Tale of the Thunderbolt (2 page)

 

Though the Easy Street was only a waterfront dive, it was
his
waterfront dive, so Martin Clive took pride in every squeaky stool and chipped mug of his saloon. From grid shielded-electric lights to sawdust-covered floor, he loved every brick of it.

His customers, on the other hand, he could take or leave.

Not that he didn't need them. Clive's herd of cash-bearing cows, properly milked, provided for him. Clive surveyed the noisy, smelly Thursday-night crowd as the winter rains poured down outside. Safe behind the badge sewn to the money vest he seldom took off — even to sleep — and in the ownership of the biggest bar on the dockyard district of the dike-hugging waterfront, he passed his time and occupied his mind in sizing up the men as they talked, smoked, and drank. The few women in his bar were there on business, not for pleasure.

Clive perfected a three-step practice of evaluating customers over the years, now so ingrained that he did it unconsciously. Separating the “payers” from the “bums” came first. Knowing who had the cash for a night's drink and who didn't had been second nature to Clive since before he acquired the establishment. Distinguishing “gents” from “trouble” was yet another specialty. As he aged, and passed the responsibility of serving out drinks and rousting the “bums” and “trouble” to younger, stronger men, he took up a third valuation: that of predicting the remaining life span of his customers.

Clive looked at a bent longshoreman, hook over his shoulder and a pewter mug of cheap beer at his lips. The man had drunk, smoked, and wheezed out a few hours in the Easy Street six nights a week for the past ten years. Clive had watched him age under grueling physical labor, rotgut alcohol, and bad diet. If the longshoreman could stay in the good books of his crew chief, meaning handing over kick-backs out of his wages, he could probably spin out as many as ten more years if he stayed out of the hold. Sitting two seats down from him, a merchant sailor drank plain coffee, sixty if he was a day, dye rubbed into his hair to darken it in an effort to look younger. Soon no captain would hire him on, no matter how sober and upstanding a character he might be. He was due for the last dance within a year or two. On the next stool, a boy kept an affectionate eye on the aged sailor, perhaps a relative, perhaps just a shipmate. The boy did not drink either, and with hard work and a clean nose could expect to live another fifty years as long as he kept indoors after nightfall.

Over at a warm corner table, a young officer drank with three of his men. The officer was a welcome combination of “payer” and “gent,” to the point where Clive bothered to name him. The officer was “the Major” to Clive, and the Major always ordered a good bottle and never complained about the cheap whiskey substituted inside. That made him a fine payer. The Major and his men rarely caused trouble; therefore, they qualified for genthood. They wore the mottled green uniform of the Carbineers, one of the horsed troops of paramilitary Cossacks who kept civil order and patrolled the streets of New Orleans.

Maybe in other city establishments the Major threw his weight around, took food and drink without paying, and had his uniform silence objections. But not in the Easy Street. Clive had friends at the top of the city's food chain.

Clive learned in his youth that if you were in good with Kur, you could thumb your nose at the Port Authority, the Transport Office, even the police and militia. With Kurian patronage, he bid for ownership of the moribund Easy Street. A whiff of anything going on in the bar that Kur wouldn't like, and he picked up the phone. Clive wore his third ten-year badge on his chest, not due to expire for six more years, and he was certain of acquiring another. The badge put him off-limits to the Kurians' aura-hungry Hoods — well, mostly — and brought him peace of mind that muzzled any protest from his conscience.

The inner door of the entry vestibule opened, and Clive heard the wind and splatter of the rain pouring down outside in the moment before his doorman swung the outer portal shut. Clive liked the rain. It drove customers indoors and flushed the filth from the city's gutters.

A stranger stood silhouetted in the door.

The man didn't remove his raincoat. Clive took a closer look. A coat could conceal any number of unpleasant accoutrements. The Easy Street's owner relaxed when he caught a glimpse of uniform under the coat's heavy lapels. The flash of navy blue and brass buttons revealed the stranger as a Coastal Marine. From the fit of the coat and the good though mud-splattered boots Clive judged the man a payer. But something about his face made Clive reserve judgment on whether this man would be trouble or not.

