by Glen Cook
Actually a notion that had occurred to me when first I'd heard that he was still missing.
I said, "Excellent thinking, Old Bones. I see only one problem with the scheme. I'm so beat-up I can hardly move. At my best speed today I can grow a foot-long beard faster than I can make it to the river."
A difficulty anticipated and overcome. In my communications with Mr. Dotes I arranged for you to be transported wherever Miss Pular's nose leads her.
"Who's going to pay for all of this? We've got Saucerhead out there somewhere getting gray. We've got Singe and Winger working. We've got who knows how many of Morley's gang backing up Winger. Where's the money coming from? Kayne Prose don't have a pot to pee in. Her kids don't seem to be producing. Playmate isn't much better off than Kayne. Anytime he gets two extra coppers to rub together he gives one of them away."
You are going to pay for it. As an advance cut out of your share of that lake of gold you see yourself tapping in the future.
"What? Are you digging around in my head again?" There was entirely too much of that stuff going on around here lately.
The outbreak of warfare amongst the pixies prevented me from going off on a rant.
The Goddamn Parrot wanted a part of this action. He started hooting and hollering and cursing the pixies.
I believe your help has arrived.
37
Somebody knocked on the door with a battering ram. Plaster dust fell all over the house. The pounding didn't stop. Dean came roaring out of the kitchen armed with a cleaver, ready to offer somebody some advanced training in etiquette. He beat me to the door. He was in such an evil temper that he opened the door without first using the peephole.
"Gah!"
Who would've thought a man that old could jump that far? And backward at that, while inscribing sagas on the air with the edge of his lightning cleaver.
I caught him "Hey! Maybe you want to settle down. Before you damage the woodwork. It can't be all that bad."
"I'm all right," Dean insisted right away. "They just caught me by surprise."
An odor wafted in through the open doorway, like the southern extremity of a northbound skunk or, more likely, the last thing you smell when you meet up with one of the big flesh-eating thunder lizards out in the woods. It was bad breath on an epic scale. I hadn't encountered it in a long time but I knew it of old. Its provenance was just coming back to me when I got up to the door and leaned out just in time to get the full benefit of the exhalations of a pair of humongous creatures who'd bent down to peer into my house.
These boys both fell out of the ugly tree at a young age, hitting every damned branch on the way down. Then their mommas whupped them with an ugly stick and fed them ugly soup every day of their lives. They were Uh-glee, with a couple of capital double-ugs.
"Doris. Marsha. How're you fellas doing?"
Doris and Marsha Rose were two of three brothers who insisted they were triplets born of different mothers. Doris and Marsha have a greenish cast and stand twenty feet tall. They have teeth that stick out all which way. One is crosseyed and one is walleyed but I can't keep that straight. Sometimes they trade off. They're grolls, a seldom-seen result of what can happen when giants and trolls fall in love. Doris and Marsha aren't very bright. But they don't have to be. They're so big hardly anything else matters.
"We're all doing marvellously, actually," a small voice piped. Of course. The grolls seldom went anywhere without the third triplet, Dojango, who, being a half-wit, was the brains of the family.
Dojango Rose isn't much over five feet tall. Well, taller than Bic Gonlit, so maybe he's five and a half. He's indistinguishable from a thousand other weasel-eyed, furtive little grifters on the streets of TunFaire. He'd have no trouble passing for human if he wanted, though he can't be more than one-eighth human in reality. In some fashion he's distantly related to Morley Dotes. Morley tosses snippets of work his way when finesse and a low profile aren't critical components in the grand scheme.
I descended the front steps amidst booming greetings from the larger brethren and the worst carrying-on by the pixies since their own arrival. I barely noticed. Already their hell-raising was becoming a commonplace, part of the background noise of the city. Seldom is TunFaire completely quiet.
Dojango Rose had himself in harness between the shafts of Kip Prose's two-wheeler man-hauling cart. He grinned. "Bet this's something you never thought you'd see, actually."
"Actually. You really think you can haul that thing around town with somebody in it?" Dojango seemed to have gone a few rounds with consumption since last I'd seen him. He looked lucky to be able to shift himself.
Based on prior experience chances were good he had his brothers carrying him most of the time.
"I am kind of counting on my brothers to help, actually," Rose admitted. "But there's more to me than you think, actually."
"Actually." Dojango Rose had some annoying verbal tics. "There just about has to be. Hey! Knock it off! Let her go."
Doris unpinched thumb and forefinger. A pixie buzzed away in dazed, staggering flight.
Amazing. Some people will respond automatically to any loud, commanding voice.
"Ah, Garrett, I was just—"
"I know what you was just." I climbed into the cart, every muscle arguing back. "Save it for the villains. We're liable to run into some. Godsdammit!"
There I was in the street about a thousand steps downhill from my front door and I hadn't brought anything out with me... Dean and Singe materialized, each with arms filled. They clattered down the steps. Singe dumped her load into my lap. That consisted of enough instruments of mayhem for me to start up my own small army.
Singe and Dean stayed busy around the back of the cart for a while, with trips into the house and outside again. Then the old man headed back up the steps. Eventually, Singe came up beside me. "We are ready to travel." She tossed Dean a cheerful wave. Dean returned the gesture.
