Crimson Waters by James Axler Read Free Book Online

toward the corner, where JaNene Fish and her fake fish tail were busy at work. He was nursing his third beer, a dark, bitter ale. Ryan actually found it pretty good.
    One of the scuts McDugus Fish referred to had swept sawdust over a spilled beer, then swept the mess up, dumped it in an old paint can and thrown fresh sawdust from a pail in its place. Evidently there was a mill somewhere on the island. And evidently either the Syndicate or the joint’s owner—who Ryan guessed was from one of the Syndicate families—or Fish himself were serious about keeping the place shipshape.
    “Here, now,” he heard J.B. call. “You look like a man who could use a drink.”
    A man had slipped in through the door with the air of a man who knew, from experience or observation, that lingering in a doorway too long just made you a good target. He didn’t look the coldheart part. He was middle height, with his chest kind of sunken over a significant paunch, dressed in a faded flowery shirt open over a grimy T-shirt, khaki shorts held up by a length of nylon line, and sandals cut from old tires. His hair hung like a curtain around the sides and back of a high domed head, with a few brown strands brushed across it. His face would’ve been homely even if it wasn’t a mass of random lumps, almost as if he’d fallen foul of a whole hive of yellow jackets.
    His eyes darted left and right before dead-centering on J.B. “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.
    “Sure, mister,” J.B. said. “Come on over. We’ll buy you whatever you’re drinking.”
    The man ran a yellowish tongue over thin lips. “I—I ain’t registered, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m, uh, clean, and all. But I better not—”
    “You got us wrong,” Ryan said. He had J.B. looking for likely prospects to pump for information with minimum cost, particularly in terms of suspicions raised, which was something they could afford little of in a place like this. “We’re new in the ville. We’re just looking for the angles.”
    “Oh. Well. That’s different.”
    He hooked a chair from a table nearby, where a pair of villainous-looking fat women with two good eyes and about five teeth between them sat murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were so absorbed in gazing into each other’s eyes they never looked around when the chair legs went scraping away across the sawdust-covered planks.
    “I’m Lumpy,” the man said, seating himself between Ryan and J.B. “From the lumps, you see? Just so you know, I ain’t a mutie or anything. They’re parasites.”
    And he grinned around at everyone with a mouthful of uneven teeth in varying shades of brown, as if announcing he’d just won the trophy for having the biggest dick in NuTuga.
    “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mutie,” he added hastily. He was looking at Jak, who scowled.
    Ryan carefully didn’t look at Krysty, who was a mutie.
    “I mean, to some there is, to some there ain’t,” Lumpy said. “Syndics won’t have any taints here in the ’Tuga, of course. The crews love to jolly ’em up too much, you know what I mean? Bad for order. But over to Monster Island, now, muties and norms live side by side like there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.”
    “Monster Island?” Mildred asked. “Where’s that?”
    Lumpy frowned for a moment. He scratched idly at a particularly prominent lump on the right side of his jaw. It seemed to Ryan that something like a hair whipped back and forth from it before zipping back inside.
    A trick of the light, he told himself. He hoped so.
    “Why,” the disfigured man said, brightening, “took me a moment. You folks really aren’t from this part of the Carib, are you? Monster Island is Puerto Rico, is all.”
    “That’s the only reason they call it that, my good man?” Doc asked. “From the admittedly rare case of normal humans and mutants living together in harmony?”
    “Well, that,” Lumpy said, transferring his dirty-nailed attentions to the