Sirian Summer (Nick Walker, U.F. Marshal Book 2)

by John Bowers

  Kline scowled again, took a deep breath and released it noisily. “I’ll get in touch with him.”

  Kline turned toward the door, hesitated, and looked back. For a moment he seemed to be forming words, but nothing came out.

  “You’re welcome,” Nick said.

  Kline nodded and went out the door.

  The moment the door closed, the room buzzed with conversation. Nick turned back to his breakfast, which had stopped steaming, and forked eggs into his mouth.

  “Change of plan, Nathan,” he said. “We’re not going today after all.”

  Nathan pushed his empty plate away, slid his coffee cup down the bar, and took a stool next to Nick.

  “I kind of guessed that,” he said. “When do you think we can go?”

  “Maybe tomorrow, maybe later, I dunno.” He glanced at the boy. “But we are going.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t mind.”

  Nathan glanced at Kristina, whose eyes still reflected wonder at what she’d seen and heard.

  “Man!” Nathan laughed. “I never thought I’d see anyone handle Mr. Kline like that!”

  Nick glanced at him in surprise. “‘Handle’ him?”

  “Yeah, you know—nobody ever talks back to him. He’s the man around here. Him and that asshole Willis.”

  Nick bit a bacon strip in half. “He still got what he wanted. I just made him work for it a little.”

  “Yeah, but you had him speechless there for a minute. I’ve never seen that before.”

  “He’s always in charge,” Kristina added. “He pushes everybody around.”

  Suzanne nudged the girl and silenced her with a sharp look.

  “Mr. Kline keeps this town running,” she said pointedly. “He has his faults, but I don’t want to hear any disrespect toward him. Do you understand?”

  “Mother! I just…”

  “I think there’s an order waiting in the back. Why don’t you deliver it?”

  Kristina’s eyes blazed with anger and she flounced through the door.

  Nathan’s eyes widened slightly, but he avoided Suzanne’s gaze. “What are you going to do with Joel?” he asked Nick, dropping his voice so other diners couldn’t hear.

  Nick frowned, swallowed, and tipped his coffee cup. “Depends. If he wasn’t involved in the kidnappings, then nothing.”

  “But you think he was involved?”

  Nick looked at Nathan and shrugged.

  “At this point, it would be inappropriate for me to comment. But let me ask you something. You know Joel—do you think he’ll come in?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “I’ll be surprised if he does. Even if he’s innocent, he won’t show.”

  “Not even if Mr. Kline tells him to?”

  “No. He’s not afraid of Mr. Kline. He knows that Kline likes his dad, and he knows his dad will cover for him.”

  Nick nodded grimly, forking another bite.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  Nick walked back to his office, greeting several citizens on the street. Sirian Summer was getting close, and people were shopping before it hit, stocking up so they wouldn’t have to venture out during the worst of it. Nick wondered how bad it would get, and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The temperature was already in the triple digits, and it was early morning. Midafternoon would probably see 110 or higher, and Kristina had told him it would get much worse very soon.

  In his office he turned on the air and checked his messages. A message from London acknowledged his report of the Baker killing, and another scheduled the Graves arraignment for the following week. Nick replied with an acknowledgment of his own, then checked his comm messages.

  There was one from Marshal Colwell.

  Nick rang him back immediately. Colwell’s face looked tired in the holo, but he no longer looked angry, as he had the last time.

  “Glad you called back, Walker,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know, I talked to Steve Baker’s widow.”

  “Okay.” Nick wasn’t sure why that was significant.

  Colwell sighed. “I felt like a fool doing it, but I asked her if there was any way he could be involved in the slave trade.”

  “And?”

  “She said no, he wasn’t. But then she said something that I didn’t expect. She told me she has a brother who is. And he lives in Kline Corners.”

  Nick sat forward.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Gerald Graves. You know him?”

  Nick nodded, his heart thumping. “I arrested him yesterday.”

  “You work quick.” Colwell looked surprised. “On what charge?”

