I'd have to get Marantha to update me on her investigation into the attempt on Nance's life, and then there was the army. Bloody Sarah now had more bodies, but no more weapons. Somehow the new sharks would have to be trained, armed, fed.
I brought Nance's hand to my mouth, kissed it and held it to my cheek as I muttered, "You dumb bull croc lizzie yard monster, why'd you have to go and get yourself shot?"
I felt the fingers of her hand tighten on mine until the pressure was considerable.
"Ow." The pressure increased. "Hey!"
I saw her lips move.
"Nance? Nance, what is it?"
I stood and bent over her, placing my left ear next to her mouth. "Nance? What're you saying?"
I felt a stabbing pain in my earlobe and I broke her grasp and jumped back, holding my ear. It was wet, and I looked at my hand. My fingers were wet with my own blood.
"Bitch! You bit me!" I looked down at her and her eyes were open. They were glazed with pain but she grinned at me.
"Next time you call me a lizzie," she whispered, "I'll bite off your damned head."
"Nance!"
She closed her eyes. "Get out of here. You have work to do. When it's dark, get the column moving." Her breathing became very labored and I saw her eyes glisten. It frightened me to see the Iron Lady with tears in her eyes. "Bando, get together with Bloody Sarah about our plans for doing the Hand. We need more soldiers. When Dom came in he said you were going to meet a landing. Did you get any to join the Razai?"
"About sixteen thou."
The expected pat on the head didn't come. "We need more. Lots and lots more. And, Bando?"
"Yeah?"
Her voice became a hoarse whisper. "Find the bastard who did this to me. I want him to get his payback, and I want to deliver it personally. Get going." She closed her eyes and I stood there for a moment looking down at her. I had my orders. I touched her hand, turned, and left the sled.
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What's Mine Is Mine
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When I climbed down from the sled there was a crowd waiting for me at the edge of the sunlight. Columns of the Mihvihtian convicts were entering the camp, and Colonel Indimi along with a few of the other Mihvihtians were waiting for me. Besides the Colonel and the commanders of the other columns, the only Mihvihtian I recognized was cockroach Lewis Grahl. Apart from them were Ondo and the RCs. Stays detached himself from the crowd and met me. "You all right, Sherlock?"
"Peachy." I pointed back toward the sled with my thumb. "You know about her not having any anesthetic?"
"Yes."
I turned and grabbed his sheet with both hands at his neck. "Why didn't you do something? Couldn't you get her some drops, save some of that Hand made vino, anything?"
With his strong hands he gently pried my fingers off of his sheet. "Grab a piece, Bando. The few bottles of hootch we captured from the Hand were like raw meat tossed to the lions. Hell, I bet at least a quarter of our people are dry drunks. As for pills and powders, most of the stuff that did manage to make it to the grit was used up days ago. What's left is near and dear and there's nothing in the universe you can trade a deadhead for it."
"Then why didn't you take it from them?"
He looked at me with hooded eyes for a long moment. "Our first rule, Chief: What's mine is mine. It's the law. Nance understands. Why don't you?"
"Man, this law shit is getting real old real fast."
Stays grinned sympathetically. "Welcome to the universe." He pointed toward the Mihvihtians. "You have other things to handle right now." He studied me for an instant. As he placed a friendly hand on my shoulder, he said, "I'm going to do a little survey of the newcomers and see if I can come up with something for Nance. Okay, Sherlock?"
"Yeah. Thanks." I shrugged and held out my hand. "Sorry about grabbing you. It's been—"
"Yeah. One of those days." He shook my hand and left me standing there feeling out of place. Everyone was waiting for me to tell them what to do. Rather than look at any of them, I rubbed my eyes.
"Beautiful camouflage on the camp," said the Colonel. I looked at him, glanced at the tent that covered the wagons, and walked over to the gathering. "I'm no judge."
"I am."
"So what do you want, man?"
"Where should we put them?" He gestured with his thumb toward his fellow Mihvihtians coming in from the dunes.
