Bitter Gold Hearts (21 page)

“It took more doing than you think.”

“Get in here, Amber. Go to your suite.”

Amber didn’t come out of hiding.

I said, “There’s a fee due.”

“Yes. Of course. You’re a parasite, Garrett.”

“Absolutely. But unlike the ruling-class sort of para­site, I relieve pain instead of creating it.” I winked, grinned. “Is the honeymoon over?”

She almost smiled back. “In about a minute.” She produced several fat doeskin bags. I let her plunk their weight into my folded arms, then turned. Amber came out of hiding, took a sack, counted out Saucerhead’s fee, whispered, “You take care of this, Garrett. I’ll pick it up as soon as I get away from my mother.”

I lent her only enough ear to follow what she said. I asked Domina Dount, “Just as a matter of personal curiosity, did you ever tie the knot on that warehouse trouble?”

“Warehouse trouble?”

“Back when you first called me out here, you told me the younger Karl disappeared after you sent him out to check on a pilferage problem. I just wondered if you’d put the wraps on that yet.”

“I haven’t had time to worry about it, Mr. Garrett.”

Amber and Saucerhead pushed past us while we talked. The Domina realized that Saucerhead was going inside.

“Hey! You! Come back here. You can’t go in there.”

Saucerhead ignored her.

“Who the hell is he, Garrett? What is he doing?”

“He’s Amber’s bodyguard. DaPena youngsters have been dropping like flies. The reason she ran away was she was afraid she might be next. To get her to come back I had to fix her up with a bodyguard so mean and ugly and stubborn he’d take on the gods themselves. Also one who has a lot of friends willing to get revenge if anything happens to him.”

“I don’t like your tone, Garrett. You sound like you’re accusing me.”

“I’m accusing no one. Not yet. But somebody had Amiranda and Junior murdered. I’m just letting people know it’s going to get gruesome if it’s tried on Amber.”

“Karl took his own life, Mr. Garrett.”

“He was murdered, Domina. By a man named Gor­geous.
I
think at the instigation of a third party. I’m going to be talking to friend Gorgeous later. One of the questions I’m going to ask is who put him up to it. Thanks for this. Enjoy your day.”

I left her looking flustered and maybe — hopefully — frightened.

The name of the game was Garrett opens his bag of little horrors and lets out some of what he knows, hoping that knowledge looks like a thick and deadly wall against which the onrushing Stormwarden might crush the guilty. Maybe somebody would panic. As I moved away, looking around to see if any of Morley’s boys were lurking, I heard footsteps behind me. I looked back.

Courter Slauce was hurrying my way, an odd expres­sion on his fat face. All the color was gone. “Mr. Gar­rett. Wait up.”

Had my bolts pinked something in the bushes already? He obviously had something on his mind.

“Courter! Where are you? Come here! Immediately!”

Domina Dount sounded like a fishwife. I couldn’t see her, so I assumed she couldn’t see me. Slauce threw up his hands in despair and trotted back home.

What had he wanted to tell me?

Morley was waiting at the house when I got there. He hadn’t been waiting long.

__XXXIX__

WHAT’S UP, MORLEY?” “Chodo wants to see you. Right away.”

“Now I’m not happy. What brought this on?”

Morley shrugged. “I’m just relaying a message Crask left with me. I’ll say this. He didn’t look like he thought his boss was going to feed you to the fishes.”

“That’s very reassuring, Morley.”

“Chodo is an honorable man, in his own way. He wouldn’t chop somebody down without warning.”

“Like Gorgeous?”

“Gorgeous had plenty of warnings. Anyway, he put himself on the bull’s-eye. Then he stood there with his tongue out. He begged for it, Garrett.”

“What do you think? Should I go?”

“Only if you don’t want the kingpin pissed at you. A time might come when you’d want him to give you a little leeway.”

“You’re right. Let’s go. Lock it up, Dean.”

Dean grumbled, I told him it wouldn’t last much longer. Chodo had set himself up in a manor house in the suburbs. The place beggared the Stormwarden’s in size and ostentation, a commentary on the wages of sin if you’re slick. Sadler was waiting at the gate, a commentary on the confidence Chodo had in the terror of his name, I sup­pose. He said nothing, just let us follow him across the professionally barbered grounds. Having that kind of eye, I couldn’t help but study the security arrangements.

“Don’t step off the path,” Morley cautioned. “You’re only safe inside the enchantment.”

