Wild Country (26 page)

Leakey's little clinic had seen many a gunshot wound. "I'm sorry," said the sad-faced little doctor, removing old-fashioned glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. "Maybe if I'd got to him a little earlier…" He waved a hand and let it fall. "From the angle I'd say the bullet nicked his heart. I'll know more, ah, later. Your friend simply bled to death internally, Mr. Coulter. I'll have to have a statement, of course."

The young man with the blood-caked shirt sighed. While still in his teens, Quantrill had learned the trick of divorcing himself from the dead, no matter how dear. The more you mourned, the less you were able to avenge. "You still go by the book out here, huh?"

The little doctor elevated his chin. "This country won't be wild forever," he said stolidly. He could not have known that he was endorsing Quantrill's goals.

Quantrill stared over the man's green-smocked shoulder at the body of Cameron Concannon, naked to the waist and grayish against cold, impersonal sheets. The wound had bled so little outside that Quantrill had maintained an irrational hope. "Right. But right now I need a VHP set." He saw what he took for a negative look as the doctor opened his mouth. "It may be life or death."

The doctor shrugged and led him to the front desk, where a grandmotherly woman sat dozing. Moments later, Quantrill had Mulvihill Garner's call code from the Del Rio exchange.

The old rancher did not answer for so long that Quantrill was already imagining him dead. When he did answer, Quantrill identified himself as Sam Coulter and said, straight off, that he bore the worst kind of news.

"Seems to be your specialty." Mul Garner yawned. "Put Cam on."

"I can't," Quantrill replied, and told him why. He ended the account with, "You may need some help there, Mr. Garner. Are you speaking freely?"

"Nobody in the house but me. And don't worry about me. I'll take care of my own. Always have."

"Concannon told me to say"—he paused, glancing at the physician—"that the man I fought has a big pile of hard money stashed away. He implied it was from illegal dealings." Quantrill repeated the location as the foreman had gasped it out to him. "I don't know if that means anything to you."

"Yes, but mostly it means it's dirty money, so it's not Jerome's and it's not mine. It's nobody's." Mul Garner's voice in the earpiece was old now. "I've lost my best friend, and I guess I've lost my son. You have anything else to keep me awake with?"

Quantrill denied it. He was in the act of apologizing when Mul Garner killed the connection.

He was turning away from the radiophone when he made a mental connection and wheeled back, punching a code he knew by heart, feeling icy tentacles constrict around his chest. He relaxed when Sandy Grange answered.

He told her there had been a shooting scrape without giving details. "No, I'm fine… well, as good as you could expect," he amended, seeing the doctor's eyebrows rise. There was no telling what the physician might make of the conversation, and he took no chances. "I had a minor accident or two while looking for our livestock." Pause. "I'm really okay, honey, will you shut the hell up and listen? Okay, you recall that neighbor of yours who used to try shaking me up at Saturday dances. Yeah, him; and his friends, too. Somebody told me today to watch my back. I figure you two may be the only unprotected back I have, so stay healthy 'til I get there."

A longer pause, and the doctor saw the young man's face split in a grin. He would never have guessed that young man had just been told that a wandering Russian boar had come ambling home. Ba'al had a deep cut in his underlip, but blue ointment was Sandy's sovereign remedy. He was near the soddy, so if she needed any help, she could whistle it up in seconds. Childe, she said, reported that Ba'al actually looked forward to his next encounter with the English lieutenant.

Quantrill: "The hell of it is, so does Wardrop." Pause, then a lopsided smile. "What
can I
do? If they're gonna fight like this, why don't they just get married?"

Her reply was unprintable. Quantrill put down the headset still smiling guiltily, then followed the physician to give Sam Coulter's version of the night's violence. At least half of his statement was true.

The man known to a few as San Antonio Rose took the call on a Wednesday night during late October in his SanTone Ringcity apartment. The caller used a voder with a preset message; such a cheap voder that it did not even place graceful inflections in common phrases.

Even so, the message was too direct to misunderstand. He might care to visit a certain dubok—a word the voder botched badly—one of several drops his leader had established for business connections. There he would retrieve a sample of goods that might be of interest to someone called Caballo the Horse. In due course, the caller would quote a price. End of message.

