Текст книги "Cloud's Rider "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Windchill on those high turns is too fierce. Uphill’s easier. Longer. But easier. Theycan come back down a lot easier than they can go up. Surelythey’ve got that sense, if they’re stuck there.”

“No sign of it yet,” he said.

“Maybe they made it up before the weather. Just pushed on.”

Maybe they didn’t make it. He had to think that, too.

In that case he’d be sorrier than he could say. And he and Tara would be wintering in Evergreen.

But they had to go there anyway.

There was nothing right now in the ambient but themselves. There was that silence all around them, a mountain swept clean of life. Or life gone underground, gone into hibernation, as happened in deep, foodless winter.

But there’d been more food on Tarmin Height, grisly thought, than anywhere he’d ever heard of.

“You suppose,” he said, “everything’s eaten so much they’ve all gone to burrows?”

“Possible,” she said. “Possible, too, they remember the rogue, and they’re scaring each other, one to the next. Or possibly—that horse is out there. I don’t think it belonged to my partners. I’d know.”

“Harper’s horse,” Guil said.

“Yeah,” she said. “No question in my mind.”

And long, long after they’d settled down to sleep, tucked down by the fire, in all the blankets they’d brought and found, came a strange, spooky sending that drew an alarm from the horses.

Ghosty thing, just a shiver over the nerves. Guil lay still, but Tara sat up, and got up, and he stirred onto the side that didn’t hurt and sat up, too.

The horses were upset.

“Something’s wrong,” Tara said, with her hands on Flicker’s neck.

Burn came over and stood right over him,

Burn was going to defend him, that was clear. A shiver ran up Burn’s leg and over his hide and Burn snorted and hissed at an unseen enemy.

“Can you make it out?” Tara asked. “It’s not a swarm.”

“Don’t think so.” He made an effort to get up and did, leaning on Burn’s shoulder. From Burn there was another snort and a violent shake of his mane.

Not good, whatever it was.

Tara was came from her and from Flicker, he couldn’t mistake that.

They were armed. They had supplies. But there was that notice on the board that Danny Fisher had written, that warning.

The kid hadn’t been a rider that long. The kid hadn’t ever been into the High Wild. And if he’d heard something real damn confusing—he might not know what he heard. But twoexperienced riders and their horses—

–didn’t know, either.

It was a moral question to Danny—whether his responsibility for Carlo and Randy continued or ought to continue; and it was still a common-sense kind of question whether he could get Carlo in some kind of trouble by running over there to inform Carlo on what lawyers were doing, and including Carlo into matters that obviously involved the rich and powerful people in the village. Such people weren’t as rich and powerful as they might be down in Shamesey, granted, but seeing Carlo was accidentally between these people and a lot of money, he’d spent some extensive worry on the matter, at some times concluding he shouldn’t go, then thinking that while some were for protecting Carlo’s rights, some weren’t. And then again thinking—if Carlo was seen notto know, Carlo had a certain amount of protection, in that ignorance—if ignorance was ever protection, and his own experience said it wasn’t as much as the ignorant thought it was.

Most of all he didn’t know at what point of their own morality these people from the pretty blue-muraled church would conclude they were doing wrong. He was scared of lawyers. He was scared of courts.

Most of all he didn’t want to mess up Carlo’s future by making a decision that he didn’t have the information to make, and he’d held off till this morning hoping he’d hear some kind of wisdom out of Ridley or Callie during their evening talks.

“You suppose they’re going to treat the Goss boys all right?” he’d asked finally in desperation. “Are the lawyers honest?”

“They’re fools,” was all he’d been able to get out of Ridley last night. Ridley was mad about the situation, and that was what Ridley had on his mind: losing people from his village. And to the question of the lawyers being honest– “At poker,” Callie said, which didn’t tell him much about Carlo’s chances with them.

“You suppose I ought to tellCarlo?” he’d asked Ridley then, deciding on the direct approach.

“Don’t know what he could do about it,” was Ridley’s answer.

That put him in mind of what his father had always said about the law, which seemed the only wisdom that applied—just don’t sign anything.

He’d slept with it, and waked with it, and worried over it.

