Glen Cook - Garrett Files 06 - Red Iron Nights

VIP免费
2024-12-23 1 0 463.2KB 146 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
RED IRON NIGHTS
by Glen Cook
Book Six of The Garrett Files
Scanned by wicman99; proofed by Nadie. If you enjoyed this e-text, why not consider buying a
print copy?
1
When I shoved through the doorway of Morley’s Joy House you’d have thought I was the old
dude in black who lugs the sickle. The place went dead quiet. I stopped moving. I couldn’t push uphill
against the weight of all those stares. “Somebody sneak lemons into your salads?”
Quick check of the talent. It looked like somebody with an ugly stick had gone berserk. That or
those guys spent a lot of time diving into walls and shaving themselves with hatchets. I saw enough scars
and bent noses to open me a sideshow.
The Joy House boasts that kind of clientele.
“Aw, damn! It’s Garrett.” That was my pal Puddle, safe behind the bar. “Here we go again,
troops.” Puddle goes two-eighty, maybe more. His skin is the hue of somebody who’s been dead
awhile. You ask me, rigor mortis set in above the neck twenty years back.
Several dwarves, an ogre, miscellaneous elves, and a couple of guys of indeterminate ancestry
chugged their sauerkraut cocktails and headed for the door. Guys I didn’t even know. Guys who knew
me did their damnedest to pretend they didn’t. A murmur spread as the ones who didn’t know me got
clued in.
What a charge for the ego. Call me Typhoid Garrett.
“Hi, everybody,” I chirped, going for cheerful. “Ain’t it a grand night out?” It wasn’t. It was raining
cats and dogs and the critters were quarreling all the way to the ground. I had dents in my head from
random volleys of hailstones, not being bright enough to wear a hat. On the plus side, flash floods might
clear the garbage festering in the streets. Some of that was ready to get up and walk.
The city ratmen get lazier every day.
“Hey, Garrett! Come on over.”
Well. A friendly face. “Saucerhead, old buddy, old pal.” I steered for the shadowy corner table
Tharpe shared with another guy. I hadn’t spotted him because of the gloom back there. Even close up I
couldn’t make much of Tharpe’s companion. The guy wore heavy black robes, like some species of
priest, complete with cowl. He exuded gloom like a miasma. He wasn’t the kind you’d have over to
liven up a party.
“Drag up a chair,” Tharpe said. I don’t know why he’s called Saucerhead. He don’t like it much
but ranks it higher than “Waldo,” which a parent or two hung on him.
I planted my behind. Tharpe’s companion observed, “Seems you’re less than welcome here. Are
you diseased?” He wasn’t just gloomy, he was forthright, a social handicap worse than bad breath.
“Ha!” Saucerhead snorted. “Ha-ha-ha. That’s good, Licks. Hell. This’s Garrett. I told you about
him.”
“The mist begins to clear.” But not around him, it didn’t.
“I’m starting to feel a little hurt here,” I said. “You’re wrong.” Louder, “You’re all of you wrong. I’
m not working. I’m not into anything. I just thought I’d drop in and catch up on my friends.” They didn’t
believe me.
At least nobody cracked wise about me not having any friends.
Saucerhead said, “If you’d come around and socialize sometimes, instead of just when you’re up
to your crack in crocodiles, maybe folks would smile when they saw you.”
Grumble grumble. Hard to argue with that. “You’re looking good, Garrett. Lean and mean. Still
working out?”
“Yeah.” More grumbles. I don’t much like work. Especially not workout-type work. I figure in any
rational world a man will get all the exercise he needs catching his share of blonds, brunettes, and
redheads. Got it so far? I’m Garrett, investigator and confidential agent, not animated by any
overwhelming ambition, with a penchant for figures of a certain kind and a knack for stumbling into
things friends and acquaintances don’t find enthralling. I’m a young thirty, six-feet-two, ginger-haired and
blue-eyed, and the dogs don’t howl when I go by, though the hazards of my profession have left traces
which give my face character. I say I’m charming. My friends disagree, say I just won’t take life serious.
Well, you do too much of that and you end up as dark as this friend of Saucerhead’s.
