No Man's Land. James Axler

chance to slip.

      “I mean, what’s a man supposed to feel in his position? His own son and heir left to bleed out like a strung-up hog by those bitches from that gang of coldhearts the patrol trolled in last night. Be enough to break the heart of a cee-ment statue.”

      Erl started to shake his head. Then he chuckled—as the keen straight edge began to scrape at the dark-and-light bristles that sprouted overnight on his considerable jowls. Triple-stupe move I almost made there, he thought.

      “Before he let us all finally go the hell to bed last night—this morning, more like—he was offering the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who ran them coldheart fuckers down and dragged them back. Dead or alive. Not gonna happen. They’ve hightailed it all the way to the Red River by now. Along with thirty head of prize cavalry mounts.”

      “Interesting,” a voice said by his ear.

      Erl felt his brows crease in a scowl. It wasn’t like Watkuns to comment on things his master said. It wasn’t his place.

      Then it hit him: the soft, sibilant hiss wasn’t anything like his long-time servant’s half-simp drawl, either.

      Erl’s eyes flew open. The face close to his was as narrow and hard as a bowie blade and had a yellow cast to it. There was a shiny black patch over one eye, and a hint of fine scales at the edges of the lean jaw and around the eyes, and colorless, almost invisibly thin lips. It was as unlike Watkuns’s saggy old face as night from day.

      The big man went rigid with terror. His hands gripped the arms of his comfy chair fit to pop the tendons. For a moment his mind went white in sheer panic. A stranger with a razor to his neck!

      Then he relaxed. He recognized the stoneheart he himself had hired a week or two back to transact certain...business for him.

      “What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you mutie bastard!” Erl yelled, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to startle the man, to call him that, as a body probably oughtn’t, taint that he was.

      The thin lips smiled. “Ease your mind, Mr. Kendry,” he said. “I just wanted to report the successful completion of my mission. And receive my payment due, of course.”

      He continued to shave Big Erl’s cheek with a steadier hand and smoother motion than his servant managed after almost two decades’ practice.

      “But—Watkuns—my servant...”

      “Don’t worry,” Snake Eye said.

      That was the chiller’s name. Erl remembered it now. A notorious man. A man who always fulfilled a contract.

      That was why Erl hired him. That old sag-bellied bastard Earnie had a way of slipping out of the tightest places. For various reasons connected to his important position in the community Erl couldn’t act against his former partner directly. And none of the men he’d paid to chill Earnie before had come through. Erl reckoned the bastard had bought them off.

      “I persuaded your servant to let me take his place this morning,” the assassin went on, as easily as if he was discussing a fair day’s weather.

      Erl scowled deeper. He was going to need to have words with Watkuns over this. More than just words, mebbe.

      “Tell me about it,” he said, anger and residual fear making his voice husky.

      Snake Eye briefly tipped his head in what Erl took for a form of shrug. The chiller had on a black hat and a white shirt with a black velvet vest over it. He and the clothes smelled clean, not of days, if not weeks, of accumulated sweat. That was an unusual thing in itself, and Erl chastised himself for not noticing the man who shaved him smelled differently than his servant before now.

      “He was in the shop he ran,” Snake Eye said. “Cowering in the basement. Not that I blamed him overmuch. Both your army and your opponents were busy shelling the stuffing out of the place. I found him there. He tried to buy me off. I reminded him of my invariant policy and dealt with him accordingly.”

      Erl had to restrain himself forcibly from nodding in eager satisfaction. “Ace!” he exclaimed.

      “And now,” the mercie said, “there’s the issue of my compensation. Don’t get up—just direct me to where I may find my payment for successful completion of my contract.”

      “In the lockbox by the foot of my cot,” Erl said, rolling his eyes toward the objects in question. “There’s a velvet pouch. Royal blue.”

      “Tasteful,” Snake Eye said with a nod.

      “It’s right on top, now,” Erl said. “Don’t go grubbing around in there.”

      “Tut tut, Mr. Kendry. Surely you don’t mean to impugn my professionalism.”

      The yellowish, dry-backed hand paused briefly with the razor edge close to Erl’s mostly shaved right cheek. Erl’s blood cooled down many degrees in a hurry.

      “No,” he admitted, “I surely don’t.”

      Inwardly he seethed. I don’t care what it costs me, he thought. I’ll make this mutie bastard pay for this! I’ll have his scaly yellow hide stripped off and have him kept alive to watch it made into a pair of boots!

      “I thought not.” Snake Eye resumed his expert shaving. “I charge premium prices for my services. And as you know, I am most exact in delivering them. As indeed I have.”

      “Yeah” was all Erl could manage to say to that.

      “There is one thing, Mr. Kendry.”

      The coldheart finished shaving Erl’s right side and moved with silky smoothness to the left. Now that he wasn’t mimicking Watkuns’s lame-legged gait he made no more noise than the thoughts in his servant’s narrow hairless skull.

      “Before his demise, Earnie told a most diverting story,” Snake Eye said. “A tale of a hidden underground bunker filled with marvelous treasure. Old-days tech, abundant and beyond compare. A trove he and a certain erstwhile partner stumbled across in their younger, more...congenial days.”

      Erl’s mind was still stumbling around the word erstwhile when the import of the rest of the mutie’s statement hit him. He went dead still. If his blood had gone cold before, it was a wonder it didn’t freeze solid enough to break.

      “Now, circumstances prevented him—and you—from exploiting your discovery, he said,” Snake Eye continued. “Then or later. But he attempted to use its location to buy his life.”

      “Well,” Erl said weakly, “isn’t just that cowardly, greasy old weasel all over?”

      The blade had moved down to Erl’s neck. “He failed, of course. When he wouldn’t divulge the actual location, I went ahead and finished the job.

      “But he’d said too much. They always do.”

      “He was weak,” Erl said, none too strongly himself. “He was always weak. That’s why he tried to get me chilled, in the bushwhacking that cost me my son! My boy. Poor Fank.”

      He felt his eyes fill with tears. His vision blurred. Not solely out of grief.

      The edge of the razor tapped against his Adam’s apple. “But you know the whereabouts of the entrance to this wondrous store of scabbie,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t you, Mr. Kendry?”

      Erl’s main reaction to that was actually outrage; he felt momentary pride in the fact.

      “You—you’re trying to put the arm on me!” he sputtered. “After all this fine talk about professionalism! It was all a bushel of bullshit.”

      “Not at all, Mr. Kendry,” the chiller said calmly. “You see, before he died, Earnie also offered me a contract.”

      Tap-tap against Erl’s throat. He felt his eyes go wide.

      “Against me?”

      “Who else? I told him