A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  “Come now, Miller. We both know that's not true. So, you can give it back to us, or you can spend the next hour or two screaming while we torture it out of you, because you only have two options. Either I'm completely bananas, in which case you get tortured because, you know, bananas. Or I'm telling the truth, in which case you're getting tortured because your existence means nothing to me. This whole world means nothing to me. You mean less than to me than some bullet magnet NPC in Grand Theft Auto.”

  She twirled the bottle around and raised it high as though to stab it deeply into the meat of his leg.

  “No!” barked Smith.

  “BUT I DON'T HAVE THE FUCKING THING,” Miller wailed. “I sold it,” he blubbered. “I t-tried to tell you. I already s-s-sold it.”

  He fell apart then, giving into his cowardice and shame. Cady closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, looking like she was fighting off the grandfather of all headaches.

  “Awesome,” she said. “That's just awesome.”

  Still worried that she might actually start carving him up, Smith hauled Miller's limp, blubbering deadweight out of the chair.

  “Who did you sell it to?” he said. “Will they still have it?”

  “The payday loan place,” he snuffled miserably.

  Smith was pushing the man toward the entry hallway, partly to get him away from Cady, partly because time was running out and he had no intention of letting Miller get away until he had laid hands on Mr. Wu's chronometer again.

  He heard glass break as Cady tossed the bottle away.

  “Can you carry the bags?” Smith asked her. He was busy with Miller, but he also thought it might be a good idea to give her something to do with her hands, lest the devil find work for them.

  “Sure,” she said, sounding tired. “You got a car, Miller?”

  “No, b-b-but Johnny does.”

  “That your b-b-boyfriend on the floor out there?”

  “No, I mean yes, I mean …”

  “Just get the fucking keys.”

  25

  Johnny's car was a half-open wagon. Smith thought it would make a useful conveyance on a homestead. It was in much better shape than the house where Miller and his buddy lived. There were two rows of seating. He rode in back with their captive while Miss Cady drove.

  They traveled at quite remarkable speeds through the streets of the borough. Miller and Smith were thrown into each other once or twice when she took the wagon around a tight corner. Smith raised no objection to the wild ride. They had less than an hour to go before the watch bestirred itself into life again.

  “Clean him up,” Cady ordered from the front seat. “We don't need any more trouble with the cops when we get to this place.”

  “Better do as she says, Miller,” Smith said. “I do believe she spoke true back at your cabin. She will take your scalp if you steer us bad.”

  Miller used his undershirt to wipe away most of the snot, blood and tears. His face looked sick, nigh on malarial, under the glow of the street lamps.

  “Is she crazy?” he asked in a whisper. “All that stuff she said? That can't be true.”

  “Then I guess she's crazy,” said Smith. “Either way, you don't want no trouble with her.”

  Miller fell silent at that, leaving Smith with his own thoughts as they raced through the night.

  They were not happy thoughts.

  He had known Cady McCall for the shortest while, and had come to respect her during that brief time. She was whipcrack sharp, no doubt of it. Brave enough to die standin' up, too.

  But hell fire, she had him convinced of her malign intentions back at Miller's place.

  Was she some sorta Broadway calico? A natural actress who never found her way to the stage?

  Or did she speak true when she threatened torture on this blubbering lickspittle?

  He honestly could not say.

  “We're here,” she announced, pulling Johnny's wagon over to the side of the road out front of a blockhouse with a large, well-lit signage touting itself as a provider of “Payday Loan$” at “Supa-low interest.” Every window and door were protected by bars. The premises to either side offered “Best Cheap Tattoos” and “Live Sexxx.” Both businesses looked to be doing loud and boisterous trade.

  “Leave your rifle, Smith,” said Cady. “Take the six-shooter, but keep it holstered. Oh, and maybe wear the badge out so they can see it.”

  “I thought we agreed it to be a poor idea for me to be putting myself about as a marshal here,” he said.

  Miller started whimpering and cussing under his breath at that. “Oh, man. You guys are in so much trouble.”

  Cady opened Smith's door and he climbed down out of the cabin, watching Miller the whole time.

  “Come on, Miller. Let's just get the watch and get gone.”

  The fat man shuffled across the width of the seat and stepped out unsteadily.

  “But what if they already sold it?” he said, sounding just as worried about that as Smith felt.

  “You better pray not,” Cady told him.

  They left their baggage in the wagon, which Cady locked with a magical totem that she squeezed between thumb and forefinger. However fraught their circumstances, Smith could not help but marvel at small wonders like that. There were other things to contemplate, though.

  The tattoo shop appeared to double as a saloon for a gang of desperados all tricked out in black leathers and—here was a helluva thing—bright cloth patches announcing these fellers as … Desperados!

  “What in the Sam Hill?” Smith muttered to himself as they hustled on by. There were maybe eight or nine of these layabouts, just layin' about, and a working majority fixed him with the evil eye as he happened past. They had seen his badge, and he would wager good folding money they were not well disposed toward the US Marshals Service.

