by Michael Lane
“There must be a rule,” the Captain said as the pair crested the horizon and waved before turning and riding out of sight.
“What rule?”
“The guy with the cowboy hat always gets the girl.”
* * *
The bodega was hot as an oven even though the sun had ducked behind the western mountains. July was a punishing month in Chico, and much of the little town’s business occurred at night. The bar in question never seemed terribly busy, and sat the better part of a mile from the knot of buildings that formed the city proper; structures of adobe and brick built where the original town had burnt down decades before. It was a business frequented by people who wanted privacy, and the locals knew better than to visit uninvited.
That evening the bar was empty but for a wizened old man wiping out jelly jars with a rag and a table occupied by two men, one extraordinarily large, and a woman in dusty black.
A waterwheel in the tepid creek behind the bar turned an ancient ceiling fan with soot-black blades, and the draft made the oil lamps on the bar and tables flicker. The fan chirped like a bird as the wooden shaft rubbed against its oak bushing with each revolution. The air smelled of cigars and spilled wine.
“Esteban’s late,” Creedy said. He stared at the glass of wine sitting before him and twisted it a quarter turn.
“He’ll be here. He said around sunset,” Hollis said.
Creedy nodded. “Do you expect any trouble from him?” Esteban was a jovial, fat man and Creedy mistrusted his smile and his bright yellow and red serape and his intentionally comic sombrero.
“No,” Hollis said. “He’s eccentric, but he deals square. That - and his habit of castrating anyone who crosses him - keeps him in business.”
Creedy grunted. “So shooting him and taking the heroin is a bad idea?”
“Very.”
“Then we won’t.”
Gregor stood up and rolled his head, making his neck crackle.
“I’m going to get a beer, does anyone else want one?” he rumbled.
“I’ll take one,” a fourth voice said. Gregor turned to face the door, where a man in a striped serape and sombrero stood. He held an old blue suitcase in his left hand.
Hollis stood and drew a flat nickel automatic with an inhuman speed. Even as the man in the serape raised his right hand, the folds of the cape falling away to reveal a long-barreled revolver, she fired. The man staggered back a step, finished leveling the revolver, and shot her in the chest, sending her backward over her chair in a spray of blood. Gregor had drawn a knife from his belt, and as the man staggered he threw it at him. His aim was perfect, but the man’s drunken stumble took his throat out of the line of the knife’s flight, and it sank into his left arm. The suitcase dropped to the ground and the man cursed. Gregor crossed to the door in three lunging strides, another knife in his fist.
The stumbling man threw the ridiculous hat into the face of his attacker as he took another step backward, off the bodega’s porch and into the dusty forecourt, nearly falling. The big man gripped his opponent’s right wrist and twisted savagely as the pair exited the building. The gun thudded to the packed clay.
“Private party,” Gregor said pleasantly, waggling the knife.
“We have an invitation,” a familiar voice said to his left, from the shadows under the ratty arbor that ran around the bar.
Gregor never heard the shot.
Creedy glanced around the room, at the tiny windows, the single door, the narrow stairs leading to more tiny rooms with equally tiny windows in the upper floor. The barman had dropped behind his bar with practiced speed, he noted. He freed the pistol he carried and laid it on the table before him, then picked up his wine and took a sip. The man in the serape came back inside, the knife still in his arm. He held his revolver at his side.
Bearded and obviously Anglo without the hat, the man was about Esteban’s size and build. Creedy wondered what had tipped off Hollis, not that he could ask her anymore.
“Shall we talk, or would you rather shoot me now?” he asked. He had no illusions of beating anyone who could take out Hollis and Gregor both.
“Sam, get his gun, and the one the woman dropped,” the man said. Creedy started.
Sam entered the bar, cradling a shotgun and wearing a green and gray uniform topped with a black vest. Her eyes glittered like glass in the lamplight.
“Sam?” Creedy said, his eyes widening fractionally. The bearded man raised his revolver and held it on Creedy as Sam stepped forward and retrieved the two weapons. Creedy started to laugh. He laughed until his eyes watered and he had to stop to wipe them.
