Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (22 page)

He took a deep breath and, keeping his eyes on the poker table, rolled out what sounded like a party line. “Well, it’s not like she’s our candidate or anything. She’s running and we’re supporting her. If someone else wants to run, and Newt Scorsi wants to support that other person, that’s up to him, isn’t it?”

“Of course.” I tossed it off like I didn’t much care. But there was no mistaking the kid’s slightly embarrassed look. He knew better, knew she was their candidate, and he wasn’t happy that he had to lie to me. I didn’t much like making him unhappy.

“I like Hannah,” I said. He nodded, noncommittal. “I’m thinking of working on her campaign. Guess I’ll talk to her about it.” I turned and moved away. “See you later, Drew.”

“Yeah. Later.”

So Drew wasn’t crazy about Hannah. Was he the only one in his family who could see through her or did they all feel the same way? Hannah could be stepping into a killer-ants’ nest. They were running her but watching her. If they caught her at anything dicey she might want to toss me onto the hill as a diversion.

I took the finally-moving elevator up to the third floor and retrieved my sys from the pants where I kept it hidden. Holding it in my palm, I stared at it for a moment. It was bigger than the button-sized hear-only Newt had given me, which was stuck to the inside bottom of my back pocket. I would love to keep this one in my pocket, too, but it was more likely to slide out and if I dropped it I’d be exposed as owning something no server could afford to own. Maybe I shouldn’t even be keeping it in my room. Or my car. Maybe I needed to find a tree somewhere in the woods and stash it inside.

The way this assignment was going, some damned squirrel would find it and bury it. I’d just carry it in my pocket and hope for the best.

For the umpteenth time, I was wishing I knew how sophisticated Blackjack’s techspy system was, or if the casino even had one, and how thoroughly they watched their employees. The path the chief and I used was routed through ringers and baffles, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure that a sniffer hadn’t been planted. I’d run the squeeze a couple of times and hadn’t found anything. That was all I could do, along with using a lot of code.

The chief didn’t answer so I left her a message. What I told her was this: “Thinking of getting involved in politics here. A friend named Hannah Karlow is going to be running for mayor, with the support of my boss. She’s a keeper.”

“Keeper” was our code word for double agent. To rhyme with sleeper.

I lay back on my bed and let things run through my mind again, hoping the fog would start to clear. Had Newt Scorsi killed Madera so he could run a candidate of his own undercover as a Coleman candidate? Was he that smart? I thought, and a scratchy thought it was, that maybe, under his secretive, slimy exterior, he could, indeed, have a real plan going.

The whole thing was giving me a headache.

The Colemans were making a mistake, that was clear. Judith should be running for mayor. Jo. But then, a candidate could be defeated, tossed out of office, neutralized politically or even killed. It was safer and stronger to be the power behind the candidate. To fill the public offices, including the appointed town cabinet, with your own people and run things from behind the scenes. That way, you weren’t the one who got killed, or exposed as a fraud or a crook. That way, your power could go on and on and on.

Or Jo planned to go for something wider-ranging than mayor of Tahoe. That wasn’t the only job on the ballot. Some of the council seats would be opening up. I didn’t know a lot about Sierra politics; I certainly didn’t know how many council members she already controlled and what it would take to own the majority.

I left another message for the chief: How many knights do the queens own? That was as vague as I could get without dumbfounding her. We didn’t have a code word for the council, I hadn’t thought we’d need one. But I knew they met at a round table. And “the queens” was a term I thought she wouldn’t have much trouble with.

Okay. That was done. I dropped my sys in my front pocket and went back out to the elevator. I had plenty of time to look for the airport, sniff around, and get back in time for my shift.

The airport wasn’t that easy to find.

After driving south of Stateline for ten minutes, I still saw nothing but a screen of trees and brush beside the road. If there was a field in there somewhere, I couldn’t tell. The signs that must have pointed the way years ago were all gone now, scavenged or lying somewhere in the underbrush, rusting to dirt. There weren’t enough planes flying for anyone to bother maintaining or replacing them. The few people who did fly would know where the airport was, and no one else would care.

Then I got my first hint: a fence. New-looking, eight feet tall, solid wood, visible behind the trees. I drove another five minutes. The fence ended and there was nothing but trees again.

