by James Axler
So Ryan, if not content, had consented to bide his time and scheme. He was at least slightly soothed by Dark Lady’s assurances that Sand was unlikely to harm Doc, nor allow harm to come to him. Not without provocation.
Mebbe he wasn’t as calmed by all that as his companions were. But he had to admit Dark Lady’s assessment of the blonde, anomalously self-named lady Baron dovetailed his pretty neatly.
“Why not drink?” Jak said. He was especially bored and disaffected. Inaction galled him like a pebble in his shoe. He’d tired, at least for the moment, of exploring Amity Springs. And Ryan had strongly forbidden him to venture past the outskirts without permission.
“You know, Jak,” Krysty said.
She shot a worried look at Ryan. She knew he was worn down until the nerves stuck out of his skin like invisible porcupine quills. Even if the others didn’t see it. He hoped.
The door opened. Always alert, Ryan flicked his eye that way.
Then it went wide. He stood and stepped out from behind the table, reaching for his SIG handblaster.
“Good afternoon,” Baron Sand said, sweeping in as grandly as if she owned the gaudy. “I trust everyone’s having a good time.”
“I am now,” Ryan rasped. “I didn’t reckon on you making it so easy.”
“Blasters down, boys.”
Ryan froze as a voice cracked out of the stairway like a whip.
“And girls,” Dark Lady added. She stopped a few steps from the bottom of the stairs.
“Don’t make me use this,” Mikey rumbled from behind the bar, where an eye blink before he had been lazily washing glasses.
Ryan only needed to flick his eye that way to see what it was the two-headed giant was aiming at him and his friends. A giant-ass SPAS 12-gauge battle shotgun, as it happened.
“I was starting to sorta like you folks,” Bob said in a tone less menacing, if not exactly friendly.
“But not enough to lose sleep over,” his twin added.
“What’s going on?” Ryan asked Dark Lady.
She had put on her finery for the evening: off-the-shoulder black dress with its skirt puffed out by petticoats, also black-and-white-striped knee socks, tall lace-up boots with high but blocky heels and little skulls and crossbones picked out on the toes in either steel studs or fake gemstones. And a blaster, still black, in either fingerless-gloved hand. Not hidies, either; a matched set of CZ-75s or some license-built version.
Over her shoulder Ruby aimed a lever-action carbine from a couple steps upstream of her employer. The entertainer had a low-cut bodice and a look on her lovely coffee-with-cream face that said loudly to Ryan that she was gut frightened.
Of the situation. But not to shoot.
“The bitch betrayed us!” Mildred yelled.
“Wait!” Ryan shouted. He knew Dark Lady had a few raw spots, and calling her a name like that dug a dirty thumbnail straight into one.
“Everybody calm right the fuck down and let her have her say,” he said in a voice that even to him sounded as if it came out of a throatful of ground glass. “It’s not like we’ve got anything to lose from that.”
“Thank you,” Dark Lady said tautly. She took a deep breath and visibly composed herself. “Nothing has changed, including my absolute policy that guests of this house are sacrosanct.”
“What about those Crazy Dogs you chilled?” Mildred demanded.
“They broke D.L.’s absolute policy,” Bob said.
“You don’t threaten the lady in her own house,” Mikey growled. “Not and live.”
Sand was standing alone in the middle of the sawdust scattered on the floor for the evening not ten minutes before. Even her two sec men hung back. It seemed to Ryan she wasn’t failing to enjoy being the cause of so much strife.
“Really,” she said, pulling off a long black glove. “Such melodrama.”
“Don’t press your luck,” Dark Lady said.
The baron smiled. She wore a man’s suit of what looked like purple crushed velvet, with a lilac-colored shirt beneath. She also wore Lobo, her sec boss Trumbo’s giant shadow, and a second sec man on invisible leashes two steps behind her—flanking the now-closed door.
“What do you want?”
“A cool, refreshing beverage would be nice,” Sand said. “A mug of your fine dark that Ms. Chavez brews up for you. Cider for my men—the non-hard variety.”
