No one seemed to be watching as they slipped up the steep, wide steps to the main entrance. The two Angels guarding the main door were standing in pools of light from a pair of oil lamps—which messed up their night vision way more than they provided useful illumination—and kept turning around to look inside at every fresh roar bellowing out the open entryway. After Ryan and Jak all but strolled openly up and choked them both out, it became apparent they couldn’t see anything but the huge lobby area.
The group quickly slipped inside. The lobby was illuminated by a few oil lanterns, which mostly emphasized the shadows and made the space seem bigger and spookier than it was, but it was deserted. All the action seemed to be inside the auditorium itself, to judge by the bellowing noise and sullen orange forge light glowing out the entrances.
They found a utility closet to stash the sentries, bound and gagged with their own clothing. Ryan sent Jak and Ricky off to hunt down a way to get high up and prepare to make serious mischief.
“But what if the door to the stairs leading up is locked?” Ricky asked.
“Did you lose the lockpick kit I gave you?” J.B. asked. “Time to put all that training to use.”
The young men went off. Ryan led the others to a side entrance to the auditorium and peered inside, where they saw Leto kneeling, shirtless, between two giant leaping fires while voices from the crowd of hundreds bayed for his blood.
* * *
“
H
OW DO WE
play this?” Krysty asked. They were crouched behind the top row of seats, more out of reflex caution than any need. “It doesn’t look promising.”
Ryan looked at J.B. “You, Mildred and Doc go left where there are more empty seats and work your way close as you can without getting spotted. Then get ready to back our play.”
“What play is that, exactly?” Mildred asked.
“Reckon we’re going to do the only thing we can under the circumstances,” J.B. said.
“Which is what?”
“Something ballsy and triple stupe,” Ryan said. “If all else fails...”
The two women didn’t try to talk them out of whatever crazy scheme they had in mind. They knew better. Krysty hugged Ryan and Mildred hugged J.B., and then Ryan watched the trio make their way off counterclockwise around the arena.
Down on the floor a tall, lanky guy with a headband and a long gray beard was presenting the case against Leto. “By his own admission, he was captured by blasters working for our enemies. Our longtime blood enemies, who had dared to threaten our sacred domain! But how could one so highly placed among us, heir to the Presidency and Maximum Leadership of all the Desolation Angels, allow mere hired blasters to take him? I ask you, brothers and sisters, how?”
He banged the six-foot wooden staff he was holding in his right hand against the floor for emphasis.
“Treason!” voices shouted from the crowd. They were few and widely scattered.
“Whoever that dude is, he’s got himself a pack of shills in place,” Ryan said.
“Most of the crowd doesn’t seem to be buying it,” J.B. said.
“Mebbe not. But people who run shows like this one don’t generally rely on luck to get the results they want. They set up a machine to manufacture consensus and then crank the handle for all they’re worth. Come on.”
“Blasters?” J.B. asked with one brow lifted.
“Slung,” Ryan decided. “They can blast us into pink mist if we try settling this with weps. So we just march right down and announce ourselves.”
J.B. nodded. “You were right. Ballsy and triple stupe.”
“Did you ever doubt it?”
Initially, no one even bothered glancing their way as Ryan and J.B. walked side by side down a set of stairs that would bring them to the wall around the former rink right behind the captive Leto. Whether for or against, or just enjoying the show, the Angels in their brown vests and colorful patches were totally engrossed in the spectacle and the gray-bearded man’s rabble-rousing oration.
But as Ryan and J.B. continued down the concrete stairs, they started to attract looks. They continued walking as if they owned the place.
“Nobody seems too put out to see us here,” J.B. said.
“They may be used to visitors,” Ryan replied. “And we sure don’t look like Hizzoner’s sec men.”
The prosecutor was spinning a loud tale about how Leto had been trying to undermine his father’s manly policy for some time. Ryan heard some grumbling from the crowd as they passed. Some of the men and women here had apparently fought alongside Leto. The portrait the graybeard drew did not agree with their personal experiences.
Ryan’s, either.
Ryan strode right down to the short wall that separated the concrete floor of the former rink from the stands and clambered over. J.B. followed a beat later.
