Angry Lead Skies (18 page)

He had, hadn’t he?

Singe suddenly bustled in with a tray of food and drinks suitable for a party of ten. She offered me one of her forced smiles. “Dean is teaching me how to prepare meals.”

“Tell him he has to let up on the spices a little when he’s working with you. You have a delicate and precious nose.”

“And hello to you, too, Mr. Garrett. How was your day?”

“Evidently sarcasm is on the training schedule, too. My day was pretty much like every working day. I walked a couple thousand miles. I interviewed a lot of people who were either crazy or born-again liars. Tomorrow I’ll round up some of them and go check out something that might sort out the liars from the loons.”

“I will go with you.”

I barely got my mouth open.

She will go with you.

“Well, that’s nice of you. I hope Reliance isn’t in too black a mood when he catches us.”

“I do not fear Reliance. Reliance fears me.” Singe spoke around a mouthful of roll. The already-depleted state of the tray she’d brought warned me that I’d better grab fast if I wanted my share.

What she said was at least half-true. Getting Pular Singe back must, by now, be as much a fear of consequences matter as it was a bruised ego thing for Reliance. Strongmen, and even strongrats, have to keep on demonstrating their strength. The moment they show a hint of weakness some younger, hungrier strongarm is going to reach up and pull them down.

I glanced at Singe — she waved a fried chicken wing and nodded to let me know it was some good eating — then at the Dead Man. Old Bones wasn’t sending it out but I could sense that he was entertained. He knew I was eager to run off and find Katie. I’d been rehearsing my most abject excuses and humble apologies all day long. I wanted to get cleaned up and get going, to take my personal life back.

I wondered how much Singe knew. I wondered if Dean’s sudden interest in Singe might not be anything but another triumph of the old man’s basic decency. He didn’t approve of Katie, though you’d never guess it from overhearing one of their conversations. Katie was too much like me. And I’ve mentioned his attitude toward my approach to life.

Ain’t none of us going to get out of it alive so we might as well get all the enjoyment out of it we can while we’ve got it.

I said, “I need to get cleaned up.”

First you need to let Mr. Big into the house. He is becoming impatient. I believe he is hungry. In any event, he is about to denounce your taste for
 —

“I’m on my way.” That damned wonder buzzard was invincible.

Somebody, once upon a time, said you surround yourself with the friends that you deserve. I need to take some time to lean back and think about that.

31

Katie’s dad wouldn’t let me in. Katie was home but he refused to tell her I wanted to see her. He didn’t like anyone male, liked anyone interested in his daughter even less, and me least of all. I’ve never been real good on any musical instrument so I couldn’t get her attention with a serenade. Grumping, I stood around in the street wondering, “What now?” I could wander over to the Tate compound and see if Tinnie was talking to me this week. I could try a couple of other young and incredibly attractive women of my acquaintance, though it was getting late of a workday evening to be turning up on anybody’s doorstep. Or I could go somewhere and hang out with other guys like me — dateless and not wanting to stay home — and pay five times retail price per mug of Weider beer not bought at home by the keg.

Laziness and a long lack of the companionship of men who remembered drew me toward Grubb Gruber’s Leatherneck Heaven. Which is as fat a misnomer as the one that used to hang on Morley’s place back when he called it The Joy House. Grubb’s joint isn’t exactly a pit of despair where lost souls go to drink in solitude, perhaps in search of oblivion, certainly nurturing a sad pretense that camaraderie might break out at any moment. But you don’t hear a whole lot of laughter in there. As the evening progresses the reminiscing turns inward, private, and maudlin, to memories that as individuals we cannot easily share. And I’m always surprised when there isn’t any of the whimpering and screaming that had so often come around in the darkest hours of the night, down in the killing zone.

When those memories come, and somebody in Gruber’s place starts wrestling with them, somebody else will hoist a mug and summon a ghost. “Banner-sergeant Hamond Barbidon, the meanest mortarforker what ever...”

And the cups will rise up. And ten thousand ghosts will rise with them.

“Corporal Savlind Knaab.”

“Lance Fanta Pantaza.”

“Andro Pat.”

