Carla Petersen looked solemn. "I heard he blamed you for it. Thought it was part of a plot. Riddler spoke for you. He said it couldn't have been arranged, that you didn't even know about the run. Mote was all for taking action."

"Action?" Krysty asked.

"Lining you up for a feeding."

Ryan nodded. "You got a good weapon, you'd be a stupe not to use it. One thing puzzles me, Carla. How did Mote get this snake cult started?"

"Nobody really knows. Or remembers. There'd always been big snakes out in the brush, toward the foothills, but nothing the size of Azrael and the rest. The Motes came out of the desert in a couple of wags. One of the wags was enormous, and some folks say it held straw and was like a kind of cage inside."

"You mean the Motes brought those rattlers with them?" Krysty's voice betrayed her shock and disbelief.

"That's what people say. But these days they say it quiet behind closed doors and shuttered windows. Edgar's brother was one who said it aloud. Never found even a bone of him."

"Nice," Ryan muttered. "Real nice."

"And they brought this worshiping and chilling with them as well?"

Carla glanced around, as though she thought she'd heard a sound in one of the dimly lit alleys behind her. "That's about the breadth of it, Krysty. Like I said before, step careful." With that advice Carla left them to visit with J.B.

The sun had vanished, and night came across the land in a shifting, sideways, skulking run, dragging its black cloak in the dust behind it.

Ryan and Krysty decided that they'd leave a recce of the Sierra Sunrise Park to some other time.

Chapter Twenty-Three

J.B. had begged some clean, dry rags from Ruby Rainer, explaining that he wanted to do some cleaning. She'd also supplied him with a white enamel bowl that was half-filled with steaming water. He'd carefully drawn the curtains shut across his second-floor back room, sliding the bolt in the center of the heavy oak door.

The Armorer always made it a policy to try to fieldstrip and clean all of his weapons at least once a day. In the Deathlands that wasn't always possible. But here in Snakefish he had everything that he needed to perform the task.

He was whistling quietly to himself as he began — an old hymn tune that dated right back to the shadowed days of his childhood. "The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended." If asked, J.B. probably wouldn't even have realized he was whistling any time at all.

This evening he decided to check out the contents of his voluminous pockets: the plas-ex, detonators and wires; the sextant and the garotte; and the grens — the scarlet-and-blue implode and the slightly smaller frag-gren with the flip-top firing.

He fisted the Tekna knife, feeling the dark metal hilt with the holes cut for lightness and grip, admiring the honed steel blade with the jagged sawing part, nearest the grip. J.B. held the blade to the lamp, turning it to catch the reflection, rubbing with one of the pieces of cotton waste to remove a barely visible smear.

As he concentrated harder, the whistling ceased and the room was quiet. He caught the noise of one of the Last Heroes thundering past the Rentaroom, but he ignored it.

Once the knife was cleansed, and a fine film of oil applied to it from a small screw-top container in one of his pockets, J.B. began to work on his blasters.

Time slipped by. Outside his room the sun dipped below the horizon and the streetlights came on. With a sigh the small man stood, stretching his arms above his head. He moved aside the corner of the flowered curtain and watched his two friends, close together, strolling through the dusk.

The ritual went on.

All the parts clicked, one from another, and were laid on the bed, on the cloths, in their ordered positions. Springs, catches and gleaming muzzles. J.B. started to whistle once again. Happiness wasn't a concept that preyed much on the mind of John Barrymore Dix from Cripple Creek, but if he'd thought about it, times like this would have been equated with happiness.

His strong, capable fingers rubbed, oiled and cleaned, sliding the various machined parts of the Heckler & Koch MP-7 SD-8 together. It was warm in the room, and the steam from the bowl of water began to condense on his spectacles, fogging them. J.B. took the glasses off and began to wipe at them with a corner of one of Mrs. Rainer's old bed sheets.

The knock on the door of his room was soft and hesitant.

J.B. didn't reply. He drew the knife and stuck it into his belt. Hefting the automatic rifle from the bed, he moved, light-footed, to flatten himself against the wall by the door.

The knock was repeated.

He still kept silent.

"John? John Dix? You in there? It's me. It's Carla."

His expression unchanged, almost, the Armorer threw the blaster on the bed and slid back the bolt on the door.

"Come in."

"You're a careful man, John Dix," she said as she walked across the threshold. He closed the door behind her and locked it again.

"I try to be."

"And you succeed. I saw Ryan and Krysty out walking a few minutes ago."

"Yeah."

There was an awkward silence.

The room wasn't large — around ten feet by ten feet. A small pie-crust table with a broken leg was at the head of the bed; a bureau with three drawers stood alongside the window, next to another small chest with a water jug and bowl on top of it. The carpet was faded and worn near the door. The only attempt at any kind of decoration was an attractive watercolor painting on the side wall, showing some trees and an expanse of grass.

There was also an armchair in a patched, loose cover. J.B.'s jacket was flung over the back of the chair; his stripped handblaster covered the bedspread.

He looked at the woman. Carla was dressed much as she'd been at the morning service in the snake temple: polished boots, trim skirt, crisp white blouse fastened at the neck with a sapphire clip. A jacket of dark brown corduroy had been draped over her shoulders against the night air.

"Well," she said, trying to defuse the sudden tension that she felt between them. "Looks like you're busy."

"Busy?"

"The blaster." She gestured toward the bed.

"Oh, yeah. Cleaning it... them. Cleaning them while I got the chance."

He was aware that Carla was still standing uncomfortably by the locked door, her arms folded defensively across her chest.

"You want to sit down? I mean, I'll clear off some space for you. The chair or the bed? Which would you?.."

"Sure. Bed'd be fine, John. Can I give you a hand to move anything?"

"No!" he answered sharply. "Sorry, Carla. Just that I don't like..."

"Anyone to touch your blasters," she finished, smiling at him. "I should have guessed, John. You go ahead."

His hands were almost a blur of movement as he reassembled the Steyr pistol, slotting the parts together in a series of soft, greased clicks, whipping away the stained rags with the flourish of a magician performing his greatest trick.

"There," he said, patting the bed. "Sit down, Carla. Can I ask Mrs. Rainer to bring you up anything?"

She sat down primly, crossing her legs with a whisper of rustling sound. "Thanks, John. If Ruby brought me anything it'd probably be cyanide."

J.B. laughed and sat down at the far end of the bed, licking his lips and blinking behind his glasses. It seemed odd to him how the room had become so very much smaller in the past few minutes, and how the bowl of hot water had made the bedroom feel uncomfortably humid. He ran his finger around the inside of his shirt collar.

"Want me to open a window, Carla?" he asked. "Seems kind of stuffy."

"That would be nice, John."

He stood and slipped the catch across, levering the top half of the casement upward a few inches, which brought a breath of cool evening air into the room. Before he could turn around, J.B. felt the woman's hand touch his shoulder, her breath against his neck. Suddenly she was in his arms, and the soft caress of her lips was against his. After a split second's shock, he found himself responding to her warmth.