It was then that I noticed that the roomsys, mounted on the desk, was blinking at me. Imagine that, I thought, a roomsys that works—not that I’d use it for anything private. I had a message from Jo.
Her dusky voice told me to meet Monte, the head cashier, in his cage, at noon. He’d take my picture. I realized that I was disappointed that Jo wouldn’t be doing it, and that irritated me. I wasn’t in Tahoe for that kind of fun, certainly not with someone I was spying on.
The bloodstained glass-sequined working clothes I’d been wearing during the raid were soaking in the bathroom sink. The blood was coming out but the bits of broken glass were hanging on. I might just have to buy new black pants.
I’d managed to make it to my car the night before and get some of my things. I’d hesitated about my sys. A new-from-Redwood coin-sized personal sys would be harder to explain away than a new weapon, if someone decided to check out my room. They were hard to get, wildly expensive, and nobody owned one who wasn’t either rich enough to buy it as a toy or doing something that required secrecy and flash-distance communication. In the end I stuck it in a money-pocket flap I’d sewn into a pair of pants, and hauled those pants and maybe a third of my clothes, along with personal odds and ends, to the elevator. Which, it turned out, didn’t work. So, at least an hour after the last of my adrenaline had leaked away, I’d had to drag my sacks of stuff up the stairs to the third floor.
I’d taken the time to find my snoop-sniffer before I fell asleep and run a scan on the room. No bugs that I could find. But I still wouldn’t trust the room-sys.
My meeting with Scorsi wasn’t until three that afternoon. I had enough time to sit through the photo session, change clothes, and do a little scouting around town. Research. Background. Gossip with strangers. Catch the local threads and tie them together. Read some back issues of the local newspaper. Timmy had told me there was one. It even had a real office. There was a website, he said, but it was down most of the time. I tried to access it on my sys. Sure enough. Nothing.
I took a long shower and laid out three outfits. A floor-length dark blue dress with long tight sleeves and a low-cut neckline, a white one that came to mid-calf and had loose, gauzy sleeves and real sequins on the bodice, and flowing pants and blouse made of forest green silk that had actually come to San Francisco on a boat from China. I didn’t much like the white one and wasn’t in the mood for the blue, so I chose the green. It set off my hair.
By the time I’d dressed and put on just enough makeup to create an effect for the picture, I had ten minutes to meet Monte.
* * *
Even if there had been time for breakfast, I couldn’t have gotten it at the casino. The restaurant was closed and a sign on the door read “Cook Wanted.” The casino, a little the worse for wear but cleaned up and with spaces waiting for new or repaired machines and tables, had already drawn a couple dozen gamblers. My green silk attracted a lot of curious stares.
I was on my way to the cashier’s cage when I spotted Bernard, the flabby change guy who’d passed me the note. Maybe he’d know a good lunch place.
“You working a double shift or something?” I asked. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Not a sound leaked out.
He looked over his shoulder, twitchy with nerves at being seen with me. He couldn’t have looked more guilty. Made me want to twist the knife by thanking him again for delivering the message, but I couldn’t chance anyone overhearing.
“Some of our people never came back. I have to fill in.” Eyes shifting all over the place.
I wasn’t enjoying the conversation any more than he was, and had decided by then that he was the kind of short-lived spy who was bound to blow his cover, so I got to the point. Food. Bernard didn’t think for even a second before he directed me, loudly, to “The Blue Chip Diner, the second best eats in town.”
“Thanks, see you, then,” I said, escaping.
Monte was waiting for me. His gray eyebrows shot up at the sight of me in my torch suit. He gave me a friendly smile, smoothed back his sparse hair, and taking my arm in his thin hand, led me inside the cage.
He actually seemed to know what he was doing. He had me posing this way, that way, glancing over my shoulder, smiling, smoldering, head shots, full body, to the waist. He took his time. My stomach was growling.
Finally he was finished.
“Okay, Rica! That’s just great. We got a bunch of good ones. You want to look them over?”
