Dead Man in a Ditch

by Luke Arnold

  “Relax, I was talking to the double-dipping Elf.”

  Harold barely looked at his card before he placed it back down. My second one was on the lower side.

  “I don’t know Gnomish,” I said to my date. “Is that good?”

  “Not great.” Small squeeze to tell me she was lying.

  Harold’s girls glared at me. I guess bringing up wives wasn’t polite behavior at Cornucopia. Probably put a dampener on the spending.

  “Oh yeah?” said Harold. “And I know your mother.” He must have hoped that I was just trying out banter. A couple of the others chuckled along. “How is she doing, son?”

  “Dead.”

  The Werewolf groaned. Apparently I wasn’t playing the distraction game right.

  Knowing what card to play was easy enough. We took turns to take one from the pile, look at it, throw it back in the center or swap it with one of our own. When a card is thrown out, it is left face-up so that the next player can choose to take it, rather than draw one from the deck. The kicker is that you don’t always know what you’re getting rid of. If you happen to throw out a good card, the next player can pick it up, but then everybody knows where it is when it comes to the vibrant final round.

  “You’re dead too, aren’t you, Harold?” I pulled a one-point knight from the pile and held it up to Cylandia so she could admire it.

  “Hold on to that one, honey,” she said without squeezing. The Gnome looked confused when I obeyed Cylandia and swapped it for the picture card I’d glimpsed at. He’d thought we were just playing opposites.

  “I’m what?” Harold asked finally.

  “Dead. Ground down to teeth and dirt because you got yourself in trouble with some bad guys downtown. Well, that’s the story, anyway. I don’t think you tried to create it – it was just some happy accident – but that’s what she believes.” The game went on. The other players were used to turning cards while they talked but I had more of their attention than they wanted to spare. “You know what’s funny? I was hired to kill the man who killed Harold Steeme. Now, here I am without a body or murder weapon or a bad guy’s confession. All I have is a question that I don’t know how to answer.”

  The Orc threw out one of his unseen cards. An ace. I snatched it up before anyone else saw it. Mohawk Man swore as it slid into my deck without him knowing what it was.

  “Maybe you can help me, Harold. Maybe you can shine some light on my predicament.” The cards kept falling from nervous fingers. “Is Harold Steeme alive? Or did you kill him?”

  We went around again. The Orc dropped a card on the discard pile. I took one from the stack and didn’t even look at it. My eyes stayed on Harold but I tilted it enough for Cylandia to take a look. She gripped my leg like a vice.

  “What are you? Some kind of private cop?” asked Harold.

  “Just a guy who helps out when he can.”

  “Well, I’m sorry my wife dragged you into this but it’s not any of your business. You probably think you’re doing a good deed for a poor, helpless woman. I assure you, this is more complicated than you understand. What say we finish up here, I buy you a drink, and we can square this all out? You’ll be compensated for your time and I’ll even give you something extra for your silence. How does that sound?”

  All eyes were on me as I swapped the unseen card in my fingers with a face-down card in front of me. I slammed that card down on the discard pile and said “I Heros!” like I’d already won the game.

  Everyone chuckled. I looked down at the ace I’d recklessly thrown out.

  “Shit.”

  Cylandia sighed.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

  “I thought I did.”

  Laughter bubbled out from everyone except Harold, whose tightened skin had turned sickly and pale.

  “We usually go around a few more times before anybody calls it,” said Mohawk Man. “We were just getting warmed up.”

  The Werewolf took my discarded ace. It was the right move, unless you thought I had a winning hand that needed to be sabotaged. Nobody thought that. In fact, nobody thought anything. They’d all been watching the back-and-forth between Harold and me and had missed most of the cards in play.

  Because of that, they all took the ace. It was passed from one player to the next until it was the Orc’s turn. He was looking at my hand, grumbling into his mouth, trying to remember where I’d put the knight that he’d thrown out two rounds earlier. But he was too drunk, and had been too taken in by my story.

