Jak stepped so close that Ryan could feel his breath on his face. The teenager was the best part of a foot shorter, but he managed to come near to staring directly into Ryan’s good eye. “Can run. Can fight. Can try hide. Not forever, friend. Nobody runs forever. Promise.”
“You really know he’ll come?” Krysty said. “I can understand that, Jak. Hope it’s a right feeling.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Three-quarters of an hour later, the black-clad figure of the General appeared at the glass door to the Visitors’ Center. He was hatless, showing a small crown of baldness as he made a mock bow toward the watching group, standing around sixty paces from the doors. His silver-topped cane had vanished, and he looked disheveled and dusty.
“I should have known, amigos,” he called. “Maybe waited for a week or a month in that ghostly labyrinth and then you would have gone away.”
“Not in a thousand years, butcher,” Jak shouted.
“Ah, you must be the one who has an interest in that woman and the little one. I see.”
“Drop the blaster,” Ryan said.
“I think not,” the General replied. “Thank you for the suggestion, Cawdor. But I will need it for a short moment or two longer.”
“Looks like a Smith amp; Wesson,” J.B. commented. “Seven forty-five Model. Eight round.”
“Take him out with the Steyr, Dad,” Dean suggested, recoiling at the way Jak spun around to face him.
“No fucking way, kid!” he spit with a bitter and ferocious venom. “I chill him. Nobody else!”
“Sure, Jak. Sure. Be a hot pipe that way. Let it swing, Jak, all right.”
The General watched the exchange with a casual interest. “Dissension in the ranks? Strange that after this time I am ended because of a dead baby and a useless, crippled woman. Me, like that. For such a trivial and pointless reason. But I am forced to admit that you and your team are very good, Cawdor. Trader taught well. I had some passing pride in my men and women. Trained them hard and, I thought, enough. Yet, they have all been sent ahead to that limitless room in the basement. Now, I shall be joining them there. But first”
He drew the automatic from its holster, and they all heard the click as he worked a round under the hammer.
“Down,” Ryan said.
“No need.” J.B. pointed.
The General had leveled his blaster at the serene sky above him and fired it in a burst of noise.
“Was that eight?” Dean asked.
“Eight,” J.B. confirmed.
The General stood, legs spread, holding the blaster in his right hand. “One for the money and one for the show, is what I believe was once said. One for the baby and another one for the road.”
He brought up the Smith amp; Wesson and placed the muzzle beneath his chin. Jak started to move quickly forward, but J.B. called after him. “It’s empty, Jak. He can’t”
“Goodbye cruel world.”
They heard the sharp sound of the hammer dropping on an empty chamber. The General lowered the spent handblaster very slowly, seeing the albino closing on him. He threw the weapon into the dirt and opened his arms, like a smiling priest receiving a candidate for benediction.
Ryan watched the final scene, a vague unease sliding across his mind. It was a rare business, pursuing a swift and evil bastard like the General, hardly even coming face-to-face with him. Most of the men and women that Ryan had chilled in the past couple of years had been people that he’d eventually gotten to know something about. But this was different.
He didn’t even know the General’s name.
Jak was twenty feet away from the man, and the unease became certainty.
“Hideaway, Jak!” Ryan yelled.
It was a .32 over-and-under derringer, hidden in the sleeve. From the speed of its appearance in the General’s right hand, it was probably held there in a quick-release rig.
Ryan winced, waiting for the shot, powerless to do anything to stop it.
But it never came.
In the space of a single heartbeat, Jak had thrown two of his concealed knives, one with his left hand and the other with his right.
The first knife sliced into the General’s right hand, severing the tendons in the wrist, so that the fingers opened spasmodically and the derringer slipped away to the ground.
But the blaster hadn’t even begun to fall when the second throwing knife struck home.
At the last moment the General saw the blades glittering in his direction. An uncontrollable reflex closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. But the knife cut through the closed lid, driving through the dark pupil, into the optic nerve that was a direct channel into the brain.
The General had no time even to realize he’d been cut on the wrist, before feeling a punching blow in the face.
In the eye.
” Quien ?” he began.
Something streamed down his face, warm, dripping off his chin, and clouds veiled across his mind.
Jak watched the man drop slowly to his knees, hands reaching out blindly in front of him. A pink mixture of blood and aqueous liquid trickled from the taped hilt of the knife that protruded from the socket of the right eye.
The albino pursed his lips and spit in the dying man’s face. Twice. “For my wife and my baby, you bastard,” he said with an infinite gentleness.
The General slid forward onto his face and lay still.
Jak stooped and retrieved his knives, wiping them on the man’s black shirt.
“Shame so fast,” he said, turning to the others, managing a grim smile. “Now go home.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The journey back north was surprisingly free from any major incident, with one notable exception.
After some discussion outside the Visitors’ Center, it was agreed that all of the animals should simply be let loose.
“Navaho’s pinto ponies’ll probably run free and wild,” J.B. said.
“My horses should find way home.” Jak looked at the line of animals. “Mebbe ride them as string myself.”
“Let them go, Jak,” Ryan urged. “Too many two-legged wolves between here and your ranch.”
The teenager nodded, smiling. “Guess that’s right.”
Doc cleared his throat. “Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, but I do have a small problem with this decision. Worthy and wise though it probably is.”
“You want to shoot Judas yourself before we go.” Mildred grinned.
“Quite the reverse.”
“Hot pipe, Doc!” Dean exclaimed. “Why not ride the booger all the way home again?”
The old man smiled, a little thinly. “I fear that my altered attitude toward the beast doesn’t quite extend to enduring physical suffering, dear boy.”
“You want Judas to ride along on the wag with the rest of us, Doc?” Ryan laughed, feeling the release of the tension of the past few days. “Crowded enough as it is.”
“No.” Doc turned to the albino. “Jak, do you think the wretched beast will be able to find its own way home again, without harm or hindrance?”
Jak thought about it for a moment. “Doc, know any living thing stop Judas doing what wants?”
“No, I believe not.”
“So, he’ll make it.”
THE SUN SHONE as they rattled northward, out of the hills by the Grandee, into the New Mexico desert.
Once again the engine overheated, and they had to stop for a couple of hours to allow it to cool down again. But the trip was easy and relatively pleasant.
When they were about forty miles away from Jak’s spread, J.B. called from the driver’s console that the engine was playing up again.
“Could do with water,” he said.
“Small ville dozen miles east,” Jak shouted from his perch astride the long barrel of the 25 mm Bushmaster cannon.
“Water there?”
“Yeah. Called Patriarch. Friendly.”
THE TOWNSHIP of Patriarch was a dozen houses with the clapboard ruin of a church and a single store. The arrival of the clattering wag brought out the whole population, which seemed to consist of an immensely tall and powerful black man and his white wife, along with what looked like two or three dozen children of varying ages.
“See why the place is called Patriarch,” Krysty shouted in Ryan’s ear. “Looks like they’re trying to repopulate the entire southern plains on their own.”
“Haven’t had so many strangers in many a long week,” called the man, whose name was Fred Zero. “Got a packman from up north staying the night is all.”
“Enough beds for us?” Ryan asked, looking down at his absurdly elongated shadow. Another half hour and it was going to be night.
“Sure. Sure.”
THEIR BED WAS MADE from hollow tubes of old brass, and it tinkled and chimed every time either Ryan or Krysty made the slightest move.
“Sorry, lover,” Ryan said. “Just can’t concentrate with all this fireblasted noise going on. Wait until tomorrow when we get back to Jak’s. Then we can bounce each other’s bones without the musical accompaniment.”