The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  “You want me to…?” Fiona began.

  “I want you to do what comes naturally to you, gunfighter.”

  Chapter 12: Feverish, famished, and frustrated.

  Fiona left the Lazy Ravens’ brothel with a sack containing hundreds of the silver coins and the enormous strap-on from her past. She was rich, not because the coins had an inherent value, but because she knew Veronica would make them worth killing for within a month’s time. That’s what Veronica did: find desires, exploit them, and consolidate all the vices under her rule. Her Machiavellian approach to controlling a population was the norm in the Lazy Ravens, and Veronica was the best at setting up franchises. Before Veronica had come to Vegas to tame the town, it was Tombstone without Zeke’s tenuous control. Methanol cults, slavers, drug dealers, Slark sympathizers, white supremacists, and roving marauders turned the former tourism Mecca into a perpetual war zone. Fiona joined the Ravens just to have a group to watch her back. Within six months of arriving in town, Veronica had brought the entire city of Las Vegas under Lazy Raven control, took over the slave trade and eradicated anyone who wouldn’t be brought in line. Immediately after, she reintroduced money, taxes, racketeering, and government. Tombstone was looking to be a softer approach for Veronica—at least, Fiona hoped it wouldn’t turn into the slaughter required to tame Vegas.

  Fiona walked the streets again, head and heart full of conflicting feelings and thoughts, and weighed heavily with newfound wealth and an old friend. She nearly drew steel when she caught on that she was being followed. Her hand went to her gun, but her tail identified himself before she could jerk it and blow him out of his boots.

  “Easy, Red,” Danny said, “it’s just me.”

  Fiona relaxed her posture, although her hand remained on the butt of her pistol. Danny emerged from the shadow between two trucks, hands held up, Padres hat turned backward to make his face clearly visible.

  “What do you want?” Fiona asked with a little more acid than she intended.

  “I saw you come out of the Lazy Raven Nest,” Danny said. “That’s what they’re calling it, I guess.” He stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and shrugged like the confused surfer boy she’d known years ago. “Do you think Veronica recognized me?”

  Fiona slid her hand away from her gun and took the rest of the striking coil out of her stance. She sighed and shook her head. “I should have known you would put it together.”

  “My mom only raised three fools, and I wasn’t one of them,” Danny said with a boyish grin. “If you’re making a play for anything, count me to back your hand. There’s only a few of us left, but we all remember what you saved us from.” Danny took a few steps closer to lower his voice to just above a whisper while still being heard. “I’m also starting to piece together that what you saved me from might also be starting here.”

  “Veronica says the Ravens are done with human trafficking,” Fiona said.

  “Maybe she was telling the truth, I mean, you know her better than I do,” Danny said. “Do you think she was lying?”

  “She can lie to me like breathing and I would never know the difference.”

  “All I know is the people that Zeke puts on the train to Vegas don’t come back,” Danny said. “Maybe train tickets back cost too much. Maybe they like it so much they stay. I don’t know. I’m not about to hop a train and find out though. I’ve got the wrong plumbing for a position of power and I’m not interested in bondage, if you catch my meaning.”

  Fiona snorted. “Welcome to the world I grew up in.” She turned to walk away, although she only made it a few feet before Danny called after her.

  “Are the rumors true?” Danny asked. “Are you the Fiona Bishop from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue?”

  Fiona stopped dead in her tracks. She thought it was a real secret, something only someone as smart and stalker-ish as Gieo would figure out; she even thought of saying something trite and hackneyed along the lines of ‘that Fiona died a long time ago,’ but she didn’t think she could keep a straight face. She looked over her shoulder and gave Danny a sultry half-smile reminiscent of her modeling days. At twenty-six, her modeling career would have been long over even if the Slark hadn’t invaded—what did she care if Danny knew.

  “The one and only,” she said, walking away.

  Gieo was packing up her work for the day when Fiona finally strolled through the saloon’s swinging doors. It took everything in her not to leap from her seat to run to her; then, everything in her failed to hold her back, and she went ahead and vaulted the table.

  “Are you okay?” Gieo asked. “You’ve been gone all day and I was worried. Not that you’d get hurt, but that you’d shoot more people on my behalf. You look half-starved and sunburned. Have you eaten today? Did you drink any water?”

  “No, I guess I haven’t had anything since breakfast.” Fiona took off her hat and wiped her forehead with the back of her forearm.

  Gieo reached up and touched Fiona’s forehead with her hand as soon as it was done being wiped, but before Fiona could replace the hat. “You’re burning up,” she said. “Were you out in the sun all day?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You’ve probably got heat stroke.” Gieo guided Fiona to a chair, took her hat and sunglasses from her, and began fanning the gunfighter with both. “We have to get you cooled down.” Gieo knelt at Fiona’s feet and began pulling off her boots.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You have two options, but both of them involve you getting naked,” Gieo said. “You can do it yourself voluntarily, or I can do it against your will, but it’s going to happen.”

