The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  Gieo abandoned her search for the moment, took a long drink of her tea, and gazed out over the town’s rooftops to the Hawkins compound on the outskirts. She’d seen Fiona hit smaller targets from much farther away; if the gunfighter had meant to hit the cultists, she would have. Gieo couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Fiona would shoot a man she knew for trying to steal from her, but wouldn’t shoot cultists who hated her in the process of saving her girlfriend…friend…property…whatever. Gieo thoughtfully scratched the midline of her forehead with the back of her thumb—figuring out Fiona was going to be an ever evolving headache.

  “Are you sure she didn’t hit them?” she finally asked, knowing full well Ramen saw better at night than most people did during the day.

  “Not a one, boss,” Ramen said. “They all got up and ran, bumping into each other on the way, of course.”

  “Interesting…” Gieo polished off her tea and set aside her tin cup. She abandoned her sifting through the crates operation and decided she might make herself presentable for Fiona. “I’m going to get dressed. See if you can find a dog collar and a leash, will you?”

  “You got it, boss.” Ramen immediately fluttered down from his perch and headed for a group of crates that Gieo hadn’t searched yet. “Are we getting a puppy?”

  Gieo dressed quickly in her ruffled white skirt, matching high heel, knee high boots with tan spats, and her tan, leather matador jacket over a white, lace blouse. The outfit was demure in a way most of her clothing wasn’t, but not without a hint of burlesque. She emerged from the tent, planted a foot on the edge of the roof, and quickly finished tying her boots.

  “What’s the word on the leash and collar?” she asked.

  “Puppy?” Ramen asked hopefully, dropping a leather leash and spiked dog collar in Gieo’s hand. His robotic little face dropped when Gieo promptly latched the collar around her own neck.

  It was slightly uncomfortable and a little on the wide side for Gieo’s taste, but it would serve the purpose, and miraculously, it sort of matched a lot of what she usually wore. She flipped over a metal pie tin with a shiny bottom to admire her reflection and how the collar complimented her slender neck.

  “What? Oh, puppy, um, I’ll think about it, I guess,” Gieo said. Once she was certain the collar would work, she unbuckled it and wound it up with the leash. It was for show, a display to set the town at ease about Fiona’s position of authority…so why did Gieo want Fiona to be the one to buckle it onto her so badly?

  “No, I meant, is the collar for a puppy?” Ramen corrected her.

  “Oh, no, the collar is for…something else. Where did we even pick this up? It doesn’t smell like dog.”

  “I don’t think it was ever worn by a dog. Remember the two guys who came in with the portable DVD player…?” Ramen was interrupted by the door to the roof creaking open in an almost apologetic way. They both looked over to see Fiona poking her head out of the slightly ajar door.

  “Is everything okay up here?” Fiona asked.

  “Sure, come on up,” Gieo said. “The show should be starting soon.”

  Gieo noted, with more than passing interest, that Fiona was cleaner and more softly adorned than usual. Instead of her alternating three pairs of leather pants, she was wearing faded blue jeans with tan chaps, a white baby-tee, a leather vest buttoned halfway, and the gun belt with the Colt Anaconda strapped low on her right hip. Gieo pointed to the telescope by the lawn chair at the edge of the roof. She fell in a half-step behind Fiona on the walk over. She tilted her head just enough to get a good look at Fiona’s backside; the jeans, which were practically painted onto the gunfighter’s lanky form, hugged the contours of her pert little ass, aided by the buckles and lines of the chaps just below each cheek. Gieo hadn’t even known something could look so appealing, and she had to fight an overwhelming urge to bite Fiona’s behind.

  Gieo repositioned the telescope, and motioned for Fiona to sit in the lawn chair. When she’d found the exact center of the Hawkins House compound, she stepped aside to let Fiona lean in closer to take a look. “I’ve been watching them,” Gieo said. “The priesthood, for lack of a better word, drinks from a different well than the general population. You can spot them by the traffic cones they wear like miters.”

  Fiona leaned in, close enough for Gieo to catch a faint whiff of the soft, lavender soap she had used with an undertone of sweat and gun oil. Fiona looked through the telescope, watching the compound as she spoke, “Are they siphoning gas out of that truck or something?”

  “That’s where they keep their private stash of…who the fuck knows,” Gieo said. “But they’re not drinking their usual methanol concoction this morning. I changed the hose to a jug of agave white lightning with peyote in the mix.”

  “Why?” Fiona pulled away from the telescope, surprised, but not unhappily so, to find Gieo leaned in very close.

  “Ethanol, alcohol that normal people drink in beer and whiskey, helps the body metabolize methanol to counteract methanol poisoning,” Gieo said. “And the peyote…you know.”

  Fiona’s beautiful blue eyes opened a hair wider. “So they’re going to get very lucid and then trip balls?”

  “Exactly!” Gieo said. “Hopefully, they’ll mistake it for a religious experience, put that together with Zeke’s demon-based attack on them, and want to leave Tombstone to follow whatever direction their trip guides them. If it doesn’t work, no harm done; they’ll just have some new material to write a Braille bible with.”

