The light down there, such as it was, came from a window at the far end of the corridor. It was high up in the wall, showing that the level wasn’t fully underground. Naturally, it had heavy security mesh over it—making it ideal for a prison cell.
They were taken to a room and thrust inside. It was about the size of a modest office and had solid walls, not partitions. More light, yellowed by late afternoon, came in from a window. It was barely enough by which to make out the room’s contents: a pair of cots, a table, a bucket in the corner.
“Use that,” the black sec man said as the white one closed the door behind them. “Hizzoner likes to keep things nice and neat.”
His partner used a lighter to spark up a lantern on the table. The smell of burning kerosene filled the air.
“You trust us with a kerosene lamp?” Mildred asked.
The guards looked at each other and laughed. “You wanna check out by setting yourself on fire, feel free,” the white man said.
“No one’ll hear you scream,” the black guard said. “Rooms are soundproof.”
They stared at the captive women. Mildred did not like the way they did that. Krysty thrust her chest forward. Her large breasts bounced obligingly beneath her shirt.
“You boys don’t have to run off, do you?” she said.
“Krysty!” Mildred said.
Krysty turned to her and shrugged. “Sometimes you got to go along to get along, you know?”
And with the eye turned away from the two SWAT men, she winked.
“I guess you’re right,” she said, forcing herself to smile as she looked back at the guards. “Anyway, we don’t often get a chance to see what
real men
are like.”
The black guard rubbed his cheek inside his helmet. “I dunno,” he said. “Michaud says leave them in good shape.”
“We don’t have to leave marks,” his partner said, turning and locking the door from the inside with a key from a heavy brass ring. “Unless they like it rough.”
“I like it rough,” the black guard said.
“Leave the face alone, then.”
“No need for that,” Krysty crooned. “We’ll rock your world in ways you never imagined.”
She ran her tongue sensuously over her full lips.
One of the guards growled low in his throat. They both started forward.
“Not so fast, boys,” Krysty said. She managed to make her voice sound at once playful and commanding, like a kitten with a whip. The pair actually hesitated.
The redhead turned sideways and bent slightly, moving her hips suggestively.
“You want it from the back?” the white one asked.
“You’ll see, won’t you? Silly. Our hands are tied.”
“What’s wrong with that?” the black guard said. “You can still show us a good time like that.”
“But think about how much better we can make it if we can use our hands, big boy.”
I cannot believe anybody could fall for this, Mildred thought.
But Krysty’s voice, her whole manner, was pure sex. And Mildred had already realized that Bone did not recruit his elite SWAT troopers on account of their big brains.
The white guard was licking his unpleasantly fleshy lips. But his black companion, who was an inch or two shorter and an inch or two wider, looked doubtful.
Krysty glanced over her shoulder at Mildred. Taking the hint—somehow—Mildred turned her more substantial buttocks toward Krysty. The two began to slide up and down each other, back to back.
“Cut us both free,” Krysty purred, “and we’ll put on a show for you you’ll never forget.”
“And we
guarantee
you’ll have a happy ending,” Mildred added as seductively as she could. The pure sex thing had never been her department.
“All right,” the black one guard. “I’m in. Man, I’m in!”
“Good man,” the other said. “What’s the harm? We’re Detroit SWAT. What can a couple of bitches do to us?”
* * *
T
HE FIVE COMPANIONS
sat on the floor of the windowless cell in the light of a single kerosene lantern. The table it rested on and a bucket in the corner were the room’s only furnishings. If you could call them that.
“Well,” J.B. said, “it’s not like Leto didn’t warn us.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. He could’ve said that clearly the captive Angels heir was self-interested and trying to sow doubt. But that would be making excuses. “I just didn’t figure on the bastards turning on us quite this fast.”
“So this isn’t how it ends, is it?” Ricky asked. He started sounding disconsolate and passed all the way to almost giddy optimism by the end of the short sentence. Ryan marveled at his resilience sometimes.
“I mean, we’ve got a plan. Don’t we? Don’t we?”
“Nope,” J.B. said. “Every line comes to an end eventually. Looks like this is the end of ours.”
“Oh.” Ricky hung his head. It struck Ryan as mostly an attempt to hold back tears.
