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“And so what is it we are now doing with this tough man?” Anna wanted to know.
I shook my head. “We’ll talk to him. Find out what he knows. If he knows anything.”
“You think this Bud fella might be having a skite?”
I looked at Nicky. His brow was knotted together. He was clearly looking for all the angles and not sure what they might look like if he saw them.
Every now and then Nicky forgets what country he’s in. Or maybe he figures Australian is, or should be, universal speech, like Esperanto. Whatever it was, he would slide out some strange turn of speech and expect me to answer him.
“What does that mean?”
He looked at me, blinked. “Eh?”
“What’s a skite?”
“Aw, come on.”
“That’s not American. It’s not even English.”
“Pull the other one.”
“Really.”
“You’re having me on.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Having a skite, you know. It’s, it’s… Look,” he finally said. “Here’s the thing. Do you trust this Bud fella?”
It was odd, but I hadn’t really thought about that yet. I thought I knew what he wanted. He wanted to keep his position in the River community, but even more he wanted to see this thing stopped. He couldn’t stop it himself, and he couldn’t rat out anybody, but he couldn’t allow it to go on without changing his picture of who he was, changing it in a big bad way. If I could take care of it for him, that would be all right with him.
“Yeah,” I said. “I trust him. At least as far as getting the guy there tomorrow night, and not setting us up to get whacked on the head.”
“Oh. All right,” Nicky said, and from the way he said it I knew he had been worried more about getting ripped off for the hundred bucks than he had been about getting killed.
We drove the rest of the way back to the motel in silence. I think Nicky was starting to realize what he was into. It was no longer truth, justice and the American way. It had turned into something very real and very scary.
At the motel, Nicky went into his room and turned the TV on and started making telephone calls. I don’t know who he talked to. He had his whole New Age support network. I’d never met most of them. Judging from the one or two I had met, that was a blessing.
I kicked my shoes off and lay back on the bed, trying to figure out how to keep us all safe tomorrow night.
I had to watch three backs. For that matter, the fronts weren’t all that secure. Nicky didn’t have a clue how to handle anything we might run into. He still thought carrying a gun was protection.
As for Anna, I couldn’t be sure what she knew. She had escaped from an inhuman war zone. She had seen things and gone through things that put her outside my experience. Maybe she was being quiet because she realized what we might be facing. And maybe she just didn’t have anything to say.
A lot could go wrong tomorrow night. There were too many variables, too many different ways it could turn sour. Somebody who’s talking to you for money can’t be trusted. Sometimes they figure out they can get more money by playing double. And sometimes they figure they’re so tough they’ll just take your money for nothing, or lever more cash out of you, or—
The silence got a little deeper and I looked up. Anna had closed and locked the interconnecting door between Nicky’s room and ours.
She was standing with one hand on the door, watching me. As I looked she turned her head away quickly and ran one hand through her short blond hair. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen her look nervous, unsure of herself. Like so many very physical people she almost always had a strong sense of confidence.
That was gone now, and she looked strange without it. She met my eyes again and took one step towards me. “Billy—” she said with a small catch in her voice.
I sat up.
She took another step towards me.
“Billy,” she said again. She half-raised a hand. It was shaking. She stepped to the bed on unsteady feet. The hand went to her throat and toyed with a button on her shirt. She tried to say something else but it wouldn’t come out.