“I trust you, Monte.” It was always more important to make a friend than it was to guard my ego. He smiled happily and escorted me out of the cage.
After I’d trotted upstairs and changed into normal clothing, a pair of denim pants and a blue striped shirt, I passed the restaurant again and saw that the help wanted sign was gone and the doors were open. But since the new cook was a question mark and I’d rather not see Waldo again so soon anyway, I decided that I might as well take Bernard’s enthusiastic recommendation.
Outside the front door, a barker was urging passersby to “Come in for a Blackjack win!” I remembered seeing him at the back door after the raid. He was wearing the same gold jumpsuit with white braid. When I passed him, I saw that his eyes were foggy and blind. He looked to be in his fifties, so he’d have been a child when the poison began. Some of the chem-bombs did this to people. His nameplate said he was called Owen.
The Blue Chip was a small diner with a counter, a dozen booths and tables, three of them occupied, and a round table in the front window. One server, she had varicose veins and a black comb stuck through her dyed flat-brown hair, worked the tables; a fiftyish man took care of the register and probably the counter trade when there was some. He looked an awful lot like the change guy at the casino. Pale, bald, wearing a frayed pink shirt.
When I saw my breakfast, I was sure he was related to Bernard the spy. No one but a relative could have recommended the food there. The eggs over medium were a mess of broken yolk and crisped white. The toast and home fries were as damp and white as the man at the register. I ate what I could with lots of ketchup and hot sauce, left a decent tip on the counter and took my check to the register where he was standing reading a newspaper.
“Enjoy your food?” The man took my money and laboriously counted out the change.
“Yes. Very good.” He did a double take. Maybe no one had ever answered the question that way before. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
He grinned, nodding happily. “Well, thanks. Haven’t seen you around before.” He raised one thin eyebrow in what I supposed was flirtation. He must have thought he was on a roll. “I’m Xavier Polsky.”
“Rica Marin. New in town. Working over at Blackjack.”
His puffy eyelids dropped, covering his thoughts. Was he connected with the Colemans’ enemies, too, like the change guy, or did he just know that his clone was a spy? “Oh, yeah? They do real well over there. Working as a dealer?”
“No. Waiter. And singer, as soon as they open the room. Bernard, one of the change people? He recommended you.”
He nodded, still looking at the counter. “No kidding. Well, that’s nice. Bernard’s my cousin.” Aha! “Nice of him to send you here, and nice that you’re a singer. Maybe you’ll come over and do a number once in a while, huh?” He laughed and looked up at me, raising that eyebrow again. I laughed too, and left it at that.
“Maybe you can direct me to the newspaper office?”
He raised an arm and pointed east. “Right down the street here about a block and a half.”
“Thanks.” I turned to leave.
“Real nice people, those Colemans.” He was definitely protesting too much, or he was scared of them.
“Yes, they seem to be.” Nice. I started walking toward the door.
He called after me: “Well, you take care, then.” I sent him a backward wave on my way out. I was a couple of buildings down from the diner when I noticed a poster tacked to the wall, a political poster for a candidate for Sierra Council. This was the first adverti
sing I’d seen for the elections, which the poster said were about a month away. I glanced at the photo of the candidate and then looked again. I couldn’t be sure, the quality of the photo wasn’t great, but he looked a lot like one of the mercs who had attacked Blackjack.
The Sierra Star’s office was close to the center of town, housed in a two-story wooden building that looked like it hadn’t been painted since the Poison. The front window had a new wooden frame, but that hadn’t been painted, either. The chubby young blonde woman in the front office looked at me as if no one had ever asked for back issues before, but she sat me down at a table and brought all eight back issues for the past couple of months. I could tell she wanted to know what I was looking for, but was too polite or too well trained to ask outright.
“Was there a particular time frame you wanted to look at?”
“No. Just wanted to see what’s been going on around here lately.”
“Oh. Well. Here they all are.” She dropped the papers on the table. “Happy reading.”
