The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (14 page)

“So, no matter how I did that job, the result
was going to be the same?” Gieo asked.

“From what you told me about Yahweh showing
up at just the right time,” Fiona said, “I don’t think you were
supposed to get back out. Everything else though, was exactly what
Zeke wanted.”

“You think Zeke tipped off the cultists?”

“I think we have to assume this was something
he’s been planning for a long time.”

Gieo finally pulled herself from beneath the
hood. Her face was smudged with engine grease, her hands covered in
heavy leather gloves that fanned out around her forearms, and her
eyes were still covered with the green goggles, but she was easily
the most beautiful grease monkey Fiona had ever laid eyes on.

“What are the Lazy Ravens anyway?”

“A Vegas-based brothel…corporation for lack
of a better word,” Fiona said. “They’re part business, part crime
syndicate, part government.”

“That doesn’t sound like the influence Zeke
would want in Tombstone.”

“It isn’t, or, wasn’t, anyway. This concocted
nonsense with the cultists is far too elaborate to simply be a
cover for a change of heart, so I don’t really know why he bothered
with it.” Fiona finished off the last of her warm beer and set
aside the bottle. The setting sun had moved just enough to put a
backlight on Gieo, and she considered moving to keep her lovely
view. “I can only assume they’ve offered him something worth giving
up some power over or there’s something else going on that is
beyond my brain’s figuring capacity. It’s not dangerous that I know
what I know. Zeke can outthink me, no problem, but I’d imagine he
wouldn’t want you looking into it though.”

“You’re not stupid,” Gieo said, “not by a
long shot. So don’t sell yourself short. Besides, I can’t be that
bright if I was the patsy for a job you turned down.”

“Those two comments don’t fit together in a
flattering way from where I’m sitting,” Fiona said with a
smile.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it like that.” Gieo
set aside her wrench and pushed the goggles up away from her eyes.
“I’m feeling foolish and you’re looking damn clever from where I’m
standing.”

“Is that all I’m looking?” Fiona’s smile
passed from joking to coquettish in an alluring way Gieo could
distinctly remember from the gunfighter’s old modeling days. There
was a very specific picture, a cover shot from the summer
catalogue, which Gieo had carried with her in the clear, plastic
cover of her binder through her entire senior year of high school,
displaying that very smile; she loved the fact that it was
something natural to Fiona, and not a product of a photographer’s
direction.

“Actually, you’re looking hungry for
something that I might be able to…” The rest of Gieo’s comment was
cut short by the sound of Rawlins’ tow truck grinding its way
around the saloon to the back.

Beside the main winch, hugged to the truck’s
frame with a dozen or so bungee cords, was the skeletal remains of
the 1948 Indian Chief. Gieo couldn’t help but hop a little in
excitement.

Rawlins, who had begun to seem increasingly
agitated since Gieo’s arrival, slammed the truck door and stormed
to the back to unload the goal of Gieo’s blackmail scheme. It was a
difficult proposition that neither Fiona nor Gieo offered to help
with, and resulted in Rawlins barking his knuckles against the bike
or his truck no less than a dozen times, and squashing any number
of his limbs between the motorcycle and the railing nearly as many.
He leaned the old hulk of the bike against the side of Jackson’s
Wagoneer, and began the weary walk back to his truck without so
much as a word or glance directed at Gieo or Fiona.

“One more thing,” Gieo called after him,
stopping him dead in his tracks.

Rawlins looked angry, even from behind,
lifting his hands to plant them on his hips with an exasperated
sigh. “What now?”

“The collaring thing bugs you,” Gieo said.
“Are you mad because you want to wear Fiona’s collar, or you’d want
her to wear yours?”

The audacious temerity of it aside, Fiona
thought the question was just about the funniest damn thing she’d
ever heard. Moreover, Rawlins’ slow, or absent really, response,
left both gunfighter and pilot to wonder if it really was the
former.

“Fuck you,” Rawlins growled.

“Answer her question,” Fiona said.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Rawlins
finally turned, leveling his gaze directly on Fiona.

“Why do you think?”

Rawlins didn’t bother answering the question
or waiting for one to his. He stormed back to the truck, got in,
slammed the door, and tore away from the scene in a spray of dust
and gravel. When the cloud of his departure slowly drifted away on
the breeze, Gieo and Fiona were left to giggle at what they could
only assume was his admittance to wishing for a collar of his own
from the gunfighter.

“Seriously though,” Fiona said when her
laughter subsided, “what do you want that old thing for?”

“Ah, an astute question from an eager student
of science.” Gieo winked at her and tapped the Wagoneer with the
socket wrench she’d lifted from her toolbox. “The power plant in
Jackson’s old ride is from a Slark hover thingy. You know, the ones
they used before they figured out how good human snipers were? It’s
too small to really do much for this monstrosity, but it’ll be
perfect for a motorcycle, especially after I reclaim another one of
our forgotten technologies.”

“Which technology is that?”

“Internal combustion!” Gieo hopped off the
footstool she’d been using to get into the Wagoneer’s engine
compartment and knelt on the dusty ground in front of Fiona’s feet.
She drew out a hasty diagram of a piston and cylinder in the sand
with the handle of the socket wrench. “Basically, an internal
combustion engine just harnesses the chemical kinetic energy of gas
expansion, usually a small explosion, and transfers it to
mechanical energy. The Slark engines use a similar technology, but
work with torsion, like a jet engine. I’m going to combine what
they know, with what we know, and make an engine that is
steam-powered internal combustion powering a torsion turbine.
Creating an ember that will flash-vaporize water using Slark fuel
should make the engine 82% more efficient than anything on the
planet. Think of it as a Harley-Davidson crossed with a steam
engine made possible by Slark hardware and fuel.”

