Wild Country

Chapter Thirteen

"First client I ever lost on a hunt," Hutch admitted, elbows propped on the table in the lodge at ranch headquarters. In unspoken agreement, the four men who had watched Placidas die waited for the daughter to arrive, drinking the time away. "Them ponies of yours. Lieutenant — the ol' man wasn't used to a hog-trained horse."

"First rule with a mount trained for Muckna pig." The tall Englishman shrugged. "Leave your horse alone. The judge should've let the mare have her head. And I should have mine examined," he added in furious self-accusation. "What shall I tell Marianne? Why, that I lent her father the means to suicide!"

"Aw, shit, once he heard what you was up to, you couldn'ta stopped him with hobbles and a Spanish bit," Hutch gloomed. "Crazy old coot, I never seen him happier on a hunt. I think he'd've ridden against Ba'al hisself after you got that first one. He kept askin' me what you was yellin', but I didn't have no idea."

"Oh. 'Woh-h-h jata!' Just wogtalk, or was in my grandfather's day. It means 'There he goes,' more or less."

"Well, woh jata for Tony Plass, too." said Jess Marrow, now slightly drunk on his favorite vice, Old Sunny Brook. "Every boar in his prime thinks he is Ba'al."

Quantrill had done more listening than talking, but now he spoke quickly to divert the topic. "Lieutenant, I don't know what you heard out there, but it might be… um. kinder to Placidas's girl if we pretended he didn't have any last words."

"Girl! My lad, Marianne Placidas is only a girl the way Horatio was only an infantryman," Wardrop said, draining his glass in salute. "Waaagh, this whiskey — well, sorry. My arse is tough, but my palate is rather tender. As I was saying.

Marianne can be very, very hard cheese. And I did lend a mount for the old gentleman's madness. The fault was mine," he said.

"Hope you won't mind sayin' that to my foreman," Hutch put in.

"My pleasure," Wardrop said, and reached for the bottle with something like mortal resignation.

Hutch heard the high-pitched snarl first, turning his head toward the window. Quantrill was first out of his chair. "Christ," he said, "it sounds like one of the little Spits."

But it was not one of the half-scale Spitfire aircraft from LockLever's Battle of Britain complex. It was a gasoline-powered Ocelot roadster, shrilling its turbocharged challenge to anything else on wheels. Useless as an off-road vehicle, on macadam the Ocelot's racing tires could hurl it faster than many light aircraft.

"That will be Marianne," said Wardrop. He stood up, straightened his shoulders and his hunting jacket, then strode outside to meet his fate.

The others watched from inside. Marianne Placidas was a surprise to them all, older than they had expected and beautiful without much femininity. Her helmeted dark curls and scarlet neckerchief, her graceful motions, all reminded Quantrill cruelly of the long-dead Marbrye Sanger. She exited the little roadster, whirled back to retrieve a stained overnight bag, recognized Wardrop, spoke quickly with him. Then something in his response snapped her erect posture, and she sought Wardrop's shoulder for a time. More talk; Wardrop gestured toward the ranch clinic and followed her sprint into the place. She did not relinquish her heavy bag.

"Handsome pair," said Quantrill.

"Oh shut up, Ted," snapped Marrow, who had been thinking exactly the same thing.

Quantrill strolled out to look over the Ocelot, a limited-production toy favored by the shuttle set. He noted the metallic plum paint job, the suede seats, the spatters of mud around the enclosed wheel wells, the sand in the driver's footwell. Marianne Placidas had finally been contacted somewhere north of Wild Country Safari; and the nearest source of mud or wet sand in that direction was the Llano River, which meandered past Junction. He pondered the unlikely notion of such a shuttle-setter as Marianne Placidas tooling her Ocelot along a riverbed, then turned away from the car and the question. The motives of the spoiled rich were not his province — or so he thought.

Quantrill, Marrow, and Hutch returned to the lodge and watched without shame from a window as a succession of LockLever people converged on the clinic. Hunt-party waivers gave the company protection against lawsuits, but Wild Country Safari did not need the anger of a Placidas heiress.

Two glasses of Old Sunny Brook later, the woman emerged from the clinic with Wardrop in tow, the ranch manager at her left. To the manager she was abrupt. To Wardrop she streamed vitriol, slapping his arm aside as he attempted to carry her heavy bag. Again Quantrill was struck by the small anomaly: the scuffed, mud-stained bag was not the sort of accessory such a woman would carry. Why hadn't she left it in the roadster?

The answer — that the contents of that bag, retrieved from a Llano sandbank, could have bought several new Ocelot roadsters — never crossed Quantrill's mind.

Marianne's mascara was smudged, but now, dry-eyed, she stalked to her car and faced Wardrop. Her harangue was designed for the hearing-impaired. "No, dammit, for the last time! If I had never set eyes on you, my father would be alive now!" She swung into the driver's seat, stowed the bag carefully in the passenger footwell.

Wardrop knelt his long frame to make some plea.

"I don't know what you can do! Undertake some inane romantic quest in my name?"

Wardrop still knelt, but as he spoke he seemed to be at attention.

An expression of fierce joy spread across the elegant cheekbones of Marianne Placidas. "All right, you pigsticking moron, bring me the head of Ba'al, and then I'll forgive you! I don't know if my father would; he died without last rites." Now she was nodding, pleased with her idea. She unwound the scarlet kerchief, flung it at Wardrop's feet. "Here, Ivanhoe, I'll give you a real Wild Country quest — and a token of my affection! Bring me the head of Ba'al," she snarled, and the Ocelot's engine snarled with her.

The three voyeurs watched her storm off with Wardrop half-hidden in her dust. "She wants the man dead," Marrow observed.

"That's one hunt I ain't goin' anywhere near," Hutch replied.

"There won't be any hunt," said Quantrill. thinking fast, "if nobody helps Wardrop. Ba'al hasn't been seen around here for years. Probably dead."

"No, he ain't," said Hutch. "One of Garner's fence-riders seen his sign this spring."

"You tell the Englishman that, if you want to see him buried in a cigar box," Quantrill said evenly. "Besides, Wardrop may be a romantic, but I don't think he's stupid."

"He ain't," Hutch agreed, "but he's got bigger balls than a pawnshop where pig is concerned. The way he'll wait for a boar's charge with not even a sidearm to back up that lance just scares the pure-dee ol' shit outa this child. No, I don't reckon I'll help him."

But by now. Lieutenant Alec Wardrop was certain that the name "Ba'al" referred not to some mythical Hebrew demongod but to something tangible. Something worthy of the Wardrop steel.

By nightfall, the body of Anthony Placidas was on its way to SanTone. And by then some fool had shown Alec Wardrop a glossy print of an old infrared photo. It revealed a boar beyond Wardrop's wildest dreams, and all the warnings in the world could not make Wardrop forget the scarlet pennant that symbolized his quest.