Dean Ing - Wild Country

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CHAPTER ONE
Death minus three minutes and counting: Rawson squinted through yellow sundazzle and displayed his
Mex dental work as the stranger neared maximum range. The scope of his wire-stocked assault rifle
showed only a single, helmeted rider, straight and tall on the hovercycle, its caliche dust trail writhing
behind.
Had Rawson been a praying man, he might have prayed for this break. One well-placed round could
mean the difference between Rawson afoot in Wild Country, with deputy marshals closing in. and
Rawson sitting pretty in that hovercycle with a straight run to the Rio Grande.
On the other hand, a clean miss might alert the silly bastard, and several hasty shots might render that
cycle useless. From his cover among the blistering rocks of South Texas. Rawson judged that his prey
would cross within a hundred meters of him. If he waited an extra few moments, he would have a good
headshot, and time for more if the first round missed. Rawson flicked his fire selector to semiauto,
wishing he had thought to drop his beltpac near the tracks his boots had made. A nice fat beltpac
would've provided bait to halt an unwary traveler. Well, tough shit; Rawson concentrated on the world as
it was—or rather, as he thought it was. It did not occur to him that the target in his crosshairs might be
bait.
Death minus two minutes and counting: For an instant, as the cycle passed below on its cushion of air,
Rawson's imagination whacked him under the ribs. What if the rider gripped the throttlebar in his death
agony? The hovercycle might just continue on out of sight, its whirr fading with the dust trail, a
diesel-hearted horse with the bit in its teeth and a dead man in the saddle. The outlaw adjusted his aim to
the base of the neck, let the crosshairs traverse to lead the target, and squeezed gently.
The rifle's muzzle suppressor was a custom job, so that the muzzle scarcely moved and emitted only a
flat, whistling pop. The slug flew a trifle high, catching the erect rider behind the ear. Rawson sent two
more rounds after it; saw the helmet jerk again, saw shards of plastic spray bright sparkles against the
sun.
Death minus ninety seconds and counting: Rawson flung himself down from his prominence, bounding
to flat, sunbaked soil, cursing the hovercycle as it continued. The damn thing had slowed a lot, but it was
still under way, now wandering in a broad arc above the sparse brush of Uvalde County, Texas. The
rider was well-zapped, but at this pace Rawson, carrying the heavy rifle, would never catch up. He made
a snap decision, dropped the rifle, and sprinted hard. He willed his legs to pump harder. The goddamn
rifle had done its job and in any case he still had his little Chink automatic, courtesy of World War IV,
stowed in his breakaway hip pocket. In a long, gut-wrenching sprint he knew that he was gaining. And
so, in a way, he was definitely losing.
Death minus forty seconds and counting: The rider had not fallen, though his head lolled loosely on his
neck. Both hands still gripped the handlebars of the cycle, a scruffy, two-place McCullough with a tarp
over the rear saddle cowl. Rawson's thigh muscles told him he'd spent too many summer days in the
cantinas of Hondo and Eagle Pass, waiting for word that Sorel needed him for a shipment. Trembling,
gasping, he drew on his last reserves of stamina and stumbled, nearly fell. But now the diesel stammered
too. Rawson hoped that didn't mean the effin' thing was out of fuel.
He found out what it meant as he staggered forward, exulting. Everything became clear with the sudden
emergence of the compact, green-eyed blond fellow from under the tarp. Rawson was only
three-quarters surprised; in the smuggling biz, you learned to count on fuck-all.
"Michael Rawson, you're under arrest," the younger man called. He wore the shoulder patch of a federal
deputy marshal on his thin deerskin shirt, a shirt too nice to perforate, though Rawson fully intended to do
that very thing.
"Well—ain't you cute," Rawson puffed, stopping ten paces away, putting hands on hips while he fought
for breath. Very 'cute indeed, wiring a cast-off android from Wild Country Safari into the front saddle
and steering from under the tarp. The little deputy might be young but he had used guile, forcing Rawson
to run from cover and tire himself with a long, exhausting sprint. Not cute enough to have a weapon in his
hands, though. If he knew who Rawson was, he ought to know how fast Rawson was.
