Deadly Quicksilver Lies

32

Slither surprised me. He was a decent cook, which I learned when I stumbled down for breakfast, after having been rousted out by Ivy, who must have caught something Dean had left behind.

"You have to loosen up, Ivy," I grumbled as I toddled into the kitchen. "This isn't the service. We don't have to haul out before the goddamn crack of noon."

"My daddy always told me a man's got no call lying in bed after the birds start singing."

Inertia more than self-restraint kept me from expressing my opinion of that perverted delusion.

One songbird was wide awake up front, rendering chorus after chorus of such old standards as, "There was a young lady from... " I wondered if Dean still had some of that rat poison that looked like seed cakes. The rats were too smart to eat it, but that bird...

"You're working on a job, aren't you?" Slither was still vague about what I do.

"The mission," Ivy mumbled. "Old first rule, Garrett. Even a jarhead ought to know. Got to follow through on the mission."

"Watch that jarhead stuff, Army. All right. All right." Good old attitudes from the bad old days. But was the mission more likely to be advanced at sunrise than at high noon? Excuse me for entertaining doubts.

I wondered if they had noticed the changes in TunFaire. Probably not. Neither was in close touch with the world outside his skull.

I surrendered. "I guess we can hit Wixon and White."

At the moment, the occult shop was my only angle. Mugwump had not yet materialized with the promised list of contacts.

Slither's cooking would have appalled Dean and sent Morley into convulsions. He fried half a slab of bacon while baking drop biscuits. He split the biscuits and soaked them in bacon grease, then sprinkled them with sugar. Poor people food. Soldier food. Food that was darned tasty when it was hot.