Puddle arrived with a huge tankard of my favorite food, that divine elixir that makes it necessary for
me to work out. He’d drawn it from his private keg, hidden behind the bar. The Joy House doesn’t
serve anything but rabbit food and the squeezings thereof. Morley Dotes is a rabid vegetarian.
I took a long drink of bitter beer. “You’re a prince, Puddle.” I fished out a silver mark.
“Yeah. I’m in line for the throne.” He didn’t pretend to make change. A prince indeed. You could
buy a pony keg wholesale for that, the price of silver being what it is. “How come you’re in here instead
of gamboling through acres of redheads?” My last big case involved whole squads of that delightful
subspecies. Unfortunately, only one of the bunch turned out palatable. Redheads are that way. They’re
either devils or angels—and the angels are no angels. I think it’s because they try living up to an image
from an early age.
“Gamboling, Puddle?” Where did Puddle pick up a word like “gamboling”? The man had trouble
with his own name on account of it had more than one syllable. “You been going to school or
something?”
Puddle just grinned.
I asked, “What is this, teak on Tommy Tucker night? With easygoing old Garrett playing Tommy?”
Puddle’s grin widened into an unappealing smear of rotten and missing teeth. He was one guy who
should convert and become one of Morley’s born-again vegetarians.
Saucerhead said, “You make yourself a fat target.”
“I must. For everybody. You hear what Dean did?”
Dean is the old boy who keeps house for me and my partner and cooks for me. He’s about
seventy. He’d make somebody a fine wife.
While we jawed, Tharpe’s tablemate filled and tamped, filled and tamped the biggest damn pipe I
ever saw. It had a bowl like a bucket. Puddle snagged a brass coal bucket off the bar. Licks used
copper tongs to transfer one small coal to his pipe. He puffed clouds of weed smoke potent enough to
sky us all.
“Musicians,” Saucerhead muttered, as though that explained the ills of the world. “I didn’t hear,
Garrett. What’s he done now? Found you another cat?” Dean was going through a stray-collecting spell.
I’d had to get firm to keep from ending up up to my belt buckle in cat hair.
“Worse. He says he’s moving in. Like I don’t get a vote. And he goes on about it like he’s making
some kind of supreme sacrifice.”
Saucerhead chuckled. “There goes your extra room. No place left to stash you a spare honey.
Poor baby. Gots to make do with one at a time.”
Grumble grumble. “Ain’t like I’m overstocked. I been doing with none at a time since Tinnie and
Winger ran into each other on my front steps.” Puddle laughed. Heathen.
Tharpe asked, “What about Maya?”
“I haven’t seen her in six months. I think she left town. It’s me and Eleanor now.” Eleanor is a
painting on my office wall. I love the gal but she has her limitations. Everybody thought my situation was
hilarious—except Tharpe’s friend. He wasn’t hearing anybody but himself anymore. He started
humming. I decided he couldn’t be much of a musician. He couldn’t carry a tune in a handcart.
Puddle stopped snickering long enough to say, “I knew you was up to something. Not your usual,
but you still looking to get bailed out.”
“Damnit, I just wanted out of the house. Dean is driving me buggo and the Dead Man won’t take a
nap on account of he’s expecting Glory Mooncalled to do something and he don’t want to miss the
news. I defy anybody to put up with those two for half as long as I have.”
“Yeah, you do got a hard life.” Saucerhead sneered. “My heart goes out. Tell you what. I’ll trade
you. I take your place, you take mine. I’ll throw in Billie.” Billie being his current flame, a little bit of a
blond with temper enough for a platoon of redheads.
“Do I detect a note of disenchantment?”
“No. You detect the whole damned opera.”
“Thanks anyway. Maybe next time.” Saucerhead’s place was a one-room walk-up without
furniture enough for company. I lived in places like that before I scored big enough to buy the house I
share with the Dead Man.
Saucerhead tucked his thumbs into his belt, leaned back, smirked and nodded, nodded and
smirked. A smirk on his ugly face is a wonder to behold. He ever holds one too long the Crown might
declare it a national park. He claims he’s all human, but from his size and looks you’ve got to suspect he
has a little troll or giant in him. “You ain’t ready to deal, Garrett, I can’t say I got a lot of sympathy for
you.”
