Read Online The Bully of Order by Brian Hart - Free Book Online

through the night.”
    â€œDying will solve it.”
    â€œYours or mine?”
    â€œDon’t threaten me.”
    â€œYou’ll know when you’re threatened.” Bellhouse slapped the knife free and went back to sharpening. “It’s never a change of subject with you. Never a ‘Did you hear what happened with the Russian dancer and that Tlingit fella they call Jameson?’”
    â€œFine, why don’t you tell me?”
    â€œThe way I hear it, they had to tie him down to free the slipper from where she’d crammed it up his asshole.”
    â€œNews of the Harbor.”
    â€œIt is fucking news. More than your tin-pail stump speeches.”
    â€œJameson isn’t Tlingit. He’s Quinault.”
    â€œI fucking care.” His eyes brightened, knife raised. Haslett didn’t want him to stand up; he might need to leave if he stood. “It must take a big heart to pump blood to all that fat.”
    â€œIt’s the same as yours, Hank, about the size of a fist and going all the time.”
    â€œI’d like to train mine to turn off while I’m sleeping so it’ll last longer.”
    â€œIf you trained it to listen, you’d never sleep again.”
    â€œYou are a fucking slint, aren’t you?”
    â€œI am something.” He sucked his cigar till it wore a ripe orange ember. “Did you hear about the corpses found bobbing in the slough last Tuesday?”
    â€œDead men?” Bellhouse faked a bout of shivering.
    â€œThey were yours. I put them on the slab, and I know it was you.”
    â€œNo, you don’t.”
    â€œI’d tell you you can’t murder your way into power, but I’d be lying.”
    â€œYes, you would.”
    â€œBeware of the starving masses.”
    â€œI am the starving masses, Sawbones, fucking mutt-hungry.”
    â€œSure you are, except it’s not food you’re after.”
    â€œWisdom might be your salvation.”
    â€œFor all of us, as it should be.” The doctor dropped the cigar on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “Send someone over to my place if you see Ellstrom, would you? His wife and child are camped out there for now.”
    â€œShe’s a pretty lady, that one. Haven’t I heard Tartan talk about her sometimes? Will that be available? Will the shelves be stocked with the wives of doctors?”
    Dr. Haslett couldn’t stop the smile that crept onto his face.
    â€œAnd you’re watching over them? Huzza huzza. Lions and lambs.”
    â€œHardly.”
    â€œSly old devil, all wrapped in lard.”
    â€œSays Lucifer. Thanks for the cigars.”
    Back in the rain, the doctor’s feet were squishing around in his boots. The light was failing behind the clouds.
    He stopped and had another shot with Persimon before he went home.
    â€œMy feet itch, Doc. Where’d you put em, so I can go and give em a scratch?”
    â€œWorms ate them by now, Persimon. Sorry.”
    Persimon, as if he’d spilled a drink in his lap, leaned back and studied the stumps of his legs. “Sometimes I feel like I could get up and walk.”
    â€œWe all do.” And with that the doctor got up and left. He’d had enough, enough watery liquor and dogged bar top. Enough of the hard harbor. He wanted his comfortable home and to see the woman waiting for him there.
    As he walked in the rain, his thoughts returned to Hank Bellhouse. Society wasn’t uplifted by men like him, but eventually he’d bury his chisels and pry and move the population along just the same. A slow grind. With killers comes progress, and with progress come new, more insidious killers to replace the rougher and more real ones that preceded them. This wasn’t the doctor’s first boomtown. The real trouble would set up camp on Bellhouse’s grave, but here he was a sailing man who didn’t even care that the steamers were coming up behind him. To have blind