by James Axler
Kneeling at Ricky’s side, Jak moistened his lips. This wasn’t where he wanted to be right now—he claimed. But it was where Ryan had told him to stay. For once he’d obeyed without much fuss.
Standing first on one leg, then the other, Krysty pulled off her blue cowboy boots. She showed a balance that surprised Ricky, and he’d spent pretty much every day of the past few months in her presence. The well-worn socks joined her shirt.
To Ricky’s right, by the window on the other side of the front door, someone tittered. He heard a thwack, followed by a muted, “Owww!”
There had to have been a dozen people crowded into the front room of the hacienda alone, craning and jostling for a view through the narrow windows. Ricky had the impression the other front-facing windows had drawn crowds, as well. Aside from Ricky, Jak, Mildred and Doc, everybody in the front room belonged to the hacienda. Baron Sand herself stood by the other window, leaning forward with keen interest on her oddly handsome moon face, taking advantage of her height—augmented by the ankle boots she wore—to see over her retainers.
She had issued stern warnings against making the least bit of noise no matter what happened. Apparently she had given the violator a thump on the head to punish his breach.
Or hers. In some cases, Ricky wasn’t triple sure.
Krysty bent over, skinning the jeans down her legs. Her skin was so white in the bright afternoon that it was startling. As was the tapered perfection of those legs, so leanly muscled. Ricky might have moaned, but he wasn’t the only one.
She was now dressed only in the sports bra and some faded lavender panties. She turned profile to the house as she skinned the bra off over her head. Her breasts popped free in their full glory.
“Ooh,” said several voices at once. Sand didn’t even shush them. Ricky suspected hers might have been among them.
He bit his lip so hard he would’ve been afraid he’d make it bleed had he any consciousness left over for such things. Pretty much since the moment he’d met Ryan and his bizarre crew Ricky had been in love with Krysty. He was a healthy, if sheltered and naïve, adolescent boy. She was clearly the most beautiful woman in the world.
He had tried to hide it, with what his new companions had made clear, not always gently but usually humorously, were the usual results.
His lust for the statuesque redhead caused him more than moral qualms. If Krysty was the most beautiful woman in the world, her mate was the deadliest man.
Taking too keen an interest in the mate of a man like Ryan Cawdor was a triple-good way to wind up humiliated. Or dead. Fortunately neither Ryan nor Krysty showed much outward sign of jealousy as such. They were just so absolutely confident both in themselves and their love for each other that nothing could challenge them. Especially not the blushing half-hidden attentions of an awkward teenage kid.
He’d seen glimpses of Krysty nude. There was no way to help it, the way they lived. But he had never seen anything like this from her—this deliberately provocative display.
He had never seen anything like this, period.
Pretty much all the workers in eyeshot had dropped whatever they were doing and stood to stare. Ricky vaguely gathered that, because he had a pretty strong case of tunnel vision himself.
Krysty turned back toward the water. She put her hands up behind her neck and fluffed her glorious hair. Suddenly it seemed to expand into an incredible mane of fire. Ricky knew that was because her hair actually moved of its own accord, though fortunately there was no way the watchers could know that.
She put her hands behind her back and hooked her thumbs in the often-shortened elastic of the waistband. She paused a moment that way, as if contemplating.
“Oh my God,” somebody whispered. “She’s really gonna do it—”
Then everybody in the room except Jak yelped and screamed as a sound like thunder broke the air.
Chapter Eleven
In the corner of the baron’s barn, Ryan threw the bolt of his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster as recoil made the weapon kick his shoulder hard and rise inevitably upward. Behind him horses neighed and stamped in alarm and annoyance at the sudden noise that had agonized their sensitive ears.
As the carbine settled back into line with his eye again, he felt it scrape against one of the wooden corner panels of Sand’s pole barn. He’d poked it out between them when he shouldered the longblaster to take the shot. Then he was looking once more through the longeye-relief Leupold telescopic sight at the Crazy Dogs’ spotter’s position, up on the ridge behind the hacienda, 150 yards off. He saw nothing.
Nothing was just what he’d expected. Even as the recoil from the powerful 7.62 mm cartridge pushed up the short-barreled longblaster, he had seen pink mist spray from behind the head and the binoculars that obscured most of the spy’s face.
The binoculars had been fixed on Krysty as she’d disrobed by the stream.
Just as it had all been planned.
He held on target a moment more, breathing regularly. Aside from a sense of satisfaction at a job well done, he felt nothing in particular. His heart rate wasn’t elevated. For him, this was business as usual.
“Get him?” J.B. called from the barn’s front door. The horses were stamping and swishing their tails, but settling down. Now they seemed mostly annoyed at the strange intruding monkeys and their noise.
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “How’s Krysty?”
“Almost naked.”
“Enjoy the show?”
”Nothing we all haven’t seen before a time or two. Except mebbe Ricky.”
Ryan laughed. “I guess you’re right.”
They’d needed a cunning stratagem. And Krysty had come up with it.
