Wild Country (4 page)

"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 his knees and waited. Ba'al took offense whenever Quantrill stood erect nearby, for then the man's eyes were a handsbreadth higher than the boar's. With bent knees. Quantrill would eye the boar on even terms.

Ba'al planted his forelegs like a cutting horse as he noted the offering; then advanced again, snuffling. Quantrill held the snake out in both hands, nodding, Childe moving to Ba'al's side with odd snortings and head motions. Then—perhaps it was only his imagination—Quantrill could have sworn the great jaws opened in a smile. Ba'al moved his snout across the snake, his enormous tusks long as a man's forearm, curving up and back. Now nearing middle age, Ba'al had to lower his snout even farther to impale an enemy. A product of Texas Aggie geneticists, Ba'al was beyond prediction. It was Sandy's hope that he would live until both tusks formed complete circles, which might take another twenty years.

Quantrill reached out, scratched the boar's bristly jowl, moved back with empty hands. Ba'al shifted the tidbit in his jaws, snuffled in curiosity, then stalked slowly to the hovercycle.

No one interfered as the sensitive snout inquired around the rear cowl and its tarp. The bodybag was, after all, sealed. After a moment the boar backed away, tail erect, and uttered a series of deep grunts before he turned and trotted from sight into the deepening shadows of range scrub.

"Huh; well, I guess it's okay," Childe said, and walked back to the soddy with Quantrill.

As always, he took potluck. Sandy hauled a block of venison chili from her old Peltier freezer and let Childe make the biscuits. Their guest noted, but did not mention, the new microwave cooker. If Sandy wanted to discuss her new gadgetry, she would.

Later, sharing strong coffee and the rich musk of buttermilk pecan pralines, Childe sighed as she heard a rusty old argument grind into motion between her elders. Sandy began it with, "I hear they're paying top dollar for construction work."

"In SanTone Ringcity, yes," Quantrill said. Of the American urban centers that had felt nuclear fury, perhaps half of them had been rebuilt. Some, like San Antonio, had been firestormed to their beltline freeways. San Antonio had been unlucky enough to catch some intercepted nukes, bombs that had been scattered over ground zero without detonating. The center of San Antonio would not be fully safe for human life until that contamination was all scraped away. It was quicker to rebuild this nexus of Texas commerce as SanTone Ringcity, looking outward, away from the inner ruins.

Quantrill knew SanTone well. "No half-built boomtown is a proper place to raise a kid," he said, cutting his eyes toward Childe. "And you'd have to kiss that boar goodbye."

"There's lots of work nearer, at Wild Country Safari," Sandy replied, and whacked her cup down with unnecessary force. "Dammit, Ted, you
have
to work your way into something better than deputy work; you've just
got
to!" She saw the film of stubborn resolve cross his face; tried to attack through it. "Don't kid me about working your way up to Marshal Teague's office; that's a political job, and you can't run with that crowd."

"Don't want to," he grumped. "I prefer the company of ol' Jess Marrow, keeping track of exotic game on Safari lands. It's not as if I were a full-time deputy."

"And someday those freak reflexes of yours will fail you; everybody slows down eventually. And then, instead of having two part-time jobs, you'll be full-time dead. You think I intend to wait around until the day some
cimarron
buries you?"

Long silence. Then, "Who asked you to wait?"

"You did, a month ago," Childe piped angrily.

Frowning at the girl, a half smile giving the lie to it, Quantrill winked. "You hear too much, sis."

"I hear Sandy cry at night. She wouldn't if you stayed here more."

He nodded slowly. "Sis, these are hard times. I wish the exotic game work would pay a man enough to marry and settle, but it won't. I make more money as a deputy in a week than I do in a month with Jess Marrow. Do you know what a federal deputy marshal does?"

"Manhunter." It was a flat accusation from a nine-year-old, and it hurt. Even if Childe attached very few demerits to the idea.

Grudging it: "Sometimes, yes. Before you were born, this wasn't Wild Country—not
this
wild, anyhow. A lot of Americans suffer today because of smuggled drugs, poorly refined fuel, and diseased animals coming across the border. Somebody has to stop it."

