by David Dixon
I woke late the next morning, naked and lying next to Carla who had managed to steal the entire top sheet and blanket for herself. I had a slight hangover, but considering how good the rest of me felt, I saw no cause to complain about anything. The clock on the bedside table read 10:28.
I stretched and yawned. The movement woke Carla, who rolled over and looked up at me.
“Aren’t you cold, sleeping like that?” she asked. I looked down at my naked body. It was cold, but the shrinkage wasn’t too bad.
I shrugged. “Yeah, but snakes are warm blooded, see, so they make their own heat.”
Carla gave me a strange look.
“What?” I asked.
“My God, you’re serious, aren’t you? Snakes are cold blooded, dumbass, and I thought everybody knew that. I can’t believe you didn’t.”
“Biology wasn’t my strong suit in school.”
“What was?”
“I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.”
“Now that I believe.”
The apartment door slammed. Carla winced.
“Might want to cover up. Jade’s coming, and she’s gonna be on the warpath.”
She tossed the blanket over me just in time for Jade to burst in the door.
“What the fuck, Carla? Last night your date shows up and he’s all pissed off and makes a scene and when my date shows up, he thinks your date is upset with me and my date gets pissed off and leaves too. Then you ignore my texts all night about wanting to meet up somewhere, so I go off alone and drink myself damn near to death and wind up over at Sam’s, and you know how that goes, so we fight again and I wind up crashing on her couch.”
“Jade—”
“I’m not done yet, Carla. Then when I get in here this morning the whole place is a wreck and smells like booze and sex because you two fucked in every room in the whole goddamn place.”
“We stayed out of your room, and I don’t think we made it to the bathroom yet,” I offered.
Jade looked at me like she wanted to claw my eyes out. “And then I come in here and find you in bed with him—after I told you to not bring anybody from work to the apartment. You said he was a ‘business associate,’ Carla. Jesus, what kind of business are you in?” Jade muttered.
“Well, I’d say this is hardly a work-related event at this point,” Carla said dryly. “Call him a boyfriend if that makes you feel better.”
“Makes me feel better,” I said.
“Shut up. Nobody asked you,” Jade snapped as she left the room and slammed the door behind her.
“She always like that?” I asked.
“Not always. It’s a long story,” Carla said. Something about her tone made me rethink a few things.
I brushed Carla’s hair out of her face and kissed her again.
“Is she still upset you two broke up?”
Carla hit me with a pillow. “I told you, my past is my past.”
I took a long shower, made longer by the fact that Carla joined me halfway through.
We had finished brunch and Carla and I were talking about various dangerous runs we’d done before I remembered I was supposed to bring the boss back chicken wings some twenty hours ago.
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“My boss. See, I kind of told him I was going out to pick up some wings for an early supper for us last night and it’s now, uh—”
Carla checked her ring. “It’s 1315.”
“Okay, so I’m a little late.”
“You said you were going out to pick up chicken wings and then never told him any different? How the hell did you wind up over here?”
“My brain works in very complex patterns,” I said.
“When it works at all. Has he been up all night waiting for you? Worried about you?”
“My boss is not Jade. I guarantee you he has not been waiting up or worried. He is gonna be pissed about the wings though.” A little voice in my head reminded me the wings might not be all he would be pissed about, but I ignored it.
“I’ll say,” Carla told me. “You’re gonna earn the ‘least reliable crewmember of the month’ award—no doubt for the sixtieth month in a row. You’ll be lucky he doesn’t kick you off the crew.”
“C’mon. And replace me with who, exactly? It isn’t like it’s the end of the world if I don’t come back for a bit. Hell, this week he stormed off and didn’t come back until four days later, hungover as shit. Besides, you’re one to talk—you stood up a date last night for a guy you didn’t even expect and apparently broke all your roommate’s rules. And her heart. Again.”
“Jade’s a big girl. She can take it.”
“Well, the boss is a big boy, and he can take it.”
“Maybe we should get those two together,” Carla said, and we both burst out laughing.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. “You like him too much to subject him to Jade?”
“Nah. Other way around.”
“You know,” Carla observed, “he’d smack the shit out of you if he heard you say that.”
“No doubt he’d try.”
“But seriously, you probably ought to get back so he doesn’t get too pissed,” she said. “And you definitely owe him some wings.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, which is why I probably ought to get back.” I stood to go.
“You two planning on heading out soon, huh?” she said with a smirk.
“Ha. You’ve seen the ship. What do you think?”
I walked to the door and was a second from stepping through it when I remembered a small but important detail. I turned back to Carla, sheepish look on my face.
“Uh, Carla, I got a little bit of a problem.”
“Which is?”
“Remember the deal about me not having any money last night? ‘Cause I still don’t have any money. Like, none.”
She gave me an incredulous look and pulled a small wad of bills from her pocket. “You are a real piece of work, asshole, you know that? I swear to God, if somebody’d told me yesterday morning I’d take you on a date, buy your food, sleep with you, and then give you more money for a train ride and food, I think I’d have had them committed.” She slapped the money into my palm with feigned exasperation. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t.”
