Robert Ferrigno - Sins of the Assassin

“Where…where are my manners,” gasped the Colonel. He half bowed. “Baby…may I…may I present John Moseby. Mr. Moseby, may I present my wife, Baby.”

Baby grinned, stuck out her hand, her gaze amused and coquettish. “Mr. Moseby,” she said, sliding her hand into his, “you better close your mouth before a big ol’ horsefly lands on your tongue.”

Shit. Rakkim saw the cop car hidden in the shadows just as he pulled into the parking lot behind the Piggly Wiggly Diner, the car up against a storage shed where it couldn’t be seen from the road. Too late now. Worst thing to do would be to leave without going inside. Cops were probably inside with a camera remote just waiting for suspicious behavior.

“What’s wrong?” said Leo, attuned now to any change in Rakkim’s demeanor.

Rakkim drove past a row of haphazardly parked trucks and vans, finally backed into a spot beside a four-by-four diesel with an armored grill and a winch on the back. A barbecue pit smoldered off to one side, the night air heavy with slow-roasting flesh. A huge emergency generator rested under the kitchen. Sun-bleached yellow paint peeled off the back of the diner. Bird shit streaked the walls and windows from dive-bombing crows, crusty under the parking lot fluorescents.

“What’s-”

Rakkim backhanded him.

Leo squealed, clutched at his cheek, eyes brimming with tears. “Why did you hit me?”

“How do you feel? Angry? Humiliated?” Leo swung on him but Rakkim easily deflected the blow, not taking his eyes off the parking lot. “Helpless? Yeah, that the one eating you up right now? That’s what it’s like to be an Ident.” He grabbed the kid’s chin, turned his head. The handprint was still fiery. “These little cafés always use Idents for the scut work. They see you walk in, after you got your leash tugged, they’re going to know what that feels like. We may be able to use their sympathy.” He stepped out of the car, boots crunching on the gravel. “There’s local cops inside too. So mind your manners.”

Leo stayed put. “Cops…?”

Rakkim snapped his fingers. “Now.” He saw the dishwasher peeking out through the slatted windows of the kitchen as Leo scurried out. Leo kept one step behind him as Rakkim walked around to the front, putting on a serious limp, hitching himself forward like a crab.

A grinning terra-cotta pig in bright red trousers stood on its hind legs in front of the diner. Rakkim patted its snout for good luck, the paint worn away from thousands of others who had done the exact same thing. All the people filing into churches and mosques, hoping to curry favor with God…Rakkim figured he might as well pat the pig and hope that the heavenly reservoir of good luck still had a few drops left for a thirsty man.

“Sweet Home Alabama” blared from the sound system as Rakkim threw open the front door and stepped inside. Seemed like half the diners and honky-tonks in the Belt had that old song on permanent rotation. Sarah said that during the early days of the Civil War, “Sweet Home Alabama” had been the battle song for the Belt troops. After the armistice there had been talk of making it the official national anthem, but representatives from the other Southern states had balked, and in the end, “Onward Christian Soldiers” had won out. Rakkim would have voted for “Sweet Home Alabama.”

The scanner inside the front door beeped, cycling. The clerk seated behind the glass of the gun-check room didn’t even look up, busy with his handheld game. Shotguns, assault rifles, and pistols stood stacked and tagged behind him. Rakkim waited. The Fedayeen knife against his forearm was entirely nonmetallic, and didn’t register even on scans designed to pick up graphite-composite weapons. The inner door beeped. Swung open.

Rakkim nodded at the flag over the bar, his hand flopping over his heart. Nothing too showy. Shadow warriors on their first mission in the Belt sometimes overdid the patriotism thing. Dangerous mistake. Belt folk loved God and country, loved them so much it was second nature, easy as breathing. Flag wavers drew attention to themselves. The booths were filled, hunters and truckers and college boys. No sign of the cops. The customers craned their necks at the Mudbowl XXXVI rerun on the wallscreen. Good screen too, the image more crisp than anything commercially available in the republic. No wonder the diner drew a crowd, even at this hour of the night. On-screen, young women raced four-by-four buggies, studded wheels spinning rooster tails of mud fifty feet in the air, covering the barely clad contestants in a sheath of muck.

The woman pouring coffee at the counter nodded at Rakkim, indicated a couple of spots. She had mugs of coffee waiting for both of them as they sat down. Rakkim pushed his aside, ordered a strawberry malt, heavy on the malt. The request tumbled out of his mouth like somebody else was talking.

The Mudbowl camera zoomed in on a filthy blonde whose buggy went airborne over a jump, her hair flying as her feet left the pegs, her body horizontal for a full five seconds.

“I’d eat that three ways from Sunday,” said the hunter beside Rakkim, tall guy with a grimy camouflage jacket, jabbing a thumb at the screen.

“Amen,” said his buddy.

The guys in the booths cheered. Before the tit-for-tat in the ionosphere between Russia and China made the point moot, the republic blacked out all foreign satellite images. Couldn’t blame the religious authorities-half-naked women riding around full-throttle like they owned the world…people could get ideas. Rakkim leaned forward. The filthy blonde was Tanya Tyson, three-time motocross champion from Baton Rouge-every underground club in Seattle had satellite descramblers to pull in forbidden programming, but all that space junk had shut down the global Net, and no one was willing to say how long it would be before things settled down. Rakkim wondered what the Blue Moon and the other clubs would do to keep the customers happy.

Eagleton would have figured a way to filter out the chaff from the transmissions. Worst body odor in the Zone, a real curl-your-nostril-hairs stink, but the guy had vision. Until al-Faisal killed him, Eagleton had sold the best Swiss and Malayan black-tech out of that hole-in-the-wall shop of his, zero-grav tech that he tweaked even further. Rakkim still wondered what Eagleton had put together for al-Faisal-it must have been major, so important that al-Faisal couldn’t trust him to live. State Security was certain that al-Faisal was dead, blown to chunks rather than allowing himself to be captured. He and the device he had picked up from Eagleton. Rakkim would have liked to believe that…another reason he wasn’t convinced.

The president of the Belt came on-screen, and somebody immediately turned the sound down. Laughter rolled from the booths as the new president jabbered away, a slick young politician with a mop of carefully tousled hair and too many teeth.

“That grinny-Gus done nothing but sell us out since the day he got elected,” said a fat man with a straw hat pushed back on his forehead.

“He weren’t elected,” said his buddy. “Never met nobody yet who voted for him.”

“Brazilians own his ass,” said the fat man. “How you think they got logging rights on the Carolina state forest?”

Somebody switched the station and the crowd cheered.

The waitress set a strawberry malt in front of Rakkim, the clear glass glistening with condensation. “Got five kinds of barbecue and breakfast’s served twenty-four/seven,” she said, pointing to the LED menu embedded in the counter. The cigarette tucked in the corner of her mouth bobbed with every word. Melissa McQ was stitched onto the left pocket of her uniform in fraying red thread. She noticed Leo’s Ident collar. Noticed the handprint on his cheek too, but didn’t say anything.