Book 06 - Red Iron Nights by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

reputation.”
    See? Just not my day. I pulled the door shut without bothering
to holler to Dean. What did I have to worry about? I had a heavenly
host on guard. “Why don’t we scare up a beer, then? I
feel the need.” For about a keg, taken in one big gulp.
    “Be quicker if we just walk.” His little blue eyes
were chips of ice. He didn’t like me but he was working hard
not to offend me. He wanted something bad. I noted that he’d
acquired a little mustache like Morley’s. Must be something
going around.
    “All right. I’m a civic-minded kind of guy. But
maybe you could drop me one little hint?”
    “You figured it already, Garrett, I know you. I need a
favor I hate to ask for. A big favor. I got a problem. Whether I
like it or not, you’re probably the only guy I know of can
solve it.”
    I think that was a compliment. “Really?” I swelled
with newfound power. It almost matched the growth of my paranoia.
I’m the kind of guy gets really nervous when my enemies start
making nice on me.
    “Yeah.” He grumbled something that must have been in
a foreign language, because no gentleman would use words like the
words I thought I heard. Watch officers are all gentlemen. Just ask
them. They’ll clue you in good while they pick your
pocket.
    “What?”
    “I’d better just show you. It isn’t
far.”
    I touched myself here and there, making sure I was still
carrying.
    After a block, during which he muttered to himself, Block said,
“We got a power struggle shaping up up top,
Garrett.”
    “What else is new?” We haven’t had a big
shake-up or a king bite the dust for a couple years but, overall,
we change rulers more often than Barking Dog changes clothes.
    “There’s a reform faction forming.”
    “I see.” Bad news for his bunch.
“Grim.”
    “You see what I mean?”
    “Yeah.” I’d heard grumblings myself. But those
were there all the time. Down here in the real world we don’t
take them seriously. All part of politics. Nobody
really
wants change. Too many people have too much to lose.
    “Glad you do. Because we got something come up that gots
to be tooken care of. Fast. We got the word. Else it’s going
to be our balls in a vise.” See? He even talked like a
gentleman.
    “Where do I come in?”
    “I hate to admit it, but there ain’t none of us
knows what to do.” Damn! He
was
in trouble. He
was
scared. They must have showed him a vise heated red
hot, with ground glass in its jaws. “I put in some time
thinking. You was the only answer. You know what to do and
you’re straight enough to do it. If I can get you
to.”
    I didn’t say anything. I knew I wasn’t going to like
what I was about to hear. Keeping my mouth shut kept my options
open. Marvelous, the restraint I showed in my old age.
    “You help us out with this, Garrett, you won’t be
sorry. We’ll see you’re taken care of fee-wise. And
you’ll be covered with the Watch from here on in.”
    Well, now. That would be useful. I’ve had my troubles with
the Watch. One time they laid siege to my house. It took some doing
to work that one out.
    “Right. So what is it?” I had a creepy feeling.
    Didn’t take a genius to figure it would be something big
and nasty.
    “I better just show you,” he insisted.
    Despite his fine-sounding offer I was liking this less and
less.
     
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11
    We walked only a mile but that mile took us over the edge of the
world into another reality, into the antechamber of hell, the
Bustee. Now I understood why he was out of uniform.
    TunFaire boasts peoples of almost every intelligent race. Mostly
they clump like with like in closed neighborhoods. Likewise with
humans not of the ethnic majority. Breeds fall into the cracks,
live in between, catch as catch can, often welcome nowhere.
Two-thirds of the city is ghetto slum. Poverty is the norm.
    But the Bustee is to those slums as the slums are to the Hill.
People there live in tents made of rags or in shanties put together
from sticks and mud