Ryan gestured to the others to put away their blasters, bolstering his automatic, seeing that the moment of crisis had passed. For the time being. “She’s good,” he whispered to Krysty.
“Wrong, lover. That girl is very good.”
Emma hadn’t finished, her voice caressing the hundred or more men gathered all around her, making them forget the dead man lying still by the bar.
“When he spoke I could catch the scent of death around him. But it was so close, like a galloping horse on top of him, that I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My skill isn’t perfect. It’s fallible. I say what I think I can see. But everyone controls their own destiny. Time can jerk aside, like a heavy drape over a picture window.”
“Like my own seeing,” Krysty said to Ryan. “Sometimes it works like a miracle. Sometimes it doesn’t work. And there’s no reason for the good or the bad.”
“Yeah, I understand. Like my shooting. Nine from ten I can hit the ace on the line. Tenth time.I can’t.”
“Today was one of the nine from ten, Dad.”
“Yeah, Dean, it was.”
The young woman was wrapping it up, looking now toward Ryan and his group. “Some say that what I have is a blessing. I say it isn’t. I say that it is all too often a curse. I’m real sorry the ace of spades turned up tonight.”
Then she was gone, walking quickly behind the piano toward the bar, vanishing through a door at the back of a beaded curtain.
NOW THAT THEY’D MADE their presence known to the packed saloon, there was no longer any point in making a tactful withdrawal back up the stairs to their rooms.
“Drinks, anyone?”
Ryan grinned as everyone nodded at his suggestion. He led the way between the tables, where the poker games had continued again, past the dart-board, easing through the crowd to the bar, beckoning to Clinkerscales.
“Yes, Mr. Cawdor? What’ll it be? And these are on the house, as well, after your pretty piece of shooting. Saved us a nasty murder, it did. And that might easy have carried on into a lynching.”
“Where’s the woman come from?” Krysty asked.
“She’s a true mutie seer. Came in from the west a day or so ago. Showed me enough to know that she was for real. Thought it might be an attraction. Didn’t figure on it ending with blood on the barroom floor.”
He quickly poured out a round of drinks, mainly beers, with a Cointreau for Krysty and Dean.
Jak wandered off to watch the dart throwers, eventually insinuating himself into the next game.
The rest of them stayed at the heart of the crush around the bar, enjoying their drinks, enjoying the evening.
Chapter Fourteen
After the excitement of Emma Tyler and her interrupted act, the Lincoln Inn had quieted down. The whores circulated, some of them bare-breasted, lifting their ragged skirts to show prospective Johns what they might be buying.
The card games were proceeding, with the occasional imprecation as an attempt to draw to an inside straight met its inevitable failure.
A few of the shanty town locals were interested in the group of outlanders, a couple of them fascinated by Ryan’s powerful handblaster, asking if they could take a look at it.
“Sorry,” Ryan said. “Nobody touches my blaster.”
But there seemed to be no ill-feeling.
Everyone had a second round of drinks.
Around a quarter hour later, Clinkerscales passed by and touched Ryan gently on the shoulder. “Could be some trouble brewing,” he said quietly.
“Last group that came in?”
“You spotted them?”
Ryan nodded. “Trader used to say that a man who doesn’t keep his eyes open won’t get to see his death coming. They came in together, nine of them. Now they’ve split up.”
“Ones I mentioned before. Coldhearts. Heavily armed with sawn-downs as well as hideaways.”
“You reckon they could be scouting for Baron Sharpe?”
Clinkerscales nodded, wiping away at a glass as he spoke. “He pays well for unusual strangers. Either to work in the ville or as part of his collection.”
Ryan bit his lip. “We’d be no use to them dead?”