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

by Shelley Singer

  I preferred to assume that all this interest in me was based on lust, even if the assumption was dangerous.

  We talked about music and Tahoe and the casino business and even my supposed desire to learn to be a dealer. I never did find a way to bring Hannah into the conversation.

  At 1:05, after my second restaurant shift, I opened my car door and slid inside, leaving the passenger side locked. Hannah came out the back door and moved toward my car. I watched her. She walked like she knew she was being watched, glancing casually at a car here, a bus there, up at the moon. Too tall, too thin, too self-conscious. Gangly, that was the word. Like a teenage boy whose legs had grown too fast. But people built that way could be strong and wiry and have a long reach in a fight.

  I opened my window. She started to walk around the car to the passenger side. I didn’t want her in the car.

  “Just come over here and talk to me,” I told her, opening my door and standing so she wouldn’t tower over me quite so much. She shrugged and grinned and came back around.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you sound a little like June Christie— they used to call her ‘the misty Miss Christie.’ Way back.”

  Way way back. “Actually, I have been told that once or twice.” By people who really knew their jazz standards. But I wasn’t about to compliment Hannah, and I kept the upper hand by implying that her observation was not original and I was not impressed by it.

  “What’s going on, Hannah?” Was there any way I could be wrong about her seeing me hiding in the trees? I didn’t think so, but just in case, I played it close. “We both know you saw me.” I was careful not to say where.

  “No harm in you being there. You work for the Colemans, right? Just curious, probably. Why didn’t you come on in and join us?” She was laughing at me. I don’t usually mind that; this time I did.

  “Stop playing games, Hannah.”

  She smirked, reached over and chucked me under the chin. I wanted to stomp her instep, but I slapped her hand away instead. She had the nerve to laugh.

  “Why didn’t you tell Samm I was there?”

  She studied my face for a moment. “Flying blind, aren’t you? Well, that’s Newt. Tight with information. Fact is, we do both work for the same people, Rica. I mean the ones we really work for.”

  Well, that explained it. And I was relieved. At least I wouldn’t be dealing with blackmail. Or maybe I would anyway. What kind of merc was she? There was the kind who did the job she was hired to do and never betrayed anyone connected to her employer. And there was the kind who would play anyone off against anyone else, make the people she was spying on believe that she was really loyal to them. Or to get something she wanted from a fellow spy.

  All I could do was ask. She’d lie, but her face might betray her.

  “And what are you going to do about it, Hannah? Let me do my job or turn me in to get points with the Colemans?”

  “If I was going to do that, wouldn’t I have done it already?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Well, Miss Torchy, that’s the only answer you’re going to get.” There was that smirk again. Miss Torchy indeed. Bitch. “Want to go get a late supper somewhere? Somewhere besides Blackjack?”

  I closed my car window and locked the door. “I don’t think so, Hannah.” I walked back toward Blackjack. I felt like I had driving across Iowa. Not enough eyes in the back of my head.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Double Christian all over the landscape

  Before I dropped onto my mattress that night I shoved the bed against the doorway. Even though I guessed that anyone who wanted to come after me would have done it by now, I thought I’d sleep better if I wasn’t worried about assassins picking my lock. I sent two messages, one to Newt Scorsi and one to Chief Graybel. The one to Newt: Thanks for the offer to perform at your casino. I’d like to hear more. Wednesday morning at 10 a.m.

  I wanted to talk to him about Hannah, among other things. I didn’t include a meeting place. If he couldn’t figure out I meant the same clearing we’d used the first time he’d have to message me.

  As for the chief, I had decided I couldn’t trust Hannah, even if we did work for the same man, and, reluctant as I was to do it, I had to send a warning that I might need help. I wrote:

  Stand by. Double Christian all over the landscape. May need your prayers.

  Double-crosses, may need to be extricated. No action yet.

  It was only good form. The last thing she wanted was for me to be captured and questioned. She served the Council. She liked to keep her covert operations disconnected from what she thought of as her power base, her job, because spying could fail as often as not and too many failures, made public, could put her out of work.