  “Kidnapping and human trafficking. Some of the girls I rescued identified him as one of the perps who took them. Did Mrs. Baker say anything else? Why did her husband try to stop me from rescuing the girls?”

  “She wasn’t absolutely sure, but she took a guess, and it makes a lot of sense.” Colwell wiped a hand across his mouth. “Steve was pretty good friends with Graves, she said. When he found out what Graves was involved in, he tried to talk him out of it. Told him it reflected on him and his wife, but Graves wouldn’t listen. Said the money was too good.”

  Nick nodded, trying to put it together. “So…”

  “Mrs. Baker thinks Steve was trying to protect her; if you took the girls back and they identified her brother, then she’d be caught up in the scandal. And it wouldn’t look very good for the U.F. Marshals either.”

  Nick sat back and sighed, despair washing over him. “Christ! I killed him for that?”

  Colwell didn’t look happy, but he nodded. “Yeah, you killed him for that. But, look, Walker…I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, and I don’t see how you had any choice.”

  “You didn’t think so the other day.”

  “It looked bad for you the other day. But I found Yolanda. Like you said, Strong had her hidden in that dorm in the back. Wouldn’t let me talk to her until I threatened to break his head. She confirmed everything you said about how the killing went down.”

  Nick nodded, relieved but far from happy.

  “When are you coming back down?” Colwell asked.

  “I was planning to come today, but something came up. I’m still looking for a perp, and I may have a lead on him. I have an arraignment next week that I can’t miss, and they tell me Sirian Summer is going to start any minute.”

  “Don’t try to make the trip then. Too dangerous.”

  “Well, I may have to wait until it’s over.”

  “Strong’s been pestering me about his car, but I’ll tell him to piss off. I’m mad at him for lying to me, so he can damn well wait. Go ahead and take care of things on your end. Come down after the weather cools. There’s no rush.”

  Nick nodded.

  “I’m going to amend the report to London, tell them the killing was justified,” Colwell added. “And if you need any assistance from me on the slave thing, let me know.”

  Nick considered a moment.

  “You might start by arresting whoever brings in a slave shipment,” he suggested. “It may be legal where they pick them up, but it’s not legal to sell them in your jurisdiction.”

  Colwell’s face pinked, but he nodded.

  “I know you’re right about that, Walker, and I can do that, but it won’t make any difference. I can arrest two men or a hundred, but they’ll just sell them somewhere else. This region is too big to police adequately, so if I can’t stop it, I’d rather have it happen where I can keep an eye on it.”

  “It didn’t look like you were keeping a very sharp eye on it before I came down there.”

  “I wasn’t. But you embarrassed me, Walker. I had gotten lazy, figuring it was too big for me, so I just ignored it. I won’t do that again.”

  Nick grinned, feeling a little better.

  “I appreciate that, Marshal. Thank you.”

  Nick crossed the street to the sheriff’s office and stepped inside. Roy Blake was seated at his desk, cleaning a slug
pistol. He looked around, saw Nick, and scowled. He laid the weapon down and picked up a smoldering cigarette, squinting against blue smoke that layered the air.

  “Graves ain’t here!” he said before Nick could speak. “Mr. Kline said you okayed his release. Is that right?”

  “His temporary release,” Nick said. “He can go to work, but he sleeps here. Kline tell you that?”

  “Yeah. Just as long as we’re clear—I only let him out because Mr. Kline said you okayed it.”

  Nick nodded.

  “What do you know about Joel Graves?” he asked.

  “Gerald’s son.”

  “What kind of kid is he?”

  “Like most kids his age. Full of piss and vinegar.”

  “He ever cause you any trouble?”

  “Had to bust him a couple times for speeding through town on Friday nights. He damn near ran over an old lady once.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I need to talk to him. You see him, hold him for me. I told Mr. Kline to send him in, but I have a hunch he may ignore the order.”

  “What do you want him for?”

  “Just want to talk.” Nick shifted his cowboy hat and turned for the door. “You see him, hold him. And call me.”

