Red Iron Nights Read Free Page B

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 dearer my heart,