The man holstered his weapon while Sam covered Creedy, her face pale as milk. It was stippled with blood. Gregor’s, Creedy assumed. The man in the serape tugged the knife from his arm with a grunt and tossed it aside. He examined the wound.
“I’d think the bullet was a more pressing issue,” Creedy said.
“Not so you’d notice,” the man said, stripping off the woolen tunic to reveal a black vest identical to the one Sam wore. He fingered the shiny lump of a slug that sat half-buried in the armor over his heart. “Saw that in a movie a long time ago.”
He tore a strip from the serape and roughly bandaged his arm, then sat in the chair opposite Creedy. Sam stood to one side, the shotgun level and steady.
“You don’t recognize me, then?” the man asked. “It’s been a long time.”
Creedy stared. “You’re not with the CDF?” The man shook his head.
“It’s the beard. I used to keep it trimmed short.”
Sipping wine, Creedy studied the aged face, seeing nothing special at first. Something about the eyes though; something there reminded him of hunger and cold woods, and then he knew. He smiled, revealing a humorless crescent of teeth and his eyes darkened as his pupils dilated.
“Grey.”
“Long time, Kingsnake.”
“It was you, this summer. It was you,” Creedy whispered, still blackly grinning. “You weren’t satisfied with killing us fifteen years ago, you had to come back and try to finish it.”
Grey shook his head. “Part of me started out that way, but it wasn’t you I needed to kill. You were going to move into the Okanagan, though, and I have friends there. I run a trapline, have a house. It’s home. That’s why I’m here, now.”
“Do they know what you do to your friends, Grey? Did you ever share the story about the day you killed half of them for some dirt farmers you’d never even met?” Creedy shook his head. “You’re best avoided as a friend.”
Grey shrugged, wincing at his wound.
“I’ve never forgotten, if that’s any comfort.”
“It’s not,” Creedy said. He turned to stare at Sam. “You’re friend here led us across most of the northwest for a decade, robbing and killing as we saw fit, until one day he decided to have an attack of conscience.” He looked back at Grey, taking a sip from his wine glass as he did so. “He didn’t just leave, oh no. He decided that if he was done being bad, so were we, and he managed to kill twelve of his friends before we managed to lose him.”
“I ran out of shells,” Grey said.
“I suppose it made you feel better to be the good guy that day? To put on the mantle of the hero?” Creedy sneered. “Sir Launcelot on his charger.”
“No, Snake, it didn’t,” Grey offered, hands in his lap. “Looking back, I hadn’t learned how to stop. But I did, eventually.”
Creedy sat and continued to sneer, his eyes black holes.
“Where are the cases? Upstairs, I assume?” Grey asked, glancing at the stairs.
Creedy sat silently. Grey stood. The flickering light picked out the creases in his face and neck in lines of black shadow.
“What’s in them?” Grey asked.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I did,” Grey said. Creedy laughed without humor and shook his head.
“You got old, Grey,” Creedy said. “You quit trying and hid in the wood
s. What good would a new world be to you?”
Grey shook his head. “No, Snake, I was about your age when I finally realized I hadn’t been trying. I hadn’t tried since I was fourteen and the world stopped being what I wanted it to be.”
“So you’re trying now?” Creedy sneered.
“Yes.” He turned and studied Sam’s face, her thinned lips and the little crease of concentration between her eyes. “Do we leave him for the cartel, or do you want to shoot him?”
Creedy smiled his empty smile. “You should kill me this time, Grey. You really should.”
Sam snugged the shotgun into her shoulder and took a step forward, the barrel hovering a yard from Creedy’s temple. He turned his head, his stare meeting that of the weapon’s bore.
Sam reversed the gun as she half-turned, slamming the butt into the side of his head with a brittle crack. His jaw jerked over beneath his right ear and his eyes rolled over white under fluttering lids. He slid bonelessly from the chair, his ruined head banging off the table’s edge and leaving a bloody smear.
