The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  Chapter 5: A spiritual education.

  Nearly a week’s time passed in a strange haze of what might be considered a courtship in the peculiar terms Fiona understood. They shared a bed, shared meals, and shared free time talking about everything under the sun. Gieo only ever let Fiona do as she’d done the first night with heavy making out until Gieo allowed Fiona the chance to rub herself lewdly on the pilot’s leg, always to climax, and never with skin against skin contact. The good news, if there was any, was that Fiona was getting exceptionally good at the dry humping act; the bad news, which was all Fiona could focus on, was that Gieo had taken complete sexual control of her.

  Every morning Ramen flitted away to Gieo’s workshop to retrieve an item or two until the roof of the saloon looked like a proper tent-city workshop. While Fiona hunted, Gieo busied herself on converting Mitch’s truck to the new power source with the help of the items retrieved by Ramen. Every evening when Fiona returned, Gieo took her up to their shared room for another leg rubbing. In a strange, Pavlovian twist, Fiona began finding herself aroused at just seeing or thinking about Gieo’s right leg.

  Fiona considered this peculiar conditioning she’d undergone on Sunday morning as she watched Gieo get dressed before breakfast. The pilot wore a brown, leather pencil skirt, matching knee-high boots, and a white, lace Lolita blouse. Fiona couldn’t help but watch Gieo’s legs hungrily when she planted one foot on the desk chair to zip up the back of one of her boots.

  “I’m sick of eating in the room,” Gieo said. “Let’s go downstairs for breakfast.”

  Fiona was in no position to argue or otherwise find fault with the plan. She followed the pilot downstairs to the busy saloon floor; two dozen of the rougher looking customers of Tombstone gathered around the tables. The grizzled men sat hunched over their respective plates, shoveling food into open mouths with forks or bare hands. When they spotted Gieo and Fiona at the top of the stairs, table manners suddenly rippled through the room, straightening backs and adjusting utensil use. Mitch cleared a table as a group of three bikers left.

  Once they were settled at the table, Mitch brought two metallic plates of what had likely been eggs, potatoes, bacon grease, and tomatoes before it was all stewed together. “The truck’s looking great, Gieo,” Mitch said.

  “Thank you.” Gieo settled a scrap of cloth over her lap as a napkin. “It’s going to run even better.”

  Fiona paid little attention to Mitch, keeping her eyes roving across the room as she carefully brought tiny bites to her mouth.

  “It looks…good,” Gieo said of the food before Mitch took his leave.

  They ate in silence for a short time before Gieo pieced together what was oddly mechanical about Fiona’s fork use—she was eating left-handed. Craning her neck to see around to Fiona’s right side, Gieo spotted the reason: Fiona had her right hand on the butt of her pistol.

  “So…did your mom ever cook you breakfast?” Gieo asked. “I had a tiger mom. She would make me breakfast, but then would drill me on differential equations the entire time until I didn’t feel hungry anymore.”

  “My mom was a fame whore who tried to take my success for her own,” Fiona said without pulling her eyes from the room. “She used to call me her chubby little sister and seldom woke up before noon, so, no, breakfast wasn’t really a priority growing up.”

  “Wow, that’s fucked up,” Gieo said. “Where was your dad?”

  “Sperm donor,” Fiona corrected her. “Dad would imply he did something beyond shoot his genes into my mom and then start sending child support payments through an intermediary.”

  “Yeah, well my dad was a robot,” Gieo said. “He was only programmed with three English statements: Stacy, do homework! Stacy, practice piano, now! Stacy, stop all you being weird! And volume was stuck at eleven. He was a little more articulate in Korean, but only a little.”

  “Yeah, that sounds pretty…wait, who is Stacy?”

  “Me,” Gieo said. “I never liked it though, so I changed it to Gieo when everyone who knew my real name was killed by the Slark.”

  “I kind of like Stacy,” Fiona muttered.

  “Aw, I kind of like you too, sugar.” Gieo leaned over and kissed Fiona on the nose.

  “Why Gieo?” Fiona asked, a little flustered by the public display of affection.

  “It’s Korean for…”

  A loud throat clearing on the other side of the table cut Gieo’s explanation short. They both looked over to find an enormous rectangle of a man, right down to his flattop hair cut, standing with a plate of food in hand and expectant expression painted across his moon pie face. What looked like baby fat had followed the man into adulthood, giving him a youthful appearance along with something of a doughy physique despite his obvious attempts at building as much muscle as possible. The man’s affected jovial demeanor came complete with a grin that gave him something of a simple quality.

  “What do you want, Rawlins?” Fiona snarled.

  “Officer Rawlins.” The man offered the meaty palm not holding a plate of food to Gieo as if to shake.