Death minus eight seconds and counting: The broad-shouldered little deputy saw something in
Rawson's face. "Don't do it," he said equably. But Rawson thought something in the man's face was
pleading, do it. Rawson did it while the deputy's right hand was fishing out a card, probably to read him
his rights.
Rawson's rights ended with an impossibly liquid left-handed draw by the deputy, who flicked a
seven-millimeter Chiller from its hidden armpit holster as he bounded from the cycle. Rawson got his
sidearm out, began his trusted sidewinder maneuver, swung his weapon to intersect the spot where the
deputy would land… and felt two paralyzing impacts in his torso.
Rawson crumpled, the slugs hurling him back. He lay with one leg buckled, both arms flung wide, the
little automatic a full pace from his nerveless fingers. He understood a great deal more, now. There were
maybe a half dozen bad dudes in Wild Country who could draw with Rawson, but only one whose
freakish reflexes were said to be absolutely lethal whether fiat-footed or airborne; a regular John Wesley
Hardin.
And the blond deputy was a wrong-hander. too. Ex-assassin for Search & Rescue, ex-rebel with Jim
Street, now a part-time lawman in Wild Country: "You'd be Ted Quantrill." Rawson grimaced, now
feeling thick fluid in his throat.
"And you had to find out the hard way," said the blond, reseating his Chiller.
Rawson's eyes were beginning to defocus, but he never lost his courage. "Well, I said you was cute." he
said, dying.
For the record, Quantrill noted that Michael Rawson's long countdown ended at 1:54 PM., central
daylight time, on the seventeenth of September, A.D 2006.
CHAPTER TWO
Quantrill finished rolling the body into a standard bodybag, spat caliche dust, hauled Rawson's bulk to the
cycle, and retrieved his own Aussie hat, flopping it on his head after wiping a film of sweat and dust from
his face. The old 'droid in the front seat had been emptied of its innards and was soon stowed in back
with Rawson.
After he disconnected the rear steering yoke, Quantrill stepped into the front cowl, then pulled a cold
bulb of Pearl beer from the right-hand cargo pannier. With his other hand he toggled his VHP set. A
moment later, he had Chief Deputy Stearns on-line.
The complaints began almost immediately. "Nope, I never got a chance to read him his rights," Quantrill
replied. "He went for a Chinese sidearm; I'm bringing it as evidence."
He waited, pressing the earpiece with two fingers, meanwhile scanning the innocent horizon. Then, "It
was Rawson's choice, not mine." Pause. "Sure. If my belt video was working, you'll see me with the chit
in one hand and a handful of air in the other while he was drawing on me. I won't kill a man unless he
forces me to." Pause; a flare of nostrils below his broken nose. "Well, I don't anymore, sir. You can tell
Marshal Teague our Justice Department is still just. Anyway, you've got two more of Sorel's men for a
nice showy trial. You'd never have gotten anything from Mike Rawson. Read his file."
This time Quantrill waited longer. He was shaking his head in disgust when he replied. "It's not my fault if
they got sprung so fast. Did anybody plant a tracer bug on either of 'em?" Another pause. "I'm sorrier
than you are, mister; Espinel was a friend of mine. Sometimes I think Teague is sorrier to see a fugitive
come in horizontal than he is when one of us gets it. No, cancel that. I'm just hot and tired and pissed
off—sir."
As always, the "sir" sounded insincere. Marvin Stearns, grown sleek with inaction, could list a dozen men
he would prefer over Quantrill. Ted Quantrill could list several friends who'd become casualties through
the inaction of sleek men.
Kent Ethridge, for example. Some men put the entire blame for that on Ethridge himself. Quantrill's
reaction had been a deepening fury against those who had made Ethridge's death possible. Now he took
a final pause and a gulp of Pearl before: "I'm near Dabney, just north of Zavala County. You want
Rawson in SanTone Ringcity, or do I freight him back to you in Junction? Yeah, he's in a bodybag, he'll
keep 'til tomorrow. Right. See you in Junction bright and early. A-a-and out," he drawled, putting away
the tiny headset with relief.
