Book 06 - Red Iron Nights Read Free Page B

yelled some more. The stoop
isn’t protected from the weather.
    Maybe my ears were still ringing. I thought I heard something
like a kitten crying inside. I knew it couldn’t be a cat.
I’d given Dean the word about his strays. He wouldn’t
lapse.
    I heard shuffling and whispering inside. I did some more
yelling. “Open this damned door, Dean. It’s cold out
here.” I didn’t threaten. Mom Garrett didn’t
raise no kids dumb enough to lay threats on somebody who could just
go back to bed and leave me singing in the rain.
    The door creaked open after a symphony of curses and clanking
bolts and rattling chains. Old Dean stood there eyeing me from
beneath drooping lids. He looked about two hundred right then. He
is around seventy. And real spry for a guy his age.
    If he wasn’t going to get out of the way I was going to
walk over him. I started moving. He slid aside. I told him,
“The cat goes as soon as the rain stops.” I tried to
sound like it was him or the kitten.
    He started rattling bolts and chains. I stopped. All that
hadn’t been there before. “What’s all the
hardware?”
    “I don’t feel comfortable living somewhere where all
there is is one or two latches to keep the thieves out.”
    We needed to have us a talk about assuming and presuming. I knew
damned well he didn’t buy that hardware out of his own
pocket. But now wasn’t the time. I wasn’t at my
best.
    “What’s that you’ve got?”
    I’d forgotten the butterfly. “Drowned
butterfly.” I took it into my office, a shoe box of a room
behind the last door to your left heading back to the kitchen. Dean
hobbled after me, bringing a candle. He has decrepitude down to an
art. It’s amazing how incapacitated he gets when he has a
scam running.
    I used his candle to light a lamp. “Go back to
bed.”
    He glanced at the closed door of the small front room, a door we
shut only when there’s somebody or something in there we
don’t want seen. Something was scratching its other side.
Dean said, “I’m wide-awake now. I might as well get
some work done.” He didn’t look wideawake. “You
plan to be up long?”
    “No. I’m just going to study this bug, then kiss
Eleanor good night.” Eleanor was a beautiful, sad woman who
lived once upon a time. Her portrait hangs behind my desk. I go on
like we’re into a relationship. That drives Dean buggy.
    I have to balance the scale somehow.
    I settled into my worn leather chair. Like everything else
around my place, including the house, it was secondhand. It was
just getting adjusted to a new butt. Just getting comfortable, I
pushed my accounts aside, spread the butterfly on my desk.
    Dean waited in the doorway till he saw I wouldn’t react to
the accounts being out. Then he huffed off to the kitchen.
    I popped a quick peek at the last entry, made a face. That
didn’t look good. But go to work? Gah! Sufficient unto the
day the evil thereof.
    Meantime, there was this raggedy old green butterfly. It
could’ve been a beauty before, but now its wings were cracked
and chipped and split, bent and washed out. A disaster. I suffered
a moment of
déjà vu.
    I’d seen its cousins in the islands while I was doing my
five years in the Royal Marines. There’re a lot in the swamps
down there. There’s every kind of bug the gods ever imagined,
except maybe arctic roaches. Maybe creation was handled by a
heavenly committee. In areas where departmental turfs overlapped,
the divine functionaries went to competing. And they all for sure
dumped their bug-production overruns in those tropical swamps.
    But the heck with the bad old days. I’m all growed-up now.
What I had to ask was, what was I doing with the flutterbug in the
first place?
    I was definitely, for sure, guaranteed, not even a little bit
interested in anything involving dried-up old geezers with stomachs
so sour they belched up butterflies. I’d done my good deed
for the decade. I’d rescued the maiden fair. It was time to
get on with things