Abe looked around the room, with its rickety furniture and floor covered in damp sawdust. Two trappers sat at a table near the door, heads close together, sharing a bottle of whiskey. A single man, looking like a traveling merchant, was stubbornly resisting the blandishments of one of the gaudy sluts. Her name was Kim, and she sported a better mustache than most men. She was drunker than her prospective client, and the barkeep had to keep walking around to pick her off the floor and set her back on the chair. Neither Kim nor the merchant seemed to notice anything wrong.
Abe had also noted the only other occupants of the gaudythree men who’d been drinking quietly and sending away any women who approached them. They sat under a guttering oil lamp that one of them had risen to turn off, so that it was difficult to see their faces.
Abe kept his hand on the stainless-steel Colt Python Magnum that he kept tucked into the front of his belt.
He’d booked a room on the second floor and was feeling about ready to go up to it. But he decided to read the mysterious letter from the Trader one more time. He pulled out the stained, crumpled piece of paper and angled it to catch the best of the light that remained.
Trader himself was virtually illiterate, but he’d apparently dictated it.
“Abe, glad the mutie bobcat didn’t chill you. Always sleep with one eye and two ears open.” It was touches like that that had convinced Abe that the missive was genuine. The reference to “one eye” was obviously intended to make Abe think of Ryan Cawdor, and it had.
“Known for some weeks you had been on my trail. Should’ve known I couldn’t just walk out like I hoped. Still rather been lost and stayed lost. No point weeping on account of a spent round.” Another clue there. It had been one of the Trader’s notorious sayings about the meaning of life in Deathlands.
“Time you read this I’ll be moved on some. But not far. Reckon we might meet soonish, Abe, and jaw over old times like old men does. Watch your back. Trader.”
“That wouldn’t be some sorta fucking map, would it, shit for brains?”
The triple shadow across the letter and his table told Abe that he was in trouble.
“No. Letter from a friend.”
“Sure,” said a different voice. “But the word is that you’re some little prick of an outlander. Come around the Northwest here, after fucking predarkies. Might know about some lost blaster store. What do you say, outlander?”
“Never been here before. That’s true, mister.” They were ranged behind him so that he couldn’t actually see their faces without straining his head around. “But I’m not into predarkies. Trying to track down an old friend. Could be you might be able to give me some help.”
Though Abe knew there was a whole subculture in Deathlands who scavenged through the nuked ruins of predark buildings for all sorts of salable souvenirs, blasters were the best treasure. And he also knew that gaudies were hot spots for the sale of “genuine maps, guaranteed from before the long winters, showing plenty of undug places.”
“Help you, asshole?”
“Why not?”
The third man mumbled, like someone had knocked out all of his teeth. “Why not? Help’s a one-way highway, you runty cunty bastard.”
“I don’t know a thing that could help you boys,” Abe said, laying the letter on the table, allowing his hands to drop naturally into his lap.
Three armed sons of bitches standing close behind tended to push up the chances of catching the last train west. But there might be a hope of taking one with him, if he could draw, cock and fire his .357 blaster before they gunned him down in the spit, beer and dirt.
“You got a gun in your belt, fuckface?”
Something cold pressed against the back of Abe’s neck that he knew wasn’t the handle of a spoon.
One of the trio giggled. “Little cocksucker gone whiter than the main-street slush.”
There was a muffled sound as the whore fell off her chair again. This time, though, the barkeep didn’t go to help her up.