Under Dark Sky Law (15 page)

He stood facing her in the entryway, his
hands on his hips. “I meant more for capturing and interrogating
someone if we were to be attacked,” he said. “Besides, I’m pretty
handy with a firearm, but I'm not all that much good in terms of
hand to hand combat. I’m more of the man behind the desk, the guy
behind the computer, if you would. Trying to physically overpower
you isn’t something I’ve got on a list of smart things to try.”

“Duly noted,” she said. He was probably
telling the truth, but she wouldn’t even think of trusting that
statement until she’d tested it for herself. The most surprising of
people ended up being decent in a fight, and it was never a good
idea to underestimate someone before you had a chance to size them
up in the heat of action.

She looked around at the grandiose
furnishings. “Isn’t all this wealth a little bit suspicious?” she
asked. The piece of land they were on had been an exclusive golf
club at one point in time. Real, live unmutated saguaro cactus
dotted the landscape, and an oversized moon had been rising over
sculpted red rock formations when they’d pulled up to the estate.
It had to have been worth millions.

He shook his head and shrugged. “Not really.
I make a lot of money in my legitimate practice, especially since I
have active government contracts now. To be honest most of this was
bought with clean money. Now, if I used my dirty money to buy
something, well, now that would be conspicuous. I could almost
purchase this entire dome,” he said.

She nodded her head slowly. “Not bad. I’ll
have to spank myself later for not knowing your organization had
gotten so prolific. I must have some people asleep at the
switchboard or something,” she said. She would have liked to blame
her ignorance on their recent dysfunction, but if his organization
was as big as he said it was, he’d been flying under the radar for
a long time. Or he was bluffing.

He saw the skepticism in her eyes. “Not that
it really matters, but if you’re concerned that I don't have a
sufficiently big organization, I can show you my bank statements,”
he said. It was a joke, but she got the sense he would show her
evidence if she asked.

She shook her head and ran a hand through her
hair. “Nah, I’ll take your word for it. It’s not really that
important anyway. If you hold up your end of whatever bargain we
end up making, that’s all that really matters. Anything else is
just grand-standing and chest-beating,” she said.

“We can talk more about that over dinner,
perhaps?” he said.

Her stomach bunched just thinking of food.
The last thing she’d eaten had been nearly twenty four hours
before, at The Niagara. Granted, it had been a hell of a meal, but
even the best of food wouldn’t keep her sated for that long, and
she was injured. She needed fuel to heal.

“I don’t give a fuck what you want to talk
about as long as it’s over food,” she said.

He folded his arms and leaned against a
sculpted column that framed the entryway. “Whatever the lady
desires,” he said.

“You always this fucking formal?” she said.
She had this sense that there was still a big barrier surrounding
Xed. Like there was a molten, raw center covered by a thin candy
shell, and if she tapped him just a little bit more it would spill
out.

He blinked slowly and didn’t change his
position, but his face went blank. “No, no I am not. However, as
I’m almost always in a dome area, and there are cameras everywhere,
I’ve practiced keeping my official self ‘turned on’ whenever
possible,” he said.

“Even in your own goddamn house?” she said.
“Seems like a pain in the ass.” If she had been back at her home in
the pits, she would be letting it all hang out. Not that being away
from her home stopped her from doing that most of the time anyway,
but she put a little effort in now and then when it was really
required.

“When I’m in my own house and a stranger is
with me, yes,” he said.

Xero smirked. “Well, Xed, maybe you just need
to get to know me better, so I’m not such a stranger anymore,” she
said.

He smiled. “Would you like to take a shower
or a bath and get cleaned up?” he said, looking surprised that she
continued to be so careful of his inanimate possessions. Certain
things were really hard to come by in the pits, and you didn’t fuck
shit up just for the fun of it.

She looked down at the small patch of couch
arm she was sitting on carefully so as not to accidentally stain
anything with blood. They had cleaned up her wounds, but her
clothes were still filthy with bodily fluids and probably worse
things.

