Red Iron Nights Read Online Free PDF

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.
     
     

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