I then noticed that in addition to the expected and obvious armed guards and killer dogs, there were thunder-lizards lazing in the bushes. They were not the tenement-tall monsters we think of, but little guys four or five feet tall, bipedal, all tail, teeth, and hind legs built for run­ning. They were the reason for the enchantment on the path. Unlike the dogs, those things were too stupid to train. All they understood was eating and mating.

“Nice pets,” I told Sadler. He didn’t respond. Won­derful company, the kingpin’s boys.

But the grimness ended at the front door.

Chodo knew how to do it up royal. I’ve been inside several places on the Hill. None could match Chodo’s.

“Don’t gawk, Garrett. It’s impolite.”

A platoon of nearly naked cuties were playing in and around a heated bath pool three times bigger than the ground area of my whole place. We passed through. I muttered, “Business must be good.”

“Looks like.” The man who had cautioned me not to gawk was looking back, the gleam in his eyes a conflagra­tion. “Never saw them before.” He walked into a pillar.

The part of the house where we met the kingpin was less luxurious. It was, in fact, your basic filthy, miserable dungeon — except it was located on the ground level. The kingpin himself was a pallid, doughy fat man in a wheel-chair who didn’t look like he could whip potatoes until you met his eyes. I had seen eyes like those only a few times, on some very old and hungry vampires. They were the eyes of Death.

“Mr. Garrett?”

The voice went with the eyes, deep and dank and cold, with hints of awful things crawling around its underside.

“Yes.”

“I believe I owe you a considerable debt.”

“Not at all. I —”

“In your fumbling and poking after whatever it is you’re seeking, you presented me with an opportunity to rid myself of a vicious pest. I seized the chance, trampling your interests in my rush, a presumption you’ll have found close to intolerable. But you’ve been gracious about it. You participated in the operation which delivered me despite having little hope you would get what you were after. So I believe I am in your debt.”

Were it not for his voice from beyond the grave, I might have been amused by his pedantic manner. When I didn’t respond, he continued, “Mr. Dotes didn’t make much sense when he tried to explain what you’re doing.

If you can satisfy me that your interests don’t conflict with mine, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

I wanted to demur, quietly, still preferring to avoid any chance of becoming identified with him. But Morley gouged me gently, and the fact was, he had two of the people I most wanted to question. I explained as con­cisely as I could, carefully sliding around the matter of two hundred thousand marks gold floating free.

Sadler continued, “One of Gorgeous’s enterprises was the fencing of goods stolen from the warehouses along the waterfront, sir.”

“Yes. Continue, Mr. Garrett.”

“Basically, I need to question Gorgeous and Skredli so I can define their sector of the web of intrigue.” Does that top you, you villainous slug? “I need to ask them who told them to kill Amiranda Crest and the younger Karl daPena.”

“I knew Molahlu Crest when I was a young man. You might say I was one of his protégés.” He crooked a finger. Sadler went to him, bent down. They whispered. After Sadler backed off, Chodo asked, “The questions you want answered are the ones Raver Styx will ask with a great deal less delicacy?”

“No doubt.”

“Then not only must I pay my debt to you, I must move to avert the attention of the mighty. But I have erred, and today I demonstrated my fallibility to myself in no uncertain fashion. I’m able to give you only the lesser part of what you want. 1 overestimated Mr. Staley’s endurance and he’s no longer with us. He couldn’t take it.”

I sighed. I should have expected the grave to slam another door in my face. “He wasn’t in very good shape the last time I saw him.”

“Perhaps his injuries were more extensive than they appeared. Whatever, I learned very little of value. But the other, the ogre breed, has survived and is amenable. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to know much.”

“He wouldn’t.”

Morley gouged me. “Donni Pell, Garrett.”

“What?”

Chodo raised a plump, almost white caterpillar of an eyebrow. He was as good at it as I was.

“You said the hooker was the key, Garrett. And you don’t even know where to start looking.”

“Who is Donni Pell?” Chodo asked.

“The she-spider in this web.” I gave Morley a dirty look. “She used to work for Lettie Faren, but ran out on her the day Junior was snatched. She could be related to Lettie. Human, but supposedly with a thing for ogres.” I ran through the whole thing, how every way I turned the name Donni Pell popped up. I finished, “She could be masquerading as a boy but using the same name.”

Chodo grunted. He stared at the nails on one plump pink hand. “Mr. Sadler.”