  “Blast,” he said eventually, and succumbed to stealing the ace just like everybody else.

  His nervousness put all the other players on edge as they realized they’d missed something. The Orc was the first to start flipping.

  My partner bounced up and down on my leg.

  “Do the honors,” I told her.

  The little blonde turned the cards from left to right. First, the knight that I’d taken from the Orc. Second, a three. Third, an ace.

  Cylandia looked around the table. A lot of bad hands. One jester was wasted on the Werewolf whose overall score was twenty. Harold was lowest: he had two aces, a knight and a three. Six points. All eyes fell to my last card. Cylandia slipped her fingers beneath it and took a breath. Then, she spun it around.

  Jester.

  She cheered and grabbed my head, planting a smacker on my cheek. The Amalgam played her hand but it was all over when she turned a six as her first card. The whole pot was pushed in front of me: seven bronze-leaf bills. The Gnome was the only other player smiling. Everyone else was sour.

  “Well done,” growled the Werewolf. “But don’t expect it to happen again.”

  “I won’t.”

  I plucked one leaf out of the pile and handed it to Cylandia. I gave another to the dealer and folded up the rest inside my jacket pocket.

  “Come on,” said Mohawk Man. “It’s bad form to leave like that. Have another go.”

  “Thanks, but I’m all good. I’ve got some news to deliver.”

  Harold’s mouth made shapes as it searched for the right thing to say to me. I walked away before he found it.

  “You sure you don’t want to stay?” asked the blonde. “I can think of a few fun ways to spend those winnings.”

  “Sorry, darlin’. Got a job to do.”

  I went down the stairs and back outside. The evening crowd was building in the Rose. Even the chill air coming off the Kirra couldn’t keep all the lonely hearts away.

  I crossed the bridge and kept moving. Maybe Sampson and the Sickle had stopped knocking out kneecaps but that didn’t mean it was completely out of fashion. My pockets were full of bronze and I’d solved the mystery in a single day but I couldn’t shake the thought that something was wrong.

  As I went out into the night, I could feel someone stepping on my shadow.

  22

  I got a few blocks away from Cornucopia, back in the guts of the inner city, and found a late-night barbershop with a working payphone. I called Carissa and it sounded like I woke her up.

  “I have some news. Not what you were expecting. It would be best if I deliver it in person.”

  “All right. I’ll come by in the morning.”

  Out the window of the barbershop, across the road, there was a narrow alley. Something moved in the darkness. A stray animal? No. There was a small flash of fire as somebody lit a pipe.

  “I don’t mean to spook you, Mrs Steeme, but certain elements are already in motion. Would you mind if I made a house call?”

  “This evening?”

  “I think it would be best.”

  She took a long time to think about it. Outside, the orange glow in the alley flared as the smoker breathed in. I pulled back from the window to hide myself behind the wall.

  “I suppose that’s fine,” she said. “Will you be long?”

  She told me her address. It was a short walk uptown to East Thirteenth.

  “I’ll be fifteen minutes.”

  I could have made it in
under ten but I wanted to take a detour. When I came out of the barber’s, the glow went away as whoever was watching me covered the pipe with their hand. I went west.

  Somebody was following me. But who? I walk fast. Harold’s skin might have been tightened up but his bones were old. There’s no way he would be able to keep up with me. Maybe he’d paid some hired brute to wait downstairs. Not a bad idea when you play the high-rollers’ table and want to be sure your winnings make it home.

  I turned right, then left, then ran through an alley into an alcove behind a bakery. I waited without even reaching for a Clayfield. I stayed still and silent until I heard my stalker make his way down the cobblestones.

  Pat. Pat, tap. Pat. Pat, tap.

  He came around the corner. Slowly. Not at all like a man in pursuit.

  Pat. Pat, tap.

  He had a cane in one hand. A pipe in the other.

  Pat. Pat, tap.

