by Ric Beard
“Oh, right. I guess Carson got his man, after all. That right, Bradshaw?”
Something flickered in those almost transparent blue eyes for just a tick, but then it was gone, as they leveled themselves on Sampson again.
Bradshaw nodded. “Yup.”
Ruby had heard the call on the radio as they’d made their way to Blacksburg hours earlier, when Carson gave the location of the wrecked truck so the drugs could be retrieved. Two troop carriers called in while Sampson’s team had dragged Proctor to Shawsville, reporting they’d had no luck apprehending the man in black or the vehicle Carson described across the radio network, but they’d manage to retrieve the drugs and had been loading them at last contact.
“That’s an example of good business,” Sampson said. “Mistakes were made, but in the end, our money was returned and Miss Bingham gave us our drugs, anyway. Seems this Stone character is a valuable asset. What do you think, Ruby? What would you give to know why arguably the most powerful woman in OK City wanted this young lady’s friend?”
In lieu of answering, Ruby’s eyes traced the ridgeline above as she breathed air too thick for this altitude and for winter. Moisture pervaded her flannel shirt, and she didn’t know whether to attribute it to the weather or the discovery on the back of Sampson’s personal troop carrier.
There was a game afoot, and all this time Ruby had been merely a piece being played on a board comprising the MidEast territories. Considering what her old life had been, as a hooker on the dusty streets of whichever towns wouldn’t run her out like a pariah, being a simple piece in Sampson’s larger puzzle wouldn’t have offended her, if she’d known about the other pieces. No, she didn’t mind the game…
…if only she’d known the rules.
Now that she had a better understanding of the interlocking edges of transpiring events, Ruby wasn’t sure she liked playing Sampson’s game. There were a few pieces she hadn’t fitted together floating around in her head as she searched for the patterns that would secure them tightly and close the final gaps.
Sampson’s head swiveled toward her, and their eyes locked. Ruby kept her expression slack while she rooted around for answers.
Black Ghosts in Blacksburg.
“Ruby?”
Ruby’s eyes diverted to the row of Sampson’s enemies, and she cocked her head to one side as she suddenly realized what all these intruders held in common…disinterest. Though they were surrounded by all these burly men wielding weapons and wanted for murder throughout the MidEast, she couldn’t spy fear in any of their eyes.
It’s one thing to be hard, but it’s another entirely not to give a shit. Look at the smirk on that short guy’s face. I wonder what expression he’d be wearing if he could see Bradshaw staring a hole in his back. Probably no different.
Sampson’s eyebrow was crooked like the top of a triangle. “You okay, Ruby?”
“Right as rain, governor.”
Sampson’s gaze lingered for a moment longer before returning to the redhead.
“So, is he your lover? Friend?”
“He doesn’t mean shit to me,” the redhead said. “Is this going to take long? I’ve been on the road a long time, and my back is a little sore. You think you—”
A soldier with a square jaw and a tooth missing from his snarling mouth stepped up from behind her and slammed the butt of his rifle into her back. The woman tumbled forward, but fell neatly onto her forearms, balancing herself on the toes of her boots with her whole body hovering inches off the ground. Her head bobbed down, firelight enhancing red tendrils and orange streaks reaching in curly fingers toward the ground. The soldier raised his weapon to finish the job, but Sampson’s raised hand deterred him. He lowered the weapon and stepped back with a curt nod.
A closer look revealed a matching black arm brace wrapped around the redhead’s forearm. It explained why she was shifting her weight to the other arm, raising it off the ground, and setting it gingerly back on the surface.
Injury?
As she scanned the black-clad, lean shoulders, straight back, and high, muscular rump of the woman perched in the strange position on the ground, Ruby’s mind trailed off to the discovery in the cargo box and the item now tucked into the back of her jeans, concealed under her shirt tail and jacket.
