Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels (13 page)

Somewhere down there Jak lurked unseen, as was his wont, ready to move in and do his work when the time came. Ricky wasn’t even tempted to worry about him. His part was easy. If you were Jak Lauren.

Krysty, Mildred and Doc were stationed under cover nearby, where they could provide fire support to their comrades if anything went wrong. Krysty had Ryan’s Scout longblaster; Doc had J.B.’s Uzi. But if that support was needed, the trio would also have to fight off a passel of pissed-off Dragons spilling out of nearby buildings looking to deal some swift, hard justice to any intruders. Having seen a lot of armed gang members during the course of their surveillance, Ricky wasn’t too optimistic about that.

Not to mention the fact that Ricky’s own position wasn’t all that secure. The town house was a whole story lower than the gang leader’s mansion. He didn’t worry much about the roof guards spotting him. He could blend in to the piles of debris up here, enough to escape casual detection. The two guards on top of the building had spared scarcely a glance his way in the hours since he’d crept into position, which he’d done sixty minutes after the sun had gone down. They seemed concerned exclusively with watching the streets and the fields nearby.

His problems would start, and get triple bad triple fast, if they did spot him. They had a clear line of fire at him, and they could lie behind the low rampart that ran around the whole part, or even stand or kneel behind the higher ones at the nearest corner.

There was nothing he could do about it. Ricky focused on peering at the lit window on the top floor instead.

* * *

U
P UNTIL HALF
an hour ago Ryan had shared the rooftop with him, watching the top-floor rooms and occasionally using his big Navy longeyes. Their target was the Dragon leader, who called himself Tommy Ten-Inch. When Ricky asked what that meant, the adults just stared at him until he blushed in comprehension. Tommy Ten-Inch was known to be a drunkard with a bad temper, which Ricky thought all gang leaders probably were, so he reckoned Tommy had to be really good at both.

Then lanterns had been lit inside the room on the nearest corner. Ryan had grunted and grabbed up the longeyes and peered intently at his target.

“Looks like the man we’re here for,” he said. “But he’s got somebody with him.”

Ricky tried not to squirm too visibly. He
really
wanted to ask if he could see, too. But he was too scared to do that. Ryan could be gruff when he was focused this intently. And especially when he was bothered by requests or questions he deemed wastes of his time.

“Huh,” Ryan said softly. “Couple of girls with him. Don’t look happy about it.”

Ricky was naive. He knew that. But he wasn’t that naive. He knew what a drunk, cranky gang leader most likely had in mind taking a couple girls up to his room late at night, especially if they weren’t exactly volunteers. He felt bad about the girls’ plight. But sheer adolescent hormones overpowered both that and his fear of annoying Ryan.

“Let me see,” he said.
“Please.”

Ryan turned his face toward Ricky. He was frowning, but even as Ricky’s heart skipped a bit he realized that Ryan’s expression didn’t look angry. The man was close enough he could tell that just by the starlight. But he had no idea out what the look might mean instead.

“Here,” Ryan had said, thrusting the longeyes toward him. “I don’t think you’re going to like what you see.”

Ricky held the longeyes firmly. He didn’t want to think how Ryan would react if he dropped the device off the roof.

He pressed them to his eye. The yellow patch of the window swung blurrily in them, and he adjusted the focus.

“Wait,” he said instantly. “They’re, like,
twelve.
”

“It’s how I figured it, yeah.”

Ricky handed the longeyes back.

“You’d better hang on to them. You might need to take a peek.”

Then Ryan left.

* * *

R
ICKY HAD TO
force himself to breathe as he watched through the longeyes as Ryan reached the narrow ledge that ran around the base of the top floor. The stone protrusions weren’t enough to stand on, but the thick ivy growing up the wall gave sufficient handholds and support for both men. And the ledge did give a little extra purchase beneath the toes of Ryan’s boots.

He waited, out of sight of the window, while J.B. came up on the far side.

Both men froze.

For a moment, Ricky frowned through the binoculars, not comprehending. Then he thought, oh, shit.

He raised his head to look over the longeyes. The two roof guards had come to a stop directly over where Ryan and J.B. clung to the wall not six feet below them. One of them leaned out slightly.

