Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  “I guess not every bounty is going to be naked robot hookers and gunfights.”

  “Well, I hope not. A man needs a break every now and again.”

  I hadn’t been in the restaurant for half an hour but I guess, as I had told Dog, that news travelled fast in a little town like this. The door pushed open with a warm gust of wind and I looked up.

  Local law enforcement on colony worlds can wear a variety of different uniforms, from camouflage military-style fatigues, to a traditional blue, to nothing but a jacket with their seal sewn into it, but you can always tell them. There’s a certain air to them, slightly harried, as if they have too much responsibility and not enough people to handle it, and yet also a sense of absolute power, like being out on the ass-end of nowhere means there’s no one to second-guess them. It’s a strange and sometimes dangerous combination.

  This particular example was dressed somewhere in the middle between civilian clothes and a traditional uniform, the jeans and boots not particularly saying “law enforcement,” but the brown jacket and dress shirt bearing the markings of the Absolution District Constabulary, which I thought was a bit grandiose for something that probably had three employees at the very most. The pistol at her hip was not grandiose at all. It seemed worn and used and right at home. Her hand rested on it, ready to pull, and I got the feeling I was the reason.

  “Good afternoon, officer,” I said, nodding toward her. I would have tipped my hat, but I didn’t wear it indoors. It wasn’t polite. I didn’t get up because she was already nervous enough and I didn’t want her to think I was about to pull on her.

  “Are you the bounty hunter I been told about?” she asked, not returning the pleasantries. I let it go, but it was disappointing. There’s always time to be polite.

  I fished my bonafides out of my jacket pocket and passed them to her slowly and carefully. She took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from her like it was radioactive.

  “Grant Masterson, licensed by the Union Fugitive Recovery Department,” I added, keeping my hand away from my gun.

  The woman studied the document for several moments, much longer than she needed to, as if she expected it to suddenly give up some new secret not originally printed on it, then she tossed it back to me with a negligent snap of her wrist. I caught it in mid-air, not wanting to look like a dumbass rube and let it hit my chest, which was what she had in mind. I think she looked disappointed.

  “You’re supposed to consult with local law enforcement,” she reminded me, “whenever you’re searching for a fugitive.”

  “I fully intended to,” I assured her. I gestured at the remains of the burger on my plate. “I was just grabbing a bite to eat first.” I winked. “They got great cheeseburgers here, you know?”

  She scowled at my attempt at humor, for which I couldn’t blame her. I’ve never been that good at it. It was only then that she seemed to notice Dog, which I also couldn’t blame her for, since she’d been more focused on my blaster and the possible threat it presented. Dog was half under the table and when he saw her eyes on him, he wagged his tail hopefully.

  “This is a restaurant…” she began and I rubbed tiredly at my temples.

  “He’s a robot.”

  She scowled again. It seemed to be her default expression and I wondered if she was a robot, too, and needed a factory reset.

  “You’re here looking for someone.” It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway.

  “This woman.” I held up my ‘link with Beckett’s picture and added the spiel about her crimes and the reward. Deputy Grouchyface might not be interested, but there were other customers. “Any chance she’s sitting in your jail cell on a drunken disorderly and I can go home early?”

  “I’ve never seen her. Maybe you got the wrong town, Mr. Masterson.”

  “I might,” I agreed. “But I got the rental car for the rest of today, so I might as well keep looking.”

  She grunted noncommittally.

  “Don’t cause any trouble. And notify me if you make an apprehension.”

  “Of course, officer.”

  “Constable,” she corrected me. “Constable Edlund.”

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, Constable Edlund.”

  She turned and headed back out the door, still watching me over her shoulder.

  A few of the other patrons who’d drifted in while I’d been eating stared at her, and at me. I paid the bill and pushed up from the table.

  “Come on,” I urged Dog. “Let’s go see if that bar’s open.”

