Chapter Seven
Madame Zaroza sighed theatrically. Krysty felt some of the sudden tension bleed out of the crowded room.
“We can’t afford to let the rubes feel like they can pick on us with impunity, either,” said Squatsch. His voice was surprisingly high, given his size. While he was shorter than Ryan, he was thicker and his fur made him look bulkier still. “So we got plenty experience in beating them down and teaching them a good lesson, without leaving more than bruises.”
“You see our dilemma,” Madame Zaroza said. “Anyway, though Sleeping Beauty warned us, and Catseye watched you the whole way, kept me informed of your kids creeping around my mobile home and everything, you didn’t give us time for a better plan.”
“That wasn’t rightly our intent,” J.B. said with a slight smile.
A woman came into the already-overstuffed room from the passage to the rear that no doubt led to the bedroom. She was a small but curvaceous woman with long blond hair framing a pretty face. Also she was entirely naked.
Ricky uttered a squeak like a stepped-on mouse.
“S.B.,” Madame Zaroza said, “you’re naked.”
Sleeping Beauty, who this evidently was, yawned and stretched.
“You make me wear clothes all the time, Z,” she said. “It’s not comfortable.”
“Yes,” Madame Zaroza said. “When marks are around. As they are now.”
“No,” the blonde said sleepily. “These are Dark Lady’s friends. Tol’ you.”
“Employees.”
“Whatever. I’m hungry.”
Masked Max, sans mask, reached to a kettle of washed but unpeeled and uncooked potatoes on the stove. He picked one up and without looking lofted it over his head toward the naked woman.
Without even opening her blue eyes fully, Sleeping Beauty reached up and caught it one-handed. The movement made her full breasts dance in a way that made Ricky’s eyes stand straight out of his head. Her pink nipples played hide-and-seek with her long gold ringlets.
Without a further word she turned and padded back the way she’d come. Krysty looked over to see Ryan frankly admiring the play of her well-rounded naked buttocks as she walked. Good thing I’m not the jealous type, she thought.
As if sensing her attention—or unusually self-conscious—Ryan’s lone blue eye flicked toward her. They traded smiles.
Madame Zaroza shook her head. “She’s a sweet girl, and an ace draw,” she said. “But she got no more sense than a week-old blue-tick hound pup. She sleeps a good twenty, twenty-two hours a day, like lazy old Belphegor there.”
She nodded at the orange tabby, who had settled, purring, on Krysty’s lap.
“So,” Ryan said, “where’s what you took from Dark Lady?”
The woman cocked her head at him. “Did she tell you what it is?”
“No,” Ryan said.
She laughed. “I have no earthly idea, either,” she said. “And I looked at it. Baron told me not to, of course, and of course I did. Just like I told those fool kids not to look, and of course they did.”
Moss dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet. “We did not!” his sister exclaimed in outraged tones.
“Don’t lie to me, little missy,” Madame Zaroza said. “It’s not like I won’t know.”
“Well—” It was the girl’s turn to sidle her big long-lashed eyes and scuff her foot. “I might’ve peeked. A little.”
“She picked the lock,” Madame Zaroza said matter-of-factly. “Same as I did, the moment I got alone with it once they brought it back here.”
“So, what is it?” J.B. asked. Krysty knew he was not much given to abstract curiosity—not like Ryan was, much as her man tried to pretend he wasn’t. But the Armorer was clearly hoping it would be some kind of wizard gadget.
Madame Zaroza snorted a laugh. “No clue,” she said. “Couldn’t describe it to you if I cared to try. Only thing that really matters to me or you, for that matter, or so I reckon—is that somebody’s willing to pay for it.” She yawned and rolled her shoulders.
“But your quest for the Great Whatsit is in vain here. I already passed it on to the person who hired the job done.”
Ryan’s eye narrowed to a slit of blue fire. “Are you trying to put something over on us?”
The room got tense. Before taking his blaster off Madame Zaroza, J.B. had insisted his friends’ weapons be returned to them. Though their longblasters were in a trunk outside, where Jak could keep an eye on them, everybody had his or her handblasters and knives.
