Liberty bared his teeth.
Ryan quietly hoped none of the gang looked up. The ropes above had been impossible to completely hide among the branches, and white scarring showed where limbs had been hacked away. The skin around the scar on his face tightened as the final cards were about to be played. He had seven rounds for the Steyr, and a full clip plus three for the SIG-Sauer.
Usually the companions didn’t get so low on ammo. There were places to trade, and there were the redoubts that they had access to that sometimes hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. Pressing on past Hazard didn’t make any kind of sense unless they were better armed. And if it had been possible to trade without getting their throats cut, Ryan would have been all for it. Only Liberty and his band didn’t have a reputation for dealing from the top of the deck.
In quick succession, Doc unveiled the denim shirts and pants in neat stacks on the woolen blanket. From there he moved on to the dozen packs of manufactured playing cards they’d raided from personnel lockers in the redoubt. Deathlands had their own pasteboards, many of them crude and hand-drawn.
In some areas, a deck of predark playing cards brought top jack.
“Let me see that deck,” Liberty demanded.
Doc reached down for the cards. Ryan remembered the deck, remembered talking to J.B. about it, both of them agreeing that it would capture the eyes of most of the gang. The cards held pictures of creamy female beauties from a bygone era, clothed rather than naked like some of the decks, and oozing a sexuality that had affected Ryan, as well, as he’d looked at them.
The box said they had been drawn by someone named Gillette Elvgren, some time in the 1940s. The pictures seemed subtly more provocative than many of the sexually explicit ones Ryan had seen. Nudity was commonplace in Deathlands, but the flirty near innocence exhibited in the drawings of the women on the cards was something seldom seen.
“Ah, a connoisseur of fair feminine beauty,” Doc said, handing over the deck. “Do be careful with it. They are quite valuable.”
Liberty took the box and opened it. He fanned a number of the cards, some of the mounted men crowding in close to him to get a better look.
Ryan gazed in the direction Philox and his men had gone, guessing he’d never see the men. Nor would he see Jak, because the albino was one of the deadliest killers around.
The sec chief shoved the cards back together and reverently placed them within the cardboard box. “What else do you have?” He made no effort to hand the cards back, and a handful of the men around him cast covetous eyes on the prize their leader had selected.
“A few knives,” Doc said. “Military blades with a sheen and a luster not seen often in these times.” He unfolded another section of the blanket to reveal a half-dozen sheathed combat knives. One of the gang asked to see a blade that could have doubled as a small machete. Doc passed over the weapon.
The man drew the blade from the leather sheath. The keen edge splintered the weak sunlight that penetrated the tree canopy. Murmurs of appreciation followed the knife as the man whisked it through the air. He shaved the back of an arm with it, startled by the bright line of blood that followed one of his passes that had pressed too hard.
“Show the rest of it,” Liberty ordered.
Ryan knew the gang leader was only buying time. The deal had been closed with the deck of cards, and the larceny in Liberty’s warped soul wouldn’t let him settle for anything less than all of the prizes displayed on the blanket. Trader had a saying: before a man learned to recognize honest emotion in a lover’s eyes, he had to learn to spot greed in the eyes of a man waiting to cut a deal.
The one-eyed warrior saw greed all over Liberty. The sec chief wasn’t used to playing his cards close to the vest. Most people he dealt with saw it coming.