Somewhere, there had to be an opening. I pulled up alongside the road, nosing into the brush as far as I could, and began walking back along the fence.

There it was. An iron latch with a lock hanging open from it. Sloppy, but I could have climbed over if I’d needed to. And a barely car-sized opening in the brush and trees. I yanked the latch and the gate swung open. Tarmac. A couple of hangars. The place looked deserted, but I decided not to make a stir by bringing Electra through, just in case someone was around.

The airport had one runway, a road parallel to that and connecting roads I thought were called “taxiways” where the planes moved from still to slow to position to fast enough to move to the runway and finally take off. Or something like that. Gran had shown me a small abandoned fallen-down airport once, up in Sonoma County, and explained some of it.

Several buildings stood at the back of the field. “Stood” was a relative term. One small building looked like it had been an office of some kind, a long time ago. The windows were boarded up, a quarter of the roof rotted and fallen away. Two hangars that seemed to have most of their parts loomed over big piles of what must once have been other hangars.

There was no cover of any kind between me and the hangars, so I ran across the runway, listening tensely for a shout, and skidded to a stop in front of the nearest one. The front was missing. It was empty. Moving to the next one, close by, I saw that it was complete and completely closed up. A new-looking patch was screwed to one wall. I walked around the side and found a small, human-sized door. A big, new-looking padlock hung from a shiny hasp, but there was a window. Boarded up from the outside, and not very well. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring a crowbar, but those piles of collapsed hangars might offer something I could use. No one seemed to be around. I had time to do some breaking and entering.

I went to the closest pile and began shifting pieces.

Ouch. Okay, I’d be leaving some of my blood behind. I hadn’t thought to bring work gloves, either.

After several minutes of hard labor, nicks, scratches, and strains, I unearthed concrete rubble and— luck at last! A loose piece of rebar sticking out of the chunks. I grabbed hold of it, wiggled it, pulled, and it came free. A three-foot rod.

One of the boards on the hangar window had a knot in it. I jabbed at it until the knot fell out, leaving a small hole. Couldn’t see anything through it, but it gave me a place to stick the rebar. The board came away, and it was easy to get leverage on the others. I could see why the knothole hadn’t let me get a look inside; the window was opaque with dirt. No other way. I covered my face with my shirt and swung the rebar, shattering the glass.

It was in there, all right. Cutest little Gullwing II. Pristine. Just like the one that had so frustrated the Rocky border guard. Probably, I thought, the very same one.

I propped the boards back across the window again and managed to stick a couple of nails back in their original holes. Anyone who went inside would see the broken glass, but at least no one could tell at a casual glance from the outside, that someone had come by to have a look.

On the way back, I checked my sys; no answer from the chief. Then it buzzed. Not the chief, though. Gran.

“Rica! I’m so glad I caught you.”

“Hi, Gran. Something wrong?”

“Not here. But what’s going on there?”

Uh oh. Reading the cards again.

“Nothing much. Just working on the case. Listen, Gran, I’ve only got a few minutes. I’m on my way back to the restaurant.”

“What restaurant?”

She didn’t usually ask a lot of questions about my cases until I was safely finished with them. I realized I’d told her almost nothing about Blackjack and what was going on in Tahoe. I gave her a quick rundown and said it was all a lot of fun.

So I exaggerated.

I also said there was some question that this casino clan might be skimming a little tax money. That was all, just some possible theft. Nothing dangerous. I didn’t mention any dead mayors or gorgeous soldiers or wildly attractive would-be dictators.

“I did a reading—

"

“Gran! More death cards?”

“Never mind, Miss Skeptical. No, not the death card this time. There’s a queen of pentacles and an Empress and the outcome is the Tower of Destruction. Sounds like two very dangerous women to me, or at least one. There’s also swords all over the place. A knight— that means a soldier, but with the Tower involved it could mean war, or at least a powerful conflict. And then you’ve got the page of swords. And the ten. Spies. Trouble.”

That was scary. Sometimes Gran and her cards came too close to truth.

“Gran, I am a spy. And there are other spies here. And yes there’s a soldier. More than one. But there won’t be any Tower of Destruction. What’s that mean, anyway? Isn’t it sometimes good, like the Death card?”