  She wouldn’t trust any merc to keep her mouth shut if things got bad, and for good reason. I never knew a merc who was willing to die under torture rather than expose an employer. Only a terrorist or a martyr would do a crazy thing like that. The trick was not to be captured at all, and, of course, not to die.

  Damned toxbag Newt and his skinny razor blade of a double agent.

  I was tired, but still quivering from the double dose of adrenaline— the show and the tense meeting with Hannah Karlow. If I thought about either of those things I’d never get to sleep, and I really needed some rest after this long and raggedy day, so I put them out of my mind. Instead, I found myself lying in bed thinking about Samm and Jo.

  It was a real shame I’d had no time alone with either one of them. If my songs had made that woman in the audience cry, maybe they’d also softened up Samm or Jo. Soften up, open up. No such luck. The conversation was light and friendly, they were charming and attentive and interested in my life. I gave them a good story, based narrowly on truth, embellished with fantasy jobs like the one on the Riverboat Queen, and then I had to go back to work.

  Samm’s image drifted away on a cloud of twitchy weariness and Jo remained, hovering in my mind.

  Jo didn’t seem to be anything like Sylvia. Sylvia was an artist. Jo was a— what? Politician? Sylvia was blond, with hair like white sand, and she was soft and sweet and smelled like spicy nasturtium. Jo was dark, demanding, with hard and angry edges, even if she spoke softly, moved softly. And she smelled like cut grass. The sweetness and fear that coexisted so touchingly in Sylvia were both missing. Well, that might not be fair. Jo had been tender and loving with Drew when he was wounded. Just because she hadn’t shown her soft side to me…

  Sylvia needed love and needed to feel safe in love. Jo? She needed admiration. She needed followers and comrades and flawless performance and probably sex. But a warm kiss? A loving touch? Safety? No, that didn’t seem to have much currency in Jo’s life. I saw no sign of anyone who gave her those things.

  It was possible that I was drawn to her because she was different. Or because really, under the swagger and in her soul, she wasn’t different from Sylvia at all.

  The attraction was powerful. The dangerous glint in her eye. The dry hint of humor that I guessed could spin wilder and wilder webs of laughter and excitement. Maybe it was because she was bad enough, and dangerous enough, and challenge enough, to take my mind off Sylvia entirely for a while.

  I needed to stay away from her. She could drag me in over my head.

  I was investigating her family. I could practically taste her ruthlessness and I wanted to kiss her ear, nuzzle her neck. I wanted her to put her hands on my shoulders and pull me close and kiss me and lead me off to her bed. Well! That was clear enough. But why? Because Sylvia wouldn’t, and probably never would again. Because she couldn’t forgive and couldn’t trust me. And because she’d made a life without me and was determined to be as faithful to that life as I had not been to her.

  I didn’t know what I would do if Jo came closer. If we became lovers and I was faced with the choice of turning her over to the chief or letting her get away with whatever crimes she was committing. It would be easier to let myself follow my safer inclination toward th
e exotic and beautiful Samm, who seemed less complex and less threatening, except that it might not be any easier to turn him in. So all in all, the course of action seemed to be prescribed. Stay away from both of them, make friends with Samm— I didn’t think I could with Jo, the heat was too intense— and do my job.

  And consider the possibility of traveling to Sylvia’s house when this was all over and shooting her husband. No, of course not that. Going to her house and what? Begging her to follow me around the countryside like a nomad. She’d love that. Sylvia and her little house tucked in the woods. Sylvia and her safe little house and the lover she controlled and dominated with her love. Well, she could stay with Gran while I worked.

  But she had no reason to want me back. It had been a long time and a dozen lives and what I could offer she didn’t want.

  A dozen lives.

