Wild Country Read Free Page B

too perfect English. "I shall obtain something to tempt you." He took the ramshackle steps in a springing lope, removed the neckerchief of bronze silk from his throat, dabbed perspiration away as the heels of his polished riding boots echoed down the parquetry of an inner corridor.
    He continued past the lounge to a door the girl had always found locked, waited for the voiceprinter to unlock the carved oak door, strode in. In Spanish, he said with deceptive mildness to the two waiting men, "I assume this is worth interrupting me."
    One of the men was trained to operate the laser comm set; the other to encode and decode messages. Both had the straight hair and liquid obsidian eyes of Indios, and the look of men in the presence of their demigod.
    The tall man with the coder key around his neck ducked his head in respect. "Such is my belief," he said formally, and handed Sorel a folded scrap of paper. The other man, thick and silent, sat waiting for orders. A Yucatecan whose primary language was Maya, he sat as though prepared to wait through a geologic era.
    Sorel glanced at the scrap, let his hand drop in disgust, scanned it again, then glanced toward the ceiling as if instructions were printed there. For an instant he stood still, the blue eyes staring at nothing. Then he said to the seated man, "Please go to the kitchen, Kaiyi, and prepare sangarees for me and the woman. Serve them by the pool. Tell her I shall be with her presently."
    Kaiyi—a Maya nickname, for the sturdy fellow swam like a fish—arose without comment and left the room.
    "Give thanks, Cipriano." Sorel growled then. "You will share no more bad blood with Rawson."
    "I never thought you could trust him, senor."
    "And I never did; except where his own interests were served. Now it seems the trigger-happy fool has finally caught a fatal case of lead poisoning, if San Antonio Rose is right. He has not misinformed us yet."
    "Not that you know of," Cipriano replied impassively.
    Sorel studied the mestizo while abrading the scrap of polypaper under his thumb. He peeled its two layers apart; watched them degrade into loose fibers as he spoke: "You have kept something from me?"
    "Only my disquiet, senor. Your San Antonio Rose has too much of the gringo in him."
    The ghost of a smile: "Not as much as I, you buffoon. If he has arranged bail for Longo and Slaughter, he is still dependable."
    "Perhaps so that they can lead the yanquis back here?"
    "They know better than that. And if they do not, a sniper laser will teach them quickly enough." Now the smile was a grin: "That would please you, I am sure."
    A blink and a smile, where a yanqui would have nodded.
    One elegant finger, backed with sorrel hairs, wagged before the mestizo. "You are a deeply prejudiced man, Cipriano. Were it not for those renegade Texans of mine, it might be you and Kaiyi who would cross Wild Country with our shipments. And you would never pass for TexMex, my friend. You never learned to lower your chin when facing armed Anglos."
    " Gracias a Dios for that," Cipriano muttered. "Even here in Mexico they cheat at cards. They eye our women too openly. They need humility."
    "They need a cold-steel education, you mean," Sorel furnished with a thumb-flick that mimed a switchblade. "Perhaps you are right, but now we need them. For one thing, the two yanquis know where the shipment is hidden, and I cannot afford any more losses to the border patrol."
    His Indio eyes slitted, Cipriano asked, "And how do we know the yanqui patrols did not confiscate your demon-powder?"
    "Because," Sorel said as if to an idiot, "if they had, they would be holding Clyde Longo and Harley Slaughter without bail. One can learn much merely by understanding how the yanqui system works. Now then: since Slaughter is a cautious man, we can expect him to stay in contact with our San Antonio contact. I wish you to encode a reply."
    Cipriano was cautious, too; he handed Sorel a small polypaper pad so that the encoded message would be,