by Emma Bull
My eyes kept going, past the rack to another shining wood door and the man standing straight and stiff next to it. I didn’t recognize him at first. He wore a high-collared white jacket and black trousers. His blond hair was scraped back from his face, and he looked even more cadaverous than usual. He was trying desperately to look at nothing, and the effort, I could tell, was almost more than he could bear. Cassidy. Uniformed, clearly in Albrecht’s employ, he was having to witness his boss’s seduction of the woman he was in love with. I turned back to Dana and found her watching me.
“Is this one of life’s little jokes on the two of you?” I asked. My voice was unsteady, but not much. “Or did you use your connections to get him the job?” Connections. I’d realized that Dana had them. I just hadn’t realized they’d been to here.
Dana flushed. “Honey… ” She shook her head.
I looked again at Albrecht, who was pouring himself a drink from a decanter he’d taken from the cabinet, and then back to Cassidy. His deep-set eyes were wide, meeting mine, even wider than the circumstances would warrant. For an instant, I didn’t understand. Then I did what I should have done long before. I turned around.
There was a fifth person in the room. He leaned at ease against the wall, where the opening door from the office had hidden him as I came in. He was tall and lean, with sandy brown hair that fell forward into eyes so light-colored they were nearly colorless. His white shirt was open over his pearl-gray cotton trousers, and his feet were bare. His smile was full of big, even teeth.
“Howdy,” he said. “I do believe you must be Sparrow.”
Frances, I thought in that long moment when I couldn’t so much as swallow, I found the monster.
Mick had said he was strong, fast, and bugfuck crazy. I could see it, feel it, smell it on him, the madness that, when he had to, he could probably disguise as something else. Now he didn’t have to.
He crossed the space between the wall and me in three strides, grabbed up my stiff right hand in both of his, and shook it, hard. “Mighty pleased to meet you, after all this time. I’ve heard an awful lot about you. Heck, for a while I thought I might miss you completely, but here you are at last.” His smile grew, if possible, wider, and he turned it on Dana. “Your friend don’t talk much. You didn’t tell me that.”
“I’m sorry. I just haven’t had anything to say,” I said. I barely recognized my voice. I sounded like someone talking to a growling dog. “I missed your name.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t.” The smile had changed. I was not going to be able to bluff my way through this. “I didn’t tell it to you. But you know what it is, don’t you? These folks have been calling me Fred, but I want you to call me by the name my momma gave me.” He still had hold of my hand. He squeezed it. “Go ahead. You call me by my name.” He squeezed it ’til the bones pinched together.
“I really don’t—” Harder. A little catch of sound came out of my throat. I saw a movement from Dana, that might have been her fingers going to her mouth.
“Say it,” said the monster, his face close to mine.
“Tom Worecski,” I said. He let my hand drop. I was afraid to flex it, for fear that he’d notice he’d left it attached to my wrist.
“Good for you! Now, you go sit on the sofa there. Babe, come over here and give us a kiss.”
As she passed me on the other side of the table, Dana’s eyes cut away from mine. She went to Tom and put her arms around him. He didn’t turn his face to her, but she kissed his jaw and his neck and the hollow of his collarbone while he smiled at me. It wasn’t Albrecht’s seduction. It was Tom’s. I wondered whether anybody would care if I was sick on the rug.
Albrecht set his glass down on the cabinet. “God damn it, Krueger, she’s not—”
“A. A., if you keep your mouth shut, not only will I let you live, I’ll think about not walkin’ you through Nicollet Market buck naked with your dick in your fist. You got that?”
Tom had raised his voice. Albrecht’s face, innocent of sun, flushed to magenta, then went bloodless. “You need me. My staff won’t listen to you.”
“We been through this before. I need you like a goddamn dog needs shoes, A.A. I figured if I let you run all the little shit, it would keep you out of my way. But if that’s not workin’ anymore, I can find some other asshole to run the little shit. So you just sit behind your big desk and buy movies that you think’ll help you get rid of me, and stay the fuck out of my way.”
