Dark Goddess. James Axler

what?”

      “He’s already got her, so why does he want to bargain with you for her? What does he need you for? It’s the Cerberus armory he wants, not her…unless he thinks having two bargaining chips is better than one.”

      “That possibility occurred to me,” Kane admitted. “He was pretty disappointed when we came to him yesterday bearing no gifts, particularly of the lethal kind.”

      “I got that. But I don’t think you can trust this son of a bitch to do a simple exchange, Brigid for blasters. You may have to—”

      “I hope you’re not trying to prepare me for the possibility that she’s already dead,” Kane interrupted.

      “Now that you’ve brought it up,” Grant said, “what if she is? This guy reps out as a stone-cold murderer, not a businessman.”

      “If she is,” Kane intoned flatly, “then all the more reason for me to be in Billy-boy’s company. If she has so much as bruise on a leg, he is most definitely a dead man.”

      “And what about you?” Grant argued. “You’re waltzing in there unarmed and even if you manage to get close enough to kill the bastard, there’s no way we can extract you before you’re killed, too.”

      Before Kane could formulate a response, he heard the grinding of an engine.

      He turned toward the south and saw a red Jeep emerge from a copse of royal palm trees. The chassis was painted a bright cherry red with the illustration of a shocking pink porpoise emblazoned on the hood. The vehicle rolled smoothly on oversize beach tires across the expanse of searing sand where it met with the surf line.

      The driver was a tall man who looked half Viking and half pirate. His long white blond hair was tied back in a foxtail, a sharp contrast to the deep bronzed tan of his naked torso. A black eye patch embroidered with the outline of a pink dolphin covered his right eye. Sunlight winked from the three-inch gold ring piercing the lobe of his left ear.

      The man’s single eye glinted with cobalt brightness, and his hands on the steering wheel were very big and powerful. As the Jeep drew closer to Kane, he flashed a taunting grin. His teeth gleamed startlingly white in his bronzed face.

      A young woman sat beside him, her eyes the deep amber of a Siamese cat’s, slanted, cold and dangerous. They looked at Kane with contempt. Her hair was a thick glossy black, cascading in loose waves over her bare shoulders. Little-girl bangs hung in feathery arcs, inky against the white of her forehead. Her eyelids and sullen mouth were heavily rouged, and the bright red blossom of a flower made a splash of color in her raven’s-wing hair.

      The woman’s full breasts strained against the tight confines of her slate-gray bikini top. The cloth was almost the same color as the S&W Airweight .38-caliber revolver she aimed at him around the frame of the windshield. Kane had been introduced to the man and girl the previous day. Their names were Shaster and Orchid.

      “Here’s my ride,” Kane murmured.

      “Acknowledged,” Grant replied. “Standing by.”

      Shaster braked the Jeep a few yards away and sat with the engine idling. He stared at Kane and Kane stared back.

      After a few seconds, the tanned man challenged, “Well?”

      “Well what?”

      “Are you trying to see how long it will take to pass out from heatstroke? Don’t you have a breakfast sit-down scheduled with B.B.?”

      “You tell me,” Kane retorted.

      “You do,” Orchid snapped petulantly, gesturing with the short barrel of the revolver. “Get your ass over here.”

      Kane’s mouth quirked in a smile. “Don’t you want to frisk me, sweetheart?”

      Shaster glanced toward the girl. “Don’t you, Orchid?”

      She shook her head impatiently. “Maybe later. Right now it’s too goddamn hot. Besides, you were told to come unarmed, just like yesterday, right?”

      The half smile disappeared from Kane’s mouth. “Right.”

      “Good enough for me,” Shaster said. “Climb aboard, muchacho, so we can get back to the pool and the piña coladas.”

      Swallowing a sigh, Kane crossed the stretch of scalding-hot sand, feeling the heat even through the soles of his boots. Orchid slid into the backseat, affording him a glimpse of her well-molded backside and the pink porpoise tattooed at the center of her back.

      “Billy-boy really believes in this brand-recognition thing,” Kane commented as he climbed in on the passenger side. “Even on his hired help.”

      He felt the cold tip of the pistol press against the back of his neck. “Shut the fuck up, sec man,” Orchid said, voice sibilant with spite.

      Kane felt his shoulders stiffening at the epithet, then he forced himself to relax. “Sec man” was an obsolete term dating back to preunification days when self-styled barons formed their own private armies to safeguard their territories. It was still applied to Magistrates in hinterlands beyond the villes, so Kane figured Orchid was either a former Roamer or a Farer. Roamers were basically marauders, undisciplined bandit gangs who paid lip service to defying the ville governments as a justification for their depredations.

      Farers, on the other hand, were nomads, a loosely knit conglomeration of wanderers, scavengers and self-styled salvage experts and traders. Their territory was the Midwest, so Farer presence in and around Florida was a little unusual. Regardless, Magistrates were feared and despised all over the Outlands by Roamer and Farer alike.

      Shaster turned the Jeep and drove up the beach, the coarse sand flying from beneath the knobby tire treads in a double cresting of rooster tails. After a quarter of a mile, he turned off onto a bumpy asphalt road that led directly to a glass-walled toll booth. Within it sat a man wearing swim trunks and a gold chain about his neck, but little else.

      He saluted Shaster with the barrel of a shotgun as the Jeep rolled past. The vehicle followed a narrow lane stretching over a moat filled with brackish water and flowering hyacinths. The canal Kane had been forced to swim less than eight hours before fed the moat.

      The lane curved into a community of pale pink stucco houses with red-tiled roofs. Palm trees sprouted from the small lawns. The houses faced a beach that sloped gently toward the waters of the gulf. White-winged gulls wheeled over the shoreline. A number of boats floated on the brilliant blue sea, and although most of them looked like fishing vessels, Kane knew a number of them were disguised fast-attack craft. The bows of several boats bore the outline of leaping pink porpoises.

      The beachfront marina was one great open market, just like the intel had indicated. Shops and stalls were brightly painted, the vendors selling the wares looted from other coastal communities by Billy-boy’s fleet. People from all over the region mingled with the tanned locals who came to trade, exchanging valuable items like drugs for guns or artifacts dredged up from the Gulf coast’s plentiful supply of submerged ruins.

      Shaster steered the Jeep through an open gate in a five-foot-high whitewashed wall. Bracketing both sides of the gate, painted in pink on the surface on the wall, was a pair of sporting dolphins. A deeply bronzed blond man, stripped to the waist and cradling a lever-action 30.06 rifle in his arms, pursed his lips at Kane, blowing him a kiss as the vehicle drove into the compound.

      Shaster cast Kane a sly grin. “Lucas is checking you out.”

      “I noticed,” Kane grunted.

      “He didn’t get the chance to formally meet you last night.”

      “That’s a shame,” Kane replied blandly.

      Brigid Baptiste had described the Porpoise compound as the model of an exclusive beachfront estate—it had been built as such more than two centuries earlier, when land development was the chief economic force on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

      Kane had been less interested