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  "Yeah. I buy the farm now and what've I left?" An engine roared into life, revved up, then fell away to a gentle rumble. "Not a lot, Ferryman. No brats. But a shit-load of corpses. That's what I leave behind me."

  Sharona Carson had come out to join her husband. She was wearing comparatively dull clothes: skintight jodhpurs tucked into highly polished riding boots, a blouse of milk-white silk and a kerchief of maroon satin around her neck. Her blond hair was pulled back into a short ponytail and held in place with a silver clip shaped like an eagle's claw.

  Ryan was exchanging a last few words with the Trader, nuts-and-bolts details about the running of the war wags—food and drink, and oil changes and sentry patrols; who should cover for whom; what changes they might make to the normal timetables and duty rosters.

  They'd been told that the hunters should return to Towse before sunset. Ferryman had grinned at the news.

  "Folks left outside after dark likely won't ever be coming in," he said. "Like the baron mentioned—the ville's not much loved." He spit again in the dirt. "Not that it matters. Long as they fear you. That's what matters."

  Baron Carson pressed the button on his musical jeep horn.

  The discipline was impressive. All of the sec-men going out with him on the hunt fell silent, allowing his words to ring clear.

  "Let's to it, men. Ride on the nova express to hunt the legendary white lion. I want his skin, and I want it intact. Man that scars the pelt gets to chew on broken teeth."

  Sharona was about to climb into her husband's wag when her eyes were caught by Ryan, standing away by the other vehicles.

  "Not coming on the hunt, outlander?" she called. "You'll miss all the excitement."

  "It's a dirty job, lady, but someone has to do it."

  She laughed. "Then we shall meet up at supper tonight when… Oh!" As she was stepping up into the jeep she seemed to slip and twist her ankle, nearly falling. She grabbed on to the seat of the small wag to save herself. "Oh, my leg!" she cried, her face contorted with sudden pain.

  Her husband looked down at her without the least change of expression or concern, but his words carried in the stillness. "You had better rest that, my sweet honeycomb. I suggest that you find some way of taking weight off it."

  "I will."

  "Best be well by the time we get back with this white lion."

  "Of course."

  Ryan sensed that all things weren't as they appeared, but he couldn't work out what was going on.

  It was almost as if the baron and Sharona were acting in some little drama, a play that they'd perfomed before and were giving a repeat performance.

  Ferryman, in the second of the baron's command vehicles, turned very slowly and looked directly at Ryan. He held his glance for a moment, then looked away.

  At a signal from the baron, the hunting party drove out of Towse ville, dust boiling around them. The main sec-gates slammed shut, and the settlement went about its business.

  And Ryan Cawdor and Sharona Carson were left alone in the main plaza.

  "Well, outlander," she said. "I've been told to take the weight off my ankle. I'd best do that. Will you give me a hand to my room?"

  "Sure."

  Chapter Eighteen

  RYAN DIDN'T KNOW much about furniture, but he guessed that the four-poster in Sharona Carson's room had to date back well over two hundred years, to the early 1800s.

  It was oak, so dark and weathered that it was almost black, and carved in an ivy-and-acanthus pattern. A large chest and a side table matched the bed. The walls were pale cream adobe, a couple of feet thick in order to keep out the scorching heat of New Mexico summer.

  The room contained a single square window, the glass of which was crazed by the scouring desert wind. Iron bars were set firmly into the walls as a security measure. Additional safety was provided by metal-bound shutters that locked tightly across the window and turned the bedroom into a darkened cavern.

  The floor was a pattern of rectangular tiles, iron-blue, slightly uneven, and a single Navaho rug of black, white and crimson was set in the middle of the room. A similar rug was hung on the wall opposite the window.

  The door was iron-studded and had three large black bolts at top, middle and bottom. All of them were slid across. There was an inner door that opened onto a small, well-appointed bathroom.

  A pair of highly polished black riding boots stood like sentries against the oak chest. On it, folded neatly, was a blouse of milk-white silk and a crumpled pair of jodhpurs. A maroon satin kerchief had been tossed on top of the blouse.

