Valentine watched the valley until darkness made it impossible, then admired the stars and planets. He hadn't seen them so bright since he'd been at sea in the Caribbean.
The memories that evoked turned him sour and gloomy. He slipped out of the cactus thatch - his old Wolf habit of changing positions after darkness was so deeply ingrained he did it even if it was only a shift of twenty feet or so - and listened. A distant coyote howled in the valley. Others took up the chorus, but none called from the mountains he and Hornbreed rested against.
Too uneasy to really sleep, he dozed, sitting cross-legged with his rifle against his lap, small of his back pressed up against a sun-heated rock. The air had turned cold with astonishing speed, a desert feature he was still getting used to... The moon came up, so bright it looked as though an artist had painted it on the sky with radium.
He heard Hornbreed come out of the cacti, mumble something about pinching a deuce. Valentine saw him move off into the bushes, heard him stumble, curse, right himself.
Seemingly moments later, Valentine came fully awake, though he couldn't say why. How long had it been since Hornbreed had stepped behind the bushes?
"Hornbreed?" he said quietly. He raised the gun to his shoulder and came up to one knee.
"Hornbreed?" Louder this time.
The bushes didn't answer.
Valentine touched the sword at his back, tested the slide of the blade in its sheath.
"Hornbreed!" Valentine said, coming up to a crouch.
He advanced, well clear of the bushes.
No sign of the pilot. A white packet shone in the moonlight. Hornbreed had picked a sandy spot for easier burial. Valentine studied Hornbreed's footprints, placed in the expected position to either side of his - well, with a mule deer it would be called "spoor". The white packet was a little cardboard-banded issue of "field hygiene paper" courtesy of High Sierra Paper Products.
No body. No sign of the Jaguars. And no Reaper.
Strange divots stood out in the sand here and there, like little craters. Near-perfect circles. If they were tracks, only an unusually hard-stepping big cat like a mountain lion would make them. But there were no drag marks away from the bootheels and TP.
Ten thousand dollars in gold - and more importantly, a key to the mercenary pilots of Pyp's Flying Circus - had been spirited away without a sound or a cry of distress.
Valentine felt a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the Arizona night. It occurred to him that he'd been meaning to ask Hornbreed why they called him milkman.
Something glittered in the night a few feet away. Valentine knelt, saw loose coins scattered in the rocks and sand. Valentine picked one up, a "five-dollar" piece marked AZT-CON. He'd seen them before, in plastic Baggies holding Texas Quisling prisoners' possessions. He'd been told the coin was good over much of the Southwest and northern Mexico.
Valentine guessed that Hornbreed, literally taken with his pants down, had lost whatever change was rattling around in his pants. At least now he could guess in which direction the mysterious tracks went.
The lack of blood gave him some hope.
As he followed the tracks there were other signs - the creature must have been of some size, at least that of a small tractor. It had snapped off cactus stems in several spots over two meters apart.
It also left an odor, vaguely musty and yet ammoniacal. He traced the source of the smell, an object that looked a little like a hollow-reed thorn, in a vaguely green brown polished-turtle-shell color. Some sticky material coated one end, and Valentine hazarded a guess that it was a quill or spine.
Had a giant Arizona porcupine made off with Hornbreed?
The trail led up into the mountains. The mystery of the Jaguar leader's imprecations against hanging about the wreck had been explained. Anything big enough to approach and then make off with a sizable man in silence was a foe to be feared.
The musty-ammonia smell grew stronger, and Valentine realized that the dark of the mountainside had a darker spot. A cave opening, shaped like one of the little lateen sails he'd seen on fishing boats in the Caribbean. Valentine looked around, got his bearings, and listened to the cave mouth. A bat fluttered somewhere above.
A metallic clang sounded from the cave mouth and Valentine went flat, his senses sparking like a downed line. Valentine heard low snorts and growls and watched three Grogs emerge from the cave, heavy sacks across their shoulders. They waited, standing back-to-back, and Valentine felt a fresh chill. A Reaper emerged from the shadows, carrying a long staff that made the robed figure a scarecrow caricature of a desert prophet. It hissed at the Grogs and followed them on a westward-leading path.
The sensible thing to do would be to hotfoot it back to the convoy, leave these mountains crawling with assorted enemies, and let fate have its way with the fatalistic Hornbreed. Duvalier, had she been
with him this trip, would no doubt be resting in some hidey-hole with a good view of the interstate, waiting for the roar of truck engines and the rumble of tires.
But dammit, he needed Hornbreed - and the promised reward, provided Flying Circus would be willing to negotiate, not amount, but kind. He slipped off his backpack, extracting a small, tough flashlight with a clip that allowed him to hang it on a pocket or attach it to the underside of his gun. Something in him had to know. He fixed the light to his carbine, coaxing himself into making the attempt by getting his gear ready. If he squatted here much longer, he'd freeze up and come up with more reasons not to try it...
Valentine stepped into the ammonia smell.
A big metal locker, whose door was the source of the clanging sound, he guessed, stood just inside the cave. Electrical cable ran down the top of the cave and into it. The locker was fixed by a simple bolt. Valentine drew it back and opened the locker, smelling Grog sweat.