Ted Quantrill hadn't had a mastoid-implant radio in his noggin for four years, but he still hated any comm
set that reminded him of a mastoid "critic," however faintly. An explosive critic had executed his lover,
Marbrye Sanger, on command of the murderous Young administration. The postwar excesses of
Young's people had driven Quantrill to rebellion; nearly to madness as well. They drove so many good
people to the rebel ranks that the elections of 2004 had cut across the lines of Mormonism and
federalism. Now it was President Ora McCarty whose cabinet struggled to reconstruct America. As long
as the ex-rebel boss Jim Street was attorney general, there would be jobs for men like Quantrill.
Like the American nation itself, old Jim Street had suffered systemic shock during the Sinolnd War. The
grizzled, crippled old Texan rode herd on the Justice Department, including both the FBI and the Border
Authority. Street had to let other folks wrangle over the new Capitol site, now abuilding in the District of
Columbia, Missouri. He worried about foreign entanglements when they crossed American borders—for
example, when the Ellfive colonies of New Israel helped Turkish drug merchants open conduits through
Wild Country.
Street knew in his chalky bones that America could not survive another reign of unjust rule, of
government by terror. As long as he could climb into a wheelchair, he would prowl the corridors of law
and order. If Wild Country and Oregon
Territory were to be parts of the nation again, they must get fair-handed justice. With deputies like Ted
Quantrill, Jim Street's justice reached a long way into lawless regions.
On this day, Quantrill was far into the violent border region claimed by both Mexico and Reconstruction
America. Here, whole families sometimes disappeared during a feud or a border raid from Mexican
cimarrones, wild ones. It was truly no government's land, and it could not be reclaimed without rough
justice. When it had to be, Quantrill's was as rough as it came.
Quantrill could have chosen a shorter route back, but his years in the region had given him Wild Country
wisdom. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the Sinolnd War, Texas ranchers and hoe men had
wrestled chunks of this sun-broiled land into submission. In less than ten years after the war, most of
those chunks had gone wild again, returned to the kind of new-world savagery that Francisco Vasquez
de Coronado had fought in 1541. A few places, chiefly narrow creekbottoms defended by grit and
gunfire, were still cultivated. Quantrill did not relish a mechanical breakdown, not with a deader ripening
under the tarp behind him. and he also went wide of the cultivated areas. Only fools and desperadoes
took chances in the trackless wild regions over soil that, locals claimed, was "hard as a whore's eye."
Was Quantrill too cautious? Item: During the first cattle drive east from the Pecos, Coronado's men were
forced to build pillars of dung and bones to post the way. Not even their herd of cattle could mark the
cactus-dotted hardpan enough to let a man backtrack their path. When those cattle stumbled forward
toward water, usually it was deadly alkali water and those cattle had to be whipped away from it. Now it
was still possible to find a remnant of a buffalo wallow or a dry hole where a Spanish buckle and bones
might gleam, burnished by the dusty winds of five centuries. This was a timeless land, and it would kill
you for the slightest miscalculation.
The most pitiless of that land lay far to Quantrill's left. His route was made interesting by deep,
brush-choked arroyos and hills. Bit by bit. the stupefying violence of Texas weather had whittled those
hills down from mountains to mounds. That weather was thought, by people who had never experienced
it, to be just a part of Wild Country myth; but Quantrill kept an eye on his horizons. He knew that in any
season, a hellbroth storm might fling hailstones the size of his fist so hard they dented the cowls of
hovercycles, with a blazing cadenza of lightning tinted gold and mauve by dust hurled on gale-force
winds.
To outlanders, it was all mythology to be taken in good humor. If it were even half-true, they reasoned.
Wild Country would be peopled exclusively by the insane. To Ted Quantrill, it was taken for
granted—and in good humor. If you lived out here and said you liked it, people figured you'd been too
long in the sun without your sombrero. So Quantrill cursed it as necessary and told no one but Sandra
Grange that he had learned to love it.
He put in a call to Sandy while sliding up into Edwards County but got no reply; expected none, really.
Like as not, she'd be tending her truck garden, and there was no one else to take a call at her soddy.
