Read Book 06 - Red Iron Nights for Free Online

what with his wild eyebrows, mustache, bulbous
nose, and buggy eyes. At least he didn’t try to handbill me
or want me to sign a petition.
    Might as well push my experiment to the limit. “Guy called
Bishoff Hullar.”
    “Who? I don’t know no Bishoff Hullar.”
    “Runs a taxi-dance scam in the Tenderloin.”
    He looked at me queer, sure I was lying or crazy. Then he
frowned. “A nominee! Of course.”
    “Say what?”
    “A nominee. A stand-in who hired you for somebody
else.” He began nodding, grinning. Somebody was out to get
him. He liked that idea. After all these years, somebody was out to
get him! Somebody was taking him seriously! He was about to be
persecuted!
    “Probably so.” I’d never spent much time
wondering about Barking Dog. Occasionally I’d given thought
to whether or not he believed what he said. It was common knowledge
his claims about his family were exaggerated. None of his
conspiracy claims had borne fruit, and that in a town where
everybody who was somebody wanted scandal ammunition to use against
other somebodies. Nobody tried to shut him up.
    “What did they nick you for?” What the hell. I
wasn’t going to get much wetter. And the damp was toning down
the miasma around Amato.
    “Sixty days.”
    A comedian. “What was the charge? It’s a matter of
record. Wouldn’t take me an hour to get the story.”
    He mumbled something.
    “What?”
    “Public nuisance.” He didn’t boom this time
either.
    “They don’t give you two months—”
    “Third complaint.” His excitement over being
persecuted had faded. Now he was embarrassed. He was a convicted
public nuisance.
    “Even so, more than a few days seems excessive.”
    “I kind of got carried away at my hearing. Fifty-five days
were for contempt.”
    Heavy time, even so. The magistrates I knew were pretty
contemptible. They ran their courts like feeding time at the zoo.
It would take some barking to aggravate any of them.
    I recalled outrageous claims I’d heard Amato make.
    Yep. He had run into somebody with no sense of humor, somebody
who didn’t know Barking Dog was a genuine loony, harmless in
the extreme. Nobody else could get away with the stuff he said.
“Maybe you were lucky,” I told him. “You get
somebody really pissed, they could toss you into the
Bledsoe.” Part of the charity hospital is a madhouse. You get
stuffed in there, you won’t get out unless somebody outside
springs you. There are plenty of stories about people who have gone
in and been forgotten for decades.
    Barking Dog went pale under his tan.
That
scared him.
He started to leave.
    “Hang on, old-timer.”
    He settled, resigned. He thought the threat had come. The
Bledsoe. Just sitting there beside him, talking to him, I’d
begun to feel like a candidate for the cackle factory. “You
won’t talk, eh?”
    “No.”
    I shook my head. Water from my hair dribbled into my eyes.
“I’m getting paid, which maybe ought to be enough, but
I’d sure like a hint why I’m spending time with
you.”
    I suspected that, on reflection, he’d decided that
he
didn’t know. A cold drizzle can be a great cure
for a case of the fantasies.
    My thoughts flitted like drunken butterflies, trying to make
sense of what was happening. The only answers I found were that
this was a practical joke, or a mistake, or a sinister plot, or
something. It couldn’t be the job advertised.
    I heard the Dead Man: “Three marks a day and
expenses.” I hadn’t thought to ask if we’d taken
a retainer.
    “What’re your plans?” I asked. “Right
now.”
    “You’re going to get wet, son. First I’m going
to go see if I still got me a place to live. If I do, then
I’m going to go buy me a bottle and get drunk. You want to
hang around, wait for me to sneak off and make contact with your
boss’s secret enemies, you just go ahead.” He spoke
with conviction when he mentioned getting drunk. That
wouldn’t be the first thing I’d go for after leaving
jail, but he was maybe