“Pull back off the trigger, there, sport,” Madame Zaroza said. “I know better than that. Mebbe my children here think we could get the better of you a second time tonight. I don’t. We got paid for delivery. Even ten times that wouldn’t be worth getting even one of us chilled. Least of all me.”
“Don’t tell them, Z,” Draco said. “Mebbe they ain’t such bad sorts for locals. Mebbe they ain’t coldhearts. But they’re still rubes.”
“I already agreed to,” she said. “And, scammer or not, I’m as good as my word. Especially to a bunch of chillers like this. Anyway, I don’t owe my principal anything more than delivery of the goods.”
She tipped her head briefly to one side. “Rad-blast it, I doubt the principal would mind if I told. But I’m going to. It was Baron Sand, up to Arroyo de Bromista.”
Ryan looked at Krysty. She nodded. As far as she could tell, the woman was telling the truth. She didn’t have any kind of power that’d let her tell—not mutie stuff. But both of them trusted her intuition and her judgment.
“All right.” Ryan stood. “Reckon you might want to shift away from Amity Springs, and keep clear for a while.”
“Reckon we will,” Madame Zaroza said with a rueful smile. “We’re already ready to roll. It’s why we break down the show every night and pack it in. Never can tell when we may need a sudden change of location for our health.”
Ryan rounded up his own troop with his eye. “It’s time we shook the dust of this place off our heels,” he said. “Our employer won’t like the taste of what we’ve got to tell her any better, the staler we let it get.”
“Tell D.L. I’m so sorry,” Madame Zaroza said in a dull voice.
“D.L.?” Ryan asked.
“Dark Lady. Tell her sometimes there’s such a thing as conflicting loyalties. You know? Uh—she will.”
“Why not?” he asked.
She relaxed visibly.
“But won’t this Baron Sand get hot, you ratting him off like this?” Ryan asked.
“Baron Sand won’t care,” she said with a secretive and, Krysty thought, somewhat sad smile. “I think I can assure you of that.”
“Doesn’t sound much like most barons we’ve encountered, ma’am,” J.B. said. “The harder cases they are, the tenderer their sensibilities tend to be about that kind of thing.”
She laughed.
“You’ve just pretty much defined Baron Sand, my boy. Not a scrap like any other baron you’ve known. Expect surprises.”
* * *
“B
ACK
SO
SOON
?”
It was Mikey, the more ingénue, snarkier head of Dark Lady’s titanic mutie right-hand man, calling out as Ryan and the companions walked through the swing doors. He—and of necessity his brother—stood behind the bar, where they appeared to have taken over the role of bartender for the evening. Right now he was mainly occupied washing glasses.
“Looks dead in here,” Ryan said, looking around the mostly empty barroom.
The scattering of customers went back to their muttered conversations or lonely beers. The three or four gaudies, which had looked up alertly if not necessarily eagerly when the door opened, visibly lost interest when they recognized the new hires.
The giant shrugged.
“Amity Springs is known for nothing if not its solid bourgeois values,” balding Bob said. “Everybody works, and goes to bed at night.”
“And if they’ve left here, definitely to sleep,” said his brother with a dirty snicker. That earned him a dirtier look from his twin. “Unless a bunch a outlanders are in town, the place drains out early.”
“Where’s your boss?” Ryan asked.
“Asleep,” Bob said.
“She said to report in when we got back,” Ryan said. “Go get her.”
Mikey sneered. “You’re not my boss.”
“We could just go up ourselves,” Ryan said. “Or stay down here and make enough noise it’d be triple sure to wake her.”
“My brother’s just being obstreperous,” Bob said wearily.
“Isn’t that a fancy word for a two-headed freak,” Mikey said.
“You know it, too. You’re not as big an ignoramus as you like to pretend.”
Before his twin could respond the balding head looked toward a pretty woman with café-au-lait skin, a brown ringlet hanging in her face from a pile of hair pinned atop her head, and a frilly dress with a blouse cut low enough to display everything short of nipples. She was playing solitaire on a table to one side of the bar.