Ricky set down the device as carefully as he could while being damn quick about it, caught up his DeLisle and propped in on the wall, aiming at the men. In this light it was a tricky shot, even though it was only a fifty-yarder or so. He just had to not miss....

The guard straightened. He turned back to his partner. The two walked on around the roof.

Ricky relaxed. He felt as limp as a wrung-out bar rag.

Across the weed-grown intersection Ryan and J.B. entered the bedroom.

* * *

A
S QUIET AS
he and J.B. were, the first thing Ryan saw when he stuck his head above the level of the sill was two sets of huge, frightened eyes staring at him.

The girls, both still dressed, were lying on a bed that appeared to be a stack of ancient mattresses. In a well-stained jumble of blankets between them, a figure with a pair of long, pale, skinny legs sticking out from under a blood-colored silk robe lay on its belly snoring, with its head turned to one side. Ryan guessed the coldheart boss had passed out as soon as he’d laid down on the bed.

Hard man though he was, Ryan was glad of the fact.

He held his finger to his lips. The two girls nodded.

He looked back down at J.B., who was crouched with his feet sideways, one before the other, on the skinny ledge. He nodded.

They moved.

* * *

T
OMMY
T
EN-
I
NCH
, undisputed warlord of the Dragon Clan, was roused from his righteous slumber by a hard prod in the ribs.

As he came muzzily awake, he realized he hadn’t yet poked his little bed warmers tonight. That pissed him off even more than the fact that they had the nerve to wake him up.

“Cassie, Allisun, you little bitches,” he snarled as he rolled over on his back. “I’m gonna give it to you both extra hard tonight.”

“I love it when you talk to me like that,” a deep voice said.

A deep, unmistakably male voice that, to the best of his admittedly impaired recollection, Tommy Ten-Inch had never heard before in his life.

His eyes were open, but it took them a moment to focus.

Then it hit him like a bucket of cold water. The two faces looking down at him from close range were not young and—relatively—unspoiled. Nor was one black and one pale. They were older, tanned but white, beat hard by wind and weather. And...only had three eyes between them. One actually wore an eye patch.

Both, though, sported big grins.

“Wakey-wakey,” said the one in the hat.

As sloshed as he was, Tommy Ten-Inch wasn’t soft. You didn’t get, much less hold on to, top spot in a snarling, vicious pack like the Dragons by being anything less than cement hard, brutal and triple good at it. He inched his right hand up toward the blaster he’d hidden under the cushion beneath his head. His bedmates knew better than to try to get at it, no matter how dead asleep he seemed. He’d feel it—and hurt them. And they both had families among the subject farm workers to think about.

Something gray and metallic slammed down like a wall right next to his head, cutting off his view of Cassie’s wide-eyed face. Low amber lamplight glittered, revealing it to be a wide, hefty knife blade. Its tip was sunk deep in the purple satin cover. Down floated like moats in the air.

The two girls gasped.

“All right, girls,” the man with the eye patch said. He was also the one on the other end of the huge knife. “You can move now.”

The frozen gang lord felt his mattress-heap bed bounce as the two bodies hopped off it.

Tommy Ten-Inch felt something hard and cold dig into his left cheek. He recognized the feel of a blaster muzzle, a double-wide one. Shotgun. He rolled his eyes left to look up its length at the man who held it. He was the one in the hat. His eyes were invisible beneath the dull orange flame-reflecting disks of his eyeglasses.

The shotgun dug into his cheek right below the bone, urging him to turn his face back upright. He didn’t. The blaster was withdrawn.

“You going to behave?” its holder asked.

He had a mild voice and sounded like a wimp. Tommy started gathering tension, slowly, to spring. He’d found the weak link. Time to snap it.

The scattergun barrel stabbed down into his groin. He gasped as he felt the cold kiss of the ring of steel on his cock and balls right through the thin fabric of his robe. He groaned as it dug in.

“If you don’t behave,” the little man said, still in that same calm, conversational voice, “we’re not going to chill you—right away.”

* * *

R
YAN FINISHED TYING
their captive’s wrists behind him, then straightened. He looked down at their captive where he lay on his belly in the rumpled nest of his bed. It stank of sweat and grease and booze.

