Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (6 page)

Jo caught up with the tall man’s group just as Drew, howling like a dog, threw himself onto a wildly shooting merc. The boy went down, still howling, the cleaver dropping from his hand, red blood spreading across his shirt.

About time you got here

Jo, trembling with adrenaline and rage, pointed her laser at the broad khaki backside of a retreating enemy but in the next second she forgot all about that target. A gut-piercing shriek spun her around, eyes searching desperately for the source of the cry. Lizzie, young Lizzie, still screaming, had dropped to her knees beside a black-clad body, reaching for a cleaver on the floor. A merc stood only a few feet away, taking aim at Lizzie.

Racing toward him, Jo stumbled over the leg of a broken stool as she fired, only grazing his thigh, but it was enough of a distraction to turn him toward her. Before either Jo or the merc could shoot again, Liz had flown at the invader and chopped him across the neck, dropping him in a wide spray of blood.

And the man on the floor— wait a minute. Drew! Dressed in his restaurant black. Jo lunged toward him through a red tunnel of rage. Shouts near the door cleared the haze and pulled her eyes back toward the battle, tearing her in two. Samm, fighting hand to hand with two mercs, one of them huge, bigger and heavier than her six-foot-three General. She forced a deep breath, swallowed her sickening fear for Drew, raced to clear-shot range and burned a hole in the giant’s chest. By the time she turned again toward her niece and nephew, Lizzie was back at Drew’s side, bloody footprints marking her trail from the dead merc back to her brother, and that new singer, Rica, was reaching down to Drew.

Yes! He was shaking his head. Moving.

Jo exhaled.

Alive, then.

He waved Rica away and began trying to get up on his own, blood dribbling down his arm. Maybe not hurt too badly after all.

Jo focused again on the sounds behind her, the hiss of a laser, the pop-pop-pop of an old pistol, a man screaming, something heavy crashing metallically into something else. Thick glass breaking. A merc ran past her with a big overfilled sack dribbling reals. She shot and winged him, but he kept on running. Damn! Pulled between what was left of the battle and a desire to touch Drew, speak to him, assure herself, she looked around, desperately, and noticed Waldo peeking out from behind a slot machine.

“Waldo! Go help Drew. Now!” Waldo came creeping out into the aisle, his eyes wide and fearful. Drew was on his feet, sagging in Rica’s arms; Lizzie was watching him uncertainly, her outstretched hand shaking. “Get him upstairs!” Waldo picked Drew up and tried to hoist him across his wide shoulders.

“Put me down, you asshole!” Drew screamed, struggling out of Waldo’s thick arms and falling to his knees with a grunt of pain. Rica was right there, taking his good arm, trying to help him to his feet.

Samm and the others were backing the mercs out the door. Not counting Drew, six people down that she could see: two customers, three mercs who were dead or unconscious, and over there, by the poker tables, a cashier, holding his bloody head and crying. The last merc out the door aimed at Jo, missed, and hit a poker slot slam in the screen.

The battle seemed to be over. Samm turned around, flushed, tense, eyes bright, scanning the casino; looking for someone more to attack. There was no one. They were gone, leaving a mess of blood and broken machinery behind them. His body relaxed, shoulders slumped. Jo caught his eye and he straightened up again, nodding in acknowledgment. Showing her he was ready to deal with the clean-up.

Always the soldier, just as she needed him to be. Because she certainly wasn’t one. She’d done a lousy job of defending the casino. Too smug, too cerebral, she thought, to think she might ever have to actually engage in a fight. No dirty hands for her. Well, she could do a little better. She could at least keep up with target practice.

It was a lucky accident that Samm had returned from Sacramento in time for the battle. She hadn’t expected him until the next morning. Then she had an unnerving thought: time. She’d been thinking there was time, that she could plan and prepare and work on her own timetable. Make her moves when her people were ready. But today the choice of when and where and how to fight had not been theirs. Bandits? She doubted it very much. Bandits weren’t usually that clean, didn’t usually wear shiny boots. Sure, they’d gone right for the money, but why not? No rule that mercs couldn’t steal. If the Scorsis were behind this— and who else could it be?— it was a major escalation in their rivalry when the Colemans were trying to hold the line. And yet another thought: Had they known that Samm was on the road? Had they also not expected him back so soon?

