Bitter Gold Hearts gf-2

by Glen Cook

  I nodded. No point slowing her down.

  "So a few months ago she was called to the Cantard because the course of the war seemed to be swinging our way and it was time to put on all the pressure we could. She left me to manage the household, as she has done a dozen times, and especially charged me with riding herd on her family, all of whom had been showing an increasing tendency toward getting involved in scandals."

  "The two Karls, you mean? They're the ones the rumor mill loved. I never heard of the daughter till the other day."

  "She was blind, the Stormwarden. Those girls were the ones who were deserving. Though Amber had begun to show signs of getting wild, just for the attention."

  I nodded as my contribution.

  She took a deep breath. "Since she's been gone this time, it's been like I've been under a curse. Father and son were determined to circumvent me at every turn. Then that kidnapping business had to come. I had to deplete the family treasury severely, selling silver at a discount, to get that much gold together. It was a disaster, but for a cause the Stormwarden could respect once her temper cooled. I might even have survived Amiranda's having taken flight during the confusion. The girl was restless for some time before she took off. The Stormwarden herself had remarked that it was coming. But putting out two hundred thousand marks gold to ransom Karl, only to have him take his own life, that's insupportable."

  Was I supposed to know about Junior or not? Instinct told me to play it cautious. "Did you say that Karl killed himself?"

  "This morning. He slashed his wrists and bled to death in a hole of a room in Fishwife's Close."

  "Why the hell would he do that?"

  "I don't know, Mr. Garrett. And to be perfectly frank, at this point I can't much care. He destroyed me by doing it. Maybe that was his motive. He was a strange boy and he hated me. But Karl isn't the reason I came here. I'm doomed when the Stormwarden returns, which she will very shortly. However, my pride—badly mauled but not yet dead—insists I go on, trying to salvage what I can on her behalf. Amber fled the house this morning. This is where you come in."

  I told my face to look interested.

  "Amiranda and Amber are at large and therefore at risk. If I can salvage that much for the Stormwarden, I will. I'm going to try. I have gone into my own funds to do so. I want you to find those girls. If you can."

  She plomped a sack down in front of me.

  "One hundred marks gold, to retain you. I'll pay a fee of one thousand marks gold each if you can return either of those girls before the Stormwarden comes home."

  "Your man Slauce can't handle—"

  "Courter Slauce is an incompetent imbecile. This morning I sent him after Amber. He turned up just before I left to come here, too drunk to recall where he'd been or what he'd been doing. I console myself with the certainty that he'll starve to death after the Stormwarden chucks the lot of us into the street. Will you look for my missing girls, Mr. Garrett?"

  "Give me a few minutes to think." I had to smooth out some dents in my ethics and reach an accommodation with my conscience. I considered myself to be working for three clients already: myself, Saucerhead, and Amher. Though Amber wasn't getting the first-class production. And nobody was paying me. Willa Dount would be paying, though she wouldn't be getting her money's worth. Still, an experiment had occurred to me.

  "Suppose I had a notion where I could find one of the girls right now?"

  "Do you?"

  "Take it as a supposition. How can I be certain I'd get my fee?"

  She levered herself out of her chair, straining like a woman decades older. "I came prepared for that possibility." What might have been a smile tickled the corner of her mouth. She started digging sacks out of her clothing. In a minute there was a line of ten before me, each a twin of the one offered me as a retainer. I checked the contents of one at random.

  It was good. Eleven hundred marks gold. More than I'd ever had a chance at before. With prospects for another thousand, which I could collect easily. Certainly a temptation to test the dark side of a man's soul. We all look for the big hit—hope for it, talk about it—but I don't believe we think about it. Not seriously. Because when it's suddenly there, a lot of thinking has to be done. Amiranda was dead. And what was Amber to me? Morley always says the supply of women is inexhaustible. And who would I have to explain to or make excuses to?

