Book 06 - Red Iron Nights Read Online Free PDF

up wishing you had had
the foresight to carry something. Is that not so?
    That was uncomfortably close to the truth. I wished it
wasn’t. I wished we lived in a more civilized age. But
wishing never makes anything so.
    I went upstairs, to my closet of unpleasantries, where I keep
the tools I use when the tools I prefer, my wits, fail me. I
grumbled all the while. And wondered why I resisted good advice. I
guess I resented the fact that I hadn’t thought of it
myself.
    Lessons you don’t want to learn come hard.
    TunFaire is not a nice city.
    I hit the street in a black humor. I wasn’t going to make
the city any nicer.
     
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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