  “Who’s gonna be at a bar this early?” he asked me after we’d passed through the door and back out into a steady wind that could mask his voice from the few dusty, vacant-eyed locals walking by.

  “Drunks, I hope.”

  Chapter Four

  I was not disappointed. If there’s one thing you can count on in a Podunk, nowhere town on a Podunk, nowhere colony, it’s afternoon drunks. Not just workers having a beer at the end of their shift, I’m talking about the losers who’ve lost their last three jobs and hate their life and are intent on spending every credit they can scrounge pouring liquid comfort down their throats because it’s better than sitting around sober realizing what utter pieces of crap they are.

  Not that I have any experience with this myself.

  This was the perfect bar to find people like that, dim and dingy and beaten down by the environment. The walls were cracked, the floor perpetually covered in dust, the windows small and braced by shutters to keep out the ever-present wind. There were tables, but they were unoccupied. Tables were for parties, for friends, for groups. The people I was looking for would be alone, sitting at the bar, waiting for life to come to them.

  I went to them.

  There were three at the moment, two men and a woman, evenly spaced around the bar, trying not to get too close to each other, afraid too much of the stench of failure would build up and cause an explosion. I chose one of the men. I’d tried to pry information from a drunk woman too many times and it usually ended with them thinking, for good or ill, that I was coming onto them. Sometimes that helped to loosen them up, but extricating myself was always much more complicated.

  I sat down beside a man who could have been anywhere between forty and a hundred and forty, depending on how much money he’d started out with before he’d wound up here. His hair was shot with grey through tight curls of brown, his face cracked and lined, weathered by time and exposure to sun and wind. His clothes were plain, not ragged or torn but work clothes just the same. Old grease stains darkened the sleeves, long faded, showing the duration of his current unemployment.

  He didn’t look up at me when I sat down, but his perpetual frown deepened.

  “There must be a lot of other places you could sit,” he murmured. Then he did look over, eyes widening. “Did you bring a fucking dog into the bar? How did they let you get away with that?”

  I sighed. That was getting old.

  “You want another drink?” I asked him, nodding at his nearly empty glass of something clear and cheap and alcoholic.

  “I ain’t your type, cowboy,” he grunted in dark amusement.

  “Are you the type who’d like to make a few easy credits just for telling me what you know?”

  “I don’t know shit.” He downed the dregs of the drink, his words and body language sounding final…but he didn’t get up, didn’t leave the bar.

  “Tell you what,” I offered, fishing a few strips of paper money out of my pocket, “I’ll buy you a drink. In exchange, you listen to what I need to know. If you can give me something useful, there’s a lot more in it for you.”

  “Fine.” He grabbed the bills and waved them at the bartender, who seemed just as old and embittered as the drunk, if more economically secure. “Another vodka, Grimaldi.”

  The bartender took the money but eyed the man skeptically. “I’ll get you another drink, Cappy, but you throw up again,” Grimaldi warned him, “and you’ll have to buy your booze
in a bag and drink outside.”

  “It was just the one time,” Cappy insisted, but the bartender had already turned away.

  “Her,” I told Cappy, holding the picture up for him. “I want to know about her.”

  His eyes narrowed as if he couldn’t quite see straight and needed to concentrate to actually focus on the image. He knew her. I don’t know if he’d ever been good at concealing his emotions, but years of alcoholism hadn’t done him any favors when it came to controlling his face.

  “Why you interested in her?”

  “She’s a fugitive, I’m a bounty hunter. There’s a reward. You help me, you get ten percent of it.”

  “Fifty,” he said with mulish stubbornness.

  “Ten.”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Ten.” I eyed him balefully. “I got expenses to make and a ship to pay off. Time, I got plenty of. I can stay here for a week sleeping in my ship, paying next to nothing, coming back every day.”

  I didn’t mention the car rental, which would begin to build up over a week. He didn’t need to know.

  “I want it up front,” Cappy said. “I ain’t waiting till you haul her back to the Marshals.”