She’d read the cards for me hundreds of times but I always managed to forget what they mean.

“Yes. I suppose it can be. It can also mean a terrible catastrophe.”

“Can’t it also mean a powerful change that leads to enlightenment?” Gotcha.

“It can. But…”

What was this dramatic pause for?

“But you’ve also got the Devil. In the environment.”

As a matter of fact, my environment seemed to be strewn with devils, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Look, Sweetie, that’s what I do. Joust with devils. Don’t worry.”

“I am going to worry. I think I’ll have a consultation with Macris.”

Macris. John Macris was an astrologer she’d known since before the Poison. He insisted on being known only by his last name. He was a silly man, but handsome, with long gray hair. Gran adored him.

“You go ahead and do that, just don’t tell me what he has to say.”

“You are a stubborn woman, Rica. Always good to have fair warning.”

When I got to my room I saw that the casino sys was blinking. I had a message from Hannah Karlow.

“Tell the housekeeper your toilet is broken.”

Your piss is dribbling down your leg, Macha

She’d sent the message while I was snooping around the airport. Good. We had a lot to talk about. I told housekeeping that the toilet needed fixing right away. In an hour and a half I’d be in the restaurant serving early dinners to daytime gamblers.

Twenty minutes later, she knocked on the door.

“What’s this about, Hannah?”

She held up her hand, pulled out a sniffer and stalked slowly around the room.

“There’s nothing here,” I told her. “I checked the first night.”

“Run a squeeze lately?” She smirked at me. I hadn’t since I’d gotten back that day, but I was damned if I’d admit that to her. I gave her a neutral disgusted look.

“Okay,” she said finally, walking back in from the bathroom “All clear.” No new bugs, no nothing.

She helped herself to my bed, fluffing up the pillows, propping them against the headboard, stretching out her long skinny legs.

I took the one comfortable chair in the room and glared at her.

“You’re too good at singing to wait tables.”

“Is that what you want to talk about?”

“You’ve already got a lot of fans, me included.”

“I’m flattered.” I wished she’d get to the point.

“Maybe if you talked to Newt, he’d put you on as an entertainer in his bar and you wouldn’t have to waste your time doing the menial crap.”

“Not wasting my time would be nice,” I growled pointedly. “But I’d rather work here for now.” I had no idea what she was after. She could have been trying to replace me as the spy in the Coleman camp, or giving me an opening to work for the Colemans as a spy at Scorsi’s. “What exactly are you getting at?”

“Nothing. Just talking. What do you think of Jo Coleman?”

I continued to glare at her. “You’re staging a fake toilet-fix so we can sit here and gossip? Pardon me, so you can lie down and gossip?”

She laughed. “Just answer the question.”

“Why the hell should I? I’ve got questions for you.”

“Trade?”

“Me first.”

She looked me up and down. If she was trying to be provocative it wasn’t working. I was just plain damned provoked. “Okay.”

“You’re a fixer and a mayoral candidate and a spy for Newt, but why are you working for him? Does he pay that well or is it loyalty?” I wasn’t sure which would make her more dangerous.

She shook her head. “Funny. A merc asking a merc about loyalty. Of course I’m loyal. He’s paying me. And he’s not the one trying to conquer the world. I’m not in favor of people conquering the world.” She grinned so I’d know she was bullshitting. I thought she’d love to own the world herself.

“Are you really learning to fly the Colemans’ Gullwing?”

She shook her head. “That’s two questions, Rica. Now it’s your turn to answer one of mine— what do you think of Jo?”

“I’ll answer it when you tell me why you’re asking.”

Fast as a snake, but without a rattle of warning, she was on me. Off the bed and flat up against me, her strong, long-fingered hand wrapped around my throat, shoving me and my chair to the wall. I brought my arm up, hard, ripping her fingers away from me, and kicked her left knee, which buckled for only a second. She fell back, though, as I sprang to my feet, her eyes glittering, tongue-tip showing between her lips. Snake. Did she lie in the sun to warm her blood? My neck hurt— she’d yanked it when I’d knocked her away— and I could only hope her knee hurt as badly.