Red Wings sat glaring down at him and J.B. as if he’d never seen them before this moment. The booze that was slopping unheeded out of his carelessly canted skull goblet had dulled his legendarily keen wits.
And maybe more than booze. The Angel lord’s skin looked unhealthy, gray and blotchy. Rumors suggested he’d stumbled into a nuke hotspot some months back and had never been the same since. Mildred had suggested he’d picked up a dose of one or another of the hell brew of extremely toxic heavy metals that tended to find their way into fallout, some of which were known to cause mental and physical deterioration.
Taking advantage of the crowd’s confusion and Red Wings’ stunned inertia, Ryan stepped right up to the captive. Drawing the Bowie he’d appropriated from Chief Armorer Dominguez’s stock of dead men’s weps, he cut the bonds holding Leto’s hands behind his back.
The tall, cadaverous prosecutor pushed himself forward with the aid of his staff. His gray beard and eyebrows bristled impressively. He pointed a trembling finger at Ryan.
“Seize the intruders!” he shouted. He had balls, Ryan had to admit, though maybe not much sense.
Leto sprang to his feet, ignoring what had to be fierce pins-and-needles sensations from his formerly pinioned arms, and shouted, “Wait!”
The Angel sec man had started moving forward again. Evidently the prosecuting Angel—or his violently capricious boss—frightened them more than a sniper hidden up in the heights. But glancing around, some of them actually looked relieved to obey the heir to the throne’s voice of command.
Ryan held up his left hand, open. That was a signal for Ricky to hold his fire. For now.
“One thing I’ve got to say,” J.B. said, taking his glasses off and polishing them with apparent calm. “You do know how to stir the shit, Ryan.”
The one-eyed man shrugged. “It’s a gift.”
“Angels!” Leto cried. “Listen to me! We all know Tommy was a dirtbag. Why would we trust him?”
“He was our ally!” a voice cried from the crowd.
“He was a shithead,” a female voice cried. “We never shoulda got tight with him.”
“You all know me,” Leto said. “You know that I’ve always lived to serve the Angels—and my father.”
That stirred the old man to life.
“You ungrateful little shit,” he rumbled. “You’ve been interfering with everything I’ve tried to do for years. Always want to take the pussy way out. But this is the Detroit Rubble. And the only language anybody understands here is a bullet in the gut and a boot in the face!”
“What about us?” Leto said. “Are the Angels mindless, violent stupes?”
He turned and waved an arm around. “You all know what we’ve built here. You all helped to build it.”
“Yeah,” Red Wings said, “and the bastards want to kick it all apart. Just for laughs.”
He was sounding lucid again, but his flab jiggled like jelly with what Ryan couldn’t tell was palsy or suppressed rage. Likely both.
He reminded Ryan of a volcano about to blow. It gave warning signs, just as the gang king was.
“If we try to fight everybody—the whole Rubble by ourselves—we lose. Anybody can see that. And it is possible to reason with them, at least some of them. We had an alliance with the Dragons, in spite of what a turd their boss was. We have a hands-off agreement with the Felonious Monks. And we had a bunch of other gangs join in to fight off the DPD invasion, don’t forget. Do we want to try fighting them all, too? That’s not a fight we can win. You know that plain as I do.”
“What I don’t get, kid,” said Red Wings, almost calmly, “is why you’d let these coldheart blasters talk you into trying to get us to talk with that puke-eater Michaud and his bastard lapdog, Bone.”
“Because they said to me the very things I was starting to see for myself, Father. If we and DPD continue to fight, we just wear ourselves down. And both of us lose.”
“You have no right to speak!” the prosecutor shrieked. He seemed miffed at not being the center of attention anymore.
“Shut it,” J.B. told him, “or I’ll shut it for you.”
He made no move for his Remington 870P, which, like Ryan’s M4 carbine, was slung muzzle down over his back. But the graybeard’s eyes widened, and his mouth shut.
Red Wings scowled as if thinking it all over. Then slowly, ponderously, he began to shake his huge head.
“You always preach the pussy way,” he growled. “You’re always trying to get us not to fight. You call that being a nuke-eating Desolation Angel?”
“Yes,” Leto said.
But his rock-steady calm could no longer contain his father’s drunkenness and rage and incipient insanity.
