FORTY

Moving along with the pedestrian flow, Mason was still trying to decide how best to discover the capabilities of a Taser when he felt a tug on the back of his shirt.

“Mister!”

He twisted, glimpsing a waist-high child moving to hide on the other side of him. He felt contact on his rear.

Mason growled and twisted again. This time, because of the patch on his eye, he lost sight of the child. So he swung violently, raking his hands across the air. His fingers made solid contact, and he was able to grab the child’s shoulders. He pulled the child in front of him, where he could see.

A girl. Giggling. “Mister, you’re fast.”

“Go away,” Mason said. He pushed the girl backward. He glanced at the passersby, to see if they were going to interfere. They averted their eyes.

“Mister,” she said, smiling. Her face was streaked with tattoo lines. She pushed strands of hair away from her forehead. Her hair might have been blond, but it was too dirty to be certain. She was in bare feet. “I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes.”

“Bet what?” Mason snorted. She might have been six years old, if that. What would she have of value?

Then he snorted again. At himself. That simple question had trapped him. Now he was in a conversation.

“What do you want to bet?” the girl asked.

“Not interested,” he said.

“How about this?” The girl flashed a paper note. Looked new. Looked like one of the bills Everett had given him, Mason thought. He slapped his back pocket. Empty. He kept most of the money inside his shirt but had placed a bill there so, when he needed some, he wouldn’t have to pull out an entire roll.

“How about you give it back to me,” Mason said. “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”

“My name’s Thirsty,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Nothing as stupid as Thirsty,” Mason said. “I want that money back. Now.”

The girl danced backward, frailty making her light on her feet. “Come on, mister. Bet I can tell you where you got your shoes. I’m wrong, you get this back.”

“It’s mine. I don’t need to win a bet to keep it.”

“Afraid I might know the answer?”

Mason took pride in his boots. They were the only thing remaining from his life in Appalachia. Black soft boots that were as comfortable as socks. First thing he’d done at Abe’s was rework and polish the leather to make them supple again after time in the river. No way the girl could guess he’d taken them from a fugitive he’d been forced to shoot in the back.

“You don’t know the answer,” he said, realizing he’d made another mistake by dropping the issue of the ownership of the money. But the girl was unafraid enough to be of some amusement value.

“We got a bet? Ready for me to tell you where you got your boots?”

Mason sighed. “It’s a bet.”

He stuck his hand out to win back his own money.

“Where you got your boots,” the girl began, then paused and grinned, “is right on the ground where you’re standing. Yup, you got your boots on the ground.”

“Very funny,” Mason said. He made a flicking motion with his hand. “Give it back.”

The girl giggled again and ran, darting between a couple of shanties.

Mason took a step in that direction, irritated. “Come back!”

“Don’t do it,” a soft female voice advised from the other direction.

Mason glanced over to identify the source. He’d missed her. She was sitting, cross-legged, just off the wide path, well below his eye level. The constant flow of people had obscured her.

“You listening?” The woman’s head was tilted slightly. She had long dark hair, brushed back. Her face wasn’t conventionally pretty, but seemed pleasant enough beneath the webbing of tattoos. “You hear me?”

“’Course, I’m listening,” Mason snapped. “I’m looking right at you.”

“Well, don’t chase her,” she said. “She’s looking to get you off the main path. If you go back in those shanties, about ten of them will drop on you. They’ll take anything you have of value and then kill and dismember you so that no one will ever know how and where you disappeared.”

Mason didn’t think about women much, not in the way he knew most men hungered for them. He wasn’t wired that way and didn’t care. His own hungers were more difficult to satisfy.

But he wasn’t blind to a woman’s physical attributes either. In Appalachia, women wore modest clothing. Always. This one, web of blue tattoos across her face, sitting cross-legged with a loose skirt, had on some kind of deeply plunging V-neck shirt, and she seemed careless about the exposure.

Mason moved closer, feeling a slight sense of shame for the view that his vantage gave him.

“You still there?” she asked, head tilted.

“’Course I am,” he said. “Right in front of you. You blind or something?”

Her chin dropped in a few inches of shame, and the silence was enough of an answer.

Then he saw a bowl beside her. With a few scattered coins in it.

Mason wanted to kick dirt. This was exactly why he avoided conversations. His life as a bounty hunter consisted of listening to lies or confessions or telling people what to do. Or better yet, uttering threats. He didn’t have much practice with conversation.

“Look,” he said. That led to another moment of awkward silence, this time on his part. He’d just told a blind person to look.

He started over. “It’s like this. I’ve got only one eye myself.” When he’d had two eyes, one always wandered and gave people the creeps, but he wasn’t going to admit that. “I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

She turned her face upward, and he noticed her eyes were creamy white.

“You sound like a nice man,” she said. “It’s all right. And I can tell you’re not from here.”

“How can you know that? You’re…” Mason let his voice trail off, embarrassed again that he couldn’t manage this conversation.

“Blind. I know. But Thirsty, she don’t try leading anybody back among the shanties unless they’re strangers. You don’t have a tattoo face mask either, do you? She wouldn’t have tried if you were one of us.”

“No,” Mason said. “I’m here looking for someone. They’re supposed to be at the Meltdown. I see smoke. I figure that’s where I need to go.”

“It’s a long ways,” she said. “You’ll need to pay attention as you go.”

“Don’t worry,” Mason said. “I’m good at paying attention.”

Especially right now. Given the V-neck on her dress, he couldn’t help his wandering eye from doing a lot of wandering. Most of the time, when he’d actually been with women, they hadn’t been too willing, but circumstances as a bounty hunter gave him a large degree of latitude in how he took his pleasure with them. Other times, much more rare, the women had been far too willing, drawn to Mason because of his reputation.

Here, there was something about the combination of the woman’s sadness and vulnerability that quickened his heartbeat. But he couldn’t take her like he’d taken others, and she wasn’t directly offering either. He didn’t know how to handle this.

“You seem like a nice man,” she said. “And I’m an excellent judge of character.” She pulled her bowl onto her lap, and it sagged into the material of her loose skirt. Mason had a flash of imaginary vision of lithe legs hidden.

“I’m not asking,” she said in a quiet voice, “but if you could spare a little for the trouble I saved you, I’d be grateful. I’m hungry. Real hungry.”

The words came out of Mason’s mouth before he fully understood what he was saying. “Are you lonely some too?”