“Ruby,” Bob called. “Run up and tell D.L. her, uh, independent contractors are here.”
She looked at him with sleepy eyes and pouted briefly with bright-red painted lips. Then she stood and trotted up the stairs.
* * *
T
HE
GAUDY
PROPRIETOR
slouched in her chair with her chin sunk to her clavicle and listened as Ryan rendered his report by the light of a low-turned lamp. She made no comment or even showed sign of reaction until he mentioned the person who paid for the theft—and now had possession of the object she’d sent them to bring back.
“Baron Sand,” she repeated, with a certain fastidious distaste. “I should’ve known.”
“So what now?” Ryan asked.
For a moment Dark Lady kept her head down. She looked oddly vulnerable like that. The shadows hollowed her cheeks to the point of gauntness and made her eyes look huge. Like a lost little girl, Mildred thought.
When she looked up her expression was resolute.
“I hired you to bring back a certain object,” she said crisply. “I still want it. Nothing has changed.”
“Where is this Baron Sand to be found, exactly?” Ryan asked.
“On Arroyo de Bromista. It’s about two miles northwest of here, nestled against the ridges that ring Santana Basin on that side. It should be no more than a bracing hour’s walk for travelers as seasoned as you.”
Ryan rubbed his jaw. Mildred heard his coarse blue-black beard bristles crackle against his palm.
“Yeah. You mean for us to go now? Tonight?”
“By no means,” she said. “You shall sleep here. I have already had rooms prepared. Nothing is likely to have changed by the morning.”
She looked from one of them to the other with her dark, haunted eyes.
“You would not find it easy to sneak into the Baron’s Casa de Broma.”
Ryan grunted. “Come to that,” he said, “we didn’t find it so rad-blasted easy to sneak into the bastard freak show, either.”
Chapter Eight
They spent the night in several fairly comfortable rooms on the Library Lounge’s second floor. The gaudy did not attract much morning custom, it turned out. And not surprisingly the gaudy sluts of both sexes slept late, as apparently did their employer.
The only person in the barroom when Ryan led his friends down the stairs just after dawn was Mikey-Bob, both of whose heads were unusually taciturn. Without speaking a word he served them a breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, boiled beans and chunks of sourdough bread. Then he retreated into the kitchen.
“I guess they’re not a morning person,” Mildred said.
They lingered over mugs of what tasted surprisingly to Ryan like real coffee. That was a rare and expensive trade item. He judged the gaudy, at least, had to be doing even better than he’d initially thought.
He drained the final drop from the fired-clay mug and set it back down on the tabletop. Then he stood, picked up his Steyr from where he had it leaned against the wall beside his chair and swung out the double doors.
The morning sun wasn’t far up the bright sky, but its light on his face was nearly hot. It was shaping up to be a fine high desert day.
A fair number of people were on the street when the seven companions set out. Some walked briskly on errands or pushed handcarts with goods in them. A pair of laughing children chased a small blue-dotted dog with one blue eye and one brown across the street in front of them, laughing. A medium-size guy in an apron swept off a wooden sidewalk beneath a sign that read V. W. Kennard’s Dry Goods and General Confusion. He lifted his head to leer at Krysty and Mildred as they passed without missing a beat with his broom.
“For a fact,” Doc observed, “the people of the ville do not seem intimidated by the presence of visibly armed strangers.”
“Mebbe that’s because a lot of them are packing heat themselves,” J.B. observed.
Ryan had already taken that in.
A sturdily built, handsome woman with short red hair appeared in the door of the general store, scrubbing her hands on a rag.
“Wilson,” she commanded the sweeper, “stop pestering the pretty ladies and get your butt inside. You’ve got serious work to be done.”
“Sure, Kris. Anything you say.”
His apparent wife lingered a moment in the doorway, giving Ryan a far from disinterested look. He nodded politely and walked on. She laughed and vanished inside.
“They go to pains to not show it,” Ryan remarked, “but this seems like a pretty flush place.”