“I could’ve gone to some second-rate swillhouse and drowned my sorrows in ardent spirits,
pouring my woes into the ears of sympathetic strangers, but no, I had to come down here . . . ”
“That works for me,” Puddle kicked in when I hit the part about ardent spirits. “Don’t let us hold
you up.”
I never did count him as a friend. He just came with my friend Morley—though Morley’s friendship
can be suspect enough. “You take the joy out of the Joy House, Puddle.”
“Hey, Garrett. The place was rocking till you walked in.”
Saucerhead’s pal Licks wasn’t even gurgling now, but he kept puffing like a volcano and grinning. I
was getting the smoke secondhand but was ready to start humming myself. I lost track of what I was
saying, started wondering why the place was called the Joy House, which made it sound a lot more
exotic than the vegetarian hangout it is.
Licks suddenly shot up like he’d been goosed. He headed for the door, sort of floating, as though
his toes barely reached the floor. I’d never seen anyone do weed so heavy. I asked Tharpe, “Where’d
you find him?”
“Licks? He found me. Him and some other guys want to organize the musicians.”
“Say no more.” I could imagine their interest in Saucerhead. Tharpe makes his living convincing
people. His technique involves bending limbs in unnatural directions.
Two or three Morleys descended the stair from the second floor, staring toward Licks as the
musician hit the exit. Morley had heard about me. Puddle had warned him through the speaking tube to
his office upstairs. Hard to tell through the smoke, but Dotes looked irked.
Morley is a breed, part dark-elf, part human. The elf side dominates. He’s short, trim, so
handsome it’s a sin. And sin he does, as often as he can with anybody’s wife who’ll hold still. He’d
grown a little pencil-stroke mustache. He had his black hair slicked back. He was dressed to kill—
though his type looks good in anything. He drifted our way, showing a lot of pointy teeth.
“What’s that thing living under your nose?”
Saucerhead offered a crude suggestion. Morley ignored him. “You quit working, Garrett? You
haven’t been around.”
“Why work if I don’t have to?” I tried looking smug—though my finances weren’t comfortable. It
costs to keep house.
“You have something going?” He occupied the chair vacated by Licks, waved at persistent weed
smoke.
“Not hardly.” I gave him my sad tale of woe. He laughed too.
“Imaginative, Garrett. I almost believe you. I have to admit, when you make them up they sound
like things thatcould happen. So what is it? Something hush-hush? I haven’t heard about anything
shaking. This town’s getting dull.”
He talked that long only because I was stammering. “Damn! Not you too!”
“You never come around except when you need muscle to hoist you out of a hole you’ve dug
yourself.”
Not fair. Not true. I’ve even gone so far as to eat some of the cow chow his joint serves. Once I
even paid for it. “You don’t believe me? Then tell me this. Where’s the woman?”
“What woman?” Dotes and Saucerhead and Puddle all grinned like shiteating possums. Thought
they had me on the run.
“You claim I’m working. Where’s the woman? I get into one of my weird cases, there’s always a
lovely around. Right? So you see a honey on my arm? Hell, my luck’s so bad I’d almost go to work just
to . . . Huh?”
They weren’t paying attention. They were staring at something behind me.
2
She liked black. She wore a black raincloak over a black dress. She wore high-top black boots.
Raindrops shimmered like diamonds in her raven hair. She wore black leather gloves. I imagined she’d
lost a black hat and veil somewhere. Everything about her was black except her face. That was as pale
as bone. She was about five-six. She was young. She was beautiful. She was frightened.
I said, “I’m in love.”
Morley’s sense of humor deserted him. He told me, “You don’t want anything to do with her,
Garrett. She’ll get you dead.”
The woman’s gaze, arrogant from amazing black eyes, passed over us as though we didn’t exist.
She chose to perch at a table isolated from those that were occupied. Some of Morley’s patrons
shivered as she passed, pretended they didn’t see her.
Interesting.
I looked some more. She was about twenty. She wore lip paint so red it looked like fresh blood.
That and her pallor gave me a chill. But no. No vampire would dare TunFaire’s inhospitable streets.
I was intrigued. Why was she afraid? Why did she scare those thugs? “Know her, Morley?”
“No. I don’t. But I know who she is.”
“So?”
“She’s the kingpin’s kid. I saw her out there last month.”