  Sharona's badly sprained ankle lasted just long enough for Ryan and herself to hobble together across the plaza of Towse ville, through the entrance of the baron's living quarters, along the corridor that arrowed down the middle of the cool house and into the bedroom of the mistress of the ville.

  She pushed Ryan's supporting arm away and turned quickly to slam the door, ramming each bolt across with what seemed a particular venom.

  "There! Keep the prying eyes of them Mex slut-bitches off of us!"

  She smiled at Ryan, making a half move toward him, glanced around and realized that the shutters were open and anyone walking by could look straight into the room.

  "White light!" Her heels clicked across the stone floor. The shutters clamped tight shut, making the room seductively dark. "There. That better, Outlander Ryan?"

  "Better." He hesitated. "You sure?"

  "Am I sure what?"

  "Baron's often kind of… Your husband didn't strike me as a man who'd be that generous with lending out his possessions."

  "Meaning me?" He could just see her face as a pale blur in the dimness, but he could hear the sharp edge to her voice and knew that he was walking on treacherously thin ice.

  "Sort of. That's the way some barons think about their women."

  The sharpness blunted a little. "Long as you don't look at it that way, Ryan."

  "I don't want to wake up in that bed and find there's a .44 Magnum pressed behind my right ear." He paused. "Or my left ear, if it comes to that."

  "Alias won't be back for at least four hours. If they've got to go scour Trick Canyon all the way to Dry Falls Creek, it could be close on dark. Nobody in the ville would speak to him about what I do. Sure, he might kill me and might reward an informer. But they know I'd get to them first and chill them."

  Ryan risked firing off a round at random, after a guess. "And even if he knew, mebbe he wouldn't care that much, huh?"

  Her white teeth flashed. "I was right about you, Ryan Cawdor. You are something a little special, aren't you?"

  "Everyone thinks that. That they're special."

  "Sure. But you… Why don't we get on and find out just how special you might be?"

  Ryan had enjoyed his fair share of sexual encounters in his twenty-five or so years, but a lot of them had been with scrawny little whores in frontier gaudies, places where you kept as many of your clothes on as you could and only handed over the jack after it was all over.

  Of course, he'd had plenty of women who hadn't wanted paying, but never anyone remotely like Sharona Carson of Towse.

  For a start, Ryan wasn't used to finding a woman who insisted on making all the moves—not that she actually put it that way. But that was the way it turned out.

  "You take your clothes off first, Ryan. I like to see a man while I'm still dressed. Makes it more of a turn-on for me."

  Ryan looked at her for a moment, considering the request. He'd checked out the room. Nobody could get in without making a whole lot of noise and taking a lot of time. Unless the woman was going to kill him herself—and that didn't seem logical or likely—there wasn't any immediate danger. But the habits of a lifetime still made him hesitate.

  "Let me help you," Sharona offered, standing close to him and kissing him long and slow on the lips. The tip of her tongue probed between his teeth with a sensual urgency that removed the last pathetic shreds of his hesitation.

  He sat on the bed while she knel
t before him and unlaced the steel-toed combat boots. She pulled them off, along with his wool socks, brushing his bare feet with her lips.

  He took off his shirt and laid it on the chest, drawing the Smith & Wesson from its holster and tucking it carefully beneath the fluffy white pillows at the top of the bed.

  The belt was unbuckled by Sharona's long, strong fingers, and the front of his pants yielded to her. Ryan stood still while she knelt again, pulling them down over his ankles, followed by his shorts, which got a little snagged up.

  "Sorry about that," she whispered. "Hope it didn't do any serious harm."

  "Doesn't look like it," Ryan replied, a little more hoarsely than he'd intended.

  "I'll just give it a little kissing to make sure."

  The room was surprisingly cool, and Ryan suddenly shuddered.

  Sharona looked up at him, smiling. "Cold, lover? Or someone wander by your tomb?"

  "Cold feet."

  "Soon get warmed under the sheets." She stood up. "Now it's your turn to get me naked and ready."

  While he knelt down, she sat on the bed, legs slightly apart, allowing him to slide the mirrored boots off. On an impulse Ryan lowered his head and kissed her bare feet, as she'd done for him. Sharona sighed with pleasure.