“Drew!” Her sister’s deep voice. There came Judith, cruising down the mezzanine stairs at low speed like one of those big old ships you could tour in San Francisco Bay for five reals. Jo went to meet her.

Lizzie had returned to the dead merc with the cleaver in his neck. Staring at him, she vomited suddenly into the wide pool of his blood. Drew was on his feet, Waldo dancing around him ineffectually. Rica, her hand light on Drew’s good shoulder, was saying, “You really should let Waldo take you upstairs. You need to lie down and you need a doctor.” Had Rica been there from the start of the battle? She hadn’t seen her taking part in it, but it had all been over very quickly and she was new, after all. Probably confused by the mayhem and by who was fighting whom. And probably not a fighter. Not muscular, not particularly tall.

Jo reached Drew a moment ahead of Judith. She brushed hair out of the boy’s eyes, touched his cheek. He raised his eyes to her. “Rica’s right, Drew. The battle’s over. Go upstairs. Go to bed.” She glanced at Rica, who had backed away a couple of paces. “Thanks for helping him.” Rica nodded.

Judith looked hard for a moment at Drew, then at Lizzie, and then glanced over the battlefield.

Samm and Monte, the head cashier, were searching the corpses of two mercs. Samm looked over toward Jo and Judith and shook his head. Nothing on the bodies that told them anything about the raid. No IOU’s from Newt Scorsi, she thought wryly. A cleaner and a young change guy were carrying the cashier with the head injury, stepping over another merc’s body where it lay in the shards of the shattered door. Willa was talking to an injured customer who was peeking around the end of the bar, probably reassuring her that Doc was on his way. Lizzie turned from the man she’d killed, bumped into a customer blindly dashing for the exit, and stumbled against Jo, who wrapped a supporting arm around her.

“It’s okay, Lizzie. You saved my life, and Drew’s.” Jo knew it wasn’t okay.

Judith and Waldo together were leading Drew toward the hallway. It wouldn’t be easy getting him up to his room. Damn elevator. Where was Rica? Over there, helping Zack move a broken slot machine. Waldo turned and called out to Lizzie. Jo said softly, “Go upstairs now with your brother.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Rather stay with you.”

“All right.” What else could she say to that?

“I’ve never killed anyone before.”

“I know. You had to.” Jo was twenty years older than Liz, and she’d never killed anyone. She’d never had to. She wished she’d been able to today. Now Lizzie was carrying the burden for both of them.

The last of the ambulatory customers, a few with scrapes and bruises, some of them glancing at the shivering, staring, blood-spattered teenager, stepped gingerly around the dead and injured, through the breakage, and out onto the street, headed, undoubtedly, for safer shops. Probably Scorsi’s.

* * *

I looked around at the shattered room, searching for Jo and Judith. Jo and the young girl had disappeared; the beautiful tall olive-skinned man was directing the clean-up. The woman with the dislocated shoulder was wearing a sling; someone had found her a chair.

The way the employees fell to, sweeping up debris, removing the dead and tending the injured, I wondered for a moment if they were used to this kind of thing. The chief hadn’t said the feud had turned to war. Maybe she didn’t know, or didn’t care. But the stunned looks on their faces and the scared, shocked conversational bits I picked up led me to believe this was all a surprise. A couple of people I recognized as cleaners were posturing and laughing together, but they were breathing hard, shaky, and damp with sweat. I heard speculation about both “bandits” and “mercs.” I heard anger that anyone would do this to their casino and I saw a determination to make everything right and get the customers back in the doors.

I followed the lead of the others, righting some of the fallen machines, taking an offered broom. A young woman and a man were sweeping glass nearby, rehashing the attack. The woman said it started with a ruckus in the restaurant. I remembered hearing a lot of noise coming from that direction at the start. Two raiders, she said, had run out of there and nearly collided with their pals coming in the front door.

“Must have been trying for a diversion,” her large, bald friend said. “Gets a fight going in the restaurant, come in and take the place easy. What do you think, Emmy? ”

The woman agreed. “Yes. But their timing was off or something.”

Maybe just too eager to start the main event, I thought.

I helped Willa, who was trying to bandage a cut on a friend’s arm. Her hands were shaking and she kept dropping the tape. She’d given me directions to Judith’s office just that afternoon, but it seemed like days before. A man in a gold jumpsuit with white braid stood near the back door, staring, it seemed, at nothing.

