“Far enough, outlander,” he said.
Ryan paused on the bottom step. J.B. was just behind him, Doc about halfway down.
“Ville’s tighter than a duck’s ass, Cawdor.” The torchlight shone on the sec chief’s grizzled hair. “You got nowhere to go from here. Men above you. Doors secure.”
“We got in.”
Joaquin nodded. He was tense, every nerve strained and alert. “Like to know how. My guess is around back, but there hasn’t been time to check it. Also, Sharpie told us to keep out of his zoo. He’s in there with the doomie slut.” He smiled mirthlessly at them. “Guess he’s real busy and don’t want no onlookers right now.”
“You going to face this one down?” J.B. asked. “Three against three. But we got the better blasters.”
“Stuck halfway up the stairs. Doesn’t leave you room to jump, does it? And it ain’t three against three. There’s half a dozen more in the hallway above you. More scattered around the ville. They don’t like the fact that Josh Morgan got butchered.” He stared accusingly at Doc. “We know you did that, old man. Be a reckoning soon.”
Doc coughed. “I had no wish to take his life. But he would not accede to reason.”
Joaquin sniffed. “Reasons aren’t worth puma shit in a thunderstorm!”
“Time’s running, Ryan,” J.B. whispered. “Better we get to the baron soon as we can. Jak might be there by now.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah.”
Joaquin gestured with the machine pistol, which looked to Ryan like a hacked-down, altered version of the old M-3 submachine gun. “Cut the muttering. You putting the blasters down, or do we take you all out?”
Ryan’s combat mind was racing, considering all the various possibilities, rejecting most of them, setting other ideas to one side.
Trader used to say that talk beat shooting. But if talking didn’t work, then that only left shooting.
“All we want is Emma.”
Joaquin sniffed. “Doomie slut?”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. We find the baron. Take her from him. We all leave. Easy as that.”
The sec boss laughed. “Easy as that?” he mocked. “I don’t think so. Baron pays us. Feeds us. You got to have some sort of respect for that, Cawdor. Not counting the blood debt for Josh Morgan and the others.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
The range was around twenty yards. If the sec man had been armed with a revolver like the others, there would have been no need to waste time on talking. But the machine pistol could be lethal at that distance.
J.B. had exchanged the Uzi for the eight-round scattergun, feeling it might be better suited if they ran into a close-combat situation.
“Me, Ryan,” he breathed.
The one-eyed man didn’t say anything to his old friend, just nodded once.
J.B. had been holding the shotgun down low, against his thigh, hidden from the sight of the sec men by Ryan’s body. Now he eased it forward. Ryan knew what was going to happen and moved his right arm a little away from his side, leaving a narrow gap for J.B. to push the Smith & Wesson M-4000 through.
“Not goin’ to change your mind, outlander? Sure?” the sec chief asked.
“Do it,” Ryan said.
He felt the shock of the explosion between his ribs and arm, and moved sideways, opening fire with the SIG-Sauer at the group of men, seeing them going down. He spun to put a burst of full-metal jackets into the dark at the top of the stairs.
J.B. fired a second round into the wounded sec men, while Doc stood half up the staircase, hesitating.
Each of the shotgun’s 12-gauge rounds held twenty of the murderous Remington flechettes, inch-long steel darts that scythed through the still air of the hall, spreading out a little by the time they reached Joaquin and his two henchmen. They cut into and through flesh, muscle and soft tissue, scraping off bones, distorting as they angled sideways, causing terrible injuries.
Ryan put Joaquin and one of the sec men out of their misery with bullets to chest and throat, while the second charge from the Armorer’s Smith & Wesson chilled the last man, who had already sunk screaming to hands and knees, fingers groping at the bloody mask of his face, where the tiny arrows had jellied his eyes.