Lobo’s blunt Indian face showed no more response than the statue he resembled. His partner, a wiry Mex-looking guy, medium height, made a small sound of disappointment.
“And drinks for the house on me,” Sand finished with a grand sweep of her arm.
“No one count on a second round,” Dark Lady said. “The baron won’t be tarrying.”
“Stand down,” Ryan said to his companions. He didn’t take his eye off the baron, though he kept his focus soft, so that if either of her chillers made a move, it’d register. He had no more attention to pay to the blasters aimed at him and his people. If they even still were.
“Seems like you’re taking an almighty chance marching in here like this,” J.B. said.
“Why, Mr. Dix? Don’t you think I know Dark Lady well, her qualms and her curiously archaic sense of honor? Not so much different from my own, I grant, but where hers is arbitrary, mine’s capricious.”
She pulled off the other glove. “Also, as a practical matter, and just in case you chose—or choose—to disregard your employer’s clear wishes, please let me remind you we have a hostage.”
“What have you done with Doc?” Ricky asked.
She smiled. She walked up to the boy and briefly caressed his cheek. He held his ground, though it visibly cost him effort.
“Treating him better than would be suitable for you to know,” she purred. “See, D.L.? I do have some scruples.”
“Say your piece,” Dark Lady said.
“Well, as I was saying,” the larger, paler woman said, stepping back out of the kill-zone of the leveled blasters, “we do have your Doc Tanner in hand, back at my Casa de Broma. A truly lovely man, really. He is, as I intimated, well. Doing well indeed. Still—”
She shrugged.
“As I suspect, my narrow-bottomed dear rival here has assured you, wanton cruelty is not my style. I dislike inflicting pain. Unless it’s strictly necessary. Or—for pleasure, but granted that tends to different, in degree if not in kind.
“However, my sec boss—these gentlemen’s superior, Trumbo—feels quite differently. Especially in regard to your friend, inasmuch as you and he chilled several of his men during your nocturnal visit to my home.”
“You don’t sound too broken up about it,” Mildred said.
Sand shrugged. “Trumbo and his men are hirelings,” she said. “I hire them to do things like die so that I and my retinue don’t have to. It’s a dirty job, and they are handsomely paid to do it.”
Wanda June, a short, nervous redhead with disproportionately large breasts pushing out and weighing down the front of her filmy red top, came from behind the counter carrying a tray with the drinks for Sand and her guards.
Sand picked hers up and drank deeply. “Ah,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “My compliments to Leticia. An excellent batch.”
Behind her, the door opened. The smaller guard spun to face it. Lobo just stood with his leg-size arms crossed over his keg-size chest.
Blinking and disheveled, Coffin the coffin-maker shambled into the gaudy. He stopped just inside. Then shaking his wild-haired head and muttering, he stepped the rest of the way in and closed the door.
Sand gestured imperiously. The smaller sec man stepped back. He continued to give the shabbily dressed carpenter the fish eye.
“Isn’t it a little early for the usual, Mr. Coffin?” asked Dark Lady. She still held the blaste
rs. But now their muzzles were pointed upward with her fingers off the triggers and outside the guards.
“Well, I saw the way the wind was blowing,” he said. “And I come in looking to see if, you know, my services are needed.”
He brightened and dug into his pocket. The smaller sec man started to reach for his holstered sidearm.
Coffin’s hand came out clutching his ragged cloth tape. “I was all ready to measure folks, and everything.”
“You seem disappointed at not having had any custom drummed up for you, Mr. Coffin,” Sand said.
“Well, you know. Not wishing harm on anybody here or anything—well, you know, business is business.”
“Indeed,” Sand said. She turned back to Ryan. “And just to confirm what you and your colorful and handsome associates have doubtless figured out, given how astute and quick-witted you have shown yourselves to be, if I do not return, safe and sound, by sunset, I am afraid Trumbo will mishandle poor Doc quite severely. And I hope that you will believe me when I say I want that no more than you do.”
