“How far are we going?”
“Let you know when we get there.” Ryan turned, leaving Morse in Jak’s hands, and went back to join Krysty. She was asleep when he got there, her face turned in toward her arm. He settled in beside her and let the motion of the river lull him. His hand, though, never stayed far from the SIG-Sauer.
“YOU BELIEVE you can fix these, John?”
J.B. looked up at Mildred, his lap covered by the hand-blasters he’d found in the hold. There were eight of them in all, four Colt 1911 model .45s and four 9 mm Beretta Model 92-Ss. Two of the .45s had satin stainless-steel finishes, and the rest were all matte black.
“Can you fix a broken arm?” the Armorer asked.
“I don’t fix a broken arm,” Mildred replied. “I just set it and it fixes itself.”
J.B. took one of the .45s from the military footlocker they’d been held in. “Don’t fix these, either. But in my hands, they fix themselves.” He knew his words, spoken in jest, were nonetheless almost the truth. There wasn’t much he hadn’t been able to fix back in Cripple Creek where he’d been born and raised, and the rest he’d learned even before he’d hooked up with the Trader.
“Best eat while you got the chance,” Mildred said. “Keep your strength up.”
“I’ll get to it.”
The light in Junie’s hold was dim. There were no portholes—mainly, J.B. figured, because much of the hold could be below water if she carried a heavy load.
The lantern he’d lit hung on a long hook attached to the wall, sticking out far enough that even though the lantern swung, it never connected. The pale yellow light ghosted the room, giving it a surreal quality. It was nowhere near natural light. But that was okay with J.B. because, if he’d had to, he could have fieldstripped and inspected the hand-blasters, and probably even fixed them in the blackest night.
The room held a small gas stove and kitchen. A warped table with benches screwed into the floor occupied the center of the room. And there was a mass of mattresses, sheets and pillows that served as a bed. Personally J.B. figured the bedding needed airing out in the worst way.
Mildred continued sitting, watching him. “Damn, but you smile like a little boy when you got your hands on a new weapon.”
J.B. felt his smile get a little bigger. He couldn’t help himself. Weapons had always been his top interest. Back when he’d been traveling with War Wag One and the Trader had given them permission to roam through a ville, most of the men had made for the closest gaudies to get laid as often and as soon as possible.
But J.B. hurried to visit the weapon smith in each ville they traded with. Sometimes they had shops, and sometimes they dealt out of saloons. And more times than not, the local weapon smith was just a guy or gal working out of his or her own home.
J.B. had learned to be a hell of a trader himself. It had been his job as armorer for War Wag One to keep the weapons up and dependable, and keeping extra parts on hand for some of the heavy machine guns had almost been a full-time effort.
When he hadn’t been trading for parts the wags needed or might need, he’d traded blasters. He’d kept a fair selection aboard War Wag One, and always managed to have something to trade. He’d found that other weapon smiths were just as eager as he was to get their hands on something new and different, just to see if they could figure it out. J.B. would trade, sometimes coming out on the short end of the trade if it was a particular piece he hadn’t had the chance to work with before, just for the privilege of working on it.
He’d taken a lot of busted blasters, pieces other weapon smiths had given up on. Nearly always he’d managed to find ways to fix them.
The blasters in the footlocker were going to be no challenge at all compared to some of the projects he’d taken on. Whoever had stored the blasters in the footlocker had removed the firing pins. It had been too much to hope that they would be in the footlocker, but if he had access to a machinist’s shop for a day or two, he could get them all replaced. There’d be some repair work on the slides and other inner mechanisms, because there’d been some water damage. From the looks of the rust, he figured that the water damage had happened in the past couple of months, maybe when the footlocker had been dredged up by Morse and his sons.