“Chodo’s daughter?” I was stunned. Also a lot less romantically inclined.
Chodo Contague is TunFaire’s emperor of crime. If it’s on society’s underbelly and there’s a profit
in it, Chodo has a piece of it.
“Yes.”
“You went out there? You saw him?”
“Yes.” He sounded a little vague, there.
“He’s really alive, then.” I’d heard but I’d had trouble believing it.
See, my last case, the one with all the redheads, ended up with me and my friend Winger and
Chodo’s two top lifetakers going after the bastard. Winger and I took a powder before the dirty deed,
figuring we’d be next if we hung around. When we left, Crask and Sadler had the old boy ready to go
on the meathook. But it hadn’t taken. Chodo was still boss wazoo. Crask and Sadler were still his top
headcrushers, like they’d never had a thought of putting him to sleep.
That worried me. Chodo had seen me plain enough. He wasn’t the forgiving sort.
“Chodo’s daughter! What’s she doing in a dump like this?”
“What do you mean, a dump like this?” You can’t even hint that the Joy House might be less than
top of the mark without Morley gets his back up.
“I mean, obviously she thinks she’s a class act. Whatever you or I think, she’s got to figure this’s a
dive. This isn’t the Hill, Morley. It’s the Safety Zone.”
That’s Morley’s neighborhood. The Safety Zone. It’s an area where folks of disparate species get
together for business reasons with a lessened risk of getting murdered. It’s not your upper-crust part of
town.
All the time we’re rattling our mouths, whispering, I’m trying to think of some good excuse for
going over there and telling the girl she’s made me her love slave. And all the time I’m doing that, my
little voice is telling me: don’t make a damned fool of yourself, any kid of Chodo’s is going to be murder
on the hoof.
I must have twitched. Morley grabbed my arm. “You’re getting desperate, hit the Tenderloin.”
Common sense. Don’t stick your hand in a fire. I hung on to my ration of sense. I settled back. I
had it under control. But I couldn’t help staring.
The front door exploded inward. Two very large brunos brought half the storm in with them. They
held the door open for a third man, who came in slow, like he was onstage. He was shorter by a couple
of inches but no less muscular. Somebody had used his face to draw a map with a knife. One eye was
half-shut permanently. His upper lip was drawn into a perpetual sneer. He radiated nasty. “Oh, boy,”
Morley said.
“Know them?”
“I know the type.”
Saucerhead said it for me. “Don’t we all.”
The scar-faced guy looked around. He spotted the girl. He started moving. Somebody yelled,
“Shut the goddamned door!” The two heavies there took their first good look around and got a read on
what kind of people hang out in a place like the Joy House. They shut the door.
I didn’t blame them. Some very bad people hang out at Morley’s place.
Scarface didn’t care. He approached the girl. She refused to see him. He bent, whispered
something. She started, then looked him in the eye. She spat. Chodo’s kid for sure.
Scarface smiled. He was pleased. He had him an excuse.
There wasn’t a sound in the place when he yanked her out of the seat. She betrayed pain by
expression but didn’t make a sound.
Morley said, “That’s it.” His voice was soft. Dangerous. You don’t mess with his customers.
Scarface must not have known where he was. He ignored Morley. Most times that’s a fatal error. He
was lucky, maybe.
Morley moved. The thugs from the doorway got in his way.
Dotes kicked one in the temple. The guy was twice his size but went down like he’d been whacked
with a sledge. The other one made the mistake of grabbing Morley.
Saucerhead and I started moving a second after Dotes did. We circled the action, chasing the
scar-faced character. Morley didn’t need help. And if he did, Puddle was behind the bar acquiring some
engine of destruction.
Rain hit me in the face, like to drove me back inside. It was worse than it had been when I’d
arrived.
“There,” Saucerhead said, pointing. I spied the loom of a dark coach, figures struggling as Scarface
tried to force the girl inside.
We pranced over, me unlimbering my favorite oak headknocker as we went. I never leave home
without it. Eighteen inches long, it has a pound of lead in its business end. Very effective, and it don’t
usually leave bodies littering the street.
Saucerhead beat me there. He grabbed the scar-faced guy from behind, twirled him around, and
threw him against the nearest building with a force that drowned the rattle of distant thunder. I slithered
into the vacated space, grabbed the girl.
