Wicked Bronze Ambition: A Garrett, P.I., Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

come here.”
    Old Bones has tasted and smelled plenty of wickedness in his time, but I wasn’t sure he was ready for Shadowslinger.
    Fear not, Garrett. Shadowslinger is more bark and urban legend than she is bite and ugly history. She worked hard to create her legend
.
    Experience suggested that I trust his judgment. But wow! Grandma was so creepy.
    “What do you think, Chuckles? Is it even appropriate for us to get involved? It’s sorted itself out without us every time before.”
    He inserted visions of faces into my consciousness, starting with Kip Prose and Kevans Algarda. He followed up with a real-time look at Strafa glaring at me in disbelief.
    “Are you deaf as well as dim, love? There isn’t any free will involved. We’re in whether we like it or not. We were in before Grandmother asked you to poke around. Please think.”
    Wow.
    You see?
    “I see. So, what do you think our course should be?”
    Not entirely what your future family seems to be hoping. This would be my personal suggestion, given four centuries of experience.
    He did not include Strafa in what followed.
    Old Bones thought I ought to take it outside the family.
    He went back to a point he had made earlier, now in more detail.
    I told you we have resources unique to the modern age. I posit that, as such, they have not been taken into account by the Operators.
    “Huh?” Whatever he was on about, it hadn’t come clear to me, either.
    The Unpublished Committee. This is the sort of thing that it was created to handle
.
    “Yes! Ha!” I laughed out loud. He was absolutely correct. I might be able to abort the entire tournament horror show with one office visit, if I could be convincing. “Deal Relway will jump all over this!”

10
    The evening started out rainy, not in any driving, windy form. Then it became a drizzle of the sort that is more depressing than soaking, a halfhearted weather episode that leaves the world feeling colder than it is and you wanting nothing more than to get inside, close to a fire. It got better later on.
    After a nice evening at the Macunado place, Strafa and I split up. She wanted to go flying, then to drop by her grandmother’s house to try to arrange for the folks we had met there to visit the Dead Man. She promised to see me back at her house in the afternoon.
    After a massive breakfast devoured at a ridiculously early hour, I headed for the Al-Khar. It was raining again. I hunched down deep inside my canvas coat. What breeze there was came from behind. I dedicated my attention to wishing that I had a hat with a more generous brim, especially in back. The beast riding my scalp just then did not keep the rain from running down the back of my neck.
    People were out doing make-a-living stuff despite the hour and weather. I spent some pity on them for having to work, then some more on me for getting rained on when I ought not to have to lift a pinkie again.
    The great dirty yellow ugliness of the Al-Khar, TunFaire’s Civil Guard headquarters, hove up out of the mist. They should paint it, or something. Anything to make it less of an eyesore.
    I lumbered past a rank of transplanted poplars that would, once they grew and leafed out, slap a layer of pancake over the ugly, then hove to just in out of the rain, in a tunnel-like ancillary entrance. I considered those trees. They said a lot about the Civil Guard. They declared the age of law and order solidly begun. They dared anyone to be bold enough to try converting Guard property into firewood.
    The city had been stripped of almost every stick outside the Royal Arboretum, for conversion to warmth, by the impoverished and refugees, before the law and order affliction commenced with a vengeance and became a full-fledged, citywide pandemic.
    “May I help you, sir?”
    The voice came from behind a small barred window on the left side of the tunnel, just before it was blocked by massive, antique wooden doors. An attractive brunette looked out from behind the bars. Not so