Red Iron Nights

6

Like most public buildings in this town, the Al-Khar is generations overdue for renovation. It looks like the prisoners could walk through the walls if they wanted.

The Al-Khar was a bad idea from the beginning, a pork-barrel project making somebody rich through cost overruns and corner cutting. The builder used a pale yellow-green stone that absorbed grunge from the air, reacted with it, streaked, turned uglier by the hour, and did not stand up, being too soft. It chipped and flaked, dropping talus all around the prison, leaving the walls with a poxy appearance. In places there'd been mortar decay enough that stones were loose. Since the city hardly ever jailed anybody, there seemed to be no financial provision for prison maintenance.

It was raining still, though now the fall was just a drizzle. Just enough to be a misery. I posted myself under a forlorn lime tree as down-and-out as any alley-dwelling ratman. It didn't know the season. But its sad branches offered the only shelter around. I recalled my Marine Corps training and faded into my surroundings. Garrett the chameleon. Right.

I was early, not something that happens often. But since I started my exercises I move a little faster, with more energy. Maybe I should go for a mental workout too. Develop some energy and enthusiasm in that direction.

The trouble with me is my work. Investigating exposes you to the slimy underbelly of the world. Being a weak character, I try to make things better, to strike the occasional spark in the darkness. I have a notion my reluctance to work springs from the knowledge that if I do I'll see more of the world's dark side, that I'll butt heads with the Truth, which is that people are cruel and selfish and thoughtless and even the best will sell their mothers at the right time.

The big difference between good guys and bad is the good guys haven't yet had a fat chance for profiting from going bad.

A bleak world view, unfortunately reinforced by events almost daily.

A bleak view that's scary because it keeps on telling me my turn is coming.

A bleak street, that dirty cobbled lane past the Al-Khar. Very little traffic. That was true even in good weather. I've felt less lonely, less touched by despair, alone in the woods.

The street was a problem professionally as well as emotionally. I didn't blend in. People would start wondering and maybe remembering—though they wouldn't come outside. People in this town avoid trouble.

Barking Dog came stomping out of prison, thumbs tucked into his belt. He paused, surveyed the world with a prisoner's eye.

He was about five-feet-six, sixtyish, chunky, balding, had a brushy graying mustache and ferocious huge eyebrows. His skin was tanned from decades in the elements denouncing conspiracies. Prison hadn't faded him. His clothes were old and tattered and filthy, the same he'd worn when he'd gone inside. The Al-Khar doesn't offer uniforms. Barking Dog, so far as I knew, had no relatives to bring him anything.

His gaze swept me. He didn't react. He raised his face, enjoyed the drizzle, then started moving. I gave him half a block before I followed.

He had a unique way of walking. He was bowlegged. He had arthritis or something. He sort of rolled along, lifting one whole side of his body, swinging it forward, following with the other. I wondered if he hurt much. Prison wouldn't do wonders for arthritis.

Barking Dog wasn't in a hurry. He ambled, savoring his freedom. I'd hang out in the rain myself, enjoying it, if I'd been locked up. But I wasn't terribly empathic at the moment. I muttered and sputtered and grumbled. Such thoughtlessness! Keeping a crack investigator out in the rain.

Wasn't his fault, though, was it? I started plotting vengeance on the Dead Man.

Always an interesting mental exercise, that. What sanctions can you exercise against somebody who's been murdered? Aren't many options left.

Even us masters of the game get sloppy. It's easy when you don't feel threatened. I didn't feel threatened. Barking Dog wasn't the kind of street bruno I run into ordinarily, somebody big as a house and half as smart and just as easy to shove around. Barking Dog was damned near a little old man. Little old men don't get violent. Or, if they do, they pay some big, stupid bruno to do it for them.

I strutted around a corner and—oooph! Right in the breadbasket. Lucky for me, Barking Dog was damned near a little old man and little old men don't get violent.

I folded up, tried to prance away from his follow-up. Wonder of wonders, I made it. He was, after all, damned near a little old man. I gagged and hacked and got my breath back. Meantime, Barking Dog added things up and decided he hadn't gotten enough oomph on his punch and his best move now was to apply heels and toes vigorously to the cobblestones.

Not unwise tactics, considering the mood I was in all of a sudden.

I got me trundling after him. Lucky me, I'd been working out so I was in good enough shape to come back quickly. Before long I was keeping up, then I started gaining ground. Barking Dog looked back only once. He saved his energy for streaking away.

Me, I started taking corners more carefully.

It didn't take me long to catch up, grab him by the shoulder, block his futile blows, and force him to sit on somebody's steps. "What the hell was that for?" I demanded.

He looked at me like I was a fool. Maybe he was right. I hadn't exercised a lot of wisdom so far. He didn't answer me.

It didn't look like he was planning to make a break, so I sat me down beside him, far enough off so he couldn't cream me with a backhand. "That hurt, guy. How come?"

That look again. "What you take me for, bruno?"

Oh. That hurt more than the whack in the gut. I'm an experienced investigator, not a street thug. "A crazy old man, ain't got sense enough to get in out of the rain."

"I'm one with nature. You going to get to it?"

