Justice in an Age of Metal and Men

by Justice in an Age of Metal

  Balon Swayle was facing us, but he looked like a freighter had hit him hard. He shook his head and tried to stand but stumbled back to one knee.

  I took another step back. The tails of my coat flew behind me. The heavy door was next to me now, a sidestep might get me out of the line of fire, but Johnson had a bead on me. Our gazes were still locked, but I didn’t like what I saw.

  “You know me, Johnson. You got a duty to me, not this guy.”

  “The transfer was legit, J.D. Swayle is the new sheriff.” His voice was gaining more certainty, more strength. I wracked my numb brain to find something that might have swayed him, but nothing came.

  Swayle stood, recovering faster than I would have thought possible. He scanned the now cowering crowd with his shining eyes. He took a step, but nearly lost his balance when his knee buckled.

  “Do what you need to do, Johnson, but remember, we’re in this business for justice. We don’t shoot fellas who haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Johnson’s hesitation was gone. “We do shoot fellas who are criminals and run from the law.”

  “That we do.”

  I brought my left arm up in front of me and dodged to the left. The slug from Johnson’s pistol slammed into my hand, just where it would have hit my face. Johnson was trying to take me down just exactly how I had taught him to.

  The force spun me off balance but didn’t penetrate the army-grade black metal. It bought me enough time to get to the door, which I kicked hard. The heavy metal door slammed shut and I braced myself against it.

  Their first attempt to get through nearly knocked me down. I was solid too. Johnson must have either had some pretty serious modifications that I didn’t know about or the good sheriff was back on his feet. I knew I wouldn’t last long.

  The force hit again. The door slid a few inches, but I managed to force it back.

  I scanned the area for something I could wedge under the door to buy myself enough time to get to my skidder. I tried to figure a way to jam the lock. Nothing came to me. My brain was still muddled from rage and adrenaline.

  I couldn’t think of any clever or violent solution, so I tried talking.

  “Stop,” I said. “Let’s do this right, sheriff.” I had given up on trying to talk to Johnson.

  The force hit me again. This time I was ready for it. Almost. I stopped it but it felt a lot like a cheap flying sedan had hit me full on. The memory of what that felt like was still pretty fresh in my mind.

  “Noon today,” I spoke in calm, deep voice. I knew he could hear me. Nobody that modded ever neglected the ears. “The Brown Ranch. We’ll settle it all.”

  The next hit was due but it didn’t come.

  “All of it. You, me, the Brown murder, the contamination. We’ll settle it all at noon and only one of us is gonna walk away.”

  Silence. I started to suspect he’d just decided to go around the back entrance, but I wasn’t sure how far away that put him. The emergency exit didn’t just come out the back of the big concrete dome. It ran around through tunnels and came out somewhere around the hills. Maybe he didn’t know that.

  “All right,” Balon said in his deep voice. “You’ll have it, but you take what Deputy Contrisha’s going to give you.”

  I turned away from the door to see Trish standing not three meters from me. I didn’t know how long she’d been there, but I suspect it was long enough. She held a small device, like one a person would put in his ear. She tossed it to me and I caught it.

  Once in, the little plug crackled with Sheriff Swayle’s monotone voice. “I’ll see you at noon, sheriff. You got three hours.”

  Trish’s eyes met mine as I passed her on the way to the parking lot. I couldn’t read what I saw there. She looked like she was intentionally keeping her expression blank. If I had to make a guess, I would have said she was apprehensive. I hadn’t known her long, but she didn’t seem the type to be overly indecisive. She seemed to be having trouble now. Maybe that’s a natural thing when your old boss wants to kill your new one.

  What I wasn’t sure of was which of us was the new boss.

  A belch of blue flame and I was cruising through the sky at a couple kilometers. High up, the air was cold and dry. It cleared my thoughts and let me consider fully what I had just signed up for.

  I had really counted on Trish catching Henry Sharpe. He’d headed out the back door, after all. Somehow she didn’t have him, which meant I might need to pick him up before noon. Ma Brown would be at the ranch, as would her boys. Billy Sharpe was out of reach. City folk had to deal with city folk as far as I was concerned.

  Was he out of reach, though? The wheels were turning now. There was one man in the city that I thought I might be able to trust to bring Billy in. I figured if I could get all of the major players at the ranch, then maybe I could get everything nicely tied up before my showdown with the sheriff.

  The clouds boiled below me. The lightning had stopped, but the storm was slowly building. To the west, a wall of darkness was forming. My timing couldn’t have been worse. The storm would hit in about three hours.

  “J.D, what are you doing?” The voice was Trish’s. For once, it didn’t give me any sort of headache. In fact, I was glad to hear it.

  “Your boss listening?”

  “Probably.”

  “Can you make that not happen?”

  “Probably not.”

  I grunted. It would have been better to keep the new lawman out of this, but my options were limited. “All right, you manage to get a hold of the good reverend?”

  “Tracking him now.”

  Though I’d had very little to do with her training, I felt a bit of pride. She had managed to get to Henry before he escaped. Still, I had to wonder why she followed the same pattern of tracking instead of just capturing the target.