Somebody was trying to drag her into the coach. I slipped my left arm around her waist, pulled,
pushed my headknocker past her, figuring I’d pop a bad boy between the eyes.
I saw eyes, all right. Eyes like out of some spook story, full of green fire, three times too big for the
wizened little character who wore them. He had to be a hundred and ninety. But he was strong. He hung
on to the girl’s arm with hands like bird claws, pulled her in despite her and me both.
I swished my billy around, trying to avoid seeing those eyes because they were poisonous. They
scared hell out of me. Made me feel cold all the way down to my tail-bone. And I don’t scare easy.
I got him a good one upside the head. His grip weakened. That gave me a chance to line up
another shot. I let him have it.
His mouth opened wide, but instead of a scream, butterflies poured out. I mean like about a million
and two butterflies, so many the coach was filled. They were all over me. I stumbled back, flailed
around. I’d never been bitten by a butterfly, but who knew about the kind that come flapping out of
some old geek’s mouth?
Saucerhead pulled the girl away from me, tossed me back like a rag doll, dived in there, and pulled
that old guy out. You don’t want to get in Saucerhead’s way when he’s riled. He breaks things.
The old man’s eyes had lost their fire. Saucerhead lifted him with one hand, said, “What the hell
you think you’re pulling, Gramps?” and tossed him over to ricochet off the same wall that had been
Scarface’s undoing. Then Tharpe went over and started kicking, one for this guy, one for that, no
finesse. I heard ribs crack. I figured I ought to calm him down before he killed somebody, only I couldn’t
think how. I didn’t want to get in his way when he was in that mood. And I still had a flock of soggy
butterflies after me.
Tharpe calmed himself down. He grabbed the old man by the scruff of the neck and pitched him
into the coach. The old boy made a sound like a whipped puppy. Tharpe tossed Scarf ace in on top of
him, then looked up. There wasn’t anybody on the driver’s seat, so he just whacked the nearest horse
on the rump and yelled.
The team took off.
Hunching down against the rain, Tharpe turned to me. “Takes care of those clowns. Hey! What
happened to the girl?”
She was gone.
“Damned ingrate. There’s a broad for you. Hell.” He looked up, let the rain fall into his face a
moment, then said, “I’m going to get my stuff. Then what say you and me go get drunk and get in a
fight?”
“I thought we just had a fight.”
“Bah. Bunch of candyasses. Wimps. Come on.”
I had no intention of going trouble-hunting. But it did seem like a good idea to get in out of the rain,
away from the butterflies. I told you I hadn’t used up my ration of sense.
One of the two thugs was blocking the water flow in the gutter in front of Morley’s door. The
second came flying out as we started in. “Hey!” Tharpe yelled. “Watch where you’re throwing your
trash.”
I looked around inside. The girl hadn’t gone back in there. Morley and Puddle and I settled down
to wonder what it was all about. Saucerhead went off looking for a real challenge.
3
I did my best to get my money’s worth out of Puddle’s keg while Morley and I dissected cabbages
and kings and butterflies and the old days that never were that good—though I’d had me a moment now
and then. We solved the ills of the world but decided there was nobody in authority with sense enough
to implement our program. We were disinclined to take on the job ourselves.
Women proved a topic of brief duration. Morley’s recent luck undershone my own. It was too
much to take, seeing that great blob Puddle tipped back in his chair, thumbs hooked in his belt, grinning
smugly in regard to his own endeavors.
The rain continued relentless. At last I had to face facts. I was going to get wet again. I was going
to get a lot wet if Dean failed to respond to my pounding and whooping at the door. With set jaw and
scant optimism I took my leave of Morley and his establishment. Dotes looked as smug as his man. He
was home already.
I hunched my chin down against my chest and wished I’d had the sense to wear a hat. I wear one
so seldom it doesn’t occur to me to top myself off when that would be wise. Right away rain started
sneaking down the back of my neck.
I paused where we’d rescued Chodo’s mysterious daughter from her more mysterious assailants.
There wasn’t much light. The rain had swept away most of the evidence. I poked around and was on the
verge of deciding half had been my imagination before I found one big bedraggled butterfly. I salvaged
the cadaver and carried it as carefully as I could, cradled in my left palm.