Simms, the dead lawkeeper. A name already widely known across the MidEast, whose death Sampson attributed to the Black Ghosts’ tactical natures. What better way than to sow discord, make a people feel unsafe, than kill those who would keep them safe? But it was just a small town. Simms was just one man. What made him special?
“That’s not necessary.” Sampson’s head tilted toward the woman. “Why don’t you just sit down there.”
The woman looked up from her balanced position, her body straight as a board, curls covering half her face, and sprung to her feet. Though she was unable to hide her grimace, and though she bent slightly as a result of the assault on her back, she remained standing.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“The governor said—” the soldier stepped forward, gun raised to strike again. In a blur of motion, the woman leaned backward at an impossible angle. As the weapon missed its target and crossed over her torso, she clutched the barrel, leaned forward while wearing a wide sneer, white teeth, and pulled the man across her hip by slamming the weapon down toward the ground, causing the enforcer to summersault and slam hard on his back at Sampson’s feet.
The rattling sounds of guns cocking filled the air as the rest of the enforcers raised their weapons, and the woman completed her motion. Sampson stepped back. The enforcer on the dirt raised his back off the ground, groaning in pain.
The woman glanced around at the weapons trained on her and shrugged, her palms turned toward the sky next to her shoulders.
“Hey, guys, he’s still the one holding the gun.”
Ruby’s eyes jerked down, and she saw it was true. She’d used his own grip on the weapon to throw him and then left it clutched in his hands as he hit the ground.
“Doesn’t feel so good, does it, asshole.”
Silence washed over the scene, the only sound the crackling fire next to her. Ruby perused the expressions of the numerous men wielding their rifles and found a mixture of anger, fear, and, yes, even awe.
Sampson smiled. “I thought you were a woman! You’ve got balls!” The governor laughed boisterously, looking around.
Ruby noted the Black Ghosts hadn’t budged throughout the encounter.
She glanced at the tall woman in the strange black suit, then at the shorter woman perched next to her, staring off into the distance in a familiar gaze Ruby couldn’t quite place her finger on. There was something wrong here, but her mind was torn between too many sets of circumstances. She thought the short woman might be talking to herself, her lips moving ever so slightly as she stared off into the distance, but the moment was gone as quickly as it had come.
Bradshaw shifted, and Ruby read the outline of his muted, black leather pants and matching vest.
Bradshaw likes black. He’s the perfect failsafe. The backup patsy.
“You Black Ghosts are wanted for murder throughout the MidEast,” Sampson said. “Yet you stand here like you don’t have a care in the world. What am I to make of your brazen disrespect for our laws?”
Black Ghosts.
What had Sampson asked her to wear when she’d gone to town? A black dress. Black, black, black. Everyone in black. Her eyes took a gander at the boss’s own outfit. Tan boots. Matching jeans. A scarlet shirt replaced the black one he’d worn to sneak into Blacksburg tonight. She eyed his golden hair, the hair she’d admired since that day she’d first seen him preaching from a truck in the South.
Soft, reflective in the midday sun that day…
“Don’t even care enough to answer me?”
Sampson reached into his holster and raised a black pistol, made of some kind of composite material and rolled it over in his hands as he walked to the shorter woman with the black hat hangi
ng on her back, supported by a string wrapped around her neck.
“This is a pulse pistol, right?”
The woman in black yawned. Ruby smiled, in spite of herself, but the expression dwindled as she reacquired the governor in her sights.
“This is the kind of weapon we believe killed Lawkeeper Simms, Justice Bradshaw.”
“I know it boss. We should execute these murdering dirtbags with it.”
Speaking of executions…Bradshaw, who executed his own man, calling someone else a murdering dirtbag.
“I tend to agree.”
Ruby perked up as Sampson raised the weapon and leveled it on the short woman.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Lexi said.
“What’s that? Now you want to talk?”
Though the tall one had responded to the governor’s sudden act, Ruby noted that, once again, the short woman didn’t flinch. Squinting her eyes for a better look through the woman-in-black’s glasses, Ruby felt a thump in her breast. The arms folded above her even-breathing bosom, one hip cocked out to the side…the look in her eyes wasn’t a glare, it was a gaze.