“Aw, I’m just jacking with you, kid,” J.B. said. “Takes more than this dreck to keep us in. These boys are double stupe.”
Doc shook himself, as if shedding the internal mists that sometimes enveloped his mind.
“It is the common concomitant of arrogance,” he announced. “An occupational hazard of being a powerful baron. Or his sec boss.”
Ricky had perked right up at the Armorer’s dry admission. Now he looked at his friend Jak, who slouched against a wall looking comfortable, which was surprising, because he tended to be claustrophobic in manmade surroundings.
“So how come they never shucked you out of that jacket?” Ricky asked. “It’s, like, a lethal wep in itself.”
“Not like touch,” Jak said.
“Yeah, they don’t like to frisk you much, either. You still got some weps concealed, I bet.”
Jak just smirked.
“
I’m
not fishing for them,” Ryan said. “I don’t like to touch him, either. Not with those razors sewn into the collar and who knows where else.”
Ryan inched across the few feet that separated him from J.B. The bare concrete floor was cold on his tailbone. Starting to feel uncomfortably hard, too. Ryan didn’t have much padding down there.
J.B. obligingly turned his back toward Ryan, who pushed in close. J.B.’s hand began to fiddle with his belt buckle.
Ryan saw Ricky’s eyebrows raise.
Apparently J.B. noticed, too. “You know it’s not like that, kid. And Krysty would kill me,” he said.
“What is with you today, J.B.?” Ryan asked. “You practicing to start up one of those predark comedy clubs I read about?”
“He is peculiarly well qualified,” Doc said. “When he kills, he really kills.”
“Now everybody’s a comedian.”
“Just circumstances, I reckon, Ryan,” the Armorer said. “Gotta laugh at life sometimes.”
“That is kind of a new philosophy for you.”
“It’s a hard old world,” J.B. said. “A man’s got to adapt to survive. There. Got it.”
Ryan immediately scooted back away from him. Unless he had no choice whatsoever, he didn’t trust any kind of blade that close to his balls. Even if it was relatively tiny, like the hidden one the Armorer had just extracted from his belt buckle.
Even a man as good as Dix needed room to work, anyhow.
Across the room Jak held his hands up before him, shook them to restore circulation and lazily stretched like a cat.
In another moment the Armorer was free and deftly snipping Ryan’s bonds. “Still got the lock pick in your boot heel?”
Ryan grinned.
* * *
J
AK SHIED BACK
from the corridor junction. “Sec men coming,” he said.
“How many,” mouthed Ryan, who was right behind him with one of the albino’s leaf-shaped throwing knives in his hand. Ryan was not the knife fighter Jak was, but he was skilled enough to like his chances in a scrape, even with a little knife, and especially when he had the advantage of surprise.
Jak held up two fingers. His pale skin helped Ryan make them out in the gloom. Hizzoner sure believed in sparing every expense on illumination down here in his prisoner holding area. Some light, faint and gray with the dying of the day, filtered in through the small windows at either end of the cross corridor. Otherwise, there was nothing but the odd kerosene lamp, turned low to do no more than help a body not trip on anything.
Ryan couldn’t help wondering what use the original architects had had in mind for this basement. The rooms had stout walls on all sides. They made ideal cells.
He only hoped they’d find Mildred and Krysty in one of them.
He came up alongside Jak. Obligingly, the smaller man lowered himself in a deep squat, allowing Ryan to bend above him to take a quick look.
Yeah, two of them, not that he doubted their scout. Still twenty yards away, but walking briskly, the guards wore full DPD SWAT riot armor and held side-handle batons in thickly gloved hands. One tall, one short. For some reason both had their bulletproof face shields down. How they could see through the tinted plastic to walk that fast was a mystery to Ryan.
Maybe they were just that familiar with the dungeon. It served him anyway, because it helped him avoid being spotted.
He gestured the others back so that he and Jak could press against the wall, right by the mouth of the other hallway. He took the closer spot. He’d take the taller sec man. The faster-moving Jak could handle the other.
It felt good to be striking back against the bastards.
“Don’t kill yours,” Ryan said from the side of his mouth. “We need help finding the women.”
The steps got louder. Ryan listened carefully.
