by Ric Beard
“Well, that’s a hoot.” The words were out of her mouth before she realized she’d adopted an old southern mannerism, equating her speech to Lucinda’s. Lucinda smiled in response, but her eyelids lowered slightly, her appraising glare returning in an instant.
“A hoot, indeed.” She stepped closer and lowered her voice. Lexi doubted Cage or Ella could hear her from across the way. “You strike me as very mature for your years. There’s something in you, something underneath. I take pride in my intuitions, and there’s something about you I just can’t quite set my finger on.”
Lexi shot a glance over Lucinda’s shoulder at her children and chose her words carefully, keeping her own voice equally low.
“Does this intuitional response make you uncomfortable?”
Lucinda blinked as her face muscles widened into a full-blown smile and, for a moment, Lexi’s intuition glanced a psychopath…or a politician.
“Honey, a bed of nails couldn’t make me uncomfortable in my own place…and this,” she gestured around with one winding hand of loose fingers, “is my place.”
Lexi looked back at the guns covering the walls and then at the cannon her son wore on his hip. Then she glanced at her host’s thin hips.
Lucinda Proctor is the only unarmed person I have seen in this town since we arrived.
Chapter Thirty-Six
PUSH UP THE TIMELINE
36
The ocular showdown went on for what seemed like minutes, but could’ve been seconds; Jenna couldn’t be sure since her bones were icicles, and her body quaked freely, of its own accord. While the idea passed through her mind that she could jog in place or something to get her core temperature up, she’d be damned if she’d give these pricks the pleasure.
The woman who’d introduced herself as Ruby stood outside the glass, hands shoved into the pockets of jeans that had probably been made at the around-the-clock textile factory from which half the addicts she’d treated in Ripley had come. There was no impatience in those glaring brown eyes. To the contrary, her facial muscles were relaxed, almost slack.
The asshole who’d nearly suffocated her and left her in her near-hypothermic state stood next to the watertight door, leaning on the heavy metal wheel and wearing a dejected expression.
Well, at least there’s that. The way he’s glaring at ol’ Ruby, there, I’m guessing he isn’t big on the womenfolk intruding into his playtime.
Ruby finally broke the silence, pulling Jenna’s own death gaze from the mother fucker.
“We lost another lawkeeper last night while your friends in black sprung your people from a town in the south.”
Friends in black? Jenna furrowed her eyebrows.
Ruby stepped closer to the glass wall. “You look confused. Something you want to say?”
Jenna’s mind raced as the words crept through her mind, bringing with it the pangs of heartache she sometimes felt when she found herself missing the friend she’d made out on the interstate. Had it only been two years?
Is Moss in the MidEast? Is he killing lawkeepers? To what end?
Moss’s motivations were a mystery. Had she ever known the soldier out on the interstate? The soldier who’d help watch her crew’s back from time-to-time while rotating from hers, to the backup crew, to Little Rock? Lexi’s description of the mysterious man in black seemed at odds with her experience, to say the least. If the woman who Moss rescued from badlanders in the MidEast hadn’t been there to validate his identity, Jenna wouldn’t have believed Lexi’s story.
The Moss she’d known was a gun toting, tactical picture of efficiency. The man Lexi described was a kung-fu dude who looked like some sort of cross between Neo and Zorro.
Ruby jerked her chin up to get Jenna’s attention.
“Jenna? lawkeepers?”
“I don’t remember you asking me a question.”
“Is it you?”
“Is what me?”
“Are we really going to run in circles all afternoon, or can we talk straight?”
“Oh, is it afternoon? Sorry, I’ve been stuck underground in a god damn glass cell for an indeterminate amount of time!”
Ruby’s smile didn’t reveal any teeth, but her lips spread wide. Jenna’s eyes traced her angular features, but her thoughts were still on Moss. She didn’t know if he was the source of her heart thumping or if it was the stress caused by the possible hypothermia and the desire to choke the life out of the guy in the corner.
“Ok, let’s change directions, then. Tell me, Jenna, why are you in the MidEast?”
“Maybe I’m from here.”
Ruby laughed gently. “Honey, I’ve been here my whole life. I know MidEast when I hear MidEast. You are not one of ours. I guess you could be OK City, but I don’t hear any drawl at all. So, I assume Triangle. Am I right?”
“Actually, you’re not.”
The mother fucker rang in. “She said she’s from somewhere in the mountains. I don’t believe her.”
Ruby held up a finger. “Is that your expertise, Augustus?” Ruby asked. “Recognizing where people are from.”
Augustus, huh?
“Well, sorta.”
“I guess I could see how your demented little games might give you insight into people, but next time I want your opinion,” Ruby threw a sneer over her shoulder, “I’ll cut it out of you. Now. I think you’ve pushed your luck with me enough for one day.”
The purplish hue that washed over his face caused Jenna to snicker against her own will.