The graybeard goggled at him. He had gray eyes that had a bit of a bulge to them and wet-looking lips. Possibly he was a spitter when he speechified, Ryan thought. He wore a tan canvas shirt beneath his colors and blue jeans.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “You think you can just barge in here?”
A pair of burly gang members stood flanking the throne where Red Wings lolled. Ryan could tell it was the Angel lord because, along with the fact he was sitting on a fancy elevated chair that was mostly hidden under a variety of stained cushions right at the focus of the entire big room, he had a set of spread crimson wings tattooed across his expansive chest. And even more expansive belly. The guards started to unfold their arms and step forward.
The crowd had begun to buzz with Ryan and J.B.’s unexpected move. He continued to walk toward Leto, who kept his face rigidly turned toward his father.
“I’m here to tell you,” Ryan declared, making his voice ring, “that that’s not the way it happened.”
The orator’s eyes narrowed. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m saying the story you’re telling isn’t straight,” Ryan stated. “Somebody told you wrong.”
The prosecutor drew himself up to his full height. He was as thin as a rail and didn’t look healthy. But he had the presence to hold center stage and was unwilling to yield it to random interlopers.
“Who are you to barge in here to our sacred ceremony of trial and contradict me? How would you know what happened? Were you there?”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “We’re the people who captured him. He was in the middle of leading a battle against the Detroit Police Department that had just routed their west wing.”
“You
what?
” The graybeard stuck his head forward on his scrawny neck and his eyes stood out so much they threatened to pop out of the sockets.
“We’re the blasters he told you about,” Ryan said, coming to a halt beside the kneeling prisoner. The heat of the fires made the already hot night and poorly ventilated auditorium uncomfortable. But at least the scent of whatever kind of wood they were burning masked the smells of several hundred impassioned and not particularly clean Angels sweating inside their vests. “That story you were thinking was far-fetched? It’s the truth.”
The graybeard collected his wits with visible effort, and his prosecutorial task, or nature, promptly took over.
“Blasters!” he screeched. He extended his free hand to point a trembling finger at the intruders. “They are Michaud’s vile hirelings! They’ve come here to add their lies to the traitor Leto’s. Seize them!”
Guards were stationed around the inside of the wall, presumably to keep overly agitated or drunk Angels from climbing over and horning in. In his right-side peripheral vision, which was all he owned, Ryan saw several start forward.
“Blasters now?” J.B. asked.
“Not yet,” Ryan said.
“Your call.”
They stood their ground as the orator yipped about their perfidy and insolence. He had a more than decent vocabulary for a random urban gang member. Then again, Leto was pretty well-spoken, more like an actual baron’s son than a gang leader’s.
Despite the predicament, he had to grin at himself. There was a difference?
As the Angel sec men closed in, the giant suddenly slapped a palm on the arm of his throne with a sound like a blaster shot. The whole arena fell silent.
“No,” Red Wings said in a voice that sounded as loud as a wag-size boulder rolling down a granite slope.
The prosecutor spun to look at his master. “Lord Red Wings?” he asked as if he wasn’t sure what he had heard.
He might have been befuddled by surprise again, or he might have been just a good actor. “Let them have their say,” Red Wings said. He leaned forward. It was quite an operation, given how his astonishing belly fought back. “This is just getting fun.”
He banged his drinking vessel on the other arm of his throne. A skinny young woman with lank blond hair hurried up a set of steps to refill it from a jug.
“That’s a skull he’s drinking from,” J.B. said sidelong to Ryan. “Human, by the looks of it.”
“Didn’t expect him to be quite this big,” Ryan said.
“What are your names?” asked the voice of the thunder.
“I’m Ryan Cawdor. This is J. B. Dix.”
“Did you come here as emissaries for the bastard Michaud? That’d be ballsy. And stupe.”
“That does seem to be the consensus. But no. We separated from Hizzoner’s employment. Tonight, in fact. A little manner of his deciding to reward all the ace work we did for him by throwing us in cells while he figured out how he wanted to kill us.”
“Lies!” screeched the prosecutor. “It’s a trick! Don’t listen to them!”
Red Wings turned a massive scowl on him. He wasn’t actually equipped to do much that wasn’t massive, Ryan thought.
