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“Mebbe she wants to preserve her sec men,” Ryan said, “which still leaves the question of what for. Then again, she is there at the border of the Basin, and borders are triple-dicey places. Crazy Dogs probably aren’t the first problem she’s had of the sort. Though mebbe the most persistent.”

  “She might be trying to get under Trumbo’s skin,” Krysty said.

  “It’s working,” Mildred stated.

  “So, Jak,” Ryan called, “see an easy way in?”

  Jak yipped a laugh, not unlike a coyote himself. “No way!”

  “That’s what I reckoned.”

  “We did get to see the back room,” Mildred said.

  “Eager to try climbing through one of those windows?”

  “Not me.”

  “I’m not even considering frontal assault,” Ryan said, “since those are for when you let yourself get triple-screwed out of any other option, or got loads more warm bodies and blasters than tactical sense. Not to mention it’d take an armored wag’s main gun to poke through those walls, mud or not.”

  “So are you still willing to go for it?” Mildred asked. “Getting Dark Lady’s thingamajig, I mean?”

  “You size her up for the sort who’ll pay us for a job that produces no results?”

  “Hell no!”

  “Then absolutely.”

  “How?”

  “I’m working on it,” he said.

  * * *

  THE SUN WAS near to setting and the street in front of the gaudy house was unusually vacant. The gaudy was all lit up per usual, though.

  Nobody was outside. When Ryan stepped up to the door, he couldn’t hear the usual music and merriment.

  Instead he heard voices raised in anger.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Allow me to remind you,” Dark Lady was saying in a whip-taut voice when Ryan pushed open the door, “you are guests in this establishment.”

  There was a good crowd in the gaudy for late afternoon. Most of the tables were occupied, and at least half a dozen of Dark Lady’s “entertainers” were standing or sitting in conversations with guests that might turn into business transactions. The gaudy’s star performer, the lovely blond Lucy, had drawn a crowd all her own.

  Ryan took that all in in a flash as he entered, followed by his friends, except for Ricky, who had to have his sleeve grabbed by Jak and be towed out of the doorway to stand in front of an unoccupied table.

  Some of the customers glanced at the newcomers when they came in and their eyes got wide. Some visibly began to think even harder about bolting out those self-same doors.

  The “guests” Dark Lady was addressing in a not-double-friendly voice never bothered to glance around.

  “We’re not guests,” said a tall guy with a sharp knife-scarred face and a shock of sandy-blond hair. He was tall and wore some kind of yellow pelt draped on the shoulders of his black leather jacket. He had a sawed-off lever-action longblaster holstered to his right thigh. “We go where the fuck we please.”

  “Please do not ever address me that way again,” Dark Lady said. Her tone of voice suggested the “please” was mere formality. She wasn’t making a suggestion.

  The tall, rangy blond man in the fur had a pair of backups, shorter but no less mean-looking. One was a woman with stubble starting out on a skull shaved up to a Mohawk so ludicrously tall it might as well have been shellacked that electric shade of blue to make it stand up. She wore black leather with studs and spikes, and her face might not have been unattractive without the sneer and the black paint on her lips. She had a couple big knives sheathed at her chain belt.

  The other person was a man even shorter, even aside from the hair, than she was, and heftier built than his partners. He had greased-back hair that was probably a shade of brown, and a seamed, jowly, stubble-cheeked face. His back was turned to the door; if he carried a visible weapon Ryan didn’t see it. Nonetheless he took one’s presence for granted.

  “Crazy Dogs?” J.B. murmured from Ryan’s left elbow.

  “Reckon so.”

  “Listen up,” the blond man said. “Listen close. You’re the closest thing to a baron this shithouse ville has, so you have to answer. And if you care about the people, or anything but your pussy-selling profits and your own pretty little pale ass, you’ll think twice before you do answer. Unless mebbe it’s time to set up a proper baron here, and cut through the bullshit?”

