It was rare that his verbal exchanges with Baron Tourment involved any humor. Even grim humor. But after he had made his initial report, the baron had looked at the state of his beloved suit.
“It looks to me, Mephisto, like you got yourself elected out there.”
He’d replied, “No, baron, but I surely got nominated real good.”
His lips curled into a smile at the memory. The deaths of the men had creased Tourment’s heavy brow, but the news that two women were bound and unconscious in the basement had brought a flash of white from his excellent teeth.
Now Mephisto waited for his lord and master to arrive to inspect the prisoners.
The rooms had two tables; the tops were scored and scarred, even scorched in places. The floor was bloodstained. Being questioned by Baron Tourment was not a gentle experience.
One table held the blonde. A tasty dish for the baron. She was very tallclose to six feet was Mephisto’s guess. Her long hair was the color of summer corn in the old vids, and her red skirt, topped by a red blouse, showed most of the smooth thighs. Boots in crimson leather reached way over her knees, with high heels that must have added five or six inches to her stature. The boots had tiny silver spurs that made a delicate tinkling sound as the girl struggled with her bonds, moaning and clawing her way back toward consciousness.
“Delicious,” whispered the sec boss. But the other woman was even more amazing.
Though an inch or two shorter than the blonde, she was beautifully built, with firm thighs and fine, proud breasts. Mephisto glanced toward the door, wondering whether he dared risk being caught stripping either of the women for his own pleasure; he decided immediately that he didn’t dare. This girl wore coveralls streaked with drying blood from when she’d taken the neck out of one of the sec men who tried to close in on her before they used the stun grens. She still had on the most amazing pair of boots that the sec boss had ever set eyes on. But it was the hair
Hair that was brighter than any fire. Redder than a chem cloud sunset across the bayous. Long and thick tresses, clotted with mud, tumbled over the girl’s shoulders. Mephisto moved closer, extended a hand tentatively to touch the hair,
“‘Lord Jesus!”
He spun on his-heels, his eyes wide with panic, face pale with terror, afraid that his forbidden Christian oath might have been overheard. If it had, then he was a dead man. Although standing up and breathing, he’d be as dead as a pair of gator-skin boots.
But the hair. It had moved under his fingers. Moved and tangled itself around his palm with an infinitely gentle-slowness. The silken hairs had actually responded to his touch. Mephisto again looked over his shoulder and hastily crossed himself, whispering the words “Sweet Jesus.”
These strangers weren’t ordinary mercies, hired from some frontier ville farther west in Tex-Mex. They weren’t drunken outlander pistoleers who’d slit a throat for a handful of jack and a gaudy whore. Then who were they?
Behind him the door swung silently open on its oiled hinges. Mephisto heard the creaking of the baron’s leg-supports. His ears caught the rhythmic chunking of one of the ice-making machines out in the kitchen units beyond. “Are they awake, Mephisto?”
“Coming around.”
“And we know nothing of them?”
“Nothing. Fine clothes and boots.”
“Weapons?”
“Yeller hair had only a small pearl-handled PPK. Slut’s blaster, .22. Nothing else.”
“Red hair?”
“Pistol. But a man’s gun. Real stopper. Name on it’s Heckler amp; Koch. Real handsome pistol. Silvered finish. Holds thirteen rounds of nine mil.”
“The fat man who clipped you?” Tourment loomed over the helpless women, his giant shadow stretching across the floor and onto the far wall of the underground chamber. He leaned forward, stumbling, steadying himself on the shoulder of his sec boss; he winced at the frightening power of the pincering hand.
“He he had a sub, firing triple bursts. I guess a big handblaster as well. He was good. Most of the dead were on his sheet. But both of the women also blasted men forever into the dark night.”