"Cook, Glen - Garrett 03 - Cold Copper Tears V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

People who get into a fix where they think I'm their only out are unpredictable. Add weird. But when you've been at the game awhile you think you get a feel for types.

Jill Craight didn't fit.

For a second I wondered if that wasn't because she was an actress who had done her homework and had decided to grab my curiosities with both hands. I can be had that way sometimes.

The clever, cutesy ones are the worst.

I could go two ways here: lie back and forget Jill Craight until I gave her to Pokey, or walk across the hall and consult my live-in charity case.

That woman had given me the jimjams. I was restless. The Dead Man it was, then. After all, he's a self-proclaimed genius.

They call him the Dead Man. He's dead, but he's not a man. He's a Loghyr, and somebody stuck him with a knife about four hundred years ago. He weighs almost five hundred pounds, and his four-century fast hasn't helped him lose an ounce.

Loghyr flesh dies as easily as yours or mine, but the Loghyr spirit is more reluctant. It can hang around for a thousand years, hoping for a cure, getting more ill-tempered by the minute. If Loghyr flesh corrupts it may do so faster than granite, but not much.

My dead Loghyr's hobby is sleeping. He's so dedicated he'll do nothing else for months.

He's supposed to earn his keep by applying his genius to my cases. He does, sometimes, but he has a deeper philosophical aversion to gainful employment than I do. He'll bust his butt to shirk the smallest chore. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

He was asleep when I dropped inЧmuch to my chagrin, but little to my surprise. He'd been at it for three weeks, taking up the biggest room in the house.

"Hey, Old Bones! Wake up! I need the benefit of your lightning intelligence." The best way to get anything out of him is to appeal to his vanity. But the first task is waking him, and the second is getting him to pay attention.

He wasn't having any today.

"That's all right," I told the mountain of cheesy flesh. "I love you despite yourself.Ф

The place was a mess. Dean hates cleaning the Dead Man's room, and I hadn't kept after him so he'd let it slide.

If I didn't watch it the bugs and mice got in. They liked to snack on the Dead Man. He could handle them when he was awake, but he wouldn't stay awake anymore.

He was ugly enough on his own, without getting eaten.

I puttered around, sweeping and dusting and stomping, singing a medley of bawdy hymns I learned in the Marines. He didn't wake up, the stubborn hunk of lard.

If he wasn't going to play, neither was I. I packed it up. I reloaded my mug with beer and went out to the stoop to watch the endless and ever-changing panorama of TunFaire life.

Macunado Street was busy. People and dwarfs and elves hurried to arcane destinations, to clandestine rendezvous. A troll couple strolled past, kids so infatuated they had eyes for nothing but one another's warts and carbuncles. Ogres and leprechauns hastened to assignations. More dwarfs scurried by, dependably industrious. A fairy messenger more beautiful than my recent visitor cussed like a sailor as she battled a stubborn head wind. A brownie youth gang, chukos, way off their turf, played whistle past the graveyard, probably praying the local Travelers would not come out. A giant, obviously an up-country rube, gawked at everything. He had fantastic peripheral vision. He almost batted the head off a pixie who tried to pick his pocket.

I saw half-breeds of every sort. TunFaire is a cosmopolitan, sometimes tolerant, always venturesome city. For those with that turn of mind, it's interesting to speculate on the mechanics of how some of their parents managed to conceive them. If you're of a scientific mind and want to take your data from direct observation, you can visit the Tenderloin. They'll show you anything down there as long as you come across with the money.

My street was always a carnival, like TunFaire itself. But it's all darkness grinning behind a party mask.

TunFaire and I have a ferocious love-hate relationship that comes of us both being too damned stubborn to change.