Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (2 page)

“Even when they got red hair. I hate red hair.”

I always liked to think of it as auburn, but I decided not to argue with him again. He still had hold of my throat; I reached for the last front-of-the-car pistol anyway.

“Too bad you’re old and got red hair.” He let go of my neck and walked away. I had my fingers on the gun but waited. If he came back, I’d shoot him.

They let the hugger take a spare cell and one hydropack— take them where? And did he have a weapon hidden somewhere in those green rags?— loaded everything else into one of their cars and took off again, leaving the old crazy standing beside the road. Did they expect him to catch another fool that day? Not likely anyone else would come along. I hoped they rode out of the quarry and fed him once in a while. He was still singing. “…And no religion, too…”

Helluva headache. My throat hurt and my wrist burned. As the guffaws of the bandits receded, so did my pain and nausea; I tried to shrug it all off and turn my attention to the business at hand. Grabbing the gun, I pushed open the car door and stumbled, head pounding, to where the hugger stood, shoving his share of the booty into his bag. He had stopped singing, intent on his work, lips pursed. He glanced up at me.

“Nice new gun you’ve got there. Trade you back your stuff for a ride.” His eyes shifted nervously between my gun and the quarry where his friends were no doubt already tossing back the 100-proof.

“Give me the cell and put the pack in my car.” He did as he was told. I slid the spare into the fuel-slot, while he dropped the hydropack in back and slammed the lid. Then he hoisted his foul-smelling sack over his shoulder and started to open the passenger side door.

“Take me to California. Dreamin’.” This guy seemed to be celebrating the centennial of the Summer of Love— a year early.

“Not going that far, green-man,” I lied, hoping he’d come up with a destination more like 25 miles into Nebraska.

“You have flowers in your hair.” I didn’t, but I was sure he saw some there. I waited. “Okay,” he said finally, “Maybe another time.” He turned and started walking toward the quarry, singing something about an American Pie.

Chapter Two

So much for Lady Macbeth

The summer landscape changed, gradually, from rolling green softness to hard, flat, far-horizoned prairie, from sheltered farms to stark brown ranches. I saw a lot of it through a gray scrim of heavy rain, navigating in black-cloud thunderstorms nearly all the way across Nebraska, wondering if I’d be seeing a funnel touching down any time soon. When I tapped into the netsys I kept under a flap of armrest upholstery, it three-beeped me, saying it was temporarily out of service. Which could mean anything from the next half hour to 500 miles from now or more.

By late afternoon, the rain was letting up, settling in to a steady dismal patter, but I was too tired to go any farther. My head had stopped bleeding but it still hurt, my eyes ached from the struggle to focus, my fingers had cramped so hard around the disk I could barely wiggle them. The brace I’d wrapped around my wrist itched.

Just west of the ruins of outer North Platte, I nearly missed a turquoise blue motel with cracked stucco and an almost-dead sign that said MO, jammed on the brakes and U-ed back into its half-flooded empty parking lot.

The office was tiny and the mustard yellow paint was peeling off the front of the desk. Three taps on the bell brought a “Hang on!” from somewhere the other side of a faded red curtain. The woman who finally appeared, a skinny wrinkled sack with dyed red hair, didn’t even look at the registration form after I filled it out with my name and car number and country of origin, and didn’t ask for ID.

“You got any hydropacks?”

She shook her head. I wasn’t surprised. “But my brother’s got a still out back if you can run on that.”

Might as well refill my alkie tank, just in case. “I could use some.”

She opened a drawer and pulled out a big dusty, dented, ancient sys the size of my hand, punching a few buttons. I didn’t hear a voice at the other end, but she yelled, “Carl! Customer!” She shoved the sys back into the drawer and told me he’d be right with me.

“Okay.” That necessity dealt with, I added, “Any food?” I looked around the lobby. Not so much as a potato in sight.