“I wasn’t kidding last night—you really are the luckiest motherfucker in the whole world right now, and you had better not forget it,” she said from the table as the apartment door closed behind me.
“Yeah, I know,” I whispered to myself as I strode down the hallway, a spring in my step.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I walked up the open cargo bay ramp and into the Black Sun 490, plastic bag with a box of wings and a pair of cold beers in my left hand. My boss looked up from where he sat next to a wiring diagram and a mess of circuit boards. He seemed surprised to see me, and I think his first reaction was relief, but it transitioned to anger in an eyeblink.
“What the fuck?”
“A funny thing happened on the way to the wing place,” I said as I sat the box of wings and beers down. “It took me a little longer than expected.”
“You don’t say.” He gave me an icy glare. “Here I was figuring you’d gone and got yourself hired on somewhere else and then you show back up with chicken wings fifteen hours later or whatever, looking like the happiest motherfucker alive? Where the hell have you been?”
I sat down on the couch and stretched my feet out. “It’s a long story, really.”
He gestured to the battered ship. “I got nothing but time, Snake. Nothing but time. So, start talking.” He opened the box of wings and a beer and leaned against the computer cabinet.
Even though I’d been thinking about it the entire time on the train, I still hadn’t figured out how to tell him anything without this seeming like a repeat of the Nasra incident, only a
million times worse.
“So, on the way to the wing place, I stopped to light a cigarette over near one of the apartment complexes because the wind was blowing and—”
“Snake,” the boss said.
“Fine. I noticed one of the apartment numbers on a sign. It was seven digits, like the number Carla left us, which got me thinking maybe it was an apartment number.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“A loan, Boss. Remember? She told us at Joey Machete’s that if we needed a loan, she could talk terms.”
“She wasn’t being serious, dumbass. She was making fun of us.”
“I know, I know, and that’s what I thought too, but I figured what the hell I might as well try. It’s got to be better than borrowing money from the Sevens or flying without radiation shields or whatever, right? So, I took the train to the apartment, which turned out to be her roommate’s. But anyway, Carla was there so I went to ask her for the loan, but it didn’t quite go like I planned and we got to talking.”
“About the loan?”
“About a bunch of stuff, really. Anyway, so—”
“Okay,” my boss cut me off. “So enough about Carla’s. Then what?”
“What do you mean ‘then what?’” I asked.
“I mean what happened after you left Carla’s? What the fuck do you think I mean?”
“Well, that question is more complicated than you probably think, because—”
“Jesus, Snake, just get to the point and tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Fine. He asked for it, didn’t he?
“Okay, look, here’s the deal. After Carla and I got to talking we wound up going out to someplace she had reservations to—fancy place, Chapeau de something or other. Anyway, after that…” I trailed off.
He very deliberately sat his beer bottle down and calmly folded his arms across his chest, a mixture of complete disbelief and burning rage on his face. His lower jaw worked, and I could almost hear his teeth grinding.
“And then?”
“Look, man,” I said. “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you we fucked in the cab, and then in the elevator and then on the wall and the table and the couch and the floor and the bed? And then woke up this morning and did it again in the shower, and it was for sure the best, most absolutely mind-blowing sex I’ve ever had? Because that’s pretty much the ‘and then’ portion of the story. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“No, Snake. That is actually the very last thing I wanted to hear this morning. Very last. Like, I almost would have rather read my own obituary.”
“Well, you asked,” I said. “And now you know.”
“Did you get it?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“Get what?”
“The loan, you dumb motherfucker. The loan—the whole reason you went over there, remember?”
His question hit me like a punch in the face.
Shit.
“Actually, it never came up.”
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he folded the box of wings closed and set it back in the plastic bag. He sat the bag just inside the computer cabinet and looked up at me from the floor, his face completely without emotion.
“Snake, my hands are greasy. Which is why I am going to stand up and wash my hands and dry them real good, because I don’t want to lose my grip. Then, I’m going to grab that big, heavy, adjustable crescent wrench we have and break every motherfucking bone in your whole goddamn body. After that, I will fly your lifeless corpse out to one of those cannibal death cults in the Akula Nebula, where I will let them eat you. Then, I’ll make sure that when they shit you out, they put your remains in little plastic baggies I can personally take with me as I travel the galaxy and leave on distant planets, so that the entire fucking universe can understand, ultimately, that you are a giant piece of shit.”
“Hey, man, I got you the wings, didn’t I?”
I worked outside on the hull the rest of the afternoon, preparing engine one for removal. There were a couple reasons why I felt this was the best use of my time, the main one being that I figured the harder I was to reach, the less likely the boss would be to snap and choke the ever-living shit out of me. The second reason was that to unbolt engine one from its mount, I had to use the big adjustable crescent wrench, which seemed best for me to keep out of his hands—just in case.
