Both barrels of his scattergun vomited fire and noise, but it was at the stars. He toppled backward, mortally struck by Krysty’s fusillade.
With her handblaster empty and useless again, she saw a sight that gripped her heart like a fist. Another motorcycle had skidded to a sideways stop right behind where Ryan lay, still single-mindedly focused on his sniping and completely vulnerable.
In an ecstasy of terror Krysty fumbled for a fresh reloader. The others on the firing line were still engaging the attackers. They couldn’t help her doomed mate, either.
The Crazy Dog turned his bike to line up right between the prone Ryan’s outstretched legs. Grinning diabolically through his beard, the shaved-headed man gunned the engine to alert his prey as to the awful fate that awaited: having his bones and flesh pulped and ground beneath tires of seven hundred pounds of malice.
Then a slight figure with streaming white hair appeared astride the bike behind the hunched-over figure. Two hands as pale as the stars themselves crossed beneath the driver’s chin. Slim shards of steel flickered outward. The biker’s head snapped back in a gargling scream as blood geysered from a throat doubly severed to the neck bone.
Jak jumped lithely clear as the bike fell onto its side well behind its intended target. Its rear tire spun futilely as its former driver attempted to breathe through a clean-cut airway. The engine died away with no hand on its throttle.
Down on the road the nearer of the parked wags suddenly blew up in a yellow ball. Ryan had pierced its gas tank and then managed to light the spilled fuel fumes.
But the pickup was already peeling away into the darkness. “Pull out, boys and girls,” Diego shouted into the night. “We’ll let these ville rats and their shitbag mercies broil in their own fear of when we’ll come back to pay them off—and where!”
Ryan was up on his knees, cursing. He had just fired his current 10-round detachable mag dry. As fast as he could reload the Scout, there was no chance of getting another shot off before night and distance swallowed the biker chieftain.
“Well,” Mildred said, standing.
Five feet from her a figure lying on its face in the grass started to rise, a cowboy-style six-shooter in a fingerless-gloved hand. Barely looking, the stocky black woman shot the Crazy Dog in the head.
“I guess that means we’re off his Christmas list.”
“We wish,” Ryan growled.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Poor Lucy,” Dark Lady said. She had her head down with her black bangs hanging in front of a face that looked paler than usual in the turned-down lamplight of her office. Behind her Mikey-Bob loomed outside the lamp glow like a shadow colossus.
The Great Whatsit in its box had been duly delivered and paid for. Dark Lady proved as good as her word. For all his mistrust of barons—which Dark Lady was to his mind, regardless of what she or the Amity Springers might say—he wasn’t surprised.
Neither Ryan nor J.B., who had naturally stopped on the way back to Amity Springs to pick the box’s lock and peer inside, had the remotest clue what the Whatsit or its nature might be. Ryan’s rad counter showed it was only slightly hotter than background, which settled their only practical concern.
And
practical
was commonly all Ryan concerned himself with.
“She betrayed you,” Mildred said. “Why waste your tears?”
The giant rumbled deep in his outsize chest. Ryan wasn’t sure which head was responsible. Both, likely enough.
“I long suspected she was spying for Sand,” she said. “I never could have imagined she was also working for the Crazy Dogs.”
She raised her head to look at Mildred, calm despite the tear trails glimmering on her cheeks.
“I care about my people,” she said. “Because the rivalry between myself and Baron Sand has not descended to killing—so far—I believed that her spy’s motivation, whoever he or she might be, would be non-malicious. But to learn that she also served Diego—and the reason why...it breaks my heart.”
“But how do you know Sand and Diego weren’t together on this spying thing?” Mildred asked.
“Aside from the fact she offered to pay us to chill Dogs?” Ryan asked. “Plus paid us when we did?”
Dark Lady was shaking her head.
“For all her flaws,” she said, “Sand would never be in league with the likes of the Crazy Dogs.”
“You seem unusually charitable toward your main rival,” Krysty said.
“I stand for truth,” Dark Lady said. “I strive to be honest, with myself or others, which is one way Baron Sand and I differ.”
“She does seem to have a double-loose notion of where other people’s stuff ends and hers begins,” Ryan said.
With visible effort the gaudy owner pulled herself together.
