The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (13 page)

“Nothing,” Gieo said. “I blackmailed
him.”

“That’s my girl.”

Gieo’s heart fluttered at the gunfighter’s
words and her proximity.

“What’s he doing?” Fiona asked, pointing at
the feed with the lip of the whiskey bottle.

“That is a 1948 Indian Chief Roadmaster,”
Gieo said, “and he’s stealing it for me. I spotted it when I was
spying earlier and fell in love.”

The dusty, barely recognizable motorcycle
from just after World War II seemed to be fighting Rawlins every
step of the way. Getting it up from the hard-baked ground that had
practically grown around it was the first obstacle that nearly did
him in. Rolling it on two flat tires that fell apart like dry
coffeecake was the second. Pushing it up the ramp into the back of
his tow truck that he’d somehow managed to pull right into the
compound was the last. The whole thing looked like a comically
angry Sisyphus who had traded in his boulder for a motorcycle.

“Feminism is all well and good,” Gieo said,
“but there was no way I was going to be able to haul that thing out
of there myself. More importantly, I needed a distraction for the
entire compound to do it.”

“You knew the cultists would flood into the
city to be a pain in everyone’s ass?” Fiona asked
incredulously.

“Hell no!” Gieo grabbed the bottle from
Fiona’s hand and poured herself another shot, feeling loose and
happy with her mounting buzz. She downed the drink and poured
another. “My original plan involved setting a fire and stealing a
forklift, but this worked out much better.”

“What are you going to do with an antique
motorcycle?”

Gieo leaned heavily against the arm of the
lawn chair, placing her face inches from Fiona’s. “You’re cute when
I’m drunk,” she slurred. “Not that you aren’t cute all the time,
but when I’m drunk, your edges are all fuzzy.” Gieo ran her finger
along the outline of Fiona’s face, down her jaw, ending with her
index finger resting on Fiona’s chin.

“I’m going to put you to bed.” Fiona gently
lifted Gieo from the lawn chair, sliding in under one of her arms
to support the wobbly pilot.

“You should put me to the spurs, or your
spurs should be put to me…hey, why don’t you have spurs?” Before
Fiona could answer, Gieo nearly spun out of her grasp to head back
toward the edge of the saloon roof. “Hey! Shaddup you damn cane
tappers!” She hoisted the nearly empty bottle by the neck and
hurled it over the edge at one of the passing groups of cultists
who were singing a toneless rendition of “Old Rugged Cross.” The
bottle sailed over their heads, and, remarkably, struck the dirty
road without breaking, rolling across the street on its side to
come to rest against a clump of weeds clinging to the base of the
town hall. The cultists didn’t appear to have noticed the bottle
and thus made no move of response, continuing along their merry way
without so much as a tilted head. “I’m not going to be able to
sleep with all that racket,” Gieo said, stumbling back into Fiona’s
arms.

“Oh, I expect you’ll manage,” Fiona said with
a little laugh.

The laugh, brief, but genuine, stopped Gieo
in her tracks. “You don’t laugh enough.”

“I haven’t had much reason to.”

“I’ll invent a machine that will make you
laugh and…yanno what? Fuck it, I’ll make you laugh.” Gieo allowed
herself to be led toward the army tent while attempting knock-knock
jokes, most of which ended in some sort of mathematical pun that
Fiona didn’t understand. Gieo forwent the sleeping bag, flopping
onto the hammock and nearly spilling herself back onto the roof in
the process.

Fiona leaned over the quickly fading pilot
and brushed one of her purple braids from her face with gentle
fingers. “Sweet dreams, Stacy.”

“Normally I don’t like people calling me by
my real name,” Gieo said dreamily, “but you can because I’m your
collared little pet…” She might have had more to say or it might
have been a yawn, but whatever followed failed to escape the fast
approaching sleep.

Fiona tucked in Gieo as best she could and
headed downstairs. Between the head full of confusing thoughts,
stomach churning with bad whiskey, cultists singing in the streets,
and nail-biting sexual frustration, Fiona struggled to find sleep
as though sleep wanted nothing to do with her.

Fiona rolled out of bed much later than
usual. The lousy night of sleep, combined with the alcohol and lack
of necessity to get up early to go hunting, held her in bed until
she naturally came to the day—something she never did. Despite the
added hours, she wasn’t any more rested than usual, and had a
headache hitchhiker. She was barely dressed for the day when a
harsh knock came at her door. Rawlins, no doubt grumpy from his
long night of working for someone else’s silence, barked at her
through the door that there was a meeting in twenty minutes and her
ass had better be there.

She put on another pair of blue jeans,
skipped the chaps, strapped on her gun belt, and pulled on a black
tank-top. With her hat and sunglasses on, she headed out to the
meeting at the town hall. In all the time she’d lived in Tombstone,
they’d only ever had a handful of meetings between the hunters, and
those were in the very early days of the town to establish the
order they would all live by. Since then, the hunters worked in a
solitary fashion. If a new hunter came into town, Zeke or one of
the veterans made sure they knew the score; if they didn’t follow
the rules, they didn’t last long.