Nine-year-old Childe might hear the VHP beeper, but never answered. If you weren't standing in front of
her where she could study your face, Childe saw no point in jawing with you.
Quantrill tried again an hour from the soddy, then shrugged and popped open another cold Pearl. He told
himself he wasn't worried about the two sisters; though they lived on the edge of Wild Country, they
were rarely more than a whistle away from a mind-boggling mass of four-hoofed help.
Reminded of Sandy's huge guardian, Quantrill slowed the cycle and began to scan overhangs of stone.
Generally, Texas rattlers grew larger in regions with more rain. Quantrill knew the legend of Sowell's
dragon, the nine-footer killed by mustangs in the old days, and discounted that legend by two feet. He
was looking for any handy diamondback or prairie rattler that might serve as a snack.
CHAPTER THREE
The unlucky rattler wasn't even coiled, merely stretched out enjoying a recent meal, when Quantrill
spotted him. Moving quickly in the late afternoon heat, the ugly brute coiled a good honest warning to this
interloper. Quantrill's ventilated boots and brush trousers were snakeproof, with leg panels that served as
chaps; but his primary defense against rattlers was a combination of reflexes and untrembling control.
That combination had stunned U.S. Army medics when they'd first tested him for lethal skills.
Once in a human generation, a specimen with Quantrill's natural gifts might occur. Those gifts had been
viciously misused until Quantrill turned rebel, pitting himself in single combat against his masters. Now that
the rebels had won—and despite the best arguments by Sandy Grange—he still used his gifts in combat.
He took them as much for granted as the rattler took its heat-seeking sensors.
. For another man, Quantrill's rapid right-handed pass before the snake might have been bravado, but for
the deputy it was only a way to coax a snake into straightening out. The rattler lashed his triangular head
forward, the S-curve of neck and one coil now the size and rigidity of a baseball bat. And now the
yellow-white fangtips lanced for the tempting target, but now too the hand flicked out of range, which
was roughly two-thirds the length of the rattler.
And one-tenth of a human heartbeat later, the rattler hit caliche dirt, pinioned there by the treacherous
hand while Quantrill's left hand grasped the rattler behind its anal opening to keep that cylinder of muscle
from whipping around his arm.
Vaqueros, locally teased by the term "buckaroos," had first learned the trick of whip-cracking a live
rattler to remove its head. Once a Mexican cowpoke showed that trick to his Texas neighbors, it became
a well-known sport. Some said it separated the men from the boys; some said it separated the smarts
from the plain stupids. Quantrill did it because it separated the snake from the sting, and he would not do
it while anyone watched. Long ago he'd learned to avoid displays of his quickness. Why put an unknown
enemy on guard? Word got around too soon as it was.
A moment later, Quantrill hefted the headless rattler, smiled to himself. Sometimes he brought a toy for
Childe, or a spray of wildflowers for Sandy. But this time he curried favor with Ba'al, an enormous
Russian boar bred to Texas proportions by Texas A&M researchers before the war. One day when
Wild Country was tamed, there would be no room for such a monster, a full five hundred kilos of tusk
and gristle, standing tall as a Mex pony and bearing the scars of many encounters with men. It was hard
to say if Ba'al accepted Ted Quantrill as a friend. The great animal loved Sandy and, especially, Childe;
but Quantrill's odor was the hated mansmell, and the two males had never faced each other without a
soothing female presence.
If Ba'al loathed anything more than man, it was a live snake. A recently dead snake was something else
again. His forelegs and snout were scarred from rattler punctures, and the boar dined as often from rattler
nests as from wild goat, tender shoots, or stray animals from the nearby preserves of Wild Country
Safari. Quantrill hoped that this quivering rattler carcass would be the equivalent of a sherbet for Sandy
or a praline for Childe. If not—well, whatthehell, he'd tried to pacify the surly bastard…
Less than an hour later, a few kilometers from Rocksprings, Quantrill topped a rise in view of Sandy
Grange's soddy. He tried to deny the sense of relief spying the long, semisubmerged dwelling with its
grassy sod roof and spiky agarita shrubs planted on the earth berm. Too many times he had seen roofs
caved in by concussion grenades, smoke curling from burnt hulks, well-tended gardens ribboned to
mulch by cimarron gangs hostile to settlers.
