Wild Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

winked. "You hear too much, sis."
    "I hear Sandy cry at night. She wouldn't if you stayed here more."
    He nodded slowly. "Sis, these are hard times. I wish the exotic game work would pay a man enough to marry and settle, but it won't. I make more money as a deputy in a week than I do in a month with Jess Marrow. Do you know what a federal deputy marshal does?"
    "Manhunter." It was a flat accusation from a nine-year-old, and it hurt. Even if Childe attached very few demerits to the idea.
    Grudging it: "Sometimes, yes. Before you were born, this wasn't Wild Country—not this wild, anyhow. A lot of Americans suffer today because of smuggled drugs, poorly refined fuel, and diseased animals coming across the border. Somebody has to stop it."
    He saw only polite interest in the girl's gaze. To her, these problems seemed very far away. He rarely opened old wounds, but this was a special case. "I had a friend named Kent Ethridge once. One of the finest gymnasts this country ever had." He stopped, turned to Sandy. "Can she handle this?"
    "I think so," Sandy replied.
    Quantrill faced the memory, gnawing his lip as he proceeded. "Kent Ethridge and I were—manhunters for a bad government. We hated it. Ethridge began to spend his time off with drugs, stuff that made him forget what he was. The stuff is terribly expensive; that's bad enough. But it did terrible things to his mind and his body, too." He saw Childe nod solemnly, considered explaining the terror of knowing that your mastoid implant could be detonated by pitiless masters; decided against it. "Ethridge was a hero in the rebellion, and became an agent for our new government."
    "This gov'ment? The good one?"
    "Good as we deserve, as usual. We thought Ethridge had cleaned himself up, didn't use drugs anymore; but maybe you never get entirely cured. Anyway, he stopped a shipment of heavy sh—drugs, and he didn't turn it all in." A silence. "I guess he decided then there was no way he could get straight. So he took the best way out that he knew."
    "I don't get it."
    "He took a massive overdose," Quantrill said softly. "When they found him in his apartment, he'd been dead for a week."
    Childe knew about that . "Yuck." she said, wrinkling her nose.
    "I had to identify him. and yuck is right. I know it was partly his own fault, but Ethridge didn't start the drug smuggling. He just got caught in it. It turns good men into bad ones."
    "And you hunt those bad men?"
    "Sometimes. Now then: Mexico could help stop it, but too many bad men pay mordidas , bribes, to their government."
    A moment's confusion. "Is a bribe more like a peso or a dollar?"
    "More like a million dollars in good money."
    "That's not good money," Childe said, going directly to the heart of the matter.
    "Money is just money to most people, hon," Sandy put in. "I know that Ted's job is important. But it is also very, very dangerous, and he has done it long enough. He doesn't think so. and that." she said gently, placing a hand on Quantrill's while she spoke to her sister, "is why we argue."
    "Our money's good," said Childe. "and Ba'al won't mind if you come live here." Then, through her shyness: "Me neither."
    "I know that, sis," he sighed. "But this little spread of yours won't pay for new dresses or fencewire. Maybe when I've saved some money—"
    "We're doing all right," Sandy said, cautious lest she say too much.
    "So I noticed. Beats me how you do it," he said.
    "What if I won a pile at roulette over in Faro—or something?"
    "I'd want to hear all about it." he grinned. Sandy had visited the gambling hells of Faro, the synthetic Old West sin city of Wild Country Safari, exactly once, and she'd gone with a pass.
    Now Sandy improvised on dangerous ground. "Maybe I wouldn't tell you. You don't know everything; maybe I do things you don't know about. Maybe you just have to take me as I am."
    "That was what I had in mind," he said slyly.
    Childe reached for another praline, got the lightest of slaps over her spindly