  Dark Lady’s face was whiter and tighter than usual. She obviously deemed that a rhetorical question, and not requiring an answer. She showed no sign of backing down, even to a much larger, deliberately brutal man and his two coldheart pals. Indeed she looked even less intimidated than she had when they had first seen her, having a rude patron pitched into the street by her two-headed giant.

  That patron was standing behind the bar right now, rubbing it with a rag and not looking directly at the intruders.

  “You hired yourself a bunch of no-account mercies from the outlands to run some errands for you,” the blond man said, leaning closer. “Well, they shit the bed. They’re all out of Newcombe Flats’ privileges. Nukefire, they’re out of life privileges. So you want to give them up nice and sweet.”

  As he reached out to take her chin, she reached a black-lace-gauntleted hand up and steered his away.

  “So that’s the way you like it? Playing rough?” He laughed. “Listen, sweet cheeks, it doesn’t have to be that way. Diego can be generous too. But if you cross him, you are seriously screwed.”

  Diego. That was the name of the Crazy Dogs’ boss, all right. Ryan flicked a gesture to his companions to get ready to rock and roll. He eased open his coat to free up the SIG-Sauer and his panga. The companions had left their packs cached outside the ville, but he, J.B. and Ricky still carried their longblasters slung.

  Mikey, the better-looking head, lifted his down-turned face just enough to catch Ryan’s eye. He gave his head a single shake. His twin kept staring down and polishing the bar as if he meant to wear a hole in it.

  Interesting, Ryan thought. That was the impulsive member of the team. If he was telling Ryan to hold off...

  With a slight raise of the two front fingers of his left hand, Ryan passed the signal for his companions to stay out of it. For now, he didn’t need to tell them.

  “Tell Diego,” Dark Lady said in a surprisingly business-like tone, “that it is you and he who have worn out their privileges in Newcombe Flats. And especially in this ville. Now leave and never return. Unless you mean to stay forever.”

  This time Pelt Boy put back his head and laughed uproariously. “Then it’s gonna be forever,” he said, clearly missing the import of her words.

  “And now—”

  He moved with sidewinder speed, grabbing the wrist of the right hand she’d used to deflect his, stepping past her to put his back to the bar and spinning her into an armlock.

  “I’m gonna knock some sense into you right here in your own bar,” he said, and suddenly he was holding a huge Bowie blade-first against her slender white throat and grinding his crotch into her rump. “Then mebbe I’ll have a taste of your own sweet self before I turn you over for free to anybody who wants to try you out. I hear you’re too high and mighty to peddle your own sweet thing. And after that, if you see reason, mebbe I’ll settle for cutting your pretty face some, and not your throat.”

  Ryan saw Dark Lady’s left hand push behind her back as if to join its captive mate.

  Yellow-white light flashed to either side of her wide skirts at hip height. A muffled bang sounded.

  The blond Crazy Dog’s blue eyes stood out of his head. The knife fell from his fingers. He bent over as Dark Lady tore herself out of his grasp.

  Even through a dense coating of various filth and stains, Ryan could see the crotch of his jeans was spreading with a stain as if he were pis
sing himself. Except Ryan knew that wasn’t piss, and the grimy fabric was smoldering. He smelled burned propellant.

  “I told you not to call me that,” Dark Lady said, raising the hidie blaster in her left hand. Smoke trailed from its upper barrel from the shot that had smashed his cock and balls.

  His eyes went wide as he stared down the lower barrel of the 2-shot derringer. She let him get a good look into it, then she fired.

  The bullet exploded his right eye in a spray of blood and nastiness. Whatever she had chambered didn’t exit the back of his head. Instead it evidently ricocheted inside his skull and turned his brain to jelly to match his balls.

  The back of his head slammed against the bar top as he toppled backward, stone chilled.

  Dark Lady’s action had astonished his two backups at least as completely as it had him. If not as painfully. Or fatally. Yet.

  The greasy-haired guy’s right hand came out of his jacket holding a pitted 1911 blaster. As he turned it toward Dark Lady something flickered from Ryan’s left, where he had no peripheral vision.

