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

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.
     
     

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 and trash scavenged before the ratmen could