Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy

by Shelley Singer

  “The look of them?” Jo asked.

  “They were loud, pushy, and they were wearing long coats. He made one of them take his off and he was dressed in some kind of uniform. Khaki.”

  “Rocky military?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. Military, probably, but one of them tried to talk the guard into going back with them and making babies, and another one was spouting some crap about the immorality of Sierra.”

  Judith stared at Jo, who blurted, “Military, breeders, and godders, all together?”

  As long as Rocky was split into factions, their bluster was limited to infighting. She hoped this was just a fluke, a gang of rejects, and not a first sign of an alliance.

  “I’ll find someone I can send,” she said. “I haven’t heard anything about this from the people I have there now.” Brave word, “people.” Jo had two spies in Rocky. Looked like she’d have to be deploying more. Just when she needed to focus on Scorsi. “What finally happened between the guard and the Rockies?”

  “Some of the Rockies had guns, and waved them around threateningly, but the guard called for help and the Rockies turned around and headed east again. No way to know if they sneaked in some other way.”

  Everyone sat silent for a moment. Then Judith broke the spell by asking, “Anyone else got anything they want to report?” Jo knew that Judith wasn’t downplaying the subject of Rocky. But their eastern neighbor had been posturing and puffing for a long time. A mixed mob of hoodlums didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  “I’ve got something,” Drew said. “Waldo.”

  Judith’s mouth twisted. “What about him?”

  “He knows when we’re having meetings. Every time we have one he’s even lazier and meaner at work. He’s always watching. The host station has a great view of these stairs. I’m sure he knows we’re in here now. He always makes some remark to me. Like ‘I’m a Coleman, too.’ Or ‘What’s the big secret this time?’ I don’t know that it’s such a good idea to leave him out of everything.”

  Waldo also hated that Samm, who was not born a Coleman, was part of the inner circle while he was an outsider.

  “Too bad,” Jo said. “But that’s not going to change. I don’t trust him. I think he’s capable of selling information to Scorsi.”

  Judith nodded. “Or stupidly blurting something we don’t want blurted.”

  Jo added: “Or telling a secret to a woman to impress her.”

  “He’ll just have to keep not liking it, Drew,” Judith said. “Even if he had something to contribute to the discussion, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “But, Mom, if he’s burned all the time, doesn’t that make him more likely to do something against us?”

  Judith shrugged again. “Yes or no, either one.” Jo smiled. Exactly. She remembered a time when they’d tried to make Waldo feel like a Coleman in more than name. But he’d said something to Frank about skimming tax money and they’d been forced to start paying the sheriff a percentage. They’d kept him in the dark since then and the only way they held his supposed loyalty and kept his mouth shut was by letting him keep his well-paying, high-status job. He was an irritation they lived with, like a poison-oak rash that never went away.

  Judith was careful to ease away from talk of Waldo in a way that didn’t make Drew feel his words were being dismissed along with the topic. “Drew, you’re absolutely right about him. He’s crawling with resentment. This is something we’ve been deciding and re-deciding for years. But unless we want to kill him, there’s not much we can do.” Drew laughed nervously, as if he wasn’t really sure she was making a joke. Samm looked only mildly interested. He didn’t have to deal directly with Waldo, and he avoided him. Jo had often thought killing Waldo would be the best solution, but Judith said they couldn’t kill their own cousin.

  “But that does bring up another topic,” Judith went on. “Drew, I wanted to ask you about someone else you work with. The new woman, Rica— what do you think of her?”

  The boy— well, he really wasn’t a boy anymore— blushed. Uh oh! Not that Jo couldn’t understand it.

  “I think she’s great. Nice. And smart. And I loved that she tossed Waldo.”

  “Jo? What do you think?”

  Jo hoped she wasn’t blushing, too.

  “I like her. But there’s a lot there to wonder about. She’s smart, and she goes deep. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. I like the way she carries herself, I think she might be, well, helpful. But I don’t know how and I don’t trust it. I ran her through a verbal maze about Blackjack having enemies, and loyalty, all that kind of thing. She didn’t bullshit me but she looked nervous and then she slid right through and out the door. We need good people. So, Drew, when you go back to the restaurant, keep an eye on her.”

  He nodded eagerly. This was an assignment he obviously liked.

  So Judith had hinted to Rica that Blackjack might have more to offer a smart woman than casino work. She did that kind of thing sometimes, hinted at hidden power and a hidden agenda with near-strangers. Jo knew that it was deliberate and never because of lack of caution. Judith believed that rumors were good; that they created confusion and speculation among their enemies. And for those who were not their enemies, rumors built mystique: a political weapon.

  And she wasn’t wrong. One thing Jo’s people in Rocky had noticed— the Coleman name was known there. Through spying or gossip or both. If Rocky believed the Colemans were creating a buffer in Tahoe, the rich and well-defended gateway to Sierra, if they saw only the image and didn’t bore too deeply, they’d be less likely to try to move in. But she didn’t want Rocky slipping tentacles, political, military, or economic, into Sierra. Not before the Colemans had a chance to take over.

