He nodded, turning from the window, letting the tattered curtain fall back into place. “Hundreds. From the big snows down to the gulf. From the Cific to the Lantic. If I had a fistful of jack for every frontier pesthole I’ve visited, then I’d be the richest baron in Deathlands.”
There was a knock on the door.
Ryan picked up the blaster and moved to flatten himself against the wall. “Who is it?”
“Me, Dad. Joint’s jumping. Packed out. Clinkerscales says outlanders are rare and everyone’s here to check us out. You coming down to eat?”
“Sure. Be right down.”
“If the meal’s as good as the bath, then it’ll be an evening to remember,” Krysty said.
Chapter Twelve
The Lincoln Inn was groaning at the seams.
As Ryan and Krysty paused at the top of the stairs, they could hardly see a free inch of floor space. All of the tables were occupied, and three separate games of poker were going on, with jack piled up among the beer glasses. The dartboard was the center of a noisy game, the flighted hand arrows thudding hard into the sectored cork.
Clinkerscales behind the bar was busier than a one-legged man in a forest fire, rushing from end to end, drawing beer and sliding shot glasses of the house whiskey through the spill puddles to the clamoring crowd.
The only women in the saloon were gaudy whores, working the room to try to get some custom, even though it was still early in the evening. As Ryan and Krysty looked down, one of the sluts was coming up the stairs, dragging a three-parts drunk breed behind her. The man seemed to have two sets of teeth, laid one inside the other, and he was grinning vacantly at the tantalizing prospect that lay ahead of him.
The whore was young and skinny, with a dreadful knife scar, barely healed, that opened up the left side of her face from hairline, past the corner of the eye, down to the angle of her jaw. The cicatrix was puckered, purple at its edges, a livid white at the center.
Before the scar, she might once have been a pretty girl. Ryan’s guess put her at about fifteen years old.
A tubby man wearing a greasy derby was hammering out music at a tuneless piano by one of the front windows. At least Ryan assumed that it was music, though there was nothing that even vaguely resembled a tune, just an endless collection of bright and discordant notes.
“Where are the others?” Krysty asked, having to raise her voice and press her mouth close to Ryan’s ear to be heard above the riotous noise. “Don’t know. Can’t see any of them.” He had the SIG-Sauer on one side, balanced by the weight of the eighteen-inch panga on the other. The rifle rested under the bed in their locked bedroom. Krysty was wearing her own five-shot.38.
At that moment Clinkerscales looked up from his flurried work behind the bar and caught Ryan’s eye, simultaneously waving one hand to him while wiping sweat from his shaved head with a checkered cloth in the other.
Then he pointed to a small doorway, directly beneath the stairs, miming putting food into his mouth.
“He means the eating place is through there,” Krysty said.
“Yeah, I got that.”
As they walked down, the hubbub began to fade away toward something that was almost silence. The game of darts stopped, and the poker players held their cards in their hands, frozen in mid-bet. The piano was suddenly three times as loud, hammering away at something that Ryan finally recognized as being close to an old song that he’d heard before, a soldier’s song, about a girl wearing a yellow ribbon around her leg.
“Center of attraction, lover,” Krysty whispered, taking Ryan’s arm.
“Looks like she be one of Sharpie’s pets,” someone shouted near the bar, triggering a bellow of laughter that ran clear around the saloon.
“Ignore it,” Ryan said out of the corner of his mouth, not moving his lips. But his hand rested casual and easy, just above the ridged butt of the blaster.
They reached the bottom of the stairs, turning sharply into the lake of deep shadows, where the oil lamps didn’t reach. Ryan pushed open the door, standing back to allow Krysty through first, keeping an eye open for any danger from the main room behind, But the moment of tension had passed and, once again, he could barely hear the thumping rhythm of the piano.