“Leave the suitcase?” Grey asked, bending to see if Creedy was still breathing. He was, though he was making a strange snoring gurgle each time he exhaled.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Let him explain why he has it and Esteban is dead in an arroyo with his two bodyguards.”
Grey stood and walked behind the bar. He looked at the old man sitting there, hands in his lap. His head was bent and all Grey could see was the smooth bronze dome of his skull, dotted with a few stubborn hairs.
“You didn’t hear any of that, yes?” Grey dropped a roughly milled gold coin into his hands.
The old man nodded and his fist closed around the coin.
“No oigo nada,” he said.
“You ought to get out of here for few days.”
The old man said nothing. Grey went upstairs.
The six cases were stacked neatly, each the size of a large suitcase and made of a tough black synthetic with metal reinforced corners. Grey hefted one and grunted at the weight. He set it on one of the two beds and flicked the latches along its front open. Four long black canisters lay in the case, each perhaps six inches across, each again hinged and held shut with steel latches. He lifted one out and opened it. Grey stared at the segmented, glassy green cylinder inside for a moment before realizing it was a rack of discs, hundreds of them bedded side by side in slots fuzzed with green velvet. He ran a finger along the length of the column, feeling the bite of each edge as it passed.
* * *
They took their time returning north, keeping to paths less travelled and bearing gradually east toward the CDF base in Billings. Sam didn’t want to assume that Nakamura had control of Washington and argued for the eastern route, toward areas already garrisoned. The weather cooperated, though the heat made the horses irritable and finding water was a major undertaking on some days.
Grey thought about Josie a lot.
* * *
“How long have you been working for them?” Grey asked on the day they rode down a series of switchbacks, blue gulfs opening below on the line of the Snake River.
“I enlisted almost four years ago,” Sam responded. “Why?”
“Just curious,” Grey said. “You have a feel for this new government of yours?”
“I suppose I do. What’s bothering you?”
Grey twisted to look back over his shoulder at Sam while his horse picked its way along the narrow trail. Rocks disturbed by its hooves would occasionally roll from the path and fall into the canyon, turning slowly as they fell through hundreds of feet. She tried to keep her eyes on the tracker rather than the drop.
“Well, do you trust them to do right by folks?” He gestured to their mule and the cases it carried. “You figure they’ll share that, or keep it?”
Sam’s eyes narrowed.
“There are idiots in any organization, Grey. But if you’re asking if we’re setting up a military junta and planning on keeping the peasants ignorant and fearful, then no, we’re not.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said, turning back to face he trail. He said something else but Sam’s horse picked that moment to decide to toss its head at a fly and stumble. It regained its balance and continued placidly on, but it took her a minute to begin breathing again.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear,” she managed when her heart had slowed.
“I was just saying that it would be nice if we could raise some kids on books instead of guns,” he said over his shoulder.
* * *
They didn’t speak much about Chico, though they spoke a lot about what the discs might mean, and what changes could come. Sam told stories about what had happened at the Castle, and Grey revisited his own dark recollections around a series of campfires. Neither shared those stories with anyone else, afterward.
* * *
On their last night before reaching Billings, Sam voiced a question Grey had been thinking about for some time.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” she asked, staring out into the darkness over a valley of pines that soughed in the late summer wind. A single small meteorite trailed a green thread across the northern sky.
“Creedy? Because I didn’t have to,” Grey said, watching the bolide. “It’s always been too easy for me to kill. It’s forgiving that’s been hard. Why didn’t you?”
It took Sam a long time to answer. “I didn’t want to know if I could shoot an unarmed man,” she said at last.
“What’ll you do now?” Grey asked.
“I’ll stay with the cases and help make sure they get to somewhere with a computer that still works,” she said. “Then, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take a vacation. What about you?”
“I’m going home. I can do that now.” He laughed under his breath. “If you every want to go fishing, swing by the Port in Kelowna. I know some spots.”
“Maybe I will. I’d like to meet Josie.”
They stood silently, listening to the trees in the warm wind.
Grey cocked his head and his teeth gleamed as he smiled at the dark.
The wind was from the east, and blowing down it, faint and far, came the cry of a train whistle.
-End-