Hardwired (22 page)

Inside there’s a metal cabinet holding tools, chairs and a table, a pair of narrow cots lying on their sides against the wall. An old metal stove with a coffeepot on it, cooking implements hanging on the wall, shelves holding cans of sugar, flour, lard, coffee, beans. He steps out into the sun and waves Sarah toward the shack.

“The lock says no one’s been here since spring,” he says. “I don’t think it’s been fooled with. I doubt they’d find this place, and I don’t see why they’d bother bugging it anyway.”

Sarah glances around uneasily, sweating in her armored jacket that’s closed up around her throat. “Whatever you say. This is your country, not mine.”

He steps back and lets her into the shack. She puts the Heckler & Koch down on the table and pulls off her jacket, fanning her jersey against the heat. “This place is only occupied in winter,” Cowboy says. “People come here to look out for the cattle that use this water hole.”

She looks around the small room. “Let’s clean the place and take the shutters off,” she says. “I don’t like being blind in here.”

“First things first.” He walks to the tool cabinet and takes out a pry bar, nails, and a hammer. He moves the old metal frame of the cot and raises a pair of floorboards. He takes out a flat metal box and opens it.

Traveling money, documents identifying him as a man named Gary Cooper who was born twenty-five years ago in Bozeman, and a bright needle on a silver chain. He raises the key and smiles at the crystal that gleams on its point. “Safety deposit box down in Butte,” he says. “Where Mr. Gary Cooper keeps his spare funds.”

Sarah is looking among the supplies on the shelf and finds an old bottle of whiskey, half full. She blows the dust off it, looks at Cowboy and grins. “Looks like a party,” she says.

Cowboy puts the chain around his neck and takes a heavy knife from its place above the stove, then walks back to the metal cabinet. In the corner stands a rifle in its case; he takes the rifle out, smells gun oil and the lanolin of the lamb’s-wool lining of the case. Curled magazines lie in a box on the upper shelf. Behind him he hears Sarah unscrewing the cap on the Bottle.

“I’ll get us some steaks,” he says.

He snaps a magazine into the rifle. The cattle are half his anyway.

Moths dance their kamikaze spirals around the sunset flame of a kerosene lamp, battering against the blued glass of the ancient flue. Cowboy lies with Sarah under a red trade blanket, staring at the rugged cedar beams of the ceiling and surprised to find he’s missing the presence of the midnight stars.

Beside him he can feel Sarah’s body spasm; and all at once she sits up, the blanket falling from her breasts as she reaches for the machine pistol. “What’s that?” she whispers.

“Nothing.”

“Thought I heard something.”

She listens carefully, her eyes moving slowly from one corner of the room to another.

“Nothing,” Cowboy says again. “I was awake.”

Sarah listens again, then Cowboy can see her shoulders relax and she settles back against the pillow. He considers putting an arm around her and decides not to. There are moments when she doesn’t want to be touched, and from the hard expression on her profile this is one of them. She seems to be listening, still partly on guard.

“Ah, fuck it,” she says, and reaches for the machine pistol. He watches while she reaches into her pocket for her inhaler, triggers it once up each nostril, then pads to the door on bare feet. She listens for a moment, the flickering glow of the lantern light making her seem to be in motion as she stands poised, then Sarah opens the door and glides into the night.

Cowboy rests his head on his arms and waits. After a few minutes Sarah slips back in the door, propping the gun’s folding stock on her hip as she stands on one foot, brushing soil from the bottom of the other. Her eyes are distant, unforthcoming. Cowboy admires the way her muscles play under her dark skin. Without a word she brushes off the other foot and slips under the blanket.

“You’re not going to be able to sleep after those torpedoes,” Cowboy says.

“I know.” Staring at the ceiling. “I should do a workout.”

Cowboy reaches above his head for the bottle, takes a short pull. He holds it out to Sarah and she shakes her head.

“Making plans?”

“Trying to.” She decides to take the bottle anyway and props herself on one elbow while taking her drink. She puts the whiskey down on the blanket between them. “I figure I’ll enter the Free Zone at Havana. Then I won’t have to go through customs at Tampa, just take the ferry. Once in Tampa I can hide until I talk to some people and find out if it’s safe to come out. I think I’ll be okay–– the Herman’s in too deep to back out by now, and he’ll be wanting soldiers. And we know by now the war’s not being fought over me. ”

“Yeah. And we know that out here it is being fought over
me
.”