  One of Jak’s throwing knives, which he had no doubt palmed the instant he’d seen the Crazy Dogs, punched through the back of the coldheart’s blaster hand. The man shrieked like a wounded horse.

  Mikey-Bob reached a plate-size hand across the bar and wrapped it over the top of the Crazy Dog’s head. Then he slammed it against the edge of the two-inch-thick hardwood slab he’d spent the past few minutes polishing so assiduously.

  The bar was better built than a coldheart’s skull. Ryan learned that beyond any doubt when he saw the side of the Crazy Dog’s head flatten and heard a loud crunch with a back of wet squishing that gave even his vanadium-steel stomach a twinge. The man slumped as lifeless as the boss he’d failed to protect.

  The Mohawk girl was more decisive. She had her big blades out and whirling as she closed on Dark Lady, hissing like an angry wildcat and just as fast. Ryan had his own handblaster out but couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the gaudy owner.

  But she didn’t stand there meek and mild to be sliced to ribbons. Rather she sprang to meet the taller woman. She turned counterclockwise as she did, slapping the Crazy Dog’s right wrist with her left hand, pushing the forearm with her right. That created an opening for her to turn her hip hard into the woman’s flat belly, inside the arc of the left-hand blade.

  Cupping right fist over left, Dark Lady drove her left elbow into the coldheart’s solar plexus. The Crazy Dog doubled over with all her air blasting out her narrow nose and wide-open mouth.

  Dark Lady stood her up again with a right-hand palm-heel strike that flattened the nose all over her hard-bitten face with a crunch of smashing bone and cartilage. That wasn’t a kill-shot, no matter how many stupes still thought it was.

  But breaking her nose did disorient the coldheart. Dark Lady grabbed her left arm and spun out again, straightening it. Holding the wrist with her left hand, she gave a right-forearm shiver to the coldheart’s locked-out elbow, putting a lot of hip into. The joint snapped with a noise like a handblaster shot.

  The Crazy Dog screamed just as loud. Dropping the knife from her right hand she went to her knees, clutching her destroyed elbow and wailing.

  Dark Lady looked past her at Ryan. Her black eyes were wide and wild, her little jaw set. But it was not fearful wild. It was the sort of look Ryan knew well from the inside.

  She simply nodded once. Then she looked down at the whimpering coldheart.

  “Now it’s your turn to listen,” she said.

  She grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair and yanked her head up and around to look at her. Tears sheened her thin cheeks. A glistening false beard of blood and snot covered her mouth and chin.

  “Tell Diego to leave this Basin and this ville alone. I am not the baron of Amity Springs, but this ville and its people are under my protection. Anyone who threatens them will die. Nod if you understand.”

  The Mohawked woman shook her head and gobbled something incomprehensible.

  “If you don’t understand my message to take back to your leader,” Dark Lady said, “I have no reason to leave you alive. If you want to live, tell me you understand clearly and now.”

  Her voice was now eerily calm, almost conversational. Ryan didn’t know if the fact was getting through to the coldheart she’d beaten so efficiently and comprehensively, but he reckoned it was more chilling than even a cold, hard voice would have been.

  “Yuh—yuh—yes!” the coldheart sobbed. “Please don’t chill me.”

  Dark Lady flung her forward onto the floor. She didn’t look that strong. But then again, the coldheart wasn’t exactly resisting at this point.

  “Then go,” she told the sobbing puddle of wretchedness. “Give Diego my message. And tell him not to bother coming to collect these two. They will feed the armored coyotes.”

  The Crazy Dog picked herself up off the floor. She left behind a blot of blood-soaked sawdust. Ryan was surprised she could navigate on her own, but she lurched toward the door on rubbery legs.

  J.B. held it open for her. She vanished into the indigo dusk.

  “Always a gentleman, John,” Mildred said.

  Ryan looked around at his crew as J.B. let the door fall shut. Somewhat to his surprise, Krysty and Mildred were grinning all over their faces.

  The men, even Jak, still had big eyes. No doubt they were still feeling that nut-shot. Ryan knew he was.