She had outstubborned him and overcome his prejudice by force of personality. Singe was, indeed, a wonder girl.
"What were you doing back there?"
"Storing provisions. You do not plan your travels properly. Especially in the area of food. So Dean and I fixed us something to take along."
While I was digesting that Dojango suddenly called out, "Where to, boss?"
38
There were subtle signs that some parts of Playmate's place had been searched. I asked Winger, "Has anybody been in here since you took over? Since Playmate wandered off?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"Absolutely." She was irked. I was daring to question her faithfulness to her commission.
"I didn't think so. So you have to quit going through Playmate's stuff." While she sputtered I took a lamp into Kip's workshop. At first glance the only change there was the absence of the cart I'd ridden over here. Behind one or another of the grolls, mostly. As I'd anticipated.
Three blocks from my house Dojango was already trying to mooch a ride.
With Doris or Marsha pulling the cart, though, there were problems. Problems which sprang from their size. Neither could fit between the cart's long shafts. So whichever one was on the job dragged the cart along one-handed. The ride became a series of wild jerks as the groll swung his arms.
Then there was the problem of height. The grolls' hands were eight feet off the ground when they stood up straight. When they pulled the cart I ended up lying on my back.
But we had arrived at Playmate's stable. Marsha had volunteered to carry me around in his arms when he saw how much trouble I had levering my stiff old bones out of the cart. "I'd take you up on it, too," I told him. "Except for the fact that you're too tall to go anywhere inside here."
That was one big problem with being those two guys. Hardly any structure in TunFaire was tall enough to accommodate them.
So I limped a lot and leaned on things. I was crabby. I snarled at people for no good reason. And I didn't find a single clue as to where Playmate had go
ne. But I did have Singe. She'd located Playmate's newest track and was ready to move out on it long before I finished my rounds of Playmate's digs. I swore there had to be something incriminating somewhere. Something to tie him into the evil equine empire.
I kept returning to Kip's workshop, convinced that there was something I was overlooking. There was nothing missing and nothing wrong there but something deep inside me kept telling me to watch out for something.
I never did figure out what it was. But I trusted my hunch. I told Morley's associates to keep a close eye on Kip's junk. "Something here has something to do with what's going on. I don't know what it is yet. So I don't want you to let anybody in. Don't let anybody touch anything. And in particular, don't let Winger touch anything. But otherwise, consider her to be in charge."
I gave Winger a big grin and a glimpse of the old raised eyebrow trick.
Winger gave me the finger.
"Promises, promises."
That earned me a matched set of flying fingers.
39
Singe was having trouble concentrating. Dojango kept distracting her. He wouldn't shut up. Which was a habit of his that I'd forgotten. Kind of the way you forget how much a broken bone hurts until the next time you bust one.
I explained, on three separate occasions, how difficult it was for Singe to follow a trace as old as Playmate's, to explain that she had to concentrate all her attention on the task at hand.
"Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I understand, Garrett, actually." And thirty seconds later it would be, "This's just like the time me and Doris and Marsha was running the bag for Eddie the Gimp, actually. If we wasn't right on top of what we was doing every second... "
I sent a look of appeal up toward Doris, whose turn it was to walk beside the cart. But it was too dark out for him to notice. So I asked, "Doris. How the hell do I get your little brother to shut up?"
"Huh?"
I got ready to groan.
"I don't know. I just shut him out. Is he running off at the mouth again?"
"Still. I can't get him to stay quiet for twenty seconds straight. He's driving me crazy and he's making it impossible for Singe to keep her mind on her work." I suffered a moment of inspiration. "If we don't pull this thing off, if we don't find this guy, we blow the job. Which means that none of us will get paid."
"Dojango, shut the fuck up. You even cough, I'm gonna slug you." Doris waved a fist about the size of a bull's head in his brother's face. "Where we gonna put him when I do, Garrett? 'Cause I'm guaranteed gonna gotta do it on account of he can't even keep his mouth shut when he's asleep."
"He managed to shut up when he had to that time we all went to the Cantard."
"Yeah. But like they say, long ago and far away. And times change."
They do indeed. I'd just gotten more words out of one of the grolls than I'd heard before in all the years I'd known them.
Dojango couldn't help observing, "Actually, it ain't really polite to be talking about somebody like they ain't even there when you—"
Bop!
Doris's blow was almost casual. Dojango rocked and wilted. His brother scooped him up and carried him like a baby.
I asked, "Wasn't that a little harsh?"
"He ought to be getting used to it, Garrett. Actually." Doris grinned broadly. Moonlight glistened off his snaggle teeth. "This ain't the first time his mouth has caused us some trouble."
"Amen, brother," Marsha said from up front. "We gotta love the guy on account of he's family, but sometimes... If it wasn't for his connection with Cousin Morley... "
"Guys, we all have relatives like that. I've got a great-uncle Medford that somebody should've poisoned a hundred years ago."
