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Zeal knew the only thing with explosive potential over by the gaudies was
Trader's captured convoy. "Let's go!" he shouted at the driver as he piled
into the back seat.
The baron's personal transportation was a passionate pink
1997 Lincoln Towncar, with side and rear window glass replaced with one-inch
tempered steel plate. The front windshield was likewise protected, except for
the driver's ob slit. Armored skirts covered all the wheel wells, defending
the tires from everything but rocket attack and cannon fire. What with all the
added weight it carried, the Towncar was a sluggish performer on the uphill
climb to the big house.
But this trip was all in the other direction. The Lincoln fairly roared down
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into the heart of Virtue Lake.
When Zeal jumped from the wag, he was immediately surrounded by a phalanx of
sec men with their weapons drawn.
He roughly shoved them to one side and stepped forward so he could view the
damage. He saw at once that one of the small war wags had exploded, taking
with it the transport parked alongside. The combined blast effect was
devastating.
Ground zero had been the middle of the mini-mall parking lot, which was now
marked by a huge, smoking crater. Ninety feet away, two of the storefronts
were completely demolished, turned into nothing more than heaps of smoldering
debris. All the other facades were scorched and windowless. There were human
bodies and body parts strewed far and wide.
"What the hell happened here?" Zeal demanded.
No one dared answer.
Then Levi Shabazz stepped up beside him. "Trader must've mined his fucking
wags. One of my drivers probably touched this off by accident."
Zeal looked at the captured vehicles that surrounded them, and his eyes
suddenly went wide.
"You mean they're all mined?"
"Most likely."
"Can't we deactivate them?"
"Mebbe," Shabazz said. "Mebbe not. Trader's no triple stupe.
He's got to have five backups for every detonator we find. And it only takes
one to make things go boom."
Zeal turned to his sec men. "I want everyone cleared out of this area at once.
Everyone! I want an armed perimeter set up around the gaudies. Rope off the
whole area. No one is to enter without my permission. If anyone tries, chill
them. No warning shots. Aim to kill. Do you understand?"
Heads nodded.
Before Shabazz could slip away with the others, Zeal grabbed hold of his
shirtfront and pulled him up until they were almost chest to chest. "This
doesn't make me happy," he said.
The baron's mascara had badly smeared, blurring on his eyelids, turning the
sockets into black pits. The lipstick on his mouth had likewise spread far and
wide, and the makeup on his cheeks and chin had dried out and begun to flake.
In other words, he was a perfect fright to behold.
"This doesn't make me happy, at all," he repeated. "Why the hell did you bring
Trader's wags into my ville if you thought they might be boobied?"
"I didn't think that," Shabazz said. "Who would? I mean, he's riding in the
goddamn things himself. Got to be out of his mind to run a booby-trapped
convoy on these roads."
"I'd say Trader knew exactly what he was doing," Zeal replied.
"Now that we have his wags, we can't move them a foot, let alone use them to
reach our objective. If they all blow, it could level the whole town. The way
things stand now, my gaudies are out of business. No telling what it took to
set off the first blast. Mebbe a goddamn sneeze. I can't have drunks and
jolt-heads wandering around a fleet of live bombs. I'm going to have some real
trouble if the gaudies don't come online in short order. That's how I keep my
work force happy."
"You could always set them up someplace else, till we get this straightened
out."
"Line the mattresses up in the street? Serve the white lightning from the
curb? Somehow it doesn't seem quite the same to me. The only thing we can do
is make Trader disarm the mines."
"You don't make a man like Trader do anything," Shabazz said. "He's going to
want something in return. Something big."
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"Like?"
"Like his freedom. Mebbe all his wags back. He's the one down in the shithole,
and the fucker still has us by the short hairs."
Beneath the peeling makeup, Zeal's face darkened. "Mebbe not. Mebbe he doesn't
know what he really wants until we show it to him. Come on, let's take a
ride."
The two got into the Lincoln and, at the baron's direction, headed for the
jail with three sec wags in close pursuit. The entourage stopped alongside the
Trader's cell. Zeal and Shabazz got out and looked into the barred pit.
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