Chapter Eleven

Baron Lundquist Zeal was soundly napping when the wags blew. The thunderous boom sat him bolt upright in his huge, sheet-tangled bed. Heart thudding, he pushed aside the naked women who had been dozing with him, and who were now also startled wide awake. His first thought was for the refinery, that an enormous blowout of some kind had occurred.

He raced barefoot across the floor of his master bedroom, pausing only to snatch up his spikes and fur robe. As he ran through the big house, he cinched the waist tight with its matching fur belt. By the time he reached the front porch, his sec men already had the stockade gates open and his wag waiting there, idling for him.

“What was it?” Zeal demanded as he hurtled down the steps. “Was it the refinery?”

“Nah, something blew over by the gaudies,” said the man holding open the rear passenger’s door of the wag.

Zeal knew the only thing with explosive potential over by the gaudies was Trader’s captured convoy. “Let’s go!” he shouted at the driver as he piled into the back seat.

The baron’s personal transportation was a passionate pink 1997 Lincoln Towncar, with side and rear window glass replaced with one-inch tempered steel plate. The front windshield was likewise protected, except for the driver’s ob slit. Armored skirts covered all the wheel wells, defending the tires from everything but rocket attack and cannon fire. What with all the added weight it carried, the Towncar was a sluggish performer on the uphill climb to the big house.

But this trip was all in the other direction. The Lincoln fairly roared down into the heart of Virtue Lake.

When Zeal jumped from the wag, he was immediately surrounded by a phalanx of sec men with their weapons drawn. He roughly shoved them to one side and stepped forward so he could view the damage. He saw at once that one of the small war wags had exploded, taking with it the transport parked alongside. The combined blast effect was devastating.

Ground zero had been the middle of the mini-mall parking lot, which was now marked by a huge, smoking crater. Ninety feet away, two of the storefronts were completely demolished, turned into nothing more than heaps of smoldering debris. All the other facades were scorched and windowless. There were human bodies and body parts strewed far and wide.

“What the hell happened here?” Zeal demanded.

No one dared answer.

Then Levi Shabazz stepped up beside him. “Trader must’ve mined his fucking wags. One of my drivers probably touched this off by accident.”

Zeal looked at the captured vehicles that surrounded them, and his eyes suddenly went wide.

“You mean they’re all mined?”

“Most likely.”

“Can’t we deactivate them?”

“Mebbe,” Shabazz said. “Mebbe not. Trader’s no triple stupe. He’s got to have five backups for every detonator we find. And it only takes one to make things go boom.”

Zeal turned to his sec men. “I want everyone cleared out of this area at once. Everyone! I want an armed perimeter set up around the gaudies. Rope off the whole area. No one is to enter without my permission. If anyone tries, chill them. No warning shots. Aim to kill. Do you understand?”

Heads nodded.

Before Shabazz could slip away with the others, Zeal grabbed hold of his shirtfront and pulled him up until they were almost chest to chest. “This doesn’t make me happy,” he said.

The baron’s mascara had badly smeared, blurring on his eyelids, turning the sockets into black pits. The lipstick on his mouth had likewise spread far and wide, and the makeup on his cheeks and chin had dried out and begun to flake. In other words, he was a perfect fright to behold.

“This doesn’t make me happy, at all,” he repeated. “Why the hell did you bring Trader’s wags into my ville if you thought they might be boobied?”

“I didn’t think that,” Shabazz said. “Who would? I mean, he’s riding in the goddamn things himself. Got to be out of his mind to run a booby-trapped convoy on these roads.”

“I’d say Trader knew exactly what he was doing,” Zeal replied. “Now that we have his wags, we can’t move them a foot, let alone use them to reach our objective. If they all blow, it could level the whole town. The way things stand now, my gaudies are out of business. No telling what it took to set off the first blast. Mebbe a goddamn sneeze. I can’t have drunks and jolt-heads wandering around a fleet of live bombs. I’m going to have some real trouble if the gaudies don’t come online in short order. That’s how I keep my work force happy.”

“You could always set them up someplace else, till we get this straightened out.”

“Line the mattresses up in the street? Serve the white lightning from the curb? Somehow it doesn’t seem quite the same to me. The only thing we can do is make Trader disarm the mines.”

