Dread Brass Shadows (2 page)

Saucerhead shoved him under, brought him up a half second before he sucked in a gallon. “So tell us about it, little man. How come you stuck the girl?”

He would have answered if he could. He wanted to answer. But he was too busy trying to breathe. Saucerhead shoved him under again.

He came up, swallowed an acre of air, gasped, “The book!” He gobbled some more air—and that was the last breath he drew.

“What book?” I snapped.

A crossbow bolt hit the guy in the throat. Another thunked into the trough, and a third put a hole through Saucerhead’s sleeve. Tharpe came over the trough in one bound and landed smack on top of me. A couple, three more bolts whizzed past.

Tharpe didn’t bother making me comfortable. He did stick his head up for a second. “When I roll off, you go for that door.” We were about eight feet from the doorway to a tavern. Right then, that looked like a mile. I groaned, the only sound I could make with all that meat on top.

Saucerhead roiled off. I scrambled. I never really got myself upright. I just sort of got my hands and feet under me and made that door in one long dive, dog-paddling. Saucerhead was right behind me. Crossbows twanged. Bolts thunked into the door. “Boy!” I said. “Those guys are in big trouble.” Crossbows are illegal inside the city wall.

“What the hell?” I gasped as we shoved the door shut. “What in the hell?” I dived over to a window, peeked through a crack in a shutter still closed against winter.

The street had cleared as though a god had swept a broom along it, excepting a mixed bag of six nasties with crossbows. They spread out, weapons aimed our way. Two came forward.

Saucerhead took a peek. Behind us the barkeep went into a “Here, now! I won’t have trouble in my place! You boys clear out!” routine.

Saucerhead said, “Three dwarfs, an ogre, a ratman, and a human. Unusual mix.”

“Odd, yes.” I turned. “You got trouble already, Pop. You want it out of here, lend a hand. What you got under the bar to keep the peace?” I wasn’t carrying anything. Who needs an arsenal to lumber around the block? Tharpe didn’t carry, usually. He counted on his strength and wit. Which maybe made him an unarmed man twice over.

“You don’t get going you’re going to find out.”

“Trouble’s the farthest thing from my mind, Pop. I don’t need any. But tell that to those guys outside. They already killed somebody in your watering trough.”

I peeked again. The two had pulled the mustache Out of the water. They looked him over. They finally figured it out, dropped him, eyeballed the tavern like they were thinking about coming inside.

Saucerhead borrowed a table from a couple of old boys puffing pipes and nursing mugs that would last them till nightfall. He just politely asked them to raise their mugs, picked the table up, and ripped a leg off. He tossed me that, got himself another, turned what was left into a shield. When those two arrived, he bashed the dwarf’s head in, then mashed the ogre against the door-frame with the table while I tickled his noggin with a rim shot.

One of their crossbows didn’t get broken. I grabbed it, put the bolt back in. popped out the door, and ripped off a one-handed shot at the nearest target I missed and pinked a dwarf ninety feet away. He yelped. His pals headed for the high country.

Saucerhead grumbled, “You couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a ten-foot pole if you was inside the barn.” While I tried to figure that out, he grabbed the ogre, who was as big as he was, and tried to shake him awake. It didn’t work. Not much of a necromancer, my buddy Saucerhead.

He didn’t try the dwarf That guy had gotten pounded down a foot shorter than he started out. So Tharpe just stood there shaking his head and looking baffled. I thought that was such a good idea I did it, too. And all the while, that old bartender was howling about damages while his clientele tried to dig holes in the floor to hide in

“Now what?” Saucerhead asked.

“I don’t know.” I peeked outside.

“They gone?”

“Looks like. People are starting to come out.” A sure sign the excitement was over They would come count the bodies and lie to each other about how they saw the whole thing, and by the time any authority arrived—if it ever did—the story’s only resemblance to fact would be that somebody got dead

“Let’s go ask Tinnie.”

Sounded like a stroke of genius to me.