But Sandy's corn stood high and golden, now with a deeper glow from the saffron sun far to the west.
Over the years, sunsets were beginning to lose the psychedelic glows brought on by thousands of nuclear
blasts during the war years. Atmospheric dust and smoke had brought depressed temperatures and poor
crop yields until recently. Quantrill tried once more with his VHP unit, and this time Sandy heard the
beeper, complaining that she would not have time to freshen up before he arrived. He thought it better to
avoid mentioning his cargo; Sandy tended to get squeamish about such things.
CHAPTER FOUR
Between two and three hundred klicks southwest of Rocksprings, Texas, lay La Mariposa—the
butterfly—a sun-splashed village in the state of Coahuila. In the same way that Kerrville and Junction,
Texas, marked the northern boundaries of Wild Country, La Mariposa marked its southern reach. North
of La Mariposa lay a parched wilderness of jumbled mountains, Serranias del Burro. Beyond that ran El
Rio Bravo, which yanquis called the Rio Grande. Contraband flowed between Mexico and
Reconstruction America by the routes least likely to be discovered; and if you didn't have guaranteed
passage through the Serranias, your most likely discovery was death. You would probably not discover
the ruined dude ranch from which the contraband flowed.
The man who could guarantee passage, or oblivion, dismounted at almost the same moment when Ted
Quantrill stepped from his hovercycle. In well-bred Spanish he said to his wrangler, "Let him cool off
slowly," and bestowed a pat on the neck of his lathered polo pony. The little stallion was an unmarked
golden brown; a sorrel. His owner took great pleasure in surrounding himself with variations on the sorrel
theme, for he, Felix Sorel, enjoyed a golden lifestyle. When Anglos called him Sorrel, he enjoyed that as
well.
Born to wealthy Marxists in Guadalajara, Felix Sorel grew from a handsome athletic child into a golden
opportunity for Mexico's soccer hopes—an opportunity that country lost when Sorel's father arranged
his education in Cuba. Felix Sorel put Cuba in the World Cup semifinals in 19%, then toured several
countries as an honored guest. No one doubted that Sorel would become a millionaire forward on
whatever team he chose, until the Sinolnd War flared. World War IV embittered young Sorel chiefly
because it interfered with his career. Naturally, he blamed the US/RUS allies for the war.
Sorel vanished during the Cuban-based invasion of Florida; was reported dead twice; then reappeared in
Cartagena at the war's end as the guest of a Frenchman from Marseilles. Sorel could not have been an
honored guest in that context: it is hard to honor a man by entertaining him on the profits from heroin
sales.
Yet Mexico, little damaged by the war and enriched by its oil sales to desperate North America, was
anxious to honor Sorel. The media reported that he had put on too much weight, and Sorel proved
critically sensitive about it when giving interviews. Felix Sorel returned to Mexico and his adoring fans by
executive jet, and promised that he would'be down to a decent weight in the near future. He shed ten
kilos of that weight soon after he breezed through Mexican customs, simply by removing the bags of pure
heroin, twenty million pesos' worth of it, from around his waist. His gut pads, and the media hype
surrounding them, had provided the perfect cover.
Felix Sorel moved in very fast company. Sorel, in fact, was fast company, still in his physical prime at
thirty-two. He took good care of his yellow hair, golden tan, blue eyes, and a grin that could scarcely be
viewed without sunglasses. Sorel had every reason to grin a lot; his father had taught him that it was
eminently proper to grow rich and powerful through flooding the yanqui domains with hard drugs—so
long as he did not become a user of his own shit.
A dutiful son, Felix Sorel kept his body finely tuned and free of drugs. His addictions could be guessed
from his medical records. Urethritis from his gonorrhea; gonococcal pharyngitis; herpes simplex II; and
trichomoniasis. The first two of these diseases Sorel got from male friends; the last two from female
friends. In the celebration of self, Sorel was willing to share, and as a world-class soccer player he
scored as often as he liked in sexual games.