His first trip this morning had to be out to the den, and he left the breakfast table, dressed for the cold—a light snow was falling– and took Cloud a biscuit from breakfast. The other horses, crowding him as he came into the den from the open-air approach, were obliged to wait: Ridley encouraged him to do that, saying that waiting their turn was good for them: they’d gotten out of their summer manners, meaning when they regularly had strange horses in the den, and they could learn they hadn’t a right to every biscuit that came into their sight.

So while Ridley was helping Callie clear the dishes, he fed Cloud his treat and rubbed him down from head to tail and oiled his feet, quiet in his mind for the first time since he’d come to Evergreen.

Cloud was satisfied, making that curious contentment sound, enjoying the importance of the first and only biscuit of the day. Cloud ducked his head around while he was working and licked the inside of his ear, which Cloud knewhe hated.

Both of them were moving a little more freely now, on feet less tender and joints less sore, and, able to go to Cloud and do such basic, ordinary things, Danny felt a great knot of tension that had been in him unravel. Conclusions hard to come to in the guarded ambient in the barracks were far clearer to him when he’d gotten out here to ordinary work.

The truly difficult things were over and done with, the emergencies were all settled, and there was almost nothing to do but brush Cloud’s tail and feed Cloud and bring him biscuits.

Cloud liked that idea. If there’d been females available, the winter would be absolutely perfect. But, next best thing to please his horse, Danny thought about and expected Cloud to approve that idea.

Cloud wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he might have been. Cloud lifted his head and looked toward the walls and shivered.

Danny found that very odd. He stopped the brushing with his fist still full of Cloud’s tail, and he looked in that direction without even thinking he’d done it.

He’d never been wintered-in anywhere before. Shamesey didn’t have weather to require it, although a lot of riders arrived there to winter-over and the trade died down: Shamesey never felt isolated.

But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain– there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.

Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Danny put into it.

A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.

The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.

The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the beginning had: he had every legitimate rightto be in the rider camp for the winter, but he still found himself in an awkward position as an intrusion in the common room of the barracks– which turned out to be a family’s living room: not that it was supposedto be that, but there just wasn’t another child Jennie could play with—even as easy as the rider camp’s relationship with the village seemed, thatline was one people wouldn’t send their children across—and the barracks that in some places was a very rough and careless environment, was unquestionably a family living arrangement in Evergreen, an arrangement in which a teenaged visitor of outside origins was undeniably suspect in motives and personal habits. He didn’t think even Callie thought he’d do something so awful as have designs on Jennie; but clearly Callie didn’t leave him alone with Jennie, He wasn’t friendswith Callie. He never would be, he strongly suspected. He probably would never be friends with Ridley, on Callie’s account.

He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was beginning to believe Callie that he was a fool in the path of rational people, and he was scared to give Carlo advice on something he really didn’t understand any more than Carlo did.

He was spooked about the law, was one thing. Hisearly association with it hadn’t been that of an honest and upright citizen

And heheld too damn many secrets to sleep sound at night—Callie not even trusting him to keep to his bed. He’d tried turning down the vodka last evening.

Funny thing, Callie had said her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t drink it. So he had drunk it, all but certain now his very deep sleep and morning lethargy had something to do with it. People who’d do thatto you—maybe they didn’t want you wandering across the line between camp and village. That was the other matter that had him spooked—but at least this morning he knew for sure what he’d suspected about his nights there.

And theywere the source of all the advice he had.

Maybe they had their own set of problems. He had his.

So he found no need to tell them he was going.

He cast a look toward the barracks veiled in blowing snow, and no one was stirring—he’d given the excuse of going out to the den—he didn’t have to give them excuses, and there was no reason he couldn’t go over villageside on his own, absolutely no reason. Ridley was camp-boss, and could forbid him, but then he’d be out that gate and elsewhere.

They’d say later, Where did you go and what did you do? not as if they had a right to ask.

And he supposed, as he walked toward the camp gate and toward the village, that if he told Carlo what he knew, things were going to get out that could speed up the gold-rush mentality that was working among the rich. And that could rouse a little of the anger he knew was stored up and waiting for him when he finally didlet loose what he knew about the Goss kids.