  Smith was afeared this would not end well as Cady led them into the payday loans place. He fixed his attention on her and Miller rather than the Aladdin's Cave of stolen goods into which they had stumbled. For there could be no doubt that the business here was the receiving and conversion of merchandise taken by thieves. After all, they had purchased his watch from Miller without need of a receipt or any other proof of ownership. He wondered if the tattooed desperadoes next door had a commercial interest in the operation.

  Cady was already engaged in conversation with the storekeeper when Smith rolled up with Miller in harness.

  “So, I'm sorry but we need my grandad's watch back,” she explained.

  The feller behind the counter seemed less interested in her than he was in Smith and Miller, in that order. Or perhaps to be more accurate, it was Smith's badge that caught his eye. He looked even more a thief than he did a customer of thieves. Tall and hollow cheeked, his face was scarred by the pox. A drooping mustache gave his mournful appearance an even more funereal aspect.

  “Don't know what you're talking about,” he told Cady, while looking directly at Miller with knives in his eyes.

  “Oh, come on, man,” cried Miller. “Just give them the watch. Seriously. I made a mistake. They need it back.”

  The man turned his eyes on Smith. It was like attracting the attention of a snake.

  “Never seen this man,” he said, nodding at Miller. “Never bought nothing off him.”

  “This is bullshit,” Cady snapped. She took out her wallet and removed a fat wad of currency throwing it on the glass countertop. It sat suspended above a motley collection of pilfered jewelry.

  And watches.

  Including Wu's timepiece. Smith could see it in there. He was certain.

  For maybe half a second, Cady had the man's attention. But his eyes flicked back to Smith's badge and he shook his head.

  “We don't deal in stolen goods here,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” said Smith, causing Cady to spin around.

  She had never heard him cuss a single word a’fore.

  “Got a warrant, pig?”

  “I got what you need right her
e,” Smith growled. He hauled out his Colt .45 and pistol whipped this lying scuzzler without warning or remorse, dropping him like a bag full of Idaho spuds. Then he brought the gun down on the glass of the counter, shattering it with an enormous crash.

  Miller cried out.

  Cady swore.

  And Smith calmly reached in and retrieved his watch.

  They had fifteen minutes until they could jump again.

  They also had company.

  “Yo. Pig.”

  He turned, gun still in hand, and found himself facing off with the bandit crew from next door. Perhaps they were concerned citizens. More likely, his guess about their investment in this place had proved right.

  One of the men was carrying a shotgun, and as he raised it toward Smith, the marshal snapped off two shots, drilling him though the heart and the head.

  All kinds of hell broke over them at that.

  He heard Cady yell out his name and turned for her, only to find the storekeeper climbing back to his feet, unsteadily waving his own shortened shotgun in the general direction of Smith and Miller. He fired, and poor sniveling Miller caught most of the blast in the face. Smith was sprayed with bits of the clerk and a few stray, stinging pellets of shot.

  Before the storekeep could get off another blast, Cady laid him out with a baseball bat she had retrieved from Lord only knew where. It was a shiny metal thing and it met this feller's melon with a sickening CLONK. Down he went.

  “RUN,” Smith bellowed at Cady, who did not require a second telling.

  They headed for the door, where at least two of the Desperadoes had taken poor cover to fire on them. Shots cracked and bullets zipped past, and rather than running as Smith had so strongly advised his partner, he stopped dead still, took the time to lay his sights on one Desperado, then the next, and he sent them both down to Hell with two pulls of the trigger.

  Then he got to running again.

  In Smith's experience, the fight did not always go to the quickest, the strongest, or even the meanest, although you should never discount those particularities in any man intent on killing you. Nope. In his experience, the fight went to the man who held his nerve and kept his wits about him.

  He told Cady to run, and he himself moved with all dispatch toward the exit, but he did not panic, and he did not fire wildly about him. He held onto the watch. He killed those men who needed killin', and he made sure to interpose his considerable bulk between Miss Cady and any of the desperadoes who had not cleared out at the first shot.

  Thankfully, that appeared to be most of them.

  Again, in Smith's experience, men like that were strong in a pack, but once you broke the pack apart by blowing the heads off one or two of their number, they tended to scatter like curs.

  He emerged from the payday loans ready to put the last of his bullets into any man who stood in their way, but it was not necessary. They had a clear path to the wagon.

  Cady was swearing. The same crude word over and over again, and Smith could not bring himself to think ill of her for it. The devil had got the better of his tongue back in the store when he could see that they were being gulled by the villain who ran the place. And now that everything had turned to blood and chaos, he found himself tempted to vent his own choler in the strongest of language.

  The strange exaltation of the spirit that can make the quickest and most violent action pass in a slow, dreamlike state was clearing like morning mist. Smith piled clumsily into the wagon as Cady struggled to start the combustion engine. She let out one, huge scream.

  “FUCK!”

  Exhaled all of her breath.

  And laid her hands lightly on the steerage wheel as though they had no business more pressing than a buggy ride to a picnic.

  Unable to operate the wagon, Smith had to place his faith in her.

  She reached calmly for whatever mechanism stoked the boilers on this thing, and with one simple turn, brought it to life.

