The baby was still squealing as the adult head snarled at the top of its lungs, “I’ll get you for that, you little bed wetter! See if I don’t! I’ll eat the flesh from your bones!”
“Shut up,” Dean told him as he reholstered the Browning. “Can’t you see you’re scaring the baby head?”
“Yeah,” Leeloo chimed in. Then she slipped her thin arm in his and said, “Come on, Dean, let’s go look at some of the other cages.”
Dean liked her a lot, he realized with a start. Not in a sexual way, but he liked how she looked at him. As if he were her hero. And she wasn’t any sort of quivery-lower-lip girl either. The kind who was afraid of spiders and sorrow. Leeloo was a little girl, but Dean could tell she was as hard as flint. And in a strange way, she reminded him of Krysty. It was something about her certainty, something in the way she carried herself. He could tell even now that she was going to grow up to be a stunningly beautiful woman. Strong. Proud. Compassionate. Honest. It made him feel absolutely wonderful to be looked up to by her. It made him want to protect her.
As they walked to the next cage, he started to think about the tent, and what was going to happen inside, and it made his face go dark with worry. He wanted to tell Leeloo to skip the performance altogether, to just go someplace out on the plain and hide there until it was over, but he knew he couldn’t do it. Everything depended on secrecy and surprise. Though he instinctively trusted her with his life, he couldn’t place the lives of the companions in her hands.
Which left him only one alternative.
“Where are you going to sit for the show?” he asked her.
“Dunno. Anywhere I can, I guess.”
“Would you sit next to me and my dad if I asked you to?”
Leeloo’s face lit up instantly. “Are you asking me?”
“Yes. I want to watch the show with you.”
Though it seemed impossible before it happened, her face lit up even brighter. “That’ll make it extra good,” she said.
Chapter Ten
With both hands on the steering wheel, Azimuth wound out the Baja Bug on the long straightaway, loving the way the oversize off-road tires juddered, the vehicle’s independent suspension gobbling up the ruined highway’s ruts and rills. The engine howled at redline; in his rearview mirror was a wall of yellow dust. He had his APC-crew, polarized goggles up. The hot valley wind pressed against his face like the palm of a great gritty hand. Gobs of dried white spittle were stuck in the corners of his grinning mouth.
In his lap was a predark portable CD player, one of the perks of traveling with the carny; the headset earphones clamped down over his dreadlocks. His head juked and bobbed to Bob Marley’s greatest hits. From playing the same compilation CD over and over, he had picked up some curious and archaic mannerisms of speech.
One of the best parts of Azimuth’s scouting-advance-man job for Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny was having plenty of wag fuel to burn in the Bug, no boss man hanging over his shoulder and the right to go as fast as he pleased. The other good parts happened when he arrived at the performance sites, where he was fed and liquored bastard well, and then fucked seven ways from Tuesday, all for free. This day, he was headed up valley, to Perdition’s sister ville of Paradise at the northern end, where in two days the carny’s next scheduled performance was to take place. Paradise was renowned for having the best gaudy sluts west of the Shens, both in terms of talent and raw enthusiasm.
Azimuth didn’t see the rude barricade that completely blocked both sides of the road until he was almost on top of it. Made of a pile of broken chunks of concrete, it had a sign propped up in front of it.
“Fuckin’ B!” he growled, taking his foot off the accelerator and locking up the brakes. As the Baja Bug slewed right, its rear end swinging out, he steered into the skid with one hand. With the other, he yanked the KG-99 handblaster from its leather scabbard under the dash.