It wasn’t a happy situation he’d landed in. In some measure he’d like to walk up to the barracks, fling open the door and lay out in two minutes everything he had to say.

But once you let a matter out of the proverbial bottle, it was out.

And panic wasn’t at all a thing to let loose in a place like this, with all the High Wild around them—at least that was the only wisdom on a situation like this he’d ever gotten from anyone. Panic in the ambient was like blood-smell on the wind.

There were two other people who knew everything he knew. And Carlo began to be not only somebody he owed the truth to—Carlo began to be the only human being in Evergreen that he’d rely on.

So never mind what the village marshal wanted, or what Ridley expected. With a quiet walk through thick snow-fell over to the gate of the camp and past the restraining post into the village side, he was gone, on his first foray into the village alone, into the quiet of the villageside ambient, this time without Ridley’s voice to fill the silence.

He found it spooky to walk among utter strangers. He felt cut off, deaf in a very important sense. Passersby became a threat to him in a way merchants and chance encounters in his own neighborhood in Shamesey town had never been. He didn’t know these people. For the first time in his life he was in a place where he didn’t know people either by long experience or by the thoughts they shed.

Which was stupid. He wasn’tin danger and neither was Cloud.

But he’d sure felt safer when Ridley were with him.

Right now—he’d feel safer with eight-year-old Jennie for a guide, which told him how entirely silly he was being: the street was mostly deserted, and while a rider in his leather breeches and fringed jacket was as conspicuous as a horse walking down the street, he was in a mostly deserted neighborhood in heavy snow, and it wasn’t exactly as if he was walking among hostile crowds.

The few venturers outside their passage system did stare. One man even said hello. A couple of girls—he thought they were girls—walking along bundled into shapeless coats talked behind their hands while they approached and giggled as they came close. “Hello,” he said, defiantly taking the offensive in the deadness of the ambient; “hello,” one said, and then they went into a spasm of teenaged giggles and raced off down the street.

Very young, he said to himself in all the maturity he’d assumed. Too silly. He wasn’t interested. Much.

He passed the public tavern Ridley had mentioned—Ridley hadn’t said whether in so small a camp he and Callie ever crossed over for an evening of what his father called ale and riot—or whether it was going to be a dry winter. It looked like a comfortable sort of building, with lights glowing behind glass windows, with tracks on the snow going up onto the porch and inside.

Then, next to a rusting and untidy stack of iron scrap and old truck parts mostly buried under snow, was a huge evergreen tree, and the smiths’ shop.

The double doors were shut, as came as no surprise. But he took the handle and turned it and pushed, testing whether the place was open, and as it proved to be, walked from the snowy outside white into the shadowy, smoky heat of a large, low forge-shed.

“Yeah?” said a burly young piece of trouble who turned up standing right beside him.

In the same moment, across a low stone wall, he’d seen the ones he was after. Carlo and Randy were working at the forge, Randy with his hand on the bellows lever and Carlo with a set of tongs in his gloved hand—which, if Carlo’s fingers felt like his, Carlo wouldn’t find comfortable.

“Looking for the Goss boys,” he said. “Hello,” he said cheerfully, walking past the surly, close-clipped kid, him with his hair growing long and a knife in his boot. “How’s it going, guys?”

The burly kid said, from behind him, “You the new rider, huh?”

He stopped so as to include the guy in his field of view—not inclined to ignore a provocation behind him, not in Shamesey alleys and not here. “Yeah,” he said. The guy was big, but there was soft fat over the memory of muscle. The gut argued for more acquaintance with the bar than the bellows. “Wintering over, at least.” He didn’t like the tone. At all. And Carlo hadn’t answered his hail—Carlo hadn’t given him a clue what the situation was except to say something low and fast to Randy. But he was getting bored with the threat, and walked on.

“So what do you want?” the big kid asked, not satisfied with one look back.

“Friendly call,” he said, just about hoping the guy would pick up one of those iron bars and come at him. He’d notbeen a thoroughly good kid back in Shamesey streets. He’d been very good since. He’d learned to be smart. But God should give him some satisfaction for his reformation.

Carlo came to meet him, and Randy stayed. Quiet, real quiet, for Randy.

“How’s it going for you?” Carlo took his gloves off and offered a handshake.