“You don’t make a man like Trader do anything,” Shabazz said. “He’s going to want something in return. Something big.”

“Like?”

“Like his freedom. Mebbe all his wags back. He’s the one down in the shithole, and the fucker still has us by the short hairs.”

Beneath the peeling makeup, Zeal’s face darkened. “Mebbe not. Mebbe he doesn’t know what he really wants until we show it to him. Come on, let’s take a ride.”

The two got into the Lincoln and, at the baron’s direction, headed for the jail with three sec wags in close pursuit. The entourage stopped alongside the Trader’s cell. Zeal and Shabazz got out and looked into the barred pit.

A grinning face stared back up at them, striped with shadows.

“Somehow I figured you two would be around right sharpish,” Trader said. “You ready to deal?”

“Get him out of there!” Zeal told the jailers.

The cage was promptly opened, and Trader was unceremoniously pulled from the cell.

“Well, what’s it going to be, gentlemen?” he said. “Your money or your lives?”

“I’m not talking serious business out here in the open,” Zeal replied. “Get in the back of my wag.”

They headed for the open door of the rear compartment.

As Trader started to get in, Zeal stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “Take off those boots of yours first,” he said. “I don’t want what they got on them stinking up my wag.”

Trader looked at what was caught up in the tread of his boot sole. “Oops,” he said. “Wonder who that belonged to?”

“Just ditch the boots.”

Trader obliged and climbed in the wag in his bare feet.

After Shabazz had shut the door behind them, Zeal said, “We’ve got a proposition for you.”

“And that is?”

“We know you’ve got your wags mined. We can’t move them. And we need them for a big job.”

Shabazz was an echo. “Yeah, a real big job.”

“So that’s the reason you had me swing by Virtue Lake?” Trader said. “You don’t want my cargo. You want my wags.”

“You’ve heard of Spearpoint, of course,” the baron stated.

Trader’s eyes narrowed. “Everybody’s heard of it.”

“Well, we’ve found it.”

This put the great Trader at a momentary loss for words. When he recovered, he said, “You mean, youthink you’ve found it?”

“I’m sure enough to bet everything I’ve got on it,” the baron said. “Everything you’ve got, too.”

“Where is it?” Trader asked. “Is it close?”

“Close enough. How’d you like to be in for a full tenth share of the proceeds?”

“In return for which,” Trader said, “you want me to turn my crews and wags over to you?”

“All we need are skeleton crews,” Shabazz told Mm. “My people will do the rest.”

“We need guarantees that the wags won’t blow up on us,” Zeal said.

Trader lifted his right foot, hooking the heel over the top of his left thigh and started to look at the horny hunk of callus on his big toe. “Must be some near-nuclear shit to cut through between here and Spearpoint,” he said, “otherwise you could do the job with your own wags. But you don’t have anywhere near the firepower, do you?”

“What’s your answer?” Zeal asked.

“I’m going to need more than a tenth share,” Trader said, using the edge of his fingernail to scrape some of the dead skin away. He blew it off onto the Lincoln’s rug.

Shabazz glowered at Zeal.

“How much, then?” the baron asked.

“My wags, my score” was his terse answer. “I’ll give you two a total of twenty percent off the top. No more. Rest is mine.”

Shabazz went ballistic. “I’m going to take this piece of shit outside and gut him!” he snarled. “And after I pull out his innards, I’m going to loop them around his neck and strangle him to death!”

Zeal tried to calm the man. “Easy, easy,” he soothed, “we need to do some negotiating here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If we explain things to Trader in a way he can understand, mebbe he will change his mind.”

“Face it, Zeal,” Trader said, “you can barely negotiate your way out of a latrine.”

“How about this for a negotiation?” the baron snapped back. “I pull the rest of your crew out of the cells. I take them and you over to the refinery, where I have some special motivational equipment already set up. All I need is an hour or so and I’ll adjust your fucking attitude.”

“It’s already adjusted,” Trader told him. “I’ll make it thirty percent. That’s my final offer.”

“You don’t know when to quit, do you?” Shabazz said.

“No, I never quit.”

“We’ll see about that,” the baron promised. “I’m going to give you my special tour. A real eye-opener.”