He pondered the mystery of a caller who knew his telephone code, yet refused to identify himself. It could mean the Department of Justice had penetrated Sorel's channels—but if so, they would already have the apartment staked, and his own channels inside the law would have alerted him. No, the caller was almost surely one of Sorel's regular contacts, because he was obviously familiar with those ringcity duboks.

That particular dubok was in a part of the latino district so conspicuously dangerous at night that only members of a local
raza
bunch dared walk the shadowed streets. And they dared it only because it was they who made it dangerous. San Antonio Rose decided that the sample, presumably of drugs, could wait until morning. He had not achieved his status in this business by taking insane chances with teenaged muggers.

The caller had chosen that dubok for precisely that reason: San Antonio Rose would almost certainly visit the drop in daylight.

Next morning, after a sidewalk breakfast of
huevos con chorizo
and a bottle of Negro Modelo beer in the barrio, San Antonio Rose paid a visit to a tiny, parklike, street-corner cemetery; knelt with hat in hand at a flat headstone boasting polyethelyne tulips in a brass vase. He casually rearranged the plastic blooms, then palmed a vial no larger than a thimble and leaned back as though satisfied with his decorating talent. His guess—that the vial contained some illegal drug to be analyzed for purity—was perfectly correct. He did not guess that the cocaine sample was merely bait, sacrificed so that he would not wonder why he had been lured into the open on a fruitless errand. The man remained there for a few moments and then, satisfied that he was not to be challenged, walked away.

The challenge, when it came, was the commonest type to be met there in daylight. The boy who materialized at his side had done so with no more noise than a mouse, on bare feet with soles tough as horn. "Watch your car, shine your shoes, find a virgin, only a dollar," he chanted in locally accented English.

The man shook his head, irked because the little
cabrdn
had nearly made him jump.

The boy had not kept his belly off his backbone by being shy. "Ever'body needs something, mister." He danced ahead of the man, now skipping backward to match the long strides, and waved his hands for attention. "What you doin' here, anyway? You lost? You look like an Anglo to me."

San Antonio Rose stopped, reached out casually with one hand, then swiftly with the other, grabbing the lad by the collar of a jacket much too large for him—but perhaps the right size to hide a loaf of bread. The man rattled off, in local Spanish dialect, an ugly suspicion concerning a relationship between the boy's mother and a small hairless dog. Then in English he added, "I see a cornshuck in your pocket, so you already stole your tamales for lunch. You love Anglos so much, go find one." He turned the boy around with ease, released him, moved as if to whack his rump.

Of course he swept thin air, as he had expected. Nimble as a mountain goat, the boy darted away and was instantly swallowed between the small, close-packed houses of the barrio. San Antonio Rose smiled to himself and walked on to Fredricksburg Road, where he caught a bus, once more anonymous.

But not destined to remain anonymous for much longer. The boy hotfooted it over fences and between chickencoops to arrive back at a street corner a block from the tiny cemetery. The slender fellow with the soft voice and the scarred face was there, as promised, with a crisp fifty-dollar bill, also as promised. The boy gravely withdrew the little tape recorder from the depths of a jacket pocket; exchanged it for the reward.

They spoke in Spanish. The boy: "It was hard work to make him talk with me. Dangerous. Worth more money."

The adult: "I watched. You were well paid." Then the little recorder went into a tattered shopping bag, next to the camera with the excellent four-hundred-millimeter lens.

The boy had seen the results of knife fights before; surmised that this fellow with the soft voice, badly cut hair, and uncallused hands had met with a broken bottle, and recently. Noting the boy's interest, the fellow turned away, hitched the shopping bag up under one arm, and strode off. The boy thrust the money out of sight and watched his benefactor for a block, wondering what was odd about that stride. Probably a homosexual, thought the boy, and dematerialized into the alleyways. He would break that bill and give only twenty to his mother. She would, in any case, never believe he had earned fifty dollars from a swishing
maricon
merely by provoking a stranger to curse him.

You could get many, many things in SanTone Ringcity with cash. With cash and close connections of long standing in the legal system, you could get almost literally anything. With several good telephoto close-ups of a man standing on a sidewalk in broad daylight, and a voiceprint of that man in two languages, you had a fair chance of discovering much about him. Especially if he had any criminal record since the war.

