Rogue's Rules: A Certain Roguish Charm
Copyright© 2018 by FozzieBare
Chapter 12: In Which the Wolf Dines on Squab and the Inspector’s Blood Pressure Suffers Accordingly
“You are absolutely a stark-raving-crazy mad lunatic, Arin Wolf. Do you know how many men that ass Harian has searching for you right this minute?”
“All of them, I would assume. But there are two things going my way, Inspector. First, they would never expect me to be openly having lunch with you at this very moment. And second, by the time someone tells that fat toad where I am, you and I will have finished this very nice meal and no longer be here.”
Tymson stared at me. He still thought I was crazy, but the ground beneath his metaphorical feet was no longer quicksand. Just deep, sucking, boot-grabbing mud.
He spoke slowly.
“That was not supposed to reassure me, was it?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t. It was a statement of fact.”
Tymson looked as though someone had struck him with a metaphorical mace directly between the eyes. Thankfully only metaphorically. His nose had already been broken one too many times breaking up tavern brawls and similar examples of civic enthusiasm. One more solid blow might have produced consequences.
“Then why did you answer so flippantly?”
“Because you asked the wrong question.”
He considered that.
“What’s the right question, then?”
I leaned back.
“What will Harian think when he learns that the notorious Rogue Arin Wolf, who quite recently gave him a rather dashing neck scar, has come out of hiding to eat his favorite meal, at his favorite restaurant, with Harian’s least favorite member of the Guard?”
Inspector Tymson smiled. Only slightly. But I could read him like a book. Plenty of practice at this point.
I suspected he was enjoying a brief mental picture of Harian’s face turning an impressive shade of red while every favored thug in the room attempted to put someone else between himself and his employer.
“Is it too much to hope he suffers a sudden bout of apoplexy and dies on the spot?”
Time to start explaining the Inspector’s role in this little drama.
“That would be an added bonus. The small part of me that occasionally worries a Rogue may be just a mite vicious would take no small amount of pleasure in it.”
I picked up my fork.
“But no. Sad to say, making him foam at the mouth, metaphorically, I hope, is merely the first course of a meal I intend to make him choke on.”
I considered saying that if Harian was literally foaming at the mouth, then he clearly hadn’t paid his healers enough and all we had to do was wait. I didn’t think he was quite that stingy. Still, one has one’s small hopes.
I filled him in on what Auntie had told me, and he nodded ruefully.
Apparently Harian’s men had returned to the social club not long after being unceremoniously and forcefully ejected. They tore the place apart and then set it on fire.
Thankfully, the fire brigade kept the neighboring buildings from catching, but officially no one seemed to know what had started it.
Tymson understood what that meant.
Auntie had to answer.
If she did not, she would lose the trust that held her organization together.
Normally, wars like this stayed uglier in quieter ways. Target the madam. Try to buy her out. Depreciate the business by having known Independents loiter nearby and conspicuously record who entered and left. Frighten away customers. Lean on suppliers. Make operating expensive enough that eventually someone surrendered.
This was different.
Harian’s lieutenant had begun by promising his men a night at the club with women who were not permitted to say no. It ended with those same men burning the entire place to the ground. It was blatant. It was forceful.
It was a declaration of war.
Between that and Auntie’s warning that the Duke was seriously considering stationing troops in Totar and declaring the city to be in insurrection, even a man of the Inspector’s stature looked chilled.
A man concerned only with the power he had accumulated would have been terrified for his career. The Duke was unlikely to look kindly upon a Guard Inspector who had allowed his city to descend this far into chaos.
Tymson was worried about something else. The people who would suffer when the Duke finally decided enough was enough.
On that, at least, we were in complete agreement.
It was probably the only reason he agreed to hear the rest of my quite possibly foolhardy plan.
I filled him in on the first part of the plan.
He was ... hesitant.
“You want me to storm into a known Independent hangout, arrest everyone who doesn’t run fast enough, destroy all the furniture and booze, and leave one table untouched with a Wolf paw painted on it?”
“I did say you should do it at a time when there’s nobody there except Independents. And if the bartender and staff aren’t actually members, they’re certainly adjacent enough to bring in for questioning.”
Tymson’s expression hardened.
“And I suppose you want me to do what with the prisoners? I am not allowing extrajudicial punishment, Arin. There are lines I will not cross.”
“Oh. When I said bury them, I meant metaphorically.”
That did not improve his expression.
“Put them somewhere Harian’s people cannot reach them. No visitors. No messages. No way for him to discover what happened inside or what they told you.”
I shrugged.
“Which will probably be very little. Right now, they’re more frightened of him than they are of you.”
He gave me a questioning look.
“You don’t care if they talk.”
I grinned. A rather wolfish smile, if I may be forgiven the joke. I was beginning to enjoy this part of the role more than I cared to admit.
“Not particularly.”
Tymson still looked confused.
Then his expression changed.
He had followed my thoughts far enough to see where this particular road ended.
I decided to say it aloud anyway, if only to reassure him that I was not proposing something even more criminal than he already suspected.