“Got some soup left.” She slouched off to the back room, returning with a screw-top mug of something that didn’t smell too good. I took it anyway. As she handed it to me, our eyes met for the first time. There was anger and pain in hers, the look of a dog left tied up in the yard too long.

A door slammed and a male version of the motel clerk strolled out of the back room. He was wearing jeans that were brown and stiff with dirt and he hadn’t shaved for a while. His hair was pulled back in a skimpy gray ponytail. From the look of his red nose, he’d indulged too much in his own product.

“You need some corn?” His teeth took up too much room in his small mouth and his protruding incisors turned the word “some” into a whistle.

He looked like the type who’d raise the price if he thought I was desperate. “Sure, if it’s good enough.”

“Pure 60 percent. Guaranteed.” If he said 60 there was a hope of it being 50, good enough to replace the barely adequate 100-proof Blackbeard was probably busy throwing up.

“Okay. How much for a six-gallon tank?”

He squinted at me, his flat, pale blue eyes all but disappearing in the pouches around them. “Ten a gallon. That’ll be sixty Lincolns.”

“Make it forty-five.”

He shrugged and jerked a thumb toward his sister. “Pay her.” I handed over enough for the moonshine, the soup and one night in the motel. She gave me a key. It was an actual metal key, rusty and pitted, must have been seventy years old or more. I slipped it into my pocket. Carl went back through the curtain again; in a few seconds, I heard something rattling around outside and went to look. He was pulling a big rolling tank up to the back of my car. I set my soup down out of the way and tapped the lock, watching while he screwed one end of a black hose into his tank, climbed in, started the siphon by sucking at the hose, spat onto my floor, and stuck the other end in my tank. When he finished, I checked the gauge. Full. I nodded. He made an odd, jerky half-bow and rolled his tank back around the side of the motel.

I slipped my sys out of the armrest slot and dropped it into my shirt pocket, retrieved my three remaining laser pistols and the charger from their hiding places, and grabbed the pack of necessaries from the back. Clean shirt, underwear, socks. Toothbrush, soap, comb. I shoved a bag of raisins and nuts from the passenger seat, along with the soup mug, into the outside pocket of the pack and slung it over my shoulder.

The kinks were slipping out of my muscles already, and fatigue was easing into relief and a measure of cheer, despite the headache and the sore wrist. I wasn’t proud that I’d killed a shoot-first-ask-questions-later sheriff or let a brain-rotted hugger wander back to his keepers, but I’d gotten out of Iowa alive one more time and was traveling west. That was worth a celebration. I stopped at the vender next to the ice machine and searched my wallet for more Nebraska paper. Wine? No, beer. I pushed the bills through the intake and poked at the LaCrosse button. A decent import from Northland. The can dropped into the catch-tray, bouncing hard and more than once before it settled.

I’d heard that someone up in Olympia, Seattle I think, was working on getting that dance bug out of the organic plastic. But then a lot of people were working on a lot of things. They were trying to put together a new web in Redwood, and I’d heard that someone way the hell out in Atlantis was working on it, too, but so far all we had was a ragged and rare mess of spotty egos spiking out of the West. Gran said the leftovers and revived bits and pieces of the old Internet couldn’t compare with the web of her youth, and no matter how close I got to the East Coast I still couldn’t get anything there except netsys email that didn’t work half the time. A few optimists kept trying to blog but more often those addicted to communication or to history had started local newspapers, printed on re-pressed paper and plastic. They came in handy when nothing else was working right. Gran found it funny. Newspapers were practically extinct, made obsolete by the Internet, when she was young.

It took three tries to get the sticky lock open. The room had water stains on the ceiling but no drips that I could see. The bed was dry. The bathroom was spotted with mildew. A cheap fifty-year-old sys hung from the bedroom wall, a low-speed, unsecure clunker no better than a toy linked to TV, capsule player/recorder, and phone. I tapped its on-button. Dead. This motel could use a fixer. But then why would a fixer hang around here?

I set the bounced beer down to rest on the nightstand—I wanted it in me, not all over me— the food next to it and my own sys beside that, and tapped the on-button hopefully.

