He quietly slipped out from under the front bumper, using his powerful fingertip grip to hold his torso off the ground, and rose directly behind the man looking down the side of the truck to its rear. Ethan’s sensitive sense of smell had already detected the fear and perspiration smells of these closest three men, and the man next to him positively reeked. All three of them smelled familiar. He realized they had been some of the seven men out at the airfield that morning, and had arrived on the truck. These were men employed by the owner of the two shuttles out there. A man he’d learned was also a rich CCA member, by the name of Janek Gregos, owner of the Lazy S ranch.
“Kit,” He called silently over his Comtap. “Some of these men are from the airfield this morning.”
“I had already detected that, you half nosed hunter. Why does that matter?” Kobani, even with ripper genetics for sense of smell, had fewer scent receptors in their smaller nasal cavity.
“They weren’t supposed to be hired killers according to the sheriff, and they weren’t ready to shoot just now until they were on top of me. Not professional gunmen at all.”
“Hired or volunteers, they’ll become my prey if they attack us. They’re certainly stalking you.”
“They work for a man named Gregos, another big rancher like Egerton. The boss of these men might not know I met with Egerton two hours ago.”
“Do you want them dead if they shoot or not?” She sounded exasperated.
“Damn, you’re a bloodthirsty bitch.”
“Thank you. I’m honored. My cubs would be proud to know their human uncle agreed with other adult rippers that know me, including my former mates.”
“That wasn’t exactly a complement.”
“Then phrase it differently than one.”
He sighed. “Try to keep as many of them alive as you can, but don’t risk being wounded to do that.”
“I can take a nap, and wait until you politely capture them all alive if you like. Please don’t scratch or dent any of them.”
The lightning fast mental exchange had required barely a second. Ethan had to get some answers before a body count mounted. He and Kit could certainly kill them all, but not without the personal regrets that he didn’t wish to accumulate.
He reached his arms around the man in front of him, grabbing his pistol and blocking the trigger pull while placing his other hand tightly over the man’s mouth.
He sent mental images to the man with words. “I don’t want to snap your neck, but I’m a Kobani, and I can literally pull your head completely off your shoulders with no effort. Now that I have your gun in my control, I might let you live. If you stay silent and answer my questions, you get to live without weeks spent in a med lab. Do you understand me? Think the answer. You don’t need to speak because I’m telepathic.”
“Don’t hurt me. I heard what you did to Jace Wilkins.”
“Fast learner. Why are you after me?”
“Boss said to bring you in to talk. When we saw you getting drunk we thought it would be easy.”
Ethan saw the image of a thin man with black hair in the man’s thoughts. He returned the image. “Is that Gregos?”
The man showed startled surprise at the sudden mental image. “Yes. He wants to talk with you. Make you a job offer.”
“You weren’t out to kill me or my friend?”
“No!”
“Your mind says if I fought you that you were to shoot to kill.”
“Only in self-defense!”
“Right, sure.” He said. “My partner and I enticed you to follow me outside, and we were prepared to kill all eight of you if we had to do so.” A fleeting thought leaked through from the frightened man.
“Kit, they have a sniper with a night scoped rifle on a roof across from the bar. But they didn’t want us dead before we talked with their boss.”
“An offer like the other guy made? By the way, I’m on the way to the sniper.”
“Evidently the two bosses don’t talk all that often. Both of them want us on their personal payroll. Don’t kill the sniper. They weren’t supposed to start shooting unless I did. The dumb asses still don’t think you’re a real threat.”
Ethan after warning his captive to stay quiet, and with the other man’s gun in his left hand, he stepped around to the left side of the truck and walked up behind the two nervous men there. “Don’t make a move.”
Naturally, they both startled like rabbits and tried to turn around. He thumped both on their heads with a gun butt, and with his right hand, he snatched the cocked revolver out of the man in the back’s hand, using his own thumb to block the hammer’s fall. He put the barrel of the other captured pistol against the temple of the man in front, and said, “What do you think don’t move means, moron? Toss your damned gun under the truck before I scatter your brains under there.”
