Valentine would have happily bought the lives, had he or his column had anything the brigands would accept.
"Payment is you just hand over your collection without going in the bag with them. My Old Man likes keeping brimful on aura when traveling, and they're not particular."
"He's bluffin' , " someone called from behind Valentine.
Valentine whirled. "Kiss my ring and check it out. I don't mind."
A brass ring on its rightful wearer accumulated enough bio-electric charge to tingle when you touched your lips to it. Valentine found the sensation similar to licking a battery. His brass ring, fairly won in Seattle, was legitimate enough, and he usually kept it with some odds and ends in a little velvet bag along with a few favorite hand-painted mahjong pieces. Though he'd lost his taste for the game long ago, they still made useful tokens for sending messages to people who knew him. The only tarnish about the ring was the mark it had left on his conscience.
Valentine could tell the crew was impressed, even if Blitty Easy still looked suspicious.
"Or you want to test me some other way?" Valentine said, drawing his blade.
"Regular Sammy Rye, with that blade," Blitty Easy said.
"Steel without the talent to back it up's just so much butter knife," a man who smelled like cheap gin said, two younger versions of himself flanking him.
Valentine inflated his lungs and let out an unearthly wail. An imitation of a Reaper scream had worked once before, a dozen years ago, several hundred miles north in the hills of western Illinois. It might work here.
Movement and a bullet crack.
Valentine's reflexes moved ahead of his regrets.
The camp exploded into noise and motion, like a tray of ice cubes dumped into a fryer.
He knocked Sunday flat.
No rhyme or reason to the rest. The fat was in the fire and he had to move or burn. A hand near him reached for a chest holster to his right and he swung his sword and struck down in a sweeping blow. A shotgun came up and he jumped as it went off, spraying buckshot into the men behind him, turning one's cheek into red mist and white bone. A poacher put a banana-clipped assault rifle to his shoulder, and then his hair lifted as though an invisible brush had passed through it, and he went down, a thoughtful look on his face as he toppled.
Valentine rolled free, dropping his sword and reaching for the little submachine gun he'd carried across Kentucky twice as he ran out of the firelight. With a shake, the wire-frame folding stock snapped into place and he put it to his shoulder.
A bullet whizzed past, beating him into the night.
The poachers had pitched their tents in a little cluster, and he moved through them. A shaggy back with a bandolier-he planted a triangle of bullets in it between the shoulder blades, moving all the while, zigzagging like a man practicing the fox-trot in triple time.
Tent canvas erupted and Valentine felt hot buckshot pass just ahead.
Move-shoot, stop, and reload. Move-shoot, shoot; move-shoot, stop, and reload.
Blitty Easy's Crew was shooting at anything that moved, and Valentine was only one of several figures running through the night.
Turned out the twelve and then some could be taken without too much of a risk.
These weren't soldiers; they were brigands, used to preying on the weak. They popped their heads up like startled turkeys to see where the reports of the sniper fire came from and received a bullet from Dorian's rifle. Pairs of men moved together instead of covering each other-Valentine cut two down as they ran together toward the machine gun pointed impotently at the sky.
Valentine saw a figure with long hair running, dragging a child. Please, Dorian, don't get carried away.
There was only one headhunter Valentine wanted to be sure of. He wasn't that hard to find; he made noise like an elephant as he ran through the Kentucky briars and brambles.
Thick legs pumping like pistons, Easy made wide-spaced tracks for timber.
A brown-coated figure rose from the brush as he swept past. She executed a neat thrust under his shoulder blades.
The fleeing figure didn't seem to notice the quick poke. Blitty Easy pounded out three more steps and then pitched forward with a crash.
Duvalier kicked the corpse and then waded through the brush to Valentine, sniffing the beaver hat suspiciously as she passed.
"That was a good piece of killing," Duvalier said, wearing that old fierce grin that made Valentine wonder about her sanity. She lifted a coattail on one of the bodies and wiped off her sword.