“Take, part, profit, whatever,” Fiona said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I never wanted it in the first place.”
“Good, because I have a plan.” Gieo motioned Fiona over with her cup, which she then realized contained a shot, which she drank. The effects of the whiskey were starting to become a little more apparent in her speech, and she guessed wasn’t doing any favors for her walking, should she choose to try any of that. “Now, don’t get mad…”
“Whenever people say that, my first inclination is to always get mad.” Fiona walked over to pilot’s perch, took the bottle from beside the lawn chair, and drank deeply of the noxious, yellow whiskey.
“…but I sent Rawlins on an errand.” Gieo pulled up the monitor for her spy cameras around the Hawkins compound, waited for the slow software to load up, and then tabbed through the feeds until she found what she was looking for. “With all the cultists wandering the streets, it shouldn’t be a problem for him to get in and get out without too much trouble.”
“What did you give him to do this job?” Fiona knelt beside Gieo, leaning in close beside her to watch the grainy, black and white feed.
“Nothing,” Gieo said. “I blackmailed him.”
“That’s my girl.”
Gieo’s heart fluttered at the gunfighter’s words and her proximity.
“What’s he doing?” Fiona asked, pointing at the feed with the lip of the whiskey bottle.
“That is a 1948 Indian Chief Roadmaster,” Gieo said, “and he’s stealing it for me. I spotted it when I was spying earlier and fell in love.”
The dusty, barely recognizable motorcycle from just after World War II seemed to be fighting Rawlins every step of the way. Getting it up from the hard-baked ground that had practically grown around it was the first obstacle that nearly did him in. Rolling it on two flat tires that fell apart like dry coffeecake was the second. Pushing it up the ramp into the back of his tow truck that he’d somehow managed to pull right into the compound was the last. The whole thing looked like a comically angry Sisyphus who had traded in his boulder for a motorcycle.
“Feminism is all well and good,” Gieo said, “but there was no way I was going to be able to haul that thing out of there myself. More importantly, I needed a distraction for the entire compound to do it.”
“You knew the cultists would flood into the city to be a pain in everyone’s ass?” Fiona asked incredulously.
“Hell no!” Gieo grabbed the bottle from Fiona’s hand and poured herself another shot, feeling loose and happy with her mounting buzz. She downed the drink and poured another. “My original plan involved setting a fire and stealing a forklift, but this worked out much better.”
“What are you going to do with an antique motorcycle?”
Gieo leaned heavily against the arm of the lawn chair, placing her face inches from Fiona’s. “You’re cute when I’m drunk,” she slurred. “Not that you aren’t cute all the time, but when I’m drunk, your edges are all fuzzy.” Gieo ran her finger along the outline of Fiona’s face, down her jaw, ending with her index finger resting on Fiona’s chin.
“I’m going to put you to bed.” Fiona gently lifted Gieo from the lawn chair, sliding in under one of her arms to support the wobbly pilot.
“You should put me to the spurs, or your spurs should be put to me…hey, why don’t you have spurs?” Before Fiona could answer, Gieo nearly spun out of her grasp to head back toward the edge of the saloon roof. “Hey! Shaddup you damn cane tappers!” She hoisted the nearly empty bottle by the neck and hurled it over the edge at one of the passing groups of cultists who were singing a toneless rendition of “Old Rugged Cross.” The bottle sailed over their heads, and, remarkably, struck the dirty road without breaking, rolling across the street on its side to come to rest against a clump of weeds clinging to the base of the town hall. The cultists didn’t appear to have noticed the bottle and thus made no move of response, continuing along their merry way without so much as a tilted head. “I’m not going to be able to sleep with all that racket,” Gieo said, stumbling back into Fiona’s arms.
“Oh, I expect you’ll manage,” Fiona said with a little laugh.
The laugh, brief, but genuine, stopped Gieo in her tracks. “You don’t laugh enough.”
“I haven’t had much reason to.”
“I’ll invent a machine that will make you laugh and…yanno what? Fuck it, I’ll make you laugh.” Gieo allowed herself to be led toward the army tent while attempting knock-knock jokes, most of which ended in some sort of mathematical pun that Fiona didn’t understand. Gieo forwent the sleeping bag, flopping onto the hammock and nearly spilling herself back onto the roof in the process.
Fiona leaned over the quickly fading pilot and brushed one of her purple braids from her face with gentle fingers. “Sweet dreams, Stacy.”
“Normally I don’t like people calling me by my real name,” Gieo said dreamily, “but you can because I’m your collared little pet…” She might have had more to say or it might have been a yawn, but whatever followed failed to escape the fast approaching sleep.
Fiona tucked in Gieo as best she could and headed downstairs. Between the head full of confusing thoughts, stomach churning with bad whiskey, cultists singing in the streets, and nail-biting sexual frustration, Fiona struggled to find sleep as though sleep wanted nothing to do with her.