  The blouse came next. It was no surprise at all to find she wore nothing beneath it. The pressure of her nipples against the smooth material had already told Ryan that.

  He stood away from her a little then reached out with both hands, stroking the tips of her breasts with his callused fingers. Sharona closed her eyes and sighed again. "That's real nice, Ryan. Real nice."

  He unknotted the maroon kerchief and dropped it on top of the blouse.

  The riding breeches were more difficult. They fitted her so tightly that it was a struggle to remove them. In the end she had to lie on her back on the bed and brace herself while he pulled them down, unrolling the material over thighs and knees until they eventually came free over her bare feet.

  "Careful with those, lover. They're Armani, and there's only one more pair left in my closet."

  She stood again and made sure her blond hair was still snug in the silver-clawed brooch. Ryan gazed at her naked body, shimmering in the half-light of the shadowed room. All she wore was a tiny pair of turquoise silk panties.

  Sharona hooked her thumbs in the waistband, pouting at him.

  "Want to take these off for me, Ryan?"

  "Yeah. Sure."

  "I'd like it a lot if you took them off with your teeth, lover. But real slow and real careful. Come on."

  He felt the cold of the tiles against the skin of his bare knees as she swayed toward him. Once again his breath was filled with the scent of her body.

  Afterward as they dressed, Sharona peeked out through the shutters. "No sign of any dust trail. Still a couple of hours to dusk."

  Ryan bolstered his blaster. "I'll go check out the guards."

  "Breathe a word, Ryan, ever, and I'll see you down and dead. Remember that."

  He nodded and quietly slid back the bolts, walking from her bedroom without another word or a backward glance.

  Chapter Nineteen

  IT WASN'T a white lion—it was a tired, old, dusty, yellowish puma, half its teeth broken or missing, with a barely healed spear wound along its flank.

  As they walked near the wags, the Trader asked Ryan what had happened in the ville while they were away.

  "Nothing. No trouble."

  "Nick said they didn't see much of you during the afternoon. You went off, helping the woman, after she… hurt her ankle."

  The pause in the middle of the sentence was measured and deliberate, but Ryan chose not to surface to the lure.

  "That's right. Saw her to her quarters and let her people look after her."

  "Was it bad, Ryan?"

  "The ankle?"

  "Yeah. Her ankle. Was it bad?"

  Ryan shook his head. "No. Kind of swelled over the side bone. She got one of the women to bathe it in cold water."

  "And then?"

  "Then I went walking."

  "See anyone?"

  "No." He was unable to conceal the edge that was creeping into his voice.

  The Trader smiled and wiped dust off his face. "Slow it down, friend, slow it down. Just want to know how my war captain passed a few hours in the middle of a strange ville."

  "I passed them, Trader, if that's okay with you. Fireblast! What's the questions for?"

  The Trader's smile disappeared like the shroud of dew on a summer meadow. "Just want to be sure I left a man in charge of the war wags, Ryan. Not some green kid that'll go sniffing around the skirts of the baron's slut!"

  Ryan blinked, trying to clear the crimson mist that had suddenly drifted across his vision and clenched his fists at his side.

  "Not fucking fair," he said, keeping his voice pitched low so that the whole crew wouldn't hear their quarrel.

  "No?"

  "No! Sure I went with her. Dark night, Trader! She has to be the most beautiful woman I ever seen in my life."

  "Won't argue with you there, son. But that doesn't change the fact. You were gone for three… close on four hours."

  The fog of anger began to fade. Ryan swallowed hard, recognizing the inevitable truth that Trader was right. He shouldn't have left the wags like that. Nothing had gone wrong, but that could be put down to luck, not judgment.

  Finally, slowly, he nodded. "Guess that's right," he admitted.

  The Trader's smile flooded back, like sunlight filling a dark valley.

  "Sure it is." He moved closer. "Ryan, you're a good man. Why d'you think you're my right hand when there's older, more experienced men and women in the crews? Because you're the best I ever saw. But that don't mean you're real perfect."