  He wore black over white and his face was hidden under a bowler hat.

  Tap.

  He stopped right at the end of the alley where I was hiding, looked one way, then the other. He sighed, and there was a hint of laughter in it.

  The light from the street barely touched him. He was only a silhouette. The outline of a character that would look at home on a liquor bottle or a packet of peanuts. Then, he reached inside his coat, pulled out a match, and put it in the end of his pipe.

  He puffed, and the fire gave me a momentary flash of his face.

  He appeared to be Human. Middle-aged with a thin mustache. His eyebrows, straight and severe, looked like they’d been slashed onto his face by a talented swordsman. There were bandages wrapped around his fingers and whenever the fire flared up, his mouth was always smiling.

  After he’d taken a few puffs, the stranger threw the match on the ground and walked away, humming in a croaky voice.

  I should have stopped him. I knew it, even then. But two worlds were trying to fit into my mind at once.

  The world I wanted to live in was the one where Rick Tippity had created an alias so that he could set off a fireball an inch from Lance Niles’s nose. That was the world Simms wanted to live in too. The one she paid good money for.

  But I’d stumbled into another world. One where a man in a black suit and bowler hat was walking around town. A man who perfectly fitted the description of Lance’s killer but looked nothing at all like Rick Tippity.

  I let him go, back into the shadows, humming some disturbingly familiar tune in time with his footsteps.

  Pat. Pat, tap.

  23

  The whole way uptown, I stayed in alleys looking for thinly mustached men in formal suits. Every tap against the cobblestones sounded like his cane. When I found Carissa’s doorstep, I knocked more urgently than I intended to.

  She came to the door in a black velvet dressing gown with a leopard-print collar.

  “Mr Phillips, are you all right? You look quite pale.”

  “Just jumping at shadows, Mrs Steeme. Can I come in?”

  “Of course. Head straight down to the end of the hall. I have the fire going. I swear these post-Coda winters get worse every year.”

  We went into the living room and I sat on the sofa while she turned a smoldering log in the fireplace.

  “I apologize for my appearance,” she said. “The cold leaks into my bones and makes me tired, so I usually go down with the sun.”

  “I’m sorry to intrude, Mrs Steeme, but the news is rather strange. I didn’t think it was a good idea for you to be alone when you found out.”

  “Very gallant of you.” She sat on the opposite sofa and tried not to look nervous.

  “I went down to the Sickle, just like you asked. I spoke to the Ogre you mentioned, and his information led me to the Rose. Are you familiar with that part of town?”

  “Only by reputation. But the same corner exists in every city, under one name or another. I know how it operates.”

  Despite the elderly lines on her face, Carissa Steeme was street-smart. I hoped that would make things easier.

  “I ended up at a new kind of card-house. One where you can get your gambling and your girls under the same roof. A good-time place where you only go if you’re happy to let money fall through your fingers. Did you and Harold put much money away, Mrs Steeme?”

  She breathed heavily. “Yes. We did.”

  “Have you checked your finances in the last few weeks?”

  Her eyes lowered, sad and embarrassed.

  “Just today, after seeing you. I should have done it when I first found out about the gambling but I suppose I didn’t want to accept what he’d done.”

  The fire coughed a spark onto the rug. She reached out and squashed it with her slipper.

  “Did you ever suspect he might be lying to you?” I asked.

  Her eyes shot back up.

  “Harold had his vices. As do we all. I wouldn’t have thought a man like you would be so quick to judge.”

  I tipped my head in apology and held up a hand.

  “I meant nothing by it. I just hope that you might have taken precautions. Put some money aside in a place he wasn’t aware of. I don’t want to know where it is, I just hope you might have had that foresight.”

  She took a gulp of water to push down the anger that was bubbling up.

  “Yes, I did. Not that I mistrusted him or suspected he would ever do anything wrong by me, but Harold was a complicated man. He had his troubles.”

