Chapter Three
“So,” Dark Lady said. She sat back in her gilded-armed chair with its velvet cushions and crossed one slim leg over the other. “What exactly is it that you and your friends do, Mr. Cawdor?”
“Lot of things,” J.B. said. “But mostly they come down to trouble.”
The office was small enough to feel crowded with Ryan and his companions inside, even with the giant bulk of Mikey-Bob looming in the hall outside the open door.
The room’s most remarkable feature was the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books, mostly hardbacks with age-cracked backs, as well as vases holding sprays of fresh lilac that crowded the room additionally with their fragrance. But they came as no surprise to Ryan at this point, given that the main barroom of the gaudy likewise featured cases filled with hundreds of volumes. That
had
surprised him, as well as Doc, who had earned a genuine smile from the Dark Lady upon his exclamation of pleasure at seeing all the books.
As they had made their way to the office, the companions had seen perhaps a dozen customers sitting around talking or flirting with the gaudy sluts. These were of both sexes, though predominantly female; they were on the whole younger, fitter, and brisker somehow than the type Ryan was acquainted with. It was almost as if they wanted to be here doing this. Or at least were okay with it, whether ace or not.
They had made their way through the main saloon. The bartender, a long, narrow-faced man with long lank light-brown hair, had glanced up from polishing a mug with an amazingly clean-looking rag.
“Think I see what’s going on here,” J.B. had said softly at Ryan’s back. “The whole shabby look of everything outside’s mostly a front. Folks here don’t want outlanders knowing just how well they’re doing.”
“They seem to draw in a power of trade from somewhere, though,” Ryan muttered back.
* * *
D
ARK
L
ADY
RETURNED
to the business at hand, leaning back in her gold-armed chair, dragging in smoke.
“So,” she said, letting blue smoke slide out and up in front of her pale face. “Do you mean, get into trouble, Mr. Dix? Or do you mean, make trouble for other people?”
J.B. shrugged. For an answer, he took off his glasses and began to polish them with a handkerchief.
“Both,” Ryan said, taking up the slack for his friend. “Emphasis on the latter. At least, given our preference.”
Dark Lady smiled. Again, she seemed to take care to keep her black-painted lips covering her teeth.
“I quite understand,” she said. “You do seem to show a degree of erudition unlooked for in—let’s say, a man of your appearance, Mr. Cawdor, in all candor.”
Ryan grinned even broader. Their hostess’s already-pale face seemed to turn a shade paler. He realized he was probably giving her what Krysty called his wolf smile.
“We’d rather take other people by surprise than the opposite, ma’am,” he said.
He felt strong hands grip him by the shoulders from behind. Recognizing Krysty’s touch at first contact, he relaxed slightly and sat back in his own chair. She was letting him know that his tact was slipping, in her own very tactful way.
“Do I take it that you have trouble of your own you’d like help resolving, Dark Lady?” Krysty said.
“I see no reason to be coy about it,” the woman said. “Yes. A situation has come up, and you look to be just the people to help me solve it.”
Krysty laughed. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“Oh, yes.”
Ryan tried to keep his expression stone-like, but he couldn’t help noticing that the Dark Lady had let her cool reserve slip slightly out of place. Perhaps she wasn’t as in control of the situation as she liked to pretend. Or mebbe not so much in control of herself.
“I must tell you I don’t much like violence,” Dark Lady said.
“We don’t, either,” Mildred replied. “But we’re very, very good at it.”
Dark Lady looked at her as she inhaled on her cigarette holder. The motion made her already rather hollow cheeks look positively gaunt.
She nodded. Just a touch abruptly, as if she had come to whatever decision she had visibly just made against her own better judgment.
“I have recently suffered a theft,” she said. “I would like to hire you to recover the...item.”
“What exactly is this item?” J.B. asked.
“It’s a metal box, perhaps fourteen inches wide by ten inches deep and six inches high.” As she spoke, she gestured with her hands to frame the dimensions.
“And the contents of the box, Madam?” Doc asked.
“Let’s say you have no need to know that,” she said.
Then she smiled. It was a surprisingly engaging, open-mouthed smile. But she still was double-careful to keep her teeth covered.
“And don’t call me madam,” she added.
Ryan emitted a soft grunt. So she actually had a sense of humor.
“Are you sure you can’t tell us anything about the contents of this box?” Ryan asked. “Seems like it could be important.”
“Needless to say, it’s an item of some value,” Dark Lady said, waving her cigarette holder a little too carelessly to be credible.
“But it could be important for us to have at least some idea what the box contains, Dark Lady,” Krysty said. “We want to be sure we bring back the right thing.”