She gives him a look. “Yes. In a way.”

Cowboy rests his head on his hands and smiles, pieces of the panzer interface shuttling through his mind, gauges flaming, monitors searching for the hovering enemies... Nice not to miss this fuss. Hate to have a war fought over your body and not show up for it. He thinks of Elfego Baca calmly cooking his breakfast tortillas while the bullets of a mob of Texans chip away at the mud walls of his shack, the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls steadying their Sharps while Quanah Parker’s Indian coalition come wailing out of the night, Lieutenant Christopher Carson slipping past Pico’s lancers to bring Commodore Stockton and his marines to the rescue of Kearny’s column... However this comes out, Cowboy thinks, he’s going to be remembered out here for a long time.

“I figure to be an Apache for a while,” Cowboy says. “Keep light, keep moving. Keep my people doing the same. Arkady isn’t going to have a snagboy or a runner who can move without guards.”

“Do you know that much about Arkady’s organization?”

“It won’t be hard to find out. We’ll know where to look.” He laughs. “There’s supposed to be a little Apache in my family,” he says. “But that wasn’t respectable in my part of the world for a long time, so nobody knows for sure. Guess we’ll find out.”

Sarah looks at him intently, starts to say something, then falls silent. Then she looks up again. “Cowboy,” she says, “always leave yourself room to run. You don’t have to win all the time.”

“I’ve spent my career running. And winning, too.”

Her tone is hard. “Just know when to cut a deal, Cowboy. Know when it’s time to go.”

Cowboy looks at her, feels sadness pooling up in him. “You don’t think I’ll win, do you?”

Sarah turns her head away. And that’s his answer.

Cowboy lets the whiskey touch his tongue again. A chill is settling in his spine and the warmth of the drink dies at its touch. “You figure Michael has a better chance?” he asks.

She shrugs. “He’s got more resources, more contacts. Better able to deal.”

“And in Florida you’ll see your brother.”

“Yes.”

He sits up, crossing his legs and sipping whiskey again. He looks down at Sarah, her broad shoulders, the catlike muscle stretched over the ribs, the breasts that would have seemed large and out of proportion on a woman who wasn’t so tall. He flips to infrared and watches the heat moving through her muscles, the pulsing flood of warmth through her throat.

She looks at him impatiently. “Look at it this way, Cowboy. Once this trip ends, we’re just allies again, and maybe not for long. I get paid off and go home, and after that our troubles are our own.”

“I know it. I’d just like the time to regret it for a decent interval, if that’s okay.”

“Just don’t get sentimental.”

He flips back to normal vision and watches the hardness in her face as she rolls over on her stomach, pillowing her chin on her forearms, her head turned away. “It seems to me,” he says, “that I need a bodyguard out here more than on the hike across the Alley. Someone who can’t shop me to the opposition because they want her as much as they want me.”

“No. There’s Daud.”

“You could bring him out here.”

She looks at him over her shoulder. There are razors in her voice. “Look, Cowboy, from here it’s just business. The sex isn’t a part of the service anymore, and my standard rates are going up as of tomorrow.”

“If I’d known sex was part of the service, I’d have taken advantage of it a little earlier.”

Her face turns to stone for a moment. Then it softens. “Sorry, Cowboy,” she says. She looks at him. “It’s been fun, but I can’t have any attachments to people I do business with, and you know why.”

“I guess.” Cowboy takes another drink, seeing the lantern glow reflecting in the heart of the bottle like a sunrise in the midst of ragged clouds, and for a moment he recalls the sky, the deep blackness and steady stars behind as he brought the delta arrowing across the Line and into the dawn…

Sarah settles back against her pillow, her eyes black as a delta’s cockpit and glowing with the same kind of subtle light. She’s turning hard again, Cowboy thinks, and she has a reason: she’s going back into a place where she has no friends, where there is no one to guard her back but herself. Where she can’t afford to trust anyone, except perhaps this Daud in his hospital bed…

Not unlike himself. He thinks he can trust more people than Sarah can, but the one he trusts most is recovering from bullet wounds in a hidden location.

In the distance coyotes begin to make their weird yelps. Next to him he can feel Sarah stiffen, then relax. At the familiar sound Cowboy caps the whiskey bottle and leans back, his mind flickering. through the long series of plans he’s made while walking across the country.

First thing, he’s got to get himself some wheels.