He was stroking Dana absently, as if she were a cat on his lap. She had her face turned into his shoulder; whatever expression was there, none of us could see it. Albrecht watched Tom and Dana with a look that reminded me a little of Cassidy. I was glad I had my back to Cassidy.
“It’s not Hellriders,” I said to Albrecht.
“Nobody ever thought it was,” said Tom. “But we didn’t want to discourage you right off, if you thought you needed an excuse to come up.” He frowned over Dana’s head, and gazed around the room as if he missed something. “So where’s Her Highness?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t fuck with me. You know what I’m talking about.”
My hands closed in reflex over my knees. The right one hurt.
He saw it; it made him happy again. “Well, shit, Myra and Dusty work for me, you know. When Franny had her little joke on Myra the other night, don’t you think Myra would’ve told me?”
“She told you who it was?”
“She didn’t have to. Dusty told me some of the stuff Myra said when she wasn’t Myra, and I knew right off. There ain’t anybody jaws on like that but Franny.”
That didn’t explain how he knew someone had come up with me, or how he knew I wasn’t really there to sell A.A. Albrecht a faked videotape. The only thing that did -
“I expect she’s listening at a keyhole,” Tom said cheerfully. He stared at me as he added, louder, “So, Fran? You come in here, or I’m gonna break this kid’s neck. You know I can.”
Maybe she wouldn’t care. But I thought I ought to tell her, at least, that he hadn’t started yet. “I’d hate that,” I said. “Besides, you haven’t finished my hand.” Stall. You’ve lost the advantage of surprise, Frances. At least pick your moment.
“Thatagirl,” Tom called out, “come on in and have a seat. Hell, we got us enough folks for a party.”
I twisted around on the couch. The door beside Cassidy swung slowly open to admit Frances, alone, with her pistol. Why hadn’t she shot — ah, of course. She wasn’t here to kill Tom’s body. The head fight had begun already; I could see it in Frances’s tight-closed lips, the net of squint lines around Tom’s eyes.
I wanted desperately to know the range of a Horseman’s powers. Because I’d thought of another solution to the problem of isolating Tom Worecski. Frances could eliminate Tom’s options for switching bodies. Bang, bang, bang. Bang. Maybe she’d meant to all along, and it was my bad luck I’d ended up here, as one of Tom’s options.
“Someone gave us away,” I said to Frances.
“I was beginning to think someone must have. Everything was going according to plan.” She kept her eyes, and the pistol, on Tom.
By logic, someone in the room ought to have wrenched it out of her hand by now. No, if anyone approached her, anyone who wasn’t Tom, she could shoot. Tom could order one of them to get the gun. I began to think I ought to be doing something besides sitting and watching, but what could I do? I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t part of this fight. It had nothing to do with me. I was caught between the two of them.
“Go sit beside your friend, babe,” Tom said, and Dana let go of him. Her face, when she had her back to Tom, was vacant with fear. She sat down close to me and clung to my sleeve, where Tom couldn’t see it.
“Put it down, Franny. It’s not gonna do you any good.”
“Oh, I don’t know. A loud noise, some nasty stains — it would have a certain nostalgia value at the very least.” The room was cool, but there was a light gloss of swe
at above Frances’s eyebrows.
“Huh. I thought they were the good old days. But I figured you’d got religion or something. All the fun we used to have, and here you are, with a self-righteous stick up your ass, out to blow my brains out for bein’ just as bad as you.” He took a step forward, grinning, teeth clenched intermittently. “And you know that’s true. I’ve never done anything you didn’t do.”
I’d heard that before, from Mick about Frances. She’d denied it. And I remembered what Tom Worecski’s death sentence was for. I must have moved; Tom’s gaze flicked to me and back to Frances.
“You didn’t tell anybody?” he said. “Oh, my. Let you who are without sin cast the first stone.”
Frances also grinned; like Tom, she seemed to be doing it at least half because of the pressure. “If I’d washed my sins away first, I wouldn’t have been able to minister to the rest of you.”
Tom snorted. “You loved it. You always figured you had a right to run the world. You thought being part of the committee that was gonna blow it to hell was no more than you deserved. You wanted to show those bastards who hadn’t had the sense to get together and elect you Goddess.”
