“Yeah, I wanna see them pants!” the man beside him cried. “I’ll bite them—”
Coke whipped his shock rod across the bare buttocks of the four men directly before him.
The men screamed as they leaped convulsively into the wire. The cubicle swayed, but its steel-tube frame was strong enough to withstand the impacts. The men at either end of the cage, untouched by Coke’s quick sweep, looked around in surprise, all but one fellow crooning and drooling in his own private dreamworld.
The clerk turned. He bled from a score of fresh punctures and gashes scattered from forehead to mid-thigh. “You—” he shouted.
Coke flicked the clerk with the baton, this time on the lower belly just above his genitals. Flailing limbs hurled the clerk against Pilar’s cage a second time. The structure’s resilience threw him facedown on the floor. Coke stepped aside to let him fall.
A derelict raised the jagged top of a bottle. Coke held his right arm crooked to the side. His hand hovered over the butt of his holstered pistol. To draw, he would shift his hips left while his hand swept aside the tail of his jacket. He wasn’t Johann Vierziger, but it was a maneuver he’d made many times before….
“Try me,” he offered in a trembling voice.
The derelict dropped the bottle. He backed into the wall and pushed himself flat against it.
“All of you,” Coke said. “Out ahead of me.” He eased into an empty cubicle, permitting the men to pass without touching him. “Pilar, open your door and come out. It’s all right now.”
The clerk was whimpering. He paused on hands and knees to draw up his overalls.
“Did I tell you to do that?” Coke screamed. He lashed the clerk’s buttocks again, reaching from the cage to take a full swing with the shock baton. The whack! and blue spark flashed terror across the derelicts’ countenances.
“Go on! Move!”
The group shuffled and stumbled out, fettered as Coke intended by their dragging trousers; all but the wide-eyed fellow mumbling in his reverie about Maureen. Coke let him be.
Pilar came out of the cubicle. Her face was as still as that of a woman in shock, but her eyes moved febrilely.
“It’s all right,” Coke repeated. He touched Pilar’s shoulder to guide her down the aisle. “Ahead of me,” he said.
He walked in lock-step behind the woman, reaching past her with the shock baton. Someone groped from a cage despite the warning. The baton’s charge snapped him like the popper on a bullwhip into his cubicle’s walls.
The clerk and the gang behind him had shuffled to the counter at the front of the room. “Stop!” Coke ordered.
The men cringed as they obeyed. The features of most of them would have looked leprous even under better lighting than that of the glow-strips.
“Now,” Coke said. “Return the lady’s money.” In a gentler voice he added, “You paid fifty pesos?”
“Please God the money doesn’t matter!” Pilar said, clutching the crucifix beneath her cape.
“That’s not the point,” Coke said. “You bastards! Make it a hundred pesos. Now!”
“But I can’t,” the clerk wheezed. His tears diluted the line of blood trickling down his cheek from the gouge in his forehead. “I can’t get into the cashbox, only Master Delzine can open it!”
The box was a massive canister—too massive for a support structure as flimsy as the upper floors of this building—strapped beneath the counter. The inlet was a doubly-kinked tube with one-way gates, proof against any but the most sophisticated methods of drawing coins back along it. The clerk could hold out the clientele’s fees, if he wanted to risk the owner’s spot checks; but he couldn’t retrieve money once dropped into the box.
“All right,” Coke said. “Make it up yourselves. A hundred pesos.”
“The money doesn’t—” Pilar repeated.
“Shut up!” Coke snarled. “They’re paying for what they did. Or else they’ll do it again!”
The men squatted to rummage in their fallen trousers. Coke drew a figure-8 with his shock baton, touching the tip to cage supports on both sides of the motion. The sparks snapped loudly in the nervous silence.
Two of the men took off their shoes. The clerk, who’d found only ten pesos thus far, came up with an additional fifty-peso coin.
The money lay in a ragged pile between Pilar and the men. Coke couldn’t tell exactly how much there was; and anyway, the amount didn’t really matter, Pilar was right there, though the principle mattered.
“All right,” Coke ordered. “Head down to the street, all of you. Get going!”
He wasn’t going to leave any of this lot ten meters above him. Maybe none of them could throw straight, but all they needed to do was get lucky with one brick or bottle. They shambled and crab-walked out the doorway.
Pilar relaxed so completely that Coke was afraid she’d fainted. He caught her. Her body was warm and trembling.
“I’m all right,” she murmured, but it was a moment before she stepped forward. She bent, scooped the money into a pocket of her cape, and edged past the counter.
The men were partway down the staircase. The clerk had hiked up his overalls. When he saw Coke appear at the doorway above him, he dropped the garment again and hopped downward, holding the railing with both hands. The structure jounced violently. Several of the derelicts lost their footing. Half sliding, half stumbling, they made their way to the street.
Five steps up, Coke shut off the baton and slid it beneath his waistband again. When he moved, the men watching could see his holster, not that any of them had doubted it.
“I didn’t bring you here to shoot you,” Coke said in harsh, ringing tones. “But if I can see any of you thirty seconds from now, I will shoot him. Go!”
The clerk and derelicts stumbled into the traffic, pedestrians, and jitneys that had resumed when the syndicate cordons terminated at the mine blast. Coke took a deep breath. His knees wobbled. He held the rail firmly in his left hand as he followed Pilar down the remaining steps.
“You wouldn’t really shoot them, would you?” she asked.
“They’re gone,” Coke said, avoiding the question. “It doesn’t matter now.”
He massaged his left forearm with the fingers of his right hand. He’d been gripping the shock baton hard, harder than he’d realized until just now when he suddenly felt the ache.
“Look,” he said, “is your husband at home? I can take you there. Or we can get you a room in the Hathaway House; it seems to be a nice place. Like you said, a decent place.”
Pilar shook her head. “I’ll go home,” she said. “I’ll be all right, now.”
She looked toward her van. She noticed the heads of bums silhouetted against the unglazed windows. Coke offered his left arm to her right hand.
“No problem,” he said, whisking his tongue across the syllables like a blade over a whetstone. He walked beside Pilar toward the vehicle, flexing his left hand to be sure that it would obey his needs.
“Terry won’t be home,” the woman said stiffly. Her fingers lay in the crook of his elbow, light contact but warm nonetheless. “He’s found quite a number of friends here since he learned to shake the money tree.”
“He’s smuggling, you mean?” Coke said. His tone counterfeited the sort of polite interest that he thought was appropriate to the statement. Below the surface, his mind considered alternatives with the icy logic of a bridge player assessing his hand.
Pilar stopped. A sailor walking behind them cursed as she blocked his path. Coke drew his pistol and pointed it without a word. The sailor started back and jogged across the street.
Coke reholstered the weapon. “Sorry,” he murmured to Pilar.
“You work for the Confederacy?” she said tightly. She stood as though her feet had grown through the cracked pavement. “You’re investigating port duties?”
“Not us,” Coke said easily. “From what I’ve heard thus far, we’re out of business if the Marvelan Confederacy learns that we’re here.”