Cold Copper Tears

36

It was too late. The note was gone. I cussed my blindness. I tore that apartment to shreds looking for something, anything, and found exactly what I deserved to find. Nothing.

So it would be the hard way after all, hunt Jill Craight until something shook loose.

I hoped I wouldn't be hearing from the Sons of Hammon for a while. The way they'd taken it on the chin, I couldn't see them doing anything but backing off to regroup. I just hoped the bastards were as confused as the rest of us.

I got out of there and headed to the area where Tey Koto claimed Jill was likely to be found.

There are pimples and pockets of Hell and Purgatory all over TunFaire. People wouldn't want their daughters hanging out there. The kingpin probably has a finger in all of them. The worst, the biggest, where Chodo's presence is heavier than that of a king, is the Tenderloin, sometimes called the Street of the Damned. If you want it, someone there will sell it. And the kingpin will get his cut.

It's Hell on earth for those who survive that way, used and abused and discarded the instant they lose their marketability. For those who haven't been to the underside and haven't lived with the ticks on society's underbelly, it's difficult to believe people will use each other so badly.

Believe me, there are people out there who'll destroy a hundred lives for pocket change and never know a moment's remorse. Who wouldn't, in fact, understand if you told them they'd done something wrong by addicting a twelve-year-old so she'd cooperate as a thirty-a-day flat-backer.

They understand "against the laws of Man" but not "against the law of humanity." Right is whatever you make it, for as long as you can make it last.

They're out there. And they're the real bogeymen.

And through those mean streets walks a lonely man, a solitary knight-errant, the last honorable man, bent but not broken by the lowering storm...

Boy! Pile it on like that and I might have a future as a street-corner prophet—complete with all the kicks in the teeth that implies.

People don't want to be told to do right. They don't really want to do right. They want to do whatever they want—and whine that it's not fair, it's not their fault, when it comes time to pay the piper.

There are times when I don't care much for my brothers and sisters, when I'd gladly see half of them buried alive.

I don't go into my high holy mode too often, but a trip to the Tenderloin gets me every time.

So much that goes on there is unnecessary. In many cases neither the exploiters nor the exploited need to be doing what they do to survive. TunFaire is a prosperous city. Because of the war with the Venageti and Karenta's successes in it, there's work for anyone who wants it. And honest jobs go begging until nonhuman migrants come to the city to fill them.

A century ago nonhumans were curiosities, seldom seen, more the stuff of legend than real. Now they make up half the population and the bloods are becoming inextricably mixed. For real excitement wait until the war is over and the armies disband and all the war-related jobs dry up.

I'll step down off my box with the observation that, hell though the Tenderloin is, and as vile, vicious, or degraded as its habitues may be, most have some choice about being there.

"Garrett."

I think I jumped about four feet high because my sense of survival had gone into hibernation. I came down so ready for trouble I had the shakes. "Maya! What the hell are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you. I figured you'd come this way."

Was the little witch turning into a mind reader? "You didn't say why." I knew why, though.

"We're partners, remember? We're looking for somebody. And there's some places a man isn't going to get into no matter what he tries."

"You get hiking right back home. I'm going into the Tenderloin. That's no place for—"

"Garrett, shut your mouth and look at me. Am I nine years old and fresh out of a convent?''

She was right. But that didn't make me like it, or incline me to change my mind. It's weird how the symptoms of fatherhood had set in. But damn it, Maya out of her sleaze ball duds and chuko colors wasn't anybody's little girl. She was a woman and it was obvious.

And that was maybe two-thirds of my problem. "All right. You want to stick your neck out, come on."

She joined me, wearing a smug smile filled with good teeth.

I said, "You snuck up on me, you know. You grew up. I can't help remembering the filthy brat I found beat to hell all those years ago."

She grinned and slipped her arm through mine. "I didn't sneak, Garrett. I took my time and did it right. I knew you'd wait for me."

Whoa! Who was talking shit to who here?

Maya laughed. "If we're going to do it, let's go."