Dos bit back a groan of despair. What the fuck was he expected to do now?
THE FURIOUS HAMMERING of the autoblaster echoed from the window ahead of Kane and above him. Dirt divots jumped into the air directly in front of him. His measured stride didn’t falter, but he repressed a smile of relief. He had gambled correctly. For whatever reason, the chill team was under orders to spare his life, though the blastermen weren’t above trying to scare him off.
Casting a glance over his shoulder, he saw Grant peering anxiously around the base of the masonry mound. Kane saluted him with two fingers to the nose and stepped across the threshold into the squat.
As he expected, the interior was a gutted shell. The air was stagnant, and he detected the smell of old cook fires. The walls of the individual rooms had long ago been demolished. The light was dim but modified by the indirect illumination of the setting sun, peeping through a ragged gap in the domed roof.
The second floor was not much more than a rickety platform supported by a pair of square wooden pillars. A crude homemade ladder stretched from the ground to a square opening eight feet above.
Calmly Kane said, “Throw down your blaster and come down, hands behind your head.”
There was no reply, but he heard the creak and squeak of floorboards.
“Look,” Kane said reasonably, “I’m not coming up there, so you’re going to have to come down here. I promise not to shoot you. Magistrate’s mercy.”
He thought he heard a nervous intake of breath, then another creak of wood. Kane counted silently to thirty, figuring half a minute was sufficient time for the man to review his situation and reach a logical decision.
At thirty, he announced, “All right, then. This way is more fun, anyhow.”
Stepping deeper into the gloomy interior, Kane leveled the Sin Eater and pressed the trigger. The high-velocity, heavy-caliber rounds tore across the room and ripped savagely into the support posts right where the areas of dry rot were the most evident. The building filled with thunder and the sharp sweet smell of cordite. Spent shell casings arced up and clattered down. Sections of the posts dissolved in sprays of splinters.
Kane played the bullet stream over the pair of wooden pillars as if he were washing them down with a water hose. Amid mushy cracks and snaps, the entire second-floor platform tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle, then cascaded down entirely. The whole building trembled with the violence of the crash.
Kane glimpsed a man frantically scrabbling to maintain his balance, feet kicking wildly as if he were running in place. He uttered a hoarse cry as the floor collapsed beneath him. Kane stepped aside as the man struck the floor gracelessly and with breath-robbing force. He tumbled head over heels, the mini-Uzi spinning away and disappearing into a puffing cloud of duraplast dust and rotted-wood particles.
The fall had slammed all the air out of the man’s lungs, and his mouth opened and closed in shuddery silent gasps, like a fish stranded on dry land. Glazed eyes took in the dark figure of Kane looming out of the gloom, and his hand streaked for the long knife scabbarded at his waist.
Kane stomped down hard on the hand, breaking and grinding the delicate metacarpal bones beneath his heel. The blasterman tried to scream, but he didn’t have the breath for it. All that issued from his mouth was a high-pitched, aspirated gargle.
Then Grant’s voice reached him from outside. “Kane! What’s going on in there?”
“A little renovating,” Kane called. “Just stay there.”
He reached down and hauled the blasterman to his feet by gripping the collar of his jacket. The lenses of his glasses easily penetrated the dust-clogged murk, and he recognized the man, or least what he was, if not who.
“You’re one of old Guana Teague’s strong-arms,” Kane said. “Which one are youUno or Dos?”
The strong-arm’s lips writhed, and he dragged oxygen into his lungs. Cradling his broken hand, he managed to husk out, “Dos.”
“Who’s in the other building?”
“Uno.”
“Talkative as all hell, aren’t we?”