Free Book 10 - Angry Lead Skies by Glen Cook Page B

a highly respected and
greatly feared leader of that community who’s involved in a
lot of questionable and some outright illegal activities. Reliance
believes that Pular Singe belongs to him. There’s a chance
he’s right within the rules of rat society. There is some
sort of indenture involved. But rat society isn’t paramount
in TunFaire. And that guy Garrett don’t much care about
anybody’s customs or rules when he makes up his mind
what’s right and what’s wrong.
    “She wouldn’t be real happy about the boss rat
getting his paws on her again, Garrett,” Tharpe assured me.
With a wink, showing he’d gotten it. “He tried to hire
me once to bring her back.” He grinned a grin filled with bad
teeth.
    Well. Maybe I was going to get some help with this after all,
from the least likely source.
    Saucerhead really can be a sensitive kind of guy.
    And Singe, wonder of wonders, was stirring suddenly.
    “So why didn’t you take the job?”
    “Old Reliance, he’s too damned cheap for one thing.
He just can’t get it through his head that it ain’t
just a matter of rounding up one dumb female and dropping her off
where he wants her delivered. He can’t get it through his
skull that she can actually think for herself and that she can have
made friends who’d be willing to look out for her. He just
figures you’re trying to hold him up on your fee when you try
to explain it to him.”
    “You’d think he’d have figured it all out from
direct experience. Whoops! Look here. It’s alive. Hi,
sleepyhead. You’re the last one awake.”
    Singe mumbled something.
    “We’re just waiting on you.”
    Singe smiled a weak rat smile. She probably thought she heard
relief in my voice. Possibly she did. I was relieved that her
problem wasn’t real.
    Pular Singe’s recovery was dramatically swift once she
decided that she needed to get healthy. Reliance’s name made
a great whip.
    Morley told one of his waiters to make a bread and cheese run
while the rest of us sat around staking claims on being in worse
shape than the other guy. Food was a great idea, I thought, but
when the man came back with a basket filled with chow I
didn’t feel much like eating.
    A similar lack of appetite afflicted Saucerhead, Playmate, and
Singe. And none of those three liked it even a little, either. They
loved their food. Singe, in particular, always ate like a starved
alley cat or one of her feral cousins. Everything in sight,
steadily, gobbling so fast that the bugs never got a share.
    I grumbled, “I think we’ve got us an invention right
here. A new weight loss program for the lords and ladies.”
Nobody else in this burg ever gets fat.
    Soon enough, heads still aching and stomachs still empty, we
proceeded as Singe picked up Kip’s trail. Though it had begun
to get dark she had no trouble finding the way. Sight was never her
master sense. Though it did become more important after nightfall.
She could see in the dark better than Morley. And Morley has eyes
like an owl.
    This time the chase didn’t last twenty minutes.
    This time the camouflage didn’t catch us unaware, either,
though it existed as an addition to a building rather than as
something thrown across a street. From the viewpoint of the silver
elves the trouble was that the building they’d scabbed onto
was one that Saucerhead and I knew. And had we not known it
ourselves there were at least twenty local Tenderloin folk hanging
around in the gloaming trying to figure out what was going on. That
addition hadn’t been there half an hour earlier.
    Playmate observed, “These people aren’t very good at
what they’re doing, are they?”
    “I get the feeling that this isn’t anything
they’ve had to do before. What do you say we just charge in
there and grab the kid back?” I wasn’t eager to get
myself another bout of sleep because of my habit of waking up
afterward with a ferocious hangover. I didn’t need another
one of those. I was working on a couple