I marveled at my surroundings. Once I got out of Black Cross Lane I saw elfish women sweeping and washing their stoops and walks and the streets in front of their buildings. I saw their men folk manicuring greenery. It was the evening ritual.

The elfish do have their dark underside. They have little tolerance for breed offspring. Poor kids.

13.

It was thoroughly dark before I got home. I spotted several shooting stars, supposed by some diviners to be good omens and by others the opposite. One gaudy show-off broke up into lesser streaks.

Dean let me in. "d.a.m.n, that smells good," I said.

"It will be," he promised. He smiled. "I'll bring you a beer. Did you learn anything useful?"

"I don't know." What was this? He wasn't himself. "What are you up to?"

He gave me his kicked-puppy look. I think he practices it. "Nothing."

"What happened while I was gone?"

"Nothing. Except Maya came. In fact, she just left. When you knocked."

I grunted. She had obviously been working on Dean. "You'd better count the silver."

"Mr. Garrett!"

"Right. Any sign of Miss Craight?" Walking home I'd decided she wouldn't show. What was in it for her? I was pretty sure she was a gal who didn't take a deep breath without calculating her return on investment. Such a shame; all that beauty wasted.

"Not yet. She did say it would be a late dinner."

How late was late? "I'm going to freshen up." I went upstairs. A wash would help clean the body, but it couldn't do anything for the stains on my soul.

Jill was there when I came back down. She had charmed old Dean again. He was letting her set the table. Unprecedented.

They were gossiping like old friends.

I said, "I hope that's not me you're ripping."

Jill turned. "Hi, Garrett. Nope. You aren't that lucky." She smiled. There wasn't any more heat in it than in a forest fire.

"Had a good day?"

"The best. Business was marvelous. And I talked to my friend. He apologized for the trouble he'd caused me. He hadn't expected it. He's taken care of it. I won't be bothered again."

"That's nice." I checked her over. I tried not to be too obvious. She could set dead men panting. Her fear had gone. "I'm glad for you. But poor Saucerhead will be brokenhearted."

Dean gave me a disappointed scowl. Couldn't I get my mind off that for five minutes?

Are you kidding? I'm not dead yet. But I took his hint. It wouldn't be worth the trouble, anyway, just to get turned down. Sour grapes.

She got along with him better than she did with me. For us it was one of those things where n.o.body could think of anything to say.

Garrett tongue-tied around a gorgeous blonde? That did wonders for my self-esteem. But Dean's ducks were so good they made up for the lack of crisp repartee.

The main trouble was that Jill Craight wasn't about to tell me anything about Jill Craight. Not about her now, not about her then. She was slick, changing the subject or just sliding away from it so smoothly I didn't realize what she was doing until she'd done it several times.

Giving up on her left me only one area of expertise where I could talk extensively: Garrett. And a little bit of Garrett goes a long way.

I guess the high point was the wine she'd brought. It was an import. It was almost good.

To me wine is just so much spoiled fruit juice. It all tastes the same, with rare exceptions. This was the rarest. It was as good as the famous TunFaire Gold, which meant I drank most of my gobletful without sneaking off to wash the taste out of my mouth with a slug of beer. The ice maiden was on holiday, but this thing wasn't going anywhere. I figured as soon as dessert was over we ought to put it out of its misery.

Jill was more a lady than I thought. She got us through the difficulties. We helped Dean clear the dead soldiers, then I walked her home.

We'd gone less than a block when I missed something you can't miss if he's in the neighborhood. "What's happened to Saucerhead?" It wasn't like him to wander off.

"I let him go. I don't need him now. My friend straightened things out."

"I see." Especially why she was willing to let me walk her home.

I didn't say much after that. I watched for shooting stars but the G.o.ds had closed the show. We said good night outside her apartment building, a refurbished tenement. Jill did not ask me in for a nightcap and I made no attempt to fish an invite. She gave me a sisterly peck on the cheek. "Thanks, Garrett." She marched inside. She never looked back.

I considered the newly risen moon with misdirected animosity. I muttered, "Sometimes you have nothing at all in common." Not even a language where the words mean the same things.

I turned toward home and almost fell over Maya.

14.

She'd come out of nowhere. I hadn't heard a sound. She laughed.

"What were you doing with that woman, Garrett?" She sounded like Tinnie asking the same question. What was this?

"We had dinner. You object?"

"I might. You never took me to dinner."

I grinned. "I didn't take her, either. She came to the house." I'd call her bluff. "You want me to take you someplace cla.s.sy? The Iron Liar? You got it. But get yourself a bath, comb your hair, put on something a little more formal." I chuckled. I could just picture the Liar if Maya walked in. They'd scatter like roaches in sudden light.

"You're making fun of me."

