Wild Country

by Dean Ing

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sandy's journal, Mon. 18 Sept. '06

  Gloves in ribbons. Wish I could afford to autoharvest this corn! Should be finished by Friday.

  Called Ted tonight after Childe asleep. My turn to apologize, his to be tender; but Lordy, that man can be vexatious.' I hinted at availability & he gallantly suggested a tryst. Wonder if he knew I've been having kinky thoughts all day? Are corn lassies an aphrodisiac? He thought my ideas outrageous, but agreed. There must be a million ways to get a husband—have I grown cynical in thinking this may be the best way to keep one? Stay tuned, journal…

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Quantrill spent much of the next day around the breeding pens, too busy to think about the Wardrop party, which had left early. The trained Wardrop ponies had been transported by hovervan to the far southeast reaches of Wild Country Safari. It was really none of Quantrill's affair.

  It became his affair in midafternoon. He heard the emergency hooter, came running toward Marrow's office, saw Jess in a limping trot toward the chopper and beckoning him to follow. Not until Marrow dropped the little recorder in his lap did Quantrill ask what the hooting was all about.

  Jess Marrow sped the turbine's warmup and jerked them away at low altitude, spooking their penned stock. Quantrill knew then that it must be serious. "Hutch maydayed for a rescue chopper; it's on the way from ranch headquarters. Called me and told me to bring you with a recorder."

  Hutch knew Quantrill doubled as a deputy, but: "Do I have to guess why?" The younger man fumed.

  "Old Placidas got hisself thrown out there. Boar came up under his pony. Hutch says. Couldn't shoot at first, since the boar charged Tony Plass and was all over him trailin' horseguts. Hutch nailed the boar, but SanTone may be short one judge."

  "What am I supposed to do, take Hutch's statement?"

  "Placidas's. Hutch claims the old bastard's opened from crotch to navel, but wants to talk. Guilty conscience, I gather."

  "Good God," Quantrill muttered, staring at the recorder.

  Homing in on Hutch's transceiver, Marrow made the trip in fifteen minutes. The rescue chopper was not yet on the horizon when Quantrill bailed out two paces above the dirt, leaving Marrow to set the chopper down.

  Erect as a blond Masai, a tall sunburnt specimen with a clipped mustache leaned on an eight-foot lance, its weighted butt on the ground. The long, barbless point of the lance was bloodstained. The man gnawed his mustache and said nothing as Quantrill raced up.

  At the blond man's feet squatted Cleve Hutcherson, talking to the old fellow who lay stretched out with a folded wind-breaker under his head. Hutch swatted at a deerfly brought by the smell of blood. "You wanted someone with a recorder," Quantrill said.

  The old man's eyes fluttered open, seemed to focus with difficulty. "A lawman," he corrected. There was surprisingly little blood puddling the caliche dirt, considering his gaping abdominal wound. Quantrill had seen that transparent gray pallor on swarthy victims before; he judged that he was looking at a man who would not live much longer without a transfusion. The bloodless lips formed words through waves of evident pain, and Quantrill knelt on both knees to hear. The old man was stem: "ID, please." Even in this extreme, Judge Anthony Placidas was a man who could show caution.

  Quantrill fumbled out his wallet. Three five-dollar pieces and a couple of smaller coins, the entire contents of his wallet, fell out as he showed his Department of Justice shield. Placidas blinked slowly; dropped the wallet on his breast. "Only seventeen dollars," he said, his voice almost a whisper. "You must be one of the honest ones." A spasm of agony. "I'll chance it. Recorder, please." Quantrill displayed the little machine, flicked it on.

  "I, Anthony Somoza y Placidas de Soto, being—ah!—of sound mind and expiring body"—the faintest of smiles from this brave old curmudgeon—"understand and waive my rights to silence."

  From time to time Placidas paused for long, shuddery breaths. The others scanned the skyline for that rescue chopper, but Placidas seemed resigned to dying. "Added to my income with—cash contributions from a loose cartel based—in Coahuila, to the best of my knowledge. Its activities include transport of illegal fuels, foodstuffs, and—ahh—drugs to outlets in—DalWorth, New Denver, and Kansas—Ringcity."

  Placidas breathed more shallowly now, and quickly. Quantrill had heard nothing so far beyond what was already known. "Can you give me names?" He urged.