  Just to myself. With maybe the Dead Man smirking over my shoulder. Still, there was the possibility of a useful experiment. I rose and collected the gold in one big bear hug.

  "Come with me."

  Dean had turned down the lamps in the Dead Man's room. I don't know why he thinks that makes any difference. The Dead Man doesn't care about light one way or the other. When he wants to sleep, he'll sleep through sun, lightning, or earthquake. I hired me down and deposited the take beside his chair.

  Domina Dount asked, "Are you going to deliver something or not, Mr. Garrett?"

  "Turn around."

  For a moment she was human. She let out a little squeak and raised her hands to her cheeks. But she asserted control, taking a full minute to get the parts into the desired order. Then she murmured, "Will the disasters never end?"

  She faced me. "I presume you can explain?"

  "Explain what?"

  She took ten seconds, eyes closed.

  I prodded. "You engaged me to find and deliver to you, if possible, Amber daPena and Amiranda Crest. I've done half the job already."

  She stared at me and hated me through narrowed eyelids. Her voice remained neutral, though, as she remarked, "I had hoped that you would deliver them in better health. She is dead? Not in a trance or ensorcelled?"

  "Yes. Amiranda has been in poor health for some time now."

  "Your attempts at wit become tiresome, Garrett. I suppose I can assume that you weren't the agent of death. I want to know the who, what, when, where, why, and how."

  So did I.

  My experiment had flopped. Domina Dount wasn't about to be flustered into giving anything away. If there was anything in her that I didn't already have.

  "Well?" she demanded.

  Why not? I might still shake something loose. "The day you were supposed to make the ransom payoff, Amiranda hired a friend of mine as her bodyguard. That night he accompanied her into the countryside north of TunFaire. She took several travel cases with her. She went to a crossroad near Lichfield, where she stopped. My friend thought she expected to meet somebody there and that he was supposed to have been dismissed when that somebody showed."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. He, she, or it never came. A band of ogre breeds did instead. My friend killed some of them but he couldn't drive them off or keep them from killing Amiranda. He couldn't even save himself, though the ogres thought he was dead enough to throw into the bushes with Amiranda and the other casualties. When they scattered to keep from being seen by travelers, my friend found the strength to pick Amiranda up and carry her three miles to someone he knew who, he hoped, could save her."

  "To no avail."

  "Of course. My friend isn't very smart. He'd failed. He was outraged and his pride was hurt. Somehow, he got back to Tunfaire, as far as the Bledsoe Infirmary, where I got his story in the deathwatch ward."

  Willa Dount frowned, uncertain why I'd told her what I had. "You've left something out, haven't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because you don't need to know. Because no one needs to know except my friend's friends—some of them are the kind of guys who eat ogres for breakfast—who figure there's some balancing due for what got done."

  You couldn't crack Willa Dount with a hammer. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "That's why you've been digging around and poking your nose in."

  "Yes."

  "The Stormwarden resents people who pry into her family's affairs."

  "I'll bet she resents people killing her kids even more." Me and my big damned mouth! I'd blown a potful for free there. But she didn't seem
to notice.

  "Maybe. But those who stick their noses in often become victims of deteriorating health."

  I chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind. I'm sure my friend's friends will, too. They might even be so disturbed they'll give the problem enough attention to handle it before she gets home."

  I'd abandoned the tactic of experimentation for the strategy of increasing the pressure on Willa Dount. Not that I had her fixed for anything, but she knew things I wanted to know. Maybe she would tell me some to get the heat off.

  "How about you tell me the how, where, and when of the ransom payment?"

  Domina Dount smiled a thin smile. "No, Mr. Garrett." She thought she was covered. If she had any need.

  I shrugged. "So be it. Do you need a way to transport the body? I could send my man—"

  "I came in a coach. That will do. I'll send my men in to get it."

  "No you won't. You have the coach brought. I'll carry it out." She smiled again. "Very well."

