Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (9 page)

He swallowed. “Don’t want them getting away with it. Maybe you can catch them and we can stop them.”

“Them— that would be the Colemans. But tell me, what’s the particular ‘it’ you don’t want them to get away with? Sounds like they’re doing a whole lot of things.”

He nodded, took another bite, chewed, swallowed, sat down again, tapping his foot. Finally looked me in the eye. “They’re doing whatever they can do. What they want is Sierra, all of it. And Redwood, too. I know that much. I’m not sure what the plan is beyond that. More consolidation, more countries all stuck together into their own big country? They’re greedy and power mad, you know. Or they could take Redwood and Sierra and wrap the whole thing up and sell it to Rockymountain.”

And then do what with the money? Move down to California? Take over Middle by paying off all their corrupt chiefs? Or Olympia? It was pretty there, if you didn’t mind rain. No matter how I looked at what he was saying, it wasn’t making a lot of sense.

“Why would they sell? If they’re power mad, why would they go to Rocky and give up their power?”

“I told you, they’re greedy. Traitors. They’ll sell us all.”

I repeated my question. “But why would they take all that power and then sell it to Rocky?”

“Jeez-us— I don’t know!” he yelled, hopping up and pacing again, waving his sandwich. Hyper. A restless elf. He wasn’t talking to the trees any more. “That’s for you to find out. What do you think I’m paying you for?”

“Okay, okay.” No point in pushing him over the edge. I’d hate to be in range if that big head exploded. He harrumphed and calmed down.

“I’m not sure which they really want, money or land,” he said. “And maybe they’ve already got a deal to split the power with Rocky. But all the things they’re doing to make money, to get people into strategic places… political office…” He waved his hand vaguely “…you’ll see. They want to own the town so they can destroy the other casinos. They’re training fighters, too. Soldiers.” And looking for more, I thought, remembering that chat with Judith. “Those things mean they’re after power. Power and money. We hear what we hear.” He snapped off another chunk of sandwich, bouncing his heel in the rubble at the base of the rock. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“Hear from who?”

“We got people.”

“You going to keep secrets from me, Newt? I already know you’ve got Bernard over at Blackjack. Who else?”

“He shook his head. “Can’t tell you that. Security.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to go to hell, thought better of it, and took a breath. No point in arguing with him, no point in asking him why he didn’t trust me. I’m a merc. Judging by the crew who’d raided Blackjack, his experience with mercs could not have been reassuring. So aside from his probably having a congenital trust deficit, to be fair, he had reason to be careful. And there was a much bigger issue here.

Consolidation. The way it used to be. Big countries, big money. Gran had lived with all of that. Big hatreds, too. First it was terrorists blowing things up. They did that for years. Directed, organized, sent out of the Middle East and Western Asia and the Far East, recruiting native-borns, too. Jihad. Right about the time that Holy War was getting a running start, scaring people to death, the other varieties of militant godders were getting stronger, feeding on fear, and viciousness did what it always does— got contagious. Jihadists on one side, The New Crusaders on the other. Bad laws. Riots. More fear, more murder, then came the bio and chem-bombs. Cities. Water supplies. Food. The nuke-dirt hit in only a few places. Ohio and East Dixie. France. The Arabian Peninsula. Roaming vigilantes who were neither Jihadists nor Crusaders, only ordinary criminals. Far left thin-lips who wouldn’t help a cop if he was trying to save their lives. Mobs of looters. Gran said it was hard to keep track, after a while, of who the terrorists really were. And the fact was, she said, that they just started the ball rolling down a hill already imploding with overpopulation and filth. Their kills were more deliberate than what the domestic toxies had been doing for decades, but the terrorists used whatever they could, including the poisons created in local factories, so it all came down to the same thing. Eventually, everything came down to dying.

A few years into my life, nine-tenths of the people in the world were dead.

And now, Rocky pushing for population on one side, the Colemans building an empire on the other. If any of this was true it needed to stop. I liked things the way they were. Liked my life the way it was. Well, mostly. But it was also possible that Newt was just plain paranoid, or that he only wanted to hassle and persecute the Colemans. The chief had sounded pretty neutral in her messages. If the Colemans were going after political power, that was not a crime. It was possible, too, that they were guilty of no more than petty moneymaking schemes. If they were skimming reals at the tables, I should be able to figure that out pretty fast, collect my pay and go home to visit Gran for a week or two. Sit under a redwood tree and watch the ferns grow.