  "Felix Sorel was—source of my funds," Placidas said, panting. "I used influence—to reduce bail for his people. Sorel knows the bail is to be forfeit. Man named Slaughter is—his favorite bodyguard. Slaughter has special—weapons, they say."

  Quantrill: "There's got to be a regular thieves' highway for that stuff. What's their route?"

  Placidas had trouble swallowing, and for a moment Quantrill thought he would hear no more. Then: "Never knew—details. Sorel—cagey. But conduit always—maintained—through Garner Ranch."

  "Mul Garner?" This from Jess Marrow in disbelief. Marrow knew most of the cattle barons in Wild Country.

  Softly, so softly that Quantrill almost missed it: "The young one." It was as if the mention of youth stirred Placidas toward another train of thought. "My apologies to Marianne," he said, loud enough for the erect Englishman to hear.

  "The fault was mine, sir," said Wardrop, stiffening.

  "Mierda." the old man cursed to himself. "My daughter would like to remember me as an honorable man. Do what you can," he whispered, his eyes boring into Quantrill's. "She is—naive about the likes of—Felix Sorel."

  "I'll do what I can," Quantrill hedged. "You must know names of more of the people in that bunch."

  A pause, then the faintest of headshakes. "Tell Jim Street—his channels are not secure," he said, shutting his eyes against the pain.

  Then the old man relaxed. He was still breathing, but even that effort ceased before the rescue chopper appeared from the north. Quantrill sighed, stood up; wondered if there was a cool breeze in hell for men like Anthony Somoza y Placidas de Soto.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "First client I ever lost on a hunt," Hutch admitted, elbows propped on the table in the lodge at ranch headquarters. In unspoken agreement, the four men who had watched Placidas die waited for the daughter to arrive, drinking the time away. "Them ponies of yours. Lieutenant—the ol' man wasn't used to a hog-trained horse."

  "First rule with a mount trained for Muckna pig." The tall Englishman shrugged. "Leave your horse alone. The judge should've let the mare have her head. And I should have mine examined," he added in furious self-accusation. "What shall I tell Marianne? Why, that I lent her father the means to suicide!"

  "Aw, shit, once he heard what you was up to, you couldn'ta stopped him with hobbles and a Spanish bit," Hutch gloomed. "Crazy old coot, I never seen him happier on a hunt. I think he'd've ridden against Ba'al hisself after you got that first one. He kept askin' me what you was yellin', but I didn't have no idea."

  "Oh. 'Woh-h-h jata!' Just wogtalk, or was in my grandfather's day. It means 'There he goes,' more or less."

  "Well, woh jata for Tony Plass, too." said Jess Marrow, now slightly drunk on his favorite vice, Old Sunny Brook. "Every boar in his prime thinks he is Ba'al."

  Quantrill had done more listening than talking, but now he spoke quickly to divert the topic. "Lieutenant, I don't know what you heard out there, but it might be… um. kinder to Placidas's girl if we pretended he didn't have any last words."

  "Girl! My lad, Marianne Placidas is only a girl the way Horatio was only an infantryman," Wardrop said, draining his glass in salute. "Waaagh, this whiskey—well, sorry. My arse is tough, but my palate is rather tender. As I was saying.

  Marianne can be very, very hard cheese. And I did lend a mount for the old gentleman's madness. The fault was mine," he said.

  "Hope you won't mind sayin' that to my foreman," Hutch put in.

  "My pleasure," Wardrop said, and reached for the bottle with something like mortal resignation.

&nb
sp; Hutch heard the high-pitched snarl first, turning his head toward the window. Quantrill was first out of his chair. "Christ," he said, "it sounds like one of the little Spits."

  But it was not one of the half-scale Spitfire aircraft from LockLever's Battle of Britain complex. It was a gasoline-powered Ocelot roadster, shrilling its turbocharged challenge to anything else on wheels. Useless as an off-road vehicle, on macadam the Ocelot's racing tires could hurl it faster than many light aircraft.

  "That will be Marianne," said Wardrop. He stood up, straightened his shoulders and his hunting jacket, then strode outside to meet his fate.