“Fine. Want to talk to you. Private. Got a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Place to talk?”

“I’ll get my coat. —Randy, you just keep the heat on. Be back in a minute.”

“Wait a minute!” Randy began.

“Back in a minute, hear me?” Carlo tossed the gloves at him and Randy caught them, still not happy.

“You better get your ass back here,” the other kid said. “Pretty quick. You don’t get paid for talking.”

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “—Come on.” He nodded toward the door and shot a look at Randy before he picked up his coat off a peg near the door, grabbed his hat, and the two of them went out into the milky white of a snowy morning, near the big evergreen. Carlo led the way over beside it and stopped.

“Just a real pleasant fellow in there,” Danny said. “Is that the owner’s kid?”

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “Son of a bitch.” And more cheerfully: “How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m doing fine. Nice family folk I’m with. Nice kid. Pleasant place. —Is that guy somebody who stays around? You have any trouble with him?”

There was a small silence. Carlo ducked his head, arms tucked, then looked up with his jaw tight. “I tell you I’m getting out of here come spring. Me and Randy, we want to go with you when you leave downland, upland, I don’t care. Anywhere we can get work. I’ll have a little by then to pay you with—or owe you. Whatever it takes. I never hired a rider. I don’t know—”

“Save it. I won’t take your money, long as you don’t want to go off the road I’d take—which is down by east or down by west. Anything else, you’d fell off the mountain.”

“I swear—” Carlo began.

“No big favor. I’m going anyway. Might as well have good company-”

Carlo let go a huge breath. “This guy,” Carlo said. “It’s not just me, understand. I’ve tried.”

“This Mackey guy—the senior—I don’t gather he’s got a good reputation in town, clear out to the rider camp. Ridley sure doesn’t think much of him.”

“I tell you,” Carlo said, thin-lipped, “I’d like to pound his head in. But he’ll take it out on Randy. So will the old man. We wouldn’t have a roof over our heads. And Icould end up in jail.”

“I think people in the village know—”

“I’m the stranger here. This guy has property. Listen—I want to ask you. If it ever got real bad—I mean realbad—or if something happens to me, could Randy come over to the camp? And you take care of him?”

“If it gets bad– bothof you come over. There’ll be breaks in the weather. I can get you on to Mornay or somewhere no matter the weather. Winter’s bad. But it doesn’t mean a horse can’t move.”

Carlo drew several slow breaths. “That’s real generous.”

“I’d take you this week if the weather clears. But—” He suddenly remembered the whole reason he’d come—and it dawned on him the import of what he knew and the village’s ambitions, and maybe that it wasn’t a real safe thing for Carlo and Randy to try to leavethe village with their news. Respectable people could do some damn dirty things—for less money than was involved—and while there might be some who’d take a chance to see there weren’tany heirs to Tarmin property but themselves—there might also be those who’d kill to be sure no other village heard about it.

Carlo could be living with one of the chief suspects in eithereventuality, to judge by Mackey’s blowhard son and the fact Carlo was talking about refuge.

But the plain fact was, riders weren’t in great abundance up here. All of Evergreen had better reckon they couldn’t get ten meters through the Wild without a rider to guide them, and that came down to him, and Ridley and Callie—with an eight-year-old they didn’t want in rough circumstances. Things came crystal clear to him of a sudden, just being over here in this environment, that if he made it real clear to the village at large that he and Carlo were close friends, it might be the best protection for Carlo and Randy he could arrange. Nobodyhad better piss off the only rider-for-hire there was up here.

“Has the marshal talked with you yet?” he asked Carlo in his new sense of immunity. “About your rights to property?”

Carlo squinted at him through the blowing snow and went very, very sober. “No.”

“There’s lawyers involved,” Danny said. “There’s lawyers talking about how you’ve got inheritance rights down in Tarmin. That you own the smith’s shop and the house and all. And there’s a lot of people talking about going down there, families here just sort of homesteading all those vacant buildings.”

“You’re serious. They’re going to do it.”