Today, Sorel's exercise on the polo pony was chiefly for show in a Latin culture that valued
horsemanship. His private exercises featured loose clothing, mats, and sharp implements; skills he had
learned in Cuban commando training and honed with his own lively intelligence. Ambushed once by
Corsican rivals in the drug trade and once by kidnappers, Sorel had yet to be taken.
Cat-sleek, careful in his habits, Sorel ate well, slept well, and split his time prosperously. He spent ten
percent of his time among celebrities and ninety percent of it among his own picked staff, who shunned
public places.
At the moment he was baring those famous teeth of his, waving to the Brazilian nymph who sunned
herself beside the natural-seeming, artificial sweep of his pool. Even from a satellite camera, the old spa
appeared far gone in romantic shambles. Sorel's excellent comm set was line-of-sight laser, which defied
intercept and was relayed through an automatic translator station near La Mariposa. Sorel's staff was
kept small, composed of men who would rather be dead than imprisoned, and who used nothing more
mind-sapping than mezcal and an occasional joint. Sorel abandoned his smile as he saw the lounge
shutters thrown open. It was a signal that demanded his attention.
"Wait there," he called to the girl in too perfect English. "I shall obtain something to tempt you." He took
the ramshackle steps in a springing lope, removed the neckerchief of bronze silk from his throat, dabbed
perspiration away as the heels of his polished riding boots echoed down the parquetry of an inner
corridor.
He continued past the lounge to a door the girl had always found locked, waited for the voiceprinter to
unlock the carved oak door, strode in. In Spanish, he said with deceptive mildness to the two waiting
men, "I assume this is worth interrupting me."
One of the men was trained to operate the laser comm set; the other to encode and decode messages.
Both had the straight hair and liquid obsidian eyes of Indios, and the look of men in the presence of their
demigod.
The tall man with the coder key around his neck ducked his head in respect. "Such is my belief," he said
formally, and handed Sorel a folded scrap of paper. The other man, thick and silent, sat waiting for
orders. A Yucatecan whose primary language was Maya, he sat as though prepared to wait through a
geologic era.
Sorel glanced at the scrap, let his hand drop in disgust, scanned it again, then glanced toward the ceiling
as if instructions were printed there. For an instant he stood still, the blue eyes staring at nothing. Then he
said to the seated man, "Please go to the kitchen, Kaiyi, and prepare sangarees for me and the woman.
Serve them by the pool. Tell her I shall be with her presently."
Kaiyi—a Maya nickname, for the sturdy fellow swam like a fish—arose without comment and left the
room.
"Give thanks, Cipriano." Sorel growled then. "You will share no more bad blood with Rawson."
"I never thought you could trust him, senor."
"And I never did; except where his own interests were served. Now it seems the trigger-happy fool has
finally caught a fatal case of lead poisoning, if San Antonio Rose is right. He has not misinformed us yet."
"Not that you know of," Cipriano replied impassively.
Sorel studied the mestizo while abrading the scrap of polypaper under his thumb. He peeled its two
layers apart; watched them degrade into loose fibers as he spoke: "You have kept something from me?"
"Only my disquiet, senor. Your San Antonio Rose has too much of the gringo in him."
The ghost of a smile: "Not as much as I, you buffoon. If he has arranged bail for Longo and Slaughter, he
is still dependable."
"Perhaps so that they can lead the yanquis back here?"
"They know better than that. And if they do not, a sniper laser will teach them quickly enough." Now the
smile was a grin: "That would please you, I am sure."
A blink and a smile, where a yanqui would have nodded.
One elegant finger, backed with sorrel hairs, wagged before the mestizo. "You are a deeply prejudiced
man, Cipriano. Were it not for those renegade Texans of mine, it might be you and Kaiyi who would
cross Wild Country with our shipments. And you would never pass for TexMex, my friend. You never
learned to lower your chin when facing armed Anglos."
"Gracias a Dios for that," Cipriano muttered. "Even here in Mexico they cheat at cards. They eye our
women too openly. They need humility."