“You have no idea how much I would pay you
for that,” she said.

“The first one’s always free,” he said.

They both smiled.

She proceeded to take one of the most amazing
showers of her life. Well, that was probably an exaggeration,
considering the type of work and situations she often got herself
into, but it was still definitely a top 100 ranked shower. Xed’s
house was making The Niagara look shabby. The master bathroom was
huge and outfitted with a separate whirlpool tub not so unlike the
one at the hotel. She loved second chances. After spending damned
near an hour languishing in the seemingly endless hot water of the
shower, she managed to feel like she’d gotten most of the prison
grime out from all the nooks and crannies, and the smell was
banished from her lock of hair. That was one of the good things
about the mohawk—not as much hair to absorb some of the unpleasant
smells she was around far too often.

Once sufficiently de-skunked enough not to
pollute the bath, slipping into the hot water of the whirlpool was
the best thing she’d felt since fucking Argon back in the flats.
That gave her an idea.

“Hey Xed!” she yelled, hoping that it was
loud enough to hear over the roar of the whirlpool. She figured
there was probably a security camera set up in the bathroom anyway,
and just assumed he was watching. She didn’t give a fuck.

It didn’t take long before he knocked at the
door.

“Get in here!” she yelled.

“As you wish,” he said, but only poked his
head through the door. The steam fogged up his glasses so he
removed them.

“You don’t have to worry about being polite,
just come over here,” she said.

Something changed in his face, and he walked
with purpose to the side of the tub.

“Yes?” he said. He was still wearing his
clean slacks and blue-checked dress shirt.

“Why don’t you pull the stick out of your ass
and take off your clothes,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. Setting his glasses
down on the side of the tub, slowly, he unbuttoned that crisp and
perfect shirt.

CHAPTER 13

The oversized crawler rumbled as it rolled
over the rocky desert soil, vibrating her bones and making her grip
the corrugated steering wheel tighter. It felt good to be back in
charge of the convoy again. They were on her run, and the personnel
had to hold off accompanying the shipment, Yuma being too far to
travel without oxygen for anyone that wasn’t a pit dweller. Once
upon a time they tried to have a few gas-masked soldiers follow
them on all runs, but that simply wasn’t possible anymore with the
increasingly dire supply shortages.

She had one other armed accessory vehicle
rumbling along behind her stuffed with two of her own employees,
and that was it. She had Milo and Xed both to thank for getting the
extra manpower shipped over and cleared in time for the run. Even
though their firepower was reduced, it was actually much safer.
With her at the helm, and a reduced body count to be concerned
about, she would be much better equipped to quickly react to any
incidents in the field. Fucking skeletons wouldn’t get the drop on
them this time. Not on her watch.

The other great thing about getting free of
the dome was that she could freely communicate with her crew in the
pits. Unfortunately, as nice as it was to talk to Milo again, he
didn’t have any new information for her. Argon and Calavera were
still both AWOL, no additional news about the rogue skeletons had
surfaced, and Trina was still dying.

Back out in the peaceful desert again,
watching the winds blow the seemingly endless sand around in
undulating waves as they journeyed through the empty wastelands was
a perfect place to clear her head and think strategically about
what had happened over the last week. The only real conclusion she
had was that shit was fucked. She’d been ignoring the issue of
Argon’s disappearance, and the more she thought about it, the
angrier she got—angry at herself for letting it happen, angry at
Argon for not getting himself out of the situation, angry at
Calavera for not controlling her fucking personnel.

At least she was finally making headway
towards getting to Yuma and getting the Ketocillin for Trina. She
had no idea if Argon was still savable, but there was still hope
for Trina. Milo had tried to sound calm when she spoke with him,
but there was an undertone of desperation that he couldn’t hide.
She was coughing up too much blood, and they were low on
plasmasynth, another item she was supposed to bring back from Yuma
that the feds were keeping a tighter lock on in recent days. Time
was running out, and everything depended on the success of this
run.