“Peculiar,” Doc said. “Inasmuch as this is not precisely prime farming land. Nor is there any other visible source of wealth, beyond the Library Lounge. The ville is not even situated on a river.”
“I think the people probably grow gardens in their back lots,” Krysty said. She smiled at the old man. “As for where their water comes from, I suspect the name ‘Amity Springs’ may hold a clue.”
Doc laughed. “Indeed, you are most perceptive, as usual.”
“Still doesn’t explain where they get the jack to afford pretty decent sidearms,” Mildred said.
The ville ended abruptly, though a busy wag yard sprawled just beyond its west end. It gave way to what the locals termed Newcombe Flats, which occupied most of the Santana Basin: land as level as advertised, furred with still-brown grass and dotted with rabbit brush, saltbush and true sagebrush scrub as far as the eye could see. A dirt road led straight on, meeting up in a mile or so, they were told, with the Río Piojo, the largish stream that ran from east to west across the basin and provided most of its water.
They followed that for about half the distance, Jak walking point, then Ryan with Krysty by his side, and then Doc and Mildred, with Ricky and J.B. bringing up the rear deep in conversation. They passed various wags, mostly horse-drawn, headed toward the ville. The occupants watched them warily but without undue alarm as they passed.
“Looks like they don’t get too much trouble hereabouts,” J.B. called.
“Not before we got here,” Ricky said, and then laughed too enthusiastically to show it was a joke.
“Yeah, well, be glad nobody’s going to take us for Crazy Dogs,” Mildred said. “These people look like they’re ready for trouble when it does hit.”
“Suggesting that, while they have little to fear from day to day, trouble nonetheless does find its way here occasionally,” Doc commented.
“Isn’t that why they try to conceal their prosperity?” Krysty asked. “To avoid attracting that kind of attention?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “But that kind of attention has a way of sniffing out ace targets. It’s likely why the Crazy Dogs have started sniffing around.”
They came to what looked like nothing but a pair of wheel ruts that ran off the main drag a bit to the north of northwest. A few low lumps of hills and longer yellow bars of ridge were visible off that way. Instructed by Mikey-Bob before they’d left the gaudy, they turned onto the track.
A short while later the track veered right to run up a stream that seemed to be flowing from the ridges to meet the Río Piojo. “This must be Arroyo de Bromista,” Krysty said.
“Why would they call it Joker Creek?” Ricky asked.
“Anybody’s guess,” Ryan said. “Odds are nobody even remembers why now.”
They began to pass through cultivated lands. Houses grew among the early sprouting crops, mostly low one-or two-room blocks with adobe walls. People were working erecting frames of sticks for beans and vine crops to climb. Others turned compost heaps with shovels and pitchforks, or tended already-sprouting plants in neat raised beds with sides made of stone or scavvy.
As they worked, they chatted and laughed among themselves. They did stop talking and working to stare at the intruders when they became aware of them, then they resumed work and the conversation began to flow again. More guardedly, Ryan thought, as if the farmers were keeping an eye on the party as it walked upstream.
“They don’t seem oppressed,” Mildred said. “I hope that’s a good sign.”
Ryan took her meaning. They were about to approach a baron who had paid to have some valuable object stolen—to demand that the baron give it
back
. Even an average baron—meaning no crazier nor cruel than most—would tend to react unfavorably to such a request.
“That’s a pretty imposing house,” Mildred said, nodding ahead, where the road ended on a slight slow rise.
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
The baron’s residence was just a single story that sprawled considerably. Though “sprawl” didn’t seem quite right for a building so imposing. It was built in the style of the old Colonial buildings a person might see farther south, down along the Río Grande Valley and points west: blocky, flat-roofed, doubtless with a parapet, and thick sawed-off beam ends protruding from the rafters that held up the roofs.
The walls, he didn’t doubt, were also of that style: a good three feet thick and made of adobe. Which would stop a round from his .308 rifle stone cold, and give a direct hit from a howitzer or a wag-chiller missile a run for its money.
“I’m guessing a direct assault is right out?” Mildred asked.