The moron said, “Don’t shoot! We were only supposed to pick you up.”
“So I found out from your buddy. Use your transducer to call off your other men, Herb. I’d hate to have to kill some of them.” He had Tapped the man’s name.
“Uh…, only Chancy up the street has a transducer. There are…”
“I know, you have three more men behind us across the street, and Chancy is on the other side of the street with another man, and then there’s the sniper on the roof you forgot to mention. Toss your damned gun.” He thumped him painfully on the head again before he finally did as ordered, and then Ethan tossed the second captured pistol under the truck. He took a step back towards the front of the truck.
“Hank,” Ethan motioned to the first man he’d grabbed. He had also picked his name from his mind. “Step into the street and tell your other people to walk to the middle of the road where I can see them, but to keep their distance, unless they want me to shoot them.”
“There’s a man on the roof…” Hank didn’t finish that statement before a hideous scream echoed along the street, reflecting from the building fronts.
Ethan grinned evilly. “Oh…, don’t worry about the sniper. My companion just captured him, and he’s still alive or you would never have heard that scream of fright. Rippers love to terrify their victims, even when they let them live. Hey! I’ll bet he has a transducer. How else would he know when to shoot me in the back?”
He looked at the man in charge. “Contact him, Herb, and don’t lie to me again.” He ordered.
Unlike their Comtaps, which could broadcast the silent thoughts of Ethan and Kit, Herb had to speak to communicate by transducer.
“Franklin, are you OK?” He asked.
Ethan placed a bare hand on the man’s arm as the reply came, so he could pick up the answer via the leader’s thoughts.
“Holy shit. Help me Herb. This talking tiger wants to eats me. She says she’d prefer to swallow my beating heart last of all.”
Speaking aloud, so the men could hear him, Ethan used his Comtap, “Kit, bring him down here, and quit scaring the crap out of him. Have him bring his rifle.”
“The rifle’s in pieces. As are his pistol and hat. His clothes aren’t in great shape either.”
“You told ME not to scratch my guys.”
“Who says he’s scratched? I wasn’t clumsy when I shredded his clothes.”
“Then make him carry the rifle pieces. I want the evidence here if we need it, proof that they were prepared to shoot me if I resisted kidnaping with force. Some people just came out of the bar after that scream and rushed back inside. We might see a deputy or two arriving soon.”
He saw Hank had stayed close enough to him to hear what was being said. “Hey! Shit for brains, I just told you to tell the other men to get out in the open street. Tell them to hold their fire. If they shoot at me or at my tiger friend when she comes, I will shoot anyone that fires a shot at us.” He turned back to the transducer equipped head moron, and grasped his hand tightly this time, for a better mental connection.
“Who sent you after us moron, and where is he right now?”
“I can’
t tell you that.”
“Too late, you just did Herb. When you talk to Mr. Gregos later, sitting in his luxury Magnolia Hotel suite, on the tenth floor, tell him to speak with Mr. Edgerton. I saw Edgerton earlier tonight in his CCA office at the Cayuga Social Club. What’s your last name by the way? I don't mind calling you Herb Moron, but I’ll need to know your full name for your next of kin if you lie to me again, or try to withhold information I ask for.” He could sense the man was too frightened to call his bluff.
The man looked doubtful for a moment, his thoughts betraying him. “Herb, I read minds you dumbass, in case you didn’t get fully briefed on what someone like me can do. Perhaps this will convince you. I just got your last name of Ralston from your mind, and I picked up Gregos’ name when I asked who you worked for, and where he was.
“I could also do this to you if you try to hold information back again.” He sent an image of Herb’s head being shoved some place where it was anatomically impossible to fit.
Grimacing at the painful looking image vividly inserted into his mind, he realized his captor had not only read his thoughts, he could send him thoughts. He yielded. “Yes, Sir.”