Paranoid, Xero kept her eyes constantly
darting across the fried brown and red landscape, in search of
skeletons or other signs of trouble. Everything was going smoothly
until she noticed agitation on the horizon. Sands were blowing and
creating a dusky glow in what should have been a totally clear
sky.

She picked up the radio. “Hey, Delta, Echo,
keep yourselves sharp—I think we’ve got a haboob on the horizon,
looks like a big one. Be ready to dig in and bunker down if it
shifts in our direction,” she said.

“Roger that,” Delta said. She preferred not
to know the real names of her operators—it was safer that way for
everyone involved.

She adjusted their course slightly so that
they were still on track to make it to Yuma in good time, but so
that they were headed away from the area where they the sandstorm
seemed to be concentrated. Haboobs were not something to fuck
around with. It was possible to choke to death from the sheer
amount and force of the sand blowing unfettered through the air.
Vehicles could be uplifted and turned over, visibility could be
reduced to zero, and to top it off, extra toxins could be condensed
within the maelstrom. They had some old school filtration gas masks
in their gear just in case they got caught up in a situation like
that, but that alone might not be enough to combat all the deadly
consequences of being taken unawares by a really bad sandstorm.
More than a few supply caravans had been wiped out by haboobs over
the years.

“Boss. We’ve got trouble behind us,” Delta
said over the radio.

Using the crawler’s mirrors and rear camera,
Xero focused in on the desert behind them, and immediately spotted
the problem. “Oh, motherfucker,” she said. She had been so fixated
on the winds moving from the west that she hadn’t been paying
attention to the easterly winds behind them. Not that it really
would have made a difference. A rogue crosswind had decided to help
coalesce a sudden super cell that was now looming behind their
caravan. It was being sucked towards them at a rapid pace, closing
in around them in a horseshoe formation. They only had one
choice—to redirect their course straight forward, which sent them
right back into the haboob.

“Alright, I want you to juice it to the max.
Follow my lead—we’re going to try and outrun the lip of the storm
and bank west before we hit the haboob. If we don’t make it through
either one, drop anchor and shelter in place in the cargo hold. Got
it?” she said.

“Roger that, “Delta said.

Xero punched an array of buttons on the
dashboard, ground the gearshift until it clunked into place, and
stomped on the gas pedal until it hit the dirty floorboards. Her
hands clutched the steering wheel, struggling to keep the
overloaded crawler upright as she banked around sand formations and
rocks at speeds that it was not designed to travel at. As confident
as she was that Milo had picked decent operatives, she also knew
that they were short on personnel due to the heightened security
needs, and she rarely if ever allowed cargo to be transported
without at least one Grease Weasel in each vehicle of a caravan.
Watching the second vehicle fishtailing behind her, she was
reminded of the reason for this. It was a tough driving situation
to be sure, but no one other than the direct members of the Grease
Weasels themselves had as much time behind the wheel on deep cargo
runs, and it was showing in the disaster unfolding in her review
mirror.

Darkness was surrounding the caravan as the
haboob and monsoon super cell closed in around them, and Xero knew
that they had failed. Sometimes when you tangled with mother
nature, there was just no winning.

“We’re not going to make it,” she said into
the radio. “Activate shelter in place protocols. Do not exit the
vehicle and try to move to the cargo container if the storms
approach too fast. Drop the anchors, throw on a gas mask and don’t
move till I tell you to. On the count of three you need to switch
off the overdrive, downshift, and slowly come to a stop. Do not
rush this process. Got it?”

“Confirmation, ready for your signal,” Delta
said.

Xero counted down, and threw the switches.
With a trained elegance she brought the cargo crawler to a graceful
stop, the treads softly pushing into the sand. After the perfect
deceleration she was hopeful they would execute storm protocols and
escape the incident unscathed. She dropped anchor, and heavy steel
mechanisms plunged deep into the sand around the crawler, giving
her added resistance against the vicious winds. Everything went
perfectly.