“Right now I’m more concerned at the risks Jim Sinclair led the others into,” she said. “He was a fool to risk leaving the cover of the ville and going out in the open against a mobile foe. If the Crazy Dogs had rallied, he and the rest would have been cut to pieces.”
“That little move did help save our asses,” Ryan reminded her. “Just as we helped save yours.”
He couldn’t help recalling Mildred’s misgivings about the wag yard owner, though. Sure, he helped them then. But he was no supporter of Dark Lady’s. Might he be playing a double game, too?
Dark Lady sighed. “Much as I have grown to admire you and your companions, Mr. Cawdor,” she said, “I must admit my overwhelming imperative is to protect Amity Springs and its people. Not you and yours.”
Ryan laughed. “Understood,” he said. “I do the same sort of arithmetic. I throw that little reminder in for free.”
“That’s triple generous of you, mercie,” growled Mikey.
“Don’t mind him,” his brother said wearily. “He’s just bitched because Lucy got chilled.”
“She was one of us,” the black-haired head said sullenly. “She always treated us decent. Instead of as some two-headed monster.”
“We
are
a two-headed monster, dimwit. In the end she sold out Dark Lady. And that means all of us.”
“She didn’t realize the full import of what she was doing,” Mikey said. “Anyway, she didn’t have much choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Bob said, starting to heat up.
Dark Lady held up a slender hand. It looked so frail and tiny against the shadowed bulk of her helper and friend—and whatever else. But both heads immediately shut up.
“The other people may need to be reassured after all that’s gone on,” she said. “Go and make sure they’re all right, won’t you, Mikey-Bob?”
The giant sighed volcanically through both throats. “Of course, Dark Lady,” Bob said.
As Mikey-Bob lumbered past, she grabbed his left hand with her right and squeezed it briefly. He paused a step and then went out, with Mikey sweeping Ryan and his band with a final resentful glare.
“What I’m wondering,” Mildred said when the door shut, “is how Lucy was able to get to Joker Creek to tell Sand we were coming, then get back here so fast.”
“No mystery there,” Dark Lady said. “Sand used a system I myself use—and may have taught her. Thinking about it, Diego may also have employed the same technique.”
“How do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“People come and go freely from Amity Springs,” Dark Lady said, “as you have seen. People regularly travel between Joker Creek and here. Sand makes no effort to stop such traffic, any more than I do. Trade between the villes benefits us all, which she may not like but accepts.
“People carry messages to and fro all the time. Lucy probably found someone headed that way and gave them a letter for someone in Sand’s domain. That person would have been instructed to pass the message along to the baron.”
“You mean you have other spies here?” Mildred asked in alarm.
Dark Lady smiled. “No doubt we do,” she said. “But that’s supposition. This system requires no collusion between the intermediaries and the opposition. Lucy’s messenger need have no idea what he or she carried, nor its import. And when instructions or other communications came back for her, they would be delivered to a third party on whom Lucy would call to pick them up.”
“Again, you seem very trusting.”
“Not at all. It’s simple security. The fewer people who know a secret, the likelier it is to stay secret.”
“She’s got you there, Mildred,” Ryan said.
“Perhaps the time has come,” J.B. said, stirring in his chair, “to talk about compensation for those Dogs we put down.”
“I shall pay on the terms agreed, and gladly,” Dark Lady said. “I don’t believe in binding the mouths of the kine that tread the grain.”
“First
Corinthians 9:9?” Mildred said in obvious surprise. “You know the New Testament?”
Ryan remembered she was a preacher’s daughter in her prior life.
Dark Lady smiled wanly and waved a hand at the book-filled shelves that surrounded her.
“If I get my hands on it,” she said, “I read it.”
“Read
all
books?” Jak asked in something like awe.
“Not all books,” she said. “But most of what I have, yes.”
“That’s what he meant,” Mildred said. “All these. Got a stingy way with demonstratives, the boy does. Pronouns, too.”
“Mikey-Bob will provide you your reward,” Dark Lady said. “You did substantial hurt to our foes. So what will they do now, in your professional estimation?”
“Maybe we hurt them bad enough that they’ll look for easier hunting grounds,” Mildred suggested.
