Hard Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  There was a hole in her chest, right above her heart. Some blood had welled up from it, but most of it had drained out through the exit wound in her back. Her white sheets were soaked a bright crimson.

  I knelt down next to her bed. Her bright green eyes were still open, her mouth formed into a circle of shock. I reached out a hand and closed her eyes, then placed a gentle kiss on her cold forehead.

  Yabair started to protest — something about this still being a crime scene, I’m sure — but Aleks stopped him with a hand on the elf’s forearm. That was one wise gnome. The way I felt at that moment, he might have saved the guard captain’s life.

  The pair of them walked out of the room and gave me a moment to grieve. When I emerged, I found them back in the dining room, standing near the table.

  My dismay had thickened my throat and reddened my eyes, but I put all that behind me. There would be time for funerals and proper good-byes later. Right now, I had a job to do, and I meant to take care of it fast.

  Still, I had to clear my throat three times before I could speak. “Who do you like for this?” I said.

  “Did they have any enemies?” Yabair said. “Neighbors with a grudge? Rivals for affection? Had they come into some money recently?”

  I shook my head at each of the questions. “You have guards questioning the neighbors?”

  “Up and down the hall, and in the levels directly above and below us too. They haven’t come up with anything yet, but they’ll keep at it.”

  “They won’t find anything,” I said. “This wasn’t a crime of passion.”

  The elf arched an eyebrow at me. “Did you get a good look at those bodies? To come in here and slaughter five people in the dark of night like that, to spill so much blood, you don’t think that requires passion?”

  “This is the work of a professional,” I said. “Someone who knows how to handle a blade. Those were all clean cuts, one for each kill. Whoever did this didn’t hack away at —” I wanted to say, “the Gütmanns,” but found I couldn’t.

  I tried again. “He didn’t hack away at them like a butcher. He disassembled them like a surgeon. Quick, clean cuts that did exactly what he wanted them to. Not a single slash wasted.”

  I hated to admit it, but the killer impressed me. Whoever he was and for whatever reason he’d committed this horrible act, he was frighteningly good at it.

  “Perhaps you can ask our suspect, then, where he received such training,” Yabair said.

  I stood up and narrowed my eyes at the elf. “You’ve already arrested someone for this?”

  Standing behind Yabair, Aleks rolled his eyes. He knew they had the wrong man, not that it would do the poor slob any good. Yabair didn’t seem so sure himself, but he still gave me a solemn nod.

  “It’s Dörthe’s husband, Johan Steinmetz.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Are you going to beat me too?” Johan said as I entered the interrogation room in the Stronghold’s precinct house with Yabair. He didn’t look at me at first, probably figuring I was just the latest in a long line of inquisitors there to rough him up until he confessed to murdering his young wife and her entire family. No matter how many times he’d tried to explain he was innocent, no one had listened to him, I’m sure. What was the point in paying attention to them any longer?

  It gave me a chance to size him up. I’d met him several times before, gotten drunk with him once or twice. I’d even come to his wedding, although I’d sat on the bride’s side of the judging aisles.

  He sat there under the harsh light of a single bright glowglobe, in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, strapped into a chair with magical shackles that glowed an angry red any time he squirmed against them. Judging from how raw his exposed wrists were, he’d been at that a lot, although perhaps when he’d been under duress by other means.

  His beard had been unbraided and hung in damp, sweat-soaked shanks from his chin. He wore his hair close cropped, in the modern style, but it looked a lot grayer since the last time I’d seen him. He smelled of piss and fear.

  “Having a rough day?” I said.

  Johan’s head had been lolling back on his neck, but now it snapped straight up. He stared at me with wide unfocused eyes set in deep, dark circles, one of which had been blackened good. It took him a moment to recognize me in this context. He’d been cringing at the thought of another questioner come to torture him, after all.

  When he finally knew me, hope flickered in those dark eyes of his. “Max?” he said through a pair of busted, swollen lips. “That you?”

  Yabair shoved a chair toward me. I twirled it around and sat on it backward, resting my elbows on the top of its back.

  “What happened?” I said.

  Johan shook his head. “I don’t know. One minute, I was getting ready to head down to the quarry, and the next thing I know the Guard’s breaking down my door. They didn’t ask me any questions or tell me anything, just beat the tar out of me and hauled me in.”

  “They hurt you?” I shot Yabair an accusing look.

  “He received those injuries while resisting arrest,” the elf said, as if that was good enough.

  “I wasn’t resisting,” Johan said, pleading for us to believe him. “I didn’t know who they were. I thought they were going to kill me.”

  “He keeps his wand close at hand for an honest man,” Yabair said. “He sent one of the guards to the hospital.”

  “Cutting rock’s a dangerous business,” Johan said. “The Brichts got a lot of enemies. You never know what’s going to happen.”

  The Brichts were one of the most powerful dwarf families in the city. They had their pokers in every forge in the Stronghold, but they’d made their first fortune by establishing a monopoly over the city’s supply of cut stone. It turned out to be a sharp investment. Rock was too heavy to transport into the city by air — at least not in the large amounts builders demanded — and the undead hordes outside made transporting such goods by land impossible. Plus, the walls required to keep those hungry dead out of the city meant a solid demand for Bricht stone.