“Thank you.”
After a half hour of flipping pages, I didn’t have much more than I’d come in with. The mayor, a man named Arthur Madera, had been found a month before by Frank Holstein, the sheriff I was not supposed to contact. Frank had been on early morning patrol. Driving past a town park near the mayor’s home, he saw a body hanging by the ankles from a low branch of a Douglas fir. When he investigated, he discovered the dead man was the mayor himself, with an old-fashioned bullet through his brain. It didn’t look like intruders had broken into the house and nothing seemed to have been stolen, but the locals weren’t ruling anything out. So he was either kidnapped and dragged to the park or grabbed while he was strolling on his own the night before or very early in the morning. In a random or a deliberate act of thievery or maybe not.
There were no suspects.
Holstein might have found the body but he hadn’t found much of anything else. The mayor had been shot with a very old gun. Antique. A .38 police special. I wondered where they’d have found a thing like that. And gotten it working. Anyway, they shot him dead with it and then they hanged him upside down from a tree.
Hanging upside down from a tree. Interesting. A radical-hugger style killing. The fad had mostly died out back in the forties, but it still happened from time to time, though not necessarily at the hands of huggers and not often, any more, as punishment for poison. Copycats, pranksters, and people who liked doing things the old-fashioned way. Sometimes they tied their victims up there alive and left them dangling, screaming and crying for help. I’d cut down one or two myself.
Was he a toxie, I wondered? Did he own a factory? No, the story said he was a retired grocer.
It also said the mayor’d had no known enemies, which in itself seemed odd. The man was a politician. He had some power or was connected to someone who did. He had to have enemies.
There was no vice mayor, no official who could or would step quickly into the dead man’s shoes. Replacing him would wait for September’s election, and no one had yet agreed to run, at least not up until the night before when the last edition of the Star had come out.
Just shows, I thought, how unnecessary government really is.
“That’s really something, about the mayor,” I said to the blonde woman.
She shrugged. “Yeah. Sad. He was a nice man.”
“Doesn’t seem like anyone wants the job.”
“Would you?”
“But who’s running the town?”
She thought about that for a minute. “Pretty much runs itself, I guess. I kind of thought the Colemans—over at Blackjack?—would put up someone from their family, but maybe not.”
“Why’d you think that?” Should I mention I worked there?
She shrugged. “They have a lot of, I guess you’d say, influence.”
“They seem like good people. I just started working for them.”
“Oh, yeah?” An involuntary glance at my hair. Maybe I should do those stripes, after all. For credibility. “I don’t really know them well, but a lot of people like them.”
“What about that other big casino? Scorsi’s Luck. Don’t they have influence, too?”
She looked like the thought had never occurred to her. “Scorsi? Well, maybe they do. Sure, I guess so.”
I could see why the Scorsis thought the Colemans were out to grab power. They already had more than the Scorsis, at least in the eyes of this woman.
I was about to leave when a small man with salt and pepper hair appeared in a doorway behind the counter.
“Hello,” he said. “New in town?”
“Yes. Working at Blackjack.”
He nodded, which made me think he’d been listening to my conversation with the clerk. “That’s great. I own this paper, name’s Iggy Santos.”
I told him mine. He peered at me. “We just got a picture of you. For an ad. Singing in the lounge, right?”
I smiled modestly.
“Great people. Been friends with Samm for years. Samm Bakar—two m’s, three a’s.” He grinned an editor’s grin. “Blackjack’s our biggest advertiser. I’ll try to come and catch your act.” He turned and disappeared back inside what I presumed was his office. I wondered who Samm Bakar was.
Just forty-five minutes before my meeting with Newt Scorsi, I headed back to the casino.
Still not as big a crowd as the day before; the raid had hurt business. I wondered how long it would be before the customers got over it.
The house sys in my room was blinking. The message had come in half an hour before. “Come see me in my office right away,” Judith Coleman’s voice said. I might be late for my meeting with Newt.