“Shut it, Kyle,” Red Wings said. “This is way more entertaining than your line of bullshit. I want to hear them out. Anyway, that does sound like Michaud. Treacherous puke bag.”
“But—but Lord of the Rubble and King among Angels! I— That is, may I approach and consult with you—” he glanced over his shoulder at Ryan and J.B. “—confidentially?”
“Oh, I still intend to see the little weasel chilled for good and all,” Red Wings said. “But he’s still my son, and an Angel, and he deserves a fair and open trial before we execute him.”
He turned bloodshot eyes on Ryan. “Go the fuck on.”
“Your boy here laid a whipping on the Bone’s sec men. Fried their war wag with his lone missile.”
“The big one?” Red Wings asked with a gleam in his little hippo eyes.
“No. Not the Commando. The smaller one. The BearCat. But it was a solid predark armored car, not one of his junkers with rusty plates bolted on. Anyway, under his command your Angels chased off a bastard number of sec men who were advancing.
“Then we crept up on his command post, took down his guards, grabbed him.”
“And?”
“Don’t listen to him, Lord Red Wings!” a voice sang out from off to Ryan’s right. “They’re still working for Bone! They’re spies, sent to assassinate you!”
Up the side of Red Wings’ dais strode Tommy Ten-Inch of the Dragons, resplendent in a scarlet leather vest and pants.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“That’s not true,” J.B. said.
“Angels! They lie!” Tommy shouted.
“They’re the ones who snatched me! They’re still working for that fat bastard Michaud! He sent them there to chill your Maximum Leader and sow confusion so you could be conquered!”
“That’s strange,” Ryan said.
He didn’t shout, but he knew how to project his voice and make it ring up to the rafters with authority. “We
were
blasters for Michaud. And right before he turned on us, threw us in a cell and tried to chill us, we saw you and him looking real buddy-buddy. You weren’t shaking off the hand he had on your shoulder, that’s for sure.”
He did feel a certain chill at his own use of the word “we.” It wouldn’t do any of them any good if somebody thought to start wondering where the rest of those “we” were.
He could see the color, such as it was, drop out of Tommy’s already sallow face. For a moment the Dragon lord seemed struck dumb. It couldn’t have helped his credibility.
But street gangs, even as powerful and relatively well-organized as the Desolation Angels, were not notorious for their sophistication. When Tommy rallied to start bleating once again that they were lying, a number of voices shouted out agreement, although many also rose to dissent or to yell, “Hear ’em out!”
Now Red Wings, who up until then had acted reasonable and almost genial, decided to flash his mean, irrational streak.
He slammed his hand on his chair arm again. “It’s a lie! Do you think we’re all stupes? Who’d believe a bullshit story like that? Grab ’em, boys!”
Burly Angels stationed around the inside of the fence to keep their rowdy brothers and sisters in their seats started forward. They didn’t flash blasters, but some of them waved baseball bats or trailed lengths of chain wrapped around meaty fists.
“Wait!” Ryan said. Again, he didn’t shout, but he said it loud, and his voice rang with command. The Angel sec men faltered in their steps. “You might want to think twice about that.”
“What’s there to think about, mighty Red Wings?” Tommy shrieked. “They’re assassins, sent to chill you! Chill them before—”
Ryan raised his right hand, the first two fingers raised.
Tommy’s head exploded in a cloud of chunky spray.
Blood and hair clumps spattered the side of Red Wings’ face. His half-clad serving girl squealed and shied away.
A noise like a giant hammer hitting an anvil filled the arena. It rang the rafters like steel bells.
Still spurting arcs of blood from the lower half of his head, Tommy toppled off the dais.
Everybody in the whole Joe had frozen at the sight of Tommy getting half decapitated. The only sound was the echoes of the blaster shot, fading away overhead.
Into that ringing silence, Ryan said, “Now that we have your attention, let me point out that if we’d meant you any harm, Red Wings, you’d be cooling down to air temperature already. Also, we did think to bring insurance.”
Heads started craning, looking for the sniper overhead. Ryan couldn’t afford to look, but he trusted Jak to have found a spot for Ricky to watch for Ryan’s signal, and shoot appropriately from, that wouldn’t easily be spotted.