  “Officer of what?” Gieo asked, shaking the offered hand.

  “California Highway Patrol,” Rawlins explained, his chest puffing out in the process.

  “Like Paunch and John?” Gieo asked.

  “Nope,” Fiona said, returning her attention to her food. “He was the car kind.”

  “This seat taken?” Rawlins asked, pointing to one of the empty chairs.

  Fiona stretched her long legs out under the table and gave the chair a hard enough kick to send it tumbling backward at Rawlins’ feet. “Take it,” she said.

  Rawlins carefully righted the chair and sat in it, scooting up to the table.

  “No, I meant pick the thing up and take it to your own fucking table,” Fiona said.

  “There aren’t any more tables,” Rawlins explained.

  “Then shove it up your…” Fiona began.

  “What do you do now, Officer Rawlins?” Gieo interrupted.

  “I’m Zeke’s executive officer,” Rawlins explained, “which is why I kept the title.”

  “He means secretary,” Fiona said.

  “Say, are you a church going lady?” Rawlins asked of Gieo, although it was clear Fiona’s barb had found a soft spot from the flash of anger in his blue eyes.

  “I’m a Buddhist,” Gieo said. “Are you talking about the Hawkins House church?”

  “No, not those heretics,” Rawlins said. “We’ve got a little congregation that meets in the old credit union. We’re nice folk with a little singing of hymns and bible study most Sunday afternoons. You should come by and check it out, both of you.”

  “What part of Buddhist didn’t you understand?” Fiona snapped.

  “She’s a rattlesnake, isn’t she?” Gieo leaned over, wrapped an arm around Fiona’s shoulder, and gave her a soft kiss on the cheek.

  “Could you stop that?” Rawlins jovial demeanor dropped to a stern attempt at authoritarian.

  Fiona’s eyes flashed with trouble, catching on the opportunity. “Stop what? Oh, you mean stop this?” Fiona took Gieo’s face in her hands and kissed her deeply. The pilot allowed herself to be drawn into the kiss, playing an equal role in the making out. Officer Rawlins stormed out of the saloon in a huff, leaving his steaming plate of food untouched at their table. Gieo broke the kiss and gave Fiona a hard slap across the face.

  “Whoa, what was that for?” Fiona asked.

  “Using me to make that guy jealous.”

  “Okay, firstly, it’s not like you weren’t enjoying yourself; secondly, I wasn’t using you to make him jealous; and thirdly, ouch.” Fiona reluctantly turned her attention back to her food with her left cheek still stinging.

  “What was his deal anyway?”

  “He’s asked me to marry him a half-dozen times,” Fiona said.

  “And you told him?”

  “Go away or I’ll shoot you.”

  Gieo gave her a look that just screamed, aaaaaaannnd?<
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  “How much more evidence do you need that I’m a lesbian?” Fiona dropped her fork onto her plate with a loud clank. The entire saloon quieted around them.

  “I’m going to church this afternoon,” Gieo said.

  “Fine, I’m going hunting.” Fiona stood, put on her cowboy hat, and walked to the door. “If you get lynched for being a scientist, Buddhist, lesbian, witch, don’t blame me.”

  Gieo sat on the roof of the saloon beneath her beach umbrella watching the feeds from the security cameras Ramen had installed for her. The outing to the church was as productive as she’d hoped. An old Jewish couple, who only went to the church for the same networking opportunities Gieo was there for, happened to have a few industrial washers and dryers; they had a notion of getting out of the leather tanning business to open a laundry if the machines could be fixed. They’d given her a down payment of three jugs of agave white lightning for her to start work later that week.

  Of course, the biggest deal she’d managed to broker was with Zeke. Somehow he had it in his head that Fiona should poison the Hawkins House, and he tried his best to put it in Gieo’s head that she should convince the gunfighter to do it. Gieo offered to do him one better, cut out the middle woman as it were, and do the job herself. Zeke was disinterested in how it got done so long as it got done.

  On the flattop roof of the saloon, warm beyond reason even in the shade of the umbrella, Gieo sat with her four jugs acquired at church: three filled with cactus moonshine and one of strychnine. Ramen had easily infiltrated the Hawkins House compound while they were busying themselves about the weekly communion of wood alcohol. The cameras he’d set up were dusty, scratched, and gave off a poor signal, but the receiver Gieo had for them, powered by a solar panel ripped off a cattle gate outside Phoenix, boosted the reception enough for Gieo to make out what was important, where the defenses were, and how she might infiltrate the compound.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do with the poison just yet, but there was no real reason to waste it—something as valuable as a gallon of raccoon poison could have any number of uses, even if it didn’t fit into her immediate plans. As she watched the feed, she made notes in her Hello Kitty notepad, sketched a vague map, and listed possible uses for the poison.

