"What might happen out there. Famous last words, maybe, but I think I have a handle on the plants."
"You're afraid I might hurt someone?" She liked his pacifistic conscience, but sometimes it wore on her.
"No. I'm worried someone might hurt you."
The chunk of salmon on her fork paused an inch from her lips. She had to force herself to complete the motion, and then chew. The idea of someone caring about her – actually caring about her personally – had become completely alien. She hadn't been aware of just how alien until Louis had spoken those words.
"You said he had some crime boss in his corner," he said. "That doesn't sound good."
"A leader of a local biker gang," said Thalma with a dismissive shrug, still struggling to process her emotions from the moment before. "They were apparently the ones who advised him to stop making payments to a 'crooked corporation' and start investing in allegedly more profitable ventures with them."
"You could just let it go. It can't be that much money in the scheme of things."
"It's not that. It's the principle, Louis."
"I figured." He reached across the patio table and touched her hand lightly with his fingers. "But you could get hurt - or worse. Is the principle worth that?"
His fingers withdrew, leaving warm imprints on the top of her hand. Thalma saw him reading her expression – misreading it – to mean that he'd overstepped himself with that touch. There hadn't been a lot of contact between them since that first day and the chute ride.
She hadn't truly believed he'd be with her now, two weeks later. Now it was no longer a game, she acknowledged to herself in the quiet, dark moments in the middle of the night when the light from the guesthouse shone through her bedroom windows. Now it was necessary to dial back her feelings or someone could get hurt.
"If I let this go," she said, in carefully measured tones, "why not let it all go? Every time someone cheats me or refuses to pay, I let them get away with it? Where would that lead?"
"I see what you're saying, but that's kind of an interesting question. Where would it lead? None of these people know about the other people, right? So they wouldn't know that you'd let anyone else get away with cheating you."
Thalma laughed – a subdued, not especially happy sound. "You do see things logically. I admit it's mostly an emotional thing - I can't tolerate the sense of being 'punked'. Sorry, but I'm not going to be happy knowing someone screwed me over, Louis. That's just me."
"Okay," he sighed. "I get it. I guess I'm just not the vengeful type."
"Yet you told your parents to go fuck themselves."
"You think that was vengeance?"
"What else? You thought they cheated you, and you were angry."
"Huh." His chuckle wasn't happy, either. "I hadn't thought of it that way."
"Please don't worry about me." She held her breath, and reached across to touch his arm. "If you have to worry about someone, worry about them."
THAT NIGHT, in a motel outside Pierre, Thalma began her transition into a man.
She'd been five going on six the first time she learned about her male side. A friend of her mom's had been visiting for a week, and she had a son named Ralph about Thalma's age. Ralph was so quintessentially a boy – running amok, exploring the nearby woods, playing war games in the backyard – and Thalma felt both drawn to him and repelled. Her mom had always called her a "tomboy", but during those days she found herself evolving beyond metaphor into an actual boy.
It began one night, lying in the bunk above Ralph, listening to him breathe - his masculine spirit at play in the air around her - that she found herself synchronizing in some strange way with him.
She'd believed it had just been a dream until she got up and saw herself in the bathroom mirror early that morning. Individually, the changes were subtle – a slight broadening of the shoulders and narrowing of the hips, a touch of blockiness to her jaw, a new bluntness to her fine features.
That morning she dressed in some of Ralph's clothes. He thought that was funny, and for an hour or two cocked his head at her as if sensing something was off but not sure what. She got some puzzled looks from her mom and her friend, too, but they laughed it off. "Looks like we both have boys today, Ingrid," her friend joked. Meanwhile, Ralph and Thalma played in a newfound harmony, two boys roughhousing their way around the neighborhood - playing in the mud by the creek, capturing a frog and forcing it to hop to freedom. They tossed dirt clods at an older neighbor boy, and fled into the woods.
