A sort of market was set up out on the cul-de-sac that led to the partially fallen down but by no means uninhabited apartment where J.B. sat on an old chair. Dwellings had been made out of the town houses and apartments along the block, and rough-and-ready huts had been constructed of scavenged materials. People haggled with operators of booths and kiosks. Dogs and chickens wandered among their mostly bare feet.
The Monks had come here from their stronghold in the western part of downtown to exact a tax or tribute from the people of this ville. Just by looking at them, a person could tell that, though they were far from well-off, the folks here weren’t scuffling for survival.
They didn’t have enough surplus, though, to meet the Monks’ demands for payment with open hands and open hearts. Especially since the Felonious Monks were not above conscripting some of them to haul their own plundered goods back to the Monks’ core realm on carts or their own bent backs.
People scattered where the Monks advanced, silent, grim, certain. Some snagged up chickens and barking dogs before scuttling to safety. The ville folk would not refuse the interlopers’ demands. They didn’t dare even think of resisting them. They lacked substantial weapons or the skill to use them.
Nor was it easy or wise to fight the Monks. They were well equipped for the task themselves, experienced, tough and brave. They were known for following a code of honor as stringent as the Angels’ own. And like their rivals, they refused to indulge in cruelty for its own sake.
But that didn’t mean they treated enemies or resisters with studied kindness. They made it a practice to treat others as sternly and uncompromisingly as they were said to treat themselves. They might not be sadistic. But they believed in being
decisive.
That the hagglers and vendors abandoned their tasks, and their wares, to run for cover didn’t seem to surprise the Monks. If they noticed there were far fewer people abroad in the makeshift market this morning than usual, their impassive faces showed no sign.
They strode on, toward the head-woman’s residence, not far from where J.B. waited.
Right into the kill zone.
J.B. held an initiator in his right hand. It had been provided by the DPD, along with certain other gear. He clicked open the cover and pressed the button with his thumb.
The room immediately to the right of him, separated by an intact and solid brick wall, erupted in noise, a flash and a billow of smoke as a pound of black powder lit off. It blew a couple of pounds of random scrap metal, like bent screws and old nails, with some busted glass thrown in for good measure, into the faces of the Felonious Monks.
Before the smoke obscured his vision, J.B. caught a glimpse of the men reeling back, throwing up their hands against an onslaught they were already too late to defend against. As if hands could do so.
From the right he saw another yellow flash. Ears that were ringing from the first blast were slammed by another as Ricky triggered a second makeshift Claymore mine, improvised out of a large, crudely made clay jug, as the device J.B. had set off was. It was emplaced to fire into the Monks at a forty-five-degree angle so as not to endanger J.B., the rest of the companions or any of the ville folk.
Some of the Monks, spared by the first gigantic shotgun blast, had already begun diving for cover to J.B.’s left. The shrapnel shot out by the second charge missed them, too.
In his left hand, J.B. held a second initiator. He opened the safety case with his thumb and pressed the button.
A blast of flame and flying metal caught the Monks in midair and tore them to shreds.
For a moment all was boiling smoke, falling, flaming wreckage and the ringing in J.B.’s ears. The kiosks and booths were mostly write-offs, but the “goods” the people had been haggling over were just bits of junk and trash they’d scraped together. The Monks might have spotted that had they looked closely, but they had been too intent on their task of intimidation.
The smoke began to dissipate into swirls and eddies. Wisps of cloth, blackening in flames, flew like autumn leaves around it. Through the thinning cloud J.B. saw several Monks running away as fast as their legs could carry them.
The rest were down. All except the leader, who somehow remained standing. His clothes had mostly been torn from his body. What was left was smoking. One of the lenses of his sunglasses was gone, as was the eye behind, to judge by the extra flow of red from the socket to join the sheets and rivulets of blood that covered his face and torso and legs.
But he not only stood, he also had a Beretta extended in his right hand and was firing. At what, J.B. couldn’t tell. He had to admire the man for sheer grit and balls.