Fiona rolled out of bed much later than usual. The lousy night of sleep, combined with the alcohol and lack of necessity to get up early to go hunting, held her in bed until she naturally came to the day—something she never did. Despite the added hours, she wasn’t any more rested than usual, and had a headache hitchhiker. She was barely dressed for the day when a harsh knock came at her door. Rawlins, no doubt grumpy from his long night of working for someone else’s silence, barked at her through the door that there was a meeting in twenty minutes and her ass had better be there.
She put on another pair of blue jeans, skipped the chaps, strapped on her gun belt, and pulled on a black tank-top. With her hat and sunglasses on, she headed out to the meeting at the town hall. In all the time she’d lived in Tombstone, they’d only ever had a handful of meetings between the hunters, and those were in the very early days of the town to establish the order they would all live by. Since then, the hunters worked in a solitary fashion. If a new hunter came into town, Zeke or one of the veterans made sure they knew the score; if they didn’t follow the rules, they didn’t last long.
Out on the street, the cultists were beginning to show signs of wear but none of stopping. A full day and night had taken its toll. They were all sunburned, with chapped lips, and blisters rising on the areas hit hardest. Fiona walked calmly between the passing clusters; they neither avoided her nor acknowledged her presence.
The interior of the town hall was dark and cool, smelling dusty with a hint of leather, sagebrush, and gun oil. Forty or so men were milling about in the space meant for over a hundred, and they were all chaffing under the cramped accommodations being so used to elbow room for miles. Zeke took his sweet time getting to the podium after Rawlins ushered in the last few stragglers. Fiona found a spot against the wall with good visibility on the podium and the door. She fell into her pose of practice relaxation that set others at ease, but was so carefully planned to keep her at a state of readiness to strike at a moment’s notice. Her back was leaned against the wall, one boot up flat to push off should she need to, and her thumbs tucked into her pockets, close enough to her pistol that she could jerk it faster than someone could drop a hat.
“We’ve got a problem…” Zeke began.
He only managed to get four words out before the crowd turned on him. “You’re damn right we do!” “You’re pro-rating the quota for days spent stuck in town.” “You should have let the bitch kill the old fuck!” The last comment wasn’t directed at Fiona, but she knew she was the ‘bitch’ in question. She had to wonder as well why Zeke had stopped her.
“Why don’t you just give them the purple-
haired whore and be done with it?”
Fiona lifted her eyes for that comment, scanned the crowd, and found the speaker to be Steve Olsen. She marked him off as someone she would have to watch and potentially shoot.
“That’s a great plan, Steve,” Zeke bellowed, silencing the murmurs of the assembled hunters. “While we’re at it, why don’t we just tell them anytime they want to fuck us, all they have to do is march around the streets singing and we’ll bend right over? Better yet, how about you find old Bill and bend over for him yourself. I’m sure your crusty ass will be a welcome change from his harem of 12-year-old child brides. We’re not giving them shit, and I’ll personally castrate the next man who suggests it.”
“Then why’d you stop Red from enforcing the law?” Danny O’Brien shouted from the back. If there was another hunter Fiona liked, or at the very least respected, it was Danny. He was easily the best driver among them, which was saying a lot, and he sought out clean kills for professional purposes. Of all of them, he was likely the only sane person in the room; she had no idea what he was doing as a Tombstone hunter. But she couldn’t very well save a person’s life only to tell them what to do with it…
“Bill’s got a trump card,” Zeke finally conceded. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know the cagey bastard would have a way of playing it even if he was gunned down in the street on a lark.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Fiona finally spoke. Her voice, feminine and powerful, cut through the room like lightening, and suddenly all eyes were on her.
“Of all the people to ask that question, I’m glad it was you, Red.” Zeke had the look of a sleeping cat with yellow feathers stuck to his whiskers; Fiona didn’t like it one bit. “I sent a messenger to Vegas on horseback. We’ll finally be accepting the Lazy Ravens’ invitation for a franchise, due to arrive on the train coming in Friday.”
The collected hunters cheered. Even Danny, who should have known better, had his San Diego Padres cap off, waving it in the air like he, of all people, didn’t know what it really meant. Fiona stormed from the town hall, burst out onto the street, and nearly knocked down a group of the singing cultists on her way back to the saloon.
The timing was bullshit. The train from Vegas would be in Tombstone no later than the day after tomorrow and there was no way a rider would even get to Vegas before the end of the week, let alone back in time to tell Zeke the response date. She knew the Lazy Ravens would send the cultists scurrying back to their bibles and methanol rituals faster than the threat of rolling Armageddon, but that wasn’t the point. Fiona stomped through the saloon, up the stairs, and burst out onto the rooftop. Gieo was awake, more or less, still somewhat in her underthings, wearing only a white slip and the blouse from the day before, half her braids undone, with a dazed, groggy look about her. She tried quickly to straighten her hair and wipe the sleep from her eyes.