“Jellybelly Ibles.”

“Mags Cooper.”

And each name will remind somebody of another. “Cooper Away, the best damned platoon sergeant in the Corps.”

Plenty of men would be prepared to dispute that because everybody remembered a particular sergeant who brought him along. The sergeants are the backbone of the Corps. And if you lived very long out there you grew up to become one.

Chances are you never heard of any of the toastees because they’d fallen in different places and different times. But they were Corps, so you honored them. You remembered them and you wanted to weep because those people out there in the street didn’t know, didn’t have any idea, and already, just months after the long war’s end, were beginning not to care.

Sometimes it isn’t that difficult to understand why the really ugly, militant, racist veterans’ organizations have so much appeal for men who survived the Cantard.

Nobody who wasn’t down there will ever really understand. Not even those who shook our hands when we left. Not even those who welcomed us back with mighty hugs and no conception whatsoever what it was like to sit there watching the life bleed out of a man whose throat you’d cut so you could go on, undetected, to murder some other poor boy whose bad luck had placed him in your path at the wrongest time possible in the entire history of the human species. So that someday, somewhere far away, some woman would cry because she no longer had a son.

I decided that what I wanted was to spend an evening at Grubb Gruber’s place. But, apparently, I never arrived.

32

Eventually a moment came when I was rational enough to realize where it was that I was regaining consciousness. Guess who was looking down at me with an unhappy glint in his eye? I croaked, “We godda sta dis romance, Morley. Wha da my doin’ here?”

“I’ve been hoping you could explain that to me, friend. The evening is just getting started. I’ve got some swanks from the high ground down here slumming, carpeting the floors with silver. Then you burst in, obviously not part of the entertainment. You’re all torn up. You have blood all over you. You have a snarling ratman hanging on your back. You crash through three tables before you collapse. Five minutes later I’m standing here watching you leak all over a Molnar rug because all my customers have abandoned me and I don’t have anything else to do.”

I tried to get up. My body wouldn’t respond. I’d used up my reserves talking, evidently.

Morley looked up as his man Puddle entered my field of vision. Puddle was about eighty pounds overweight and appeared to be about as out of shape as a man could be and still stay upright. He had a lot of miles on him, too. But looks are deceiving. He was strong. He was hard and he was tough and he had a lot more stamina than was credible for a man his size. He was dressed as a cook. He needed a shave.

“Need to shave, Puddle,” I crooned.

I thought about going back to sleep. But I thought I probably ought to hear what Puddle had to say first.

Morley asked, “What did you find?”

“A long trail, a broken ratman and puddles a blood, boss. Da skink was a reglur one-man army.”

“Corps,” I said, not loud enough to be heard.

“And the ones who were after him when he staggered in here?”

“Split. Hauled ass out’n here da second we come out a da door.”

“Reliance’s gang, you think?”

“Not sure, boss. But dis’s his part a rat city.” TunFaire can be considered as many cities which occupy the same site. In some cases this fact is acknowledged publicly but in most the pretense is strongly in the other direction.

“No matter. We’ll get the real story when Sleeping Beauty over there wakes up.”

I managed to roll my head a short way. A ratman in worse shape than I found myself was sort of strewn around the floor ten feet closer to the front door, being stepped over and around by people cleaning up the mess.

Morley said, “Sarge, come give Puddle a hand. Get Garrett sitting up in a chair. Then we’ll find out what happened.”

Good. Good. Because I really wanted to know.

A second very large man, who could’ve passed as Puddle’s tattooed big brother, appeared beside Puddle. Straining for breath, both men bent toward me. Each grabbed a hand. Up I floated. I tried to say something. What crawled out of my mouth didn’t make sense even to me.

They dropped me into a comfortable chair. At least, it was comfortable under the circumstances. I wasn’t yet quite certain what the circumstances were.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been on the losing side in a major brawl.

Morley said, “Somebody bring the medical box.” The existence of which I noted. A fact that would weigh in on the other side the next time my good friend insisted he was completely out of his former underworld life. Which he might want me to believe because he thought I was thick with Colonel Block and Deal Relway. “Sarge, start checking him out.”