“Oh, you’ll know,” Dark Lady said. “And if you do perchance bring back the wrong item, I will pay an added fee for you to try again. Within reason, of course.”
“Yeah,” Mikey grunted. “Nothing like trusting a bunch of random coldhearts from the outlands.”
“For once I am compelled to agree with my brother,” Bob said. “I
hate
that feeling. It’s not a double-smart call, Dark Lady.”
“About that fee,” Ryan said.
They dickered. For all the little-girl-lost Ryan had thought to glimpse when her cool façade slipped, the gaudy proprietor proved hard as a blaster barrel when it came time to bargain. Then again, so was Ryan Cawdor. They were down to their last supplies and needed the jack from the Dark Lady. So the companions’ services didn’t come cheap. And in the end, Dark Lady was rather generous.
“There is one stipulation,” she said, leaning back in her chair blowing smoke out her fine and narrow nose. “There must be no chilling. Indeed, I insist that violence be kept to the absolute minimum.”
“We may find our opposition forces our hand,” Doc said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “You aren’t paying us enough to wind up staring at the stars.”
“I think what our new employer is saying,” Krysty said sweetly, “is that the people she suspects of stealing her...property are not of a violent character.”
Dark Lady nodded. “That’s right, Ms. Wroth. They cannot afford to be, in their situation. Moreover, their lack of violent disposition is precisely the reason they have sought the employee they have.”
“Ace on the line,” Ryan grumbled. “All right. We’ll do our best not to chill anybody.”
Dark Lady thought about that a moment. “I will pay a slight bonus if you return my property without hurting anybody,” she said, with an emphasis on “slight.” “But do not try to deceive me. I assure you, I will know.”
Ryan held up his open right hand. “All right, I believe you.”
He leaned forward again. “Now tell us what you can about these robbers you want us to rob from.”
Chapter Four
“A mutie traveling circus,” J.B. said dryly, shaking his head. “The last one nearly killed us.”
A couple hundred yards away the wags of Madame Zaroza’s traveling circus showed a few yellow gleams of lights. They were mostly panel trucks, pulled up in a rough laager a bit over half a mile outside the ville of Amity Springs. Ricky, who had been expecting tents and lights, even if not currently on, was disappointed.
“Dark night!” Ricky heard J.B. exclaim—softly, because the Armorer was always in control. “Don’t pop out of nowhere like that, Jak. Almost blasted you.”
Ricky glanced around to see his friend, crouching on his haunches and grinning in the starlight like a white coyote.
“No sentry,” Jak reported in that weird abbreviated way of his. By now Ricky understood him as well as the rest of the group did. “Quiet. Mebbe thirty inside.”
“You find where this Madame Zaroza’s likely to be?” J.B. asked.
Jak nodded. “Center wag,” he said. “Got lights.”
“So the others are circled around it?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah.”
Sotto voce, Ryan asked Jak a few more questions. Jak answered in monosyllables volubly.
“Right,” Ryan said with decision a few moments later. “Here’s how we play it...”
He led his companions in a wide circle around the camp, counterclockwise to the northwest. Ricky realized he meant to avoid taking the obvious approach from the ville.
For a few moments they hunkered down in the crackling-dry grass. Ricky used the opportunity to catch his breath and try to still his heart. He was in good enough shape after a few months of tramping the Deathlands with his new family. But he still tended to tense up at the nearness of action. It wore him right straight down.
“You fit to fight, son?” J.B. asked him.
The Armorer was not what anybody would call a sensitive man, but he had a surprisingly perceptive way to him. Especially for somebody who mostly acted as if he was more comfortable working with machines and gadgets than people.
Like Ricky himself.
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak without panting.
Ryan gestured for Jak and Ricky to lead off to the wag circle. The rest stayed behind crouched in the concealment of the grass. Before he took off Ricky couldn’t help noticing that Ryan had
his
longblaster in his hands, ready to roar.
Running bent over, the two young men quickly crossed the hundred yards or so to the wags. They were camped in a wide area of bare dirt. From the looks and firmness it had been trampled clean of vegetation and packed down by the boots of ville folk avid to watch the show. That and the performers, likely, as well as whoever set up and took down the stages and signs or whatever they used.
I wish I could see the show,
he thought.
At least what they do
.
They made it with no sign of detection, or any sign of life within the wag circle except the lights from the central mobile home. Breathing hard through his open mouth, Ricky pressed his back against the box of the show wag.
He realized—or his mind, over-revving, finally took note of something he’d been seeing but had been too mentally busy to take in—that the circled wags had paintings on the side of them. Not just the sign—Madame Zaroza’s Caravan of Curiosities—but images, fabulous images: a lizard man like a giant scalie but with a protuberant muzzle almost like a dog; an enormously fat woman; a pair of what looked like kids just younger than Ricky, a boy and a girl, with arms and legs of exaggerated length.