  Not that it could’ve happened to a nicer guy.

  Dark Lady turned toward the bar—and reeled. Mikey-Bob started to reach a huge hand to steady her. But she caught herself with one hand and forced herself to stand upright.

  She cleared her somewhat disordered black bangs from her face with a defiant headshake. Her cheeks had actually started to go pink as blood returned to her face. Ryan hadn’t noticed it at the time, there being other matters more urgently claiming his attention, but he knew that blood had drained away with the adrenaline dump preceding her move on the coldheart with the blond hair and the informal castration.

  “I need a drink, Mikey-Bob,” she said. “Pour me a double. Then a round for all on the house.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  She turned and flung an arm out to point at Ryan and the companions.

  “You,” she said, “come with me. Upstairs. Now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ryan said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In her office Dark Lady practically collapsed in her chair. She slumped so completely that Ricky feared she would break down crying, if not actually deflate.

  “You handle yourself double well, ma’am,” J.B. said mildly.

  “I have spent the past five years building up this establishment and this ville,” she said. “I could not have done so, or even survived, without learning how to take care of myself.”

  “Well, great job,” Mildred said fervently. She had forgotten her distaste for the woman’s profession, at least for the moment. Instead she gave her a toothy grin and a thumb’s-up.

  “Thank you.”

  For a moment she sat with her pointed chin sunk to her clavicle. Then she lifted her head and looked at each of them in turn.

  “I take it you have yet to recover my item.”

  “You take correctly,” Ryan said. As before, he had seated himself across from her. Krysty stood behind him with hands on his shoulders. The rest, including Jak this time, were stuffed into the office among the bookshelves and the knickknacks as best they could get.

  She sighed. “Nothing is ever simple,” she said, steepling her fingers in front of her chest.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Ryan did, in his usual brisk, efficient, matter-of-fact way. As he was getting to the point where Sand asked him to take a message to Dark Lady, Ricky jumped at a sound from the door like
somebody beating on it with a ham.

  “Come in,” Dark Lady called. The door opened to reveal her enormous chief assistant and bodyguard. He bent down and poked both heads into the room.

  “Got everything straightened up downstairs,” Bob said. “And talked some of the entertainers down off the ledge. Customers took the whole thing pretty calm, though. Lani’s holding down the bar.”

  “Excellent,” Dark Lady said. “Thank you.”

  Mikey-Bob withdrew his heads. He stayed standing in the open door. After a moment Dark Lady gave him a raised eyebrow.

  Mikey-Bob crossed his arms over his wag-wide chest.

  Dark Lady sighed and looked at Ryan. “Continue.”

  He did.

  Dark Lady didn’t seem put out by Sand’s bland refusal to surrender the item, nor Ryan’s—temporary—acceptance of same. Her brows furrowed slightly at the mention of the baron’s offer to buy the ville. But then came the part about Jak spotting the Crazy Dogs’ spy.

  Dark Lady’s eyes narrowed when Ryan described agreeing to take out the observer for Sand. Ricky couldn’t see Mikey-Bob’s face—faces—but heard a rumble like distant thunder that he guessed came from his chest. Ricky did think Dark Lady perked up a bit when Ryan let Krysty describe her own part in causing a diversion.

  “So then,” Ryan said, “Sand offered to pay us if we’d help take care of the Crazy Dog situation for her.”

  “Of course you told her no,” Dark Lady said.

  “Told her yes.”

  “What?” both Mikey and Bob blurted at once. “What the nuke? You’re seriously talking about going over to the enemy? D.L., I told you not to do this! They sold you out!”

  Ricky couldn’t make out which head was saying what. It got worse when they basically started talking over each other and trying to outshout one another. He couldn’t make anything out of what they said after that, only their shared terrifying behemoth anger.

  But he found himself caught up watching the reactions play out on Dark Lady’s thin, pretty, intense face. First her eyes got really big and round. Then she pulled her head down between her bare shoulders. Then her mouth started working and her forehead rumpled. He thought she might be trying to battle back tears.