My place is an old red brick house in a once-prosperous stretch of Macunado Street, near Wizard’
s Reach. The middle-class types have all abandoned ship. Most of the neighboring places have been
subdivided and rented to families with herds of kids. Usually when I approach my house I pause to
inspect it and reflect on the good fortune that let me survive the case that paid me enough to buy it. But
cold rain down the back of the neck has a way of sapping nostalgia.
I scampered up the steps and gave the secret knock,bam-bam-bam , as hard as I could while
bellowing, “Open up, Dean! I’m going to drown out here.” A big flash of lightning. Thunder rattled my
teeth in their sockets. The sky lords hadn’t been feuding before, just tuning up for another Great Flood.
Thunder and lightning suggested they were about to get serious. I pounded and yelled some more. The
stoop isn’t protected from the weather.
Maybe my ears were still ringing. I thought I heard something like a kitten crying inside. I knew it
couldn’t be a cat. I’d given Dean the word about his strays. He wouldn’t lapse.
I heard shuffling and whispering inside. I did some more yelling. “Open this damned door, Dean. It’
s cold out here.” I didn’t threaten. Mom Garrett didn’t raise no kids dumb enough to lay threats on
somebody who could just go back to bed and leave me singing in the rain.
The door creaked open after a symphony of curses and clanking bolts and rattling chains. Old
Dean stood there eyeing me from beneath drooping lids. He looked about two hundred right then. He is
around seventy. And real spry for a guy his age.
If he wasn’t going to get out of the way I was going to walk over him. I started moving. He slid
aside. I told him, “The cat goes as soon as the rain stops.” I tried to sound like it was him or the kitten.
He started rattling bolts and chains. I stopped. All that hadn’t been there before. “What’s all the
hardware?”
“I don’t feel comfortable living somewhere where all there is is one or two latches to keep the
thieves out.”
We needed to have us a talk about assuming and presuming. I knew damned well he didn’t buy
that hardware out of his own pocket. But now wasn’t the time. I wasn’t at my best.
“What’s that you’ve got?”
I’d forgotten the butterfly. “Drowned butterfly.” I took it into my office, a shoe box of a room
behind the last door to your left heading back to the kitchen. Dean hobbled after me, bringing a candle.
He has decrepitude down to an art. It’s amazing how incapacitated he gets when he has a scam running.
I used his candle to light a lamp. “Go back to bed.”
He glanced at the closed door of the small front room, a door we shut only when there’s
somebody or something in there we don’t want seen. Something was scratching its other side. Dean
said, “I’m wide-awake now. I might as well get some work done.” He didn’t look wideawake. “You
plan to be up long?”
“No. I’m just going to study this bug, then kiss Eleanor good night.” Eleanor was a beautiful, sad
woman who lived once upon a time. Her portrait hangs behind my desk. I go on like we’re into a
relationship. That drives Dean buggy.
I have to balance the scale somehow.
I settled into my worn leather chair. Like everything else around my place, including the house, it
was secondhand. It was just getting adjusted to a new butt. Just getting comfortable, I pushed my
accounts aside, spread the butterfly on my desk.
Dean waited in the doorway till he saw I wouldn’t react to the accounts being out. Then he huffed
off to the kitchen.
I popped a quick peek at the last entry, made a face. That didn’t look good. But go to work? Gah!
Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof.
Meantime, there was this raggedy old green butterfly. It could’ve been a beauty before, but now its
wings were cracked and chipped and split, bent and washed out. A disaster. I suffered a moment ofdéjà
vu.
I’d seen its cousins in the islands while I was doing my five years in the Royal Marines. There’re a
lot in the swamps down there. There’s every kind of bug the gods ever imagined, except maybe arctic
roaches. Maybe creation was handled by a heavenly committee. In areas where departmental turfs
overlapped, the divine functionaries went to competing. And they all for sure dumped their
bug-production overruns in those tropical swamps.
But the heck with the bad old days. I’m all growed-up now. What I had to ask was, what was I
doing with the flutterbug in the first place?
I was definitely, for sure, guaranteed, not even a little bit interested in anything involving dried-up
old geezers with stomachs so sour they belched up butterflies. I’d done my good deed for the decade. I’
d rescued the maiden fair. It was time to get on with things dearer my heart, like hustling Dean’s latest
fuzzball charity out my back door.