  Nick walked out the door.

  Chapter 18

  As a U.F. Marshal, no matter where you are posted, you will occasionally be shocked at the sheer brutality of which some people are capable. The farther you get from civilization, the more shocking these examples will be.

  Page 242, U.F. Marshal Handbook

  Half a mile south of Village 22, Joel Graves and Slim Owens slogged through waist-high cotton plants, their rubber boots squishing in the soupy mud. It was still early, but the heat was already rising; the night had been short, only three hours, and Sirius A was huge near the horizon. Sirius B was on the rise, and in a few hours the vast cotton fields would suffer a double bombardment from the binaries.

  Cotton is a hardy plant, and thrives in hot weather, but in Sirian Summer it would burn without protection; Joel and Slim were starting the foggers, which would inundate many square miles with a cooling mist through the heat of the day. It wasn’t hard work, but it was demanding—if even one fogger got overlooked, several dozen acres of valuable crop could be damaged or lost in a single day. The foggers drew from an underground aqueduct laid years before, the aqueduct fed by giant pumps at strategic locations around the ranch.

  Two hours after Sirius B-rise, the two men marched out of the mud onto a dirt farm road, stamped the clingy mud off their boots, and turned toward Joel’s battered pickup, parked a hundred yards away. Joel wiped sweat off his brow with a sleeve while Slim upended a water bottle and drank deeply. They reached the pickup and tossed their tools in the back.

  “Ain’t today the day?” Slim asked.

  Joel grinned. “Sure is. Payday.”

  “You got one picked out?”

  “I got six or seven picked out. Any one of ‘em will do. Just depends on who’s easiest to catch.”

  They got into the pickup and Joel started the motor. The pickup was an old wheeled vehicle, unimpressive but reliable. Joel released the clutch and the pickup jolted forward.

  “Hope nobody sees us this time,” Slim said. Slim Owens was almost seventy, shriveled and leathery, with curly, dirty-blond hair and a scraggly beard the same color. He had arrived on Sirius as one of the last criminals ever exiled by the Federation; he’d never told Joel what his crime had been, but Joel had a pretty good idea—Slim had a taste for young girls. Maybe that was why he’d never married.

  “Doesn’t matter if anyone sees us,” Joel told him. “What the hell they gonna do about it? They’re serfs, for god’s sake.”

  Slim’s eye twitched.

  “Just the same,” he said.

  “Which one?” Slim asked, peering through the bug-splattered windscreen of the old pickup.

  “Red dress,” Joel murmured.

  The pickup sat half hidden by tall reeds that lined the last cotton field before the village. A marshy depression ran parallel to the field; the ground was dry and hard, the reeds brown and withered, but they screened the pickup if no one was looking too closely. The rising wind swirled dust eddies through the village, limiting visibility, but in the depression two girls were blissfully oblivious to it all, sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing some kind of game with dice.

  “What about the other one?” Slim asked, his voice sounding hoarse.

  Joel frowned. “She can’t be more than ten!’

  “Looks like twelve to me. Don’t matter anyhow, she’ll bring double what the older one will.”

  Joel shook his head in disgust.

  “You can come back for her later,” he said. “The red dress is the one.”

  The two men watched another few minutes, then Joel started the truck.

  “You ready?” he asked Slim.

  “Born ready.”

  Joel lurched the pickup forward and down the incline into the depression. The girls looked up in curiosity, but they saw farm pickups all the time. They returned to their game. Joel drove on past them, into the edge of the village, and turned around. As he started back, he slowed as he approached the two girls.

  Then he stopped.

  Slim leaped out of the pickup with surprising nimbleness and crossed the ten yards to the girls in two or three seconds. Before the girls could even get to their feet he was on them, wrapped his bony arms around the older one, and lifted her off the ground.

  The girl struggled and screamed, kicking wildly in panic; the little one also screamed, running to get clear of the ugly white man, then turned and began screaming her friend’s name. “Lupe! Lupe!”