“No joke.” He felt keenly the lack of the ambient that would have made him aware what Carlo was thinking. “And it might work out all right. There’d be plenty of neighbors. Plenty of work fixing up. If you could stand to go back and live there—you’d ownyour papa’s forge, the shop and the house and maybe more than that. Anything you’d legitimately inherit. Anything your papa’s or your mama’s relatives had. You could be the richest guy in Tarmin.”

Carlo looked disturbed. He raked a hand through his hair, which had been damp with sweat and which was developing ice crystals in the snowy cold. “Mama’s property. Andthe forge. And the house.”

“You could be real comfortable—if you can be comfortable down there. This village hasto have Tarmin operating. Only place they can really warehouse goods. You know that better than I do. And until they can get oxen, or trucks and fuel to haul whatever they normally get from Tarmin, they’re probably going to have to port supplies up the Climb on hand-carts. That means it’s going to be a real lean spring up here. Prices are going to go sky-high. Just immediately as soon as the snow melts this village or somebody on the High Loop has got to get somebody down to Shamesey and buy oxen, hire drivers andget some truckloads of hay up here to the top of the treeline, or the Anveney truckers are going to gouge them for everything they’ve got. Not saying what Shamesey will charge—if they get wind of it before they’ve made a deal. They’re not going to wait around. These people have to move fast before word gets out.”

“Where’d you hear this?”

“There was a meeting. Actually a couple of meetings. I—should have come sooner—but—” He was embarrassed in the face of Carlo’s questioning look. “I wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure who’d be watching. I get the feeling they haven’t come here to tell you you’ve got rights. I’ll expect they’re going to talk to you. They bettertalk to you.”

“They haven’t. I figured—I figured they’d do somethingabout getting the warehouses down there going. But—”

“I get the idea a lotof people are thinking about claims down there. And you have rights. So’s Randy.” He hesitated. “—How’s your sister?”

“Don’t know.” Carlo’s whole body said he didn’t want to think about it.

“You could take care of her. And Randy. This Mackey guy is the onlyone that would be interested in the forge down there. He might try to buy you out, trade you here for what’s down there.”

“That wouldn’t be a bad deal—”

“No. Don’t take it. That’s what I’m hearing: there’s a chance—a real chance—that this village could go under—if the important people, all the people who know how to doanything, head downhill at the first thaw. It’d leave just miners and loggers up here– unless, I guess, people from the next village over decided to come over here and the next claims them—it’s going to be a scramble, is what.”

Carlo bit his lip. “I could go back down there. I would. Dammit, I would. I could set us up proper. Hellif I couldn’t. Damn Mackey!”

“If they come to you don’t sign anything. There’s lawyers involved.”

“Yeah. I hear you plain.” Carlo looked then as if he’d just been stung. “I got to get back to the forge.”

“Sure. I didn’t tell Ridley I was coming over here and Callie thinks I’m the devil on her doorstep. I didn’t tell ’em I was going.”

“I owe you a drink. At least. Several, in fact.”

“No difficulty. Anytime. You can come to the rider camp. No reason not. You get some time off—I can come across. I guess I can. Nobody seemed shocked I was here. —Suppose they’d serve riders in the tavern there?”

Carlo looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I’ll ask.”

“Hey.” It dawned on him that was one of a set of things more that he could do. They neededhim. The village might have yet to figure it. But they needed him. The Evergreen ridersneeded him—or it was going to be an ugly scene, people wanting escort and Ridley and Callie with a kid they wouldn’t want involved. He suddenly resolved he wasn’t as down-and-under the local situation as he’d assumed– and that his situation was in some respects like Carlo’s. “Who’d guide anyone anywhere but me? And there’s horses painted in the church. This isn’ttoo bad a place. We should havea drink.”

“I’m supposed to get paid the rest of my wages. He betterpay me.”

Cash money was a problem he hadn’t solved—having not a penny to his name. Villageside, it mattered.

“Sure,” he said. He had a time to do something. He had somewhere to go. Amazing how that pinned the world down. “Sundown?”

“We’ll be there.”

He went with Carlo back to the door, and when it opened the heat inside was stifling and the inside was obscured with shadows and fire.

The heavyset kid was standing real near that outside door. Randy was still keeping the bellows going, looking their way the while. “See you,” Carlo said, tight and careful. And shut the door between them.

Danny turned and walked back up the street, through the veiling snow.