I swept the bug cadaver into the trash bucket, leaned back, started thinking how nice it would be
to put myself away in my nice soft bed.
4
Garrett!
“Hell!” Every time I forget my so-called partner . . .
The Dead Man hangs out in the larger front room that takes up the whole front side of the house
opposite my office, an area as big as my office and the small front room together. A lot of space for a
guy who hasn’t moved since before TunFaire was called TunFaire. I’m thinking about putting him in the
basement with the other junk that was here when I moved in.
I went into his room. A lamp was burning there. That was a surprise. Dean doesn’t like going in
there. I glanced around suspiciously.
The room contains only two chairs and two small tables, though the walls are hidden by shelves of
books and maps and memorabilia. One chair is mine. The other has a permanent resident.
If you walk in not knowing what to expect, the Dead Man can be a shock. First, there’s just a
whole hell of a lot of him. Four hundred and fifty pounds’ worth. Second, he’s not human, he’s Loghyr.
Since he’s the only one of that tribe I’ve ever seen, I don’t know if he’d set the Loghyr girls swooning,
but by my standards he’s one homely sucker. Like he was the practice dummy when the guy with the
ugly stick was doing his apprenticeship.
After fat you notice he’s got a snoot like an elephant, fourteen inches long. Then you notice that the
moths and mice have nibbled him over the years.
The reason he’s called the Dead Man is that he’s dead. Somebody stuck a knife in him about four
hundred years ago. But Loghyr just don’t get in a hurry. His soul, or whatever, is still hanging around in
his body.
I gather you have had an adventure.
Since he’s dead, he can’t talk, but he doesn’t let that slow him down. He just thinks right into my
head. He can also go rummaging around in there, amongst the clutter and spiders, if he wants. Mostly he’
s courteous enough to keep out unless he’s invited.
I took another look around. The place was too clean. Dean had even dusted the Dead Man.
Something was up. Those two had gotten their heads together. That was a first. That was scary.
I’m nothing if not cool. I covered my suspicion perfectly. Knowing it was going to be something I
wouldn’t like, I decided to get even first.
The Dead Man made a big mistake when he taught me to remember every little detail of everything
when I was working. I started talking about my evening.
The theoretical basis of our association is I do the legwork and suffer the slings and arrows and
thumps on the head and he takes whatever I learn and runs it through his self-proclaimed genius brains
and tells me whodunit or where the body is buried or whatever it is I’m trying to find out. That’s the
theoretical basis. In practice, he’s lazier than I am. I have to threaten to burn the house down just to
wake him up.
I was dwelling in lingering detail upon the charms of the strange Miss Contague when suspicion bit
him.Garrett!
He knows me too well. “Yes?” Sweetly.
What are you doing?
“Filling you in on some odd occurrences.”
Occurrences, incidentally, of but passing interest. Unless your passions have overcome your
brain yet again. You could not possibly be considering involving yourself with those people, could
you?
I thought about lying just to rattle his chain. We do a lot of that, back and forth. It passes the time.
But I said, “Thereare limits to how much I’ll let a skirt override my good sense.”
Indeed? I am amazed and surprised. I had concluded that you have no sense at all, good or
bad.
We do get going. Usually it’s play, wit and half-wit. It’s up to you to guess who’s who.
“One point for you, Old Bones. I’m going to go put myself on the shelf for the night. If Dean
explodes in another mad burst of energy and decides to dust you again, tell him he can wake me at
noon.” I have this thing about mornings. No sane man gets up then. They come too damned early in the
摘要：

REDIRONNIGHTSbyGlenCookBookSixofTheGarrettFilesScannedbywicman99;proofedbyNadie.Ifyouenjoyedthise-text,whynotconsiderbuyingaprintcopy?1WhenIshovedthroughthedoorwayofMorley’sJoyHouseyou’dhavethoughtIwastheolddudeinblackwholugsthesickle.Theplacewentdeadquiet.Istoppedmoving.Icouldn’tpushuphillagainstth...

展开>> 收起<<
Glen Cook - Garrett Files 06 - Red Iron Nights.pdf

共146页,预览30页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：146 页 大小：463.2KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 146
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注