  The others watched from inside. Marianne Placidas was a surprise to them all, older than they had expected and beautiful without much femininity. Her helmeted dark curls and scarlet neckerchief, her graceful motions, all reminded Quantrill cruelly of the long-dead Marbrye Sanger. She exited the little roadster, whirled back to retrieve a stained overnight bag, recognized Wardrop, spoke quickly with him. Then something in his response snapped her erect posture, and she sought Wardrop's shoulder for a time. More talk; Wardrop gestured toward the ranch clinic and followed her sprint into the place. She did not relinquish her heavy bag.

  "Handsome pair," said Quantrill.

  "Oh shut up, Ted," snapped Marrow, who had been thinking exactly the same thing.

  Quantrill strolled out to look over the Ocelot, a limited-production toy favored by the shuttle set. He noted the metallic plum paint job, the suede seats, the spatters of mud around the enclosed wheel wells, the sand in the driver's footwell. Marianne Placidas had finally been contacted somewhere north of Wild Country Safari; and the nearest source of mud or wet sand in that direction was the Llano River, which meandered past Junction. He pondered the unlikely notion of such a shuttle-setter as Marianne Placidas tooling her Ocelot along a riverbed, then turned away from the car and the question. The motives of the spoiled rich were not his province—or so he thought.

  Quantrill. Marrow, and Hutch returned to the lodge and watched without shame from a window as a succession of LockLever people converged on the clinic. Hunt-party waivers gave the company protection against lawsuits, but Wild Country Safari did not need the anger of a Placidas heiress.

  Two glasses of Old Sunny Brook later, the woman emerged from the clinic with Wardrop in tow, the ranch manager at her left. To the manager she was abrupt. To Wardrop she streamed vitriol, slapping his arm aside as he attempted to carry her heavy bag. Again Quantrill was struck by the small anomaly: the scuffed, mud-stained bag was not the sort of accessory such a woman would carry. Why hadn't she left it in the roadster?

  The answer—that the contents of that bag, retrieved from a Llano sandbank, could have bought several new Ocelot roadsters—never crossed Quantrill's mind.

  Marianne's mascara was smudged, but now, dry-eyed, she stalked to her car and faced Wardrop. Her harangue was designed for the hearing-impaired. "No, dammit, for the last time! If I had never set eyes on you, my father would be alive now!" She swung into the driver's seat, stowed the bag carefully in the passenger footwell.

  Wardrop knelt his long frame to make some plea.

  "I don't know what you can do! Undertake some inane romantic quest in my name?"

  Wardrop still knelt, but as he spoke he seemed to be at attention.

  An expression of fierce joy spread across the elegant cheekbones of Marianne Placidas. "All right, you pigsticking moron, bring me the head of Ba'al, and then I'll forgive you! I don't know if my father would; he died without last rites." Now she was nodding, pleased with her idea. She unwound the scarlet kerchief, flung it at Wardrop's feet. "Here, Ivanhoe, I'll give you a real Wild Country quest—and a token of my affection! Bring me the head of Ba'al," she snarled, and the Ocelot's engine snarled with her.

  The three voyeurs watched her storm off with Wardrop half-hidden in her dust. "She wants the man dead," Marrow observed.

  "That's one hunt I ain't goin' anywhere near," Hutch replied.

  "There won't be any hunt," said Quantrill. thinking fast, "if nobody helps Wardrop. Ba'al hasn't been seen around here for years. Probably dead."

  "No, he ain't," said Hutch. "One of Garner's fence-riders seen his sign this spring."

  "You tell the Englishman that, if you want to see him buried in a cigar box," Quantrill said evenly. "Besides, Wardrop may be a romantic, but I don't think he's stupid."

  "He ain't," Hutch agreed, "but he's got bigger balls than a pawnshop where pig is concerned. The way he'll wait for a boar's charge with not even a sidearm to back up that lance just scares the pure-dee ol' shit outa this child. No, I don't reckon I'll help him."

  But by now. Lieutenant Alec Wardrop was certain that the name "Ba'al" referred not to some mythical Hebrew demongod but to something tangible. Something worthy of the Wardrop steel.