“Now, Jenna, if you’ll tell me why you’re in the MidEast and put Sampson’s mind at rest, we might be able to figure this mess out together. I know it’s hard, cooperating with someone who has killed your friend, but I hope you’ll be able to separate me from my compatriot, over there. When I tell Sampson that he killed him without getting information, he might end up inside that box with you. I hope you believe me.”
“I would love that,” Jenna said through chattering teeth.
Is Scruff dead?
Jenna plopped down on the bench and folded her arms across her chest. Numbness crept across her skin so that the touch of her own fingers against her arms seemed foreign. Her teeth chattered. Pins and needles stabbed at her bare feet.
“You think you would, bitch.”
There goes the frosty exterior. She’s got him all out of sorts.
“Augustus, go get Jenna a towel and a blanket.”
“No way!” Augustus erupted. “This is my place!” He jammed a finger toward Jenna. “That’s my prisoner! You can’t just come in here and do as you please with my prisoner!”
This time, Ruby showed Jenna all her teeth.
In an old-world cartoon, steam might have bellowed from Augustus’s ears as he clenched his fists to the point where his knuckles were white knobs.
“Don’t know who you think you are…”
Ruby stood still, smiling at Jenna as if she were a co-conspirator in her plot to drive him crazy.
“Coming in my place…” He turned toward the door, wound the wheel, and left.
“I hate that prick,” Ruby said.
“The feeling is mutual.”
But that doesn’t mean you’ll get any information from me. I’ll take a blanket, but you’re getting jack shit from me.
Ruby paced with her arms crossing her chest as she meandered, scuffing the heel of each shoe with each step as if she were giving it a little kick for good measure. The low hum of electricity droned through the overhead lights, and beneath that, Jenna could hear the slow drip of an unseen water source. After a couple minutes, Augustus stepped back through with a green blanket and a scrawny towel Jenna likened to a luxury. Tossing both through the crevice at the top of the tank, he turned and set his back against the door.
Ruby kept her back to him as she continued her lingering pace.
“Yo.”
“What?”
“Us girls need to have a talk.”
The lasers he stared through Ruby’s back should have been
terminal, but she seemed to survive. Again, she didn’t turn to look at him or acknowledge his presence beyond telling him to leave. The door slammed shut, and they were alone.
Jenna started whipping the towel along her limbs.
“I should make the asshole blow your clothes dry with his mouth,” Ruby said.
“If you two are playing good-cop-bad-cop, you’re pretty damn good at it.”
“Good cop?”
“It’s an expression back home. Suffice it to say, you two seem to have some fresh wounds.”
Ruby changed the subject.
“He can’t be much of a hero to you, either. He killed your friend.” She looked Jenna up and down. “Somehow, I don’t think the torture even touches that, in your mind.”
“I wasn’t sure he killed him. Did you see the body?”
“Well, no. I don’t see why he’d lie, though.”
Jenna felt emotion wash over her again, dragging her back in an old direction for which she had no time.
Screw this. I’m just not believing anything until I see it for myself.
From the moment the asshole had left the room, Jenna’s hyperawareness of the chills running through her body had notched up a level. Now she shivered violently within the wet panties and tank undershirt she wore, as if the towel she scraped against her frigid skin served no noticeable function.
The woman with the raisin-colored hair and pointed nose didn’t elicit the same level of hatred because, for one thing, Jenna didn’t even know who the hell she was. For another, she didn’t really care. Maybe she was just one of Sampson’s lap dogs, but she didn’t seem to fit the bill of the kind of brutal personnel Lexi described after her information gathering efforts the previous year.
Whoever she was, she needed to leave, so Jenna could warm her body without the distraction.
Let’s push up the timeline, set some standards.
“You want to know what I think?” Jenna asked.
“Sure.”
“I think your boss is a narcissist asshole who thinks he has a superior intellect.”
Ruby chuckled. “You’re probably not the first to think so, though I doubt a lot of people in the MidEast would put it like that. They don’t have your words. Your language reminds me—you know what Sampson and I have in common?”
Jenna pursed her lips in a disinterested response, but Ruby either didn’t catch it, or took it in stride as she walked around to the side of the cage and leaned a shoulder against it. Pulling the knife from the sheath on her hip, she pushed the tip under a fingernail.
“Books. I love the things. Always have. Since the day I could read, I’ve looked upon any I could lay my hands on, like they were candy.”
She flicked something from under her fingernail with the knife and continued sawing.
“How old are you?” Jenna asked.
“Thirty-four, why?”
“That means you’ve lived through Rapier, Dean, and Horace. A girl in a world where self-proclaimed generals kidnap males into service and leave nothing but memories might enjoy the escape of a good book.”
Ruby’s expression soured as she stopped picking at the fingernail.
“Oh, sorry,” Jenna said. “Did they take a brother? Your father?”
Ruby shoved the knife into her sheath and returned to her spot in front of the glass.
“Anyway, I think the books are serving me pretty well, today because I can tell I’m not talking to an idiot. You strike me as smart.”
Jenna finished toweling herself off and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. Plopping down hard on the bench, she crossed her legs in front of her and pulled the blanket down to cover them.