  “Well, that’s a nice plan, but I need him in now.”

  “Arrest him?”

  “Bring him to the Brown Ranch. In cuffs, preferably.”

  “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “I picked up a sample of Mr. Brown’s blood yesterday. Can you take a closer look at that for me? The scan is in the system already. I’m also uploading a second sample for you to look at.”

  She paused. “I don’t really work for you anymore, you know.”

  “Also.” I hesitated, feeling a little embarrassed. “How do I work this earpiece? I might need to make a few calls to the city.”

  She sighed. “Just touch it and say a name. It’ll talk you through any options.”

  “It hurts when I touch it.”

  “Don’t,” she paused. “Don’t touch it so hard.”

  “But if I don’t, it doesn’t do anything.”

  There was an exasperated sigh on the line. “I’ll ask again, J.D. What are you doing? What are you going to do?”

  “There’s someone I need to talk to before I go meet my maker.”

  Trish paused. “Where? Who?”

  “Is it you who wants to know, or the good sheriff?”

  “Maybe both.”

  “I’m going to the Dry Goat, if you must know. Might as well drink some liquid courage before the big date.”

  “You know,” her voice had hardened. “You could have avoided all this. The new boss wouldn’t have been able to take over if you had kept up with what was happening around you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the widespread corruption threatening the food and power industries? Like the uncontrolled gangs riding all over your town? Like the murder that you were perfectly happy calling an accident when modern analytics easily picked it up as suspicious. Like drinking when you should have been investigating.”

  The line was heavy with silence.

  I finally spoke. “I’m going to go get that drink then.”

  Chapter 16

  “You could have saved me a lot of trouble, Lucy,” I said.

  The Dry Goat was packed. Either this was a preferred place of worship on a Sunday morning or the l
ess fortunate residents of the city knew that this was the safest place to weather out the approaching storm. A rumbling low rhythm permeated the atmosphere, penetrating down into my bones.

  Lucifer’s black lips peeled back from his chrome teeth into a wicked smile. “But, then what reason would you have to drink?”

  “Celebration?”

  “Celebrating what? If your job is easy, what sense of accomplishment would you feel?” Lucifer pulled back, moving to the other end of the bar to help a couple of dark-skinned modders. When he returned, he was holding a small tray bearing two shot glasses and a small metal orb. He filled the glasses from an unlabeled bottle of a slick brownish liquid.

  “I’m not here to drink,” I said quietly.

  “Yet drinks are here.”

  Those drinks looked so good. I licked my lips, tasting their desert dryness. I had been craving a drink since I’d been there the day before. Resisting hadn’t done me much good back then, and there were some significant doubts that it would do me any good now.

  “You putting this on my tab?”

  “Way I hear it, you might not be good for it.” His blue eyes sparkled with humor. “Let’s just call this on the house, shall we?”

  “Be a shame to turn down a free drink.”

  I picked up the metal marble and rolled it around in my fingers. It was warm to the touch and sparkled in the pulsing blue light. This was a stylish version of the same e-cuff tech that I used to stop criminals. Nannie blockers were often used to supplement drug and alcohol use in clubs like this. I’d been here before. I thumbed the orb open and clicked it into place on my metal arm.

  My nerves were filled with a pleasant hum. The left side of my body became heavy and limp, but this wasn’t the violent shock of an e-cuff. This was the stylish throb of a designer drug. What is a drug, after all, other than a way to disable a part of yourself? My eyes slid closed and the pulsing light and throbbing crowd faded into another world. The sharp static and then the silence in my ear told me the disabling signal of the designer anti-tech was working on my new earpiece.

  With my senses clearer now, my nose detected the pungent odor of the liquor. It called to me. I figured I could just drink the first of two. I could still do what I’d come here for and then be on my way.

  That wasn’t how it worked, though. If I drank one, what reason would I have to not drink another? It wouldn’t stop there either. It wouldn’t take much to drop me on the floor. It never did.

  I forced my eyes open.

  The woman I had come here to see was sitting at a table all alone. I stood, stumbling a little from the dead weight of my disabled tech. It made me clumsy and made me look drunk, but I compensated and forced myself to move.

  She glared at me as I awkwardly pulled out a chair and sat across from her.

  There was a long silence. She had dark hair and smooth, tan skin. She was beautiful, in a way. Her eyes were a deep purple that doesn’t happen in nature, though they looked otherwise unmodified. There was some redness around them. She’d been crying but was trying to conceal it as best as possible.

  Finally, I broke the silence with the only thing I could think of to say to the woman. “Condolences.”

  She gave a weak smile.

  “Can’t be easy. Found a man you love and he’s already married. Now he’s dead and you can’t even mourn properly.”

  I let that sit in the air for a while. Even with only a couple hours left, I didn’t think there was any need to rush the conversation.

  She spoke after a minute. “We were going to run away. Make a new life.”

  I nodded.

  “Then he didn’t show yesterday morning. I thought he’d backed out.” She buried her face in her hands. “I was so mad at him.”