“They’re your business rivals, isn’t that right?”

He sighed. He could see where I was going with that. I was showing him I wasn’t ready to trust him, either. “Yeah. But that’s not the point.” He glared at me. I glared back, thinking: you potbellied big-nosed big-mouth garden gnome. “This is a war. I’m only trying to save Sierra, and I think Chief Graybel understands that or she wouldn’t be working with me.”

Newt Scorsi, savior? No. I couldn’t see it. But he was right about the chief. She had to at least be wondering about the Colemans or she wouldn’t have gotten involved.

“Did you send those mercs to Blackjack last night?”

He looked sly and smiled at his sandwich. “They did a pretty good job from what I hear.”

“The casino’s fine. Missing a few runaway workers, a few broken machines. The customers are already coming back. Is that your plan for stopping the Colemans? Invading the place over and over again until they give up and go away?”

He flushed. I needed to put a lid on my sarcasm if I meant to keep this job. But there was something about the man that made me want to slap him around verbally.

There was that glare again. “Who says I did it at all? Now what I’d like is for you to stop asking me so many questions and find out some of the answers.”

“I need more answers from you first. And please don’t lie to me. It’s obvious you were behind that merc attack. What was the point of it?”

“I want to flush them out, make them come at us, show their army, way before they’re ready.”

“You’re sure about this army?”

He glanced around as if the trees were Coleman spies. “I even heard that they got an airplane; that it arrived a few days ago. But nobody who’ll fly it for them, not yet anyway.”

I thought of that Gullwing I’d seen heading west over Rocky.

If they did have a plane… I tried to get my mind around that. What would they do with it? My imagination went a little spotty. Images from Gran’s stories, terrorists flying over cities and dropping plagues on the people below them. No. I couldn’t imagine the Colemans doing something like that. But people would give almost anything to keep that from happening.

“Who knows? They could even be trying to get some tanks.” Now this was beginning to sound like a fever dream. Tanks? Gran had mentioned seeing one of those, used by a survival cell that had once roamed the Redwood countryside. I’d never heard anyone else even use the word.

“What if you push them to fight and they beat you?”

“They won’t! They’re not strong enough yet. I told you!” More snapping. A testy little garden gnome.

“Okay. I can see why you want to keep the Colemans from taking over. But when we succeed in stopping them, what then?”

His eyes shifted back to me, and away again. He was thinking hard but not answering.

“You have some kind of plan in mind for Sierra, don’t you?”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took another bite. Chewed. Swallowed. “Well not exactly a plan. We just want to keep ourselves from being conquered and merged. Keep Tahoe safe. Keep Sierra safe. Keep things the way they’re supposed to be. That’s all I want.”

Oh, yes, Newt Scorsi was an altruist through and through. And, as a great Twentieth Century poet said, “I am Marie of Rumania.”

If the Colemans were raising an army, and Newt was raising an army, what we had, right here in Sierra, was something they used to call an arms race. I couldn’t see anything but trouble in Sierra’s future. I was wishing more and more that Sierra wasn’t so close to Redwood, to that house up the trail, to Gran, her dog, her cats, and to that hammock in the trees.

But what it came down to, in the here and now was the job I had to do. That job said the Colemans were the big threat, the one I needed to focus on. Not the lying, whining man who sat on the rock before me. He had gone for the sandwich again.

“Could you stop eating long enough to finish this conversation?”

“I’m hungry. Didn’t have breakfast. Can’t you let a man eat, for god’s sake?” But he put the last of it down beside him on the rock.

“An army takes a lot of money to raise and maintain. And where are they hiding it?”

“They move it around, is what I think. As for money, they’re smuggling vax. They’re skimming at the tables. They’re selling phony medicine. They’ve got money, lots of it. Money that belongs to Sierra. Tax money. Vax money. Health certificate money. They’re going to get people into the government. And if they have enough time and enough money they won’t have to worry about showing their military, it’ll be too big to hide and they’ll already own everything anyway.”