But it was futile. He was an enemy, still on his feet and shooting. So Ryan, set up on a floor of the ruined apartment building behind this block that stood higher than the ones in front of it, simply shot him through the chest with his Steyr Scout. Blood sprayed out behind him. He toppled to the street among the ruined bodies of his men and did not stir.
Slowly the ville folk began to emerge from hiding. Some were weeping openly in shock.
Ryan’s companions came out of where they had laid or crouched in ambush. They’d been ready to blast the Felonious Monks, but there was no need.
J.B. gathered the initiators. Either the DPD armorer would demand them back and make trouble for the outlanders if they weren’t promptly delivered, or maybe, just maybe, he might forget they had them. In which case J.B. and Ricky could certainly find uses for them.
And even if the Detroit sec men wanted their fancy electronic initiators back, J.B. had helped himself to several extra pounds of Hizzoner’s finest black powder.
J.B. went out through the front door. From his right, on the far side of the unused room that had housed the first Claymore, stepped Mildred. She looked at the fallen Monks. Some of them were groaning and stirring feebly. Most just lay there. Some smoldered. All leaked.
She shook her head. “That’s what I call overkill, J.B.”
He shrugged. “In a case like this, a job worth doing is worth overdoing.”
Mildred made no move to tend the wounded Monks. Instead she turned to the ville’s head-woman.
“What do you want to do about the injured ones?” she asked.
“We’ll send them back to their people, if you permit,” the woman said in a hushed voice. “These, at least, will do us no more harm.”
Ricky was practically bouncing with elation. “Yes,” he cried, pumping his fist in the air.
Then he noticed his companions were quiet. He looked at them, puzzled.
“What?”
“Shut it,” Mildred growled.
* * *
T
HE STREET LOOKED
like a butcher shop when Ryan came down from his perch, his longblaster in one hand.
He felt a stab of annoyance at his companions for letting their guard down so quickly, but he suppressed it at once. He’d seen the surviving Felonious Monks run off. They hadn’t looked like men who intended to come back soon for more.
If they’d brought backup, they didn’t seem inclined to step up. Why would they, when they were off on an errand they’d carried out dozens of times before, probably without incident except the odd unwise protest? Which they likely looked forward to, so they could deliver a hearty beat down to encourage the others. They might not be sadists, but they got just as bored as the next bunch of guys.
The ville people seemed especially shocked by the noise and violence. And the blood. And the smell, which was already getting thick as the morning heated up. A couple puked noisily. A couple more wept.
His companions seemed subdued. Krysty came over to him and put her arm around his waist. He hugged her around the shoulders.
“Glad it was them and not us,” he said. She nodded.
The ville boss approached him. Though her brown face and dark eyes showed fear, her back was straight and her gaze was direct. She was a well-preserved woman in middle age, fairly trim, with a red turban wound around her head and copper bangles dangling from her ears.
“What is to become of us now, after this, Ryan Cawdor?” she asked. “The Monks will not be pleased with us when they learn of this.”
“Like I told you,” Ryan said. “The mayor will extend the protection of the Detroit Police Department to you, if you’ll take it.”
Which he knew full well meant taking the “guidance” of Hizzoner and his sec men. He didn’t doubt the head-woman knew it, too. The pain in her eyes wasn’t all regret for the bloodshed and suffering she had allowed to come into her ville. Nor dread of Monk reprisals.
Their contact, DPD Captain Morgan, a big, burly, loud man with a red face and a blond buzz cut, had explained the strategy when he briefed them beforehand. Though the Felonious Monks were no friends of the Desolation Angels, they liked Hizzoner and DPD a nukeload less. So DPD was running a flanking maneuver on them, cutting into the villes to their west that they didn’t outright control but intimidated into paying them off. If DPD could get a nice, secure base of operations in that territory, they could put pressure on the Monks from a whole new direction. More to the point, the threat of attack from the west would make the gang think twice about trying to hit DPD in its flank when the self-proclaimed City of Detroit made the major move everybody in the rubble knew was coming against the Desolation Angels.
Ryan had no clue why the sec captain would bother explaining the Big Picture to a bunch of outlanders. Maybe he just wanted to brag, impress them with how smart he was. Or his boss, Chief Bone, anyway.
