Bam! Bam! Bam!

It sounded like someone was knocking with a sledgehammer. I rolled over and cracked a bloodshot eye. I couldn't see a figure through the window, but that wasn't surprising. I could barely make out the lettering on the grimy glass:

GARRETT

INVESTIGATOR

CONFIDENTIAL AGENT

I had blown my wad buying the glass and wound up being my own painter.

The window was as dirty as last week's dishwater, but not filthy enough to block out the piercing morning light. The damned sun wasn't up yet! And I'd been out till the second watch barhopping while I followed a guy who might lead me to a guy who might know where I could find a guy. All this led to was a pounding headache.

"Go away!" I growled. "Not available."

Bam! Bam! Bam!

"Go to hell away!" I yelled. It left my head feeling like an egg that had just bounced off the edge of a frying pan. I wondered if I ought to feel the back to see if the yolk was leaking, but it seemed like too much work. I'd just go ahead and die.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

I have a little trouble with my temper, especially when I have a hangover. I was halfway to the door with two feet of lead-weighted truncheon before sense penetrated the scrambled yolk.

When they are that insistent, it's somebody from up the hill with a summons to do work too sticky to lay on their own boys. Or it's somebody from down the hill with the word that you're stepping on the wrong toes.

In the latter case the truncheon might be useful.

I yanked the door open.

For a moment I didn't see the woman. She barely came up to my chest. I eyeballed the three guys behind her. They were lugging enough steel to outfit their own army, but I wouldn't have been shy about wading in. Two of them were about fifteen years old and the other was about a hundred and five.

"We're invaded by dwarfs," I moaned. None of them was taller than the woman.

"Are you Garrett?" She looked disappointed in what she saw.

"No. Two doors down. Good-bye." Slam! Two doors down was a night-working ratman who made a hobby of getting on my nerves. I figured it was his turn in the barrel.

I stumbled toward bed with the vague suspicion that I had seen those people before.

I wriggled around like an old dog. When you're hung over there is no way to get comfortable, feather bed or creek bed. Just as I was getting reacquainted with being horizontal again, Bam! Bam! Bam!

I told myself I wouldn't move. They would take the hint.

They didn't. It sounded like the entire room was about to cave in. I was not going to get any more sleep.

I got up again—gingerly—and drank a quart of water. I chased it with skunky beer and clung to my temper precariously.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

"I don't make a habit of busting female heads," I told the tiny woman when I opened the door again. "But in your case I think I can make an exception."

She was not impressed. "Dad wants to see you, Garrett."

"Say, that's wonderful. That explains a gang of runts trying to break my door down. What does the gnome king want?"

The old codger said, "Rose, it's obvious this isn't a convenient time for Mr. Garrett. We've waited three days. A few more hours won't make any difference."

Rose? I should know a Rose from somewhere. But where?

"Mr. Garrett, I'm Lester Tate. And I want to apologize—on Rose's behalf—for bothering you at this hour. She's a headstrong child, and having been overindulged by my brother all her life, she's blind to any desires but her own." He spoke in the soft, tired voice of a man who spends a lot of time arguing with a whirlwind.

"Lester Tate?" I asked. "Like in Denny Tate's uncle Lester?"

"Yes."

"It's beginning to come back. The family picnic at Elephant Rocks three years ago. I came with Denny." Maybe I had laundered my memory because Rose had been an unspeakably nasty wench that day. "Maybe it was all the hardware that made me forget your faces." Denny Tate and I went back about eight years, but I hadn't seen him in months. "So how is Denny?" I asked, maybe a little guilty.

"Dead!" barked sweet sister Rose.

Denny Tate and I were heroes of the Cantard Wars. That means we did our five years and got out alive. A lot of guys don't.

We went in about the same time, were barracked less than twenty miles apart, but never met till later, here in TunFaire, eight hundred miles from the fighting. He was light cavalry out of Fort Must. I was Fleet Marines, mostly aboard the Imperial Kimmswick out of Full Harbor. I fought in the islands. Denny rode over most of the Cantard, chasing or running away from the Venageti. We both made sergeant before we got out.

It was a nasty war. It still is. I like it better now that it's much farther away.

Denny saw more of the worst than I did. The fighting at sea and in the islands was sideshow stuff. Neither we nor the Venageti wasted wizards on it. All the flash and fury of sorcery got saved for the struggle on the mainland.

Anyway, we'd both survived our five, and had done part of them in the same general area, and that had given us something in common when we met. It was good enough till we got to know one another.

"So that's why you're a walking arsenal. What is it? A vendetta? Maybe you'd better get inside."

Rose cackled like a hen laying a square egg.

Uncle Lester laughed too, but it was a laugh of a different breed. "Shut up, Rosie. I'm sorry, Mr. Garrett. The weapons are here to feed Rosie's hunger for drama. She believes we don't dare enter this neighborhood unarmed lest the local thugs ravish her."

It was not a good dawn for me. Few of them are. Without thinking, I cracked, "The thugs in my neighborhood have some taste. She doesn't have to worry." Blame it on the hangover.

Uncle Lester grinned. Rose looked at me like I was dog flop she wanted off her shoe.

I tried to gloss over with business. "Who did it? What can I do about it?"

"Nobody did it," Rose told me. "He fell off a horse and busted his head, his neck, and about ten other bones."

"Hard to believe a skilled horseman could go that way."

"It happened in broad daylight on a busy street. There's no doubt that it was an accident."

"Then what do you need me for? Especially before the sun is up?"

"That's for Dad to tell," Rose said. The shrew had a lot of anger in her, anger that was there before I gave her cause. "Bringing you in on it was his idea, not mine."

I knew Denny's old man modestly. Well enough to use his first name if I was the kind of snotnose who calls his friends' parent by name instead of Mister. He ran a very successful cobbler's business. He, Denny, and two journeyman handled the custom and commercial trade. Uncle Lester and a dozen apprentices made boots under an open-end deal with the army. The war had been good to Denny's dad.

They do say it is an ill wind indeed that blows no one any good

Well, I was awake. Hair of the dog and scintillating conversation had reduced the pounding in my head to the tramp of ten thousand legions. Still there was a nagging guilt about not having made time to see Denny before the old gal in black climbed on his back. I decided to find out why the old man needed somebody in my line of work when there wasn't a doubt about how Denny checked out.

"Let me get myself put together and we'll be on our way."

Rose grinned wickedly. I realized I'd fed her a murderous straight line.

I didn't stick around to hear her pounce on it.