Bitter Gold Hearts

You are allowing yourself to become dependent upon my genius. You should be exercising your own, Garrett.

"We human types are bone lazy. Come on. Pay the rent."

Get the younger Karl. Bring him to me. He appears to be the weakest link in the chain of circumstance. If there is a tumor of guilt in him, I will open him up and expose it. One glimpse of that poor child there should be shock enough to leave him pliable.

"That's all I have to do, eh? Just go drag him out of that fort he calls home and bully him into coming here where you can work him over."

/ cannot do your legwork for you, Garrett.

"Bah!" He was getting a sarky tone on him, Old Bones was. Maybe he'd stub a toe on his Glory Mooncalled theory and get dragged down from the heights of conceit. Oh, how he loves to strut.

There was a foreign object just inside the front door. "Dean!"

He came at a run. "Yes, Mr. Garrett?"

"What the hell is this?"

Actually, I knew what this was. It was my old pal Bruno frozen in midstride two steps inside the front door and leaning against the wall. His expression was one of terror and one hand grasped the air before him. Dean had used that to hang up the sweater and knit cap he wears when he comes in early mornings. That showed me a side of him I hadn't suspected.

"He came to the door while you were out in the country. When I answered he just busted in past me. His nibs must have heard the uproar."

Better than a watchdog. "And nobody bothered to tell me."

"You had things on your mind."

"How'd he get against the wall?"

"I pushed him out of the way. I have to get in and out to do the marketing."

I stepped over in front of Bruno. "What am I going to do with you? You just keep coming back. Maybe drop you in the river to see how fast you swim? I'll have to think about it, because you're getting to be a nuisance." I turned to Dean. "Maybe we ought to get a chain so things like this don't happen."

Dean admitted, "His nibs could have been asleep."

The problem of Bruno's ego slipped my mind as I trudged up the Hill. I had a bigger problem. How the devil could I get to Junior, let alone pry him out? Consid­ering the attitudes of some up there, I might not get close to the Stormwarden's place. The hired guards might be waiting for me.

They weren't. Not obviously. I tramped around the daPena place three times, hoping maybe Amber would spot me before Eenie, Meenie, Meinie and Moe started closing in and I had to show the Hill the flash of depart­ing heels. It didn't work. I had to go. I decided to take a long walk. Sometimes getting the blood moving van­quishes the gloomier humors and the brain will come up with a thought.

The best I could manage in three hours of marching was the notion of sending Junior a letter saying I knew where the gold was and if he would come down to my place we could talk it over. The trouble with that was it might take a lot of time I didn't have. He might dither a couple of days. Or he might not be able to slip his leash. Or the letter might not get to him at all, with highly unpredictable results. And Amiranda's body wasn't going to keep forever. For want of something more constructive to do, I went around to Saucer head's place to see how he was mend­ing. A girlfriend I didn't know said he was keeping just fine and I should get the hell away before I got my eyes clawed out. She was no bigger than a minute but she had her back up and looked like she would give it a damned good shot.

So much for Saucer head. Maybe something had fallen into Morley's lap. Besides somebody's wife or an egg­plant steak dinner. Morley wasn't anxious to accept visitors that early in the day but he was awake so I was allowed to go upstairs. He greeted me with a scowl and no banter.

I said, "You look like a guy who isn't getting enough fiber in his diet. What's the matter? Was there a crop failure in the okra forests?"

He grumbled something that sounded like, "Goddim fraggle jigginitz."

"Would you want your virgin daughters to hear lan­guage like that?"

"Snacken schtereograk!"

Aha! He was cussing, all right, but in one of the Low Elvish dialects. I've learned that when he goes to grum­bling in Elvish he's usually having money troubles. "Been playing the water spiders again, have we?"