J.B. had tied a gag like a bandage behind Tommy Ten-Inch’s head of long black greasy hair. DPD Captain Morgan, who was overseeing this grab, had provided them with special equipment, all nice and neatly prepared.

The Armorer finished tying the man’s bare ankles together. They were pale beneath a coating of grime. J.B. stood up and rubbed his hands together as if to clean off some of the filth.

“Here’s how it goes down, coldheart,” Ryan said to their prostrate captive. “The DPD is going to be mighty generous when we bring your sorry ass back to DPD headquarters. We get a bonus if you haven’t sprung any major leaks.”

With the tip of his panga Ryan reached down to jab the man’s buttocks, fortunately covered by the red silk robe—which was badly embroidered in gold with dragons and what Ryan knew to be Chinese writing.

“But no reward means a spent shell case if we’re too dead to spend it. So if we
do
attract any attention, I’ll slash your belly open and leave you with your guts spilling on the street. Nod if you understand. Do anything else and I’ll just cut the damn thing off and carry it back to Hizzoner in this handy black bag he gave us.”

“He means your head,” J.B. added helpfully. He stood to one side, his shotgun in the crook of his arm pointed toward the door. He was mostly keeping an eye on the two girls, shivering by the window in thin soiled shifts that barely covered their skinny bodies. “Mebbe.”

Tommy Ten-Inch’s neck bones cracked with the speed and forcefulness of his assent.

“Smart choice.”

Ryan rolled him onto his back, grabbed him by the hair and forcibly sat him up. J.B. stepped forward and briskly and with no wasted motion pulled the black cloth bag down over Tommy’s head.

“Neat,” he remarked as he pulled the bag closed around the captive’s neck. They were not carrying his nasty ass back to DPD HQ.

J.B. looked at Ryan and adjusted his glasses.

“Right size, all set up with a drawstring and everything. Seems like they’ve done this sort of thing before.”

Ryan shrugged. “They’re sec men,” he said, as if that explained everything.

And it did.

He went to one of the two coils of strong, light nylon rope they’d carried looped over their shoulders and picked it up. He looked at the gang boss’s erstwhile bedmates.

“You girls up for a little climb?”

Chapter Thirteen

Ricky went rigid when he saw the flame flick alive in the window. Small and brief though the predark lighter flame was, it was distinct even against the soft yellow glow of the oil lamp inside the boss’s bedroom.

It meant the first phase of the op was a success. And now the scary part began.

After J.B. and Ryan had entered the bedroom, Ricky had placed his DeLisle beside him. If he left the weapon sticking out over the edge of the roof there was a chance one of the coldhearts would notice it. And he was also ever fearful that he might accidently drop it to the cracked, frost-covered sidewalk three stories below. He knew he had a regrettable tendency to be clumsy when he wasn’t immediately and actively engaged in some task. Like fixing a broken blaster.

Or keeping himself and his friends alive.

His motions were precise, even assured, as he took up the carbine. He didn’t hurry, even though the pair of coldhearts on foot patrol had already appeared at the far end of the front of the old mansion.

Haste missed. He couldn’t afford to. Especially not now.

Ricky slid the thick barrel with its enclosing sound-suppresser shroud over the low parapet and snugged the butt to his shoulder. The illumination from the big lanterns flanking the doors cast a bright enough light for him to sight properly by. He hoped.

The sentries strolled around the near corner of the stone building. They seemed unsuspecting. Actually casual. And why wouldn’t they be? Who’d dare challenge the might of the Dragons here in the heart of their domain? They had sentries out at the borders, watching for an attack in force. And the beaten-down peasants who grew their food knew better than to lift a hand against their overlords.

Ricky lined up on them. He led them slightly, by just the right amount for range and their walking speed. He knew the drill. He saw the sights fine—with almost unnatural clarity now. His early hours of fearful anticipation were gone, leaving only a sense of complete calm.

He knew that was what confidence felt like.

The guards passed beneath the lit top window, which currently showed nothing at all unusual to the outer world. From the lower floors came the sound of shattering glass. It jabbed Ricky like an ice-cold bayonet to his well-clenched sphincter. A roar of outrage was followed by general uproarious laughter.