She’s waiting for something!
Ruby’s head swiveled so fast to the ridgeline above that a moment of vertigo returned. When it cleared, she found her feet stepping away. A quick glance at the back of Sampson’s head, and she took another step backward. Then another.
Sampson’s voice boomed off the rocks surrounding them as she stepped away, one measured gait at a time, remembering last time she’d experienced that natural inflection, the way it boomed.
When I arrested Jonesy. What had the lawkeeper said…’
“He killed his own guy after Churchill, Ruby.”
“A guy that murdered a family and set his dog on them. What would you have done?”
“The question you should ask yourself is, ‘what would you have done?’”
She eyed the back of Sampson’s head and reached for the back of her jeans, gripping the object there, waiting.
A flash of light shrieked down from the ridge above and the enforcer standing closest to Sampson keeled over, landing face-first with a heavy thud.
A rattling sound snagged Ruby’s attention from his motionless body as a black, metallic cylinder bounced near the campfire behind Sampson and settled near the flames. The device flashed bright red for a split second. After a tick, it flashed bright yellow.
The short woman in black suddenly reached out and slapped a gloved hand over the fiery-haired Ghost’s face. Ruby’s eyes flicked to the cylinder next to the fire, then back at the woman.
Click.
Ruby swung around, threw the crook of her arm over her eyes and sprinted away from the fire. A deafening bang seemed to suck air from her ears in a vacuum, and Ruby plunged to her knees. A loud, single-tone pitch filled the air, and the accompanying, physical sensation was like warm water being poured into her ear canals.
Crawling on both knees, the ringing was replaced by Sampson’s bellowing voice, barking orders as the men yelled and scrambled. The enforcers’ weapons clattered and Ruby heard footsteps scattering in all directions to escape the slow, steady gunfire from the ridge. A few raised their weapons and fired blindly into the rocks above as they sprinted for what cover they could muster.
Eyes shifting across the field, squinting into the night lit by the fire and spotlights, Ruby crawled into the barn-red building and took refuge behind its wall, peering out to watch the fireworks.
Two figures danced together near a tree line prefacing the mine in the distance. The shape of the figure with shoulder-length hair yanking the short, slimmer figure along, brought Ruby to grind her teeth.
Lights shone upon the mine entrance, barred off by two massive doors attached to a system of counterweighted pulleys and ropes. Urged to pursue by an inner force she couldn’t explain, Ruby resisted: instead, stepping back into the shadows of the building to wait for death to take its due from others.
Chapter Sixty-Six
HE’LL BE YOUR EYES
66
The constant high-pitched whistle filling her ears was disorienting, and a heavy weight bore down on her back as Lexi shook her head, trying to clear the cobwebs. One moment she’d been squinting at Sampson, longing to put a knife in his Adam’s apple, the next, Sasha had slapped her.
No, she covered your eyes to protect you from that flashbang.
Hot breath prickled up the hairs on the back of her neck as the woman-in-black’s lips pressed there. Moss picked off the disoriented enforcers scurrying away from the campfire as the tonal invasion of her ears dissipated.
“Can you hear me?” Sasha yelled. “Can you hear me, Lexi?”
“I hear you!”
A gloved hand appeared in front of her face and shook violently.
“Can you see?”
“Yes.”
The hand extended a single finger. “Jacob ran that way. Follow and I’ll cover you! He’ll be your eyes! Go!”
The weight rolled away and Lexi sprung to her feet without thinking. Men around the fire held their hands to their eyes, yelling all sorts of obscenities into the night air as Moss picked them off.
Fish in a barrel have a better chance.
Lexi pumped her legs as fast as they’d churn.
Bullets spit stone off the rock face behind as she covered her head with her hands and doubled over, running in the shadows behind the spotlights on tripods. Jacob was a black blur in the night as he escaped the halo of the last spotlight and zipped into the towering pines on the opposite side of the field from the buildings. Sasha was nowhere to be seen; Lexi reminded herself not to be surprised.