There was a problem shooting a dude who was already scoping your position through binocs. The usual trick, a variation of which they’d taught Sand to spy the guy in the first place—of positioning yourself far enough back from a window your enemy couldn’t make you out in the shadows of a room—would not work here. The playhouse walls were so triple thick that the large blond woman had barely been able to lay glass on the spy without the risk of being seen. The angles were just wrong from the side windows as well as the rear ones. Unless he cared to try a snapshot, which he did not, that wouldn’t work.
Jak’s recon and a quick question to Sand had confirmed that the pole barn would give him a better angle to shoot from. The problem remained that, while he could safely watch the target from concealment with his own binoculars, if he presented the rifle long enough to catch a good sight picture it still gave the presumed Crazy Dog too much of a chance to see him.
Ryan didn’t know the spy had a scoped rifle of his own. Then again, he didn’t know he didn’t. Nor even that the dude might have been spotting for a sniper himself, who was waiting out of sight from below until the time came to take a shot. But Ryan had also not lived the kind of life he had as long as he had by failing to take even slim chances into account. At least when he had luxury to work the odds.
And anyway, if the spy had noticed Ryan drawing a bead on him, all he’d had to do was to duck and it was game over. Then Ryan wouldn’t get paid. And that would be too bad.
* * *
“I’M IMPRESSED,” Baron Sand said.
She, Ryan’s friends and a gaggle of her followers all waited for Ryan in front of the big house. An unsmiling Trumbo stood to one side with brawny arms crossed over his chest. His big bruiser lieutenant stood to his right, a lean little Mex-looking man with a more successful stubble than Mystery to his left.
“My pleasure,” Ryan said as he walked out of the barn with his longblaster tipped back over his shoulder and his binoculars hanging around his neck from the strap. J.B. stepped out after him.
“I was talking about Krysty’s striptease,” Baron Sand said, “which was definitely my pleasure. But you did a pretty
decent job, too.”
Ryan nodded.
“I was wondering why you took so long to take the shot,” Doc said. “I was afraid all of these fine people would see Krysty in her birthday suit!”
Putting his arm around her shoulders, Ryan turned to the others.
“I wanted to make sure the scout’s full attention was focused away from me. Watching through my binocs, I saw him visibly react. I figure it was the time she was about to shuck out of her skivvies. That told me his attention was riveted enough to take the shot.”
“It was a kindness, of sorts,” Doc said, “to send the poor devil to the Beyond with a vision of Heaven in his eyes.”
Krysty laughed. “Thank you, Doc. You’re always so courtly.”
“I’m not triple sure that wasn’t a final bait and switch on the bastard.” The baron mimed twirling a nonexistent mustache. “But from where I stood the vision was pretty heavenly. You folks sure you don’t want to stay a spell? We’ll be happy to show you why I call this place the playhouse.”
“Thanks,” Ryan said, “but we need to be getting back to Amity Springs. Time to settle up.”
“Hold on just a rad-blasted minute,” Trumbo said. “Aren’t we getting way out ahead of ourselves here? Talking about paying a bounty when we don’t even know there’s a chill?”
“There’s a chill, all right,” Sand said. “Once he started out front I slipped back into the bedroom and watched through my own spy glass. Just in time to see the shot hit. If the dude’s not dead, he has a different central nervous system than you or me—one that can run without a brain.”
She put her hands on her wide hips and looked askance at him. “Well, different from me.”
Trumbo growled.
“But I tell you what,” the baron said. “Why don’t you send a couple of your boys up to check for a body, see if there’s something useful they can bring back. Information. Scavvy. Weps. It’s time they earned their three hots and a cot, the way they eat.”
Trumbo nodded and muttered instructions to the lean dark guy. Shooting a dagger-pointed look at Ryan, he sidled off.
Sand stuck out her hand. Mystery counted the requisite amount of jack used in that area of Deathlands into her palm from a purse he produced from somewhere. She held it out. Ryan stepped up and accepted it, gave it a quick count, then nodded and took a step back.
Sand draped one arm around Mystery’s narrow shoulders and the other around the bare shoulder of a plump dark-haired girl with a pretty face and pink complexion.
“Remember,” she said, “there’s more where that came from. And just a helpful hint—forget about Dark Lady’s missing trinket. You and we’d be far prettier friends than enemies.”
Ryan said nothing. He just looked at her steadily.
The baron shrugged and laughed. “At least remember to tell Dark Lady my offer still stands to buy her ville. She’ll thank me in the long run.”
* * *
“SO WE SEEM to be running into plenty of folks who are uncommonly accepting of muties,” Mildred said as they walked across the flats toward Amity Springs.
“You noticed that, did you?” Ryan asked.
He was carrying his Steyr in both hands and on triple alert. He owed the Crazy Dogs two blood debts, and they wouldn’t wait forever to try to collect.
Nonetheless there was at least a chance there had been just the one spy, and no one to carry back word of his demise. Or at least who caused it.
Mildred snorted. “Did you think I went blind gazing at Krysty’s pretty white backside? A little hard to miss a couple of them. Like the one with the extra eye in his cheek. Or the one with the oozing hole where his nose should be, and those little pink cilia around it.”
