Krysty looked at Ryan. “Can’t wait, lover. Just can’t wait.”
Chapter Nineteen
Nobody had very high expectations of the food offered in the Stor. But Ma Jode surpassed all their hopes and set aside all their worries, though, as Krysty remarked, it was probably just as well that they never got to take a look in the kitchen. The big woman didn’t look as if she placed hygiene high on the list of culinary essentials.
She served them a fish soup to start with, snapper flavored with red and green peppers. Several of the little eels had been cooked until they were more like dry husks, added to the dish for extra flavor.
The main course was pork, stewed long and slow with sharp apples and a spiced gravy, with sweet potatoes and thin-sliced carrots and turnip greens, fresh corn bread on the side with salted butter.
There was cider to drink, chilled and dry on the palate, to wash down the good food.
Everyone except Jak refused the steaming platter of cherry cobbler, though the teenager easily stuffed down two brimming helpings.
Ma Jode appeared from the scented kitchen to offer some coffee sub. “I’m all a muck-sweat,” she announced. “Runnin’ down cross my tits and soakin’ over my belly. Hotter than the ovens of Satan out there.”
She opened the door and spit out into the darkness. Cicadas were chirping in the velvety night, and there was a faint breeze off the river.
“That was real good,” Ryan said. “Want to settle up now with us?”
“Sure, outlander. Full meal for six of you. It’s .38s that we need best. Those outland foreign 9 mill shitters aren’t much use round here.”
“Six rounds,” Ryan suggested.
“Each?” The woman grinned.
“Call it twelve between us.”
“Call it four rounds each, and you got the best deal this side of Old Miss.”
Ryan pushed back his chair, hearing it scrape on the boards. “You got a problem, Ma Jode.”
“How’s that?”
“Push your luck. You were doin’ it out there about mooring the raft. Now you’re doing it again.”
She laughed, slapping him so hard on the shoulder she nearly knocked him off balance. “Think I don’t know it, stranger? ‘Course I do. Twelve rounds of .38s and you also get a real good breakfast in the morning. And I’ll make sure Judas Portillo’s here to show you around Shiloh.”
“Deal,” Ryan said.
The woman held out her hand, horny and callused, the size of a small ham. “Take ’em now,” she said.
Ryan shook his head. “After breakfast.”
“You might just up stakes and sail away in the night. That wouldn’t be neighborly.” There was an edge to her voice, and Ryan realized that Ma Jode wouldn’t be a person to cross. Not unless you had a lot more firepower.
“We’ll be here. Around eight.”
She nodded slowly, her small, hooded eyes staring at him. “Be there or be hung out for the gulls.”
RYAN AND J.B. AGREED that it would be a good idea to keep a watch for their night at Pittsburg Landing.
It wasn’t all that likely that any of the locals would risk taking them on, but you didn’t get old in Deathlands by placing your stakes in the square marked Likely.
Jak, still complaining about the deep bruising behind his belt buckle, took first watch, from eight through to eleven, then came Doc until one in the morning.
Mildred and J.B. agreed that they’d share a double watch, from one until four, and Ryan and Krysty would be together until the dawn.
The weather was calm, with just a few high clouds blown in tatters across the face of the moon.
THERE WAS NO THREAT during the night.
Ryan slept badly, still plagued by the healing of the double wound in his thigh. It prickled as if someone had rubbed chilies into it, and the skin felt hot to the touch. But eventually the gentle lapping of the river against the huge logs lulled him to sleep, and he woke when J.B. touched him on the shoulder.
“Time.”
“No trouble?”
“Nothing.”
“Weather?”
“Dry. Light northerly. Nobody moving around the ville that we’ve seen.”
Ryan slept fully clothed. He pulled on the combat boots and slid the SIG-Sauer into its holster. Krysty was at his side, doing the same, settling the short-barreled Smith amp; Wesson .38 on her hip.