The owner of the recorder had everything it took to learn the real identity of San Antonio Rose. Including the burning will to trace his connections, using any means whatever. Now, if San Antonio Rose was known in any capacity by the legal system, he would be revealed by modestly illegal record checks. And from there, Marianne Placidas knew she was not far from locating Felix Sorel.

Sandy's journal, Wed. 25 Oct. '06

Ted looked much better this trip. At least that awful scab is disappearing from his forehead. He was sore as a boil over his tongue-lashing from Mr. Marrow but said he was able to pay for the cycle he lost. Refused to borrow from me. Borrowing from Marrow, or did he really quit that deputy job? I refuse to think he would divert money from that amulet that is owed to me.

Jerome G. paid me a visit today, with 3 of his bravos for company, & I decided not to whistle for help. He pretended to take his welcome for granted, full of false cheer and chickenshit, but I noticed the contents of his armpit holster as he nursed my coffee. Asked me slyly about Ted, and, giving him my best dose of baby blues, I lied and enjoyed it. As if I knew nothing of their enmity I said we had agreed to disagree, & that T. had intended to see about a job in Austin, where they need heavy equipment operators to help clear old UT campus. Hope Jer chases my wild goose to Austin: The big buffoon is now a wanted man in some quarters. But not by me! Rather than send him to T. at WCS I would stir rat poison in his coffee. I forbore asking why he no longer grins so much, because I could see the gap where 2 teeth used to be.

After Jer left, I called Lufo. No one else to turn to, if T. is correct about Jer having protection inside the marshal's office. Of course Lufo asked why I didn't call T
. I
said he's not a hired gun anymore & I didn't want him fetching up against those men anyway. Should I try Marshal Teague in SanTone
?

Lufo quickly shooed me away from that. Said he could leak the news without involving me. Made me repeat entire farce with Jer. Told me Jer would be crazy to show up in Austin, but he would pass the word without involving me.

God blast me, I played the weak female for Lufo but had no other weapon. Begged him to swear he would keep me & T. out of it. Only when he called me "chica" was I satisfied. Poor Lufo, I love & despise him so…

Lieutenant Alec Wardrop helped fit the armored blankets to his mount, cursing the weight of each piece, admiring the work of Jess Marrow's saddlemaker. The mare accepted her synthetic hide with the patience of a saint.

Marrow pointed to the great shoulder pads that hung across a wooden railing in the tack shed. "Ted. see if you and Wardrop can adjust the buckles to fit that to the mare's breastplate."

Quantrill hefted the kapton blanket with the hard nylon plates sewn between its layers. "My God, Jess, have you weighed all this stuff?"

"About sixty kilos. Should be no problem for a draft horse. Easy, Rose," said Marrow, patting the mare as she swung her head around. Rose was a deep roan in color, weighing nearly a metric ton and standing fully eighteen hands at the withers. She was a beautiful creature with the Roman nose of a Clydesdale and the smooth, untufted fetlocks of a Percheron. A trained eye could readily identify her bloodlines as those of the "great horse" first bred in northern Europe as a draft animal. Wardrop had bought her from a circus wintering near Galveston, depending on her calm and familiarity with exotic animals for the job he had in mind. Wardrop knew the history of the "great horse"; it had carried crusaders with massive armor into battle centuries before. This one. Rose, might do it again. She had proven herself very nimble and willing when harrying smaller boars during the past few days. Wardrop felt that, this time, he had the right mount.

He also had paid for different equipment. His hardware now included a night-vision helmet, a longer and thicker assegai spear, and a saddle-mounted socket pivot for it. His saddlebags were the size of mule packs, stocked for a week's travel in Wild Country. That polymer armor, however, was the result of a blistering argument with Jess Marrow. Old Marrow would stable the mare with pleasure, sweet-tempered rarity that she was, but remained aghast at Wardrop's use of her. She was Wardrop's property, so he couldn't forbid the man to hunt boar from her back—a broad platform that seemed the size and stability of a tennis court. He could refuse to equip her for armor, though; and he did, until Wardrop took her out to flush smaller boars.