Wild Country tq-3

by Dean Ing

  The memory of San Antonio Rose had been flawless. Faro's last chance to take a guest's money was the small, too neat Last Chance Saloon, nearest to the parking facility. Three blocks away across the tic-tac-toe street plan, on the way to the next valley, lay the Early Bird Saloon. The Long Branch occupied the entire center block of Faro, a shingled roof running completely around the building over its broad wooden porch. The many upstairs windows suggested dozens of sleeping rooms, and it was said that you could get your wick trimmed in some of those rooms by petticoated ladies.

  It was also said that the meals at the Long Branch could, if you spent much time there, make you as fat as a forty-pound robin. The dinner fare ran to corn on the cob, succulent steaks the diameter of cantaloupe and almost as thick, sourdough biscuits with redeye gravy, and buttermilk in heavy pitchers. Some subtle manager had discovered that a meal like that could give casual gamblers a stronger sense of well-being than three shots of Old Sunny Brook.

  Faro's staff spared no effort in keeping the place authentic, including the consumption of coal oil for lamps. The whole town exuded a faint odor of the stuff, reminiscent of diesel fuel and, along with wandering scorpions and rattlers, among the few real dangers in town. Faro's buried water mains were pressure-fed from a more modern installation, a valley and a century removed.

  That modem complex lay sequestered in its own long valley, the two hotels and the clinic set mostly underground with huge central atriums like sinkholes walled with glass. At one end of the valley was a romantic, stuffy jumble of structures dubbed "Soho," five hundred meters square, built to resemble downtown London during the Battle of Britain in the year 1941. Its streets, hardly more than alleyways, were mostly cobbled, the buildings sprayed for the look of stone under a coal-smoke patina. Many of the upper windows were broken as if by concussion, some with proper little curtains sadly waving from them like forgotten flags of truce. Visitors entered and left Soho from only one street, Brewer, and were prevented from other exits — and from loss of the illusion — by blockades. Beyond the cordons one could see signs reading "UXB," suggesting an unexploded Nazi bomb, and rubble choking the streets with the acrid tang of cordite turning like knives in the nostrils. Now and then, from behind the barricades at a safe distance, one might see a hunk of masonry, topple from a cornice into the street below.

  During daylight hours, Soho's guests could see music hall hijinks or an Agatha Christie play enacted by androids who never fluffed a line and, in a distinct improvement over live actors, gauged their curtain calls to the amount of applause. Or they could buy Harris tweeds, spats, or bowler hats in Soho's shops; devour steak and kidney pie until gout set in; get laid standing up by a delicious android with Eliza Doolittle's own accent and no compunctions about copping a feel; or get viciously insulted in a small philatelist's shop. All in all, patrons of Soho thought a hundred dollars a day was very reasonable for the experience, especially since it included a night's lodging — not that anybody got to sleep much. For one thing, there were the regular percussive announcements by an unseen Big Ben, which began each brief concerto with a catastrophic clatter as if someone were using its gears to grind plate-glass windows. It wasn't precisely authentic, but it added its own brand of charm. And then, of course, there was a good, safe war.

  The main show was the London blitz, three nights a week, and it was a multimedia sensation to send the craven sprinting down Brewer Street for the exit. Two WCS pilots of Confederate Air Force vintage flew the pair of half-scale, twin-engined Heinkel bombers, which were invariably picked out by searchlights to reveal the swastikas gleaming on their skins. Because a scaled-down Beaufighter was murderously hard to fly and Hurricanes lacked pizazz, other pilots chased the Heinkels in five-eighths-scale Supermarine Spitfires. Particularly on moonlit evenings, the low moan of sirens, the drone of Heinkels, the hackle-raising howl of Spits in pursuit, and the hammer of distant machine-gun fire made you suspect a time warp. The dopplering whistle of bombs and the concussions made you damn near sure of it. The choreographed march of low-level pyrotechnic flak bursts and the "crash" of a Heinkel just out of sight, complete with fireball, compelled belief.

  This kind of mock-up war was expensive, and much of its timing depended on computers. The hidden kilowatt-rated loudspeakers and pyrotechnic machines were so well placed that few people suspected the aircraft were scaled down, flying rather slowly and so low that only an occasional searchlight beam could be seen from Faro. The concussions, when anyone in Faro asked, were said to be blasting operations in a distant mine. In daylight, all this carefully staged flummery would not have fooled a real Londoner for a second, but at night Soho gave added spice to drinking tepid bitter beer in basement pubs or making love in a blacked-out upstairs room. For its sky-high rates, Soho got an astonishing amount of repeat business.

  Up the valley from Soho, on the other side of the hotels, lay the complex of entertainment rides. The main and most obvious attraction was a sinister assemblage of rails and individual plastic-canopied delta bullets designed by LockLever. Someone, after emerging mush-kneed from his first ride in it. had called it the Thrillkiller. After that, he'd whispered, nothing else could be a thrill if you lived through it. The name had stuck. The Thrillkiller's track stretched most of the valley's length, dipping underground soon after its early initial kinks for its spiral loop, which gave the rider the distinct impression he was spinning inside a vast, dank storm sewer to hell. Hurtling upward from this dim-lit limbo, each little capsule left its maglev rails long enough to convince a passenger that he was flying — which he was, completing an arc of fifty meters before engaging the rails again.