"They need a cold-steel education, you mean," Sorel furnished with a thumb-flick that mimed a
switchblade. "Perhaps you are right, but now we need them. For one thing, the two yanquis know where
the shipment is hidden, and I cannot afford any more losses to the border patrol.''
His Indio eyes slitted, Cipriano asked, "And how do we know the yanqui patrols did not confiscate your
demon-powder?"
"Because," Sorel said as if to an idiot, "if they had, they would be holding Clyde Longo and Harley
Slaughter without bail. One can learn much merely by understanding how the yanqui system works.
Now then: since Slaughter is a cautious man, we can expect him to stay in contact with our San Antonio
contact. I wish you to encode a reply."
Cipriano was cautious, too; he handed Sorel a small polypaper pad so that the encoded message would
be, letter for letter, Sorel's own. The message was longer than most. Cipriano read it through,
understanding most of it.
It was always possible that a transmission could be monitored. That explained why Sorel did not want
that shipment's location radioed from Texas. The shrewd Slaughter had no doubt cached the stuff
secretly, and well. Cipriano would have bet that Felix Sorel intended to meet Longo and Slaughter
personally somewhere near Junction, Texas. But Cipriano would have lost.
The Indio scanned the message again; shrugged. "Your man, San Antonio Rose: he knows this Cielita
Linda?"
"That is not your worry," Sorel said curtly. "Be at ease, Cipriano; I would not entrust such a crucial
operation to anyone who has less to lose than I do."
"But—a woman," Cipriano said, fingering his encoder key.
Sorel replied first with silent amusement, striding to the door. Then, "If San Antonio Rose is a man, why
not Cielita Linda? I shall send Kaiyi to operate the comm set," he added aloud, stepping through, making
certain the door latched. He hurried to change into swim trunks, only half-amused at Cipriano's
complaint. The trouble was, Cielita Linda was a woman; and while she had much to lose, she also had
powerful connections north of Wild Country. It was her infatuation with Felix Sorel, more than anything
else, that compelled her to take heavy risks. Sorel would have preferred to rule her through fear for, as
he had been taught, in his business fear was by far the most dependable motive.
CHAPTER FIVE
As always after a month's absence from Sandy, Ted Quantrill felt buoyed by a sense of coming home.
He always found changes—the corn stood in rosy golden rows, now, ready for picking, and the
pumpkins would be turning color soon. Sandy's old windmill generator was gone, too, replaced by new
vertical foils with a capstan drive. The new rig made more efficient use of ground winds and did not need
to stand on a high tower, so it was not so conspicuous. Also, a secondhand hovercycle had been added
since his last visit. Otherwise it was the same familiar little spread, he thought, strolling in the dusk with
Sandra Grange.
Time was when Sandy would have crowded near him, even in weather hot as this. Yet her independence
had grown with her body. Sandy was no longer a grubby eleven-year-old, staring worshipfully up at him;
nor an ardent, full-breasted seventeen, anxious to discover whether love and sexuality could coexist in a
world as hard as the one she'd chosen. Now she was within a few inches of Quantrill's height, her arms
tan as his, her hands roughened by farm chores. He knew she had changed to the bodiced dress and
open sandals for him on short notice, but she walked beside him as an equal, the queen of her small
domain.
Pleased at thoughts of her self-sufficiency, Quantrill eased his arm around Sandy's waist, urged her to
face him. "I've thought about you every day," he said, kissing her gently, one hand massaging her
shoulder.
"Have you thought about changing your line of work every day, too?" Her soft South Texas drawl was
like her responding kiss: warm, vibrant, but with a reserve born of longstanding arguments.
"That, too," he said, guiltily because he had done nothing of the sort. He let the massaging hand shift a bit.
"You sure we won't have an hour before Childe gets home? I've missed you. Sandy."
"I know what you've missed," she said, accusing, her full lower lip pursed as though scorning what they
both enjoyed. She eased herself away, put fingers to her lips, blew a piercing four-toned blast that
echoed from a nearby arroyo. "Now I'm sure. She'll be here in five minutes or I'll tan her hide."
His smile was wry, his hands-out gesture full of defeat. "Umm, let's see; those first two notes say, 'Come
in, all clear,' right? But I didn't get the others."