  We’d been young then. She was a dancer. Both of us scraping for a low-level living, afraid all the time of the dying around us. I met someone. A man, a little older, sweet, funny, kind, who said I could make enough money for vax for me and Gran and Sylvia if I went to work as a merc. We liked each other. He would teach me, get me started, he said. I told Sylvia I could make enough for all of us, to protect all of us, but I would have to travel. She said no, it was dangerous, I couldn’t go without her and she wouldn’t come along. I said I was going to do it, that I believed I had to. She said if I went, it would be for good. It was a terrible and catastrophic night, there in the last bedroom we ever shared. The only fight we ever had. She packed some clothes and walked out.

  Maybe she knew that I was being seduced in more ways than one, but I didn’t know it yet. Not until I ran grief-torn to my mentor and he comforted me.

  I went off to be a merc, with the man who became my lover for a time. And while I was learning useful things, and terrible things, Sylvia found safety and married it.

  Oh, Sylvia. If you can love that idiot you’re living with why can’t you love this idiot who blew our love all to hell?

  Come on, Sylvia, be a sport. I swear I’ve learned my lesson.

  All of my lessons, whatever they are.

  I’m a liar. I don’t have any idea what I have or have not learned. And as hard as I keep trying to reach her, she pretends she’s not there.

  * * *

  Jo wasn’t so sure about Hannah Karlow. She trusted Samm’s judgment about many things, but not about women. And not about politics. She and Judith had scheduled a morning meeting with Hannah to see where she stood and where her ambitions and loyalties, if any, truly lay.

  The fixer was early, standing outside Judith’s locked office when Jo arrived. They nodded to each other, stood silent, and waited. Karlow didn’t seem uncomfortable with the silence; that was good and bad. Jo hated people who couldn’t tolerate silence, had to chatter mindlessly, and Hannah seemed to understand that without Judith present, nothing of substance would be discussed. On the other hand, it might mean she didn’t think Jo had power, and that was bad.

  Right on time, at exactly nine o’clock, Judith hove into view, Drew beside her.

  “Good morning,” Judith said, opening the door to her office and ushering them inside. Judith sat behind her big desk, Jo at her right hand. Hannah took the remaining chair, across the expanse of the desk, farther away and in the line of fire of two sets of deliberately intense eyes. “You’ve met my son, Drew?” Karlow nodded and smiled. Drew nodded back and sat on the couch. He was an observer, there to learn, not an active participant.

  Judith got right to it.

  “Samm says you might be interested in running for mayor.”

  Hannah smiled, deepening her scar. Not obsequious, Jo noticed, but relaxed, cool. She would have preferred obsequious.

  “Might be. Depends on what kind of support I’d have.”

  Ah, Jo thought. The what’s-in-it-for-me factor.

  Judith shot back: “Why do you want to be mayor? And what kind of support are you talking about?”

  A blink, a second’s hesitation. “The town can’t go on forever without one. I like the idea of doing it better than it’s been done before.” Both Jo and Judith waited for more. “What I mean is, government interests me. I think with the right support I could do some good things here.”

  Jo fixed her with a deliberately bland look. She still hadn’t defined “support.” “Like what?”

  Hannah sent a bland look right back at her. “I think we could figure that out together.”

  Jo fiddled with a snow globe, the one that was a model of Blackjack. “You know what happened to the last mayor. Were you here then?” Hannah nodded. “He was a friend of ours. You’re a friend of ours. He was murdered. Why aren’t you afraid you’ll be murdered, too?” Jo watched Hannah’s face carefully. No change of expression.

  She had a fast, smug answer. “If I were afraid of being killed, I wouldn’t have joined Samm’s army. Some things go beyond that kind of fear.”

  Lots of things, Jo thought. Loyalty. Ambition. Greed. She wouldn’t bet on loyalty, not unless Karlow was in love with Samm. And she doubted that very much.

  She opened her mouth, ready with a question, but Judith beat her to it: “Like what? What goes beyond fear?”

  “Vision.”

  “Whose vision?”

  “I think I agree with yours.”

  “Really?” Jo prodded. “And what do you think our vision is?”

