The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (12 page)

“I don’t want to shoot anyone,” Gieo
whispered.

“I saw the giant gun pod we took from the
crash site,” Fiona said. “You’ve clearly shot Slark before.”

“That’s different. Slark aren’t human. Isn’t
there a difference for you to hunt them versus shooting
humans?”

Fiona shrugged and shook her head. “Why would
there be?”

“You frighten me sometimes,” Gieo said.

Fiona opened her mouth to respond, but the
resumption of the haunting singing of hymns began again outside.
They ran into Fiona’s room and made for the window. Down on the
streets, walking slowly in clumps of a half-dozen or so, the entire
Hawkins House cult spread through the town, clogging the streets
with their aimless march.

“What are they doing?” Gieo asked.

“Seeing if I was bluffing,” Fiona
replied.

Fiona stood at her window the rest of the
day, watching the cultists marching around the streets, clogging
any vehicular traffic, singing their dire hymns in eerily flat
voices. The net effect on her was to make her antsy. Her skin was
crawling with the need to be free, to rocket her car across the
desert away from the blind masses. She’d seen a few other hunters
walking the streets, unable to get their cars out either, and they
looked as agitated as she felt.

“Rawlins is here,” Gieo said, poking her head
into Fiona’s room.

Fiona pulled her attention away from the
window. Rawlins would have word from Zeke and Zeke wouldn’t be
happy that the cultists who were supposed to be poisoned and dead
were wandering the streets, en masse, preventing anyone from
participating in the town’s primary business of Slark hunting. Gieo
blocked the door, the leash in her hand, held out for Fiona to
take. The pilot’s face was unreadable and blank. Fiona took the
leash and tried to force a smile.

“I’m sorry,” Gieo whispered.

“For what?”

“For the mess that’s outside,” she said. “If
I hadn’t taken the job, Zeke would have found someone willing to
actually poison them, and this shutdown wouldn’t have
happened.”

Fiona sighed and ran her free hand gently
down Gieo’s smooth cheek. “As big of a headache as this is,
poisoning them would have gone too far, even by Tombstone
standards,” she said, a great deal of the tension draining from her
in finally saying what everyone should have been thinking. “For
what it’s worth, I’m glad you took the job.” Fiona pulled Gieo in
close by the leash and kissed her full on the lips in a steamy
embrace. Gieo’s thumbs looped through the front of Fiona’s gun belt
and held her close. Their lips reluctantly parted and Gieo stepped
aside to let Fiona past.

“This leash is driving me nuts,” Gieo
whispered as Fiona led her toward the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” Fiona replied, “maybe we can get
by with just the collar.”

Gieo closed the gap between them and gave
Fiona’s butt a meaningful squeeze. “That’s not what I meant.”

Fiona found herself flushed and excited when
she came to the meeting table with Rawlins. The cultist protest had
been bad for the saloon’s business as most of the tables were
empty, and the few patrons who had found their way to the watering
hole spent most of their time at the windows. Rawlins was sitting
at one of the center tables with his hands folded in front of him.
Fiona sat across from him, guiding Gieo toward the chair to her
right. Rather than sit in the chair, the pilot knelt at Fiona’s
side and sat back on her feet expectantly. Fiona had to bite her
lip to keep from laughing.

“Zeke isn’t happy,” Rawlins said.

“Nobody is,” Fiona corrected him.

“The methanol drinker you shot in the back
died.” Rawlins leaned his bulk back in the chair, trying to affect
a casual posture; it looked a little forced to Fiona. “They’ve got
him dressed up like a saint; they’re taking turns parading him
around town like a goddamned beauty queen on tour. People are
starting to say maybe you went too far.”

“Makes me wonder what they’ll say when I
clear the streets with my car’s cattle catcher,” Fiona growled.

The comment, for all its pointed intent
toward the cultists, actually seemed to make Rawlins uncomfortable
as though it was leveled against him. A drip of sweat ran down his
ruddy face.

“You don’t think we should take this
seriously?”

“What makes you think I’m joking?” Fiona
narrowed her eyes at him to let him know she saw him acting
suspicious. She really wished she was a more conniving thinker in
moments like this. She was a hammer, a gun, a battering ram, which
had been problematic in a world that hadn’t cared for those traits
in lingerie models, but had served her well after that world
crumbled under the Slark invasion; on rare occasion, Tombstone
abandoned its violent, straightforward tendencies to sit down and
make a game of chess out of things. Fiona was at a distinct
disadvantage when this happened.

Gieo tapped Fiona on the leg, and sat up far
enough to whisper into the gunfighter’s ear, “He’s angling to have
you give me up to the cultists for the sake of peace.” The
assessment didn’t make sense; Zeke hated appeasement and never
would suggest breaking hunter law, the laws he’d created, to coddle
the cult he hated. Gieo divined the thoughtful look on Fiona’s face
and shook her head slowly, mouthing the words, “Not Zeke.”

If Gieo’s hadn’t nuzzled under Fiona’s gun
hand in a submissive, kittenish act, Fiona knew she would have
jerked her pistol and blown Rawlins out the back of his chair. Her
vision flashed over in red. The worthless cuss was here without
orders, trying to guilt her into giving up Gieo, for his own,
self-serving ends. Fiona wondered if Rawlins knew that Gieo was the
only reason he hadn’t been shot dead in a blind rage.

“Mistress,” Gieo whispered in a demure voice,
almost entirely uncharacteristic of her, “I can tell the secretary
what I know of the Hawkins compound while you get a drink. He has
no other business here.”

