“Davichaux!”
“Yes, sir?”
“You got your brains sleeping up your ass?”
“No.”
“Let them leak from your dick?”
“No.”
“Then where the devil are they? Because I don’t believe you’re using them.”
“How’s that, Boss Wolfram? We got the wag in safe. Want us to go out in the woods after the shootist? Could mean us taking some losses.”
“Not the way that person’s shooting. It has to be either J. B. Dix or Ryan Cawdor doing the shooting, with what sounded to me like an Uzi. Anything occur to you about that, Davichaux? About the poor shooting?”
“No.”
“Cawdor or Dix can put a 9 mm full-metal-jacket round through the eye of a gnat at fifty yards. How come they’re doing so badly here?”
“We got two wounded.” The sec boss’s voice began to sound both aggrieved and puzzled.
“In the legs. Rest of the shots missed sitting targets, Davichaux. Made you run for cover. Didn’t see you or anyone else checking on the back of the wag when you let it in through the gates.”
“Why?”
Now Wolfram was losing his calm, urbane edge. “Ever heard the expression ‘a diversion,’ man?”
“Oh, yeah. Get it. Want me to go see?”
The Magus was also up and around, his voice as cold as liquid nitrogen, hissing across the open space of the camp. “Do it, Davichaux. Quickly.”
“Sure thing.”
“And do it slow and careful. I have a nasty feeling that the dice have just rolled against us.”
Ryan knelt in the darkness, waiting.
Ready.
DAVICHAUX FELT COOL and relaxed, muttering florid curses under his breath as he stepped around to the back of the wag, conscious that the Magus’s order had laid him out in the open, under bright lights, a sitting target for anyone in the woods. The carbine rested on the remains of his left hand, right index finger steady on the trigger.
He peered in among the cases, making sure that he could see the whole back of the flatbed.
“Climb up, that’s right,” Wolfram bellowed. “Only way to see.”
“Hope the chiggers swim up your cock and eat out your balls, you tub of fuckin’ lard,” Davichaux whispered, swinging onto the truck, checking it out. “Nothing here, sir!” he called. “Nobody but us chickens.”
Ryan could see the sec boss’s angular shadow, stretched out along the trampled earth, creeping within inches of where he crouched.
For a moment he wished that he’d taken up the Armorer’s offer of the Uzi. He could have sprayed the nearby group of sec men at point-blank range and chilled them all in a single burst on full-auto.
One of the Trader’s most-repeated sayings related to time and regrets “Worry about what you haven’t done, and you find yourself flat on your back with the rain beating in your open eyes.”
Ryan tensed, watching the shadow of the sec man, hopping from the wag, hearing the icy voice of the Magus urging him on.
Boots scraped in the dirt, the shadow moving.
Now.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Davichaux had been born alongside the big Sippi and once worked a shrimp boat close to Norleans with a fat, elderly man called Baptiste. Then there’d been a big blow in from the Gulf, around ten years earlier, and the boat had foundered. What remained of Baptiste had been found thirty feet up in a pollarded live oak, draped in Spanish moss, swinging in the warm wind.
Davichaux’s wife and two children had also been drowned in the flooding and he’d moved on, running all over Deathlands. He finally finished way north, up the river, working for Wolfram and for the Magus.
Now his running was done. He was thirty-one and he wasn’t going to see thirty-two.
As he stepped around the back of the parked wag, he was able to see beyond the open door of the squat fuel bowser, into the pool of stark shadow.
He blinked for a half second, starting to swing the carbine to the firing position, staring, paralyzed, at the crouching figure. He had a momentary impression of a big man in a ragged coat, something white around the throat; broad shoulders and a deep chest; a mat of tangled black hair; an eye missing; narrow, cruel lips peeled back off glittering teeth in a snarling, feral, murderous grin; and a huge knife that looked close to two feet long, the blade like a mirror in the spilled light.