Free She Who Waits (Low Town 3) by Daniel Polansky Page B

horrified at the thought of reaching it. ‘I work for a man who is very much interested in meeting with you.’
    ‘And who would that man be?’
    He pursed his lips but didn’t say anything. I waved my hand as if batting away a fly. ‘This is pointless – if you’ve got nothing to say, you can say nothing without me listening.’
    ‘Egmont,’ he said. ‘Director of Security Cerial Egmont.’
    I hadn’t been paying much attention to the Steps, as I said, but still that was a name with which I was familiar. ‘And what would this meeting be about?’
    ‘That’s not for me to say.’
    ‘Cause you don’t know?’
    You would think ignorance being the common state of mankind, fewer people would have trouble copping to it. ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Hume repeated. ‘Come in and meet with Director Egmont, he’ll make everything clear.’
    ‘Everything? That’s a tall order.’ It was clear Hume didn’t know anything more than what he’d said, and therefore pumping him any longer for information was pointless, if faintly enjoyable. ‘This has been a swell little interruption from the day to day, but I’m afraid I’m not interested in helping you.’
    ‘How can you say that, when you don’t know what it is we want you to do?’
    ‘Because it’s you asking me to do it. Your side isn’t mine. Rats don’t give no help to cats, and the cats offer their prey the same courtesy.’
    ‘They say politics make strange bedfellows.’
    ‘I sell drugs for a living, Brother Hume – I don’t lower myself to deal in politics.’
    He was getting back to talking but I cut him off. ‘There’s no point in arguing with me anymore. My mind is set as a broken clock. So here’s what’s going to happen – I’m going to slip out of this alleyway, and you’re going to wait three minutes and do the same. My man on the roof is still watching you, and if he gets the sense you’re watching me, I’m afraid your superiors are going to have several things to be unhappy about. Dig?’
    ‘I understand,’ he said after a moment, though his eyes blazed rather furiously.
    ‘Good. Now after three minutes, you take your first right, then a left two more down, then straight on ahead till you hit the canal – I know, it’s not the way you came. The way you came isn’t the way you get back. That’s a crooked truth, but it’s one you run into more often than you’d think.’
    He mulled that over for a while. ‘Can I have my purse?’
    I fished it up off the ground and tossed it to him, noticing as I did that it was lighter than it should have been. Fucking Knocker – that kid was too damn smart for his own good.
    Dull knife that Hume was, he had the thing halfway to his waistband before he bothered to check it. ‘I had eight argents in here,’ he said.
    ‘My fee for a consultation is a flat ochre – I assume you’re good for the rest?’
    He belted his purse back on rather furiously, as if by strangling the leather he was getting some payback on me. ‘You might think about what it means to go against us.’
    ‘I get a deal on bolts. And on men who fire them.’
    You can only push a person so far before they buck a little. That’s not true, some people you can push all day and they’ll come back begging for more, but Hume wasn’t one of these. He gave me the sneer he’d been waiting to offer since he’d seen me, the sneer of a man born on one side of the line for a man born on the other. ‘You can put on airs, but I know your big talk is nonsense. You’ve got a dive bar and a mutt boy who runs poison for you. You might act like the King himself, but it’s a bluff, and no good one at that.’
    I hopped down from my spot on the crate, eased over towards him, turned my face nasty. ‘I hope for your sake that the people who make your decisions aren’t operating under that misimpression. Low Town is mine. Every broke-down whore shaking her ass on a midnight thoroughfare is keeping her eyes out for me, every lost