“Tell your boss that I wasn’t invited into Edgerton’s office either. If I decided to visit Gregos for payback after tonight’s attempt to force me to go with you, tell him that he doesn’t have enough hired hands to keep me away from him if I want to reach him. I don’t feel like talking to him tonight, and I might not be interested in working for him or Egerton. I haven’t decided yet, but neither of them has impressed me favorably, and I don't take kindly to pressure. Got that?”
Herb nodded, and then jerked as he saw something coming down the sidewalk. Goose stepping ahead of a large dark apparition from a nightmare, came the sniper. Poor Franklin had a badly broken rifle with a night scope clutched in his arms, a seriously frayed wide brimmed cowboy hat on his head, pant legs ripped into ragged ribbons flapping as he ran, and his shirt was barely hanging around his neck and shoulders. He saw his friends, and promptly started screaming for their help.
Passing below a streetlight, the apparition following him was resolved into a white fanged, grinning blue tiger, loping along at the man’s heels, snarling and snapping its jaws.
Suddenly, one of the three men standing in the street, a lefty, apparently thought the tiger was pursuing rather than escorting his comrade, and he drew his gun and took careful aim at the moving target. The shattering sound of a shot was startling, as was the cry of pain that quickly followed.
The man aiming the gun spun in pain. Pain caused by the stinging or broken fingers of his left hand, and the spatter of lead and parts from the butt of his weapon striking him in the face and chest.
Ethan glared at Hank, standing in the center of the street. “I told you to tell them not to threaten my friend.”
“I did, I did.” The man cringed, fearing he’d be shot next.
“The other men were damned lucky he was standing in the clear, because I sure as hell would have killed anyone in the way of my shot to stop him.”
Ethan had used Hank’s confiscated revolver, thus saving the fraction of a second he’d needed for a right-handed draw of his own weapon. The flash of his single shot came from hip high, as soon as the barrel was leveled. There hadn’t been time to raise his arm higher, so he’d pivoted only his wrist.
“It’s that prick’s good fortune that he extended his arm to track Kit’s movement, giving me time and an easy shot at his gun hand. I’d have happily put a bullet through his right eye if he hadn’t been so frigging slow.”
In truth, Ethan had almost failed to notice when the man drew his pistol, his attention being focused on the amusing sight of Kit nipping at the panicked sniper’s heels.
Kit had flinched at the sound and looked quickly to her right when Ethan fired, and then resumed following the man she was herding, but without the noisy snarls and nips at his heels.
Ethan extended his arm to the side and planted a hand on the sniper’s chest, stopping him dead in his tracks with hardly a flex of his right arm, as he brought him to a halt.
“Don’t let him kill me, please,” Franklin said, as the would-be-sniper, pleaded with his would-be-target.
“Kit’s a female, not a he, and if she wanted your ass dead, your shredded bloody remains would have been left where she found you, waiting to shoot me in the back. So shut the hell up.”
Kit’s glowing blue eyes looked coolly at her brother. “Nice left handed shooting.”
“Not really. I was aiming for his head,” he joked.
“Sure. Dumb luck’s better than no luck. It would have served me right, since I was showing off and having fun, and I guess it did look like I was trying to bite him in the ass.” She was accepting responsibility for provoking what happened.
“A girl’s gotta have fun.” He acknowledged.
Looking at the men out in the middle of the street, he yelled, “Drop your gun belts and get your asses over here. Don’t make me shoot off a damned finger or toe to get you to come. I’m suddenly short of patience.”
They glanced at the man still shaking his stinging left hand, hit by a snap shot from hip level, by the man that just ordered them to drop their guns. They promptly started unbuckling their gun belts, and helped the injured man drop his, even though he no longer had a functional weapon.