He saw only polite interest in the girl's gaze. To her, these problems seemed very far away. He rarely opened old wounds, but this was a special case. "I had a friend named Kent Ethridge once. One of the finest gymnasts this country ever had." He stopped, turned to Sandy. "Can she handle this?"

"I think so," Sandy replied.

Quantrill faced the memory, gnawing his lip as he proceeded. "Kent Ethridge and I were—manhunters for a bad government. We hated it. Ethridge began to spend his time off with drugs, stuff that made him forget what he was. The stuff is terribly expensive; that's bad enough. But it did terrible things to his mind and his body, too." He saw Childe nod solemnly, considered explaining the terror of knowing that your mastoid implant could be detonated by pitiless masters; decided against it. "Ethridge was a hero in the rebellion, and became an agent for our new government."

"This gov'ment? The good one?"

"Good as we deserve, as usual. We thought Ethridge had cleaned himself up, didn't use drugs anymore; but maybe you never get entirely cured. Anyway, he stopped a shipment of heavy sh—drugs, and he didn't turn it all in." A silence. "I guess he decided then there was no way he could get straight. So he took the best way out that he knew."

"I don't get it."

"He took a massive overdose," Quantrill said softly. "When they found him in his apartment, he'd been dead for a week."

Childe knew about
that
. "Yuck." she said, wrinkling her nose.

"I had to identify him. and yuck is right. I know it was partly his own fault, but Ethridge didn't start the drug smuggling. He just got caught in it. It turns good men into bad ones."

"And you hunt those bad men?"

"Sometimes. Now then: Mexico could help stop it, but too many bad men pay
mordidas
, bribes, to their government."

A moment's confusion. "Is a bribe more like a peso or a dollar?"

"More like a million dollars in good money."

"That's not good money," Childe said, going directly to the heart of the matter.

"Money is just money to most people, hon," Sandy put in. "I know that Ted's job is important. But it is also very, very dangerous, and he has done it long enough. He doesn't think so. and that." she said gently, placing a hand on Quantrill's while she spoke to her sister, "is why we argue."

"Our money's good," said Childe. "and Ba'al won't mind if you come live here." Then, through her shyness: "Me neither."

"I know that, sis," he sighed. "But this little spread of yours won't pay for new dresses or fencewire. Maybe when I've saved some money—"

"We're doing all right," Sandy said, cautious lest she say too much.

"So I noticed. Beats me how you do it," he said.

"What if I won a pile at roulette over in Faro—or something?"

"I'd want to hear all about it." he grinned. Sandy had visited the gambling hells of Faro, the synthetic Old West sin city of Wild Country Safari, exactly once, and she'd gone with a pass.

Now Sandy improvised on dangerous ground. "Maybe I wouldn't tell you. You don't know everything; maybe I do things you don't know about. Maybe you just have to take me as I am."

"That was what I had in mind," he said slyly.

Childe reached for another praline, got the lightest of slaps over her spindly wrist from Sandy. She pulled back then, bored with her immediate prospects, and innocently changed the subject. "Can I see the man?"

Too late, Quantrill realized her drift. He and Sandy, simultaneously: "What man?"

"The man in your cycle," Childe said.

"You've kept someone hiding out there?" Sandy wasn't more than half-horrified. Yet.

"Not hiding," said Childe. "Dead." Quantrill was not surprised that Ba'al's educated nose could detect the scent of a dead man. He was astonished that the boar could have communicated the fact to Childe with only a few passing grunts.

Quantrill: "Oh, shit."

Childe: "Not's'posed to say shit."

Sandy: "Ted Quantrill, is that true? Did you actually bring a—a corpse here?" With a more hopeful suspicion, she continued, "Was it some poor wetback dead of exposure? Snakebite?" But her mood darkened as she saw he was not going to offer some good Samaritan excuse.

He pushed back from the table; took a final sip of coffee before replying, staring at Sandy. "It was a man named Mike Rawson, a hired gun protecting a shipment of heroin—for a man he called Sorrel. You remember Espinel? Friend of your old hotsy, Lufo; my friend, too. Well, Espinel and some others were deputized up near Junction to stop Sorrel's people for a contraband search. Now Espinel is cold in the Junction morgue, thanks to that brush-poppin' sonofabitch Rawson. He tried to tomhorn me, bushwhack me, south of here. No, I wasn't going to tell you about it. I knew you'd get all spooked."