Sarge is Sarge for the obvious and traditional reason. And, some think, for his tattoos, which let the whole world know that here’s a man who made something of himself in the army. Here’s a man who was tough enough and ferocious enough to have survived years of leading men in the witch’s cauldron that was in the Cantard.

What that name and tattoos don’t tell is what kind of soldier Sarge was.

Not many know, Sarge never brags. He doesn’t look the type. But if he wanted he could stay drunk the rest of his life on drinks bought for him by other guys who’d been to and come back from the land beyond the far walls of Hell.

Sarge was a field medic down there. Which means he spent more time with his neck under the blade than did most of us.
And
during most of that time he couldn’t have enjoyed the luxury of fighting back against the Venageti trying to kill him because he was too damned busy trying to do something to salvage something from amongst an overabundance of freshly mutilated bodies.

I tried to tell Sarge he was all right for a groundpounder. Almost an honorary Marine. Maybe he understood some of what I was trying to say because a sudden, horrible pain shot from my neck down my spine, through my hips and into my legs, all the way to my toenails. I believe I squealed in protest.

“He’s been worked over real good,” Sarge said. “But not by nobody who was able ta do whatever he wanted. What he’s got is da kin’ a wounds and bruises ya see when a whole bunch a clumsy guys gang up on somebody what’s fightin’ back.”

So I put up a fight. Good for me.

If I’d been worked over like a plowed field, then how come I didn’t ache in places I didn’t even know I had?

“Anything broken?” Morley asked.

“Nah. He’ll heal.”

“Damn!” Puddle observed. “An’ here I was tinking we could finally grab us a break, assuming we could a caught dis ole boy... Oh, my stars! Da man his own self is awake.”

Puddle is full of it. I consider him a friend even though he’s always saying things like that. Because he doesn’t just say them about me. You could get the idea that he wants to drown Morley and Sarge. In fact, he’s always rooting for everybody to get out of his life and leave it a whole lot less complicated.

Morley leaned closer. “So what was it, Garrett? To what do I owe the pleasure of your presence this time?”

I croaked, “I don’ know. Can’ remember. Goin’ to Katie’s.”

Morley gave me a dark, unforgiving look. He’ll never forgive me for having found Katie first. Her impact on him is just as ferocious as it is on me. Which is hard to believe, considering how I start drooling and stammering whenever she comes around me and how much more practiced and slick Morley is when dealing with the obstinate sex.

“Maybe you got there.”

Puddle got it and laughed his goofy laugh. Sarge asked, “Den how come dem ratmen was all over him when —” Puddle nudged him with an elbow, hard enough to loosen a lever or two somewhere inside his bean-size brain. “Oh. He caught da wildcat. Dat’s pretty funny, boss.”

“And maybe he didn’t. That cat would’ve scared those mice away. So what’s your game with the ratpeople. Garrett?””

I couldn’t remember. But if ratmen did this to me there could be only one answer. “Singe. I guess.”

“Reliance. The old boy does seem to be getting a little fixated on that particular subject. Don’t you think?”

“I do t’ink.” I had a strong feeling that Singe was becoming a major issue inside the world of ratfolk organized crime. Reliance was ancient for one of his kind. The up-and-coming youngsters must be getting impatient.

I tried explaining that to Morley. I faded in and out a few times before he got it.

“Bet you’re right, Garrett. It isn’t about Singe at all. Not really. And I think I know how to settle the whole mess. And turn Reliance into your best buddy while we’re at it. Sarge, the rat’s breathing just picked up. He’ll be ready to sing in a few minutes.”

“What’re you gonna do?” With stalwart assistance from Puddle I was having considerable success at staying in my chair. My speech was clearing up some, too.

“I’ll just remind Belinda that a broken-down ex-Marine named Garrett, with help from his ratgirl honey and a certain suave and incredibly handsome restaurateur, saved her sweet slim behind not all that long ago. I’ll include some suggested topics for discussion with Reliance and his troops. Like the troops should leave the general alone. And the general should remember that he’s indebted to you now, not the other way around.”

“I don’ like it.”