Singe stopped. "You are quite right about Medford Shale, Garrett." Great-uncle Medford had figured prominently in the case where I'd first made Singe's acquaintance. "Just as you were right about me needing no distractions if I am to follow this trail. Perhaps I can have Doris knock you out, then have Marsha knock Doris out, then pray that a building collapses on Marsha."
"Or we could all take a hint and save the chatter till later."
"You could do that. But I am willing to bet that none of you are able."
Was it Mama Garrett's boy who'd said that this ratgirl desperately needed some self-confidence? She sure didn't lack for it in this crowd.
Ten minutes later, I called, "Singe, I know where we're going." We were headed for the Prose homestead. Maybe Playmate's luck had changed. Or, from his point of view, maybe he had given in to temptation. "We're headed for the boy's mother's flat."
"All right. If you think so. If you want to go there and wait for me, go ahead. I would prefer to stick to the trail. That will reveal if there were other stops he made along the way."
A gentle admonition from the expert. I decided to heed it. The girl had a point. Suppose Playmate was headed for Kayne Prose's place but never made it there?
40
He did make it. But he'd gone away again. Singe explained that to me before I ever went upstairs and found a very frightened Cassie Doap holed up behind a barricaded door, refusing to open up for anybody.
"Cassie, come on. This's Garrett. The man Playmate hired to find your brother Kip. Now Playmate's disappeared and I'm trying to track him down, too." I hoped he turned up soon. My body was doing a lot of aching. "He came here about... " I looked at Singe, whispered, "How long ago?"
"This morning."
"He came here this morning. Why was that? Where did he go from here?"
Cassie kept telling us to go away. She was terrified. But Singe could detect no odors that would justify such a strong response. And none of the neighbors showed any curiosity, which suggested that great dramas by Cassie Doap were not at all uncommon.
I recalled Rhafi telling me that Cassie was an actress. She put on characters like clothing. Maybe she was overacting now.
I wished I had one of my human lady friends along. Particularly Tinnie Tate of the shoemaking Tates. That professional redhead would know how to manage a mere blonde. Tinnie was an accomplished actress herself. At least where the manipulation of guys named Garrett was concerned.
Singe did make a few calming remarks, loudly enough to be heard through the door, while I tried to talk Cassie out of her hysteria. Singe's comments were kind of childish but they had their effect. At some point Cassie decided to open the door a crack to see who was out there in the hallway with me.
I don't know why my having a ratgirl along should've been reassuring, but it was enough so that Cassie decided she'd talk to us. She asked, "What do you want to know, Mr. Garrett?"
My heart broke. That delectable young woman had called me "mister." I was nothing but a "mister." I wasn't on her list of prospects.
It's a cruel world indeed.
Probably just as well, though. Cassie was the kind of woman Mom warned me against. One goofier than me.
"Where's Playmate, Cassie?"
"I don't know. He went to find my mom."
All right. That made sense. Maybe. To her.
She was definitely afraid, for real. She had referred to her mother as Mom. She'd always called her Kayne before. "And why did he do that, Cassie? Was she in trouble?"
"I don't know. She went to find Rhafi when he didn't come home. Then she didn't come home. So I went and got Playmate. And he decided to go looking for both of them... "
Without bothering to inform me. Or even Winger. Who hadn't mentioned Cassie. Which probably meant that Winger wasn't paying attention to what she was supposed to be doing.
"Just as an aside, did you see a tall blond woman at Playmate's stable?"
"No. Is that important?"
"Probably not. All right. Let's go back. Rhafi disappeared? What's the story on that?"
"That man you had watching Bic Gonlit. Rhafi was hanging around with him. Covering for him when he had to go off. Like that. Then Rhafi just disappeared. While that man was away getting them something to eat. He told us when Kayne and me went to find Rhaf
i on account of Rhafi was supposed to start a new job today. It's getting really hard to find somebody who'll give him a chance anymore. Kayne really didn't want him to screw it up this time."
Now that she'd decided to trust me Cassie gushed, getting rid of the fear and the tension through a flood of words. She didn't really have much to say except that Rhafi had disappeared, then Kayne had gone looking for him while sending her to tell Playmate. Then Playmate had gone after Kayne. And he hadn't been seen since. And now Cassie was firmly convinced that the forces of darkness would come for her soon.
"You get back inside and barricade your door again. I'll take care of it." I hoped. I'd done somewhat less than take care of things on several occasions lately.
41
"You still have a trail?" I asked Singe.
"Yes. Getting better than it was."
I grunted. I didn't try to shortcut this time, though I expected the track to lead us straight to Saucerhead.
Which it did. More or less. Though Tharpe wasn't at his post.
I didn't even ask. I just left Singe to work her wonders.
"It is not entirely clear but it seems that Mr. Tharpe accompanied Mr. Playmate. Or he followed him within a very short time."
"And they went over to that ugly yellow building, right?"
"They were headed in that direction when they left here."
That was Singe. Making no assumptions.
"Can you detect any other odors here? That you might've noticed in that place we just visited?"
"That blond woman was here earlier today. And maybe others who left traces in that building. The odors are very faint."
"But there's nothing to contradict the story Cassie told us?"
"You do not trust her?"