  “Aren’t you in a frisky mood?”

  “Irrelevant,” Gieo said. “You wouldn’t survive having sex with me in the condition you’re in.”

  Fiona had to admit that was probably true. Her head had started pounding before she even walked in the doors and she was getting a serious case of the spins just sitting. With Gieo’s help, Fiona managed to stumble up to her room where Gieo deposited her on the bed and raced around the room to open both windows and retrieve water from the jug next to the nightstand.

  “I made fifty of those little silver coins this evening,” Gieo said as she busied herself undressing Fiona in the most unceremonious way. Fiona, who had gone limp at some point, just nodded. “Apparently that’s only eight gallons of fuel though.”

  “This wasn’t how I pictured this,” Fiona said as Gieo pulled off her pants. The cool air on her legs felt good immediately and she began to wonder if maybe the pilot wasn’t right about the heat stroke.

  “I can tell,” Gieo said with a little laugh. “You’re not wearing underwear, Lady Firebox. At least I know your carpet matches your drapes.”

  “I don’t have a carpet,” Fiona said, trying to laugh through a dry throat.

  Gieo inspected the modest amount of almost perfectly straight, flat, red hair on Fiona’s mound. It was true. Even in a natural state, Fiona was far smoother than fuzzy and in no places bristly or bushy. “You’ve got me there,” Gieo said. “I have to tame mine or be ready to braid it.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “Which part? The taming or the braiding?”

  “First one, then the other.”

  Gieo laughed and shook her head. “I think the fever is making you delirious.” She pulled off Fiona’s t-shirt before depositing her back on the bed. Gieo looked a little sad and contemplative as she stared down at Fiona’s naked form causing Fiona to curl around herself in embarrassment.

  “Fuck, you don’t have to look at me like that,” Fiona said.

  “You’re not taking care of yourself.” Gieo knelt beside the bed, dipped her hand in the pitcher of water, and began rubbing her damp hand along Fiona’s back. “I’m worried about you.”

  “You and everyone else.”

  “I’m not everyone else,” Gieo said. “I’m your…something.”

  Fiona relaxed a little, allowing Gieo access to more of her skin. The
water felt amazing and Gieo’s hands were delightfully soft. “That tears it, though,” Gieo said. “I’m doing all your cooking from now on, and you’re going to eat what I say, drink when I say, and not get heat stroke again unless you have written permission from me.”

  “You can cook?” Fiona asked.

  “Oh, sweetie, you’d be hard pressed to find something I can’t do.” Gieo gave her a little wink and dipped her hand back in the pitcher.

  After a long night of keeping Fiona’s skin properly wetted, fanned, and cooled, Gieo was awoken by the early morning sun warming her as she slept, half on the floor, head and arms on the bed. Fiona was finally sleeping comfortably after fitfully tossing and turning all night. Fiona had drunk enough water that Gieo thought her stomach might start pooching out, but had never once needed to use the bathroom. Gieo felt Fiona’s forehead and found it normal on the side of cool. She closed the windows, pulled the shades, and draped several blankets over the curtain rods to block out all but the most stubborn of light.

  Gieo made for the door with the nearly empty pitcher in hand when Fiona awoke and rolled over to face her. A little squeak from the mattress springs stopped Gieo at the door.

  “Where are you going?” Fiona croaked. In the dimly lit room, still bleary-eyed and frizzy-haired from a rough night of sleep, she looked far more innocent and sweet than Gieo knew her to be.

  “I was going to get you some more water, make breakfast, and see about earning some more of this new money we just got saddled with,” Gieo whispered, although she wasn’t sure why she was whispering as the only sleeping person in the room was awake and talking.

  “Don’t bother with the money,” Fiona said, rolling onto her back. With her toe, she nudged the bag she’d been carrying the night before, nearly knocking it off the foot of the bed where she’d set it. “Veronica gave me more money than we could use and told me I could have more whenever I wanted.”

  “Oh,” Gieo said. Her mind immediately kicked into high gear. Fiona had spoken with Veronica, exchanged something for money, and had an open invitation to return for another exchange at any point. Of course she did. They must have been friends, good friend, girlfriends even, on-again/off-again sex partners, lovers of epic proportions whose tale could only be captured in classic poems or sappy songs written and sung by multiple Grammy winners! The only role left to Gieo in this play was as the jilted, foolish girl who hurls herself into the Grand Canyon as a romantic, but ultimately futile, gesture to prove her unrequited love. The only songs sung about her would be depressing ballads about how she fooled herself into…

  “Where did you go just then?” Fiona asked. “You drifted off and kind of stared into space.”

