Wicked Bronze Ambition

30

I had acquired a shaggy brown twenty-pound mongrel sidekick who had taken station at my right ankle like he had been there forever and that was the meaning of life.

“Head on out, dog. You’re too old to hook me with cute.”

He awarded me the doggy equivalent of an adoring smile. I noted that he was actually a she. So what? A mutt is a mutt. I don’t have much use for any of them.

My brother Mikey brought strays home all the time. Mom put up with it, too, though they usually “ran away” within a few days. Mikey never could do any wrong.

She would have fits if I brought a critter home. Of course, mine were way cooler. A baby mastodon, maybe. Or a raptor thunder lizard. One of the little ones that only come up to your hip and mostly eat rats and cats.

Another sign of the times. We hardly ever see those anymore.

That dog was definitely female. She did not hear a thing she didn’t want to hear. She just got on with escorting me to whatever destination pleased me.

I growled under my breath. Brownie growled right back, making good-natured conversation. “Brownie” because I’m so clever, though Spots would have done the job, too. She had a white patch on her throat and another on her left hind leg. Her tail had been broken.

While I was cataloging her charms, another four-legged lady usurped the place of honor on my left. She was the same size but had a ration of bulldog in her background. She was charming in a maximum ugly kind of way. She did not appear to have a pleasant personality like Brownie.

She suffered from the same hearing disorder.

I was a hundred yards from Playmate’s stable. I would hunker down there, see if somebody had slipped a steak into my pocket. I saw Play his own self chatting up a customer looking to board a horse. The nag glanced my way. She made an unhappy noise.

Here we go. They’re all out to get me. Nobody believes me, but I never find any proof to the contrary. This mare wasn’t issuing a challenge, though. She was just unhappy because she had to be in the same street as that horrid Garrett creature.

Yeah. She knew who I was. She recognized me. Those monsters are connected telepathically.

Little Moo charged out of a dark breezeway. She hit me full speed. She had on the outfit she’d worn in the cemetery. She had nothing new to say. “Hate you! Hate you!” She pounded my chest with her fists.

The dogs danced around us, excited but not really taking sides.

Playmate came running.

I got hold of the girl, tossed her over my shoulder, went to meet him, whereupon he proved that he wasn’t going to be any help at all. “Put her down and turn her loose, Garrett. People are watching.”

He had a point. Folks aren’t always sympathetic to a guy in his thirties lugging a young girl who is kicking and screaming, even when her racket makes it sound like a domestic dispute. The mob might sort me out and consult the facts later, which would give the girl a great head start.

Folks there were slow, though, maybe on account of the dogs. There were four of those now, and they were turning the excitement into a great doggie celebration. They yapped. They yipped. They bounced up and down happily. How could any of that be part of an abduction?

I blathered loud nonsense about how Mom was going to blow her top this time. I put the girl down but hung on to her right hand, which was small, pudgy, and hot. We ducked into Playmate’s place.

Play brought his customer and the man’s steed inside while muttering, “Kids these days.” Then, “Dogs in the office, Gee, not around with the horses.”

Gee?

I herded hounds, never turning loose of my new young friend. The mutts were cooperative, the girl just passive. She seemed ashamed now. She kept her eyes downcast and moved sleepily.

She was set to bolt the instant she saw an opening.

I shut the door to the street.

The dogs all sat or lay down. Brownie settled on her belly in front of the street exit, chin on paws, looking worshipful. The others were not so friendly.

Brownie seemed to be the boss female.

I asked the girl, “What’s your name?” Still hanging on to her hand.

She looked at me like the question confused her, then down at the floor. “Hate you,” she said with little force.

“Not much of a vocabulary, sweetie.” I planted her in a chair, stepped away. She wiggled around before she decided she was comfortable.

“No name, eh? Where do you live, then?”

That one appeared to be as tough as the one about her name.

“All right, then. Who are your mom and dad?”

Zip. Nothing. I asked a few more, none of which produced any information other than a sense that she didn’t understand what she was being asked. She did, sadly, softly, once remind me that she hated me, but then each question made her shrink in on herself a little more, leaving her a touch more embarrassed.