When all nine now unarmed men were clustered on the sidewalk close to the truck, Ethan gave them an ultimatum. “Kit here is an intelligent alien, and I was raised with her as part of my family. She’s more than capable of taking care of herself, but I don't want anyone else thinking she’s just an animal and trying to shoot her like one. I don't care in the slightest what the local law might say about you being allowed to do that. I’m telling you all that I will hunt down and kill anyone, or an entire group that was part of even wounding her.” He pointed to the men that had experienced his Mind Tapping.
“Check with these men. Kit and I both have telepathic abilities. No matter what lie you try to tell us, we will get the truth from you, or from someone that knows you. If any one of you manages to kill her, or to kill me, the other one of us will wipe out the people responsible, right down to the last man. This isn’t our home world, so we won’t have to live here and avoid the law when we’re done with the killing.”
He pointed out the obvious. “We could have killed all of you tonight, but we’re not ruthless killers. Don’t make the mistake of provoking us into becoming such killers. You won’t like the results, or live very long to have regrets. It’s possible, after we pick whichever side we’ll support here in your range war that we could end up fighting on the same side.
“I’m not favorably impressed by the two bosses from your side tonight. We’re about to walk away in a moment, and none of you had better try to follow us. You won’t get lucky twice.”
Kit issued a deep rumbling snarl, exposing her six-inch incisors, and let her penetrating blue eyed gaze pass over each man, making deliberate eye contact. She never blinked. As she started to turn away, she paused and said, “I have the scent of each one of you memorized. I could follow you anywhere, pick you out of a large crowd, and smell you from downwind at over a mile. You had best be well behaved little pieces of meat.”
Several of the men shivered, and two swallowed uncomfortably. Her warning was taken more to heart than Ethan’s had been. He hadn’t called them “little pieces of meat,” and he didn’t have the pearly whites to make that threat seem credible anyway.
As they headed up the street quietly, they crossed over and turned into an alleyway to hide where they were going. The Comtap exchange however was lively.
“Pieces of meat? Really, Kit, a bit melodramatic don’t you think?”
“I don't know. Your bluff was that you’d wipe them out to the last man.”
“I happen to know that you won’t eat them, but I wasn’t bluffing about killing them if they shot you.”
“I’m touched.”
“You sh
ould be.”
“Did you see our mysterious watcher from the patio cross the street at the bar, as we issued our ultimatums? He went between two buildings.”
“I did. I think he’s our contact, or one of them. That’s why I crossed the street here, to see if we can spot him headed towards the back of the feed store from the next street over.”
As they approached the next parallel street, they stopped beside the wall of a building and waited behind some trash bins.
Ethan’s wolfbat hearing was slightly better than Kit’s. By Comtap he said, “Here he comes, about thirty feet away.”
“The breeze is this way. It’s him,” her nose confirmed.
They stayed in the deep shadows of the alleyway and let the man pass. He did glance down the alleyway as he crossed, but the two dark figures crouched in deep shadow were invisible to him. Both Kit and Ethan had kept their eyes angled towards the side of the wall, watching via peripheral vision. They knew that stray light, reflected from the retinas of their predator’s night vision, which their shared genetics provided to each of them, might reveal their presence.
They stepped out ten feet behind him, and Ethan called out, “Are you headed for the feed store?” He’d almost asked if he was Jeff Chastain before he was sure. If it weren’t really him, he’d give away their contact’s name.
The man jerked and spun around, but as evidence that he wasn’t a gun hand by training or instinct, he didn’t move his hand towards his pistol. At least, not right away.
Ethan, seeing the man’s face by the streetlight from behind them, knew for certain whom he was now. “Easy Chastain. We’re here to meet you, not to kill you.”
“Uh…,” he snatched his hand away from his gun butt. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be coming, Mr. Greeves.” His eyes weren’t nearly as good as theirs were at night, and the two figures had the streetlight behind them, casting them in silhouette. Ethan’s figure could have been that of any man, but there was no likelihood of any other man being accompanied by a ripper’s silhouette.
Koban Universe 2: Have Genes, Will Travel Page 13