  Her sangfroid was tested when two bullets struck the metal frame of the wagon like hammer blows, and she did effect such a sudden acceleration and wrenching turn that Smith's head was slammed into the window, filling his vision with stars. But he was just glad the glass did not shatter and cut him.

  “How long?” Cady asked, her voice sounding jagged and sharp, like a rusted butcher's knife.

  “The watch?” he asked, and suffered a second of blind terror when he could not find it.

  “Yes! The watch! How long until it's live again? Come on, Smith! I'm driving.”

  His heart slowed down some when he felt the small golden circle in the same pocket where he'd stashed the phone she had given him. He took it out and checked.

  It was hard to say without a minute hand to parse the exact moment, but he thought they were coming up on a quarter of ten.

  “Maybe five or six minutes. Maybe less.”

  She swore again, and punched the steerage wheel.

  “We'll never make it.”

  ”Then we lay low and try again tomorrow,” he said as she barreled down the road away from the mayhem they had unleashed.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You think we're going to just hole up in some canyon or gully and wait for the posse to ride on past? That's not how it works here, man.”

  Her voice was a plaintive wail.

  Smith himself was beset by an unfamiliar keenness of sentiment and, try as he might, he could not shake it.

  He felt that he had done the wrong thing.

  There was no questioning each individual decision he had made, each separate action he had taken since arriving here. They had all been justified and necessary in the particular.

  But in the general?

  He could not shake the feeling that they had done wrong, and now they would be, quite rightfully, the subject of pursuit by men such as he had once been.

  Cady pulled off the road, made a couple of apparently random turns and stopped under the spreading arms of an ancient evergreen. They were in a quiet street. A neighborhood of small residences. Lights burned in windows, but nobody appeared to question their presence or bonafides.

  “I have to think,” she said. “I just need a moment.”

  “Then take it,” said Smith.

  She breathed in deeply, held it for a few seconds, and breathed out, taking twice as long. Cady sat, doing this like some oriental mystic, for what felt like a very long time, but which really only delayed them a minute.

  Smith wished he had a real drink to hand.

  “I need to call Georgia,” she said at last.

  “That is not a good idea,” he cautioned. “The Homelanders, the sheriffs, they'd be watching her anyway. They said as much. And after tonight …”

  “After tonight we won't be here,” she said, cutting him off. “We have to get out of here, Smith. We have to go now, or as soon as we can. And I have to at least give Georgia the chance to come with us. Don't you see?”

  To be honest, he did not.

  “You had no chance to explain your circumstances to her this morning, Cady. You won't get one now. When the local law rides out from that shambles back at the Payday, her place is gonna be one of their first calls. I saw them little daguerreotype boxes everywhere. The ones you were yelling at back at the Homeland, like someone was watching from them. Well someone woulda been watching us stroll in with Miller, and they’d a seen things turn bloody. Won't take them long to pin it on us, I don't reckon.”

  “All the more reason to go and get her out, Smith.” Cady's voice was still shaky but her resolve seemed rock solid. “They will bury her after this. When they can't find us, they'll make do with her. And it's my fault. It's all my fault.”

  He thought she might come apart then, but although her eyes teared up a little, she sniffed and rubbed them dry and jutted her chin out as if daring him to take a swing.

  He felt more exhausted than at any time since he'd lost his way.

  “Miss Cady.”

  “Gah! Ms!”

  “Sorry,”
he said. “Cady. I cannot judge you because I do not share your judgment. You did not ask to be drug into all this. That was my doing and I am sorry for that. But because that fault lies with me, I know how much worse it could be for you if'n you drugged Miss Georgia out of her home year. Yes. It's bad here. But it can get so much worse.”

  She paid him his due. She listened and he could see her diligently turning it all over. But in the end she was unmoved.

  “Titanic … hmm, no, that just sounds weird. Smith, I have to do this. I have to. She's my friend and I've put her in real danger. Took a bad situation and made it infinitely worse. I have to at least try get her out of it.”

  By way of an answer he shrugged, “Well, you're not driving now. You should check that phone of yours. You set something like an hourglass on it, as I recall.”

  She had forgotten. The surprise and remembrance were written plainly on her face.

  “Oh, yeah!”

  Cady pulled the device out of a pocket in her leather jacket. Not for the first time, was he struck by the incongruity of her wardrobe choice. She was dressed in a similar style to the Desperadoes back at the payday loans.

  “We're too late,” she said. “Three minutes too late, and counting. The watch is live.”

  Cady drove with more care and much less haste for the next leg of their trip. Smith reloaded. She pulled up in Miss Georgia's street, but a goodly distance from the apartment building itself. Cady insisted they sit and “scope out the scene.”

  Smith reflected again on just how remarkably adept she was at this sort of caper. It occurred to him then that he did not really know what she did for a living.

  For the nine million dollars and change sitting in her bank account.

  She worked at her magic window and did … something.

  She'd never explained exactly what.

  “What is it you do?” he asked, as they waited in the dark.

  She continued to “scope out the scene.”

  “What d'you mean?”

  “I mean your job. Your line of work? You never told me what you do. It must be unusual, less'n it's normal for folk to be paid millions of dollars for laboring and such like.”