Smug in his assurance that God would not let him err, Blanton Young stared down at Mills. "Consider this a trial, Mills. There is only one indispensable man in Zion, and you are not that man. Now get out of my sight. I want to see that animated holo of yours in three days."
Mills knew better than to argue about deadlines. He was as powerless in Young's presence as that big brunette hotsy and he made his exit a quick one. At least he still had some freedom of movement, and a fraction of his once-stupendous fortune converted to gemstones. He would simply have to abandon the rest.
CHAPTER 63
Just as travelers in the old West moved from waterhole to waterhole, travel in Wild Country depended on precious liquids. If you were on a horse you still watched for windmills and learned which rivers were running: Rio Frio, Llano, Pecos. If you rode a fast hovercycle you needed diesel fuel, and rebel fuel dumps were hidden near places like Hondo, Del Rio, Alpine. With their pannier tanks, Lufo confided, they could make the round-trip from Jim Street's ranch to Rocksprings and back. Unless of course they got jumped by brush poppers, outlaws whose only allegiance was to booty — and in that case he and Quantrill were ordered to disengage. Translation: run like hell. Their mission had nothing to do with cleaning out the brush poppers; old Street needed that little Sinolnd nuke and he needed it yesterday. Did it really exist? Quien sabe?
The dust trails of the two 'cycles varied with their speed and the terrain, and Lufo knew the proper pace to minimize a dust signature. Long ago he had trained Quantrill in unarmed combat; now he was once again the instructor.
Skating along a dry creekbed their passage might have been heard a few hundred meters distant and when they talked, it was with their scrambled short-range headsets. "So this ol' woman brought me to Odessa and seein' it was a head wound with a few birdshot, they X-rayed me and found my critic. By the time I woke up, I was a man without a name or a critic, and I liked it that way," Lufo said, explaining his defection from Army Intelligence. "Always felt bad about getting you in, compadre, because of that chingada critic."
"S'all right," Quantrill lied. "Hey: tripwire ahead!"
Lufo jerked his head around. "O-ho. Watch your right skyline and squeeze off at anything that moves," he said, splitting his own attention between the high ground to their left and the glistening wire ahead.
"Now you'll see how the antenna works," he added, continuing at the same pace.
The 'antenna' formed a parabolic arch from the front end of the hovercycle, over the rider's head, to the sturdy pillion behind the jumpseat. Its spring aluminum alloy was triangular in cross-section with a stainless steel blade set into the top edge and Lufo's first warning to Quantrill had been to avoid grasping it. The damned thing would slice through a glove and the tendons beneath it — or sever a thin wire strung across its path.
Lufo gunned the engine to get additional lift as he neared the cable. His vehicle bobbed lower as it swept under the taut wire, polymer skirts scuffing the creekbed, and then Quantrill encountered the same effect.
He saw the cable vibrating in Lufo's wake, felt a solid thump as his own 'cycle kissed the creekbed, and then he was past it, craning his neck to the right with his H & K out and ready.
Lufo laughed at Quantrill's cursing. "No sweat. Next time you'll know just when to gun the engine, and then you won't bounce your cojones off. It's a knack. Anyway, that was just an old sucker cable, nobody layin' for us, but if it's braided cable like that sometimes it won't break."
"Nice folks out here, Sab — ah, Lufo. How do they know when they've bagged somebody?"
Lufo pointed aloft. "Buzzards. One of these days, compadre, you'n me can take some time off, set some traps of our own out here for those ladrones."
"What'll the Governor say?"
"Shit, he don' know everything," Lufo scoffed. "You think your 'migo Ethridge won't go lookin' to settle old scores when he gets to Utah? Out here it's every man for himself. Until we get a few U. S. Marshals in Wild Country, it's vigilante time." He pronounced it TexMex fashion, veeheelahntay. Quantrill admired the wild free spirit of his friend, whom he still thought of as Sabado; but a Sabado by any other name was still basically a vigilante, a man who'd sooner dispense justice of his own than leave it to a Marshal or a jury. When the Marshals came to Wild Country they might find Lufo Albeniz more trouble than help. And with that thought came another which Quantrill filed away…
Presently Lufo led the way into higher country damp with recent rain and thick with brush, where a man on a quarterhorse might have met their pace for a short distance. The tall latino was singing of his dark-haired corazdn when Quantrill interrupted, "I thought this one was a blonde."
Laughing: "As you'll see in a couple of hours. I was thinking of the one in Laredo — or is it the one in Corpus?" He yelped in sheer high spirits; sang the refrain from a current western tune: 'Like a Mormon fundamentalist I'm a much-married man."
It was no trick to get Lufo talking about that. Lufo's was the classic form of machismo: potentially every woman was his, and only his. The only time you knew you were a man was when you were atop a woman; not beside, or below. Atop. You liked frequent assurances of manhood and if you had to marry her — well, you married her. Of course any woman who dallied with any other man while married to Lufo would do it at risk of her life, and of the other man's life. It was not a joking matter to Lufo; he might have a dozen women, but they must have no other man.
Lufo explained his one self-imposed restriction: "Plain loco to have two wives near enough that they might learn about each other. That's for men who keep house; have kids. Me, I've had my tubes tied but none of my women know that. They all think a nino would get me to settle down — so they try to get one from me. Ay, it's a good life, compadre!"
Quantrill voiced an agreement he could not feel; told himself that boys would be boys: thanked God he knew no women who might fall under Lufo's spell. Three hours later, after topping off their tanks near Barksdale, they whrummed into view of the soddy.
CHAPTER 64
Quantrill imitated Lufo and shut off his engine in a clearing beyond the ramshackle rows of corn stubble.
Lufo's horn was a silly bleat, a long and two shorts. "You won't believe what I think this is all about," Lufo said, turning to his companion, "but she always comes out and — listen."
Quantrill saw a blonde figure skip out of the soddy, admired the strong legs and full figure of the young woman in the short dress. She put fingers to her mouth. A series of piercing blasts floated out across the oak and cedar scrub.
As she turned in another direction to repeat her whistled signal, Lufo said, "She always does this. It's not another man, but she's got someone out there that she won't tell me about — someone her little sister plays with." At this point he stood on his seat and waved until the woman saw him. She waved them in. Settling to the controls Lufo added, "But if you had a hotsy that lived out here alone with boar tracks the size of my hand all around, and she never wore a sidearm and never worried who came to her door, and made you swear you'd never shoot at any pig within an hour of here, — what would you think?" He shook his head, restarted, drove up in the shadow of a tarp-covered woodpile without waiting for an answer.