  As I looked away from the coach, Domina Dount told me, "You will try to deliver Amber in better condition, won't you?"

  I took a count of five, letting my irritation with her confidence in the power of her gold cool out. I kept reminding myself that it was just business. "I'll do my damnedest."

  She climbed into her coach smiling, sure she'd taken the round by getting to me more than I'd gotten to her. I wasn't so sure she was wrong.

  I went inside to see what the Dead Man thought of her.

  The fat dead son of a bitch had slept through the whole damned thing.

  ______XXX______

  I finished a long, cold one and wiped my lips. "I feel like killing the keg, but the night has only just begun. Tell Miss daPena the Domina has gone, but if she has the least sense and regard for her life, she won't even peek out a window. We may have reached a stage where people are cleaning up loose ends, real and imagined. I'm going to see Mr. Dotes. I'll slide out the back in case somebody is watching. You lock up tight. Don't answer the door unless you look first and see that it's me."

  Dean scowled, but he'd been around long enough to have seen tight times before. He got out a meat cleaver and his favorite butcher knife, both sharp enough to take your leg off without you noticing. "Go on," he said. "I'll manage."

  I went out thinking that someday I'd come home and find the house littered with dismembered burglars. Dean was the sort who would handle an invasion neither calmly nor with the minimum necessary force. Bruno and Courter Slauce were lucky that he'd been surprised and unarmed.

  I didn't realize that I'd collected a tail until I was three-quarters of the way to Morley's place. It wasn't that I hadn't checked for one; he was that good. He was so good, in fact, that half a minute after I'd made him he knew it and didn't walk into either of the setups I laid to get a look at him.

  I might as well have had a signed confession. There are only three guys in TunFaire that good. Morley Dotes and I are two of them and Morley had no reason to skulk around behind me.

  The other guy's name is Pokey Pigotta and he might even be better than we are. I've heard him accused of being half ghost.

  Pokey is in the same line as me. Had Domina Dount hired him to keep an eye on her hired hand?

  That seemed unlikely.

  Who, then?

  By then Pokey would have realized that I'd read his signature. He'd start trying to outguess me.

  I resisted my impulse to play that game and call for him to join me. Silliness. Pokey Pigotta had conservative views of what constituted his obligations to a client.

  To hell with it, I figured. I headed for Morley's Place.

  I went in the front door and straight around the bar. The surprised night barman just gawked as I shoved through the door to the kitchen. The rutabaga butchers stopped work and stared. I strolled through like a royal prince assessing the provincials. "Very good, my man. Very good. You. Let's have a little more thought to portion control. That what-ever-it-is is sliced too thick."

  I made it to the storeroom before the peasants rose and lynched me. The storeroom led me directly to the back door, which I used. I did a quick sprint down the alley and up the side lane to the corner in time to watch the front door swing shut behind Pokey.

  Good.

  He had decided that since I wasn't going to play games, he wasn't going to either. He'd just trudge after me, not bothering to sneak. And that might suit his client fine, since it would inhibit my more surreptitious ventures.

  I watched the door close and grinned, recapturing a view of the customers as I trotted through. It couldn't have been choreographed more beautifully.

  "Suckered you, Pokey," I murmured, and ran for the door. He had scanned the lay and turned to leave. He was a tall guy, without much meat on him—all bones and angles and skin so pale you'd have thought the breed half of him was vampire. He tended to make strangers very nervous.

  "Sucked you in this time, Pokey." I peeked over his shoulder.

  Saucerhead Tharpe was up and coming, hiding his infirmities well. I had no idea what the hell he was doing there but I was glad to see him.

  Pokey shrugged. "I blew one."

  "What you up to, Pokey?"

  "You say something, Garrett? I been having trouble with my ears."

  Saucerhead arrived. "What's up, Garrett?" Every eye in the place was on our get-together.

