Wicked Bronze Ambition

29

Saucerhead and Winger were onto the payroll, Tharpe definitely doing nothing connected with Womble or Muriat. The Dead Man had him doing courier duty. His first job was to inform Race and Dex that their presence was required here. Mr. Tharpe would show them the way.

I was off to see Playmate, to see if he would lead Preston Womble to the Dead Man. If his health was too fragile, I’d move on to Kolda, whose apothecary shop was just blocks from Playmate’s stable. I wanted to see Play even if he couldn’t help. I wanted to know what he had seen that night in the Dream Quarter.

Maybe he had noticed something that Penny hadn’t.

Plus, I wanted to see how he was feeling. I hadn’t had a chance at the funeral or wake.

He had been on the road to a hard death from an aggressive cancer. The combined efforts of Kolda, the Dead Man, and a healing priest named Hoto Pepper had licked that evil, barely. I hoped Play was still out in front of it. He was one of my better friends. And I liked him, which isn’t always the case with some of the people we’ve known for donkey’s years. He was one of the good guys, righteous in the sense that the word was designed.

I seemed to have the streets to myself, all by my lonesome. I started out as alert as on a patrol into Venageta’s slice of the island swamps. No one showed any interest in me, nor did I smell one. Neither friend, foe, nor Guardsman gave himself away.

I liked that but found it curious.

I followed Macunado east for a while, walked four blocks sideways to Magnolia, took that east to Prince Guelfo Square. That isn’t much bigger than a hankie. I stopped to visit Frenkeljean the sausage vendor and had a juicy hot sausage on a bun with masses of raw onion, checking my surroundings while dripping grease everywhere. Frenkeljean sees stuff. He functions more like furniture than people. Folks pay no attention. He has the added camouflage of being only part human.

He is a stringer for Deal Relway, too. I saw him inside the Al-Khar once, reporting. He didn’t see me.

I asked a few soft questions, mostly out of curiosity. I really was there mainly for the sausage.

If Strafa had a downside, it was her passion for healthy food. I could never convince her that big fat bratwursts in quantity were real good eating.

Seizing the day, I treated myself to another. Stomach bulging and happy, I resumed my approach to Playmate’s stable, now confident that I was not the drum major for another parade. I paid no attention to the dogs that were out. The city has its strays, always there, like rat people, seldom noticed.

Could the lack of interest in me be because somebody really clever had tagged me with a sorcery-based tagalong tracer? Or was it just what it seemed? Nobody cared anymore.

No boost for the ego, that. It meant that everyone, friend and foe, had found something better to do. I was old news.

Even my own life can’t be all about me.

I was in the last stretch, headed up a slight hill, puffing and telling myself that I really had to do something to get in shape.

My best exercise happens mostly inside the gymnasium of my mind.

Despite my determination to maintain a level-one alert, I did not, for some time, realize that I was no longer operating alone.