Then he struck. He flowed around the corner, grabbing the nearer guard’s wrist and twisting it up behind his back as he slid behind the man. He brought the throwing knife up to the unarmored side of his captive’s neck.
“No chill!” Jak whispered urgently.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ryan froze. His nostrils dilated. He sniffed.
Now he noticed what Jak had smelled a few seconds earlier. It was a pleasant aroma well-known to him.
His heart dropped to his boots. Now he noticed the bright lock of hair escaping from beneath the black helmet. It stirred gently, as if in a breeze.
“Ryan?” Krysty’s voice was muffled by the polycarbonate visor. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, lover.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” the other riot helmet said in Mildred’s voice. “We were just looking for you boys.”
Ryan hastily pulled the knife away from Krysty’s carotid artery. She turned, flipped up her visor and planted a kiss on his lips.
J.B. stepped up to give Mildred a quick hug. Mildred gave him a quick peck on the cheek before he could escape.
“Always the romantic, John,” she said. “I’ll fix you later.”
“How?” Ryan asked.
“You know,” Krysty said with a shrug.
“Testosterone poisoning,” Mildred said. “Too much tumescence drawing too much blood from too-small brains.”
“So they...passed out from oxygen deprivation to the small brain and you took their shit?”
“Oh, no,” Krysty said brightly. “One of them asked what they had to fear from us bitches, so we showed them.”
“Not that they’ll be in position to take much advantage of the lesson,” Mildred said darkly. “And we won’t have to worry about them raising the alarm on us.”
“You didn’t—” Ryan began.
“Oh, no,” Krysty said. “We just chilled them.”
“Somehow I find that less disturbing than the thought of you castrating them.”
“They didn’t piss us off enough to even consider that,” Mildred said. “Bone, however...”
“Later,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to shake the dust of this place off our heels before somebody comes down here and finds us.”
“What about our stuff?” Ricky asked.
“No time.”
“But my DeLisle! My uncle—”
“Won’t shoot itself if we get caught and chilled.” He led off back up the corridor they’d just come down. “But how are we set for weps?”
“Krysty and I found a Remington 870 and an MP5,” Mildred said. “Plus ammo.”
“Great,” Ryan said.
“You want them?” Krysty asked.
Ryan shook his head. “Keep them. Give the batons to J.B. and Doc, though.”
The corridor ended in a stout metal door that bled the last light of day feebly in through a grimy, fly-specked window, which was naturally covered with security mesh.
Ryan reached for the push bar.
“But the sign says Emergency Exit—Alarm Will Sound If Opened!” Ricky squeaked.
Ryan turned and gave him a look.
“Oh,” Ricky said. J.B. reached up from behind and gave him a brisk tap atop the head with his fingertips.
“Might it be locked?” Mildred asked.
Ryan transferred the look to her, then he grinned and pushed the bar.
The door opened. It stuck a little, from evident long disuse, but it did open. No alarm sounded, lacking power to produce one.
“This is the back way out,” he said, pushing it open enough to see up the short flight of stairs and beyond, north, to where what looked like the remains of town houses a couple of hundreds yards away, past a parking lot that still seemed to serve that function for a handful of DPD.
Jak promptly peeled out. “We reach cover among the buildings and then circle south,” Ryan said.
J.B. hefted the riot baton speculatively in his hands. “We could use a few more blasters,” he said a bit wistfully.
Ryan grinned. “I got that covered.”
* * *
T
HE STURDY MAN
in the canvas apron and his gawky but similarly clad assistant turned suddenly away from the long table when Ryan cleared his throat.
“Good evening,” Ryan said, holding his hands out to the side.
J.B. stood next to him in the outer verge of the circle of yellow lamplight in which the DPD armorers worked. He had the riot baton tucked into his belt at his side and was doing his level best to look as innocuous as possible. To Ryan that made him look even more menacing, but these two didn’t know him as well as Ryan did.
The older man’s shoulders dropped as tension flowed out of them. He smiled.
“Oh, it’s you two,” he said. “You kind of scared me there.”
“Sorry,” Ryan said. “You know us?”
“Who doesn’t know Hizzoner’s outlanders?” He adjusted his round wire-rimmed spectacles to look at the two better. The specs looked a lot like J.B.’s.