“One thing for sure,” Ryan commented. “If we carry on and we rattle enough bars to find out something…”
He said it on the third night, as he and the Armorer were patrolling the main drag. Now trusted to fulfill their task without his assistance, the garrulous Yardie had given them free rein—-just when they could really have benefited from his inability to keep his mouth shut.
It had been a quiet night, with only a few drunks shooting off their mouths with nothing to back it up to trouble them, and they were looking forward to getting off shift and getting some sleep as the sun began to rise. So they were surprised when Yardie came barreling toward them, his dreadlocks swinging free in time with his fat man’s walk.
“Why do you think he’s here?” Ryan asked J.B. The Armorer smiled. “Mebbe he’s come to practice his famous fighting skills on those too drunk to throw a straight punch…or mebbe he just wants to talk.”
“Which mebbe is just what we need,” Ryan murmured, adding in a louder voice, “Hey, Yardie— what’s happening?”
“Nothing much, by the looks of it,” the sec chief grumbled.
“So why do we need the company?” Ryan asked.
The fat sec man looked the one-eyed man up and down, as though appraising him. “Y’know, I wouldn’t have put you down as the stupe type,” he said casually.
“Me?” Ryan queried.
“Yeah, you and your friends. You all ask a lot of questions.”
Ryan shrugged. “Just a healthy curiosity about the area.”
Yardie smiled without humor. “Yeah, sure. Trouble is, you ask the wrong sort of questions.”
“Which are?”
“About people who pass through here, or people who don’t.”
There was something in the fat man’s tone of voice that made both Ryan and J.B. get that tingling up the spine, the subtle raising of the hairs at the back of the neck that presaged some kind of danger.
Both immediately went for their blasters—Ryan the SIG-Sauer and J.B. his trusted Uzi—but were cut short by a gesture from the fat sec chief. Looking around, Ryan could see that they had been surrounded by bar sec, appearing from the insides of buildings all around them.
Ryan and the Armorer knew when they were out maneuvered, and dropped their hands.
Yardie nodded in satisfaction. “Good move, Ryan. I really wouldn’t have wanted anything to happen to you. Now you’ll be good and follow me. The baron wants a word with you.”
With which the sec man turned and headed toward the end of the ville where Robertson had his quarters. Ryan and J.B. exchanged looks, shrugged and followed. What other option had they at this stage?
No words were exchanged on the short walk, and neither Ryan nor J.B. was surprised to see that the rest of their companions were already in the baron’s presence when they entered his villa. Robertson himself was seated on what passed as a throne, looking as laconic as ever. He dismissed Yardie and the sec men, despite the fat man’s protestation, and waited until he was alone with the companions before speaking.
“I’ve been hearing things…things I don’t like to hear,” he stated.
“Such as?” Ryan queried.
“Well, you must have realized by now that I don’t mind you asking questions about Crossroads—hell, it helps if you know a little about a place, as I figure it. But sometimes you can go too far.”
“Like asking about the Illuminated Ones?” Ryan asked.
“That’s what I like about you, Ryan,” Robertson drawled. “You’re sharp…sharp enough to cut yourself. And just mebbe that’s what you’re doing here.”
“Is it?” the one-eyed man asked. “All we did was ask about a bunch of coldhearts we’ve come up against.”
“Coldhearts is right,” Robertson said bitterly, a shocking animation betraying a sudden depth of feeling.
“Something we should know?” Mildred asked gently.
Robertson looked at her. “Yeah. See, we’d heard about these bastards you call the Illuminated Ones, but they’d never come near us…not until one day when they rode in at sunrise in those armored wags of theirs, used those motherfucking weird shit blasters and took some of our people. Haven’t seen them since.”