The marine was tall and lean, but not remarkably so in either aspect. Clive put him in his mid-twenties: he had the narrow, crinkle-edged eyelids of a man with a lot of outdoor mileage, and the bronze skin of someone with a hefty dose of Indian blood. The stranger walked with a trace of stiffness in his left leg, not a false limb but perhaps an old injury. He was good-looking in a clean-shaven, sharp-jawed way, judging from the looks exchanged by a pair of whores keeping each other company at the end of the bar. Shining black hair hung in wet tangles, a ropy opal mane thrown back over his collar. A thin white scar traced his right cheek from the outer corner of his dark eye to his chin like the path of a milky tear.

With a moment to get a good look as the marine moved, Clive judged the man to be wearing a pistol at his hip, then the capped tang of some kind of knife appeared as the entrant turned. Clive knew how to spot weapons, long coat or no.

The new customer glanced around the room. His gaze flicked from the massive fireplace at the west end, big enough for a barbecue, to the game tables at the east.

The marine froze. Clive followed his gaze. Before he could determine whom he had recognized, the scarred stranger approached the bar nonchalantly. Clive guessed he had recognized the Major, for the table in the corner had gone quiet. Probably some old quarrel over a girl, or a smuggling deal gone bad. The Coastal Marines, with their mobility and lack of supervision, were notorious black-marketeers on the coast stretching from Galveston to the Florida Floods. Intrigued, Clive looked across the bar to the Major's table. The gents had their heads together. Clive's nose, after years of smelling the various aromas of a saloon — tobacco, liquor, sweat, urine, sawdust, and vomit (usually in that order) — was not as straight as it once had been, but he smelled trouble.

 

“Tea and rum, if you've got either,” David Valentine said, dripping from head to foot on the sawdust-sprinkled floor. His coat trapped the wet of his shirt better than it kept the rain out.

“Got both, Coastie.”

“The hotter, the better,” he said, pulling his hand through his slick hair again to get it out of his eyes. The gesture gave him a chance to look at the corner table. A silent mental alarm had tripped a switch in his nervous system, warming him better than any fire. Details stood out: florid printing on the bar bottle labels, the meshed ranks of gray hair on the barman's arms, a blemish on a prostitute's neck, footsteps muffled by the sawdust scattered on the floor, the rancid smell out of a spittoon.

The officer leaned across the corner table to speak to his men. Valentine trembled as his mind raced.

“You cold, Marine?” a whore asked, brushing a wet lock of hair behind his ear. Gold lamé and blond hair covered what little skin she didn't have on display. “I got a way — ”

She'd been attracted by the uniform. Ironic, because its thick, high-quality fabric and solid brass buttons repulsed him every time he put it on. Whenever he looked at himself in a mirror, he saw the Enemy looking back out of his own eyes.

“Some other time, perhaps.” Valentine turned away from her.

His conscience hammered at him until his eyes shone wet with more than rain.
Fool! Lazy, irresponsible fool!
Over a year's worth of preparation, service to the Kurian Order under a false name, all turned to shit and flushed. Just because he'd been tired and felt like coming in out of the weather.

Valentine racked his brain for the name, picturing the hawkish face in the hammock that summer in the Yazoo Delta during his training in Free Territory. Lewand Alistar, a freshly invoked Wolf six years ago and posted missing, presumed dead. So the Reapers hadn't killed him after all. Perhaps he had been captured and turned; perhaps he had been planted in Southern Command as a spy who saw his chance to get away clean. Whatever put him in a Carbineer's uniform in New Orleans was immaterial. The fact remained that mutual recognition occurred.

Valentine remembered Alistar as a quick-witted, active comrade. A hot mug of spiked tea arrived, and Alistar chose that moment to rise and take up his coat. Valentine blew into the steaming crockery. Alistar's companions shifted their chairs around. They pretended to watch the barmaids and hookers, but all three heads were pointed at Valentine.

Valentine heard Alistar move behind him. He readied himself to turn and fight, should the footsteps approach. But the Quisling left the Easy Street in a hurry. Typical of Alistar — not heroic but smart. No wonder he wore a major's cluster in the Kurian Zone.