And then the woman. He had spotted her on the next wag over. Without thinking, he drifted over, ignoring a soft chirp of inquiry from Jak. He did keep presence of mind to glance between the wags as he passed the gap, to make sure no one was lurking on the inside to leap out at him.
No one was.
She was magical, even painted there on the box of a blunt-nosed cargo wag in colors he could tell were bright even by starlight. Her hair was so golden, streaming down the sides of the bed or cloth-covered table or whatever it was she lay on on her back. And her nipples were clearly in evidence poking up the fabric of the evidently flimsy nightgown she wore. The unknown artist’s skill hadn’t been great—Ricky didn’t know a thing about painting, but he did know
workmanship
when he saw it, or didn’t—but he managed to show that just fine.
He got so worked up by the picture that he took little notice of the giant beast-man shape looming over the painted lady in the background—whether threatening her or protecting her being left considerably more to the imagination than the contours of her lovely body.
“Quit gawking, kid,” he heard a familiar voice growl in an undertone. “We’re not here to sightsee.”
Ryan trotted up, straightening after a hunched-over dash across the clear space to the wags. He held his longblaster in both hands, but as he slowed he slung it.
The others, Ricky realized in sudden chagrin, had already come up to cluster by the other wags. Pursuant to their employer’s wishes, which Ryan had decided to humor for now, they had no weapons in hand and consequently looked even more paranoid than usual.
“What the Hell’s wrong with you, Ricky?” Mildred demanded.
“I believe you moderns call it ‘adolescence,’” Doc said with a smile half dreamy, half humorous.
“Great. It’s the perfect time for testosterone poisoning to strike.” She glared accusingly at Doc. “You probably think it’s funny, you old coot.”
“Indeed.”
She turned away in disgust.
“Men.”
“Pipe
down,
everybody,” Ryan said.
He pointed first at Jak, then at Ricky. “You and you, go scout the wag in the middle.”
Jak insisted on going first, and Ricky followed hard on his heels.
The circle left about twenty yards of open space between the outer wags and the side of the mobile home. It was huge, at least to Ricky’s eyes, covered with paintings of stars and planets, galaxies and nebulas and other fantastic things. Ricky only knew what the stuff other than stars was because his parents had insisted he read old books as part of his education growing up.
He wondered what Jak made of the paintings—which again, even in the darkness, the yellow glow spilling out curtained windows did little to alleviate, he could tell were colorful to the point of gaudiness. He wasn’t sure Jak’s mind even registered them. He was so tuned to immediate survival, and the natural world in general, that his disdain for technological artifacts, including signs of civilization, struck Ricky sometimes as bordering at least on deliberate obliviousness.
He joined Jak beside the trailer. Its interior was obviously heated somehow. He could feel the warmth beating from its thin-gauge metal sides. He fought the desire to press his body against the painted panels and suck up the warmth. The others seemed to find the high-desert spring evening no more than pleasantly brisk. He, Tropics-raised, found it freaking
cold
. He shivered when he remembered their sojourn in Alaska.
Jak flicked his ruby eyes toward Ricky. He nodded.
His pale hands made a complicated series of gestures, which Ricky, after a beat, understood to indicate that Ricky should look for a way into the trailer. The albino wasn’t much for talking, but he did love his hand signals. By constant exposure, Ricky had learned to interpret them with at least as much ease as he did Jak’s notoriously abbreviated speech.
Oh, he thought. He wants me to pick the lock.
He grinned. For all of his love of gadgets, growing up in Nuestra Señora had offered little opportunity to practice lock-picking. His home ville had seldom bothered to lock its doors. But his new idol and mentor, J. B. Dix, had proved willing to teach Ricky the art. For his part, Ricky was an avid student.
The problem was that the only door in the site was up front right beside the driver’s seat, which, naturally, would likely be watched, if not alarmed. As quietly as he could, Ricky stole to the rear of the vehicle and peered around. While there was a sort of rack affixed to the back, there was evidently a cargo hatch back there.
Uncertain how to proceed, Ricky glanced back at the outer circle of wags. Ryan was crouched behind the trailer hitch of the wag with the image of the sleeping woman on its side, and he gestured peremptorily for Ricky to proceed.
He seemed to be getting pretty hot, so Ricky swallowed his misgivings and decided to proceed. He duck-walked around the corner of the mobile home.
A massive weight slammed onto his back and shoulders. His vision was blacked out an instant before he landed face-first on the cold, hard ground.