3

Tinnie Tate wasn’t some mousy little homemaker for whom the height of adventure was the day’s trip to market. But she Wasn’t the kind of gal who got messed up with guys who stick knives in people and run in packs shooting crossbow volleys at citizens, either. She lived with her Uncle Willard. Willard Tate was a shoemaker. Shoemakers don’t make the kinds of enemies who poop people. A shoe doesn’t fit, they bitch and moan and ask for their money back, they don’t call out the hard boys.

I thought about it as I trotted. It didn’t make sense. The Dead Man says when it doesn’t make sense, you don’t have all the pieces or you’re trying to put them together wrong. I kept telling me, wait till we see what Tinnie has to say. I refused to face the chance that Tinnie might not be able.

We had a curious and rocky relationship, Tinnie and me. Sort of can’t live with and can’t live without. We fought a lot. Though it hadn’t been going anywhere, the relationship was important to me. I guess what kept it going was the making up. It was making up that was two hundred proof and hotter than boiling steel.

Before I got to the house, I knew it wouldn’t matter what Tinnie had done, wouldn’t matter what she’d been into, whoever hurt her would pay with interest that would make a loan shark blush.

Old Dean had the house forted up. He wouldn’t have answered the door if the Dead Man hadn’t been awake. He was, for sure. I felt his touch while I was pounding on the door and hollering like a Charismatic priest on a holy roll.

Dean opened the door. He looked ten years older and all worn out. I was down the hall pushing into the Dead Man’s room before he finished bolting the door behind Saucerhead.

Garrett!

The Dead Man’s mind touch was a blow. It was an icewater shower, It stopped me in my tracks. I wanted to scream. That could only mean.

She was there on the floor. I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I looked at the Dead Man, all four hundred fifty pounds of him, sitting in the chair where he’d been since somebody stuck a knife in him four hundred years ago. Except for a ten-inch, elephantlike schnoz he could have passed for the world’s fattest human, but he was Loghyr, one of a race so rare nobody has seen a live one in my lifetime. And that’s fine by me. The dead, immobile ones are aggravation enough.

See, if you kill a Loghyr, he doesn’t just go away. You don’t get him out of your hair that easy. He just stops breathing and gives up dancing. His spirit stays at home and gets crankier and crankier. He doesn’t decay. At least mine hasn’t in the few years I’ve known him, though he’s a little ragged around the edges where the moths and mice and whatnot nibble on him while he naps and there’s no one around to shoo them away.

Do not act the fool, Garrett. For once in our acquaintance astound me by pausing to reflect before you leap.

That’s the way he is. Usually more so. My tenant and sometime partner, sometime mentor. Despite his control I croaked, “Talk to me, Chuckles. Tell me what it’s all about.”

Calm yourself Passion enslaves reason. The wise man . . .

Yeah. He does go on like that, hokey philosopher that he is. Only not in the really grim times . . . I began to suspect something.

Once you get used to a particular Loghyr, you can read more than words when he thinks into your head. He was angry about what had happened but not nearly so outraged and vengeance hungry as he should have been. I began to control myself.

“I did it again, eh?”

You get more exercise jumping to conclusions than you do running.

“She’s going to be all right?”

Her chances seem good. She will need the attention of a skilled surgeon, though. I have put her into a deep sleep till such time as one becomes available.

“Thanks. So tell me what you got from her.”

She had no idea what it was about. She was involved in nothing. She did not know the man who wielded the knife
. He left out his usual stock of sarcastic comments when he added,
She was just coming to see you. She went to sleep completely bewildered.

He loosened his hold on me, let me settle into the big chair that’s there for me when I visit.

Till you lumbered in with your recollections, I assumed it was random violence.
Meaning he had sorted through my memories of the chase.

Saucerhead joined us. He leaned on the back of my chair, stared at Tinnie. He jumped to the same conclusion I had. I admired his self-control. He liked Tinnie and had a special place in his heart for guys who wasted women. He’d lost one once, that he’d been hired to protect. No fault of his own. He’d wiped out half a platoon of assassins and had gotten ninety percent killed himself trying to save her. He hadn’t been the same since.

I told him, “Smiley over there put her to sleep. She’ll be all right, he thinks.”

“Sons of bitches must pay anyway,” he growled, hanging on to the tough, but he looked relieved all over. I pretended I didn’t see his show of “weakness.”

