“You people grab chairs and sit where you’re able,” a big sec man with a burn scar on his neck said. He wore his dark hair cut short, looking like brush. “Baron Shaker’s feeling generous tonight.”
Ryan recognized the baron’s name at once as the man who’d sent the riders into Idaho Falls after Elmore. “Baron Shaker’s here?”
The big man’s eyes narrowed. “You know Baron Shaker?” A line of men formed behind him, their hands on their blasters.
“Heard of him,” Ryan acknowledged.
“You people outlanders?”
“Travelers,” Ryan corrected. Outlanders was an accepted term, but in a lot of places in Deathlands it was synonymous with enemy.
“What are you doing here?”
“They are here at my request,” Annie’s voice rang out. She swept through the line of sec men with Max plowing the way ahead of her. Judging from the sec men’s obvious haste, Max had proved his prowess to them. “You’ll do well to treat them kindly, Loomis, because they’re my guests before they’re in any way responsible to the baron.” What surprised Ryan even more was Doc walking into their midst with the woman on his arm. The old man had a well-relaxed air about him, and looked like a dandy in his freshly cleaned frock coat and new shirt and pants.
“Baron Shaker’s welfare—” Loomis began.
“Is completely dependent on my generosity tonight,” Annie stated. “Unless you’d rather take your chances out there in the chem storm that’s brewing.”
Loomis’s eyes hardened as he turned to face the smaller woman. “Mebbe you need to remember that we’ll fucking well stay here if we want. Got more blasters here than any of your people.”
Before Loomis had time to blink, Annie whipped out a snub-nosed S&W .38 Airweight Bodyguard blaster and settled it between his eyes. Her finger was tight on the trigger. Since it was hammerless, there was no indication how much pressure she’d put on the trigger.
“This is my house, you arrogant, stupe bastard,” Annie said, her voice raw with emotion. “I built it from the ground up, poured my blood and sweat into it, and no fucking man’s going to come in here and even think about telling me what I’m gonna do or not gonna do under my own roof.”
Loomis’s eyes focused on the Airweight’s barrel.
Ryan took a step to the right, noticing J.B. was automatically going to the left to balance out their firezone. However it went, he was ready to back the woman’s play.
Doc grinned widely.
“What the fuck you grinning at, you old turd?” Loomis demanded. But the effort didn’t come across very well with the blaster centered on his big nose.
“My dear chap,” Doc said blithely, “I find myself amused at the circumstance you find yourself in. Combating an abbreviated blaster with a deviated septum is not trouble you would ordinarily beckon. Shall we say, this is not the caliber of competition that you should embark on?”
Loomis shifted only slightly, not enough to get his feet under him, but enough to try to save face.
Ryan felt certain that if Loomis had moved too much, Annie would have killed him then and there. The one-eyed man touched the SIG-Sauer’s butt with his fingertips.
“Loomis, you’ll stand down this instant or I’ll chill you myself.” The voice carried over the room full of people.
Loomis’s shoulders rounded, and his weight settled more squarely on his heels. “Yes, sir,” he barked.
The crowd parted again, flowing back into place around the tall man who strode through them. Annie kept her small blaster centered on Loomis’s head. The audience was mostly quiet, but Ryan heard the rumble of discord that flowed through the whispers. There was still a definite danger of violence breaking out in the trading post as the two groups split between sec men and scavengers.
Baron Shaker stood tall and broad, heavily muscled from more than day-to-day survival. His skin was dark, a bronze coloring that hinted at a mixed ancestry, but his hair was dark copper, curled in tight ringlets, echoed by the short beard he wore cropped close to the skin. He was dressed in a red silk shirt, tight across the trunk but loose in the sleeves, black denim pants and black riding boots that nearly went up to his knees. He was one of the youngest barons Ryan had ever seen, surely no older than his mid-twenties. But his control was never in question in the room.