The mountain ate the offering greedily, crunching up the bones with no more effort than he used to chew the flesh. A thirty-pound jackrabbit was a mere snack for an animal his size—it was gone in a few seconds. But it had to have been mighty tasty if the diesel-wag purring noise the cat made as it licked the blood from its huge paws was any measure.
“Say, Dean,” Ryan said, nudging his transfixed son with a gentle elbow. “I think someone’s trying to catch your eye…”
Dean turned to look. Instantly, a wide smile lit up his face.
Standing at the far end of the plant bed was a sun-browned little girl in a too big cotton dress with a crown of daisies in her golden-streaked brown hair. She smiled back at him, tooth for gleaming white tooth.
Chapter Six
“My name’s Leeloo. What’s yours?”
The twelve-year-old boy beamed down at her. “Dean,” he said.
“That’s a great blaster you’ve got, Dean.”
He glanced at the blue-steel weapon strapped to his hip. “It’s a 15-shot, nine mill Browning. Want to hold it?”
Leeloo nodded enthusiastically.
Dean dumped the staggered-row magazine onto his palm. Then he cracked back and checked the breech for a chambered round. After making sure the weapon was safe, without a second thought, he handed over what she knew had to be his most prized possession in all the world.
Leeloo very carefully took the Browning Hi-Power from him and held it in both hands, making a shaky, wavering attempt to aim. “Oh,” she said in dismay, “it’s heavier than I thought.”
Dean stepped around behind her and helped her raise the blaster to firing position. “You want to hold it about here,” he said.
Something new happened to Leeloo Bunny as young Dean reached his arms around her, enfolding her. In kindness. She felt suddenly safe and protected; she felt the urge to lean back against his chest, to feel the strength and the energy he gave off.
It was an urge she didn’t allow herself to give in to.
With great patience, Dean showed her how to work the Hi-Power’s safety. He made her adjust her stance to brace herself for the recoil. And he showed her how to hold her finger outside the trigger guard until she was ready to fire.
Nobody had given her any blaster training before. And certainly not with such a sophisticated and deadly predark weapon. She wasn’t old enough. Dean Cawdor, whose long, dark hair tickled the back of her neck as he leaned over her, thought she was. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb and told her to dry-fire the Browning.
“Go ahead,” he said, “squeeze the trigger.”
The firing pin made a twig-snap sound.
“Does it make a lot of noise when it really shoots?” she asked him.
“Sure does.”
He took back the blaster, lowered the hammer with his thumb, put the safety on and reholstered it.
“My ma got chilled,” Leeloo told him.
Dean looked at her for a long minute. She wasn’t sure whether she had said something bad without meaning to. Something that would make him not like her anymore.
She was about to apologize when he said, “Mine, too. She died of cancer. She was sick a long time. What happened to your ma?”
“My ma got choked in the gaudy while she was wrestling.”
“Wrestling?” Dean said, puzzled.
“On the bed.”
“Oh,” Dean said.
Leeloo stared at him closely, and as if she could read his mind—or heart—said, “Did your ma wrestle in the gaudies, too?”
“Sometimes,” the dark-haired boy said, staring down at his dusty boot tops. Though his lips moved, his face was expressionless. “But only when we didn’t have anything to eat, or nowhere safe to sleep. She was so pretty she could always find work in a gaudy.”
“They strung up the geezer who chilled my mom,” Leeloo told him. “I saw them do the whole thing. They yanked his pants down first. When his neck broke, it made a loud crack and his willy stuck out, like in wrestling. One time, before they cut him down, I clonked it good with a rock.”
“What about your dad?” Dean asked.