  By nightfall, the body of Anthony Placidas was on its way to SanTone. And by then some fool had shown Alec Wardrop a glossy print of an old infrared photo. It revealed a boar beyond Wardrop's wildest dreams, and all the warnings in the world could not make Wardrop forget the scarlet pennant that symbolized his quest.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The fires of Marianne's fury did not flicker low until after she had found gasoline near Norman, Oklahoma. As long as she stayed on interstate highways, the search for this unusual fuel was fairly easy. It was different on secondary roads, where diesel and electric services were the rule and gasoline a rarity. Marianne knew, in any case, that in a pinch she could fuel the Ocelot at most airports. Gasoline was still a popular fuel for older aircraft and, of course, for special effects used in the entertainment industry.

  She rolled into a swank new Holiday Inn near Tulsa; estimated that she could get a night's rest, with the bag as her bedpartner. She could then arrive in Kansas Ringcity by noon, thanks to the ID transceiver in her roadster. Most of the shuttle set avoided fast cars, when police were so pleased to hand out speeding tickets. Police did not hassle other police, however, regardless of the vehicle type. The last special gift old Tony Plass had given his daughter had been the police ID unit for her car. Settling between clean sheets, she wondered what the old man would have said had he known the Ocelot had become a drug-running roadster.

  Marianne called the SanTone mortuary before breakfast the next day and said she simply could not face the memorial services. Would they cremate the body and turn away reporters' questions about the service? They would. They understood her bereavement; she could count on their discretion in her hour of need.

  Halfway through her outrageously expensive steak and eggs, she had shelved her grief and was planning to buy clothes for the big noon event. Something severe and dark; something suitable and sinister to impress a drug buyer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sandy's journal, Wed. 20 Sept. '06

  Ted's call has disinterred an old nightmare and grafted it to a bad joke! Somehow I always thought it would be a bunch of local vigilantes—but a Brit officer, alone?

  Well, mad dogs and Englishmen! This one has two million acres to cover, aside from WCS land. Ted claims this man Wardrop has foresworn bullets, which means Ba'al will not be enraged by the smell of gun oil. The poor man will grow old searching, if Childe can explain the problem to Ba'al in proper detail. Yes. but will he listen? If a lieutenant will not. why should a pig?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Any striking latina woman who shows up alone in the North Kaycee slums with an off-purple Ocelot and a half-million dollars' worth of poppy concentrate is a woman well worth watching, if you can catch her. The syndicate's contact man passed up the noon meeting on Tuesday, warned that the woman's plum-colored racer contained a police ID unit. Later he lost her on Vivion Road, unwilling to match her speed on public highways. But the syndicate boasted a good comm grid, and they located the Ocelot at the new Ringcity Motel before dark. After that, every move and telephone conversation by Marianne Placidas was monitored until she left Kansas Ringcity.

  Wednesday she tried again. By then th
ey understood, and envied, her use of that ID unit; their channels were that good. This time she placed the overnight bag in full view in the little Italian restaurant. She felt a tidal flush of relief as a little man left the Chianti he was nursing and walked with tiny precise steps to her table. His face was the color of pasta; his suit was expensive, playing down the paunch under his belt; his manner was very courteous. He whisked the bag under the table while sitting down, and something in his face told her not to complain.

  He knew the pass phrase and advised her that the lasagna was good. She ordered it even though she was far too nervous to eat much of it. Marianne needed several minutes of cautious small talk to realize that he was nervous, too.

  He had good reasons for a case of nerves. She was an amateur, though a courageous one; she could still be a plant from the Department of Justice. He had taken a very special commission from another group to pass an offer to Sorel's "man," who'd turned out to be a woman, and a real hotsy at that. Okay, this was soldiering time. This was what his sources paid him for.

  He was wholly unaware of his own fidgets but. watching him, Marianne found her own anxiety dying. Eventually she found herself wolfing lasagna. While he talked he unzipped his beltpouch. He scratched his blue chin. He tapped his forefingers together; cleaned under his nails with his opposite thumb; patted his knees, interlaced the fingers of both hands, scratched his little potbelly, rezipped his beltpouch. Then he did it all again in different order. Marianne was positively at ease by the time he took her bag to the men's room.

  When he returned he was smiling, and his was the kind of smile to unsettle a tummyful of lasagna: the smile of a well-fed rat. He suggested that she repeat what he had told her and paid close attention while she did it. He corrected her several times, too scornfully to suit a Placidas. Then he gave her a thin envelope, told her fair exchange was no robbery, and left with the bag.