"I am not spooked. I am repelled, I am disgusted, I am—

"Mad as hell," Childe supplied with cheer.

"And I"—Quantrill sighed—"am on my way. Thanks a lot for everything, sis," he said to the girl, and remembered to flourish his hat to Sandy at the door. "Mighty good chili." he said, and then, on his way out, "and by-God first-rate entertainment."

The coffee cup missed him because he was already in darkness, navigating by memory to the hovercycle. Much of Sandy's vitriol also missed him because he was busy muttering to himself. He caught her phrases, "no better'n a goddamn saddle tramp, a hired gunsel" and "might've brought me flowers, but no, he brings me a dead
cimarron
instead."

The dial at his wrist told him it was half-past nine, and the pounding anger in his head told him he wouldn't be able, to sleep anyway. A cold moon showed him the way to the potholed county road and, without lights, he found his way to the Junction highway. He was still vulnerable to anyone with a nightscope, and this was still the raw edge of Wild Country, so he hunkered down and flipped the bullet-resistant polyglass side panels up. He knew he could cadge a free night's lodging at the Junction jail, if he could avoid a drygulching en route.

First, Sandy Grange located the plastic cup she had hurled into the night. Then she shooed Childe into bed, arranging the woven comforter with its plaited strips of rabbit fur so that it would be close at hand. Next she tidied up, imagined that Childe's snores were genuine, and sat down at the table with her lockbox.

The contents of that box would not have gladdened the heart of a petty thief, unless he knew what he was looking at. A ruled composition tablet of polypaper and ballpoint pens; a curled Polaroid photo, a candid shot of Ted Quantrill in the early days of the war while he still carried a certain innocence in those green eyes; the tarnished engagement ring with its tawdry rutile gem which Lufo Albeniz had once given her (she had never worn it); and finally a stainless-steel amulet of peculiar workmanship. Its central bezel was empty because Sandy had pried the great jewel from it.

Sandy did not know that this unique off-planet jewel, dubbed the Ember of Venus, now adorned the throat of the mistress of a top official of Pemex Oil. She only knew that she had entrusted the thing to her ex-lover, Lufo, hoping that he might sell it for a reasonable fraction of its true value. This, Lufo had done.

Sandy had received sixty thousand pesos, roughly six thousand dollars at the current exchange rate, from Lufo. Lufo had held back a "small" commission. Sandy could not know that commission amounted to four hundred and forty thousand pesos for himself—and for his various wives in Texas and Mexico. So much for trust.

If Sandy entertained doubts about Lufo's honesty, she knew better than to voice them to Ted Quantrill. Once Ted realized that the fortunes of war and Wild Country had delivered the legendary Ember into Sandy's hands, he would know she also owned the steel bezel with its curious black diamond studs, its tiny yield chamber, and the alphanumeric readout on the back. If the jewel was worth half a million pesos, that handmade amulet was worth immensely more. Crafted in desperation by an imprisoned scientist, it was the world's only working miniature of a matter synthesizer.

Rumors of its existence had nearly died through the years. It no longer functioned because the computer terminal to which it had been linked was now fused into slag, a casualty of the rebellion in 2002. Quantrill had once argued that if the tiny thing really existed, it could topple governments; would change the face of economies across the globe and on New Israel's orbiting colonies. Sandy had known, even then, that she could set those changes in motion.

For better or worse, she had chosen to hide the thing away. Quantrill, she knew, would have delivered it to the only politician he trusted, Attorney General James Street. Knowing this, she would not share her secret until certain it was the right thing to do. In her youth and optimism, she felt that one day she would be certain, one way or the other. In the meantime, she felt that life was not bad, merely hard. If Ted Quantrill ever learned that she had kept this stunning technical toy a secret, her life might contain a Quantrill-sized void. Therefore, Sandy Grange spent half of her sixty thousand pesos on creature comforts and hoped she could invest the rest wisely.

Of course, once a technical breakthrough is achieved it cannot be hidden away forever. It had never occurred to Sandy that at least two governments were well on the way to rediscovering the secrets of the original Chinese matter synthesizer. Even if Sandy was more cautious than Pandora, others clamored to open the box.