Free Fort Freak by George R.R. Martin Page B

packing up to leave when Bugeye came over. I eyed him warily. “Hey, a few of us are going over to Shift Change for drinks. Want to come?”
    Shift Change was the local bar where most of the off-duty officers of the 5th went to drink. I’d never been invited before. “Sure,” I said. I wondered what new and horrible thing they were going to do to me.
    As we walked down the street I realized that Rikki, Beastie, Shades, Wingman, and Lieutenant Kant had fallen into step with me. My nervousness increased, but they were just exchanging gibes and talking about cases.
    Wingman held the door for me. I gave him a funny look, but went in. Bill was seated at the bar. Puff was lighting a cigarette with one of his flaming goobers. Tabby had a shot and a beer lined up in front of him. The usual cop groupies, generally older women with lush bodies, had hung themselves on the male officers.
    “What are you drinkin’?” Puff said. “It’s on me.”
    “Uh.” I wondered who had stolen the real Puff and left this version behind. “Scotch, rocks,” I finally managed.
    A steady line of cops came by to give me a slap on the back and tell me that I’d been doing a hellva job. I looked up at Bill who had an expression like the Cheshire Cat’s. He had definitely been talking.
    And from somewhere in the crowd someone said, “Nice work, Frank.”
    I cranked around on the bar stool and addressed the room. “Franny will be fine.”
    There were guffaws and Bill pounded me on the shoulder. I turned back to the bartender and ordered another drink. It seemed I had made the right career choice.
    ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥

 
    The Rat Race
    Part 2.
    CHARLES DUTTON’S MANSION WAS a sprawling affair that was normal on the outside and strange as hell on the inside. Stuffed with oddities, antiques, and wild card paraphernalia, the house was almost a museum. In fact, Dutton occasionally referred to it as “the annex,” by which he implied that some of the Famous Jokertown Dime Museum’s displays might hypothetically rotate in and out of his private quarters.
    Leo didn’t like doing poker night at Dutton’s place. He was often consumed by the irrational conviction that the house was bigger on the inside than the outside, but he wasn’t about to skip a Society game over such a minor quibble.
    He was just deciding between lifting the big, ludicrous door knocker (some kind of animal head, maybe) and pushing the ornately offset doorbell that protruded like an ivory blister when another cab pulled up. This one deposited Father Squid, who paid the cabbie and gave Leo a nod that wiggled his tentacles.
    Leo nodded back. He liked the priest—a joker a few years his senior with the cephalopod face and body like a boulder. As the cassock-clad minister climbed the front steps, Leo called out, “Don’t tell me I’m late.”
    “Surely not. It’s barely even dark.” He reached past Leo and seized the door knocker. He lifted it and dropped it a couple of times—casting forth a low, clattering rumble.
    And then the two men stood there, side by side, until the door was answered by Dutton himself.
    Charles Dutton was a tall man, thin and perennially well dressed. His death mask was its usual shade of liver-disease yellow, and if he was showing more skin he would’ve been smiling broadly. He opened the door and spread his arms like a showman with a baton. “Gentlemen! Or, you two, as the case may be.”
    Father Squid said, “I resemble that remark.”
    “I know you do. Come on in. You’re not late, but you’re last. Everyone else is already upstairs in the sanctum sanctorum, making drinks and starting cigars.” He held the door ajar and kept his arms aloft, gesturing into the corridor with its long red carpet runner. “Come in, come in. And let the game begin.”
    Leo and Father Squid followed Dutton up the stairs to the third floor, where the “sanctum sanctorum” was set up for entertaining. The detective suspected that the intimate, windowless room