I rubbed my temples for a moment. When I had eased my aching head a bit, I said, "The Razai is divided up the same way I divided up your bunch: point, flank guards, rear guard, and walking column. For the time being I'm going to send each group to its corresponding Razai group. Things'll probably change once I get together with Sarah, but for now we'll do like I said." I saw a familiar face out in the sun. "Jak. Jak Edge."
The former commander of Kegel's defunct patrol turned and shielded his eyes against the sun with his hand. He walked over. Once he was under the canopy and in the shade, he said, "It's good to see you again, Nicos."
I turned to Ondo. "I want you and Jak to scare up some guides. Have one take Colonel Indimi and his people on up to the point. When the walking column gets here, have them park it here until it's time to crank up for the night march. Bring their left flank guard on over to Ow Dao, the right flank guard to Steel Jacket, and the rear guard to The Match. Tell the generals to settle them in somehow."
"Sure thing."
Jak nodded toward the sled. "How's the Iron Lady?" He held up a dark green sheet of paper. It was covered with pale yellow writing. "Mercy Jane's been lean with the news."
"What's that?
He held up the sheet. "The Taps. A newspaper." He handed it to me.
"Ila Toussant puts it out," said Ondo.
I glanced at Marietta. "My court clerk?"
"That's the one. Besides The Taps she made up maybe five hundred copies of the law. She's got a way of bleachin' out old ink then usin' greenstick juice to make contact prints with the sun."
I held it so the light would fall on it and tried to read it. "I can't see a thing."
Jak pointed toward the sunny part of the sand. "Don't let the sun fall on it, chup. Read through it."
It was all in negative. In Ila's neat handwriting was the news of yesterday. The scout reports about a large gang following the Razai, no word yet from Bando Nicos, Nance Damas still unconscious, Mercy Jane looking for anesthetics, Bloody Sarah looking for sharks with military experience. There was a swap and shop corner and a list of meetings of various kinds from CSA to the Black Gay Bikers for Jesus. I handed the paper back to Jak thinking about everyone being able to have a copy of the law. Would it make us more lawful, or would it turn us into a tribe of cockroaches? There was something else, though. A feeling. The existence of that pitiful, one sheet newspaper seemed to give the Razai more rides on its ticket. When I saw it I knew we weren't something that would just fade away into the sands. We would have to be destroyed.
I looked up at Jak for a moment. His hair and beard were totally gray even though he wasn't more than thirty years old. He was all fog to me. I couldn't read him. "Nance'll make it," I said to him. "She's awake now and talking."
"You sure?"
I laughed, turned my head, and pointed at my ear. "I'm sure she doesn't like being called a lizzie."
Jak smiled a smile that didn't mesh with the moment, then he and Ondo led the Colonel away. All but two of the Mihvihtians went with them. Lewis Grahl, Tani Aduelo's cockroach, stayed behind along with a haystack with short brown hair, a pockmarked face, and the deadest eyes I've ever seen in a live head. He was tall and built lean like a jungle cat.
"I got a question," he stated in a voice pregnant with ready-to-be-realized catastrophes.
I glanced at Marietta and Marantha, then looked back at him. "Let's have it."
"You got any cops from Mihviht in your RCs?"
"Nope. Not yet. You want to be the first?"
&nbs
p; Suddenly his face lit up like a cat that just discovered it had a canary in its mouth. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I'd like that. What do I do?"
I nodded toward Stays, Marantha, and Marietta. "They'll fill you in and get you a piece and a copy of the law. Go get your stuff."
Those dead eyes crinkled at the corners, he nodded once, walked out into the sunlight, and headed toward a dune where several Mihvihtian sun shields had been set up. He squatted down and began making his roll.
"Who is he?" asked Stays."
"Someone who wants to be a cop."
"You didn't ask him for his background?"
I snorted out a laugh. "Except for Marantha, every badge in the RCs is a murderer, including you and me. What kind of background should he have?"
Lewis Grahl was looking at me like it was absolutely beyond his ability to comprehend the depth of stupidity in the being standing before him. "Cockroach," I asked him, "who farted in your soup?"