Bending over to collect a mound of chips that had fallen off a blackjack table, I felt someone stick a hand in my hip pocket.

“Hey!” I grabbed the hand, swinging around, ready to bash the bastard.

“No, no— look in your pocket.” He was whispering, peering around furtively. No one was looking at us. I let go of his hand. He was one of the change guys, dressed in change-guy red, a pale flabby man who managed to look soft and scrawny at the same time. His nameplate read “Bernard.” He edged away again before I could say anything.

What he’d put in my pocket was a short and uncoded message from Newt Scorsi. A meeting time, directions to the place, and the words: “About time you got here. I was beginning to think I’d have to do it all myself.” I had sent a coded message to him earlier that day, following instructions the chief had given me, asking for a meeting: “The showboat delivery has arrived, specify time and place.”

Now I was thinking that I should have kept my arrival to myself for a couple days, done some observing first. The raid had surprised me. There was too much I didn’t know. That was often the case when I started a job. The local chief would leave out some important bit of information, sometimes on purpose, sometimes through incompetence, usually through ignorance. The chief’s story had been vague to start with, but I’d thought I had enough to go on— the complaining party said a powerful family was overstepping the law; find out what they’re doing and how, so we can stop the hanky-panky. Suddenly I was dealing with something that looked more complicated, and uglier.

Shaved heads, shiny black boots— pretty spiffy for bandits. If they were mercs, were the Scorsis behind the foray? Why? In any case, it seemed unlikely the elaborate attack had been staged just to deliver a message to me.

I stuck the message back in my pocket.

Everything seemed to be under control and I wondered if anyone would notice if I went missing. I didn’t even have to go to my car; I could fall on the bed in my clothes and worry about cleaning myself up and changing in the morning.

“Hey, Rica!” I turned at the sound of Waldo’s whiny voice. “You’re wanted in the restaurant.”

Well, crap. More clean-up, probably.

But the restaurant had been pretty much set to rights already. A cleaner was sweeping up the last of the broken dishes. And there was Jo, sitting with the young girl and Waldo, who had just brought them cold drinks from the bar: something red over ice. He squeezed into the booth with them. The girl, I saw now, looked a little like Jo—her gold-brown hair striped with black—or was it the other way around? —blue-eyed, slender but not thin.

I approached the table. Jo looked up.

“I wanted to thank you again for your help back there. This is my niece, Lizzie.”

“You’re more than welcome.” I turned to Lizzie. “Hi, Lizzie. Are you Judith’s daughter, then?” And I had heard Jo refer to Drew as Lizzie’s brother. Drew had Judith’s brown curls. Clan connections were falling into place.

The girl nodded. She was, pale, teary, but had recovered enough to give me a who-the-hell-are-you look.

So Judith had two teenagers. Dangerous country for kids.

I slid into the seat beside Waldo. “That was sure some awful scene— who were those guys, anyway?”

“Just bandits,” Jo said coolly, making it clear that if she knew or guessed more, she wouldn’t be telling me.

“I heard some talk that they tried to create a diversion in here first, but it didn’t work out…?”

Jo laughed and glanced at Waldo. “They did. But the minute they started yelling, Waldo ran out the door and everyone here pretty much followed.” Waldo looked pouty. “Hard to keep a fight going when there’s no one to fight with. So the bandits ran out after them.”

No bravery on the one side and no patience on the other. What a mess.

At that moment, a potbellied middle-aged man in a white jumpsuit peeked in the door of the restaurant. When his eyes fixed on Jo, he walked our way. He was carrying a fat white valise with a red caduceus on the side. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that he was the local doctor.

“Hi, George,” Jo said. “Drew’s up in his room.”

“Everyone here okay?”

“Sure.”

George glanced at me, but didn’t stop for introductions.

“I’ll be on my way up, then. Quinn’s going to be fine, by the way, minor concussion I’d say.” Probably the cashier I’d noticed. He’d had a head injury. “The customer with the broken arm and the woman with the dislocated shoulder are on their way to the clinic.”

Jo nodded. She and Lizzie finished their drinks and stood. Jo smiled at me and said thanks one more time before walking toward the door with the doctor. Just before they stepped out into the casino, I heard Jo say, “Frank’s on his way. Guess he was busy rousting a tourist.” The doctor laughed and Jo laughed with him.