"To what?"

"The threats. The arm-twisting."

Ha! My turn to do the looking.

"You don't fool me with that dumb look. Somebody sent you to keep me from telling the truth."

Craftily I asked, "What truth would that be?"

Craftier, he told me, "If they didn't tell you, they don't want you to know. Wouldn't want to get you in as deep as I am."

Crazy. And I was sitting there talking to him. In the rain. Downwind. They hadn't given him a scrubbing before they turned him loose. "No threats. I don't care what you do."

He didn't understand. "Hows come you're dogging me?"

"To see where you go." Get him with a new technique. Tell the truth. Confuse him all to hell.

It worked. He was puzzled. "Why?"

"Damned if I know. Guy paid my partner, who took the job without consulting me. Naturally, he's housebound. So I'm the one out here drowning."

He believed me, probably because I wasn't twisting limbs. "Who'd want to know that?" He seemed lost. "Nobody takes me serious. Hardly nobody, anyway."

I checked to see if we were drawing a crowd. Barking Dog had one voice level, loud. Like he'd been yelling so long, that was all he could do. Too, I wondered what they'd fed him in jail. He had breath like a buzzard. Not to mention he wasn't appetizing visually, what with his wild eyebrows, mustache, bulbous nose, and buggy eyes. At least he didn't try to handbill me or want me to sign a petition.

Might as well push my experiment to the limit. "Guy called Bishoff Hullar."

"Who? I don't know no Bishoff Hullar."

"Runs a taxi-dance scam in the Tenderloin."

He looked at me queer, sure I was lying or crazy. Then he frowned. "A nominee! Of course."

"Say what?"

"A nominee. A stand-in who hired you for somebody else." He began nodding, grinning. Somebody was out to get him. He liked that idea. After all these years, somebody was out to get him! Somebody was taking him seriously! He was about to be persecuted!

"Probably so." I'd never spent much time wondering about Barking Dog. Occasionally I'd given thought to whether or not he believed what he said. It was common knowledge his claims about his family were exaggerated. None of his conspiracy claims had borne fruit, and that in a town where everybody who was somebody wanted scandal ammunition to use against other somebodies. Nobody tried to shut him up.

"What did they nick you for?" What the hell. I wasn't going to get much wetter. And the damp was toning down the miasma around Amato.

"Sixty days."

A comedian. "What was the charge? It's a matter of record. Wouldn't take me an hour to get the story."

He mumbled something.

"What?"

"Public nuisance." He didn't boom this time either.

"They don't give you two months—"

"Third complaint." His excitement over being persecuted had faded. Now he was embarrassed. He was a convicted public nuisance.

"Even so, more than a few days seems excessive."

"I kind of got carried away at my hearing. Fifty-five days were for contempt."

Heavy time, even so. The magistrates I knew were pretty contemptible. They ran their courts like feeding time at the zoo. It would take some barking to aggravate any of them.

I recalled outrageous claims I'd heard Amato make.

Yep. He had run into somebody with no sense of humor, somebody who didn't know Barking Dog was a genuine loony, harmless in the extreme. Nobody else could get away with the stuff he said. "Maybe you were lucky," I told him. "You get somebody really pissed, they could toss you into the Bledsoe." Part of the charity hospital is a madhouse. You get stuffed in there, you won't get out unless somebody outside springs you. There are plenty of stories about people who have gone in and been forgotten for decades.

Barking Dog went pale under his tan. That scared him. He started to leave.

"Hang on, old-timer."

He settled, resigned. He thought the threat had come. The Bledsoe. Just sitting there beside him, talking to him, I'd begun to feel like a candidate for the cackle factory. "You won't talk, eh?"

"No."

I shook my head. Water from my hair dribbled into my eyes. "I'm getting paid, which maybe ought to be enough, but I'd sure like a hint why I'm spending time with you."

I suspected that, on reflection, he'd decided that he didn't know. A cold drizzle can be a great cure for a case of the fantasies.

My thoughts flitted like drunken butterflies, trying to make sense of what was happening. The only answers I found were that this was a practical joke, or a mistake, or a sinister plot, or something. It couldn't be the job advertised.

I heard the Dead Man: "Three marks a day and expenses." I hadn't thought to ask if we'd taken a retainer.

"What're your plans?" I asked. "Right now."

"You're going to get wet, son. First I'm going to go see if I still got me a place to live. If I do, then I'm going to go buy me a bottle and get drunk. You want to hang around, wait for me to sneak off and make contact with your boss's secret enemies, you just go ahead." He spoke with conviction when he mentioned getting drunk. That wouldn't be the first thing I'd go for after leaving jail, but he was maybe a little past catching honeys. As a second choice it didn't sound bad.

"How about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow it's back to the old grind. Unless it's raining. Then I'll stay in and make the acquaintance of another bottle."

I got up. "Let's walk over where you live, then. Get you tucked in. Then I'll see this Hullar clown, find out what's shaking." Nobody likes being made a fool—and I was developing the sneaking suspicion I'd done it to myself. I should've asked more questions when I was talking to the Dead Man.

I decided to start with him, work my way back to Bishoff Hullar.