  Karlow was silent for a moment. Jo thought she was only pretending to think. She thought this woman had come to the meeting with a full script ready in her mind.

  “I like the way you run things, the way you treat your people. And I like that you’re raising an army. That means you want to spread your influence.”

  “Armies are for conquest,” Judith shot back. “Not influence. Speak plainly. Stop sounding like a diplomat. Do you or do you not want power?”

  Karlow grinned. “Yes, I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think I would handle it well and I would like it.”

  Jo nodded. Good. Hannah wanted power. They could give it to her, or make her think they had. It didn’t matter, at this point anyway, whether they could trust her or not. She would do, as a candidate. They’d put her in office and keep her convinced they were building her road to power. She would serve them as long as she thought it was in her interest. If she veered off their road, they could deal with her. And if someone else assassinated her, it would be no great loss. Satisfying. A good morning’s work.

  She glanced at Judith, who returned the look and nodded.

  “My sister and I need to discuss it, Hannah,” Judith said. “Stick around. Come back in an hour.”

  The gaunt woman stood, dismissed. She looked pleased with herself “One hour,” she said.

  Jo watched her go out the door. When it shut behind her, she said, “Do you trust her?”

  “Hell no. But she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. We’re throwing her a title and a few perks and she thinks we’re giving her control.” She grinned. “Samm told me she wants to learn to fly the plane. Asked for lessons the minute she saw it. He’s letting the merc who delivered it teach her.” Jo didn’t much like the idea of Hannah Karlow flying a Gullwing over their heads. “If she’s grateful enough, she’ll be useful. What do you think, Drew?”

  “I don’t like her.” He looked worried.

  Jo laughed. “I think that’s smart.” Drew was a good judge of people. “Did you notice— she didn’t even ask why we wanted her to be our candidate.”

  Judith smiled and shook her head. “Oh, she’s probably afraid that if she asks too many questions we’ll decide we don’t need a mayor at all.”

  Jo laughed again, reached over and patted Judith’s shoulder. “Well, that’s done. Do you want me back here in an hour?”

  “No, I’ll give her the good news.”

  “Then I’ll go roust Samm, tell him we’ve decided.” Samm had begged off this meeting. He already knew what he thought about Hannah Karlow. He t
hought she was tough and he thought she could be bought.

  “Good.” Judith looked from Jo to Drew. “See me back here at noon, then. Both of you. And tell Samm, and Lizzie, too, if she’s interested. We need to start putting together our mayoral campaign.”

  * * *

  Drew stuck a book in his pocket, a biography of Golda Meir, and headed for the lake.

  Lizzie had gone hiking with friends that morning, but had made Drew promise to tell her all about the Karlow interview. She was interested, just not enough to give up a good hike. He needed to get out for a while too.

  This Hannah Karlow… good soldier, strange woman. He wondered if there was any way the wrong mayor could mess things up. But then, what was a wrong mayor?

  Lately he’d been thinking a lot about his family’s plans. Sometimes he had his doubts about his mother’s drive for power, his aunt’s drive to consolidate little countries into bigger ones. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea to start out on that road, even if he trusted them to do the right thing.

  Big countries made irresistible targets for big terrorists. Big markets made big toxies. These were problems they had no first-hand experience with, and history showed what they could do.

  Oh, they had straggler causies and crazies wandering the roads but even the godders who had started so much of the Poison couldn’t scrape together the followers or the targets to take a bite out of what was left, and just as often were targets themselves. Just yell “terrorist” and they were dead or heading for the border.

  Someone had tried to blow up a glassy-metal molding factory in California a few years ago. They made parts for cars and buses and the few planes that were put together at a Redwood plant— if the parts made it that far north without being stolen. But the people who lived nearby, who kept a watch on the factory ready to protest the slightest hint of toxic sloppiness, eyes sharp for terror, too, took the would-be bomber into a field and shot at him until he blew himself up, blasting a crater in a patch of onions. No one ever found out what point he was trying to make.