Crime Scene!
It was unsurprisingly easier to trace the path of a wildly careening coach full of groaning mooks through the streets than it had been to track one single Adventurer on his way to breakfast. Most people hadn’t seen the coach themselves, but that was what gossip was for. A couple of times, I didn’t have to ask before somebody volunteered what they had heard from somebody else who had heard from a guy who’d been there. Mostly it boiled down to, “headed towards the southern docks.
After that, it was simply a matter of using my keen detective senses to find the remains of the coach, jammed into an alleyway. I was helped in that by the crowd surrounding the wreckage. Most of ‘em were trying to dismantle it, either for salvage or just to get the damned thing out of the way, but there were also people just there for the street theater. There usually are.
“Good morning, Shamus,” one of them said as I sidled up. She was an older lady, primly sitting on an barrel while she peeled an orange. “This your fault?”
“Nope,” I said automatically, and then snorted as I realized that it really wasn’t. “I came in late, Senora. What happened in Act One?”
“Oh, it was quite a scene,” she replied. “The coach came barreling through here about an hour ago, with maddened horses up front, fisticuffs on top, and some poor man hanging on for dear life on a rope behind. It must have bounced off of every cabbage cart in the street before the horses tried to go through that alleyway.” She sighed. “They almost managed to get the coach to fit. Orange slice?”