"No. Maybe going at it the long way around, telling you to think about growing up." I hoped she wouldn't be one chuko who fought that.

She sat down on somebody's steps. The moonlight was in her face. She was pretty under the grime. She could even be a heart stopper if she wanted to be. First she'd have to come to terms with her past and decide she wanted to attack the future. If she kept drifting she'd be another burned-out wh.o.r.e living off garbage in fifteen years, brutalized by anyone who wanted to bother, protected by no one.

I sat down beside her. She seemed to want to talk. I didn't say anything. I'd said enough to make her defensive.

"n.o.body watching your place anymore, Garrett. Vampires or anybody else."

"Probably pulled out when they heard about s...o...b..ll and Doc."

"Uhm?"

"The kingpin had them put to sleep."

She didn't say anything while that sank in. Then, "Why?"

"Chodo doesn't like people who don't listen. He put it out to lay off me and they didn't."

"Why would he look out for you?"

"He thinks he owes me."

"You get to meet a lot of people, don't you?"

"Sometimes. Usually they turn out to be the kind I wish I didn't know. There are some bad people in this world."

She was quiet for a while. She had something on her mind. "I met some of those today, Garrett."

"Oh?"

"Those guys you said to run a Murphy on. I used Clea because she can get a statue excited. They almost killed her." She got graphic with her account of the torture of a thirteen-year-old.

"I'm sorry, Maya. I had no idea they were...What can I do?"

"Nothing. We take care of our own."

I had a bad feeling. "And the two Smiths?" The Doom wouldn't have been kind.

She mulled over how much to admit. "We were going to cut them, Garrett." That was a mark of the Doom. "Only somebody already did it."

"What?"

"Both of them. Somebody took all their business oaf. They'll have to squat like women."

This was getting weird. They don't make eunuchs anymore, even as a criminal punishment.

"So we just broke their legs."

"Remind me not to get on the bad side of the Doom. Did you find out anything?"

"Garrett, if those guys weren't walking around they wouldn't exist. They didn't have anything but their clothes. You should see the woman at the Blue Bottle. A cow."

"Weirder and weirder, Maya. What do you think?"

"I don't, Garrett. You do that."

"Eh?"

"You said do a Murphy on two guys watching that place. Tonight you go strolling over there with Tawny Dawn Gill, she gives you a peck on the cheek, I figure you're working for her and you know what's doing."

"I didn't even know that name. She told me it was Jill Craight. You know her?"

"She was in the Doom when they took me in. Never told the truth when a lie would do. Had a different name every week. Toni Baccarat. Willi Gold. Brandy Diamond. Cinnamon Steele. Hester Podegill. That's the only one that sounded dumb enough to be real. She lied all the time about who her family was and the famous people she knew and all the stuff she'd done. She mostly hung out with the younger girls because everybody else had her figured out and wouldn't listen to her s.h.i.t."

"Hold on. Hester Podegill?"

"Yeah. One of her thousand and one names." She looked at me odd.

There were Podegills off in a back room of my mind. Neighbors in the old days. Bunch of daughters. A couple of them turned up pregnant at thirteen. I began to recall the talk and the way people had shunned the parents...Third floor, that's where they'd lived. And the little one, a blonde named Hester, would have been about ten when I left for the Marines.

But the Podegills were dead.

The only letter my brother wrote in his life he wrote to tell me how the Podegills died in a fire. The tragedy really broke him up. He'd had it bad for one of the girls.

That letter had taken two years to catch up to me. By the time it did my brother had been in the Cantard a year himself. He's still down there. Like a lot of others, he won't be coming home.

Maya asked, "That name mean something to you, Garrett?"

"It reminded me of my brother. I haven't thought about him for a long time."

"I didn't know you had one."

"I don't now. He was killed at Flat Hat Mesa. Ask me sometime and I'll show you the medal they gave my mother. She put it in a box with the ones for her father, her two brothers, and my father. My father got it when I was four and Mikey was two. I used to be able to remember Dad's face if I tried hard. I can't anymore."

She was quiet for a few seconds. "I never thought about you having a family. Where's your mom now?"

"Gone. After they gave her Mikey's medal she just gave up. Nothing to live for anymore."

"But you-"

"There's another medal in that box. It has my name on it. The Marines delivered it four days before the Army delivered Mikey's."

"Why? You weren't dead."

"They thought I was. My outfit was on an island the Venageti invaded. They claimed they killed us all. Actually, we were out in a swamp, living on cattails and bugs and crocodile eggs while we picked them off. Mom was gone before the news got back after Karenta recaptured the island."

"That's sad. I'm sorry. It isn't fair."

"Life isn't fair, Maya. I've learned to live with it. Mostly, I don't think about it. I don't let it shape me or drive me."