  “Fine,” I said, raising my hands palms-up. “You get it when I get her. Where is she?”

  He checked around him, as if he expected someone to be listening. The bartender was still pouring his drink and Cappy waited until he’d set it down in front of him and walked away before he continued.

  “She’s calling herself Rebecca Mitchell,” he whispered, leaning close enough I could smell the vodka on his breath, could tell he hadn’t had a shower in a few days. I forbore since I really did need the information. “I don’t know where she lives, but she works driving a feed truck out to the cattle ranches.” He chortled, as if it was the biggest joke in the world. “Bitch comes in here every night after her shift for three or four beers, but she thinks she’s too good for me, like it’s some horrible thing I get here a couple hours before she does.”

  “What time does her shift end?” I asked, not bothering to give him my opinion on Ms. Mitchell nee Beckett’s selectivity toward men.

  Cappy squinted at the data board above the bar, where the time, temperature, weather forecast and latest news got replayed every few minutes.

  “Two hours,” he told me. “Now, where’s my money.”

  “After I have her in cuffs and in my car,” I reminded him.

  “What, don’t you trust me?” He seemed truly aggrieved.

  “If I were ever of a mind to start trusting people,” I advised him, sliding off the bar stool and heading for the door, “I very much doubt I’d start here.”

  I waited in my rental. Sitting in a bar full of hopeless dead-enders didn’t seem like a productive use of my time, nor did it seem like a good way to stay out of sight and leave the coast clear for Delia Beckett. Dog wasn’t happy about it, though.

  “It’s boring out here,” he insisted for perhaps the third time in—I checked the clock—the last two hours and twenty minutes. “Didn’t the old drunk say she’d be here by now?”

  “He did,” I admitted. I leaned down further in the seat and watched the stars beginning to come out over the eastern horizon. At night, the town turned rather picturesque, I thought. “But he’s a drunk. He might not have the times exactly right.” I shrugged. “He might not have her workdays right. Or he might have been lying.”

  “You know, Masterson,” Dog said, resting his chin on the center console and regarding me with what I thought of as his philosophical look, “humans are mortal.”

  “Yes, I was aware of that.”

  “You have some of the nanites left in your blood from the Marshals Service Induction Medical, I know that. I can sense them. They’ll keep you young and healthy for longer than normal, but eventually, you’ll die.”

  “I was aware of that, too.” I tipped my hat down over my eyes. “You coming to a point or are these lines strictly parallel?”

  “You only have so many years in your life. Why are you wasting them sitting in a fucking rental car in the parking lot of a bar in a colony cow town?”

  “Oh, good God,” I moaned. “Who the hell have you been talking to, my ex-wife?”

  “Hey, it’s all the same to me, pal,” Dog pointed out. “I’m going to live forever as long as some idiot doesn’t let me get damaged so badly, I can’t be repaired. I don’t have a biological imperative to reproduce, which means I have no need to succeed at something in order to be important enough for someone to want to mate with me. I’m good just sitting here, observing, collecting data, fetching the occasional tennis ball.”

  I shot him a curious look.

  “You actually like doing that?”

  “A dog has his programming. Besides, it can be fun, as long as the human doesn’t throw like an infant.” He glared at me.

  “I swear I will do better. Throwing the tennis ball, I mean. I’m not changing jobs.”

  Dog might or might not have been prepared to keep arguing, but he never got the chance. I recognized the grumbling engine of a large cargo truck, internal combustion like you often see out in the less developed colonies. Lot easier to fabricate parts for a cylinder-driven engine than to find the precious metals and chemicals necessary for a battery-run vehicle…unless you’ve got enough money to power your truck on Bartoli crystals, and no one out here would bother. Not when you can distill alcohol and build an engine in a workshop for next to nothing.