It took her a few days after Ralph left to fully revert to her female form. She caught her mom staring at her more than once – only to shake her head and resume whatever she was doing with a self-reproving snort – but then all that was forgotten until she reached twelve and became friends with Billy Landry.
It was an awkward time for Thalma. She was quicker mentally and had a harsher, sardonic tongue than most of her classmates. She usually did well in school, but was restless, and prone to question everyone's authority – including her mom's. With adolescence, her strength seemed to increase exponentially, and after repeated incidents where playmates hobbled home with various injuries, parents kept their kids away and Thalma withdrew into her insulated world. Until Billy came along.
Billy was quieter and gentler than any boy she'd ever met. He was a pretty boy, she thought. Soft and slim, with long eyelashes that seemed to hover over his eyes like moths when he looked down. He wore his hair to his shoulders like a girl's. He made Thalma's hearts race. What her mom sometimes referred to as a birth defect – and her doctor as a 'one of a kind mutation' – Thalma thought of her two hearts as symbols, or perhaps even the cause, of her mysterious other self. Her twin brother, she called him.
That was the self that Billy seemed taken with. Billy never said that openly, but she sensed that when that side of her emerged, even for a moment, his eyes shone with longing. Thalma had been content to let her twin self lie dormant – her natural state was female – but with Billy the desire to synchronize with someone else returned.
Her mom caught her dressing in boy's clothing, and worried that she might be a transsexual – prompting a long talk where Thalma strenuously denied that was the case. Still, she had summoned forth her male self to be with Billy. It was in that form that she'd lost her virginity – as a young boy nestled blissfully in Billy's arms.
As her mom freaked out, and her teachers at Olympia Middle School in Seattle scrambled to deal with Thalma's cross-dressing and its "disturbing effects on the student body", Thalma's own natural drive to be female finally trumped her desire to be with Billy. In the end, they parted amicably as Thalma changed back, and Billy went on to find love with a "real boy" – leaving Thalma wondering about her place in the romantic firmament, or if such a place even existed.
Her thoughts returned to those times as she lay in the motel room late at night nursing the changes into being that would make her appear to be a man once again.
Then her thoughts turned grudgingly to the taboo - to Zeb Marion and her lone experience with a long-term relationship.
They'd met in the Army and become friends, but nothing serious had developed between them until two years later, when she was back from Brazil and he had departed the military. He tracked her down – back in days when she could be tracked down – and they'd begun a correspondence from different states that soon evolved into a virtual love affair. When they met again, fireworks erupted.
The next two years was a non-stop balancing act of their sexuality - his desire to dominate and be dominated sexually, her longing for affection and stability – and their competing careers. He was a singer in a rock band that always seemed on the verge of discovery, while she struggled to build her drug business without being discovered. For the first year, their two ambitions meshed – Zeb's circles of musician-friends helped jump-start her career, while she helped support him financially – but the second year found Zeb battling a cocaine addiction and growing friction within the band, while deman
ding that Thalma manifest more and more as male.
Even as they crashed and burned, leaving Zebadiah was the hardest thing Thalma had ever done in her life. She'd vowed that she would never endure that pain again, that she'd never again trust another man with her heart(s).
But thirteen years had passed since Zeb. She was thirty-seven, not twenty-four. And Louis was not Zeb. A bit angsty, maybe, but no tormented lost soul. Gentle, and deceptively bright. And those big, golden-brown eyes!
Thalma permitted herself a small shiver. She was sure Louis liked her. She'd caught him staring at her in a wistful, yearning way more than once. But could he handle who she was if she showed it all to him?
What would he say if he saw her now?
A DAY later, Thalma drove into Rapid City as Mark Matheson, her hair freshly trimmed just short of a buzz cut, and a five o'clock shadowing her features. A glance at herself in the rearview mirror confirmed that she was still a "pretty boy." She'd never been able to change her face enough to escape that – but she liked to think she was pretty in the ruggedly good-looking way that an athletic male model was. Probably not all that rugged, she thought with a regretful smile, given the lack of initial intimidation factor with the few men who'd seen her this way.