  Johan had started with them as a miner and had worked his way up the ladder. Not so long ago, he’d been promoted to the executive level, which meant wearing a suit and tie instead of overalls and a hardhat. He’d asked Dörthe to marry him soon after that.

  I didn’t like the Brichts much. They had too much power in too few hands, and one of them — Henrik Bricht — was a murderous jackass who’d once set up a friend of mine to take the fall for his crimes. Still, I didn’t see how he or his family played into the slaughter of the Gütmanns.

  “They tell you what happened?” I said.

  The defensive shield Johan had thrown up at the mention of his arrest crumbled to dust. Tears welled up in his eyes. “They killed her,” he said. “They killed my sweet Dotty, her and her entire family.”

  “‘They’ who?” Yabair leaned forward, looming over my shoulder and glaring down at the dwarf.

  “The murderers!” Johan said. “Whoever they are!”

  “And you have no idea who that might be?”

  The shield went right back up again, accompanied by a righteous fury. “Do I look like the kind of guy who would do something like that? I love Dotty. I loved them all!” He turned to me with desperate eyes. “Tell him, Max!”

  “I never doubted it,” I said. “Not for a moment.”

  “Perhaps you loved her too much,” Yabair said. “She was at her mother’s place rather than yours. Did she leave you?”

  “I was working late. She went over to wish Gerte an early happy birthday.”

  My heart ached so hard it wanted to stop. The girl would have been ten years old this week. Had Gütmann really been gone that long?

  “Were you jealous of her relationship with her family?” Yabair said.

  “No!” he said, and I had to believe him. Much as Dörthe loved her brothers, for instance, she thought they were idiots for staying at home as long as they had. She’d wanted to get out and st
art her own home in the worst way, and I don’t think I’d ever seen her happier than when she walked down the aisle next to Johan.

  “I’ve gone over this with you already!” Johan said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. What more do you want from me?”

  “The truth,” Yabair said, “and you’re going to rot in here until we get it.”

  I got to my feet then and made to leave the room.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Yabair laced his voice with the menace I was accustomed to hearing from him.

  “He didn’t do this,” I said. “I’m going to go find the people who did.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You seem very sure of your friend’s innocence,” Yabair said once we were standing outside the precinct house again. All sorts of people — mostly dwarves — rushed in and out of the place, past its reinforced doors. None of them gave us a second glance. They all had their own reasons for being there, and none of them involved us.

  Sure, the slaughter of a family of five in the heart of the Stronghold was big news, but Dragon City was a big place. It had other troubles. I chose this one as mine.

  “I wouldn’t call him my friend,” I said as I kicked my hat back on my head. “But he didn’t have anything to do with this. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Of course he didn’t kill those people himself,” Yabair said. “He doesn’t have the skills much less the spine. But that doesn’t mean he’s innocent.”

  I fed him the prompt he was looking for, even though I suspected I’d regret it. Paranoid stretches of logic have never been my favorite. “How’s that?”

  “He could have hired someone to do the job for him.”

  I scowled and started heading for the Stronghold’s Gate. That surprised Yabair, something I always relished on the rare times I managed to pull it off, but he caught up with me a moment later.

  “He’s a junior executive at the city’s largest quarry,” I said. “He couldn’t afford to hire that kind of muscle.”

  “Maybe he’s using company money to do it. It wouldn’t be the first time someone embezzled from the Brichts.”

  “He married Dörthe after he got the promotion. What’s his motive for offing her, much less everyone else in the family?”

  Yabair gave me a condescending snort through his long, thin nose. “You’ve never heard of a dwarf changing his mind? Maybe he wanted a divorce and she wouldn’t give it to him.”

  “I saw them last week. They were happy.”

  “Even if they seemed that way, who knows what happens between a husband and wife in their home, behind closed doors?”

  I gave him a wary eyeball. “You got something about your own marriage you want to get off your skinny chest?”

  He ignored me. “Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe he didn’t hire anyone. Maybe he has an enemy who was trying to send him a message.”

  I grunted. “Maybe he caught Henrik Bricht redhanded with his fist buried in an elf’s chest, and the bastard killed his family to make sure that he wouldn’t say a word about it.”

  A sly smile spread on Yabair’s lips. “I like that one. See? It’s easy when you put your mind to it.”

  I fought the impulse to smack the smile from his face. “You sound an awful lot like you’re just trying to justify your lazy work by keeping Johan locked up rather than going out and finding the real killer.”

  That stopped Yabair in his tracks. I continued on, then turned around and threw out my arms at him when I realized he wasn’t going to try to catch up. “What?”

  “I’ve been a part of the Guard since long before your grandfather was born, Gibson. I knew the original hero Gib, from whom your family takes its name.”

  I’d heard this story before, many times. “And?”

  “And I cannot tell you how many people I’ve arrested over the years whom have sworn their innocence and urged us to let them go so they can be free to pursue ‘the real killer.’”

