Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (42 page)

“Is Lizzie…?”

“I’m sure she’s there. But it seems a few other people thought it was a good idea, too.”

The crowd was huge, biggest I’d ever seen. There must have been a couple hundred people cheering on the fifty or so who were actively and methodically destroying Scorsi’s Luck, fighting their way through a few of Newt’s people to do it. Mercs and employees. I didn’t see any of the good-for-nothing bandits he thought he was turning into soldiers. I did see Waldo and his girl friend. Watching the fire, smiling, holding hands. Ugh.

A fire was blazing at the back again. Men and women were hacking away at the windows and doors with clubs and pieces of debris, shooting ancient bullets into the walls and lasering the carpets and machines and tables.

I spotted Drew, Emmy, and Liz together, and Zack, at his sys, standing next to Frank’s sheriff car. Frank wasn’t in it. Deputy Marty was sitting in the passenger seat. Just sitting. Drew was helping his sister break the casino’s big front window. Stupid kids, they could slice an artery that way. A merc was heading their way; I pulled my laser, stuck it through the open car window and winged him. He wheeled around and ran down the street, screaming. It was like a signal. The mercs still standing took off, too. I didn’t think I deserved all the credit for that; they were badly outnumbered.

“Nice shot, Rica!” Jo was grinning at me. It was, too. We jumped out of the car. I didn’t know what to do; I wasn’t sure what the plan was or if there was a plan at all. I followed Jo, who ran to Zack.

“Frank’s on his way out with Newt,” he shouted. We were right next to him, but I could hardly hear him even so over the sound of crashing glass and crumbling walls and a crowd both gleeful and enraged. “He’s the last one in there. Larry and Carl ran fifteen minutes ago. The fire finally did it. Newt’s not willing to burn for his casino.”

“Where’s the rest of his army?” I asked.

Jo answered. “They decided to go to war. Some are dead. Some are prisoners.”

I could just see that bunch “going to war.” I could only hope they hadn’t had a chance to do too much damage. Even more, I hoped none of them were still loose in the countryside.

The fire was moving fast. People were stepping back from the building, watching it burn. I was amazed at how many were just standing there in total silence, staring at it. Shocked by their own success? Stunned by their own violence and craziness?

And there was Frank, pushing a handcuffed Newt ahead of him to the car. The close-in crowd cheered and pressed in even closer.

“I didn’t do it, you fucking idiot!” Newt was purple in the face, drooling with rage and panic.

“Sure you did,” Frank chortled.

“Did what?” I asked.

“Quite a lot of things,” Frank answered. “He’s being charged with the murder of Mayor Madera and conspiracy to kill Samm and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

“Kill the bastard!” someone yelled. “He killed Samm!” The crowd surged toward the car. Frank pulled the back door open and shoved Newt in. He didn’t have to shove very hard, it was Newt’s only haven.

As Frank moved around to the driver’s seat, Newt noticed me standing there next to Jo. His mouth dropped open.

I gave him a shrug. What else could I do? Even if I wanted him to think I was still on his side, there wasn’t much I could do to help him. He glared back at me.

“I didn’t kill anyone!” he yelled through the closed window. “I didn’t kill Madera. I didn’t kill Samm! It was those boys! And Hannah!”

I shrugged again. So much for that new float-car he’d promised me.

“Did Ky implicate Newt?” I asked Frank.

Frank sneered. “Ky can’t talk yet. His mouth’s all mashed up.”

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Newt would ever have discouraged anyone from killing Samm. Even if Newt hadn’t ordered the killings, the boys had murdered Madera because they knew damned well that Newt wanted him gone. All Hannah’d had to do was look like she was working with the Colemans and the Scorsi boys started to go after her. And Samm.

And then there was Owen. The one Newt hadn’t told me was a spy. No question, Newt was behind the deaths one way or another, as surely as if he’d done it himself. And the chief— for just a second I wondered if I should message her about any of this. A ridiculous thought. Old habit and nothing more. She was no longer involved. She was just sitting in Hangtown and, well, hanging onto her job until the Colemans decided to take it away from her.

I looked at Jo’s profile. She was glaring at Newt; the softness of the night before was gone. I wanted to bring it back. I was afraid of how much I wanted that. There was too much power in it— her power. Power that might make me— do what? Not do what?