“What about the boiler experiment with
Mitch’s Kodiak?”

“Complete failure, well, moderate failure
anyway,” Gieo grumbled. “On dirigibles the ship became light enough
to haul the extra weight by using the heated air to help float it.
The truck has no such capacity, and thus drives at about a snail’s
pace at peak efficiency. Call it a mathematically sound, but
ultimately not physically viable plan. It’ll have to wait until I
get the new engine type perfected, which means I need to get back
to work.” Gieo hopped up and walked back to the Wagoneer. “I’m
sorry; this must all be really boring.”

Fiona leaned back against the saloon wall,
her eyes wandering up the pilot’s legs as she tucked her upper body
under the hood again. “Not in the slightest.”

Chapter 10:
The Ravens have
landed!

Fiona awoke
with a realization kicking her in the head from the fading dream
world she was leaving. She’d heard of people sorting out complex
problems in their sleep to awaken with the answer, but she hadn’t
actually experienced it until that morning. The payment, the thing
Zeke was giving over to the cultists for the singing protests in
the streets, was the precise thing he was claiming he would not
give them now. Fiona’s instincts had been right all along. He’d set
up Gieo to be caught so the cultists could have their female
villain to burn. Zeke could have asked any of the hunters to do the
job, but he’d come to her first and then sought out Gieo when Fiona
turned him down. No wonder Yahweh was so agitated, and Fiona’s
pummeling of him in the street couldn’t have helped.

The urge to kill Zeke was nearly
overwhelming. One saving grace of being a practiced hunter was the
ability to assess and weigh a situation; she couldn’t beat Zeke in
a fair fight and there was no way he would ever enter into a fair
fight anyway. He was a thinker and she was a reactionary. No matter
how fast she was, and she was damn fast, he would always be yards
ahead of her because he knew how to plan and she only knew how to
have fast hands.

She would need Gieo to plan, to think, to
figure out why Zeke was conspiring with the cultists, to discover
what trump card Yahweh might have, and for…other things as well.
Regardless of what Zeke threatened or said, Fiona had a bad feeling
about Steve Olsen. The man was a high quality moron with a drinking
problem, cowardly tendencies, and a history of terrible judgment;
moreover, Yahweh most likely saw it as a debt unpaid and would be
looking for someone to finish paying it since Zeke clearly wasn’t
going to. Steve had thought enough of the idea to give Gieo over to
the cultists to say it out loud in public, and there was no telling
what he might try. Fiona made up her mind. She needed to kill Steve
Olsen somewhere people would see her do it.

Fiona was dressed and ready by the time Gieo
came down from the roof to meet her for breakfast. The pilot had
somewhat gleaned what Fiona was doing when she was working beneath
the hood of the Wagoneer, and started wearing revealing clothing on
her lower half when she worked on the motorcycle, which was all the
time. The current day’s ensemble included skintight black leather
pants that Fiona had never seen the pilot wear. She was also
wearing the spiked leather collar, which she hadn’t taken off once
that Fiona had seen since it had been buckled around her neck.

“Hey, ready for cold mush and runny eggs?”
Gieo asked with a little hop in her step.

“After.” Fiona brushed passed her, gently
grazing her hand over the pilot’s exposed shoulders to feel
something pleasant before an unpleasant task. Gieo fell in behind
her, a little perplexed, but not overly so as cryptic was something
Fiona excelled at.

“Is this going to be a long enough ‘after’
that I should go work on the bike a little before we eat?” Gieo
asked as they descended the stairs.

“No, I don’t imagine it’ll take that
long.”

The saloon bustled with a breakfast rush as
it had the past few days. Hunters had found their way into the mix
as most still couldn’t get their cars out of town without mowing
down cultists to do so. The cultists started cycling their members,
which thinned the ranks some, but still only allowed a few hunters
from the outskirts to escape every day. The word was the lucky few
to get to the desert were having a rough time with the Slark now
that the numbers weren’t even; a few hunters hadn’t come back the
day before, likely outnumbered and overwhelmed by
would-be-prey.

Fiona scanned the crowd for Steve Olsen’s
trash bag coat. It wasn’t really fair to call it that. She knew it
was a rain slicker of some kind, but the black plastic looked
exactly like a garbage bag to her. When she finally found him at a
table of hunters, she shouted above the raucous din of
conversation, “Steve Olsen, you and I have business outside.” The
room fell dead silent.

“This doesn’t have to happen,” Steve
objected. “Zeke told me how it was, and I’m fine with the
explanation.”

“I say it does.”

“What has to happen?” Gieo whispered to
Fiona.

He couldn’t back down and save face, not now,
not in front of so many others like them. She’d laid out a
challenge on fertile grounds for insult, and his reputation
depended upon accepting. What’s more, she could see in his face he
was scared of her, and everyone could see on her face, the feeling
wasn’t mutual.

She began to get the adrenaline tingles in
her fingers, ache in her stomach, and the pounding in her chest as
her heart worked overtime to supply the fight response with blood
enough to carry out the kill. Her senses sharpened as her brain
sought to give her an edge by blocking out all but the most crucial
information. Steve walked for the door; Fiona followed. Everyone in
the room, save Gieo, knew what was about to happen, and they all
gathered to watch the fight unfold.