“Ace,” Ryan said. He held his hands out to his sides. “We won’t make a play. Not now.”
“You needn’t belabor the obvious, you lovely curly wolf,” Sand murmured. “And, Mr. Coffin, I have news that might cheer you. If only you, perhaps.”
He had shuffled up to the bar as if nothing was out of the way at all. Mikey-Bob stood behind it with his right hand holding the beefy Franchi scattergun pointed upward by the pistol grip, as if it were no more than a pistol. Once there, Coffin put a loose-soled shoe on the brass rail and turned an inquisitive whiskery look back.
“You might want—as soon as you finish your drink—my treat—to scurry back to your shop and get to work. Because come tomorrow, should matters not proceed as I desire, you may well have more customers than you readily know what to do with.”
“What do you mean, ma’am? Sir? Uh, Baron?”
“Simply this.” She turned a bright, beaming smile back on Dark Lady. “If you do not accept my offer to purchase your entire ville, tonight—now would of course be preferable—at the crack of dawn tomorrow I shall destroy it.”
“You wouldn’t!” Dark Lady said.
“Oh, no?” The baron showed white and even teeth. For no particular reason Ryan suspected they were triple-clean dentures. “Look into my eyes, my love. Do you really think I’m bluffing.”
For a moment Dark Lady’s eyes bored into her like black lasers. Then the gaudy owner dropped her gaze.
“Damn,” Mildred said under her breath.
“Just as a matter of professional interest, Baron,” J.B. said, “how precisely do you mean to go about doing that?”
“That would be telling.” She struck a girlish pose, chin down, finger alongside nose.
“I will point out that all of the interesting scavvy from the days before the Megacull is not necessarily lying beneath our little pink toesies as we stand here exchanging witty repartee.”
She pulled on her gloves with crisp, practiced ease. “I shall await your reply at my funhouse, my dear girl. And you know what silence shall mean.”
She gestured with a forefinger at Mikey-Bob. “Remember those drinks for the house, boys. Just put them on my tab.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Heart in his throat, longblaster gripped tightly in both hands, Ricky Morales faced the predawn flatlands.
Somewhere out there in the dark and lonely, a bird whistled a long, plaintive call.
Ricky and his companions stood with Dark Lady and a dozen or so of the ville’s defenders behind a barricade across the east-west road, improvised out of two wags loaded with crates and barrels. It was a cool morning—night still, so far as Ricky was concerned, at least until he saw the sun or any way a lightening in the sky. Dark Lady wore a black turtleneck sweater over black jeans, which emphasized her trim figure in a way that would’ve distracted Ricky more if his heart weren’t in his throat.
If their employer knew what to expect, she showed no sign. And if Ryan had any speculations, he wasn’t letting on.
“Sun’s coming up,” said Wyatt, a young employee of Sinclair’s wag lot, which lay beyond the barricade and to the left.
Ricky glanced back. The sky above the Deadfall Mountains had begun to lighten.
“Well, the baron’s ultimatum just ran out,” Mildred said, as if anybody had forgotten it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dark Lady said tightly.
“Dark Lady—” Sinclair said. He wore a sheepskin jacket, which even the tropical boy Ricky thought was a bit of overkill, and held a big black Browning automatic rifle in his hands. Ricky was totally envious of the BAR, but he thought the wag yard owner would not look too kindly if he asked to fondle it. Especially not now.
Standing next to Ricky, Jak cocked his white-haired head to one side. “Hear something,” he said.
A heartbeat or two later, Ricky heard it, too: a rumbling growl that seemed to rise like a slow tide all around them. He had no idea which direction it was coming from.
“See something moving out there,” Ryan reported. “Something big.”
Ricky aimed the DeLisle over the crates weighting down the wag bed. It was mostly to reassure himself. While in the dark he didn’t have double good depth perception, he already sort of understood that as far as his eyes could resolve anything, it was out of range for the thrown-baseball trajectory you got from a .45 handblaster round, even fired through a carbine barrel. Then he saw it: a vast humped shadow, seeming to materialize almost atom by atom from the dark ominous air into the scrub. It was unquestionably approaching the ville. But his mind couldn’t quite make sense of the vague form.
