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"What did you say?" J.B. asked.
"Nothing to you. Talking to the waitress."
"I don't care who you were talking to. I want to know why it was you felt a
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comment was necessary."
"If you must know, Four-eyes," Jackson began, but was stopped by Mildred.
"Four-eyes? Now there's a classic insult that never goes out of style," she
said.
"I was wondering why there was bread for you and none for us," Jackson
finished, continuing to speak over Mildred's sarcastic interjection.
"They were here first, ordered it before you come in," the waitress said.
"Sorry about that. Today's been busier than usual. Plenty of stew left. Should
fill your
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_39_-_Watersleep belly."
Ben Green spoke to them next. "There you go! Problem solved. Sit down,
Jackson." The son obeyed, staring hard at Ryan and J.B.
"Which way you all coming?" Green asked pleas-antly.
"West," Ryan lied, shifting the paper bag with the bread into his left hand
and smoothly dropping his right beneath the table and to his holster.
"Smart to travel in a group. I try and do the same."
"I noticed that. Right about the same time you made a point of telling
everybody in here," Ryan said in the same even tone.
"Hey, I gotta know something," Jackson said, tak-ing the conversation back
from his father and peering over at Dean. "See, I'm not used to seeing men
trav-eling with two such fine pieces of ass. Three if you count the boy "
Jackson was interrupted by a loud snort from Con-stantinople, who found this
last statement to be utterly hilarious. A double-nostril load of the pale
brown cof-fee sub exploded through the large man's nose and onto his plate of
grits and stew.
"And I was wanting to know where I could buy myself some. Traveling leg, coose
on the loose, a walking, talking velvet snap-trap you know what I mean."
"Brother, there isn't enough money in all of Deathlands," Mildred said. "You
keep looking, though, hon. You might find yourself a real relationship,
in-stead of the one you've got going on right now with your hand."
Mildred's statement amused Constantinople even more. "Who's the banshee?" he
managed to ask be-tween snorts as he tried to catch his breath from laughing
so hard and exhaling the coffee sub.
The big man was pointing at Jak. Ryan could see the albino's muscles tense
across
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_39_-_Watersleep the table, but the youth kept quiet.
"I'd say he was one of those frigging vampires I heard about down along
Louisiana way, but when I last looked, it was still daylight outside. He some
kind of fucking mutie or what?" Constantinople asked.
"Or what," Jak spat, sliding one of his small leaf-shaped throwing knives from
the secure hiding place along the underside of his left forearm. "Chill your
fat ass quick."
Ryan gave the teenager a warning look. The ruby-eyed albino gave a barely
perceptible nod and again fell silent.
So did the obese man, who chose to have another large swallow of his coffee
brew.
Jackson did the replying for him: "That's a lot of double-big talk from a
scrawny pecker like you, whitey. I think you're some kind of spook. Yeah, some
kind of ghost who walks and talks, but ain't real friendly, eh? Freaking
horrorshow."
"Ease up, boy," Green said sharply. "Let these folk be."
"Better listen to your daddy. We're not looking for trouble," Ryan said,
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keeping his tone deceptively easy, like the initial rumbling of a storm in the
dis-tance before the first signs of chem clouds began to creep across the
skyline. "No muties here, just hun-gry folks like yourselves. We just want to
pay our tab and get back on the road."
"Well, what's your big hurry?" Jackson asked in a snide voice.
Ryan decided he'd had enough mouth. "Trying to get away from pricks like you.
To be honest with you, pretty boy, I don't need the aggravation."
"Ryan," Krysty warned from his right. The timbre of the one word said it all.
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The one-eyed man had the ability to read a situa-tion, although his own gifts
weren't the result of mu-tation, as was the case with Krysty. In his years of
roaming Deathlands, encountering the good and the bad in people from all walks
of life, Ryan had become a keen observer of human nature. Not universal
na-ture, although he understood quite a bit about what drove a person to act
in a manner to injure his fellow, but more of a face-to-face understanding of
what a man would do under the right circumstances.
Mildred would have termed it an ability to read body language. Others might
have said Ryan pos-sessed a sixth sense: observation and comprehension; the
manner in how a person spoke, whether the tone was tinged with even the
slightest hint of menace or friendship; the posture of his back and how he
held his body; even the way his eyes cut back and forth all of this could
offer the crucial tip Ryan needed in knowing how to play a situation.
One bad guess or false move could mean a crip-pling wound, a loss of limb and
property and, more often than not, instant death from the barrel of a blaster
or the blade of a knife. Ryan Cawdor enjoyed being alive. From time to time,
he liked to tell himself he was getting pretty damned good at staying that
way.
The Green boy was trouble handlebar mustache, fancy duds, dyed hair and all.
Some burst of testos-terone had flooded his brain. Now the conversation had
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