  Ramen clattered around the roof between their many projects in various states of completion, whistling a jaunty tune. He was making remarkable progress in cataloguing the incoming tech from various jobs, the payments Gieo hadn’t quite figured out what to do with yet, and assessing the prices things might fetch once repaired.

  “We should have done this years ago, ma’am,” Ramen said.

  “Opportunities arise when they are meant to,” Gieo replied.

  “So you’re Buddhist again now?” Ramen asked.

  She’d leaned forward, almost involuntarily, to peer at the fuzzy picture on the LCD screen. Children, none older than four or five, were being given doses of methanol from a colossal tank in the middle of the compound. From what she could tell, the largest tank likely also carried the highest concentration. The smaller tank, the one garden-variety cultists weren’t supposed to know about, appeared to be the gas tank on a scuttled Dodge pickup. The mucky-mucks of the cult, easily identifiable by their orange parking-cone hats, snuck over and took a drink from a hose running out of the gas cap when they thought no one was looking.

  “Right now, I’m planning on being the angel of mischief and mercy,” Gieo murmured.

  The thundering sound of Fiona’s engine encroached on the peace of the town like rolling thunder. Gieo had begun to look forward to hearing the engine as it meant the redheaded gunfighter was almost home; unfortunately, she wasn’t all that happy to hear it after that morning.

  She leaned on the two-foot tall lip running around the edge of the roof, watching the silver car pull up in front of the saloon. Four fresh Slark heads lined the front of the grill. She’d had a good day. When Fiona stepped from the car, Gieo placed two fingers in her mouth and let out a loud, sharp whistle. Fiona snapped her head up.

  “I want to talk to you,” Gieo shouted.

  “So talk,” Fiona shouted back.

  “I said talk, not shout.”

  Fiona stomped up into the saloon with her head down. Gieo could hear her petulantly clomping all the way up the stairs and finally bursting onto the roof. Gieo hated to admit it, but Fiona was unreasonably attractive when fuming mad. When Fiona folded her arms over her chest, cocked her hips to one side, and jutted out her lower lip until a little glisten was showing she created a sexiness that Gieo couldn’t quite put her finger on. After studying Fiona’s pout for awhile, she decided it was remarkably similar to one of the poses she often used in the catalogue; other models usually looked spaced out and dead behind the eyes, but Fiona always seemed lively and perturbed.

  “Did you have fun at church?” Fiona asked.

  “I had productive at church,” Gieo said. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I want to apologize for earlier.”

  Fiona’s entire demeanor softened at the mere mention of apology. Gieo noted the smoldering, angry sexiness softened as well; she resolved, no matter how difficult it might be, to not make Fiona angry just for sexual purposes…at least, not very often.

  “Could you take the goggles off?” Fiona walked over to where Gieo, standing just outside the ring of shade provided by the beach umbrella.

  “Oh, sure,” Gieo said. She’d forgotten she was even wearing them. She pulled the green tinted goggles off and reached out to set them on the lip of the roof next to her chair. Fiona’s eyes followed them instinctively, but immediately refocused on something below at street level. “I’m really sorry for…um…what are you doing?”

  Fiona yanked her gun from its holster, took two steps past Gieo to the edge of the roof, and fired once down into the street. When the ringing cleared from Gieo’s ears following the explosive .44 magnum round being fired right in front of her, she heard a man groaning in the street. She jumped to the edge of the roof and looked down to find Jackson Roy, the hunter who had asked her to keep an eye out for a power drill, bleeding in the street, desperately trying to hold his right forearm together.

  “You stay where you are, Jackson,” Fiona shouted down.

  Fiona turned on her heels and was running back for the roof access ladder before Gieo could even ask what was going on. Gieo jumped up to follow but struggled to keep pace, losing track of Fiona before she could even get to the saloon’s main floor. Gieo ran out between the saloon’s swinging doors, and nearly got her head blown off when a spray of bullets passed at Fiona’s height across the plank front of the building. Gieo ducked, even though the shots were intended for someone six inches taller than her, and barely caught a glimpse of Jackson standing in front of Fiona’s car with a steaming Mac-10 in his good hand. Another report of Fiona’s Anaconda echoed through the street and Jackson’s right knee exploded in blood and bone fragments. Fiona emerged from the alleyway on the side of the saloon with her pistol trained on Jackson’s downed form.

  In a daze, Gieo plucked several splinters from her hair, and began walking toward the scene of carnage. Fiona had her Wakizashi out and was demanding that Jackson tie it off. Tie what off, Gieo wondered. She couldn’t see exactly what Jackson was doing in front of the car, but he seemed to be working a leather strap with his teeth. Fiona lifted her sword. Time finally caught up with Gieo’s mind.