  That’s the thing about colonies they don’t tell you in the corporate recruiting videos they stream in school. They have to run a profit, and with the costs of transporting people and cargo and amortizing the huge initial investment, the corners that get cut are luxuries. Colonists raising cattle or mining bauxite or whatever don’t need virtual reality entertainment or luxury flyers or the latest in expensive fabricator patterns or smart houses. They can get by just fine on old, beater trucks and local materials for their buildings and home-brewed whiskey.

  I even recognized the pattern the flatbed truck had been built from. It was something from about 500 years ago, all the way from pre-starflight Earth, with the old, boxy lines and huge windshield, a design from a company called China Star. It was a bear to drive and I’d have been hating life if I had to haul feed back and forth in one over these roads every day. Which, I suppose, was why the job was available and no one asked any questions when the applicant didn’t provide any identification or references.

  Delia Beckett looked a bit rougher around the edges than she had in her file photo from Hadur Defense, but a year on the run might do that to a person. Her firm solidity had wasted away to a gaunt look, as if her skin was stretched out over her skull, and her stylishly coifed corporate hair was stringy and pulled back into a simple ponytail. She hadn’t changed her looks, hadn’t tried to have cosmetic surgery. Maybe she didn’t have the money for it, or maybe she just wasn’t savvy enough to realize it might have helped.

  Her skin looked white and washed out through the windshield of the truck. She’d pulled it into the space right across from me, like she’d known I was there and had come to surrender. She shifted the truck into park, fatigue dragging at her shoulders, then sat back and rested her head against the back of her seat for nearly thirty seconds before she finally climbed out, slowly and without enthusiasm.

  “This is too darn easy,” I muttered, pushing my door open, adjusting my hat to give me a better line of sight.

  “You’re always complaining,” Dog said, hopping out through my door instead of waiting for me to open his. “Let’s go make some money.”

  “I’ll do the talking,”

  I was ready to run to cut her off before she reached the front door of the bar, but she was shuffling, seemingly in no hurry to get there or anywhere else. I stepped between two work trucks and directly into her path, with Dog circling around to back me up.

  “Delia Beckett,” I said, hand resting on the butt of my gun, “you’re a fugitive from the
Union Marshal’s Service and as a duly licensed independent agent of the Fugitive Recovery Division, I am placing you under arrest.”

  I wasn’t sure what I expected from Delia. She’d been on the run a long time and she was obviously tired, either from her life or of it, but on the other hand, she was wanted for a death-sentence offense and you never know how someone will react with mortality staring them in the face. I’ve had the meekest looking, mousy little people come at me like a caged tiger…

  Delia sighed and her shoulders rolled as if a weight were shifting off of them. I could have sworn I saw pale brown dust puffing off her grey work coveralls from the move, as if she’d become part of the earth-tone landscape.

  “I guess I’ve been expecting this,” she admitted, not moving a step either to run or attack. “I’m kind of surprised it took this long.” Her voice was rough and raspy, like she’d been smoking twenty cigarettes a day for the last year, or it might have been from breathing in the dust. Her eyes wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t meet mine. “It’s been so long, I’d convinced myself they didn’t really want to catch me.”

  I pulled a pair of flex cuffs out of my jacket pocket and stepped around her, holding them up so she could see what I was doing.

  “I’ve found the federal government to be fairly persistent when it comes to treason,” I said, gently but firmly pulling her hands behind her back and fastening the restraints. She smelled of dust and hay and work. Not an unpleasant scent, sort of homey. “I doubt they’d give up quite that easy.”

  “It’s so much more complicated than that,” she said, her face finally raising to meet my eyes as if she wanted to tell me something vital. But then she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s safer for you if you don’t know.”

  That seemed like an odd thing for her to say. I’d arrested a lot of fugitives, both as a Marshal and a bounty hunter, and if there was one thing every single one had in common, it was an almost compulsive need to explain to me how they were really innocent, how it wasn’t fair and they were being framed. Not one had ever suggested they didn’t want me to know what had happened.