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Everready went on: "Don't look like that. Just one ol' hound's opinion. If I knew what I was talking about I'd have some hardware on my collar and be giving orders, right?"
"Let's see about breakfast."
"I'll check the crawfish traps. Better use the big pot. That Grog can eat."
Valentine waited to open his eyes until he felt the tip of Duvalier's boot. "You can wake up Ahn-Kha," she said. "When he stretches in the morning his gas drops the birds."
* * * *
Everready's cache showed his usual craftiness. He kept medical supplies, preserved food, and weapons in several spots between the Yazoo and the Mississippi; the problem was keeping the gear away from scavengers. Humans could use tools and animals could smell food through almost any obstacle. In the Coldwater Creek cache he had solved the problem by burying his supplies behind a house and then placing a wheelless, stripped pickup body over it.
Ahn-Kha stood watch in a high pine while they excavated the cache.
"The engine block's still in this so she's a heavy SOB," Everready explained, retrieving a wire-cored rope from the house's chimney. The rope he fixed to the trailer hitch. Then he tied his Reaper-robe top around the base of a tree, looped the rope around it, and fixed it.
"Here you go, young lady," he said, handing the line to Duvalier.
She hardly had to lean as she applied a transverse pull to the center of the rope. The truck pivoted a few feet, exposing some of the dirt and a few hardy creepers beneath the pickup bed. Everready tightened it again and she slid the pickup body another meter toward the tree.
"Why the material around the tree?" Valentine asked.
Everready checked under the dashboard on the passenger side and then pulled out a folding shovel with a gloved hand. "So the bark doesn't strip. You'd be surprised how clever some scavengers are."
The heavy-duty garbage bags within had further items wrapped up inside them: a few guns thick with protective grease, boxes of ammunition, a large box of red pepper-ideal for throwing off tracking dogs-and a pair of shin-top-high camouflage-pattern boots.
"You and I have about the same size foot, I think," Everready said as Valentine grabbed up the snakeproof boots like a miner spotting a golden nugget. "There are some good socks rolled up in that coffee tin. An extra pair should make up the difference." Valentine smiled when he looked in the tin. It also contained a half-dozen old "lifetime" batteries with a logo of a lightning-bolt-like cat jumping through a red circle. Everready liked to leave the twelve-volt calling cards in the mouths of his kills.
He brought up a cardboard box full of a dozen familiar blue tins.
"Spam?" Valentine asked.
"Naw. This was part of a larger shipment going to the resistance farther east. I took a small expeditor's fee for getting the pony train there. There's plastic explosive inside the cans, you just got to pop the lid-there's even a layer of pork at the top." He passed up another bag. "Three kinds of detonators. One looks like a wind-up alarm clock, one's in this watch but you have to hook it to the batteries in this flashlight, and the others are straight fuses made to look like shoelaces, while the detonators are made to look like nine-volt batteries. Your armorers are clever."
Everready unrolled a chamois and handed a 9mm Beretta up to Duvalier. "This is a nice little gun, young lady."
"I'll take that Mossberg twelve-gauge," she said, pointing at a cluster of long guns. "Folding stock. Dreamy."
"Don't you think you'll stand out a bit in Memphis?"
"Not after I rope it up inside my coat."
"Your duster's going to look strange in this heat," Valentine said.
"Not if I'm mostly naked under it."
"Hope you're not looking for trouble in Memphis. Hard to get into. Harder to get out of. Valentine, since you're going to be posing as a reel looking to add a few new faces to his line, you'll want something with a little flash. I took this off a wandering guitar man in a swap meet card game."
He picked up a sizeable clear plastic food-storage container and broke the seal. A long, silver-barreled automatic pistol rested inside with a shoulder holster and spare magazines. The gun was nickel-plated and would reflect light from miles away-no wonder Everready stuck it in a hole. "You don't mind .22, do you?"
"For this kind of job I'd prefer it. It's quiet."
"Only took you four years and some to add that word to your vocabulary," Duvalier observed.
"And what else?" Everready said in his old talking-with-milk-chinned-young-Wolves tone.
"It's light so you can carry a lot, and it's a nice varmint round for when you get hungry."
"Exacto! Now let's get you a longarm. Where did I put that sumbitch?" He rooted through the guns and found a zipped-up case. "Here we are."
