Free Wild Country by Dean Ing

idea."
    "Oh. ' Woh-h-h jata !' Just wogtalk, or was in my grandfather's day. It means 'There he goes,' more or less."
    "Well, woh jata for Tony Plass, too." said Jess Marrow, now slightly drunk on his favorite vice, Old Sunny Brook. "Every boar in his prime thinks he is Ba'al."
    Quantrill had done more listening than talking, but now he spoke quickly to divert the topic. "Lieutenant, I don't know what you heard out there, but it might be… um. kinder to Placidas's girl if we pretended he didn't have any last words."
    "Girl! My lad, Marianne Placidas is only a girl the way Horatio was only an infantryman," Wardrop said, draining his glass in salute. "Waaagh, this whiskey—well, sorry. My arse is tough, but my palate is rather tender. As I was saying.
    Marianne can be very, very hard cheese. And I did lend a mount for the old gentleman's madness. The fault was mine," he said.
    "Hope you won't mind sayin' that to my foreman," Hutch put in.
    "My pleasure," Wardrop said, and reached for the bottle with something like mortal resignation.
    Hutch heard the high-pitched snarl first, turning his head toward the window. Quantrill was first out of his chair. "Christ," he said, "it sounds like one of the little Spits."
    But it was not one of the half-scale Spitfire aircraft from LockLever's Battle of Britain complex. It was a gasoline-powered Ocelot roadster, shrilling its turbocharged challenge to anything else on wheels. Useless as an off-road vehicle, on macadam the Ocelot's racing tires could hurl it faster than many light aircraft.
    "That will be Marianne," said Wardrop. He stood up, straightened his shoulders and his hunting jacket, then strode outside to meet his fate.
    The others watched from inside. Marianne Placidas was a surprise to them all, older than they had expected and beautiful without much femininity. Her helmeted dark curls and scarlet neckerchief, her graceful motions, all reminded Quantrill cruelly of the long-dead Marbrye Sanger. She exited the little roadster, whirled back to retrieve a stained overnight bag, recognized Wardrop, spoke quickly with him. Then something in his response snapped her erect posture, and she sought Wardrop's shoulder for a time. More talk; Wardrop gestured toward the ranch clinic and followed her sprint into the place. She did not relinquish her heavy bag.
    "Handsome pair," said Quantrill.
    "Oh shut up, Ted," snapped Marrow, who had been thinking exactly the same thing.
    Quantrill strolled out to look over the Ocelot, a limited-production toy favored by the shuttle set. He noted the metallic plum paint job, the suede seats, the spatters of mud around the enclosed wheel wells, the sand in the driver's footwell. Marianne Placidas had finally been contacted somewhere north of Wild Country Safari; and the nearest source of mud or wet sand in that direction was the Llano River, which meandered past Junction. He pondered the unlikely notion of such a shuttle-setter as Marianne Placidas tooling her Ocelot along a riverbed, then turned away from the car and the question. The motives of the spoiled rich were not his province—or so he thought.
    Quantrill, Marrow, and Hutch returned to the lodge and watched without shame from a window as a succession of LockLever people converged on the clinic. Hunt-party waivers gave the company protection against lawsuits, but Wild Country Safari did not need the anger of a Placidas heiress.
    Two glasses of Old Sunny Brook later, the woman emerged from the clinic with Wardrop in tow, the ranch manager at her left. To the manager she was abrupt. To Wardrop she streamed vitriol, slapping his arm aside as he attempted to carry her heavy bag. Again Quantrill was struck by the small anomaly: the scuffed, mud-stained bag was not the sort of accessory such a woman would carry. Why hadn't she left it in the roadster?
    The answer—that the contents of that bag, retrieved from a Llano sandbank, could have bought several new Ocelot roadsters—never crossed Quantrill's