Ryan snorted. “Dream on. I reckon we hurt them just bad enough they’re pissed off way past nuke red. They’ll come back and come harder. Triple sure.
“But Diego’s no stupe. He won’t try again until he’s got a better plan. We bought you some time. No more.”
Dark Lady nodded. Then she leaned back in her chair and eyed them appraisingly.
“What are your intentions? Will you be leaving us, now that you’ve fulfilled the mission I originally hired you for? No one could fault you for fleeing the wrath to come.”
J.B. glanced at Ryan. “Baron Sand still has Doc,” the Armorer said. “Isn’t our way to leave a man behind. Nor woman.”
“You could go elsewhere to plan your rescue of your associate. Even leaving the Basin proper might lessen your danger.”
Ryan shrugged. “I don’t think Diego’s a dog ready to let go of a bone just because it gets moved a little farther away. These are mobile coldhearts, as you yourself pointed out.
“And anyway, as long as you’re willing to pay for Crazy Dog scalps, that’s sweetening the pie. Mebbe Sand’ll pay for them, too, come to that.”
Mildred turned her head to look at him in surprise. “Why would she honor that deal, after what we just did to her? It wasn’t just the Dogs we laid the wood to tonight.”
“Just like before,” Ryan said. “Different business. And business is business.”
“She may indeed agree,” Dark Lady said. “Sand has her own code, and its core is as inflexible as its outer extremities are flexible. Plus she loves the game for its own sake. She may well choose to honor that agreement because it’s separate.”
She shook her head and frowned disapprovingly. “Or on her whim. She hates being bound by sense and reason as passionately as any other rules.”
Ryan stood.
“If your kitchen’s still open, we need to get some chow,” he said. “Or else our rumbling bellies’ll keep the whole house awake all night. And then mebbe get cleaned up so we don’t soil those nice clean sheets of yours.”
“Absolutely!” Krysty said. Mildred nodded eager agreement.
Ryan grinned.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Who are these people?” the ice-blond woman asked as Mikey-Bob ushered Krysty, Ryan and Mildred into Dark Lady’s office.
The kids, as Mildred couldn’t help thinking of best-buds Ricky and Jak even though Jak was a chronological adult even by the standards of her day, were out prowling the ville on this bright morning after their night’s adventures. This was the sort of thing that at best would bore them. And at worst, their volatility couldn’t help.
The Mikey head seemed more sullen than usual, Mildred thought. Bob looked pensive.
“They’re my new sec consultants.”
It was a cool day. Dark Lady wore a black turtleneck over black jeans. Mildred wondered if she had any other colors in her wardrobe.
“Your prices are excessive,” the blonde in the blue tunic declared. She had dismissed the newcomers with a brief look. She had a haughty supermodel look, with prominent cheekbones, a straight nose and blue eyes. Mildred tried not to hate her for her looks alone. That was racist.
I need to concentrate on hating her for her attitude,
she told herself.
Not that that should be hard to do
.
“What Mistress Devere means, Dark Lady,” said the man at her side, “is, don’t you think you could bring your asking price down slightly? Inasmuch as we are long-time loyal customers.”
He was shorter, older, and clearly didn’t spend near so much time keeping himself in shape as the woman did. He had a homely, saggy, middle-aged face with a wart on his prominent nose. His graying brown hair was cut as if around the rim of the bowl, with a bald spot on top. It put Mildred in mind of the popular conception of medieval monks and their tonsures. The fact he wore a baggy brown smock that hung down to the thighs of his tan pants did nothing to dispel the resemblance.
“You are certainly free to seek elsewhere,” said Dark Lady. Her voice was calm and conversational, but her black eyes were fixed tight on the other woman’s ice sculpture of a face. “Just as we have other parties who are eager to purchase our wares.”
The woman flashed her eyes in what was clearly not meant to be a friendly, reassuring gesture. Her nostrils flared.
“Now, now,” the man said, patting air toward Dark Lady with his hands. “I’m sure we can work something out.”
“Indeed we can, Mr. Lowenstein. You can agree to meet my price. Or you can return to the barroom below and enjoy a refreshing beverage. On the house.”
“Um,” Lowenstein said. He wouldn’t look at his mistress, which was just as well, because she was giving him a bug-shriveling look, as if she were the sun through a magnifying glass.
