Free Book 04 - Old Tin Sorrows by Glen Cook Page B

work.” Saucerhead Tharpe is a friend, of sorts, in a line somewhere between Morley’s and mine. He has more scruples than Dotes and more ambition than me, but he’s as big as a house and looks half as smart. People can’t take him serious. He never gets the best jobs.
    “All right. I’ll pay his standard rate. Bonus if he recovers any of the articles. Bonus if he gets a description of the thief.”
    “On the cuff?” That was a hint.
    I gave him advance money. He said, “I thank you and Saucerhead thanks you. I know you’re doing an old buddy a favor but it seems damned tame. Especially if the old guy is just dying.”
    “There’s something going on. Somebody tried to off me.” I told him.
    He laughed. “I wish I could have seen the guy’s face when he swung that ax and you bonged like a bell. You’ve still got the luck.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Why are they after you?”
    “I don’t know. Money? That’s the one angle that makes this interesting. The old boy is worth about five million marks. His son is dead. His wife died twenty years ago. His daughter Jennifer gets half the estate and the other half goes to his Marine cronies. Three years ago he had seventeen heirs. Since then two died supposedly natural deaths, one got killed by a mad bull, and four disappeared. A little basic math shows that nearly doubles the take for the survivors.”
    Morley sat down behind his desk, put his feet up, cleaned his pearly white teeth with a six-inch steel toothpick. I didn’t interrupt his thoughts.
    “There’s potential for foul play in that setup, Garrett.”
    “Human nature being what it is.”
    “If I was a betting man I’d give odds that somebody is fattening his share.”
    “Human nature being what it is.”
    “Nobody walks out on that kind of money. Not you, not me, not a saint. So maybe you have something interesting after all.”
    “Maybe. Thing is, I don’t see any way to tie it up in a package. If I find out who’s stealing—which makes no sense considering the payoff down the road—I’m not likely to find out who’s killing the old man. That doesn’t make sense for whoever is cutting down the number of heirs. He’d want the old man to hang on.”
    “What happens if the daughter checks out before he does?”
    “Damn!” A critical point and it hadn’t occurred to me. If everything went to the boys she’d really be on the spot. “The odd thing is, none of them act like they know what’s going on. They seem to get along. They don’t watch each other over their shoulders. I did, and I was only there one night.”
    “A marvelous aspect of your species is that most of you see only what you want.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Maybe those guys are old buddies and only one of them realizes that throat-cutting can be profitable. Maybe nobody is suspicious because they all know their old buddies wouldn’t do something like that after all they’ve been through together.”
    Could be. I’d kind of had that problem myself. I couldn’t picture me turning on anybody I’d been running with that long. “And the whole thing could be what they say it is. Three dead by explainable cause and four who couldn’t handle the life-style and walked because money didn’t mean anything.”
    “And the moon could be mouse bait.”
    “You have a dark outlook.”
    “Supported every day in the street. The other night a thirty-six-year-old man knifed his mom and dad because they wouldn’t give him money for a bottle of wine. That’s the real world, Garrett. We’re our own worst nightmares.” He chuckled. “You’re lucky this time. You don’t have anything weird. No vampires, no werewolves, no witches, no sorcerers, no dead gods trying to come back to life. None of the stuff you usually stumble into.”
    I snorted. Those things aren’t on every street corner, but they’re part of the world. Everybody brushes against them eventually. They didn’t impress me, though I was happy not to deal with them.
    I said, “I could have seen a ghost.”
    “A what?”
    “A ghost. I keep seeing a woman that