“Stupid. Goddamn. Motherfucking. Bastard. Bitch,” I grunted as I struggled with the number five bolt on the starboard side, pulling as hard as I could on the wrench handle, but the bolt refused to loosen. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and checked the bolt head again, as if looking at it would somehow make it do something that putting a wrench to it and swearing wouldn’t.
“This thing is stuck, Boss,” I called down from atop the ship. “It won’t budge.”
He stepped out from the hold and gave me the evil eye from the cargo ramp.
I rolled my eyes. “C’mon, man,” I said. “Let all that stuff from this morning go. I’m trying to actually get some shit done here, how about a little help?”
“Fine.”
He disappeared inside and came back a moment later, holding the meter-long heavy steel pipe we used to slide over the wrench handle for more leverage. “You’re probably gonna need the breaker bar,” he said with a wicked grin. “Come on down here and get it.” He slapped it into the palm of his left hand.
“You know what?” I asked. “I think I can get it with the wrench after all. Thanks for the help.”
“No, no,” he said with mock politeness. “Anything I can do to make your life easier. Helping you work on things, buying all the food, being your divining rod for women, whatever you need.”
“A divining rod?”
“Old tool for finding where to drill for water. In our case, it means I find the girls, and apparently you do the drilling.”
“Look, man, you gotta learn to let things go.”
“Oh, there’s all kinds of things I’m thinking about letting go,” he answered, staring daggers at me.
A silver, late-model SUV rolled across the taxiway and pulled up next to our pad. The windows were tinted too dark for me to tell who our visitor was, but in my experience, this sort of entrance did not bode well.
Atop the ship, I looked over the edge and tensed, wondering if I could jump from the roof to the concrete pad without breaking my legs in the event of gunfire. My boss didn’t drop the breaker bar completely, but he did shift it to his left hand to free up his gun hand, which he rested on the butt of his revolver.
The engine cut off and the two front doors opened. Jade stepped out of the driver’s seat, closed her door, and leaned against it, arms crossed and a look on her face that told me Carla was pushing the limits of her patience. Carla hopped out of the passenger seat, back in her familiar flight suit. When she noticed me atop the ship and the boss on the ground with the breaker bar, her face broke out in a wide grin.
“So, I see things are going well,” she said.
“Carla,” my boss said in a voice usually reserved for discussion of communicable diseases.
“What are you doing up there?” she called to me in a mocking tone. “I didn’t know snakes could climb ladders.”
“If properly motivated, snakes can do all kinds of things,” I answered.
“Cut the bullshit, Carla, what do you want? Aside from Snake, for some reason?” the boss said.
“Well, I figured you two would still be here—heh heh—but I wanted to chat with Snake a bit before I flew out. I got a surprise hot job from Mr. Tanaka.”
I frowned. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but I had been looking forward to a few more days.
“Well, there he is,” the boss said, pointing at me with the breaker bar. “Bye.”
“Man, you are pretty damn bitter, aren’t you?” she asked him.
“Look, if all you came by for was to rub my face in the shit you got us into, get lost, okay
Carla? I don’t care if you and Snake are whatever it is you two are, but I don’t have to put up with shit from you.”
Carla gave a nonchalant shrug.
“Fortunately for you, ace, I’ve taken a liking to your gunner, which is why I was thinking about something he’d said last night.”
“And what was that?”
She ignored him and looked up at me instead. “You never actually told me why you came by, Snake. I asked but we got sidetracked talking about other things and then, by… doing other things—”
Jade interrupted with a loud, contemptuous snort.
“Anyway,” Carla continued, “I got to thinking about it and I realized what you actually came for. You came for a loan.”
I nodded. “Yep. I remembered you made a comment about loan terms in Joey Machete’s. I didn’t figure it would work, but what the hell, right?”
“And I take it you still need it, right? And that—” Carla asked.
“You are about the absolute last person I’d want to borrow money from,” my boss said through clenched teeth.
“Well, don’t worry about it, then, ‘cause I wasn’t going to offer you anything. I came to talk to Snake, remember?” She looked up at me.
“So, do you need it or not?” she asked me.
I felt the boss’s eyes boring into the side of my head, but I didn’t meet them. Instead, I looked down at our scarred, scuffed, shot-up Black Sun 490.
“Yeah, we still need it.”
“How much?”
I looked down at the boss, whose body language told me he’d finally accepted the inevitable. “We need forty grand,” he said with a sigh.
“Forty grand it is then, Carla,” I said.
She gave a low whistle. “That’s a lot of fuckin’ money. What’s this bucket of bolts worth, anyway? One hundred? One-fifteen, tops? Anyway, I can’t loan you forty. But I can do thirty-five.”
I looked to the boss, who nodded. “Okay, we’ll take it.”
“There is no we here, Snake. This is a loan to you,” she said with a quick wink in my direction when my companion wasn’t looking. “And that’s the thing. You have zero collateral.”