“Good.” The baron drained the glass, spilling a fair part of it over his black jerkin.
“All right with you, Baron, if we stay the night here?” Ryan asked.
Tenbos tilted his head a little to one side, as though his hearing were poor. “Stay the night? Of course. I have a fond memory of the Trader. I had heard that he had been chilled down” He tutted to himself. “Stupe! You told me that you and Dix here were planning to resume contact with him. Near Seattle, wasn’t it? My memory is failing me now, the last part of my wretched body that survived unscarred from my stroke.”
“When?”
“Two years back, come Thanksgiving. Found my wife in bed with one of her sons. Chilled them both. Fell down. Woke up fucked like this.”
That short piece of quietly spoken dialogue contained such a surfeit of dreadful information that Ryan and J.B. sat silent, looking at each other, both hugging their half-empty schooners of beer.
Tenbos laughed, a short, bitter, barking sound. “Generally takes strangers that way.”
“Don’t remember you as a married man.” Ryan wiped a streak of white froth from his upper lip. “Not when I rode through your ville with Trader.”
“Wasn’t.”
J.B. had steepled his fingers together, a sure sign he was doing some kind of mental calculation. “Reckon it wasn’t that many years ago Trader was here. You weren’t married then. Had your attack around two years ago. Your wife was screwing with your son. How old was he?”
Tenbos beckoned to the barkeep for another round. “No, you got the mule by the tail, Mr. Dix. Her son. Not my son. Her son. He was twenty-four. She had three boys. Other two live here now, both waiting for me to die. Getting less patient every day.”
The baron turned to the sec men, all of whom had sat like embalmed statues since his arrival. “Right, isn’t it, lads?” He put on a thin, whining voice. “I never believed that the old man would have stayed alive for so long.” Then he reverted to his own tones. “Miserable little sons of bitches! Time was I could’ve taken all”
The barkeep arrived. Tenbos was sitting with both eyes shut tight, head dropping forward, his breathing heavy and regular. “Baron has these turns,” he said. “Gets himself angered up about Robby and Teddy. Twenty-six and twenty-three now. Mother was Janine Emms. Dead boy was Damian.” He wiped the table with his apron’s hem. “You’ll see them both if you stay the night here in the ville. They’ll be at dinner.”
THEY HAD BEEN GIVEN a room on the third floor of the tower. Unusually Baron Tenbos lived on the bottom story, in a small suite of rooms. There were sec men on the second level, and the two stepsons on the fourth. Then nothing up to the very top, where, so Ryan and J.B. were told, the baron kept his diminished firearms collection.
Ryan stood by the window, gazing out over the pastures and orchards while J.B. sat on one of the pair of single beds, cleaning the Uzi. A small can of oil was balanced against a length of white rag.
“Lovely place,” Ryan commented.
“Yeah. Change to find a ville where the folks seem happy. The sec men are doing a fair job in a fair way, and the baron doesn’t want to chill every outlander that steps across the borders of his domain.”
Ryan stretched. “Promised us a bath. Beds seem comfortable. Good food. Tenbos said we could take some dried meat and fruit with us when we go tomorrow. Eggs and cheese and stuff. Mebbe make a leisurely start, for once. I reckon this is going to be the best part of this rad-blasted journey. Just for once, we can relax. Just a little.”
A SEC MAN KNOCKED on the door at seven-thirty, telling them to go down to the ground floor and follow the old, faded signs to the Portofino Diner.
The corridors were dark, and the carpet on the stairs was worn and threadbare. A pair of doors stood open and Ryan walked in, J.R at his heels. The Uzi was across the Armorer’s shoulders and Ryan’s SIG-Sauer was safely bolstered.