Ryan glanced over at his friend. Time was passing, and they had a pressing appointment up in the Northwest with Abe and the Trader.
“One last time, Malachi,” he said. “How many folk have you chilled?”
“I could tell you if I referred to my books. I kept an accounting, you see. How old and dates and clothes and weapons, and with the woman, whether I had” He stopped abruptly as he realized he’d gone a step further than he’d intended.
“You fucked the corpses?” J.B. asked, incredulous.
The little man trembled, tied upright to the fence, his head turning from side to side as if he were seeking a light. “Not kind of Not with Altogether there was around seventy or eighty. But I could never get enough children. What I wanted most was to have children really loved children and”
Ryan shot him once, between the eyes, with the SIG-Sauer, bolstering the blaster as the corpse slumped down, blood and brains gushing from the shattered rear of the skull, dripping off the posts of the fence.
“Waste of a bullet. We should have left the sick little fuck for the rats.”
THE VIOLENT CHEM STORM of the previous day had done a lot of harm to the highways and trails of the region, slowing their progress, some of the time to a crawl, sometimes slower.
Streams had become rivers, and many of those rivers had burst banks, leading to detours of several miles to find a safe fording place.
It took them three days to get clear of Colorado and across the old state line and up into the San Rafael Valley of Utah. The wag was running much better than it had before their run-in with Malachi Gribble, and the damaged wheel from the buffalo stampede didn’t seem to give them any trouble, as long as they kept the speed down below forty.
“Into the second week,” Ryan said as they lay on warm grass and chewed the roasted flesh off a wild turkey that J.B. had shot with the Steyr the previous evening.
“Yeah. Making good time, though.”
“Been this way before?”
The Armorer thought about it. He’d taken off his glasses, leaving them on the sun-dried turf at his side, his fedora next to them.
“Not for a while.”
“I remember a ville, west of here. Could be a ways north as well.”
J.B. threw the gnawed bone against the slender willow tree that stood near a narrow stream, hitting it smack in the middle of the delicate trunk.
“I think I was off with War Wag Two at the time. Was it a baron who collected firearms?”
“Yeah, but not in a big way. Not modern stuff. His interest was flintlocks, wheel locks, percussion caps, muskets, dueling pistols. Old blasters. Can’t remember his name. Baron Something to do with numbers. Tenbos? Yeah, that was it. Baron Tenbos.”
“Don’t remember,” J.B. said. “Like I said, I don’t think I ever been here. Trader sent me off on some fly-swatting trip. Little place near the Grandee. I’m nearly sure that’s what happened. It was a long time ago.”
“I’m sure that was the name. Baron Tenbos.”
“BARON TENBOS,” the sec man said.
Ryan was in the driver’s seat of the LAV-25, with J.B. poised in the turret, ready to slam down the top at the least sign of any threat.
“All right if we pass through?”
The man wore a dusty uniform of maroon and black, with a nondescript postdark rifle remake slung over his shoulders. He stood by a long striped pole that rested across the highway. Ryan thought that he had to be one of the least threatening sec men that he’d ever seen.
“Baron’ll like to meet you. All outlanders interest him. Specially when they come driving along the blacktop in an armawag like that.”
Ryan had the ob slit a little way open and he nodded, then realized that the man couldn’t see the gesture. “Sure. Any chance of food and a bed for the night?”
It was a little after five in the late afternoon, with a cold wind springing up from the east.
“Yep.”
“What do we do?”
“Keep right along until the fork by the lake with a boulder sticking up out of the middle. Hang a left there. Up a hill, and you’ll see another sec post. Stop there and let ’em clear you on through. Straight ahead and over the bridge, and you’re in the ville. Just like that. Can’t miss Baron Tenbos’s place.”