  "You made the point," Ryan said eager now to get away.

  "You want to fuck anything that moves, then you go do it. Your cock'll rot off, but that falls into the area of being your business. You risk my wags or my people, and then it falls into being my business. I know you know that, Ryan. But I gotta say it when I see it. That's all."

  Within a day or so there was a far more serious problem to be confronted.

  Despite Baron Alias Carson's repeated promises, there was still no sign of the gas supplies. The Trader, accompanied by J.B. and Ryan, demanded a meeting with the baron, who saw them in his council room, with Ferryman at his side and a half dozen well-armed sec-men positioned casually around the room.

  Carson, as ever, was wearing a conservative suit of 1980s cut, and in his buttonhole was a tiny pink flower.

  He noticed their eyes go to the small adornment and touched it with a lazy hand. "Guess I'm sentimental after all. Five years t'the day that my first wife, Consuela, went off on the last train west. Sorry business, that was."

  Ryan had immediately been aware that the room smelled heavy from drinking, and Carson's speech was a little more slurred than usual.

  "Little bit of Mex in Consuela. Pretty as a doll. But she was kind of crazed. Too much tequila and not enough control. Got me riled once about my shooting, she did."

  Ferryman coughed. "You want to talk about that, Baron?"

  "Why not?"

  "Times past. Not worth remembering, Baron. What happened five years back… it happened. Weren't nobody's fault."

  "Sure, sure, sure." He sighed. "But I've started this so… I'd been drinking some. Don't hardly touch a bottle now. She pushed me. Kept damned pushing at me. Put a glass jug of red wine on her head and stood out that door. Dared me to shoot it off her head. Dared me."

  One of the first things that Ryan had noticed about the baron was that he didn't seem to sport a blaster. It wasn't unique in his experience, but it was unusual for the baron of a frontier ville like Towse.

  "Had an Astra .44 Magnum in those days. Good with it, wasn't I, Ferryman? Yeah, I was good with it. I sat here and I drew down on her. On my wife. And what happened, Ferryman? Tell the outlanders. Tell Trader."

  "You shot h
er, Baron." The sec-boss's face was as blank as a granite wall.

  "I shot her." Each word was drawled out to an almost unbearable length. "I squeezed the trigger of my good old Magnum. Still feel the jolt that ran clear up my arm. Saw her fall. Saw Consuela go down in the dirt. Had on a long white dress of cotton. She hadn't raided for clothes like Sharona with… I stood up and walked to that door there and looked down at my wife."

  The light wasn't good in the long, cool adobe room, but Ryan was sure he saw the gleam of a tear among the leathery furrows of Carson's lizard skin.

  "I thought it was the wine. The red all over her. The glass was broke. You thought it was the wine, didn't you, Ferryman?"

  "Wine like blood, Baron."

  Carson lifted his face from his hands to stare at his sec-boss. "What? What's that you said, about blood?"

  "The wine looked like blood."

  "That's right. That's right, it did. She was kind of moving around, like a gutted fish. Jerking. Bare feet in the sand. She'd pissed herself. Saw that. Then I seen the little black hole in the middle of her forehead. Little." He held finger and thumb apart, almost touching. "That big. Didn't look like that could've harmed a strong woman like Consuela. I knelt down. Put the gun in the dirt and never picked it up again. You destroyed it for me, didn't you, Ferryman?"

  "Yeah. I did that, Baron."

  There was a fly darting erratically around the council room, seemingly bemused by the darkness and the number of men. But everyone ignored it.

  "I lifted her and held her head in my hand. This right hand. And… and the back of her skull was like cornmeal mush. Her brains just spilled out into the palm of my hand."

  The only sound in the room was the wings of the insect, humming backward and forward. As it flew past the sec-boss, he moved with a deceptive, casual speed, plucking the fly out of the air and crushing it.

  The movement broke the spell of the stillness. Baron Carson looked up. "Why, Trader. How may I help you?"

  "By getting us the gas."

  "You got food and water?"

  "Sure."

  "Ferryman."

  "Yeah, Baron."

  "Have the outlanders been supplied with all of the ammo they wanted?"