  The viewscreen of the little capsule was not entirely for show; after the brief free-fall arc and pulling two-gee sideloads during recovery, you were asked by the screen whether you would prefer to continue on the submach track or vault to the hypersonic track — essentially, a question of the high road or the low road. If you didn't opt for the high road, you took the low one by default. Most folks, by this time, had already begun to suspect that signing the release form had been their last mortal mistake and were holding on to the grips so fiercely that they could not have punched an instruction for love nor money. This earned them the relatively mild submach track, which accelerated its spade-shaped capsules to only 150 kilometers per hour on the long stretches. It returned its sweat-soaked victims to the starting point without any more terror than they might have sustained in… oh, say, losing the laser boost while on a jetliner and hearing the pilot burst into tears.

  If you chose the hypersonic option, you would get back to the starting point just as soon as if you'd taken the low road — but you would traverse twice the distance. Your capsule found the high road by three seconds of automatic steam boost while climbing a steep incline, and instead of a controlled descent to the low road on rails, you left those rails in a free arc that carried you to another track, perched at dizzying height near the end of the valley. You then swept the edge of a low butte, pulling three gees in the turn, before augering wildly downward toward the high-velocity run.

  The bald truth was that even by firewalling your control grip, you only achieved some 350 kilometers per hour, and that for only a brief moment before the automatics kicked maglev brakes on. But you achieved it while flashing past shrubs, past the parallel outbound track, and literally through one large fiberglass boulder that seemed to have rolled onto the track just a moment before for the express purpose of making marmalade of capsule and passenger alike. The aperture that opened through the boulder was controlled by pneumatics. They had never failed. Yet. But that's what release forms were for.

  The Thrillkiller's tab was twenty dollars. Survivors of the hypersonic option tended to fall into two categories: those Jew who would pay fifty to do it again, not today of course, but someday; and the other ninety percent who would willingly have paid a thousand not to. Ever.

  Nearer to the hotels were less ambitious entertainments, some designed for children, some for ad
ults who wanted to be children for a time. The game of Copycat involved one very flexible android and a padded room; both the Haunted Mine and the Dee & Dee layout used robotic creatures of various shapes and were chiefly underground. More of these amusements were under study by WCS planners, and the fame of the place was growing. Already, plans were under way to extend the landing strip and to expand the hangar which, at present, could swallow tiny Heinkels and Spitfires, but not a delta dirigible.

  The huge deltas whispered low over the prairie on regular runs, connecting the entertainment complex with Santa Fe and Dal Worth. Vacationing foreigners enjoyed the trip for its scenic value; high rollers enjoyed it because the leviathan delta provided a smooth platform for a "little game" en route, where some of those foreigners might be relieved of excess money. Felix Sorel was certain he would enjoy it because he could board a delta without showing anything more than a ticket, and could float away unseen above any posse that might be convened below in his honor.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Quantrill's belly growled, reminding him that it was lunch-time and that Faro had many a remedy for that. He parked the rented cycle on the second level, noting that the place didn't seem to be overcrowded as it had been on his first visit. Guests usually elected to wait for the stagecoach — after all. it was free — but Quantrill preferred to hoof it, stretching the kinks from his legs. He wore the low-heeled western boots Sandy had bought him for Rocksprings dances, finely crafted footgear with uppers of burgundy sharkskin. Their fit and their elastomer soles were suitable for anything short of rock climbing. Sandy had refused to tell him the price of those hand-crafted beauties, lovingly put together by a man who'd learned his trade in Lubbock from the master, Willie Lusk. Perhaps they were not quite a match for the boots he'd worn with Search & Rescue, but those lugged gunboats would have given him the look of a man who expected a workout. He had dressed the part of Sam Coulter, fresh from Monahans in his best suede jacket, with a fat cash bonus and the urge to spend it. With those contact lenses and the hasty dye job on his hair, he felt anonymous enough to relax and enjoy this little junket. And that was the emergent tip of a profound mistake.

  For the first time in his adult life, Ted Quantrill actively looked forward to a fruitless few days at his post. He intended to spend much of the time exercising his cover, trying his luck at the games, meeting stagecoaches and being unobtrusively on hand when the big delta came sliding to or from its moorage at the airstrip. But this was also a chance for introspection, a retreat for the inner man, where he could reexamine the facets of Ted Quantrill at leisure and consider recutting his stone, so to speak, to exclude some of its outstanding flaws. There was much to consider, now that Sandy was trying to cut half a million dollars straight down the middle with him.

  Yet in entertaining these thoughts, Quantrill was letting vital bits of his old T Section training slide. That training had kept him alive because the army had grabbed him so young that he'd taken their words at full face value. And virtually all his instructors, at one time or another, had insisted that nothing was more important, or more difficult, on a stakeout than constant alertness. They'd phrased it in various ways, but always it amounted to what that sublime sonofabitch Seth Howell had drawled once, in that soft whiskey tenor of his: "When your life rides on the game, keep your eye on the goddam ball."