She had a strategy meeting scheduled in the afternoon with her persuader, Randall Hawkins, at her vacation rental in Custer, southwest of Rapid. She'd also rented a motel in Rapid, to serve as bait. If the local forces proved hostile, they would look for her in the area motels. They wouldn't expect her to be staying in an expensive chalet house fifty miles out of town.
Her true home away from home – her fortress – was her armored GM van, complete with titanium plating, airless, puncture-resistant Polaris tires, ALON bullet-resistant windows, two sound-suppressed .50 machine gun ports, sound and camera surveillance, a computer station, and – last but not least – a comfortable foam mattress and a porta-potty. A pair of powerful Li-Ion batteries serviced the electronics and air-conditioning.
Randall Hawkins was sunning himself on a boulder in front of the vacation house as she drove up. With his thick golden hair and muscular physique, she would've placed him closer to her age than his actual mid-forties. He was into meditation and distancing himself from what he called the "distractions of the world," and she might've been worried about his mellowness if not for his multiple tours with Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He'd earned his right to sun himself on a rock, she thought.
He rolled off the boulder to his feet with a cat-like grace as she pulled up in front of the house. He approached her with a guileless grin, holding out a large, calloused hand. He had maybe an inch on her, and some breadth, but he wasn't an obviously big, intimidating guy. It was his eyes that gave him away, Thalma thought. Some people, perhaps most people, might think they were unusually bright, but Thalma clearly saw the eyes of someone who measured and then meted out death. She also sensed the coiled tension in his body, and the deceptive ease of his motions, which contained lethal moves within lethal moves to her practiced eye. She guessed other people might sense that on some level, but she wasn't sure. Clearly, the owner of the used car lot, Sam Ellis, hadn't sensed it, or she wouldn't be here.
"Boss man," he said with a smile that politely fell short of open skepticism.
"Hi, Randall."
They shook hands. Like the other two times they'd met, Thalma sensed him holding back with his grip – and most everything else – as he hid behind his Brad Pittish smile and his sky-blue eyes probed her. His curiosity was a palpable question mark that his professionalism prevented him from asking. A man like Randall was used to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of both his friends and his enemies. It had been the same way with her – in and out of the Army. She was sympathetic, but she was not going to satisfy his curiosity. She'd have to rely on his professionalism.
"Nice place," he said, as they wound their way up the long sidewalk to the front door.
Inside, they settled down on a living room couch, and Randall opened a laptop.
"Here are some photos of what we're up against," he said. The first photograph showed a portly man in a colorful shirt facing a mustachioed, long-haired man dressed in faded denim and tattoos. "That fat guy is the car lot owner, Sam Ellis. The biker dude is Malcolm Andrews, the leader of the Western Brigade. They're having a bit of a powwow. I didn't record what was being said, but I'm guessing they were patting each other on the back about their latest cooperative business venture."
"Have you seen any indication that Ellis was coerced into this deal?"
"No. I don't doubt there was some pressure, but he went along willingly enough. I've looked into his background a bit, and whoever in your organization vetted him must've missed that he has spent time in prison for selling stolen goods, check fraud, and dealing meth."
"With that background, I'm surprised they didn't give him a bigger loan."
Randall laughed. "Malcolm Andrews, the biker dude, has a core ten-man crew, with a lot of satellites. You were smart to stay here instead of in town. His network would've easily placed you there."
"Where's their base of operation?"
"They have a meeting place behind Deadwood Saloon, one of the legit businesses the club owns. That's all I know so far."
"You met him and Ellis. What's your take on them?"
"Ellis believes he's sitting pretty. He thinks he's dealing with some pampered rich boys who throw money away on bad bets like himself, and wouldn't bother foreclosing on a less than $2000 a month income. I told him he was wrong about that, but he wasn't buying. The bikers are offering him some good business in return for part-ownership of his lot. They control the local arena, and he's thinking they're the better bet."