“We hear DPD can be worse than the Monks,” a woman stated.
“Yeah,” a man said. “A lot of those sec men, they get off on beating down poor folks like us just for the fun of it.”
“You didn’t raise any of these objections when we came to you with the plan earlier,” Ryan said.
“We thank you for your help,” the head-woman said. “It doesn’t mean we do not fear the consequences. If we had been able to spare what the Monks demanded of us, we would never have agreed to let you do this thing.”
She looked at the carnage, the blood pools, the tattered and shattered figures, some still smoking, the moaning, bloody rags of survivors being loaded into carts.
“And now,” she said, not looking at Ryan, “we have no choice but to accept the mayor’s offer.” She shook her head. “I knew what this would mean when you came to me last night to propose this plan. But only now do I feel the full import of what you have done—and what I have done.”
“You do what you need to survive,” Ryan said. “Same as we do.”
She turned eyes that glittered with tears to him. “This? This is what you must do to live?”
He nodded.
Chapter Fifteen
“Look,” Ricky whispered as they walked into the grand front entrance of the former Masonic temple where Hizzoner hung his hat. “In that big room, there!”
Ryan frowned, then glanced down the hallway toward the enormous chapel where they’d had their first—and only—interview with their new employers, Mayor Michaud and Chief Bone.
The same two stood near the door in the aisle between the empty pews. Hizzoner had his hand on a man’s shoulder. Bone stood by with his face showing the same expression it normally did, what a person would expect from the skull it resembled.
Except not grinning.
“Shit,” Mildred said under his breath. “That’s Tommy the Dragon lord.”
“Don’t stare,” J.B. said softly.
“Why? Because it’s impolite?”
“Because pissing off the big bosses is not the smartest thing to do when we’ve just walked unarmed into their fortress,” Ryan said. Hired hands or not, they still had to check their weapons before being allowed inside the headquarters building. “And are surrounded by dozens of their sec men.” Who did
not
have to check their blasters.
“Oh, right,” Mildred said.
She didn’t sound contrite, and Ryan didn’t really blame her. He was only bothered by the fact of her outburst, not what it was over. He wished they could have taken down the bastard, too.
But Mildred wasn’t ready to let it go.
“I’ve never been a fan of the third degree,” she muttered, “ever since I was a black woman living in twentieth-century America. So I hate to admit I was hoping they planned to sweat him real hard. They’d have a real job ahead of them doing anything to him he doesn’t deserve.”
“Yet now they appear to be as thick as thieves,” Doc said. “Perhaps that was the goal all along.”
Ricky and Jak stood a little ways down the side corridor to the meeting room they were heading toward to debrief Captain Morgan in the wake of yet another successful foray. Ricky looked guilty. Jak was shifting from one foot to another as if he urgently needed to go pee. He was just uncomfortable being hemmed in.
“Not our problem,” Ryan said. “We haven’t been chilled by Hizzoner’s men, and we have jack in our pockets. We get to live another day. End of story.”
“Best move along soon,” J.B. said. “Sec men are starting to give us the hard eye. Harder than usual, I mean.”
The Armorer stood to one side polishing his glasses. He didn’t appear to be looking close enough to the two riot-armored cops who stood flanking the chapel entrance for even his peripheral vision to pick them up.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “We don’t want Morgan getting impatient. He’s enough of an asshole as it is.”
“I don’t like it either, Ryan,” Krysty added as they set off toward their goal.
“We work for a baron and his sec boss,” Ryan said. “Which part were you expecting to like?”
They started passing more and more patrol officers. Some of them smiled and nodded and one said, “Ace job.”
One fresh-faced Asian-looking man, who couldn’t be older than Jak, insisted on stopping and shaking everybody’s hands.
“Thanks for helping out our guys out there,” he said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said, nodding. “It’s what we do.”
“Imagine that,” Mildred commented as the young patrolman strode on. “Us saving sec men’s asses.”
Ryan shrugged. “It’s the gig. Some of them aren’t bad.”
“Then there’s our current boss man,” Mildred said.