  Quantrill had received no refresher courses of any consequence for nearly four years. Instead of thinking in terms of honing those skills, he was well on the way to setting them aside — after this last mission, of course. Neither Sandy nor Marrow had the expertise to understand, and to say, what Quantrill most needed to hear: in the manhunting business, the only way to quit is cold turkey. If you try to ease out, you'll most likely get carried out.

  Instead, Quantrill wandered into the Last Chance, surveyed the tourists, then walked past a hardware store and a jewelry store flying the false flag of an assay office before crossing to the Long Branch. Virtually the first man he saw inside was Felix Sorel.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Both Longo and Slaughter had visited Faro before, but it was Sorel who thought to leave their Garner cycles in a drywash down the valley from Faro that morning. It was possible that those license plates were already on someone's shitlist. By midmorning they arrived in Faro to find that reservations had been made at the Long Branch for one Ernst Matthias, a Leo Cherry, and Clyde Longo's alias, Johnny Collier. A fourth reservation had been made as well, for the man sometimes known as San Antonio Rose. So far. the fourth man was a no-show.

  Sorel had wandered around the first floor, its gaming rooms spacious as dance floors, while Slaughter signed himself in and Longo bought necessary items from Faro's shops. Then, in Slaughter's room upstairs, Sorel plied one of the many trades he had learned in Cuba.

  One can create great art with razor blades, flesh-colored adhesive strips, and cotton. Sorel built lifts high as shot glasses into his own boots, and gave Longo an apparently broken left elbow by taping the naked arm with some of the tape in high tension. Longo had to rip it loose twice by flexing that arm before he was satisfied that it wouldn't impede him if he found it necessary, in his words, "to unlimber in a hurry."

  A pound of cotton went into the pads at Harley Slaughter's beltline and rump, but when taped in place they gave the gaunt Slaughter the look of a well-fed rancher. By careful application of bone-tinted shoe polish to Slaughter's temples and eyebrow pencil near his eyes, Sorel added fifteen false years to the man. Sorel noted that one might profitably grow wheat under Longo's fingernails and insisted that the men attend to their manicures like gentlemen. Longo's villainous beard came off next. Little more was done about his hair except send him away to have it cut at the Early Bird's tonsorial parlor.

  Later, Sorel signed for his own room and made a show of striking up a conversation with Slaughter, as though they were well-met strangers, in the presence of the room clerk. The two of them then strolled around the place, checking exits. When Longo returned at midday, he walked past Sorel near the main doorway before a familiar voice made him whirl.

  By the time he signed the register, Sorel's golden hair had become the blue-black of a raven's wing, and the tiny pads in his cheeks had subtly altered the hard lines of his face. He was as tall as Longo, and boasted a clear, slightly pale complexion thanks to long experience with women's cosmetics. "Matthias" and "Cherry" were standing with "Collier," enjoying the success of their deceptions, as Ted Quantrill ambled onto the porch outside.

  "This calls for a drink, and a meal if we can find one worth eating," said Sorel, still smiling at Longo's surprise. After two days of heavy tension, his amusement had burst forth with unusual force.

  "Best damn food in Wild Country," said Slaughter, patting his artificial belly, glancing at the dark-haired fellow with brown eyes who was pushing through the swinging doors nearby.

  Longo agreed with, "They serve great grub here, and my belly thinks my throat is cut."

  "Lead the way, Mr. Cherry," said Sorel.

  The newcomer paused, smiling. To the man nearest — it happened to be Sorel — he said, "Best idea I've heard all day. Is the food here as good as at the Early Bird?"

  "These gentlemen claim it is," said Sorel, returning the smile. "Shall we see for ourselves?"

  Quantrill hesitated, with a casual scan into the nearest of the gaming rooms. Then, "Thanks," he said, "maybe in a few minutes. Don't eat it all," he joked feebly, with a nod at the other men, and moved toward the room clerk's counter.

  Sorel followed Slaughter through lamplit halls. They passed a couple in western dress and a little brown man in an excellent suit of foreign cut on their way to the dining hall.

  Seated at the round oak tables was only a scatter of diners, a dozen or so in all. Sorel wished the place were more crowded, wanting safety in numbers. The next delta was due on the following day and, unless business picked up later in the day, he favored staying out of sight in their rooms for the most part. In eliminating room service,
Sorel felt, Faro was carrying this frontier ambience a little far. Perhaps they could add a few harmless people to their number for cover. Sorel, as usual, carried enough cash on his person to buy a condo in Austin.

  Ten minutes later, Quantrill had secured a room and a quick, expensive look at the Long Branch register. He had no way of knowing that Clyde Longo or others might be with the two he sought. No men fitting his descriptions of Sorel and Slaughter had registered — certainly not together. The manager of security would be out of his office until business picked up around dark, and Quantrill's stomach was making noises like a suspicious bull terrier. He walked through the gaming rooms, with a second look at two men playing "twenty-one" near an exit, then relaxed and asked a lone croupier the way to the dining hall.