  “You have truthsayers. Haul one of them out of that dusty tower you keep them in and get them to clear Johan. Then you can knock it off with your conspiracy theories and get down to figuring out what really happened at the Gütmanns’ place.”

  He flushed at that. “We have one on the way. Even if he doesn’t find anything wrong with the dwarf’s story, though, that doesn’t mean Johan is innocent.”

  I shrugged. “Which one of us has never done anything wrong? You keep poking at him long enough, and you’ll find something to put him away for, I’m sure. That won’t get you any closer to finding justice for those slaughtered dwarves.”

  “The wheels of justice may turn slowly,” he said with a haughty stare. “But they do grind on. Short-timers like you lack the proper perspective to see that.”

  “Forgive my lack of patience.” I didn’t bother to hide my sarcasm. “I don’t have as much time as you to sit around and spit out useless bits of philosophy. I have a killer to catch.”

  Yabair strode toward me. I stood my ground.

  “If Steinmetz had nothing to do with this, then he will be exonerated in good time,” he said. “All you’re going to do is stir things up and get more people hurt.”

  I cocked my head at him. I knew he hated that. “Or, if I move faster than the glaciers coming down from the north, I might not only beat out the coming of the next age of ice but also stop a killer before he slaughters another group of innocents.”

  “You don’t have any authority in this matter.” He sneered at me. “Leave this to the professionals.”

  “Let me know when you find some,” I said. “I’d like to speak with them about this.”

  I turned to leave and made to give him a light smack on the chest with the back of my hand as I went. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I did it.

  He reached out and caught me by the wrist, then twisted it hard, driving me to my knees. I could have kept standing, sure, but only if I didn’t mind having my arm broken. I refused to cry out in pain though. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.

  The people passing by stopped to stare at us for an instant, but when they noticed Yabair’s scarlet uniform and the vicious look on his face, they found something else to worry about, fast. He leaned over me and spoke to me a calm voice.

  “I brought you in on this because I respected Gib and because I know that — despite your many faults — you’re a good man and you knew the victims. You cared about them.

  “I hope you can figure out a way to help me solve this case. I truly do. Innocent people were slaughtered on my watch, and I cannot tolerate that.”

  He shifted to a whisper he hissed at my ear. “But if you fail to treat me or my uniform with respect again — especially out here, in public — you can look forward to sampling much of the treatment Mr. Steinmetz received today.”

  I nodded my understanding at him, and he let me go. I stood up, rubbing the pain out of my arm, and he brushed off his uniform, which looked just as trim and spotless as it had before.

  Given the day I’d had so far, I wanted nothing more than to draw my wand and feed it to him, but that wouldn’t get me what I wanted. What’s more, he was right. I’d let my frustrations push me into doing something harmless but stupid. I felt my face flush, not in anger but embarrassment.

  “All right,” I said with a grimace. “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear.” He didn’t smile at this at all, but his frown disappeared. “Where do you plan to start?”

  I grimaced at that. “I wish I knew.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I hoofed it back to my place, which took me longer than I cared to admit. I didn’t think I had much waiting for me there other than a shower and a bit to eat, though, and I needed the time to think. While Yabair’s willingness to throw people in jail until something cracked annoyed me, it had one big advantage over my plan in that he at least had one.

  I had no idea where to start. I only knew that Yabair was looking in the wrong place
. I knew Johan too well to think he would ever do something like that to Dörthe and her family.

  But who would have done such a thing? I didn’t recall the Gütmanns talking about any enemies. They didn’t seem to have any money problems either. If they’d taken it easy, Gütmann’s share of the haul from our last big adventure should have set the family up for life.

  I remembered then, though, that Heidi had complained a bit about the cost of the Dörthe getting married. In the dwarf culture, the bride’s parents not only paid for the ceremony and the celebration but also to put the bride and groom up in a new place and give them a good start on life. I knew from having been to the wedding that Heidi had dropped a tremendous amount of gold on that special day for her little girl. Maybe that had put a dent in their savings.

  I’d been to Johan and Dörthe’s home too, a trendy apartment in the upper reaches of the Stronghold, complete with a stone balcony carved out of the mountainside. I’d figured that Johan had kicked in for part of the place with the funds from his new promotion. I’d also guessed that his connections with the Bricht family had given him a leg up in the negotiations with the place’s old owners. Smart people didn’t often drive hard bargains with the Brichts.

  Still, that didn’t seem like a reason for someone to burst into the Gütmann home and slaughter them all. If they’d gotten in some kind of money trouble, I’d like to think that Heidi would have known she could have turned to me. I’m not spectacularly wealthy myself, but I made enough during my adventuring days to retire from that deadly occupation before the risks caught up with me, which I counted as a win.

  Due to helping out my landlord with a tight spot involving his daughter Moira — another of my adventuring friends — I owned my place free and clear. My only expenses were food and drink, and Thumper, the bartender down at the Quill, always let my tab ride for as long as I liked. I didn’t live like a king, but I had enough to get by, and a bit more stashed away for stormy days.