Read Online Low Town by Daniel Polansky - Free Book Online Page B

“I wasn’t here.” The manager bowed slavishly and the argent went into the folds of his robe, a vacant grin plastered across his face. I returned it but my gaze never left the target. A few seconds’ pause to work his nerves, then I turned and walked out of the building.
    This sort of operation would better be done with three more people, one to watch each exit and an extra just to be safe, but I wasn’t worried. It seemed unlikely my man would run the risk of quitting work early. I could picture him inside the dusty pen trying to convince himself his fears were unwarranted, that I was just some ignorant
guai lo
, and after all he had been diligent, careful with the body,had even gone so far as to clean it with the acid he had stolen from work. No one had seen. He would finish out his shift.
    I sat on a barrel in an alley across from the main entrance and waited for the shadows to lengthen. Back when I was an agent I had once crouched outside a whorehouse for eighteen hours dressed as a beggar until my quarry stumbled out and I had the chance to smack him in the head with a crutch. But that was when I was in fighting trim—patience is a skill that withers quickly when not used. I resisted the urge to roll a cigarette.
    An hour passed, then another.
    I was grateful when the bell above the door clanged, announcing the workday’s end, and the Kiren filtered rapidly out of the mill. I pushed my aching body up from its perch and took up a spot in the back of the crowd. My target towered over his fellows, an advantage in shadowing him that I didn’t need but would take. The horde headed south, filtering into a dilapidated drinking house marked by Kiren characters unfamiliar to me. I sat outside and rolled a tab. A few minutes trailed away with the smoke. I stubbed out the butt and headed inside.
    The bar was the kind common to heretics, wide and dimly lit, filled with rows of long wood tables. A surly, inattentive staff brought bowls of bitter green
kisvas
to anyone with the money to pay. I took a chair against a back wall, conscious of being the only non-Kiren in the place but not letting it nettle me. A server with a face that had been hit with an oak branch walked by, and I ordered a draft of what passes for liquor among the foreign born. It came with surprising speed, and I sipped it while searching the room.
    He sat alone, unsurprisingly. His kind of depravity tends to mark a man, and in my experience people can practically smell it. The other workers wouldn’t describe it that way, of course. They would say he was odd, or quiet, or that he had rotting teeth and didn’t shower—butwhat they meant was there was something
wrong
with him, something you could feel if not name. The really dangerous ones learn to hide it, to camouflage their madness amid the sea of banal immorality surrounding them. But this one wasn’t smart enough for that, and so he sat alone on the long bench, a solitary figure among the clumps of laughing workmen.
    He pretended not to notice my attention but downed his
kisvas
with a speed that belied his ease. Frankly, I was impressed with his composure—I was surprised he even had the presence of mind to follow through with his normal after-work routine. I checked my bag for the straight razor I kept attached to the canvas. It wouldn’t be much use as a weapon, but it would come in handy for what I planned after. I gave him a wave. He blanched and his eyes flickered away from mine.
    It was time to step this up a notch. I drained the remnants of my
kisvas
, grimacing at the sour aftertaste, and moved from the back table to join my prey. As he realized what I was doing, his mouth shriveled up and he stared down into his drink. The men around him glared up at me anxiously, dislike of their compatriot contending against the instinctive antagonism of similarly colored folk toward an intruder of a different one. I disarmed them with a wide smile, half laughing, feigning drunkenness. “
Kisvas hao