“That was a compliment.”
“You expect me to thank you?”
Ruby shrugged. “I guess not. That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”
Jenna chuckled in derision.
“Let’s see if we can get you out of here, Jenna.”
“As if.”
“You know, you can’t believe everything you hear.”
A flutter of light snatched Jenna’s attention. Turning her head to the left, she saw her soaked, crumpled pants wadded in the corner. Through the discolored fabric, she saw a subtle blinking red light.
Oh, my god, Scruff sewed a tracker into the new pants! She pushed air quickly through her nostrils as tears threatened to appear at the worst time possible. Grip. Get a grip. Distract her. Don’t let her see that light.
“Okay, let’s go down the list!” Jenna snapped. “I’ll tell you what I’ve heard, you tell me your side, and then we’ll talk about me. A little quid-pro-quo?”
Ruby crossed the floor and grabbed the metal folding chair. To Jenna’s relief, she carried it instead of dragging its uncovered feet across the concrete. The woman’s motions showed intent as she flipped the chair open and dropped it into place.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Shoot.”
If only I had a gun.
“I’ve heard Sampson rolled into the area after twenty years away and went on a tour to all the townships.”
“So you’re from the east. We call them towns, here.”
“Nice,” Jenna said.
The light blinked, blinked, and blinked in the corner, but Jenna locked eyes with Ruby, wondering why it hadn’t automatically shut off, as designed.
Maybe the water screwed it up, but why would it work at all?
Ruby shrugged. “I wasn’t with Sampson when his little tour started, but I witnessed the speech in a little town I’d migrated to, for work. Next thing I knew, he’d left a lawkeeper behind.”
“Saves me the trouble of asking that question,” Jenna said.
“But wouldn’t you know it? Not two days later, a client got a little rough with me on the street because I wasn’t interested in having him for a customer, and that very same lawkeeper made a timely appearance. It seemed to me there was law in my town, instead of relying on the all-too-infrequent decency of the honor system…you know, that people will behave on their own.”
“I could see how that might impress you. So you were a prostitute?”
Ruby didn’t hesitate. “Yes. For years.”
“Which job do you like better, fucking people one at a time, or fucking all of them at once?”
Ruby laughed. “You’re funny.”
“I wasn’t being funny.”
“Oh, you might not have been trying, but you were definitely being funny. What’s your next question?”
Jenna suppressed her urge to scowl. Ruby had figured out she was from the east, and now she’d displayed her wit at Jenna’s expense. Nina would be ashamed of her for giving the hooker an advantage in an interrogation. Ruby obviously wasn’t the average MidEast corner gal, though.
And none of this matters if your tracker is found. Keep her talking.
“How many innocent people have you killed?” Jenna asked.
This time, Ruby hesitated. Her eyes lost focus for a moment as she turned her head to the side so Jenna saw the edge of her pointed nose.
Definitely something there. A regret?
“I haven’t. Any more questions?”
“How can you work for a man who orders the deaths of innocent farmers who refuse to recognize his authority?”
“You’re talking about the Churchill farm.”
“Yes. Where the father, mother, and two little girls were butchered and had a dog turned loose on them.”
“That was regrettable, to say the least.”
“Wow, if understatements were gasoline, and bull shit was a match, your mouth would be on fire.”
“It’s not bull shit,” Ruby snapped. Her chest rose and fell suddenly as she huffed a breath through her nose. Again, her head turned to the side as if she were somewhere else, perhaps gathering her thoughts. “What if I told you the lieutenant who led that raid was executed?”
“Right. Sure he was.”
“How many other farmers do you know of who were killed, Jenna?”
�
�I know a lot who got roughed up.”
Ruby laughed and threw up a hand. “Welcome to the MidEast! What, you think they haven’t been roughed up before? Freedom isn’t free, Jenna!” Her eyes were wide now, her chin hanging open.
“Is that one of Sampson’s? He use that one on his stump speeches?”
Ruby pressed on. “We have a system. The citizens have to participate in the system or else it fails. If they fail to pay taxes, they pay otherwise.”
“Taxes? You mean their food. The food they grow with their own hands!”
“Yes!” Ruby yelled to match Jenna’s tone. “Food used to feed others who don’t farm!”
“Right! Who are the others? What else do you use the food for?”
Ruby huffed again and crossed her legs.
“Why are you in the MidEast, Jenna?”
“I’m helping the people addicted to your fucking amphetamines escape their grasp, so they don’t die. I do this because I’m a horrible human being.”
“You’re not sewing dissent?”
“I’m empowering the people to make their own decisions.”
“By arming them? Training them to use weapons?”
Jenna sighed.
“I’ll take that as a yes. If you’d only been helping people, Sampson would probably have left you alone.”
“Sampson is more interested in keeping slaves in his industries, working and snorting themselves to death. Don’t try to con me, lady.”
“Sampson lets people make their own choices, Jenna. Go ahead, demonize him if you like, but I know what life was like before he came.”
“You mean he’s better than Horace? Better than the men who took your family?”