He folded his arms and raised his eyebrows. "Nicos, after you executed that little girl out there on the sand, you remember that other fellow you killed?"
"The Rule 13."
"His name was David Ostrow." Grahl pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb at my brand new RC. "That's his older brother, Jay. Professional killer. At least forty or fifty gang executions to his credit. Very famous where I come from."
"No kidding?"
"No kidding." He grinned as he waved at me. "Now you go and have a nice day." The roach turned and walked away, his moment made.
I turned and faced the others. "Remind me sometime about coming up with some kind of way of screening applicants to the RCs."
"Check," Stays answered as Marantha and Marietta gave me bad looks.
I looked around for a second. "I've done enough damage here. Where's Bloody Sarah?"
"Over there," called Mercy Jane from the back of Nance's sled. I looked and the doc was pointing toward another sled. "The last time I saw her she was in the ordinance sled."
I shook Jay Ostrow out of my head. With all that I had to think about, there wasn't any room for worrying about back shooters. Of course, not having her back covered was what got Nance an opportunity to get her chest chopped up while she bit a rag. Maybe I'd have to work up some kind of bodyguards for Nance and me. Maybe not. Considering who we were, where we were, and who we were with, what RC didn't need a bodyguard? Bando Nicos was no special case.
I looked at Marantha. "The Nance Damas shooting. You got any suspects?"
"About three thousand."
I rubbed the back of my neck and looked around at the activity beneath the shelter and in the sunlight. Right there we had the densest concentration of killers for profit, fun, politics, and just-for-the-hell-of-it in the universe. We weren't in some little English rose garden looking for the bad apple who took out the local attitude problem. We had nothing but rotten apples and attitude problems. "So what're you going to do? Just hang it up?"
Marantha's nostrils flared as her eyelids half closed and her eyebrows went up. "Now that Nance can talk, maybe I can narrow it down a little."
"What about the leftover rape cases from the Hand?"
"It went a lot faster than we thought. Under the No Prisoners Rule, everyone who was accused took off into the desert. That meant that they all entered guilty pleas, so it was mostly a little paperwork. There were forty one convictions for rape, and nine for rape-murder."
"I figured there'd be a lot more."
She pursed her lips. "I figure there are. For some reason the victims are hanging back."
I pointed toward the open spaces. "And Cap, Margo, and Herb are out chasing down the buggouts?"
"They made maggot chow out of at least a dozen perps we know of."
"Could one or more of them have gotten their hands on weapons, doubled back, and done the job on Nance?"
She nodded. "As I said, we have at least three thousand suspects, and a few of those are dead. Once when Cap came back for more water, he said that it looked like a group of five perps seemed to be heading for a specific place. Every time they moved they ran a straight arrow course south."
"A camp? An arms dump? Food?"
"Maybe." She looked past my shoulder and said, "I'm going to see if I can talk to Nance."
"Keep me posted." I said to them all, "I'll be in with Bloody Sarah. I'll look in on Nance after awhile.
We broke up the jaw jam and I watched as Marantha headed toward Nance's sled. My head felt cross-threaded. There were at least a thousand things I ought to be doing, and I couldn't figure out a single one.
I stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets and shuffled toward the ordinance sled. On my way I walked next to the tightly parked row of water and supply sleds that we had captured from the Hand. I glanced in between two of the sleds and noticed a pair of feet sticking out over the runners of one of the sleds.
"Hey! Hey, sandman!" The feet didn't even twitch. Turning sideways, I worked my way between the sleds until I was standing over the feet. They were covered with dockers from the Crotch. I kicked one of them. "Hey, are you okay?"
There was no sound, and I thought whoever it was must be dead. I squatted down, looked beneath the sled, and saw the emaciated out-of-this-galaxy countenance of Pill Phil, a former pharmacist who got into the stock and became as lost as the sweet tooth who bought the candy store. One time when he had been frying his brain at work he did some creative prescription filling. Six people died and Phil came out of his fog sitting in front of the black rag who dropped him into Greenville. As a guest of the Crotch myself, I couldn't ever remember seeing Pill Phil awake during the couple of years that I had known him.