Thalma nodded. She hopped up and checked out the fridge. "Want some bottled water?"
"I wouldn't mind, thanks."
She returned, tossing him a bottle.
"But I think you want to know if they'd be amenable to negotiation," said the former Green Beret. "The answer is no. Not unless you're bringing serious heat."
Thalma sipped from her bottle as Randall studied her with a bland smile.
"I think the first thing would be to sit down with them," she said.
"Sounds like a plan. Though I'd recommend a public place."
Thalma mirrored his own bland smile.
"Listen, Mark, don't take this the wrong way," said Randall, "but these aren't the kind of people who are going to roll over. Any interaction with them could go ballistic at a moment's notice. Given that, I feel I need to ask you something about your training."
As Thalma hesitated, he added: "I understand that you aren't here to share your life story with me. But considering that this could turn ugly, I need to know who I'm standing with."
Thalma modded. "I'm former Special Forces, just as you are."
"You seem so young. May I ask what group and unit you were in, and where you served?"
"I'm older than I look," said Thalma with a smile. "You can ask, but I won't answer."
Randall set his water bottle on the coffee table between them, a hint of strain in his smile.
"Maybe you'd feel better if you checked me out," she said.
He raised an eyebrow. "Are we talking combatives?"
"Yes."
"You're sure that's something you want to do?"
"Are you sure?" Thalma met his gaze, her smile matching his skepticism. She caught the surge of male aggression in her, and wondered if her other self would've suggested this.
"I assume you're armed," he said.
Thalma removed an assault knife from one trouser's leg, and a pistol from the other. Randall chuckled, and slipped a 40 mm Sig Sauer pistol out of his windbreaker, laying it on the table. Thalma backed into the center of the large living room. He glided to his feet and moved to join her.
Thalma knew they appeared to be a mismatch. Randall looked to be 215 to 220 pounds of toned muscle, spread impressively over his broad-shouldered six-two frame. An inch o
r so shorter, Thalma as Mark appeared much slimmer, but appearances were highly deceiving: her ultra-dense musculature actually made him/her several pounds heavier than Randall. She was sure that would be the first of many surprises for him.
He had his hands out, pawing at her, feeling out his first move. She grabbed one of his wrists and yanked him toward her. Surprise flashed in his face as he was abruptly off-balance, which Thalma aided with a chopping sweep – not too hard – to the back of his ankles. When he hit the ground she maintained her grip on his wrist, moving smoothly into an arm bar.
"Damn," Randall rasped. "You're a helluva lot stronger than you look. And heavier. Do you have lead weight in your bones?"
Thalma released him and rolled to her feet. He latched onto her extended hand. She wasn't surprised when he grabbed her lead leg and surged upward. Instead of falling backward, Thalma folded herself forward over his lead shoulder, snapping her arms around his throat in a front chokehold. He released her leg. She was vulnerable to strikes to the body, but at the same time his neck bore the full weight of her body and his brain was running out of oxygen. He dropped to one knee to stabilize his position, and reached up with two hands to strip her grip. In a real fight, she could either drive her knee into his chest – the simpler and likely lethal move – or the showier, more athletic leap over his back, keeping her chokehold. Randall would've had to react quickly to avoid having his neck or spine broken.
But this wasn't a real fight, so Thalma simply shoved him off – hard – and he landed on his ass. She had to smile at his disbelieving expression. Of course, he'd assumed he could break her – well, him, Mark Matheson – in two. She imagined it was gradually dawning on him that maybe he was outclassed, as incredible as that seemed. Typical Special Forces operator, she thought, believing he could defeat anyone. A quality that sparked in her a powerful desire to kick ass.
He pushed to his feet, the disbelief on his face changing to a provisional respect.
"I must be getting old," he said. "Either that, or you're much better than I ever would've guessed. How many hours – or years – have you put in?"
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