  “The Grand Canyon,” Gieo said. “I’ll go make you breakfast.”

  “Veronica wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say airships.”

  Gieo took the cryptic message downstairs to the kitchen, filled the pitched with the hand-pumped well water, and set to work looking for something worthwhile to cook. Mitch’s new kitchen boy, Bond-O, a great oaf of a man with only three fingers on his left hand, was busy rattling pans and burning what might have once been identifiable as food when she walked in.

  “Hey, Go!” Bond-O shouted and waved with a three-fingered hand covered in what might have been cornmeal based pancake batter.

  She had her doubts about Bond-O’s capacity to learn cooking beyond what he had already picked up from baking mud pies as a child, but she would have to try. First things first, she had to get a hairnet on the wild mane of black hair on his head and the equally erratic beard he’d clearly tried to trim at some point with garden sheers—with mixed results from the looks of it.

  “I hate to say this, but we’re going to have to be kitchen buddies for awhile until the food improves around here,” Gieo said with a weary sigh.

  “Bond-Go buddies!” the man-child shouted in delight with a big thumbs-up. He popped his batter covered thumb in his mouth, bit down hard, and yelped a little before dissolving into giggles. “Mitts were my cook buddy for awhile before the knife-ccident.”

  Gieo had no idea why Mitch, or ‘Mitts’, thought Bond-O would make a suitable cook, but the old bartender seemed to be the only man in town with patience enough to find a use for him. Rumors were that the big lug was a refugee from a state mental hospital, most likely suffering from extreme developmental delay. Having the mind of a five-year-old trapped in the body of a Hell’s Angel enforcer seemed a particularly cruel irony to Gieo, although hadn’t apparently dampened Bond-O’s spirits. At least, she noted with no small amount of surprise, someone had pounded a highly fastidious nature into the gentle giant. He was the cleanest Tombstone resident, aside from Gieo, and still occasionally gave her a run for her money in the neat and tidy department. He’d taken to sleeping in a shed outback, which was quickly cleaned to a shiny polish and decorated in enough brightly colored flower prints and pictures to rival any little old lady’s sitting room. Watching him beat eggs with his three-fingered fist, she couldn’t help but wonder what tragedy had befallen him before Mitch found him on the side of the road, petting a cow skull, and singing Cher’s greatest hits to himself. For better or worse, she was going to be his second kitchen buddy until a knife-ccident or a sudden epiphany of culinary genius on his part separated them.

  After several hours, and several near misses with accidents of more than just the knife variety, Gieo had managed to pull together something resembling food from the meager means provided. Bond-O staples like sawdust, rat droppings, and what might very well be fiberglass insulation shredded extra-fine were removed from the menu entirely to be replaced by actual food, which Gieo had to send the oversized fry cook to purchase around town with the fifty coins she’d earned the day before. She returned to Fiona’s room by midmorning with a plate of bacon, eggs, stewed tomatoes, and cactus strips in southwest chili sauce.

  Fiona awoke at Gieo’s return, but didn’t seem nearly as interested in the food as she was in the jug of water. She drank greedily and rolled over to go back to sleep. Gieo set the steaming plate on the nightstand and swatted Fiona hard on the rear end with a satisfying thwack. Fiona rolled over without much of a response.

  “You’re going to eat and you’re going to thank me for my astounding patience on your behalf.”

  Fiona squinted at the food and sniffed the air. She crawled across the bed to get a better look. “That looks like actual food.”

  “Yeah, and it was neither cheap, nor easy.”

  “I’m not that hungry,” Fiona said.

  “You better get hungry, because that food is going inside you one way or the other.”

  Fiona drew herself up to a sitting position in the bed and pulled the plate onto her lap. She ate quickly without real recognition that the food actually tasted like food. The Tombstone diet of utter shit was a source of pride for most of the hunters; they saw it as a test of their toughness to eat and survive on what would kill a lesser being. Gieo had pointed out how patently stupid that was, but Fiona had only shrugged and said that’s just the way it was. Gieo was just about done with Fiona’s shrugs and ‘whatever’s; from then on out, Fiona’s apathy would be met with aggressiveness. The food vanished in a matter of minutes. Fiona tossed the plate aside and let out a long, loud burp.

  Gieo retrieved the plate and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Fiona asked.

  “To shower, to sleep, to walk out into the desert never to be heard from again…I haven’t really decided.”

  “Thank you for breakfast.” Fiona scooted back in the bed, clearing a little space. “Now come cuddle with me and take a well-deserved nap.”

  Gieo nearly burst into frustrated tears on the spot. She walked to the bed with mincing steps, pulled off her riding boots, and crawled into place beside Fiona. “Did the mighty gunfighter and huntress just say ‘cuddle’?”