“New Mail.”

Hallelujah. Back in service. Most recent message:

“Rica Marin, by order of the…” The bored male voice said the Iowa General was demanding that I appear in his offices by ten a.m. that day for questioning in the death of blah blah blah. Eight hours ago. Well gee whiz damn, I’d missed the appointment. If things stayed true to form he wouldn’t be the Iowa general in a week, anyway.

As always, a message from Gran:

“Why does the mercenary cross the road? To get home, dummy. I miss you. See you after Sierra?”

I punched the talk-back: “Yeah. Getting homesick for the fog.”

She wouldn’t expect more than that and there was no need to tell her about my day.

I damped the mike and shot the screen. The holo shimmied for a second and resolved, backdropped against the stains on the dirty beige wall. I needed to do some searching and I do that better with my eyes than my ears. Headers scrolled to the unread messages.

What I was looking for first was a message confirming a three-day gig in Rocky, a quick catch-a-bandit job for a local chief that I really wanted to do. He was offering a one-night acting undercover as Lady Macbeth at a Denver amphitheater that I knew attracted crowds of a hundred or more. A great gig. I’d always wanted to do The Lady.

No such luck. A short message from the chief.

“Godders wrecked the theater, bandits bribed my cops, I’m on my way to Desert. Phoenix I think. Maybe see you there some time.”

So much for Lady Macbeth. Well, that just meant I’d get to Sierra and the Tahoe job sooner. I unscrewed the soup lid. Split pea. Sniffed close up. Not spoiled, anyway. I tasted it. Oniony, but probably not dangerous.

I realized suddenly that I hadn’t let the Sierra chief know I was on my way. After a quick send to her, I scrolled to the earlier messages we’d lobbed back and forth. The case had grown vague in my mind.

It involved a group of people— a clan, really, mostly related— who Chief Graybel said the neighbors suspected of a conspiracy to grab some kind of power. They were accusing them of several different kinds of illegal activity: everything from skimming taxable profits to murdering the mayor of Tahoe to smuggling bootlegged vaccines to plotting secession from Sierra. Maybe even running antibiotic medicine shows to sucker the mountain people. They owned a casino called Blackjack, one of the two big ones left, and pieces of more little Tahoe shops than the chief could be sure of. Graybel said the matriarch, Judith Coleman, was very smart and very slippery. The cover job involved working in the restaurant but they were also looking for a singer and I might be able to negotiate a show a night in the lounge. Was I interested? That had been message one.

My answer: “Might? Negotiate? Send more data.” I knew the pay would be good. Graybel was an old friend who never cut corners. But she was being awfully fuzzy about the rest. The answer had come back in a few hours. Blackjack needed a server in the restaurant. They always did. That didn’t sound good. But they were opening a new lounge and were looking for a singer. The chief said she’d pass on the word that I could do both and she was sure I’d get a chance to audition. No promises about the lounge, but she’d gotten me a fake reference, had been willing to wait for me to finish the Iowa job, even spend a couple days in Rocky if that worked out, offered me a bonus on completion, and we’d struck a deal.

By the time I’d finished the soup, dabbed some salve on my scabby head-bump, laid my stuff out on the dresser and checked the bed— nothing walking or crawling or hopping on the sheets— and opened my can of LaCrosse, the new mail icon was dancing through the air. First in line, the chief was responding.

“Good that you’re coming, Rica. Go right to the casino and ask to talk to Judith Coleman. Your reference from Riverboat Queen’s already there, waiting for you. It says you worked in the restaurant and sang in their lounge. Once you’re in at Blackjack, the person you need to talk to first is Newt Scorsi. The Scorsis own the other big casino. They’re the accusers. Just keep in mind there’s some kind of feud between the two families, so it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. Don’t contact the local sheriff in Tahoe when you get there. He doesn’t know about you and he may be tight with Coleman.”

Fine with me. I’d had enough of local sheriffs for a while.