Newt wasn’t the only killer in Tahoe. I liked Zack. I more than liked Jo and her family. But it seemed to me they were getting increasingly casual about the deaths of their enemies, not to mention the niceties of truth and justice. They didn’t hesitate to lie or at least push the truth to get support for their growing power. They didn’t hesitate to kill if they decided someone deserved it or had to be killed. Sure, this was war. And that was what was bothering me. This was war. Kill or be killed. Just as I’d had to kill the sheriff back in Iowa— and he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last— before he killed me. Sometimes it’s not so easy to see the difference between really having to do it or doing it because it’s a safer bet. Fine lines. Everywhere.

Did I want to be swept up in this? Was any of it right? Was Newt really enough of a threat to the Colemans to justify his destruction and the death of Billy Scorsi? Was Rocky really enough of a threat to justify an alliance that could make something of Redwood I didn’t want it to be?

Did I want to even be worrying about fine moral distinctions and wondering where I belonged and who I belonged with? Did I want to be feeling anything for anyone but Gran and the ghost of Sylvia?

No, I did not. Was that my spine stiffening, along with my upper lip, or was I just going rigid with fear at the thought of how much I could get hurt?

At some point, as I’d watched Newt get driven away and worn myself out struggling with issues of right and wrong and lust and power, Judith had arrived and Drew and Lizzie had moved in close, Emmy still with them. Drew looked worn, dirty, and angry. Emmy looked distressed. Lizzie looked peaceful, for some reason. Sad. Spent. Maybe the ugly complexity of it all was finally registering. Tim and Fredo arrived. They looked stunned. They nodded to me, I nodded back.

Judith stood gazing at the ruined Scorsi’s Luck. Somehow, she managed, on that ash and debris-strewn street, in a royal purple dress, blue shawl drawn against the light breeze, to look like a monarch. And Jo, she had no trouble looking like Judith’s in-charge minister of everything.

I didn’t want to look at any of it any more. I sketched a little wave toward Jo, got a puzzled glance in response, and turned in the direction of Blackjack. I wanted to walk. Then I wanted to sleep for another hour or two.

It was mid-afternoon when I woke again. My chest felt heavy; guess I’d breathed in too much casino-smoke. Jo had not come knocking on my door again.

Gran and her friends in Redwood needed to know what had been going on. The raid by Rocky, and the possibility that some of them had slipped through. The destruction of the Scorsis and what that meant about Coleman power. I had second thoughts about the chief. I decided to give her a quick last report, along with a bill for the time she hadn’t paid for yet.

First the chief and her bill.

“How are you doing, Rica?”

“Just great.” Alive, no thanks to her. I told her everything I knew, everything I’d seen. I said nothing about her failure to pass on the information that Jo knew all about me. What good would that have done? She knew that I knew. Maybe she’d decide she owed me for it. “Is there anything you’d still like me to do here?” Like finish investigating the Colemans? “I never did find out if they were skimming.” I couldn’t help it. There was a sarcastic edge to my voice. We both knew she didn’t care.

“No. Never mind.”

“Okay. Well, you owe me a balance of 850 reals.”

“Let’s make it a thousand reals.”

I’d earned it. “Send it to the Redwood address. That’s where I’m heading soon.”

The conversation with Gran took a little longer. She wanted Macris and Petra to hook into it. I left out the part about Hannah escaping; it was too depressing.

Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Gran chirped, “Oh! By the way, something really strange happened, don’t know if it has any connection to what’s been going on in Sierra.”

“Something strange?” What else could happen?

“A plane went down in the Pacific, a white Gullwing. Just offshore at Stinson Beach. Splashed down, they say, and floated for a little while. The pilot swam ashore with help from some residents. A woman. Skinny, tall. Said her landing gear was broken and her plane-chute gone.”

“Long scar on her face?”

“Nobody mentioned that.”

A way to go home

The Sierra Star did something the next day I suspected it had never done before: published a one-page extra. Samm’s death and Newt’s arrest was the main story, the border war victory number two, and the burning of Scorsi’s Luck and Newt’s squeals of innocence, a pathetic bottom-of-the-page third.