Again, the door was slightly ajar. I knocked.
“Come in.”
Judith was sitting behind her desk. Today she was wearing a purple dress that made her look like a Santa Rosa plum. A man with a star on his chest was leaning against the window wall. He watched me walk in.
“Good. You got my message.” She waved toward a guest chair. “Sit down. Frank, this is Rica, she’s a new employee.”
“And you were here last night?”
“Yes, I was.”
Judith said, “Rica, this is Sheriff Frank Holstein.” I’d already figured that out. “He’s talking to everyone.”
He shook my hand and studied my face like he could see right into my brain. I thought it was an affectation. He didn’t look that smart. Holstein was a stocky, medium size man with muscular arms and a flat stomach. His too-long brown hair—it fluffed over his ears—was combed up in front in a pompadour wave. His jumpsuit fit so well it must have been tailored. He swaggered over to the second guest chair and clamped his stubby hands on its back.
“What do you do here, Rica?” I told him. “Where were you when the bandits showed up?” I told him, trying to sound friendly and helpful. He asked me who was in the casino that I could remember, and what I remembered of the battle and of the bandits themselves. I kept my answers minimal, not offering anything, certainly not saying I thought they were mercs. I couldn’t be expected to know a merc from a bandit.
He straightened up, nodding like I’d given him something to think about.
“Okay. Well, thanks a lot. Judith? I’ll get back to you when we find something. We’ll get ’em.”
“Thank you, Frank. I know you will.” I doubted that she knew any such thing. I made a note of the blank expression she wore when she expressed confidence in the sheriff: This is how Judith looks when she’s lying.
I stood. “Is that all?”
Judith shook her head and pointed at the chair again. She still wanted to talk to me—about what?
When Holstein was out the door, Judith looked directly at me. Her eyes, intense as Jo’s but lighter, hazel, were wide open, unhooded by their circle of fat or the slightly drooping lids of early middle age.
“Jo tells me you taught Waldo a lesson.” No smile, no clue of expression.
“It was a reflex. Life on the
road…”
“Not everyone has such strong reflexes. Congratulations.” Still no clue.
“Thank you.”
“Jo says you sing a hell of a torch song.” An odd and sudden change of subject. Where was the woman going with all this? “A secret sorrow, perhaps?”
Nervy. People didn’t ask strangers such personal questions. My shock must have shown because the corners of Judith’s mouth quirked in a tiny smile. But she didn’t apologize; she waited. The queen of Tahoe, I thought with a quick flash of anger. Maybe I didn’t like her after all.
“Everyone has secret sorrows.” A vague, evasive answer; a challenge I tossed right back at her.
“No. Everyone does not. Not so they can express them anyway. That’s a talent. Shows a certain depth of character. I apologize for seeming to pry.” She didn’t look apologetic. “But I like to get to know the people who work here.”
“I can understand that.” I could, too. Especially if she had things to hide.
“And everyone is not capable of throwing a 200-pound man to the floor, even one as weak as Waldo. Are you a fighter, Rica?”
“No, I wouldn’t call myself a fighter.” I could feel sweat collecting in my armpits. This was quite an interrogation.
“It’s a violent world. You travel in it. How do you survive?”
“I try to avoid trouble. And I try to live by my wits.”
“I suppose that so far, then, that’s worked for you. But you’re obviously capable of taking care of yourself. Blackjack has violent enemies. You saw that for yourself. Does that worry you? You work for us now. At some point you may have to help defend us. What do you think of that?”
Watch out. Too fast. Way too fast. Just last night, Jo had blandly insisted that the raiders were nothing but bandits. Bandits were everyone’s enemy and so they were no one’s. Now Judith was saying something else entirely. Odd that she’d open up to a stranger that way. She sounded like she was recruiting. Did she think she’d already bought my loyalty? Was she so arrogant that she assumed all her employees were loyal from day one? Bernard sure as hell wasn’t.
Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy Page 6