He had planned on floating through his eighteen year sentence, should his pills allow him to live so long. I always figured that once we hit Tartaros, Phil would be up to his baggy eyes in a reality bath, since there wasn't any way the deadheads could get their chemistry through the trip. I was obviously wrong.
I felt his wrist and couldn't get a pulse. His skin was clammy and wet. I felt for the spot in his neck and there I found a slight pulse. Pill Phil wasn't dead. He was just touring the universe by using up the remainder of his brain cells for fuel.
That this chup could get his hands on downers while Nance had been screaming out her guts under a pair of bolt cutters was almost enough to drive me into the red rage. But I chilled it. If I offed the pill head, there were consequences I didn't want to pay, even if no one else would know. I would know.
A thought did creep in. Maybe I could do Nance a favor by doing Pill Phil a favor. Besides, maybe he hadn't come up with any product because no one had asked him the right way.
I crawled beneath the sled until I was on my side next to him. God his skin looked awful, all gray and blotched. "Say, Phil, what's happening, my man? What you got?"
I looked around on the sand, and then I began patting down his pockets. They contained only little bits of this and that and I'd just about figured he'd used up his last when I noticed a bulge in the front of his pants. Either he was hung like a fire truck or there was something else snuggled up to his scrotum.
I unsealed his fly, opened his trousers, and lifted the band on his graying whites. Nestled next to his naughties was a clear plastic bag three-quarters filled with clear caplets that looked like so many glass beads. They were major downs. On the street they were called diamond drops or thumpers. Phil had been eating them like gumdrops. "Hey, Phil. Can I have these?"
I placed my hand beneath his head. "I know someone who needs 'em real bad, man. Okay with you?" I moved my hand and nodded his head. "You sure, amigo?" He nodded again. "Thanks, man. I owe you."
His mouth fell open and in a voice from some kind of horror show, he said, "It wasn't my fault. Honest."
"We know, man. A bad call. They shoulda had more sense than to come to your store."
He fell silent. I pulled my hand from beneath his head and his face turned toward me. His eyes were half open revealing nothing but bloodshot whites. "If you li
ve long enough to miss these things, Phil, drop by the CSA meeting and we'll show you how to get along without them."
I pulled the bag out of his shorts, tucked it into my trouser pocket, and crawled out from beneath the sled feeling just a bit gypped because I hadn't strangled the deadheaded bastard. I left his fly open, though.
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Bloody Sarah and the Trolls
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In the heat of the ordinance sled Sarah Hovit wore only the cut down romper macho bait she had worn when we did in the Hand. Short shorts and less than a bandage for a top, her desert camouflage sheet draped over her shoulders, and the two crowbar sharks in the sled with her were only thinking about what she was asking and how to give her whatever it was that she wanted.
There was that natural leader thing again. She had it like no one I ever knew. When you told a shark to do something, the most natural thing for the shark to do was to either slice you, thump you, or tell you to climb into your own ass and pump 'til you puke. That's why the hightowers carried all that iron; that's why the walls on the crowbar hotels were so thick. But Bloody Sarah had those same sharks running around the dunes, training to become an army, learning how to hunt, how to hide, how to kill, how to die, and the sharks were eating it up like it had a cherry on top.
The ordinance people were called the Trolls and she introduced them. Emmet Stant was a squinty-eyed, noodle-built haystack machinist and bomb manufacturer for several terrorist pistachio groups on Earth. Gordo Diaz was a well-oiled, overly-padded chili pepper arms dealer who sold his peashooters to the wrong folks once too often. Gordo knew more about all different kinds of weapons than the manufacturers of those weapons knew. The rumor was that if Emmet could get his hands on the proper tools and materials, he could take what was in Gordo's head and turn it into reality. Considering the variety of sophisticated hell makers residing in Gordo's head, there was a considerable lump of potential in the Emmet and Gordo combination.
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