“You’re not fit to be my son!” Red Wings roared, rising to his full impressive height.
He had to have been at least six-six, Ryan judged, and big as his belly was, his chest and shoulders were bigger. The Angels lord may have grown a few layers of lard over it, but he was still a moving mountain underneath. Looking at him standing there like a mad and raging god, Ryan didn’t doubt he had the strength to take on a dozen DPD armored police—and win.
In the hot, humid, riverfront night, his enormous torso glistened like a glacier and ran visibly with sweat.
Ryan held his left hand up again. If Ricky got itchy and dropped the hammer on Red Wings, the whole arena was liable to go crazy with bloodlust for the interlopers. Leto was not likely to join in.
As calculated policy, if nothing else. What better way to cement his position, and to have all the Angels behind him, than avenge his father’s treacherous murder by outlanders who admitted having worked for Hizzoner?
Red Wings was losing it completely. “Chill the little fucker!” he screeched, his voice rising to the point of actual shrillness. Spittle sprayed out over his beard. “You’re not my son!”
“Then fight me,” Leto said, almost quietly.
Somehow that penetrated both the rising hubbub in the Joe and his father’s mad fury. The bloodshot eyes blinked.
“What?” Red Wings said, his voice calm. He almost sounded reasonable again.
Ryan wasn’t fooled. He’d seen how fast the Angel boss could flash from mood to mood.
Stay alert, he told himself. He didn’t bother telling the man at his side. He knew there was no need.
“If we can’t live together, Father,” Leto said in a voice that was firm but full of regret, “then one of us has got to go. And I claim the right of trial by combat. I challenge you!”
“No need for this, Red Wings,” the prosecutor stated, turning to his lord and master. “He’s already on trial.”
But Red Wings held up a hand. The skin was mottled with discolorations. Ryan didn’t think they were all due to age.
“I accept,” Red Wings said.
“At least name a champion!” the prosecutor said, almost frantic now. “No need to risk the whole succession—”
Red Wings stepped off his dais and backhanded the prosecutor across his gray-bushed mouth. The man flew backward eight feet and lay in a crumpled heap.
“Fuck that!” Red Wings bellowed. “No man fights my fights, you toad!”
He glared at his son and heir like a bull about to charge.
“Man to man, face-to-face,” Red Wings said. “No blasters. No mercy.”
He drew a knife from a scabbard at his hip, though the weapon was more an actual shortsword. It looked to Ryan like something an old-days gladiator would use, with a stout, two-edged tapering blade a good eighteen inches long.
In his vast paw it looked like a penknife.
“Leto,” Ryan said.
The young man stood confronting his monstrous father from ten feet away. He didn’t flinch from the blade any more than he had from his bellowing fury. He looked back over his shoulder at the one-eyed man.
Ryan flipped the big Bowie into the air, caught it by the tip. Then he stepped up to Leto and offered it.
“Take this,” he said. “I can always get another one.”
Leto looked from the knife, then up at Ryan’s lone eye. He grinned and accepted the worn wooden hilt.
“Thanks,” he said.
He turned to face Red Wings.
“I’m ready, Father,” he said.
And from somewhere way high up behind Ryan’s left shoulder, a cry rang through the steel rafters of the Joe Louis Arena.
“I found the taints who sniped Tommy! Let’s get ’em!”
Chapter Twenty-Six
As the two combatants began to circle each other before the throne and between the fires, the Angels’ prosecutor stirred. He raised his narrow head. His mustache and the middle part of his beard were dyed pink with the blood pouring from his flattened nose.
But he still rallied enough to yell, “Grab ’em now! Take ’em alive if you can!”
“No blasters!” Ryan shouted. “Not unless you have to!”
He still held hopes of settling this, which meant they didn’t want to go indiscriminately chilling Angels, even to defend themselves.
With alarming alacrity Red Wings bull rushed Leto. The younger man ducked a backhanded sword slash that would have taken his head off his neck and danced aside.
He had a shot at his father’s belly—a big target. He didn’t take it. A stab would’ve been more dangerous to him than his opponent; it would never get through all that flab and be able to penetrate the triple-tough body wall, Ryan knew from experience. Plus it would risk tying his own blade up long enough for Red Wings to get in a lick of his own. Just a hammer fist from one of those ham-size hands could compression fracture a man’s neck, if not stave in his skull. A slash would at least start him bleeding, and a knife fight usually went to the man who weakened second....