From a lifetime of being thrown out of bars
and managed out of volatile situations by her agent, Fiona
recognized when she was being cut off. Whether it was at a bar or a
paparazzi-surrounded red carpet, she knew she had a redline and she
wasn’t good for anything but violence when she passed over it.
Somehow, the act of being pulled out of a situation she no longer
could control herself in was a lot easier to take when it was done
by Gieo in a loving voice; she’d never liked or appreciated it when
bartenders or her agent did it. Fiona unhooked the leash, and
slipped from the table without another word, storming to the bar
intent on getting a proper buzz going.

Gieo pulled herself up from the floor and sat
in Fiona’s vacated chair. Rawlins went from jangled nerves to angry
disdain in the span of a blink. His eyes shot daggers across the
table at the collared pilot taking the seat vacated by the woman he
longed for; Gieo knew the level of jealousy and rage storming its
way through Rawlins—she smiled sweetly and fingered the collar.

“I’m wondering what your boss might think if
he knew you were here bartering with authority you don’t have to an
end he wouldn’t want,” Gieo said. “I also wonder if you know
exactly how close you came to dying just now.”

“Fiona wouldn’t shoot me,” Rawlins said
through clenched teeth.

Gieo couldn’t tell if Rawlins meant she
wouldn’t shoot him because she cared for him or wouldn’t shoot him
because it was against a hunter law of some sort, regardless, it
was obvious he fully believed the words, no matter how ludicrous
Gieo knew them to be. It was interesting that Rawlins, who had
apparently known Fiona for years, didn’t actually seem to know the
first thing about her.

“You’re a poor judge of character, Officer
Rawlins,” Gieo said. “But it doesn’t matter what you think. It only
matters what you’ll do to keep me from telling Zeke what you tried
to do here.”

“He wouldn’t believe…”

“…wouldn’t believe me? Because I’m not a
hunter? I’ll give you that.” Gieo leaned forward across the table
and produced a small, metal shard. It took a moment for Rawlins to
recognize the device as a digital voice recorder. “Think he’d
believe you?”

It was a bluff, the voice recorder not only
hadn’t been on, but didn’t even work anymore. Gieo could tell from
the way Rawlins’ face drained entirely of blood that he didn’t know
that, and she didn’t have any visible tells that might have given
away her bluff. Her poker face was apparently ten times better than
his. She settled back into her chair, leaving the voice recorder on
the table, just out of his reach.

“Now that I have your undivided attention,
get out your notepad,” Gieo said. “You’re going to take down what I
know of the Hawkins House defenses and then you’re going to use
that information to do a little job for me.”

Chapter 9:
With a little help from
blackmail and lies.

After dinner,
which was a little difficult to enjoy, what with all the disturbing
singing of hymns by the passing clusters of blind people, Gieo and
Fiona took a bottle of corn whiskey to the roof to see if they
could settle themselves down.

Gieo sprawled on the lawn chair, in control
of the bottle, while Fiona stalked the roof. Gieo considered it
stalking as she was significantly more prowl than stroll in the way
she moved. The whiskey bit like a rattlesnake, possessed the sickly
yellow tint of stale urine, and had cost them some choice pieces of
tech to acquire, but all things considered, it was a necessity to
dull the irritation of the singing. Gieo downed a shot out of the
bottom of her tin mug and poured herself another. Fiona, having
made her way around most of the roof, finally came to the little
army tent with Gieo’s hammock inside.

“You’re pretty well settled up here,” Fiona
said, her voice taking on a sullen edge no matter how hard she
tried to be breezy about it.

“Nothing like sleeping in the open air
for…um…some health benefit, I’m sure.” Gieo downed the freshly
poured shot and considered another. Nothing would be admissible in
future relationship conversations if she could effectively blame
anything stupid she said on corn whiskey.

Fiona seemed as eager to drop the topic as
Gieo was to have it dropped. She continued walking on, becoming
increasingly difficult to see in the gathering dark as she slid
through Ramen’s filing system. She stopped when she finally reached
Ramen’s resting place; he had shut down for the night to conserve
battery power. The little robot, with his arms, legs, and twin
propellers pulled in, looked a little like a trumpet mute, albeit a
trumpet mute for some sort of jazz playing giant. It would have
been hard for Fiona to believe anyone could build something so
remarkable if she hadn’t seen it herself; of course, at one point,
it would have been pretty hard to believe space lizards would make
Los Angeles their new capital, but there they were.

“Jackson’s truck is out back,” Fiona said
idly, glancing down to the Jeep in the ally below.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”
Gieo poured herself another shot. “Do you have plans for it, or do
you mind if I break it down, use what I can, and part off the rest
for profit?”

“Take, part, profit, whatever,” Fiona said
with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I never wanted it in the first
place.”

“Good, because I have a plan.” Gieo motioned
Fiona over with her cup, which she then realized contained a shot,
which she drank. The effects of the whiskey were starting to become
a little more apparent in her speech, and she guessed wasn’t doing
any favors for her walking, should she choose to try any of that.
“Now, don’t get mad…”

“Whenever people say that, my first
inclination is to always get mad.” Fiona walked over to pilot’s
perch, took the bottle from beside the lawn chair, and drank deeply
of the noxious, yellow whiskey.

“…but I sent Rawlins on an errand.” Gieo
pulled up the monitor for her spy cameras around the Hawkins
compound, waited for the slow software to load up, and then tabbed
through the feeds until she found what she was looking for. “With
all the cultists wandering the streets, it shouldn’t be a problem
for him to get in and get out without too much trouble.”

“What did you give him to do this job?” Fiona
knelt beside Gieo, leaning in close beside her to watch the grainy,
black and white feed.