“Oh, are we screwed!” Mildred exclaimed.
“Looks like that’s on the agenda, all right,” J.B. drawled.
* * *
“WHEN IS THE sun coming up?” Mystery asked sullenly, turning back from the front window and letting the chintz curtains fall back over. The wispy hanger-on’s round cheeks were brushed with early beard growth too delicate to call stubble.
“Still an hour yet,” Baron Sand said. She sat as if lounging in her grand chair among all the swatches and sweep of fabric and the scattered cushions, with a steaming blue mug of real coffee in her hand. But perched less than comfortably on a chair beside Sand’s throne, Doc could tell she was anything but at ease.
“So why did you roust us all out so early?” Mystery whined.
“Because I want to be ready in case a messenger comes from Amity Springs,” Sand said. She lolled her head around to look at Trumbo.
“Nothing yet, I take it?” Sand asked for the fifth time.
Trumbo shook his head. “Still no word,” he said. “You’ll be the first to know.”
Doc’s sense of honor restrained him from taking any action. Not that such was readily available. Not unless it was to throw his life away to the baron’s brutal sec boss and his men. And little as Doc Tanner might value his own life, he could not do that to his companions.
They valued his life, paradoxically, far more than he. And he valued them.
So I will continue to sleep on kindling and lick gall, as our Japanese brethren say, he thought, and bide my time until opportunity presents itself to take meaningful action.
And if such action involves meaningful sacrifice—so much the better.
“You really think she’s gonna go for it, Mistress?” Trumbo asked, rubbing his jowls.
He stood by the side door that led eventually to the kitchen and the back door of the big, thick-walled house. His gigantic lieutenant, Lobo, loomed silent as always beside him, partially obscuring a gigantic painting on black velvet of a voluptuous nude raven-haired woman kneeling, apparently supplicating a gigantic, muscular demon with extravagant horns. Despite the lurid palette—Doc had long since o
vercome, or had burned out of him, his Victorian revulsion for such subject matter—and naïve presentation, it had been executed with a certain undeniable skill.
Pursing her lips dubiously, Baron Sand slowly shook her head. “It depends in large part on whether she thinks I’m bluffing,” she said. “Which, admittedly, I’ve been known to do.”
“The Dark Lady seems to be of a nature but little inclined to accommodate threats,” Doc said.
He saw no harm in candor, since he doubted he was telling the baron anything she didn’t know about her rival in Amity Springs. During his captivity it had become blindingly apparent the two women had a history stretching back years. Apparently long before either had assumed her current role, or even come to the Basin.
“And that’s the root of the problem,” Sand said with a wry little shrug. “She’s the sort to burn in her house with those beloved books of hers before she’d give in. She’s always been a bitter-ender—unwilling to trim her sails to even the most drastic shift in the wind.”
A blowsy blonde named Arabelle and a spindly mutie with a crest of yellow feathers in lieu of hair sat side by side on a bench by the other window. He rejoiced in the unlikely name of Ike, Doc knew.
Now Arabelle glanced at the grandfather clock standing by the wall across the room from the dining room door.
“It’s five o’clock,” she said.
Sand produced a noise: half growl, half groan. “Well, at the very least the little minx is determined to see my hand.”
She tossed her short hair back defiantly. “So be it!”
“Shall I fire up Old Snort?” Trumbo said with unconcealed eagerness. He ran his tongue over his wide, coarse lips. His murky gray-brown eyes showed what Doc deemed an unholy gleam.
Sand nodded. “Get your team and go,” she said.
“So we get to crush the bitch at last?”
She rounded on him with fury in her pale green eyes. “Don’t ever call her that! Or if you do, call it to her face, which will be the last thing you see. No. Make a show of it. Let her see what we hold over her head.”