Thud!

said Sergeant Colon cheerfully. “I was just about to knock!”
    After you’d had a decent earful, thought Vimes. He was pleased to see A. E. Pessimal’s nose wrinkle, though.
    “What’s up, Fred?” he said. “Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Pessimal was just leaving. Carry on, Sergeant Littlebottom. Good morning, Mr. Pessimal.”
    Fred Colon removed his helmet as soon as the inspector had been ushered away by Cheery, and wiped his forehead.
    “It’s heating up out there again,” he said. “We’re in for thunderstorms, I reckon.”
    “Yes, Fred. And you wanted what, exactly?” said Vimes, contriving to indicate that while Fred was always welcome, just now was not the best of times.
    “Er…something big’s going down on the street, sir,” said Fred earnestly, in the manner of one who had memorized the phrase.
    Vimes sighed. “Fred, do you mean something’s happening?”
    “Yes, sir. It’s the dwarfs, sir. I mean the lads here. It’s got worse. They keep going into huddles. Everywhere you look, sir, there’s huddlin’ goin’ on. Only they stops as soon as anyone else comes close. Even the sergeants. They stops and gives you a look, sir. And that’s makin’ the trolls edgy, as you might expect.”
    “We’re not going to have Koom Valley replayed in this nick, Fred,” said Vimes. “I know the city’s full of it right now, what with the anniversary coming up, but I’ll drop like a ton of rectangular building things on any copper who tries a bit of historical recreation in the locker room. He’ll be out on his arse before he knows it. Make sure everyone understands that.”
    “Yessir. But I ain’t talking about all that stuff, sir. We all know about that,” said Fred Colon. “This is something different, fresh today. It feels bad, sir, makes my neck tingle. The dwarfs know something. Something they ain’t sayin’.”
    Vimes hesitated. Fred Colon was not the greatest gift to policing. He was slow, stolid, and not very imaginative. But he’d plodded his way around the streets for so long that he’d left a groove, and somewhere inside that stupid, fat head was something very smart that sniffed the wind and heard the buzz and read the writing on the wall, admittedly doing the last bit with its lips moving.
    “Probably it’s just that damn Hamcrusher who has got them stirred up again, Fred,” he said.
    “I hear them mentioning his name in their lingo, yes, sir, but there’s more to it, I’ll swear. I mean, they looked really uneasy, sir. It’s something important, sir, I can feel it in my water.”
    Vimes considered the admissibility of Fred Colon’s water as Exhibit A. It wasn’t something you’d want to wave around in a court of law, but the gut feeling of an ancient street monster like Fred counted for a lot, one copper to another.
    He said, “Where’s Carrot?”
    “Off, sir. He pulled the swing shift and the morning shift down at Treacle Mine Road. Everyone’s doin’ double shifts, sir,” Fred Colon added reproachfully.
    “Sorry, Fred, you know how it is. Look, I’ll get him on it when he comes in. He’s a dwarf, he’ll hear the buzz.”
    “I think he might be just a wee bit too tall to hear this buzz, sir,” said Colon, in an odd voice.
    Vimes put his head on one side.
    “What makes you say that, Fred?”
    Fred Colon shook his head. “Just a feeling, sir,” he said. He added, in a voice tinged with reminiscence and despair, “It was better when there was just you and me and Nobby and the lad Carrot, eh? We all knew who was who in the old days. We knew what one another was thinking…”
    “Yes, we were thinking, ‘I wish the odds were on our side, just for once,’ Fred,” said Vimes. “Look, I know this is getting us all down, right? But I need you senior officers to tough it out, okay? How do you like your new office?”
    Colon brightened up.
    “Very nice, sir. Shame about the door, ’course.”
    Finding a niche for Fred Colon had been a problem. To look at him, you’d see a man who might well, if he fell over a cliff, have to stop and ask directions on the way down. You had to know Fred Colon. The newer coppers didn’t. They just saw a cowardly, stupid, fat man, which, to tell the truth, was pretty much what was there. But it wasn’t all that was there.
    Fred had looked retirement in the face, and didn’t want any. Vimes had got around the problem by giving him the post of custody officer, to the amusement of all, * and an office in the Watch Training