Playmate joined us. He was not in the most cheerful mood. “I had to lie about you to close that deal, Garrett. So what the dickens do we have here? What’s going on?”

“I’d cheerfully tell all if I had a clue.”

He settled behind an actual desk that took up about a fifth of the room, faced the girl across its wooden plain. That desk had come to him from his brother-in-law in a debt settlement. The brother-in-law had a history of failures achieved after showing amazing promise, energy, and enthusiasm in the organization and financing of bold new ventures.

Play’s expression was skeptical. He gave me the fish-eye, then the girl in the cow costume, and the same to all four dogs, every one absurdly quiet and well behaved. Brownie hid her eyes behind a paw.

I said, “I came over to ask about your trip to the Dream Quarter with Penny. And to see how you’re doing. And to offer you a small job helping find the people who attacked Strafa. You know what happened with Little Moo. You watched it happen.”

He could not deny that. But he wasn’t quite ready to take that at face value. He grunted and waited for me to talk myself into or out of something.

“Things happen around me. Weird things.” Things that sometimes sweep up my friends with the dust and clutter.

“Play, I don’t know this girl. I’ll happily leave her for the Reverend Playmate to sort out. I just want to know if you saw something that Penny missed because she was busy being a priestess.”

“Strafa wasn’t down there, Garrett. We would have noticed. The turnout was the worst I’ve ever seen. Religion is dying.”

“In TunFaire? This is the most god-ridden city there ever was.”

“In TunFaire. There are empty temples on the low end of the Street of the Gods today. The little cults can’t make the rent.”

Brownie lifted her chin half an inch and cracked an eye like she wondered if one of the two-leggers might do something interesting. Maybe food would be involved.

In a whisper, bashfully, Little Moo reminded me, “Hate you.”

“That’s all she’ll say, Play. Not why. Not her name. Nothing about her family. I don’t know if she even understands the questions.”

Playmate stood and leaned forward, over the desk. He had his gentlest look on, but even after the cancer had depleted him so badly, he was huge and intimidating.

Brownie opened her other eye and made a sound meant to communicate something somehow, but I did not get it.

Playmate suggested, “Maybe she’s slow?”

“It don’t seem like she’s been abused.”

Slow girls on their own don’t last long. Maybe this one was doing all right because she lived in the new, law-hagridden TunFaire sprung from the nightmares behind Deal Relway’s forehead.

Playmate settled back. “Is there someone else who could help if I turn you down?”

“I was thinking Kolda since he’s close by.”

“Anyone else? His old lady keeps him on a short leash since the mix-up with the zombie makers.”

They hadn’t been zombie makers, but I knew what he meant so I didn’t correct him. “You see him much these days?”

“He keeps me in the stuff I need to fight the cancer. I buy him dinner at the Grapevine when Trudi lets him out. Who else do you have?”

“Jon Salvation?”

“Probably not your best choice.”

“Oh?”

“He’d do it. He’d jump at a chance to be part of another adventure.”

I scowled. Did he know something about Salvation that I didn’t?

“Really, Garrett. Whatever it is to you, it would be an adventure to him.”

“You could be right.” It would all be part of a story to Jon Salvation. It would turn up in some future play. And while he was involved in real events, he would be trying to do revisions and rewrites, heading west.

Play announced, “I have animals that need me. And now I have this,” meaning Little Moo. “If you can’t get Kolda, or anybody else, then come back. We’ll find a workaround.”

Beer crossed my mind. I hadn’t had any yet today. Why think about it now? Playmate was no drinker. He might not have any on the premises. Then I got what my subconscious was trying to tell me. “I could try Max Weider or Manvil Gilbey. Preston would get all excited if he thought he had a shot at working for the brewery.”

“And there you go. So take on off. I’ll try to get something out of her.” Then, before I actually got rolling, he told me, “I don’t know what to say, Garrett. I hurt for you so bad. What happened has tested my faith. That girl was the best thing that ever happened to you. I guess I should thank God that you had her in your life for as long as you did.”

“I do,” I said. “Thank you, Play. That means a lot.” It really did, because it is so hard for Playmate to express his emotions. In this case it was especially hard because he had been a huge fan of the woman Strafa had replaced so suddenly.

I still had trouble fully believing that myself.