Cowboy is riding the interface again, the notes of a steel guitar running up and down his spine like a winter storm. It’s only a Packard midsize with a four-wheel option but it’s still the eye-face, still moving down the torn ribbon of asphalt under a free and azure sky, and Cowboy is cherishing it, monitoring the turbine revs, fuel line, engine temperature as if he were coddling his panzer’s Rolls-Royce jets.

Sarah sits in her bucket beside him. They’re heading for the train station and the Butte Bullet that waits to take her, at 200 miles per hour, to New Kansas City. From there she’ll hop a plane to Havana in the Occupied U.S.

She’s armored again, back in her freshly laundered blue jacket with the collar turned up, mirrorshades masking her eyes. Scarred, caustic, hard-faced, sometimes flexing her hands in an unconscious way, as if they were clasping someone’s windpipe. Cowboy can almost watch the streetgirl memories coming back, the reflexes she’d slowly eased out of in the last few days. Survival time, he thinks. Strange to think of a hike across the country as a vacation. But it was, and now’s the time to get serious.

The Bullet terminus is underground, beneath the streets of the city. Cowboy takes the Packard into a deep garage, feeling the echo of the humming tires moving along his nerves. His mind shuttles at the speed of light. It’s the face, and it’s been too long.

Reluctantly, he turns off the turbine. The spinning flywheel hums gently deep in the car’s body as he unfaces and looks at Sarah. She’s already half out the open door. Cowboy follows her example.

She waits while he opens the trunk. Her bag, just bought in Butte, is heavy with gold, but not as heavy as it had once been–– the Heckler & Koch won’t make it through the detectors. Written on a slip of paper is the code that will open the panzer cargo bay so that the Hetman can get his hearts back.

Cowboy holds out the bag, feels her cool fingers taking it, thinks of high-mountain air flavored with aspen, the astringent touch of desert wind in winter, the warm quicksilver touch of her body as they rode the sexual interface, her skin glowing white in his infrared eyes, dusky red-orange breath flowing from her mouth like streamers of sunset cloud.

“I don’t plan on being sentimental,” she says.

“If you need to get hold of me,” Cowboy says, “you can leave a message at the number of Randolph Scott, in Santa Fe. I’ll open the number in just a few days.”

“Randolph Scott. I’ll remember.” The shaded eyes seem to glance skyward for a moment. “You can leave a message for me at a bar called the Blue Silk.” She smiles to herself. “The owner’s a friend.”

“Okay.”

She holds out her hand. “It was good doing business, Cowboy.”

“Maybe we’ll be allies again.” Cowboy figures he can play this game as well as anybody. When he takes her hand, she steps forward and puts her arms around him. He feels the crushed armor against his chest. She kisses his neck and steps back abruptly. Past her dark mirrors he can see her eyes blinking rapidly. She smiles grimly to herself, tugs her armor firmly into place, and turns away.

Cowboy feels a draft on his neck and looks behind him, seeing no one. He closes the trunk of the Packard and steps into the driver’s seat.

Time to head south, he thinks. Montana is getting to be a lonely place.

Chapter Ten

TAMPA’S TOTALS OVERNITE, AS OF 8 THIS MORNING

22 FOUND DEAD IN CITY LIMITS

LUCKY WINNERS PAY OFF AT 3 TO 1

The
Pony Express
crouches in the big hangar like the ebony carving of a panther frozen at the moment of its spring. The Wurlitzer’s colored spotlights gleam red, yellow, blue across the beams of the ceiling, and the Texas Playboys boom loud in the cavernous space, brass ringing off the metal walls, bass throbbing deep in the concrete. Cowboy feels the familiar scent of the cockpit rising around him as he eases into the couch and adjusts the weight of the Heckler & Koch on his lap. He puts the studs into his head and wakens the delta’s sensors, his expanded vision overlapping like transparencies in his head, seeing only the dead empty hangar and waiting deltas set wing to wing.

He lights the weapons displays, seeing red lights only, missile pods in storage somewhere, no ammunition in the dorsal and belly minigun. Okay, he thinks, that’s no surprise. The Heckler & Koch will have to do.

He hears the whine of a car turbine outside and knows someone has arrived. He zips up the gray armored jacket he bought in Boulder and turns the collar up to protect his neck, then puts the helmet over his studs. The door opens and on his displays he can see a single figure enter the hangar, the sound of his footsteps on the concrete covered by country swing.