  "Me and Pokey was just headed up to see Morley. I finally got a lead on those fellows you had the run-in with the other day. You're welcome to sit in." I gestured. Pokey surrendered to the inevitable, comfortably certain that I wanted nothing from him badly enough to make an enemy. I would have seen it the same if our roles had been reversed.

  I followed Pokey. Saucerhead followed me. All eyes followed us up the stairs. Morley, of course, was expecting us.

  "So what do you want to do with him?" Morley asked.

  "Since he won't want to say why he's dogging me or who's paying him, I don't know whether to let him tag along or not. So, better safe than sorry. He's got to go into storage."

  "How long?"

  "A day, maybe."

  "Pokey?"

  "Sitting or following, it all pays the same."

  Morley thought for half a minute, then told one of his boys, "Blood, you want to politely collect Mr. Pigotta's effects and put them on the table here?"

  Pokey endured it. I knew how he felt. I'd been through it several times myself.

  Morley stirred through the take, which included a lot of silver. He examined one piece. "Temple coinage."

  I took one. Private mintage, all right. The same as the tenth mark I found on that farm.

  "Tell you something?" Morley asked.

  "Yeah. Who he isn't working for." Domina Dount never had anything but gold.

  So who?

  "Put him away," I told Morley. "There's things to talk about and decide and maybe do, and it's late already."

  "Blood. The root cellar. Gently and politely. Consider him a guest under restraint."

  "Yes, Mr. Dotes."

  _____XXXI ______

  Morley removed his troops from the room. With just two witnesses Saucerhead relaxed and betrayed how uncomfortable he really was. I spent a minute or two telling him what a dope he was. He didn't argue. He didn't go home to bed, either. Morley told me, "Only thing my boys have told me that you probably don't know is that Junior daPena's body got taken to the crematorium by the Dount woman on her way over to your place. I assume you know he did himself in?"

  "I know. Only he didn't kill himself. He had a lot of help from his friends."

  "You have that gleam in your eye, Garrett. Does that mean you know who did it?"

  "Yep. And one of them was an ogre breed named Skredli, and it just happened that a Skredli was involved in Junior's so-called kidnapping—and most likely in the attack on Saucerhead and Amiranda. And this Skredli runs with a character named Gorgeous, who sounds like he's some double-ugly... What's up, Morley?"

  "Gorgeous? You did say Gorgeous?"

/>   "Yeah. You know him?"

  "Not personally. I know of him."

  "I don't like that look in your eye."

  "Then look at the wall or something while you tell us about it."

  While I talked, Saucerhead sat nodding to himself. I pretty much opened the bag and dumped it. Morley got out paper and pen and ink and started doodling. When I closed the sack up, Morley said, "The Donni Pell trick is like the hub of a wheel. You have connections between her and everyone but the Dount woman. You can't tell about the Crest woman, but you can assume she knew who Donni was since she was good friends with Junior. This Donni is the key. Let's see if we can't lay hands on her."

  I exchanged looks with Saucerhead. "The man is a genius, isn't he? Think he's figured out that she's the next one who'll come floating belly up? If the hard boys are nervous enough to cut the son of Raver Styx ..."

  Morley said, "I think the next casualty will be a guy called Gorgeous. Though maybe I'm wrong." He still had that look.

  "Why?" Saucerhead asked. Always direct, friend Waldo.

  "Tell me about Gorgeous. I've never heard of him."

  "You ought to keep up better, Garrett. He's important."

  "I'm trying. If you'll get to it."

  "Sure. He hasn't been around long. His real name is Conrad Staley. He came from HasefBro after the kingpin checked out, figuring it was a good time to cut himself a piece of the big city. He's human but he's so damned mean and ugly he ranks with ogres. He brought his own gang to start but I hear most have gone back since he's found local recruits. Keeping the old base secure.

  There was a hot feud for a while with Chodo Contague but they sorted it out. Gorgeous got Ogre Town. He pays a percentage to keep it in peace. Chodo doesn't want a war because he's having trouble keeping his own people in line."