“That’s good, Mildred,” Ryan said. “One of these days you might actually learn a tactic.”
“Thank you so much. Somebody remind me, what does ‘Casa de Broma’ mean? My pitiful Spanish isn’t up to the task.”
“‘Funhouse,’ basically,” Ricky answered. He sounded pleased, as he always did when he got to show that he knew something. He didn’t do it enough to be a pain. Usually. “Or playhouse.”
“
That
could go either way,” Mildred said.
“I know which way I’m going to expect it to go,” Ryan said, meaning due south.
“Well, the building’s defensible,” J.B. said, “but I can’t say as much for the location. Not that close to the heights.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
The ridges, which looked to be some kind of yellow sandstone cliffs, rose steeply a couple hundred yards beyond the big house and its gaggle of wood and adobe outbuildings. Including, Ryan noted, a pole barn and a large windowless structure with adobe walls and a lean-to style roof that looked to be a mix of sheet metal, planks and asphalt tiles that lay behind the playhouse. The creek ran down an arroyo that split the cliffs. A narrow, somewhat steep dirt road ran alongside it.
“Those cliffs aren’t close enough for people to jump on the roof or throw stuff down on it,” Ryan said. “But sharpshooters up there could lay waste to anybody trying to defend from the roof. Plus shoot down through it at an angle that could lay some serious hurt on people inside.”
“At least there aren’t any guards,” Ricky said.
He’d pushed it too far in his eagerness to show off. Jak, cruising a bit ahead of the rest, yipped a laugh like an amused coyote. Then Ricky uttered a surprised yip of his own.
“Ow!”
Ryan looked back. Ricky had ducked his head into the collar of his shirt. J.B. had his left hand up behind the boy’s head, which he had obviously just thwacked with his two upraised fingers.
“What?” Ricky asked.
“No guards that you
see,
boy,” J.B. said. “Keep mixing that up with there not
being
any guards, you’ll wind up with dirt hitting you in the eyes before you know what’s what.”
“Oh.”
“Well, Jak,” Ryan called, “you had your laugh. Are there guards?”
“No. Ricky assumed. Made ass.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mildred said. “The expression is, ‘when you assume, you make an
ass
out of
u
and
me
.’ But that’d require Bayou Boy to use actual prepositions.”
There were plenty of windows, Ryan noted. They looked to be made out of good glass, clear and not too wavy. That made them triple expensive, whether they were scavvy or modern manufacture. Pale curtains hung on the insides—and as they approached the pink-painted wooden door, he could see they were hanging at least three feet in.
Fortress, all right
.
“So, do we just walk up and knock?” asked Krysty.
Jak walked up almost to the door, then along the front of the house to the right, where he stopped and peered suspiciously around the corner. From the direction of the pole barn, now out of sight behind the house, a horse or two nickered at the approach of strangers.
Jak leaned back and shook his head. Nobody in sight. He tipped his head slightly to his left. Ryan knew the albino was asking if he should cruise around and check out the back. He shook his head.
“I notice none of the happy peasants came running to alert the big boss man that there were armed and presumed dangerous strangers headed up to his doorstep,” Mildred said. “Maybe the peasants aren’t all that happy with the existing social order, after all.”
“Just because we don’t see any guards, doesn’t mean there weren’t lookouts,” Krysty said. “Also, there’s a reason they call these ‘flats.’ They could have seen us coming a quarter mile away. We don’t know if the peasants didn’t see us and sent word. In fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t send a kid or two running to tell the baron. Meaning the baron decided we weren’t threatening enough to merit breaking up the workday to go into defensive mode.”
His companions gathered, Ryan stepped up to the door. Its carved wood projected solidity. He reached up to give it an authoritative rap.
The door opened.
Inside stood, or slouched, a slender young man. He wore a loose and dirty off-white smock over dark pants. His brown feet were bare.
He blinked big black eyes at Ryan. His face was a narrow oval, with a hint of puff to the jawline and below the eyes. A dark beard and mustache framed his pouty lips, just past the stubble point.
“What took you so long?” he asked with languid insolence.