  “Has,” I coughed, like the word was a bit of phlegm stuck in my throat.

  “Sorry?”

  “He has troubles, Mrs Steeme. Your husband is still alive.”

  She went backwards through all the stages of grief. After ten seconds, she looked like she’d wring the neck of any man who glanced at her and I wondered whether I should be running for the door.

  “You’re sure about this?” she asked.

  “Yes. I saw him.”

  “At this… whorehouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her glass smashed against the wall. I sent my eyes to the floor.

  “Apologies,” she said. “Give me a moment.”

  She got up and went into the other room. Ten minutes later, she came back with a couple of glasses and a bottle of whiskey. She poured us each a slug.

  “Does he know you saw him?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I kind of shot my mouth off.”

  “It’s fine.”

  I’d never seen anybody compose themselves as quickly as she did. She sat back and sipped her drink like it had all happened a hundred years ago. The whiskey was better than I’d had in a long time. I told her so.

  “It was Harold’s. He was saving it for something special.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have some more.”

  She laughed, and it was balanced as perfectly as the whiskey: just the right amount of darkness and light.

  “There’s something else,” I had to say.

  “Please, I don’t want to hear about any other women. This has been quite enough for one night.”

  “No. Not that. But it’s something kind of strange.”

  I told her about Harold’s face. How some doctor had stitched him up like an old jacket. Smoothed out the wrinkles to make him a strange new version of his old self. When I was done, she didn’t move. Her face was blank. She put down her glass, sat back, and was silent for a long time. Maybe a quarter of an hour.

  “I guess I should get out of your hair,” I said.

  Carissa lay down lengthways on the sofa and kicked her feet up over the side.

  “No need to rush off. I don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight. Stay if you like. Enjoy the whiskey.”

  So, I did. I topped her up and took off my boots and got comfortable while she told me about her life and her doomed marriage and the way things were before the world fell apart. We got wasted and she got flirty and we laughed to tears over things I can’t remember. I must have finally got drowsy because I opened my eyes to see her tucking a blanket
around my shoulders.

  “Did I fall asleep?”

  “It’s all right. You’ve had a big day, kid.”

  When she leaned over me her gown fell open. I kept my eyes up on hers. There was a whole world inside them, swimming in circles; memories and centuries and anger and shame and a whole other person who’d vanished from the mirror one night. Those eyes made me sad, so I closed mine, and her fingers brushed the side of my face before she went away.

  24

  I woke up on the sofa at the Steeme house. There was the stale taste of whiskey on my tongue and someone standing over me, mumbling angrily to themselves.

  I opened my eyes. The machine was on the floor, beside my boots. I’d taken it out during the night so I wouldn’t drunkenly blast a hole in myself.

  “Cheap and nasty piece of shit. It’s still my…”

  It was Harold, back home for the first time with his fresh new face. He was looking down at the coffee table and shaking his head. I reached under the blanket but couldn’t find my knife or my knuckles. They were still in my coat, somewhere on the floor. Harold kept muttering. He was still drunk. So was I.

  “… this is still my home.”

  Harold picked up the poker from the fireplace and brought it down on the empty whiskey bottle, shattering it into pieces just like his wife had done with the glass.

  I sat up and Harold must have only just seen me. He raised the poker and fixed his eyes on the top of my head.

  “I told you that this was none of your business.”

  He brought the iron down and I defended myself with my forearms. Harold’s muscles hadn’t been mended like his skin so the hit wasn’t so hard. I pulled the weapon from his fingers and threw it across the room.

  “I was just doing my job, old man. No hard feelings.”

  I stood up. Harold stepped back.

  “Get out of my house.”

  “Sorry, Harold. I only take my orders from the lady.”

  The top of the bottle was still on the table and Harold snatched it up. He held it by the neck with the jagged edge pointed in my direction. I wasn’t confident I could take it from him without opening a vein. My eyes fell to the machine. So did his.