“Are you whitecoats, then?” Krysty asked. She crossed her long legs.
Ryan gave her a sidelong eyebrow-raised look. Usually she was the tactful one. But her major antipathy toward whitecoats sometimes cramped that.
Lowenstein’s eyes got wide. “No, no, no!” he said, wagging his hands in horror.
“We are representatives of a research facility,” Devere said, enunciating each syllable in an overly crisp way. She actually talked like a not double-good speech synthesizer. “Nothing more.”
“I’m sure you are,” Krysty replied, smiling sweetly.
Dark Lady dropped her curved fingers and thumb on the hardwood desktop in front of her with a precise rap.
“Have you made your decision?” she asked.
Devere looked blazing blue death at Dark Lady. Unlike Lowenstein, the gaudy owner declined to shrivel.
“Yes,” the blonde said, as if the word were being torqued out of her with a pair of pliers. “But you may expect us to explore...alternate arrangements.”
“Good luck with that,” Mildred said. And gave the anticipated Death Look a big toothy smile.
* * *
“Y
OU
ARE
A
man of parts, Doctor Theophilus Tanner,” Baron Sand said. Then she purred like a big cat adding, “Some of which are astonishingly durable for a man of your age.”
Doc lay with his weary head supported by a soft feather pillow on Baron Sand’s enormous canopied bed. The baron lay beside him on top of the pale-green satin coverlet with her bare pink rump in the air. The room smelled of sex, lilacs and cigar smoke.
“I suspect you might find me surprising in other ways, as well,” he said.
It was the second day of his captivity, which was shaping up in an extraordinarily unexpected way.
“You know so much history,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s almost as if you lived through it.”
“Indeed,” Doc said with an indulgent chuckle. “I have been on intimate terms with much of it. And I have taught history here and there to so many students.”
“I wish I knew more,” she said, clasping her knees and resting her cheek on them. It made her look like nothing so much as a schoolgirl. Albeit a more naked schoolgirl than Doc would have expected to encounter in his original lifetime—he scarcely counted the times he’d helped Emily bathe Rachel.
My poor lost loves, he thought, overcome by sudden desolation. How fresh those wounds still feel.
But Sand was lost in herself once more. “I try. I can’t even recall whether the Battle of Waterloo was in 1814 or 1914. Well, I don’t have the resources my beloved enemy Dark Lady does. And knowing that sort of thing is her job.”
That flicked him out of his sad reverie.
“What do you mean?” he said, raising his head. “My impression was most distinctly that she was what an associate of mine rather inelegantly described as a ‘flesh-peddler.’”
“Here, now.” She tut-tutted and pressed a fingertip to his lips. “That’s neither fair nor strictly accurate. To be sure, she provides the opportunity for her people to pay for their keep through selling that which my children give away purely for love. Whereas I provide for them by, for example, certain
exactions
upon travelers through my realm. Especially those with overdeveloped senses of credulity, or underdeveloped senses of the odds. But she doesn’t
peddle
anybody. Any more than she’d peddle her own tight and narrow fanny.”
“You paint her as quite the innocent.”
“That’s precisely the word. I like you, Doc. You know things.”
He smiled. “It seems as if you draw an elusive distinction between what she does and flesh-peddling,” he said. “But, back to the question of her real occupation—”
“Ah, but see, that’s more of a sideline for her. What she’s really about is both gathering and disseminating knowledge. It’s what she was trained for, you might say. In a most boringly rigorous fashion. Among other things.”
She lay back down on the bed and smiled at the round heavy rafters. “I could do you stories that would curl your hair,” she said. “For example—”
A ham-fisted knock sounded from the door.
“Go away!” she sang out sweetly.
“It’s Trumbo, Baron.”
“I know. Trumbo, my sec boss. Whom I left explicit instructions I was not to be disturbed except in case of alien invasion or unless the funhouse was on fire. And I don’t smell smoke.”
“There’s someone here to see you.”
“Tell them to go away. Tell them to come back during my next open office hours, which if I recall occur next Tuesday—the twelfth of never.”
“Double funny,” the sec boss growled. “It’s them.”
Sand sighed. “Why didn’t you say so?”