"The third said, 'Ba'al, too,' and the last note stands for your name. That's why she'll bust her buns to get
home, poor darlin'. She doesn't know what a nasty old man you really are."
"Damn" little chance I get to prove it."
"We've been all over that, and I still say the older Childe gets, the more she understands. If you want to
play house with me, Mister Deputy, we do it on neutral territory." Realizing how snappish that sounded,
she took his ear gently, circled her forefinger in it. "I'm surprised you're still so randy after the last time,
Ted."
"Last time?" It was nearly a yelp. "That was August, you blowsy wench! When do I fit into your bloody
schedule again?"
She giggled, raised her face in bogus sweetness, and began to croon: "On the first day of Christmas, my
true love gave to me-e-e…"
"Christmas your ass."
She snapped her fingers. "Couldn't phrase it better myself," and then dissolved in laughter at the look on
his face. "Ted. I have to get the corn in. Then I'll see about letting Childe stay with friends in Rocksprings,
and I'll give you a call. Soon, love."
"That's a promise," he insisted, half in frustration, half-amused.
"No. That's a threat," she replied, raking his stalwart body with her glance, mouth parted. The cool
competence in her eyes had the effect she intended. She laughed again as he wheeled away and swore to
herself that she would not be so cruel again. Not this trip, anyway.
He was muttering, "Jesus Christ, there must be a law against teasers," when Childe rode out of the scrub
cedars, waving happily from her mount. Ted Quantrill wondered if he would ever grow accustomed to
the sight, one that few others had ever seen and those few scarcely believed.
Childe sat at ease, gangly bare legs astride the great boar, Ba'al, one hand entwined in the grizzled neck
ruff while she waved with the other. Quantrill waved back, wondering whether her grip might be painful
to the boar. He had never seen the great insolent-eyed Ba'al hesitate from wariness of pain. The
significance of Childe's method of sitting her mount was not that it hurt, but that it worked. It seemed that
the boar had an Apache's outlook on life. For Ba'al, pain was overrated.
The way Childe communicated with the boar, it was no wonder the kid behaved so much like a white
Indian. On the one hand, Childe had been taught the languages of Wild Country by her companion:
tracking, weather signs, what you could eat, what might eat you—for bear, puma, and wolf had always
lurked in these parts. On the other hand, Childe liked listening to Sandy talk, and Sandy usually had no
one else to talk to. In this way, Childe learned a little about the books Sandy read. Dickens and
McMurtry, Renault and Buck, Gibbon and Gibbons, Anger and Angier.
The truth is that Childe considered her grown sister slightly dotty about words, ‘specially the printed kind.
Why, she and Ba'al got along day in, year out without a jotted note or a printed sign, theirs a world of
genuine sign and not arbitrary symbols. It was a plain puzzlement the way Sandy filled two composition
books a year, writing in a journal that nobody else had ever read.
Childe dismounted with a leap; ran pell-mell toward Quantrill, arms outstretched for one of the few dizzy
delights that Ba'al could not provide. Quantrill braced himself, caught her, whirled Childe in a circle once,
twice; heard the boar cough his concern. Then he let the girl regain her feet and hugged her briefly
without speaking.
"Bring me somethin'?"
"No time, sis—but hold on! I have something for him." Quantrill recalled suddenly. He saw her big eyes
ask the question. "Come and see," he chuckled. "For all I know he might not like it."
The leviathan boar had not moved a hoof, only switching his flywhisk tail now and then, the yellow eyes
missing nothing. Sandy ambled over to her old protector, watched in silence, and scratched Ba'al under
the jaw.
Another girlchild might have squealed in alarm when Quantrill hauled the headless rattler from stowage in
the hovercycle. Childe squealed in delight. "Couldn't find a big one?"
"Gimme a break," he joked, holding the massive varmint up for display to show that it was longer than the
girl.
She whistled, a quick two-note warble, and Quantrill turned to see Ba'al advance in a bouncing trot, the
murderous hooves spurting dust, Then, as he had learned through harrowing experience, Quantrill bent
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