  “I know,” I said. “I saw you that morning. That’s how I knew it was you. I remembered seeing your anger and hurt and I just knew that you were the woman everyone was telling me about. It just made sense.” I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder. “What happened the night before?”

  She swallowed. “He got in a fight. He was roughed up pretty bad, but he was going to recover. His nannies were the best, you know. State of the art. He was healing already, so I drove him home.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  Her piercing purple eyes scanned my face for I don’t know what. “Just the kid. I don’t know what he was doing out there.”

  “Ben?”

  She shook her head. “No. Francis, I think. The little one.”

  This new information took a little while to process. Something about the pulsing lights and throbbing music dulled the brain a little. If Francis was the one who saw this lady…

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mina,” she said. “Mina Honanie.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mina. Name’s J.D. Crow.”

  She gave a weak smile. “Yes, I know. You are the sheriff.”

  “Was.”

  “Well, I am happy you have chosen to visit me, Mr. Crow.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The crow is an omen of luck among the Hopi.”

  I smiled. I wished we had more time to talk. She reminded me of my mother; she held the same spark of life, the same sadness.

  “They are revered for their intelligence,” she said.

  “Well,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be a surplus of intelligence around here. I assumed the crow was an omen of death, since they eat carrion.”

  “So do a lot of things,” she said. “Coyotes, rats, eagles.”

  I nodded. “Well, how would you like to help this old omen do something that might bring Mr. Brown’s killer some justice?”

  “I would be happy to help, sheriff.” She leaned in close. “What are we doing?”

  “We’re going to break into the jail and set a few dozen criminals free.”

  There was a long pause and I suspected she might not be willing to help. Then she whispered so I could barely hear, “Sounds like fun.”

  Chapter 17

  The station was not well guarded. Johnson was the only one there, the way I figured it. Trish was out tracking down the bad preacher, and the new sheriff was likely helping. Everyone else was likely on patrol or taking the day off.

  Truth is, the new sheriff was probably tracking my every movement. I went through the trouble of sneaking out in the garbage, just in case there were eyes in the skies. Most likely, they just had a bead on my earpiece, but since I had disabled that they probably couldn’t track it. They might assume I just wanted one last drink before going off to die.

  They were wrong. I didn’t want one last drink.

  I wanted several.

  My mind wanted to dwell on how good a drink would taste, but I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. I figured I had about twenty minutes before somebody started trying to track me down.

  There were two ways into the station. There was a back entrance near the enclosed parking area, and there was the front entrance. The back was heavily guarded by some of the best tech in town. My understanding of such things was a little limited, but I understood that it boiled down to motion sensors with machine guns attached. Nothing to worry about if the system still thought I was sheriff, but not such a good day if it didn’t.

  Johnson was working the front desk. Since my last conversation with that beautiful man involved bullets, I figured a distraction was my best bet.

  The rain had started. It was the sort of sideways mist that gets in your eyes no matter what you do. I hunched down and faced away from it, which helped a little, but water was leaking through my badly perforated duster. With a hat and a proper raincoat, Mina was better prepared. Still, she wasn’t happy.

  I waved Mina through the door. She gave me a worried look but went in.

  Timing was critical.

  In the war, stealth was a huge advantage. Tech, those days, had been developed to detect tech. Actually, tech had been designed for stealth, which other tech had been designed to detect. So, more
tech was designed to hide from the stealth-detecting tech. You get the idea. Eventually, someone forgot to keep the thing that detected folks like myself. We naturals had a significant advantage in some very key situations. Early on, I was one of the best. People were usually pretty predictable. Just figure out what they’re interested in and you know where they’re going to be looking—and when. Don’t be there.

  That was twenty years ago. The situations were much different.

  My advantage of stealth was gone the moment a wiki lasered off my left arm. Military grade black metal was the best stuff available and still is, but any creep with a metal detector could pick me out of a grassy field. Targeting systems would lock onto me like a dog onto steak. My military career was finished, but it didn’t really die until the war was over. That’s when I moved to Dead Oak. I thought I could do some good. I figured maybe a man like me could make life better for folks out there.

  But things never got any better. They only got worse and the worse they got, the worse I felt.

  There were no targeting systems up there in the front of the building. Mina was going to walk into the station with a complaint. For two minutes, she was going to describe to Johnson a man who had assaulted her the previous day. He had chromed teeth, modded legs, and spiked hair.

  Johnson would tell her the man was in custody. He would insist but she wouldn’t believe him. She would demand that something be done to track him down. She would claim that the man had been seen outside just minutes ago. She would yell. Johnson was a pretty professional guy, but he never did figure out how to deal with a woman yelling.

  Two minutes had passed. I listened closely at the door, expecting to hear what would happen next.

  I did. Mina started shouting. After two minutes, she turned up the pressure and I knew exactly how Johnson would react.

  Thirty seconds later, I opened the door and entered the station.

  I strode inside, shook the water from my oilskin duster, and tried to tip my nonexistent hat to Mina. My jaw involuntarily clenched. The lack of a decent hat was really starting to bother me. I’d need to get a new one if I survived, or possibly track down Ben to get mine back. I decided that’s what I would do. I loved that hat.