Out on the street, the cultists were
beginning to show signs of wear but none of stopping. A full day
and night had taken its toll. They were all sunburned, with chapped
lips, and blisters rising on the areas hit hardest. Fiona walked
calmly between the passing clusters; they neither avoided her nor
acknowledged her presence.

The interior of the town hall was dark and
cool, smelling dusty with a hint of leather, sagebrush, and gun
oil. Forty or so men were milling about in the space meant for over
a hundred, and they were all chaffing under the cramped
accommodations being so used to elbow room for miles. Zeke took his
sweet time getting to the podium after Rawlins ushered in the last
few stragglers. Fiona found a spot against the wall with good
visibility on the podium and the door. She fell into her pose of
practice relaxation that set others at ease, but was so carefully
planned to keep her at a state of readiness to strike at a moment’s
notice. Her back was leaned against the wall, one boot up flat to
push off should she need to, and her thumbs tucked into her
pockets, close enough to her pistol that she could jerk it faster
than someone could drop a hat.

“We’ve got a problem…” Zeke began.

He only managed to get four words out before
the crowd turned on him. “You’re damn right we do!” “You’re
pro-rating the quota for days spent stuck in town.” “You should
have let the bitch kill the old fuck!” The last comment wasn’t
directed at Fiona, but she knew she was the ‘bitch’ in question.
She had to wonder as well why Zeke had stopped her.

“Why don’t you just give them the
purple-haired whore and be done with it?”

Fiona lifted her eyes for that comment,
scanned the crowd, and found the speaker to be Steve Olsen. She
marked him off as someone she would have to watch and potentially
shoot.

“That’s a great plan, Steve,” Zeke bellowed,
silencing the murmurs of the assembled hunters. “While we’re at it,
why don’t we just tell them anytime they want to fuck us, all they
have to do is march around the streets singing and we’ll bend right
over? Better yet, how about you find old Bill and bend over for him
yourself. I’m sure your crusty ass will be a welcome change from
his harem of 12-year-old child brides. We’re not giving them shit,
and I’ll personally castrate the next man who suggests it.”

“Then why’d you stop Red from enforcing the
law?” Danny O’Brien shouted from the back. If there was another
hunter Fiona liked, or at the very least respected, it was Danny.
He was easily the best driver among them, which was saying a lot,
and he sought out clean kills for professional purposes. Of all of
them, he was likely the only sane person in the room; she had no
idea what he was doing as a Tombstone hunter. But she couldn’t very
well save a person’s life only to tell them what to do with it…

“Bill’s got a trump card,” Zeke finally
conceded. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know the cagey
bastard would have a way of playing it even if he was gunned down
in the street on a lark.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Fiona
finally spoke. Her voice, feminine and powerful, cut through the
room like lightening, and suddenly all eyes were on her.

“Of all the people to ask that question, I’m
glad it was you, Red.” Zeke had the look of a sleeping cat with
yellow feathers stuck to his whiskers; Fiona didn’t like it one
bit. “I sent a messenger to Vegas on horseback. We’ll finally be
accepting the Lazy Ravens’ invitation for a franchise, due to
arrive on the train coming in Friday.”

The collected hunters cheered. Even Danny,
who should have known better, had his San Diego Padres cap off,
waving it in the air like he, of all people, didn’t know what it
really meant. Fiona stormed from the town hall, burst out onto the
street, and nearly knocked down a group of the singing cultists on
her way back to the saloon.

The timing was bullshit. The train from Vegas
would be in Tombstone no later than the day after tomorrow and
there was no way a rider would even get to Vegas before the end of
the week, let alone back in time to tell Zeke the response date.
She knew the Lazy Ravens would send the cultists scurrying back to
their bibles and methanol rituals faster than the threat of rolling
Armageddon, but that wasn’t the point. Fiona stomped through the
saloon, up the stairs, and burst out onto the rooftop. Gieo was
awake, more or less, still somewhat in her underthings, wearing
only a white slip and the blouse from the day before, half her
braids undone, with a dazed, groggy look about her. She tried
quickly to straighten her hair and wipe the sleep from her
eyes.

“Hey, sorry about last night,” Gieo said
quickly. “Things got out of hand, and, was it just me, or was that
whiskey really strong for being made out of corn husks?”

Fiona ignored her comments, ignored her
really, stormed to the edge of the roof where she’d seen the milk
jug Zeke had tried to give her for the job to poison the cultists.
She hoisted the jug, spun off the cap, and took a long pull of the
cloudy liquid. She spit what was supposed to be poison out over the
edge of the roof. Across the way, standing on his balcony, Zeke’s
look of gloating pride had only deepened. He knew that she knew,
and he knew there was nothing she could do about it.

“Whoa,” Gieo shouted and ran toward Fiona,
nearly tripping over a pile of old desktop computer parts. “Don’t
drink that! It’s poison!”

“No,” Fiona said, “it’s not.”

Gieo, dressed in her leather blacksmith’s
apron, little brown corduroy shorts, and a leather vest, was torso
deep in the bowels of Jackson’s old Jeep Wagoneer, giving Fiona all
the stretched legs and tight ass she could stand to look at in the
fading, golden light of the day. Fiona was making a show of
drinking a warm beer from a refilled bottle, although she was far
more focused on the pilot’s backside, waving back and forth as it
was in the little shorts while Gieo worked under the hood.