  Fiona returned her attention the telescope to watch with mounting morbid curiosity. The handful of men sneaking over to the Dodge pickup drank greedily and departed on wobbly legs. It became something of an exciting waiting game to see which cone-head would lose their shit first. Fiona reached over and grasped Gieo’s knee in nervous anticipation, watching the priests stumble drunkenly for a short time before suddenly, Yahweh himself, had a colossal freak out.

  She couldn’t tell exactly what he said, due to the great distance, but it looked as though he were suddenly assaulted by something flying. Fiona couldn’t tell precisely, because of his crazy beard, but she could have sworn she saw his mouth form the words ‘teddy bears’ as he swatted at the empty air around him. The followers seemed perplexed by his new behavior, but soon picked up on the sufficiently direness of the situation when the rest of the priests joined in on the hallucination and began to have trips of their own.

  “I was kind of concerned it wouldn’t work as well on blind people,” Gieo said.

  “You can stop worrying,” Fiona replied with a little giggle. “Apparently they don’t need functioning eyes to see things that aren’t there.” She pulled away from the telescope and leaned back in the lawn chair, obviously satisfied by the outcome. “So, what now?”

  “Now we wait and see if they have a sufficiently moving religious experience,” Gieo said. “Oh, I also found these…” She produced the collar and leash, holding them out for Fiona, displayed across her open palms.

  Fiona leaned forward a little to look them over and nodded noncommittally. “That should work.” She began to lean back again.

  “Can you put the collar on me?” Gieo blurted out. “I mean, it’s like a necklace, but harder to get on, you know? I could use the help.”

  Fiona shrugged and took the offered collar. She started to reach up to put it on Gieo, who was sitting a little higher than her on the edge of the roof, but Gieo apparently had other ideas. The pilot knelt between Fiona’s boots and tilted her head back to display her neck to Fiona.

  “Um…okay.” Fiona gently slipped the collar around Gieo’s neck and buckled it into place.

  Gieo’s stomach did tiny somersaults through the entire collaring process and refused to calm down even after it was comfortably buckled. There wasn’t any rationale to how good it made her feel, but she quickly listed it as one of the more important moments in their burgeoning relationship. When she opened her eyes to look up at Fiona, she found the gunfighter staring at her, confus
ion clearly painted across her face.

  “There’s a leash too.” Gieo offered the wound leather strap to Fiona, who took it, a little begrudgingly.

  She clipped the end to the loop on the collar and held the unfurled strap as though she weren’t quite sure what to do with the five-feet of leather dangling from the front of Gieo’s throat. “Um…what do I do with it?”

  “You lead me over to Zeke’s to collect your payment,” Gieo said. “The other hunters should be just about ready to head out. They’ll all see us and know.”

  “Okay, right, good idea,” Fiona said, getting a little enthusiasm off of Gieo’s infectious mood.

  Gieo walked a few paces behind Fiona, with plenty of slack in the leash, as they made their way down into the saloon, through the main hall where all eyes were on them, and then out onto the thoroughfare. Gieo, who had planned on every level to act the subservient piece of property, actually strutted, head held high, almost preening with pride in being collared by Fiona. This seemed to confuse the other hunters more than anything; they watched the couple with slack jaws and some, quite-literally scratched their heads.

  Out on the street in front of Zeke’s community center, Fiona let out a sharp whistle. Slow, as if the morning held twice as many hours, Zeke ambled out of the dark interior to stand on the balcony. He glanced down to the duo with a little snort of amusement. Rawlins emerged from the front door of the building, directly beneath Zeke, leaning heavily against the door frame with a contemptuous glare leveled at Gieo and the leash. His angry eyes, tantrum-red face, and twitching jaw muscles were irrelevant to her—they both knew their position in relation to Fiona, and she knew he wished he was in her place, even if it meant being at the end of a leash.

  “They’re bugging out over there, but I don’t see any of them dropping,” Zeke growled. “The job was to thin the heard, not stir it up.”

  “The job was to spike their supply,” Fiona corrected him, “and that’s been done.”

  “We’ll see if something comes of it.” Zeke shrugged and snorted. “You’re keeping your pet on a leash now?”

  “Your houseboy mentioned there might be some question as to who she belongs to,” Fiona said. “I didn’t want to leave you shorthanded, but I also didn’t want to leave any doubt in his mind.”

  Zeke stomped twice on the wooden slats of the balcony, dropping a shower of dust and sand across Rawlins. “You clear, down there?”

  “Crystal, sir,” Rawlins growled through clenched teeth.

  “That’s settled,” Zeke grunted. He shifted his posture to lean his impressive bulk against the railing, which strained to contain him on the balcony. “Matter of the job is still on the table though. I can’t pay you full price for a job half-done, but I don’t expect there’d be much point in having you try the same trick twice. No cuts and half a week’s ration of fuel.”

  “Two weeks,” Fiona said, “and my pet will debrief your secretary on the defenses she saw inside the compound.”

  “Done. Good doing business with you, Red.” Zeke turned to head back into the building, barking back over his shoulder as he ambled inside, “Rawlins, get your ass over to the saloon this evening with a notepad to take down what the pilot saw.”