Valentine needed to get out of the bar, too, without being impeded by Alistar's comrades, who he guessed had been ordered to keep him from leaving. He reached into his pocket, wadded a ball of money in his hand. He raised his mug in a come-hither toast to the whore who had approached him.

“Interested in a little fun and a lot of money?” he asked, his rough voice low.

“Always,” she said, smiling at him with a decent, if tobacco stained, set of teeth behind compound layers of lipstick. “My name's Agri. Like as in agreeable to anything.”

Valentine thrust the money into her shirt, pretending to feel her up. “Glad to hear it. There's a hundred and then some, Agri. Which girl here rubs you the wrong way?”

“Huh?” she said.

“Quick, or a man. Who don't you like here?”

She dropped the attitude at the quiet urgency in his voice. “Umm, there's Star,” the woman said, leaning out to look around Valentine's wide shoulder. “The head of hair with gold earrings. She's always breaking in and screwing my work up.”

He followed her gaze. “Which one is she, in the pink?” he asked, spotting a prostitute with a mass of wavy hair framing her face like a lion's mane. “Okay, I'm going to go talk to her. I want you to start a fight, fast.”

“And that's all I gotta do?”

“Make as big a scene as you can. Yes, that's all.”

“Shit, Marine, I'd do that for free.”

Valentine turned away from her and moved to the darker woman in a hot pink half-top. “I've heard you're quite a woman,” Valentine said, raising an eyebrow suggestively. The whore cocked her head and smiled welcomingly.

“That's my up, you bitch!” his paid prostitute shrieked.

Noisy, even better,
Valentine thought.

Star reacted with a speed that would have done credit to many of Valentine's former comrades in the Wolves. She planted herself, lowered her hips, and spread her arms.

The two women fell to the floor, fighting bobcats spitting and hissing at each other. A ring of hooting barflies formed around the combatants. Valentine backed through the crowd, snatched a hat off of an unattended table, and moved out the door before any of Alistar's soldiers had a chance to push through the crowd to guard the exit.

The conditions could hardly be worse for tracking a smart man in the crowded — and dangerous, thanks to prowling Reapers — city with a two-minute head start. Night, rain, and the rickshaw-cluttered streets all conspired to hide his quarry. Visibility nil — the big bosses never bothered much with public lighting. Most men would not have had a chance.

David Valentine was not most men. He was a Cat, one of the select specimens of humanity called Hunters trained by the Lifeweavers to fight against the abominations of their vampiric brethren, the Kur. The Kur controlled most of the planet, and the regions that remained outside their grasp, like Valentine's adopted home in the Ozarks and Ouachitas, owed much of their freedom to the sacrifices of the Hunters.

The Hunters, outnumbered and weak compared with the Reapers and the other creations of the Kur, relied on enhanced senses, physical ability, and tight mental discipline. The last was of paramount importance. The Reapers, the Praetorian Guard of Kur, tracked human prey by reading lifesign, psychic auras sent out by sentient beings.

Valentine needed to wash the fear from his mind. At the moment he was alone among enemies, surrounded by thousands who could gain a ten-year badge protecting themselves from the Reapers by pointing him out as an enemy of the New Order. And somewhere in the rainy darkness, a man whom he knew to be no fool was hurrying to ring the alarm bell.

Alistar would not just run to the nearest phone. He had no idea if Valentine was working alone, or with others who might have picked up a surreptitious signal and followed him out of the bar. Valentine remembered him as a man who liked to be in command. It was possible that he would get a posse of his own Carbineers together, to better take the credit for his coup in capturing or killing one of Southern Command's “terrorists.”

The barracks of the Carbineers would mean a long walk, too much time wasted. But Valentine knew from months of working the port that a contingent of them guarded their supply warehouse by the docks. Some of Alistar's men would be there.

It was only a guess, but as good a guess as he could make. Valentine ducked through an alleyway and broke into a sprint down a road parallel to the one Alistar probably took. Even if he had guessed wrong, the farther he got from the Easy Street, the better.