Though gunfire wasn’t a new proposition for Lexi, she’d learned over the decades that the body never quite adapted to the loud muzzle reports and she found herself jerking repeatedly with the echoes bouncing off the valley walls as she closed the final steps before the inky shadow of the trees ahead.
Pain scorched her shoulder, Lexi lost her footing, but sprung at the last moment to roll across the pine straw and bounce into a wide trunk, ending in a half-crouch. She patted her chest and abdomen to see if the bullet had passed through. Reaching over her back, she patted the injured shoulder blade and brought away wet fingers.
Just a graze.
She sighed.
When her instincts kicked in back at the fire, and she’d flopped onto her forearms at the last moment, she’d wrenched the injured arm pretty good. Logic told her that shifting her weight to the good arm at the last second might have broken the other one and that she’d done the right thing. The thought was of little comfort, however, as her healing arm throbbed.
After a few long breaths, she peered around in the darkness, trying to get her bearings.
Okay, fuckers, time to end this.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
SOUNDS LIKE IT
67
The truck’s engine wasn’t the sort that roared, per se, but it did its humble best as it climbed the steep grade.
“They might be up on this ridge,” Jenna said into her throat mic.
“Is that gunfire?” Lucian asked over the rumbling chassis of the truck as it bounded forward.
“Sounds like it!” Nina yelled unnecessarily into his ear, her head shoved through the window in the back of the cab.
“Jenna, turn here, pull up that road!”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
ONE DOWN
68
“We can’t get out that way,” Jacob said. “Too steep!”
Lexi looked around. The man in black crouched next to another pine, his head leaning into its bark, occasionally peering around its trunk to get a bearing on the enforcers. Jacob had already pulled his hat back on and yanked it down tight as his face disappeared in the shadows of the trees cast by the distant spotlights.
I can’t see dick without my glasses. Dammit!
“Fuck that, Jacob! I don’t want out! We fight!”
A quick glance at the campfire revealed her pulse rifle and
the blades, staked into the earth. Lexi suddenly longed for their weight on her back.
How Sasha and Jacob had managed to grab their weapons in the midst of pandemonium, she didn’t know, but she hypothesized their glasses had a flash filter.
There really are things to learn from these people.
As if he read her mind, Jacob said, “You want to go for your weapons?”
“Not if it means getting pinned down in the crossfire.”
“They’re all aiming up at Moss. Here.”
Jacob aimed his rifle at her, but no, it was aimed just over her head. Flicking a switch and peering into his scope, he fired, causing her shoulders to jerk violently and sending a renewal of the burning in her back wound through her nerves. To Lexi’s surprise, the pulse weapon had emitted a simple flash of white light.
It fires bullets, too?
She turned to see one of the spotlights had gone dark. Another report, and the next was annihilated.
“Shaw!”
“Yeah?”
He crouched next to the wide tree trunk, his weapon balanced in his hands.
“It’s my duty to make sure you get out of this valley alive, even if it means taking a shot for you.”
“What about Proctor?”
“Sampson had the wherewithal to drag her away from the fire. He’s heading toward that mine. She should be safe in there until we can retrieve her. First, we gotta clean house. But until Sasha comes back, I need you to stay alive.”
“Then I guess you better get your shit together.” Lexi launched and bolted out of the tree line. This time, blue lights flew out from behind her for cover. More bolts zoomed in from the front left, and Lexi surmised Sasha was firing among the low rocks.
Lexi dove and rolled within inches of the campfire. Crawling on her belly, she wrapped the rifle over her shoulder and gripped her blades as she raised and jumped away from the fire. She ran with the blades in an inverse grip, surprising herself with a wide grin and the elation of endorphins raging through her body, until she returned to the trees. Shoving the knives into the slots on the back of her suit with practiced precision, she turned the grin on Jacob.