“That’s not true.” Frances spoke without heat, as if he’d misstated the time and she was correcting that. But the heat was there, underneath, unspoken, a slow tide of it. “You had to lie to get me to sign on. You never once planned to hold the country hostage, but I believed it. I thought I was working for peace. I may have been criminally stupid and blind as a cave fish, but I didn’t think we meant to actually drop the Big One.”
“Shit, Franny, then you were the only one.”
“A loner to the very end.” Her right hand was trembling, barely.
“Is it true?” Tom asked the air. “Was she really pure as the driven snow, even though she executed half the damn launch sequence her own self?”
“We were supposed to hold and wait to abort,” Frances snapped, her face white. Some of it was surely whatever Tom was doing to her head. But she looked like a woman watching a rerun of her worst nightmare. She had done it. She had lived with it all these decades. And she’d dedicated herself to seeing that the people who’d shared the blame wouldn’t live with anything anymore. I’d been right all the time, to be afraid of her.
“I’ll bet the jury’s done deliberating,” Tom said. “Awful sorry I couldn’t get twelve of ’em, but one good one oughta be enough for this. Whattaya say, Skin? Innocent or guilty?”
In Albrecht’s darkened office, someone moved hesitantly toward the door. It was Mick Skinner.
Frances took a step forward — no, it was a stagger, a widening of an unstable stance — and flung her left hand up to her face. The pistol wobbled and sank. Cassidy, glancing at Tom, moved toward her. Then the hand over her face dropped, and showed the blackness of her eyes, and her clenched teeth. She brought the end of the silencer to bear on Cassidy. I heard Dana suck her breath in; but Cassidy stepped back.
Tom had used Mick, the shock of him, to break Frances’s concentration. Then he’d struck at her, hard enough to cut her loose, for a moment, from her muscles. But Frances was in fragile command of herself now, and Tom stood relaxed for the first time since Frances had come into the room. He’d struck and let her go. It was a gesture of contempt.
Mick looked like someone enduring the course of a natural disaster. His once-neat braids were coming loose, coils and streaks of hair stuck in the sweat on his forehead and jaw, and his clean-lined features were marked with weariness and emotion. Sweat striped and dotted the chest of the T-shirt he wore. He must have come from the island on foot, and quickly. At Tom’s command. His hands opened and closed at his side. “Guilty,” he said softly, looking at Frances. And, in an echo of himself, “My family was in Galveston.”
“I was going to tell you,” said Frances. Her eyes were on his face; her voice was low and unsteady. “By deed, if not by word. Feel free to reproach me, but you won’t catch up to what I’ve done to myself. I’ve had more time, after all. But what about you? What will you have to reproach yourself for?”
“You ought to die.” Mick sounded half strangled.
“So should your ally, here. Leave us out of it. You didn’t inform Tom of my arrival out of sheer righteous indignation. Christ, I wish you had. Then maybe you’d have kept all these civilians out of range of my comeuppance. Besides, Tom hadn’t told you I was one of the ones responsible for the Bang, had he? He wanted me to convict myself. He knew you’d hurt more that way. So why did you tell him we were coming? What superior philosophy made it necessary to warn the snake about the scorpion?”
Mick was silent.
“Or was it not philosophy at all?” Her voice was softer now. “You can walk away from him, Mick. Now. I can hold him that long. Take Sparrow and get away from here. There’s nothing he can do to you. If he told you otherwise, it was a lie.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Tom broke in, cheerful. “Ol’ Skin, his experience tells him different.”
“I tried,” Mick said. “He sent Myra and Dusty after me. I dumped my body and rode Sparrow, figuring I could hide out that way, just until things cooled down. But they found me. I got away from them, but I think I was supposed to. He can find me anytime he wants, Fran, and now he can find Sparrow, too.”
“No,” Frances said, and in her voice was the deep sadness I’d heard when she’d told Dusty, I have a damnably long memory. “He just has a hold on you. The longer you stay, and the more dirty things you do for him, the better the hold will be.”