Pretty town, all the evergreens, shadows in the white. Pointed roofs. Nice place.

He was still a little worried about Carlo. He didn’t know what he personally could do until the day Carlo and Randy showed up and said Get us out of here.

Well, he did. He could go in there, let a fight start, and beat hell out of Mackey’s offspring. He could tell the whole village to swallow it or choke, so long as they wanted his help. He’d notbeen a good kid, in town. He had what his Father called real bad tendencies when somebody shoved him.

But—pushing back too hard and trying to deal his own hand in this apart from Ridley could make hima target for those who didn’t for one reason or another want a rush down to Tarmin. That included Ridley, it included Callie, and probably the marshal and the judge and maybe even people who’d like to go but who didn’t want certain other people to go.

It could get just real complicated.

One thing was sure: with gold, furs, and timber and all, Tarmin village wasn’t going to die. Tarmin was going to rise from a bloody grave. He hoped– hopedCarlo and the kid could benefit, and that they wouldn’t get robbed. Or hurt.

And he hoped Carlo kept the lid on Randy. When the news got out, and it was, he was sure, all over town—except near Carlo and Randy, which he found troubling—it was going to be just real uncomfortable in the Mackey household.

Because if the rest of the town was going to benefit from claiming free property in Tarmin, the smith couldn’t. Not while Carlo and Randy and Brionne were alive.

But Carlo wasn’t a fool. Carlo was farfrom a fool. Carlo had understood everything from the first hint of what was going on.

And Carlo, who’d swung a hammer for his living, wasn’t defenseless, either. That surly guy crowding him was running a real risk.

Chapter 12

Van Mackey had been at the tavern all afternoon. Van Mackey had drunk quite a damn lot, as fairly well seemed his habit in the afternoon, and was a fire hazard around the forge when he came down to have a look around and criticize what those who hadworked during the day had done.

Fact was, Carlo said to himself, watching this inspection, and with Danny’s warning racketing all day in his consciousness, there wasn’t any fault to find. He’d worked hard and he’d stayed later than he was agreed to stay, and hewas ready to go out to the tavern to catch a cheap bite of supper with his brother, when Van Mackey came in showing the effects of having been there for some time. He’d worked till his shoulders ached and his hands hurt like very hell. He’d hammered and shaped and finished the whole pending job for Mackey’s inspection, a job for which Mackey would get paid a lot more than he’dsee. He’d done a day’s work in anybody’s book out of a great deal of pain, and if after he was through and after Randy had cleaned up the place, Van Mackey was going to find any fault or mess up what he’d done, he was going to—

He was going to have to sit on his temper and not say a thing, that was what, figuring that any other course was going to get them bounced out of the shop and put on Danny’s tab. He’d been building up a real head of resentment where it regarded the Mackeys– and he held it under an especially tight lid, watching the man poke into this and that.

But after looking it all over, Van Mackey came over to him and said, cheerfully, “Come inside. Have a drink.”

He really didn’t want to. In two ticks of his heart he knew for dead certain what the deal was, but he didn’t see a way to duck it.

“My brother, too,” he said. “I don’t want him knocking around the street alone. It’s our suppertime.”

“All right,” Mackey said, and the way he didn’t object also said a lot.

So they all went inside the house like good friends, Rick clumping after them, clearly out of sorts and maybe, at least Carlo thought so, puzzled.

The wife met them in the hallway, a narrow wooden hall with torn and sooty rugs, and they all went into the sitting room, where the rugs were new and not cheap but only slightly cleaner. The wife had a bottle of spirits on the table, and she set out five glasses and started pouring.

“Not for my brother,” Carlo said, “thank you.” A glass of that and Randy would be flat on the rug. Randy knew it, and didn’t more than sulk.

“There’s tea,” the wife said, and waved a hand at Rick, who hulked on the fringes. “Tea.”

Wouldn’t trust him not to spit in it, Carlo thought: he kept an eye on the process through the open door to the kitchen adjacent, and in the midst of a short course of small talk, watched Rick Mackey carry the ready teapot and a cup to the sitting room and the wife pour it. Rick went and slouched in the doorway, a picture of grace, with his hands in his pockets below a sagging belt.