He stood and offered his hand across the table. After a few seconds’ delay, Carl stood and shook hands, finally doing the same with everyone.
“Sorry,” he muttered, eyes downcast. “You was right to slap me on the wrist, Doc Tanner. My pa would have whaled the tar out of me for bein’ so rude. Specially to friends of the daughter of Mother Sonja.”
Krysty was still standing. But now the color leached from her cheeks and she sat quickly. “Mother” she said, barely audible.
“Why, sure. You won’t have heard nothing about Harmony, will you? Unless folks here in Fairplay told you. Which way did you come, anyway, Krysty?”
Seeing Krysty’s distress, Ryan answered the man. “From Glenwood Springs to Leadville and across the tops. Then down and up again through Alma. Put my son into Nicholas Brody’s school. You heard of it, Carl?”
“Guess I have. So you seen some of the work of the gang of killers we got landed with? By the gods, but there are some triple-sicko sons of bitches there. I’m on the run from them. Been after me for days. Just because I stood against them. Laid one cold with Pa’s old hammer. Busted his skull like a ripe melon.”
He looked toward the kitchen. “Any chance of some pan-fried chicken with hash browns and grits? And” His voice took on an unpleasant wheedling tone. “Mebbe some whiskey?”
The woman reappeared. “Told you we’d give you the basics, Carl, until you got yourself together. Doesn’t include giving you jack-free liquor to muddle your brains.”
“Just a glass?”
“One.”
“Thanks a million.”
“I’ll go get the food and let you talk private to your friends.”
She went through the swing door into the kitchen, and there was an uncomfortable silence that nobody seemed to want to break. Until J.B. spoke.
“How many in this gang?”
Carl turned to him, narrowing his eyes as though he’d already forgotten who the Armorer was. “The gang? There’s fucking stickies in it, you know? What kind of a man rides with mutie shutters like that?”
“How many?”
“Stickies?”
“All of them.”
“Around twenty or so norms and half that many stickies. Too many for you and your friends, Krysty. Even with all those pretty blasters.”
“Tell me about Mother Sonja and Tyas McCann and Peter Maritza. What happened in Harmony after I left?”
CARL TOLD THEM how his father, Herb, had died a few years earlier of a bloody flux after the wheel of a cart had shattered and the rig had fallen on him.
Peter Maritza had been killed the previous year. He’d gone hunting and vanished. The spring thaw had revealed his desiccated corpse with both legs broken.
“Think it was an accident,” Carl insisted.
Uncle Tyas McCann had gone into a decline after Krysty had run away from Harmony ville.
“You was always his sweetheart among the whole family,” Carl said, wiping his stubbled chin after draining the quarter glass of whiskey in a single gulp. “Broke his heart, Krysty. Broke mine. Most of the young fellers in the ville. But Uncle Tyas sort of lost interest in everything. Faded away and dried out like a leaf in the fall. Got one of them coughs that bring out the red roses. Know what I mean?”
“When did he die?” asked Krysty, who’d been sitting with her eyes fixed to the patterned tablecloth as Carl poured out the sorry news of the decline of Harmony.
“Two years after you went.”
There was a long silence, while Krysty tried to summon up the courage to ask the one question she was frightened of hearing answered.
Despite his lack of sensitivity, it was obvious that Carl knew what the question was and he was backing off from responding to it.
“My mother?” The question was asked in the faintest whisper, yet everyone in the diner heard it.
Carl had been eating his meal while he spoke. Now he gestured with the empty glass to the woman who stood by the kitchen door. Slowly and grudgingly she poured him another slug of the home-brew whiskey.
“Mother Sonja. By the gods, Krysty, but I been dreading meeting you one fine day and having to be the one told you about what happened.”