"Suppose I had a notion where I could find one of the girls right now?"
"Do you?"
"Take it as a supposition. How can I be certain I'd get my fee?"
She levered herself out of her chair, straining like a woman decades older. "I came prepared for that possibility." What might have been a smile tickled the corner of her mouth. She started digging sacks out of her clothing. In a minute there was a line of ten before me, each a twin of the one offered me as a retainer. I checked the contents of one at random.
It was good. Eleven hundred marks gold. More than I'd ever had a chance at before. With prospects for another thousand, which I could collect easily. Certainly a temptation to test the dark side of a man's soul. We all look for the big hit—hope for it, talk about it—but I don't believe we think about it. Not seriously. Because when it's suddenly there, a lot of thinking has to be done. Amiranda was dead. And what was Amber to me? Morley always says the supply of women is inexhaustible. And who would I have to explain to or make excuses to?
Just to myself. With maybe the Dead Man smirking over my shoulder. Still, there was the possibility of a useful experiment. I rose and collected the gold in one big bear hug.
"Come with me."
Dean had turned down the lamps in the Dead Man's room. I don't know why he thinks that makes any difference. The Dead Man doesn't care about light one way or the other. When he wants to sleep, he'll sleep through sun, lightning, or earthquake. I hired me down and deposited the take beside his chair.
Domina Dount asked, "Are you going to deliver something or not, Mr. Garrett?"
"Turn around."
For a moment she was human. She let out a little squeak and raised her hands to her cheeks. But she asserted control, taking a full minute to get the parts into the desired order. Then she murmured, "Will the disasters never end?"
She faced me. "I presume you can explain?"
"Explain what?"
She took ten seconds, eyes closed.
I prodded. "You engaged me to find and deliver to you, if possible, Amber daPena and Amiranda Crest. I've done half the job already."
She stared at me and hated me through narrowed eyelids. Her voice remained neutral, though, as she remarked, "I had hoped that you would deliver them in better health. She is dead? Not in a trance or ensorcelled?"
"Yes. Amiranda has been in poor health for some time now."
"Your attempts at wit become tiresome, Garrett. I suppose I can assume that you weren't the agent of death. I want to know the who, what, when, where, why, and how."
So did I.
My experiment had flopped. Domina Dount wasn't about to be flustered into giving anything away. If there was anything in her that I didn't already have.
"Well?" she demanded.
Why not? I might still shake something loose. "The day you were supposed to make the ransom payoff, Amiranda hired a friend of mine as her bodyguard. That night he accompanied her into the countryside north of TunFaire. She took several travel cases with her. She went to a crossroad near Lichfield, where she stopped. My friend thought she expected to meet somebody there and that he was supposed to have been dismissed when that somebody showed."
"Who?"
"I don't know. He, she, or it never came. A band of ogre breeds did instead. My friend killed some of them but he couldn't drive them off or keep them from killing Amiranda. He couldn't even save himself, though the ogres thought he was dead enough to throw into the bushes with Amiranda and the other casualties. When they scattered to keep from being seen by travelers, my friend found the strength to pick Amiranda up and carry her three miles to someone he knew who, he hoped, could save her."
"To no avail."
"Of course. My friend isn't very smart. He'd failed. He was outraged and his pride was hurt. Somehow, he got back to Tunfaire, as far as the Bledsoe Infirmary, where I got his story in the deathwatch ward."
Willa Dount frowned, uncertain why I'd told her what I had. "You've left something out, haven't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you don't need to know. Because no one needs to know except my friend's friends—some of them are the kind of guys who eat ogres for breakfast—who figure there's some balancing due for what got done."
You couldn't crack Willa Dount with a hammer. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "That's why you've been digging around and poking your nose in."
"Yes."
"The Stormwarden resents people who pry into her family's affairs."
"I'll bet she resents people killing her kids even more." Me and my big damned mouth! I'd blown a potful for free there. But she didn't seem to notice.
"Maybe. But those who stick their noses in often become victims of deteriorating health."
I chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind. I'm sure my friend's friends will, too. They might even be so disturbed they'll give the problem enough attention to handle it before she gets home."
I'd abandoned the tactic of experimentation for the strategy of increasing the pressure on Willa Dount. Not that I had her fixed for anything, but she knew things I wanted to know. Maybe she would tell me some to get the heat off.
"How about you tell me the how, where, and when of the ransom payment?"
Domina Dount smiled a thin smile. "No, Mr. Garrett." She thought she was covered. If she had any need.
I shrugged. "So be it. Do you need a way to transport the body? I could send my man—"
"I came in a coach. That will do. I'll send my men in to get it."
"No you won't. You have the coach brought. I'll carry it out." She smiled again. "Very well."
As I looked away from the coach, Domina Dount told me, "You will try to deliver Amber in better condition, won't you?"
I took a count of five, letting my irritation with her confidence in the power of her gold cool out. I kept reminding myself that it was just business. "I'll do my damnedest."
She climbed into her coach smiling, sure she'd taken the round by getting to me more than I'd gotten to her. I wasn't so sure she was wrong.
I went inside to see what the Dead Man thought of her.
The fat dead son of a bitch had slept through the whole damned thing.
______XXX______
I finished a long, cold one and wiped my lips. "I feel like killing the keg, but the night has only just begun. Tell Miss daPena the Domina has gone, but if she has the least sense and regard for her life, she won't even peek out a window. We may have reached a stage where people are cleaning up loose ends, real and imagined. I'm going to see Mr. Dotes. I'll slide out the back in case somebody is watching. You lock up tight. Don't answer the door unless you look first and see that it's me."
Dean scowled, but he'd been around long enough to have seen tight times before. He got out a meat cleaver and his favorite butcher knife, both sharp enough to take your leg off without you noticing. "Go on," he said. "I'll manage."
I went out thinking that someday I'd come home and find the house littered with dismembered burglars. Dean was the sort who would handle an invasion neither calmly nor with the minimum necessary force. Bruno and Courter Slauce were lucky that he'd been surprised and unarmed.
I didn't realize that I'd collected a tail until I was three-quarters of the way to Morley's place. It wasn't that I hadn't checked for one; he was that good. He was so good, in fact, that half a minute after I'd made him he knew it and didn't walk into either of the setups I laid to get a look at him.