But I had looked up, uncontrollably, at Tom.
“That’s right,” said Tom, to me. “Mick got you away from them the first time I sent my kids. No love lost between Mick and Myra and Dusty, I’ll tell you. The second time, Franny got you away. But while that was going on, I’d sent Mick himself.”
Mick, in the archives, saying, I came back for my jacket.
“You bastard, that’s not true,” Mick said. “You didn’t send me.”
“That got a little screwed up,” Tom continued, as if Mick had never spoken. “Worked out all right in the end, though. I’ve never been able to get anybody on that goddamn island before.”
This time there was no protest from Mick.
“My God,” Frances sighed, “can you hear yourself? Playing Ming the Merciless, gloating over your explanations to the captive hero?”
Tom looked surprised. “Who says you’re the hero?”
“I do. How can you be so small, Tom O’ Bedlam? How can you have lived so long, and still be so small?”
“I run a city,” he said, his lip curled. “You’re just a little killer.”
She looked mildly insulted. “I’m seeking vengeance for the whole Western Hemisphere. I think that’s positively grandiose.”
Tom leaned into the cushions of the couch and smiled. “Hell, I missed you, Franny. I’d have elected you Goddess.”
“Don’t start,” Frances said softly.
“It don’t hurt to ask. There’s enough here for two of us.” His voice, too, was soft. Albrecht, in the act of pouring himself another drink, made a little noise and turned. “Fran, I know you. I know you better’n anybody. I know Skin here thinks he’s got your number, but he’s just a goddamn puppydog.” And that made Mick flinch, and look to Frances. “But it could be the good old days all over again. I know what you want, Franny.”
His voice, his face, had turned surprisingly sweet. Frances watched him gravely, the line of her dark brows straight, her lips pressed tightly together. The head fight was over. This was the clean, insidious pressure of words and a shared past.
The rest of us sat or stood quite still, waiting for our futures to be decided. I had seen Albrecht’s face when Tom proposed to turn half his city into a courting gift. I had seen Mick’s face. Mick, who a few hours ago had made love to Frances. Cassidy’s expression was of uncomprehending, enduring despair, the look of a man who didn’t expect things to ever be good again. And Dana, beside me, might have bee
n carved out of ice. She hadn’t raised her eyes from the Chinese table since Frances’s pistol had pointed at Cassidy. There was no blood under her faint tan, and her fingers twisted and ground at the silk over her knees.
Chango, was I going to go quietly to the slaughterhouse? My side had the gun. If my side was still on my side. I wanted out of here. She wanted… something.
“I don’t understand,” I said in as conversational a tone as I was capable of. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, besides a change of subject. “Why did you decide you had to bring me in?”
Tom paced slowly to the other couch, and sat down. He was at right angles to me now, and his right knee brushed my left one. A smile grew on his face, in increments. “Because Mick said you were a good fit. He and Franny must have told you all the fun we used to have? I wanted a taste.”
“Take a bite of this, then,” said Frances calmly. She raised the pistol in both hands, firing position. The silencer had a perfectly round black eye that looked into mine.
I wanted to scream. I moved instead. Before I knew I meant to, I found myself rolling over the back of the couch and breaking for the door that Cassidy guarded. The gun made an ugly, flat sound. Cassidy reached the door first — and yanked it open. “Go!” he mouthed. His hollowed-out face was twisted with anguish, like a man facing the medusa. I’d have to take him with me. Otherwise Tom Worecski would dissect him alive, and Cassidy knew it. I grabbed his arm as I hit the door.
It turned into a snake, strong and contrary. No, still an arm, but twisting through mine, jerking it up until my shoulder joint blossomed with fire. His other arm closed around my jaw. He giggled next to my ear.
I couldn’t see him, but I could see the part of the room I’d just left. Frances stood with her gun not quite aimed at us, wearing a near cousin to Cassidy’s expression. Dana, half crouched on the sofa, stared wide-eyed at us. Albrecht had pressed back against the wall, his hands over his face. Mick was still in the office door, one arm reaching, as if he could stop whatever was about to happen. And Tom was sitting, empty, on the couch.