It was true the Colemans didn’t seem to be hurting for cash or vax.

“Who’s in charge of this army?”

“Samm. He’s doing it.”

“Who’s Samm?” Iggy Santos at the Sierra Star had mentioned that name. Samm Bakar. Two m’s, three a’s.

“Big guy. Dealer. But he’s really more. He’s getting people to join and training troops in secret.” He shrugged.

“So he’s big— what else does he look like?” I was remembering the tall man who had been so involved in the battle the night before.

“Dark hair. With yellow stripes. Looks part Chinese or Indian or something. He’s not even a Coleman but he came here when he was a kid, Judith took him in. Women like him.” Newt looked disgusted. That had to be the man I remembered. “Samm and Jo and Judith, they’re going to take over everything.”

“What about the sheriff? Won’t he stop them?” I thought I already knew the answer to that.

“Frank? He’s in their underwear.”

“Well, but the chief—”

He snorted. “She should have sent the Guard.” His wandering gaze settled for a moment on my face again. Angry and resentful.

I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him. “If you didn’t think one merc could do this job, why didn’t you take your complaints to the Sierra Council? Or even just to the Tahoe cabinet? I know the mayor’s dead but what about the rest of them?”

“Half of them left town when the mayor was killed and the rest are just sitting around getting drunk.”

“Who killed the mayor, anyway?” I guessed what his answer would be to that question.

“Samm. Or maybe Jo.” He was looking at the trees again.

I’d had enough of him. “All right, Newt. I’ll do what I can for you. I’ll get back to work now.”

“Good idea. Before you go, I want to give you this.” He held out his hand. In his palm was something that looked like a gray plastic button, no more than a quarter inch in diameter. I was impressed. I’d seen one of two of those. They were expensive and hard to get. I didn’t own one yet. It was a syslink, made in Redwood. They connected with the sys but were much smaller, tiny enough to hide on the body or clothing with minimal chance of discovery. The first one I’d seen had been snapped onto a shirt and looked like all the other buttons. This one had a tiny hook on the edge and Stick-O on the back.

“Bet you’ve never seen one of these before.” He looked smug.

I nodded. “I have.” He sighed, irritated. “Haven’t used one, though.” That made him feel better.

“It’s connected to my sys. You carry it. It’ll vibrate when I need to reach you. Squeeze the hook, stick it in your ear and you’ll hear me. It only goes one way. You can’t talk back.” He snickered.

I took it and dropped it in my shirt pocket. It stuck to the bottom. I’d check it over later to see how securely it would attach to my clothing. The hard part was going to be to keep from losing it until then.

He picked up the last of the sandwich and stuck it in his mouth. I was about to turn away when I decided I needed to make a small effort, at least, to be Newt Scorsi’s pal. “By the way, that’s a nice floater you’ve got there. One of the best Redwood makes, I think— it’s a Helio Three, isn’t it?”

He almost smiled. “You like it? Purrs like a cat, glides like a discus. New-grade glassymetal, stop a bullet. What you got?”

I told him. An Electra. An ordinary ground car. He laughed. “Tell you what, you do a good job for me and I’ll give you a bonus. What color Helio would you like?”

“Black would be nice.” I actually prefer bright colors, but they’re too easy to spot and remember.

I wasn’t sure I believed he’d actually give me one, but the promise made me more interested in chasing down Newt Scorsi’s enemies. Or his wild geese.

Clinging together on a bloodstained bed

“Well, Rica, I guess you’re in Tahoe by now. I’m lying in the hammock up on the back hill, just listening to the eucalyptus curl its bark and drop its leaves. The messy stretch under the oak is noisy with birds rummaging in the dry brush. Francisco is snoring under the garden table, his tail wagging from time to time about some good dream or other. Oakland and Berkeley are lying on the roof below me, chattering and purring at the birds, probably hoping they’ll just drop right into their mouths.

“I did a reading this morning and I got the Death card. Now, you and I both know that probably doesn’t mean death but something’s about to come to an end and that scares me when you’re off spying, so for god’s sake be careful. I’ve been meditating on the reading and your safety. Doesn’t feel right. I wish you’d just come home for a while. There’ll always be another job. Love, Gran.”