  Slim reached the pickup and threw the girl onto the front seat like a sack of grain, leaped in beside her and slammed the door.

  Joel gunned the pickup and surged up out of the depression.

  The girl continued to scream, but Slim, grinning with pleasure, held her arms to prevent her from scratching.

  Joel turned onto an intersecting farm road and poured on the speed. Soon he was racing through the swirling dust at eighty miles per hour, throwing a rooster-tail of dust behind him.

  “Slow down!” Slim warned him. “We got plenty of time. That hovervan won’t be coming through until noon.”

  Joel checked his mirror and nodded. “I know. But the sooner we get there, the more time we have with the girl. I been looking forward to this all week.”

  * * *

  Nick stopped in at Dr. Taylor’s office and chatted with the girls some more. Most of them had agreed that going back to Texiana was not in their best interest, that they should probably seek residence in some of the serf villages around Kline Corners. Nick suggested they wait until he had arrested all the men responsible for the local kidnappings, and promised it wouldn’t be long. He was still talking to them when his porta-phone rang.

  “Marshal Walker?”

  It took Nick a moment to place the voice. When he did, he felt his blood pressure escalate.

  “This is Garland Matheny. I told yew I’d call if I heard that another slave transport was coming in?”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Well…I just heard this mornin’ that one is due in tomorrow. Comin’ down from Texiana. I woulda called yew sooner, but I didn’t find out until today.”

  Nick thought fast. He’d told Colwell he wasn’t coming down until after Sirian Summer, but this was a major development. Would he have time to get there before the transport arrived?

  “Do you have any idea what time the transport will arrive? What time do they usually come in?”

  “I’m not sure what time they hit town, but they usually start sellin’ girls around noontime.”

  “You’re sure it’s coming in at Paradise Gulch?”

  “That’s the word. Hope that will help.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Matheny. I appreciate the call. I’ll see what I can do.�
��

  “Awright. Good luck, Marshal. I hope yew nail them bastards.”

  “Do me a favor, will you? Contact Marshal Colwell in Dusty Springs and give him this information too.”

  “Won’t do no good, Marshal. That sumbitch won’t do anything.”

  “Call him anyway. I’ve been talking to him about this, and he might take it more seriously now.”

  Matheny sounded skeptical. “Awright, if yew say so.”

  “Thank you.”

  Matheny rang off, and Nick stood thinking. Texiana was due north of Kline Corners, and three of the girls he’d rescued said they had been sold to the transport as it was traveling to the Outback. He pulled the three of them aside.

  “Do any of you know exactly where you were when those men sold you to the transport?”

  Constanza nodded.

  “It was where the main highways join up,” she said. “The hovervan was following the main road, and that’s where we waited for it.”

  The other two nodded agreement. They had been kidnapped at different times, but the routine had been the same.

  “How far from here is that?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe two hours.”

  Two hours. At full speed, that would be about four hundred miles, but most cars didn’t travel much over 150 knots.

  “How many men were in the hovervan?”

  “Two,” Constanza told him.

  “Three,” Julia said.

  “Two,” Consuelo said.

  Nick hurried back to his office, planning furiously in his head. He remembered seeing the highway from Texiana on his trip to the Outback, but at the time it hadn’t meant anything to him, so he wasn’t sure how far it was from Kline Corners. If the girls were right, he could be there before noon if he started right away. If he parked there and waited, he might be able to flag the hovervan down on the pretext of selling them another slave. There would probably be two men in the van, no more than three, according to the girls. If he was careful, he could surprise them. Matheny had said they were tough customers, but he would have to risk it. He would love nothing more than stopping that hovervan from ever reaching the Outback.

  The rental car from Green’s Garage was still parked at his office. Nick threw some equipment in the back, shoved his U.F. Marshal badge in his pocket, and just to be safe, slipped on an anti-laser vest under his shirt. The fuel tank was half full, so he drove down to the garage to top off. Nathan came out of the garage.