She sat up. Her breasts were so small they scarcely bounced, their tips almost covered by areoles surprisingly wide and dark brown, given her fair coloration. Doc had found little to complain about with them, though.
“I’ll be there in half a mo,” she said. Then she balled her hands into fists and slammed them down on the bed.
“Bother.”
She looked at Doc. “So you still won’t extend your parole, dearest Doc?”
He shook his head. “I fear I cannot, madam. I have stretched the elasticity of my conscience and my duty to my friends as far as it will reach by agreeing not to attempt to escape while directly in your presence, nor to harm you in any way, nor attempt to use you as a hostage or otherwise to secure my liberty.”
“And I’m so glad you did,” she purred. “Admit it. You are, too, you randy old goat!”
“Well, I admit that I have found the results of those concessions amply gratifying. But not so much I can vouchsafe more.”
“You’re no fun.”
“You said otherwise, not so very long ago.”
She chuckled, then hopped up from the bed with surprising alacrity in one so large. Though she was far from slender, he had learned she was not so much fat as large, which among other things concealed a surprising bodily strength.
I shall have bruises for a week as it is, he thought. Not without a certain smugness.
She dressed quickly in white linen and a blue-velvet shirt and breeches. He stirred himself and retrieved his long johns from where they were thrown on a chest of drawers and pulled them on up his naked bony shanks.
“I’ll have to secure you, then, you know,” she said. She knelt beside the bed and pulled open a drawer built into the massive frame. It clanked when she rummaged inside it.
A moment later she came up with a large iron shackle lined with fine black-and-silver fur on the inside, to avoid chafing the limbs of a captive. She turned and affixed the non-shackle end of the chain to the corner of the bed nearest the door.
“There,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “You’ll be able to reach the door but no farther.”
He didn’t ask her how she knew. He was quite certain that she did.
“Be a love and bring your ankle over here, Doc.”
Obedient to the limited parole he had eventually given her, he did. At this point he saw no point in trying to resist or make a break for it anyway. Trumbo and his giant shadow Lobo had beefed up security considerably after the other night’s raid. He had to bide his time in any event.
There was no reason he could see not to enjoy his captivity as much as possible. He was morally certain his friends were scheming feverishly as to how to get him back. Though he himself could see no practical means of doing so.
But then, he wasn’t the cunning one in the group, nor the tactician. He felt quite confident leaving those roles to Ryan and the taciturn but exceedingly competent J. B. Dix.
The cuff felt like a sweet embrace as she clicked it home around a pink-and-white ankle and locked it.
“These are truly lined with mink?” he said.
“Yep.” She stood and kissed his nose. She didn’t have to stretch on tiptoe to do it, nor even raise her face. “They grow wild in what used to be Oregon. There’s quite a lucrative trade in trapping them for their pelts.”
“Indeed.”
“Be good,” she said with a twinkle. “But only until I get back.”
She was gone. The door closed with authority. Baron Sand was a woman who did little by half measure. Least of all live that way.
Doc took in a deep breath, then, putting his hands on his thighs, he rose and made his way to the door.
He paused; pressed his ear against it. He heard nothing, which he found reassuring, if only mildly so. If the baron caught him eavesdropping, she was likely to regard it as a sign of spirit; the woman had a love of mischief for its own sake, and that was a fact. But he felt less sanguine about the prospect of opening the door to find himself staring into the brutish face of Trumbo as its habitual sullenness turned to sadistic glee.
Ah, well, Theophilus, old man, he told himself. Nothing is more certain in this world than that we shall one day leave it. Though my efforts in that direction have admittedly thus far come to naught.... He turned the knob and pushed the door open two finger-breadths.
He saw nothing but a slice of the corridor, whitewashed walls dim in the afternoon. But he could clearly hear voices from the main salon. And that was his goal.
“Mistress Devere means,” a masculine voice said, oozing obsequiousness, “is that the time has come for you to take decisive action, Baron.”
“We are out of patience,” said a female voice like icicles snapping. “The time has come when you must act. Or we shall.”
Doc Tanner raised a brow. And who, or what, dares speak thus to Baron Sand in the heart of her very stronghold?
He already knew the answer would portend little good—for himself or his friends.