The book?
the Dead Man asked.
That is all you got before the sniping started?
Like it was my fault. Some sniping was about to get started here. He knew damned well that was all we’d gotten. He’d sifted our minds.

“That’s all.” Play it straight. That was my new tactic. It drove him crazy when I didn’t fight back.

There was nothing in her thoughts about a book.

“Ain’t much to go on,” Saucerhead said. He had lost his mad urgency. Tinnie was going to be all right. He didn’t have to go out and lay waste. Not right away, anyway. He—and I—would keep an eye out for the characters responsible, though.

No. I suggest you both calm yourselves, then recall those blackguards carefully. Any insignificant detail might be consequential. Garrett, if you feel this is of great importance, you might consider collecting the debt that Chodo Contague imagines he owes you.

A reflection of my thoughts, that. “I will if I have to. Too soon to think about that. I need to see Tinnie taken care of and get my mind straightened out before I go off on any crusade.” That was a straight line of the sort he scarfs up usually, but this time he let it slide. “Something happens and she goes, I’ll ring in Chodo like that. . . .” I snapped my fingers. I’m a fountain of talent.

Chodo Contague, often called the kingpin, is the grand master of organized crime in TunFaire. In some ways he’s more powerful than the King. He’s no friend. He’s damned near the embodiment of everything I hate, the kind of creep I got into my line to pull down. But just by doing my job I’ve managed to do him some accidental favors. He has an obsessive, if skewed, sense of honor. The slimeball thinks he owes me, and I’ll be damned if he won’t do almost anything to pay the debt. If I wanted, I could say the word and he’d put two thousand thugs on the street to make us square.

I’ve avoided collecting because I don’t want my name associated with his. Not in any way. Be bad for business if people suspected I was on his pad.

Hell. I haven’t really said what I do I’m what the guys who don’t like me call a peeper. An investigator and confidential agent, the way I put it. Pay me—up front—and I’ll find out things. More often than not, things you didn’t really want to know. I don’t dig up much good news. That’s the nature of the racket.

On the confidential-agent side I’ll do a stand-in, like pay off a kidnapper or blackmailer for you, and make sure there’s no last-second comedy. I’ve worked hard to build a rep as a straight arrow, a guy who plays square, who comes down like the proverbial ton if you mess with my client. Which is why I wouldn’t want anybody to think I’d roll over for Chodo.

If Tinnie died, I’d change my rules. For Tinnie it would be dead ahead full speed, and whoever got in my way had best have his gods paid off because I wouldn’t slow down till I ate somebody’s liver. If Tinnie died.

The Dead Man said she ought to pull through. I hoped he was right. This once. Usually I hope he’s wrong because he’s damned near infallible and works hard reminding me of that.

Dean came in with a tray, beer, and stronger spirits if we needed them. Saucerhead took a beer. So did I. “That’s good. That hits the spot after all that running.”

The Dead Man sent,
I suggest you go see her uncle. Inform him what has happened and find out about arrangements. Perhaps he can give you a clue.

Yeah. He had to bring it up. I’d been wondering about who was going to tell the family. There had to be somebody I could stick with that little chore.

The candidates constitute a horde of one, Garrett.

He figured that out all by himself. He is a genius. A certified—and certifiable—genius. Just ask him. He’ll tell you about it for hours.

Any other time I would have given him a ration of lip. This time the specter of Willard Tate got in the way. “All right. I’m on my way.”

“Me too,” Saucerhead said. “There’s some things I want to check out.”

Excellent. Excellent. Now everything is under control I can catch up on my sleep.

Catch up. Right. In all the years I’ve known him his waking time hasn’t added up to six months.

I let Saucerhead out the front door. Then I headed for the kitchen, got Dean to draw me another of those wonderful beers. “Have to replace everything I sweated out.”

He scowled. He has some strong opinions about the way I live. Though he’s an employee, I let him

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speak his mind. We have an understanding. He talks, I don’t listen. Keeps us both happy.

I hit the street without much enthusiasm. Old Man Tate and I aren’t bosom buddies. I did a job for him once, and for a while afterward he’d thought well of me, but a year of me playing push-me pull-you with Tinnie had somehow soured his outlook.