Iggy Santos couldn’t have done better for the Colemans if they paid in advance for ten years of full-page ads. He didn’t exactly say the fire was an accident, but he put it this way:

“Soldiers celebrating the victory over Rocky invaders merged yesterday at Scorsi’s Luck with an angry crowd protesting the murder of popular Blackjack dealer Samm Bakar. The demonstrators, demanding the arrest of Newt Scorsi, attacked the casino and somehow, in the melee, a fire started at the back of the building. Firefighters were unable to save it.”

That was it, the whole story in a dice cup. Somehow. Demonstrators.

What I’d seen was a defensive army turned into a mob of aggressors. Zack had given his soldiers leave to “celebrate” without the tedious restrictions of law. And Sheriff Frank had done his job.

When the cars had come back with the prisoners, Frank and the army had set up a kind of camp at the Lucky Buck. Tents in the courtyard. I wondered how long they’d be able to keep the Rockies there without some kind of riot erupting. But that wasn’t going to be my problem.

Sitting in my room, I shot the screen on my sys and opened the line to channel 1. A male face resolved shakily. Fading in and out. He was playing a flute. I muted the sound and sat thinking about my options. Was I compromised as a merc? Probably, at least here on the western end of the continent. I hadn’t exactly kept a low profile in Tahoe. Things were happening, armies were moving. People would talk, and talk from Tahoe would spread. Too many people knew too much about me now.

Even I knew more about me than I wanted to.

I could still work the back roads of Middle or shadow-of-the dunes villages in Desert, or goad Electra through the snowdrifts in New England. I could take the job in New Orleans.

All so far away. Endless miles away.

Webber Doe’s pretty face showed. I punched sound.

“…turned the invaders back at the border.” Fade out. “…got a little out of hand in Tahoe when the returning army burned down a casino belonging to a man they said had murdered their general. He’s been arrested. Some people think maybe the troops went overboard. Here at home, a sheriff’s meeting…” Dead air. “…long way from the Rocky border, but we’ll convene the Redwood council and see if there’s anything we think we need to do. Next Data from Webber Doe—” I lost it entirely.

A long way from Rocky indeed. What a gang of fools. But at least “some people” back there, whatever that meant, thought the mob action wasn’t just a fun party for the troops. Even if Redwood did agree to some kind of alliance with Sierra, eventually, they might remember that and be wary.

* * *

Jo told me that once, when they were kids, Samm had told her that he planned to die as a warrior, and when that happened he wanted a Viking funeral. So that was what she would give him. Lake Tahoe was hardly a sea, and a raft carrying Samm’s floater was hardly a dragon-headed Viking ship, but it would have to do.

It was dusk, the light waning, pink touching the sky. I watched while Zack drove the floater onto the raft of bound fir logs and set it down on its park pads. Drew said they were afraid the floater, on its own, would sink into the water too fast once the fire hit the hover-set. They wanted it to burn completely.

I watched while Jo, Lizzie, Drew, Zack, and Emmy packed the kindling around Samm’s shrouded body. Drew had begged for the honor of lighting the pyre. He towed the raft out to the middle of the lake, driving Judith’s floater. He was to fire the pitch on a flaming arrow and shoot it back into Samm’s car where the windshield had been broken away, make sure the flames were well started, cut his line, and come back to shore where a crowd had gathered, family at the water’s edge, friends at their sides, several hundred citizens behind us. The spectacle was too far away to follow easily, but we saw the arrow arc, saw the kindling catch, saw Drew hover for a moment before he cut back toward shore.

The flames rose to three times the height of the floater. A few of the people cried out, wailed, wept; one woman screamed and fell to the ground. But most of us stood there silent in the dimming daylight, staring at the fire on the water. It took nearly an hour for the raft, the floater and Samm to sink to the deepest part of the lake.

* * *

My sys buzzed. Jo.

“Rica, could you come to my office, please?”

We hadn’t talked since earlier that evening, and then only a few words at the funeral. I wondered what she wanted. If she’d simply wanted me, I thought she’d come to my room, or she would have asked me to go to her apartment. I wondered why she hadn’t. I wondered why I hadn’t made it happen. Her voice stirred me, but from a distance, like a memory. Murder and fire and grief sat between us like a black moat. And lawlessness. I didn’t want that kind of lawlessness used against Redwood. I needed to go home.