  Fiona’s and Gieo’s eyes both tracked down to Rawlins; they both gave him a haughty smirk before turning on their heels to head back into the saloon. Gieo walked a little closer to Fiona on the way up the steps, close enough to pass a whisper between them. Her heart had leapt into her throat at being called ‘pet’, and the act of being led around by the willowy gunfighter with the perfect ass had set a fire between her legs that she had to have an answer for.

  “Take me to your room,” Gieo whispered.

  “I’m holding the leash here,” Fiona replied, her eyes never wavering from straight ahead. “I heard you screaming my name the other night.” Gieo’s cheeks flashed bright red in embarrassment. She fell back a few more paces, almost to the end of her slack. Fiona gave a light tug on the leash to pull her back in step. “It’s not nice to have that much fun thinking about a person without inviting them to join.”

  Gieo could have died of embarrassment at that moment. She hadn’t realized she was screaming, let alone anything as specific as Fiona’s name. The crushingly mortified feeling lifted when Fiona turned left at the top of the stairs and led Gieo toward the bedroom.

  Chapter 8: Cultists gone wild.

  They were barely in the room with the door closed behind Gieo when Fiona walked her way up the leash, hand over hand, pulling Gieo in close. Her fingers made for the buckle on the collar, but Gieo shook her head. “Leave it on,” she whispered.

  Fiona moved on quickly from the instruction to let the collar alone, opting to kiss Gieo with a fierce intensity that made the pilot’s knees weak. They staggered across the floor, refusing to break the kiss, groping each other with fumbling hands made clumsy by pent-up desire. Gieo finally got to grasp, fondle, and squeeze Fiona’s behind in the tight jeans, reveling in the steely muscle of the thin-framed gunfighter. Fiona sat on the edge of the bed and dropped the handle loop of the leash over one of the posts on the footboard to get it out of the way. Gieo responded by flicking Fiona’s hat off her head; she ran her fingers through the gunfighter’s bright red hair, ruffling it out of the tamped down shape the hat had left.

  Fiona’s hands found their way up the back of Gieo’s skirt, searching through the ruffles for the pilot’s slender legs. Gieo batted away Fiona’s hands and pushed the gunfighter back onto the bed. She hopped onto Fiona’s waist, straddling her awkwardly at the edge. The pilot’s talented fingers snaked their way up the bottom of Fiona’s shirt, tickling her abs, intent on finally undressing the gunfighter.

  A peculiar sound, one Gieo hadn’t heard in ages, and didn’t really recognize at first, echoed across the town. The rhythmic thrumming noise increased in intensity until it captured Fiona’s attention. The gunfighter’s eyes went wide, and she struggled to extricate herself from the many ruffled folds of Gieo’s skirt. When Gieo finally placed the noise as a didgeridoo, she couldn’t for the life of her think of a reason why someone would be playing one of the strange aboriginal instruments, or why Fiona would care so much.

  Fiona raced to the window, took once glance down at the street, and sprinted for the door. Gieo grabbed the gunfighter’s hat and started to follow before the leash, still attached to the footboard, yanked her back. She pulled the end of the leash free from the post and gave chase. The gunfighter, with her head start and long-legged strides, was already down the stairs and at the door of the saloon, gun in hand, sunglasses slipped on to conceal her eyes.

  “You’re awful far from home, Bill,” Zeke bellowed from his perch across the street. He’d always used Yahweh Hawkins’s given name, although, to Fiona’s knowledge, he was the only one who did, and she had no idea how he knew it.

  The didgeridoo never ceased playing, but was soon drowned out by several hunters’ vehicles returning from all directions. When Gieo finally caught up to Fiona, she found herself pushed back away from the door by Fiona’s free hand, barely able to see out the front doors of the saloon to the street beyond where it looked as though the entire Hawkins House cult had gathered to speak with Zeke.

  “This town’s wickedness has spilled over onto the sacrosanct ground of our sanctuary,” Yahweh shouted back. “Demons have visited us in the night, assaulting the faithful and implicating you. The Lord our Father demands the blood of the she-devils who have vexed Tombstone for far too long. You will give them to us or feel the Lord’s holy wrath.”

  “You’ll get nothing and like it,” Zeke bellowed. “I never took orders from any man and I’m not about to start with some blind old Jesus freak. Clear the street or I’ll have my hunters clear it for you.”

  Fiona glanced around to the numbers of the returned hunters, judged the situation to have shifted toward favorable, and stepped through the saloon doors to stand on the plank sidewalk in front. She kicked the nearest cultist off th
e edge of the sidewalk with a cowboy boot between the shoulder blades. The wiry man she’d punted landed face-first in the dusty street with an audible grunt. The kicked man’s two mates rushed Fiona. The first received a backhand from the long, heavy barrel of her Colt Anaconda, and the second stopped short when the same barrel was brought into pointed contact with the center of his forehead. Even the mostly blind man could see the massive blast door of the .44 magnum at point blank range; he held his hands up in surrender and backed away. Other hunters crept into position on rooftops and doorways around the gathered cultists, no less violent in their shepherding of the blind people into a single clump.