“Oh,” Por replied as he returned, his eyes on another man who’d entered, “of course.”
“Besides,” he continued, “it’s not as if she and I are that close. We haven’t known each other long enough to be slee—I mean, living together. We work opposite halves of the day. And we’re from different species. How do I know that one of these evenings she won’t get tired of drinking the canned stuff and decide to have me for a midnight snack?”
The barman delivered the drink to his newest customer, paused for a breath, and wiped his presumably sweaty hands on his apron. “I don’t think she’d do that.”
Remy swished the ice in his glass. “Maybe not. But it’s still…ugh, embarrassing.”
“You know, pal,
” Por commented, “I ain’t so sure that this is really about your independence or dignity or whatever you seem to think it is. Maybe it’s more about…” He spun a hand in a circle and searched for the right words. “Fear of intimacy. Something like that, the kind of stuff women like to talk about when they want to take things to the next level or whatever.”
Frowning, Remy turned it over in his mind while he sipped his scotch.
Meanwhile, the gnome conferred with one of his waitresses on the massive tab that the pool players were generating. Apparently, one of them had managed to knock a ball off the table itself and almost lost it in a dark corner.
So what he’s saying, the investigator concluded, is that Taylor is probably doing this as some kind of coded message about the two of us getting closer or some shit.
He crunched an ice cube between his teeth. I know I’m one hell of an eligible bachelor, what with the good looks, charming personality, towering intelligence…oh, and bravery in the face of danger, multifarious useful talents, and whatnot. But she’s presuming waaaay too much about our relationship.
As Porrillage turned back to the bar, Remy set his empty glass down and slapped a hand on the wooden surface.
“Por, you’re right,” he proclaimed, his jaw set in determination. “The time has come to make it perfectly clear to Taylor that she and I are only friends, and the way to do that is by sleeping in my own bed, at my own place, for as long as reasonably possible.”
The gnome’s eyes rolled skyward for a moment before he responded. “That’s…uh, not exactly what I meant, but I wish you all the luck in the whole wide world, my friend.” With a grunt, he shuffled away to dispense a few mugs of frothy golden beer.
The investigator stood, almost knocked his stool over with the motion, and left one of his business cards on the bar. By now, Por probably had a large collection of them, but it was easy to lose such things and there was no reason to make things difficult with such an excellent bartender.
A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3) Page 13