Wolfe nodded, smiling broadly. “Good, very good, my old friend. Go on. Let the memories flow free as fine-graded flour under the millstones.”
“You were the sec boss.”
“They had shirts the same color as your men’s jackets,” J.B. said.
Ryan nodded. “Right, they did. Baron was called Tsin Lao. Way-back Chinese warlord.”
“Leper,” Wolfe said. “You remember that? Tough old bastard had half his face gone.”
“That’s right.” He’d had no nose, just a snuffling hole, fringed with a ragged cuff of snot-dripping gristle. One eye had been pulled down toward the ravaged cheek. His upper lip had been missing, showing his tombstone teeth, like houses in a ghost town.
“You tried treachery,” J.B. said accusingly. “Drugged the meat for supper. One of our dogs ate some first. Died right there and then, in front of us. Trader had you questioned.”
“Baron let it happen. Scared of losing his whole ville. Trader in his pomp was a shit-scaring sight.”
Ryan grinned mirthlessly at the memory. “Most folks he asked questions got around to answering them.”
“Sometimes I wake in the small hours of the night and I’m crying.” Wolfe reached up and touched the network of old scars that seamed his face around both eyes. “He used a needle, heated up white. Held it in thick gloves and threatened to blind me. Why’d he do that to me, Ryan?”
“You got a strange memory, Wolfe. Kind of picks and chooses, doesn’t it?”
“How’s that?”
“You planned to murder everyone on War Wags One and Two.”
He turned toward J.B., his eye not moving from Wolfe. “We have Two in those days?”
The Armorer sniffed. “Can’t remember. Think so. Either way, it was a coldheart plan to butcher us all. Trader needed to know who was behind it. So, you ask the sec boss.”
“And I told him it was me.” Wolfe took a long shuddering breath, his dark eyes closed. “He hurt me bad. Then, when I’d admitted what I’d done, he had me held fast and took a cleaver. Took it and swung it and hacked off my left hand, clean as whistling. And I swore I’d have revenge if I ever got the chance. And here you are. Both of you. Plucked chickens on my table. Delivered by the good Lord.”
Ryan had always known, in his heart, that it might end like this.
The years with the Trader had been awash with blood. So many dead. So many left living, hearts filled with a bitter grudge against the Trader and the men who’d ridden with them.
Deathlands wasn’t big enough to expect to run and hide for all your life. In the end you’d bump into someone at the turning of a dark corridor, in a narrow alley in a frontier pesthole, at a desert watering hole, in the kitchens of a gaudy or on a mountain pass above tumbling meltwater.
In a quasi-religious, military commune among the tall trees of the Sierras.
“It’s me and J.B. you want,” Ryan said. “The others had nothing to do with Trader.”
Wolfe smiled at him. “Now then, One-Eye, I never thought to hear you talk stupe. We all know that you ride with someone, then you live and die with them. No division of that. Even the boy, who by the looks of him is your kin.”
“We take them out and let them have it, Brother Wolfe?” Owsley asked, licking his dry lips eagerly. “Or mebbe peddle them all to Mom?”
Wolfe shook his head and sighed. “From that smoke we saw, I’d be astonished to find that Mom’s Place is still functioning.”
He turned to Ryan. “No point in asking if you knew anything about that?” When there was no answer, he smiled his glacial smile again. “Now, why am I not surprised at that?”
“Let’s get on with it,” J.B. said, half turning so that the Uzi pointed directly at the leader of the ville.
Ryan sensed that a lot of the men of the Children of the Rock weren’t comfortable at the standoff.
There were enough of them, and they were well enough armed to be confident of massacring the handful of strangers. But unless they were blindly stupid, they had to have also realized that Ryan and the others wouldn’t go on into the dark land alone and unprotesting.