“I still don’t know what the big deal is,” Ricky said, shaking his head.
“You been with us long enough to know most people don’t take kindly to muties,” Ryan said. “Not like the place you come from, where you might see a scabbie walking down the street and not think anything of it. To say nothing of running across a whole ville full of friendly stickies.”
“Well, it’s not like they bothered me,” Mildred said. “Not like some of the baron’s playmates. They gave me the creeps, big time.”
“Compared to some of the barons I have encountered,” Doc said, “Baron Sand’s diversions appeared quite...sedate.”
“Look!” Ricky exclaimed suddenly. “Over there!”
Everybody turned back. He was bringing up the rear, visibly feeling proud of himself because Ryan didn’t tell one of the grown-ups to hang back and keep an eye on him. The fact was, Ryan knew the youth was keen-eyed and so eager to please he’d be endlessly alert.
He was pointing at something south of their track. Ryan saw a rustle of motion in some taller-than-average grass. He had his Steyr halfway to his shoulder before he saw what had caused it.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed. “Haven’t you ever seen an armored coyote before, Ricky?”
“Well...no,” Ricky said.
Ryan lowered the blaster. The creature was the size and general shape of a middling dog, like any coyote. And not looking any better groomed nor fed than most. The only thing that set it off from the usual run was the flexible gray-scaled carapace like an armadillo’s protecting its back and sides.
It had its head up and ears pricked. It watched them from about forty yards off. It kept standing there for a good five, ten seconds after it was perfectly aware they’d seen it.
From the corner of his eye Ryan saw Ricky, over-excited, fumbling as he tried to raise his silenced DeLisle for a shot.
“Hey!” Ryan barked. “Stop that!”
Ricky froze. He turned a wide-eyed look at Ryan.
The coyote turned and vanished as quickly and completely as if it had teleported to another world.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ryan said. “You were going to waste a cartridge on that mangy thing? When it and its whole tribe couldn’t threaten a one of us, armor or no, unless we were blind drunk and stuck in a hole?”
“Well, but, it was—” He tightened his mouth in a look of chagrined confusion. “It was scary.”
“You’re the one hails from a place they call Monster Island,” J.B. said. “Anyway, remember what Trader always said—no chilling for chilling’s sake.”
Ricky jutted his underlip and hung his head.
“I didn’t know Trader,” he said sullenly. “I’m not, like, old.”
“Mebbe just as well for you, you didn’t,” J.B. said. Then he looked at Ryan.
“You hear that? The boy talked back.” He sounded proud. He grinned briefly.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Good for you, kid. Just don’t let it get too stiff, or it’ll snap all to dreck next time one of us has call to kick your ass.”
“Yes, sir,” Ricky muttered.
Chuckling, Ryan led them onward. They were bleeding daylight. The sun had fallen well down the sky and their shadows were gaining an ever-greater lead toward their destination.
“So you gave the place a once-over, Jak,” Ryan called to their point man.
He waited a minute but the albino didn’t answer. Apparently he reckoned Ryan had already worked that out for himself. No need to waste a precious syllable acknowledging it.
“So what did you see?”
“Back door. Goes to kitchen. Separate building out back, same triple-thick walls. Sec men barracks.”
“I’m impressed,” Mildred said. “It’s like he exhausted his whole allotment of vocabulary for the month.”
“I don’t recall seeing any more sec men but Trumbo, his big goon and that skinny Mex-looking guy,” J.B. said to Ryan. “You?”
Ryan shook his head. “Me neither.”
“I did,” Krysty said. “At least half a dozen of them cam
e out of the barracks to watch my little show. Sorry I didn’t mention it earlier.”
“No call to earlier,” Ryan said.
“Think that’s all of them?” Mildred asked.
“How about it, Jak? How many do you reckon could live in that other building?”
“Dozen.”
“Where were they?” Krysty wondered. “Unless the extras are straight women or gay men?”
“Mebbe out doing stuff for the baron,” J.B. said.
“Why would Baron Sand require so many sec men?” Doc asked. “She appears most cultured.”
“We’ve known more than a few cultured coldhearts and crazies who were barons, Doc,” Krysty said.
“True. But her people seemed notably carefree. Nor did they seem to require an overseer with a whip to keep them at their tasks.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Whatever’s happening there, heavy-handed domestic repression isn’t a major part of Sand’s game. The impression I got is that most of the people there love her. Mebbe die for her.”
“Especially that sec man,” Mildred said. “He had a bad case, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Well. Can’t say I thought much of the way she rode his ass.”
J.B chuckled. “First time I ever knew you to have a soft spot in your heart for a sec boss.”
“It just didn’t strike me as a smart way to treat somebody in charge of keeping you safe.”
“I have to admit,” Ryan continued, “that Sand doesn’t strike me as being very stable. Although she’s certainly crazy in a different way from your average baron, which leads us back to the question of why she’d pay and feed so many blaster men, since she doesn’t need them to keep her subjects from nailing her to the barn and peeling the hide off her carcass.”
“Well, there are the Crazy Dogs,” Ricky said.
“Then why’d she hire us to take care of them?” J.B. asked.