Ryan had no chance to second-guess the blond-haired young prince of the Desolation Angels. He and J.B. had troubles of their own.
In the form of ten or so hulking Angel sec men closing in on them with clubs ready to beat them down.
* * *
T
HOUGH
J
AK HAD
warned him of Angels coming up the stairs to their platform that gave onto the catwalks crisscrossing above the arena floor, far below, the warning cry made Ricky jump.
The worst thing was, neither young man could do anything about the Angels closing in. They needed to keep their exact location secret as long as possible. Although Jak was a master of the stealthy chill, having a body tumble down the stairs with its throat cut—or just blood falling down the well like rain—would clue the other Angels pretty quick where their targets were.
The only thing they could do was stay where they were—Jak crouched inside the door, Ricky lying on his belly on the steel-mesh platform—and hope for the best.
The yell made Ricky turn reflexively. He saw a startled bearded face peering at him over the outside landing of the stairs. Then the man was whipping a Mini-14 carbine to his shoulder to blast Ricky, and the youth’s scoped Husqvarna was aimed exactly the wrong way.
The Angel shrieked and dropped the blaster to clutch at his bearded cheek, where the steel tang of one of Jak’s concealed throwing knives sprouted between his fingers. He fell back out of sight as blood streamed over his hands.
Jak turned and showed white teeth to Ricky in a nasty grin. “Eyes down,” he said, pointing to the floor where Ryan was shouting not to open fire yet. “Watch back.”
He turned back to the door.
“Ryan said no chilling unless necessary.”
Jak shrugged.
“Gonna cut,” he said. He didn’t even glance back at his friend.
* * *
“
W
HAT NOW?”
M
ILDRED ASKED
.
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t have a clue.”
They crouched behind the top row of seats, some distance from the entrance nearest the Joe’s main door. Fortunately, most of the audience of hundreds upon hundreds of Angels were too raptly intent on the show down on the floor to bother looking for random intruders, though they had seen a group of eight or ten head for another exit, evidently intent on smoking out the sniper.
“Perhaps we should withdraw to the corridor,” Doc suggested. “That way we might have an easier time defending the doorway.”
Krysty shook her head. She could feel her sentient red hair hugging her scalp in tension.
“If they start roaming the lobby, we’re stuck out in the open,” she said. “I think our best bet is to hold tight here.”
She heard a shout from directly below.
“Hope you’re right, Krysty,” Mildred said, “because here the bastards come!”
* * *
A
S THE
A
NGELS’
sec men closed in, Ryan and J.B. put themselves back to back with the reflex born of long habit.
“Still sure we want to try not chilling them as much as possible?” J.B. asked.
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t that Ryan had gone soft and runny to the core. It was that he was more than up to simple arithmetic. And that arithmetic told him that a thousand pissed-off Desolation Angels versus his hearty band of seven warriors equaled them all becoming bloody mush very quick, no matter how skillful, hard or cold they were. When he’d walked into this situation, he’d done so knowing full well that it was one he and his friends would never cut and blast their way out of.
Now I just have to hope I didn’t get it too far wrong, he thought as from the corner of his eye he saw Leto elude another furious rush from his gigantic father. And that we can somehow walk away.
An Angel half a head taller than Ryan reached out a beefy hand to grab him. Ryan’s hand darted out, caught the thumb and peeled it straight back up against the forearm. The man squealed like a pig as it broke.
Ryan smiled. He’d said not to chill Angels if possible. He hadn’t said anything about hurting them.
If they wanted to play rough, let them pay in pain.
But his jaw was immediately rocked by a pile-driver punch from his blind left side. Yellow lightning lanced through his skull as his head snapped clockwise.
He lashed out with an instinctive side kick. It connected, and his unseen assailant grunted. Ryan widened his stance, trying to blink away the dazzle patches floating behind his eyes.
Another Angel, dreadlocks streaming, came flying at him from the right, aiming for a head tackle. Ryan caught the Angel’s arms and twisted his hips hard left, throwing the wiry brown-skinned man into the burly shaved-head who was bent over clutching his booted balls.