“Yes sir?”

“Find the whore. Deliver her to Mr. Garrett’s residence.”

“Yes sir.” Sadler left us.

“If she’s in the city, she’ll be found, Mr. Garrett,” Chodo told me. “Mr. Sadler and Mr. Crask are nothing if not efficient.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“I suppose it’s time I took you to my ogrish houseguest. Come.” He spun his wheelchair and rolled. Morley and I followed.

__XL__

The first thought that entered my mind when I walked in on Skredli was
drowned sparrow.
He looked very small, very weak, very bedraggled, and like he’d never been dangerous to anything bigger than a bug. Curiously, I recognized him now. I hadn’t during the excitement in Ogre Town or later in the coach. He was one of the gang who had waylaid me the afternoon of my date with Amiranda, while I was on my way to the chemist for some stink-pretty. Skredli was seated on a rumpled cot. He glanced up but showed no real interest. Ogres tend toward fatalism. Morley held the door for Chodo, then stepped aside. The kingpin backed his chair against the door.

I studied Skredli, wondering how to get to him. A man has to have hope before he’s vulnerable. This one had no hope left. He was deader than the Dead Man, but his traitorous heart kept pumping and his battered flesh kept aching.

“The good times always come to an end, don’t they, Skredli? And the better the times are, the bigger the fall when they end. Right?”

He didn’t respond. I didn’t expect him to.

“The chance for the good times doesn’t have to be gone forever.”

His right cheek twitched, once. Ogres and ogre breeds may be indifferent to the fates of their comrades, but they aren’t indifferent to their own.

“Mr. Chodo has gotten what he wants from you. He doesn’t have any outstanding grievance. Mine isn’t with you at all. So there’s no reason you shouldn’t be let out of here if you give me what I need.”

I didn’t bother checking to see how Chodo took me putting words into his mouth. It didn’t matter. He would do what he wanted no matter what I said or promised. Skredli glanced up. He didn’t believe me, but he wanted to.

“The whole scheme is in the dump, Skredli. And you’re down at the bottom. No way to go but up or out. The choice is yours.” I had asked Chodo only one question coming to the cell: did Skredli know Gorgeous was out of it? He did. “Your boss is gone. No reason to stay loyal to him or be afraid of him. Your fate is in your own hands.”

Morley shifted his weight against the wall, gave me a look that said he thought I was laying it on too thick.

Skredli grunted. I had no way of telling what that meant. I took it as a go-ahead.

“I’m Garrett. We had a run-in once before.”

One bob of the head. I had him. For a moment, though, I feared it had been too easy. Then I reflected that it was the ogrish way. When you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose.

“You recall the circumstances?”

Grunt again.

“Who put you up to that?”

“Gorgeous.” That in a dry-throated croak.

“Why? What for? I’d never had anything to do with either of you.”

“Business. We had a thing going on in the daPena warehouse and they thought you were going to horn in and spoil it.”

“Who is they?”

“Gorgeous.”

“You said they. Gorgeous and who?”

He’d reached his next point of decision. He decided to tell a warped truth. “A guy named Donny something who set up the deal.”

“You mean a hooker named Donni Pell who worked for Lettie Faren and had a thing for ogres. Don’t do that again, Skredli.”

His shoulders sagged.

I took a moment to reflect. There was a question of timing that deserved it. Skredli had been in town, leading that pack, after Junior was snatched. But then he’d been at that farm the afternoon before Junior walked away, and the next morning he’d led the crew that did in Amiranda. I tabled that for the moment. “I’m interested in that warehouse scheme. All the petty little details.”

I’d caught him on Donni Pell, so now he was deter­mined to spin me a good tale. “That was one of Donni’s ideas. She was always bringing us things she’d dreamed up from stuff her Johns told her. Some of them we went with, and she got a cut. This one was real sweet. Raver Styx had left town and Donni had a foreman that would let us siphon off ten percent of everything that went through. We took it on a fifty-fifty split with Donni, on account of she was the one keeping the daPena side in line, but the foreman’s cut and expenses had to come out of her half. We moved a lot of stuff. As much as we were doing from the rest of the waterfront, practically. But then Donni warned us that people were getting suspi­cious. Raver Styx’s woman Dount sent the kid to nose around. Then there was you, starting to snoop just when we had decided to close the thing out by cleaning out the warehouse in one hit. So they had me try to discourage you.”