48. Alar #2
They were dockside muscle, used to soft marks who froze, and I was neither soft nor frozen.
I moved before the bored one finished his sentence.
Going inside the cudgel's swing instead of away from it, I took the arm and turned it until the man folded with a scream, and I pushed him, stumbling, into his friend.
Then I had the boot dagger in my hand and assumed a fighting stance.
"I have had a very bad month and taking it out on you two would give me great pleasure, but I don't want to soil my nice coat, so run now, before I change my mind and decide that I'm willing to sacrifice the coat for the pleasure of killing you."
I hadn't pulled out my gun, but my coat was open now from the struggle, and they could see the barrel. The fact that I was holding the dagger instead of reaching for the gun communicated exactly what I wanted them to believe, that I would relish killing them up close and personal.
It was a bluff, but it worked.
They decided I was more trouble than my purse was worth, and they did the smart thing and ran.
After a visit to yet another tavern, I finally found someone who knew who I should see about the grey stuff.
"The one you want is named Sivon," the guy said, and he gave me a direction and a warning in the same breath, which was more honesty than I'd bought from anyone else that night.
The address took me off down the last of the lit streets and toward the water, into the part of the docks where the freight warehouses stood shoulder to shoulder and blocked out what little there was of the sky.
The street lamps became more infrequent and then quit altogether, and the only light came from a few grimy bulbs burning over loading doors and the cold spill of a floodlight somewhere out over the container yards.
Everything down here was steel and concrete gone soft with salt, corrugated walls streaked with rust, chain-link sagging between the lots.
The smell got worse the closer I came to the water.
Salt and diesel and tar, the low chemical stink of fuel oil, and under it all the sweet rot of fish and cargo that had sat too long in the heat.
The pavement was slick with runoff and grease that caught the light.
Somewhere a generator droned. Somewhere else a bottle broke, and a man laughed, and both sounded ominous.
I kept to the middle of the road, away from the black mouths of the alleys between the warehouses, my coat open and my hand never far from the gun.
There were men in the shadows of the loading bays, still as posts, only the glow of their smokes betraying their locations.
I walked without rushing, with a swagger that projected confidence and, hopefully, the men watching me would decide that I was too dangerous to be worth their trouble.
The place, when I found it, was a freight office wedged between two warehouses, a low concrete building with a single lit window and a metal door gone orange with rust.
I knocked loudly, as if I was expected. Something scraped back from the other side, a bolt or a bar, and the door opened on a man who filled most of the frame.
He was big, taller than me by a full head, shoulders that filled the doorway, and the kind of face that even a mother would be scared to look at. He gave me a thorough once-over, from my boots to my face and back down to the coat, lingering where it bulged over the gun, and said nothing.
"I'm here to see Sivon," I said. "I was told he could help me with something."
"Lot of people want to see Sivon." He didn't move out of my way. "Told by who?"
"A man in a tavern who took my money and didn't give me a name for himself. If that matters to you, I can go and spend the rest of it somewhere friendlier."
He weighed that, and weighed me, and I let him, keeping my hands loose and open and my face bored.
"Let him in, Domar," a voice came from inside the room, dry and unhurried. "If he came all the way down here he's either got coin to buy what he needs or a death wish, and I can satisfy both."
The big man stepped back, just a little, and I turned sideways to pass him, close enough to smell the smoke on him. He then shut the door behind me and put the bar back across it, which I didn't like at all but didn't let it show.
Sivon was not who I'd expected. He was an older man, mid-fifties, with sharp eyes, an old burn scar up one side of his neck that vanished into his collar, and broad shoulders that were rounding with age.
He sat behind the desk with his hands flat on it and looked at me the way the big man had, only slower and with a great deal more going on behind it, reading my clothes and my hands and the way I stood, adding it up.
Whatever total he reached seemed to satisfy him, or at least not to worry him.
"Wait outside, Domar," he said, without taking his eyes off me. "This won't take long, and this gentleman isn't going to be any trouble." A thin pause. "Are you?"
"No," I said. "I'm here to buy, not to make trouble."
"So I see." He nodded at the door, and behind me I heard the big man grunt, haul it open, and step out.
The room was clean.