“Hey, sorry about last night,” Gieo said quickly. “Things got out of hand, and, was it just me, or was that whiskey really strong for being made out of corn husks?”
Fiona ignored her comments, ignored her really, stormed to the edge of the roof where she’d seen the milk jug Zeke had tried to give her for the job to poison the cultists. She hoisted the jug, spun off the cap, and took a long pull of the cloudy liquid. She spit what was supposed to be poison out over the edge of the roof. Across the way, standing on his balcony, Zeke’s look of gloating pride had only deepened. He knew that she knew, and he knew there was nothing she could do about it.
“Whoa,” Gieo shouted and ran toward Fiona, nearly tripping over a pile of old desktop computer parts. “Don’t drink that! It’s poison!”
“No,” Fiona said, “it’s not.”
Gieo, dressed in her leather blacksmith’s apron, little brown corduroy shorts, and a leather vest, was torso deep in the bowels of Jackson’s old Jeep Wagoneer, giving Fiona all the stretched legs and tight ass she could stand to look at in the fading, golden light of the day. Fiona was making a show of drinking a warm beer from a refilled bottle, although she was far more focused on the pilot’s backside, waving back and forth as it was in the little shorts while Gieo worked under the hood.
“So, no matter how I did that job, the result was going to be the same?” Gieo asked.
“From what you told me about Yahweh showing up at just the right time,” Fiona said, “I don’t think you were supposed to get back out. Everything else though, was exactly what Zeke wanted.”
“You think Zeke tipped off the cultists?”
“I think we have to assume this was something he’s been planning for a long time.”
Gieo finally pulled herself from beneath the hood. Her face was smudged with engine grease, her hands covered in heavy leather gloves that fanned out around her forearms, and her eyes were still covered with the green goggles, but she was easily the most beautiful grease monkey Fiona had ever laid eyes on.
“What are the Lazy Ravens anyway?”
“A Vegas-based brothel…corporation for lack of a better word,” Fiona said. “They’re part business, part crime syndicate, part government.”
“That doesn’t sound like the influence Zeke would want in Tombstone.”
“It isn’t, or, wasn’t, anyway. This concocted nonsense with the cultists is far too elaborate to simply be a cover for a change of heart, so I don’t really know why he bothered with it.” Fiona finished off the last of her warm beer and set aside the bottle. The setting sun had moved just enough to put a backlight on Gieo, and she considered moving to keep her lovely view. “I can only assume they’ve offered him something worth giving up some power over or there’s something else going on that is beyond my brain’s figuring capacity. It’s not dangerous that I know what I know. Zeke can outthink me, no problem, but I’d imagine he wouldn’t want you looking into it though.”
“You’re not stupid,” Gieo said, “not by a long shot. So don’t sell yourself short. Besides, I can’t be that bright if I was the patsy for a job you turned down.”
“Those two comments don’t fit together in a flattering way from where I’m sitting,” Fiona said with a smile.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it like that.” Gieo set aside her wrench and pushed the goggles up away from her eyes. “I’m feeling foolish and you’re looking damn clever from where I’m standing.”
“Is that all I’m looking?” Fiona’s smile passed from joking to coquettish in an alluring way Gieo could distinctly remember from the gunfighter’s old modeling days. There was a very specific picture, a cover shot from the summer catalogue, which Gieo had carried with her in the clear, plastic cover of her binder through her entire senior year of high school, displaying that very smile; she loved the fact that it was something natural to Fiona, and not a product of a photographer’s direction.
“Actually, you’re looking hungry for something that I might be able to…” The rest of Gieo’s comment was cut short by the sound of Rawlins’ tow truck grinding its way around the saloon to the back.
Beside the main winch, hugged to the truck’s frame with a dozen or so bungee cords, was the skeletal remains of the 1948 Indian Chief. Gieo couldn’t help but hop a little in excitement.
Rawlins, who had begun to seem increasingly agitated since Gieo’s arrival, slammed the truck door and stormed to the back to unload the goal of Gieo’s blackmail scheme. It was a difficult proposition that neither Fiona nor Gieo offered to help with, and resulted in Rawlins barking his knuckles against the bike or his truck no less than a dozen times, and squashing any number of his limbs between the motorcycle and the railing nearly as many. He leaned the old hulk of the bike against the side of Jackson’s Wagoneer, and began the weary walk back to his truck without so much as a word or glance directed at Gieo or Fiona.
“One more thing,” Gieo called after him, stopping him dead in his tracks.
Rawlins looked angry, even from behind, lifting his hands to plant them on his hips with an exasperated sigh. “What now?”
“Th
e collaring thing bugs you,” Gieo said. “Are you mad because you want to wear Fiona’s collar, or you’d want her to wear yours?”
The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Page 10