  Consolidation was coming, one way or another. The countries would merge and grow large. She didn’t like the way Rocky governed itself; xenophobic, overrun with godders and cops and stiff with laws; hostile, tight-assed. She sure as hell didn’t want people like that governing Tahoe and Sierra.

  What a trio we are, Jo thought. Judith and her mystique. Samm and his army and his drive to war. And Jo? Well, like Judith and Machiavelli, she believed it was essential to make yourself legendary. And like Samm and Machiavelli, she believed the foundation of power was both good laws and good arms, to inspire both love and fear. And there was so much more. The old expression: hearts and minds. Get to people where they lived, their homes, their health, their sense of powerlessness. Make them believe you could deliver them out of bondage, discontent, or dispersal. Bondage to the vax and those who could get it for them, discontent with weakness and fear and dispersal into nonfunctioning or malfunctioning little countries with populations too small to build anything of consequence.

  Samm was reporting. He was planning on running a training all day Saturday. Weapons practice, tactics, hand-to-hand. He said he now had a total of 48 fighters, up a few from the last time he’d reported. Hardly an army, but more than a police force. Of course, they had no idea how many of those soldiers would actually fight if it came to that, or how many of them would fight for the Colemans.

  Samm’s next words sounded like he’d been reading her mind. “Thing is, I can’t give you a real count. Don’t know how many of them are really ours, how many are in Scorsi’s pay.”

  Judith laughed. They all knew that was not a problem. The army could be full of spies for all Jo cared. Scorsi would be so busy getting reports from renegade soldiers he might forget to concentrate on winning people over, on giving and getting economic and political favors.

  Lizzie was biting her lip, scowling, puzzled by something. She burst out: “I don’t understand why he would send those mercs against us if he knows we have an army. With fifty fighters we could level his stupid casino.”

  Jo answered. “Knowing Newt, he probably thought he’d scare us off. Show us he has an army too.” Jo hated him. Back when they’d been teenagers, he’d tried to rape her. She’d hurt him badly. Broken his hand and his nose. H
e was the one person in the world she thought of as a personal enemy, besides the bandits who’d murdered her mother as her father lay dying of plague. Mother had been trying to defend the vax she’d just bought on the black market. Judith was a young woman at the time, Jo a child. Jo had run out the back of the house when she heard Judith screaming. When she’d crept back later she found her sister bleeding, ravaged, and her mother shot through the heart. Their father died two days later.

  That was thirty years ago. Those bandits were probably dead by now. But Newt was still alive.

  “Which brings us to the next item on our agenda. Samm, you had something to say about the merc invasion.”

  “I do, and Lizzie’s already brought it up. If we’re ever going to use our fighters, I think we should do it now. Go back at him, tear Scorsi’s Luck apart. Scare off his customers and give him some real damage to deal with. He sends a few mercs at us, we send four dozen soldiers— or however many are real— at him. Might be a way to find out who’s loyal, come to think of it. Teach him a lesson. Back him off. I’d really like to show him what happens when he jumps us.”

  Uh-oh, Jo thought. We’d better cool this off. Judith opened her mouth but before she or Jo had a chance to speak, Lizzie jumped in, her face glowing with excitement.

  “I think that’s a really tribal idea!”

  “Yeah,” Drew agreed, glancing ruefully at his injured arm. “Stop him dead right now, no more trouble from that bunch.”

  “No. We don’t want to do that,” Jo said, sitting forward, hands clasped. “Samm, you know we don’t.”

  “Why not? This was an outright act of aggression.” Samm tilted his chair back on its hind legs, crossing his arms, looking calm but stubborn.

  “We don’t want to do it because his little attack wasn’t much more than a provocation. He wants us to fight back with everything we have so he can see what it is we do have. And he’ll try very hard to make us look like bullies in the process. I wouldn’t put it past him to shove women and children in with his mercs. Enough of those get hurt we’ll lose a lot, politically.” It was an old and despicable ploy, and it always worked.

  Judith nodded. “For now, I’ll go with Jo on that. Let Newt look like a hoodlum while we keep on making friends. Pretend that we want peace, that we’re above his crap. Because we have important things to do for Sierra.” She slapped her notepad. “Which brings us to the treaty. We present him with a plan for peace. An alliance between the two families.” Samm grinned. He thought the treaty idea was funny. He liked it.

  Lizzie spoke up again. “I know you’ve talked about this, but I don’t know why you want to do it now.” She turned to Jo. “Do you want the Scorsis to think they scared us?”

  Jo laughed. “No one else will think that. Fine if he does. We just rattle on about everyone benefiting financially if we work together.”

  “It’s okay, Liz,” Drew said. “This might be fun.”

  “Work together how?” Lizzie still looked doubtful.

  “Well, that’s the trick. We need to be so vague the agreement is meaningless, but convince him with one or two small concessions that we mean it. For instance, we say that we agree not to attack or damage each other’s businesses. Then we say that in consideration of that, Blackjack agrees to return to negotiations about the Gold Bug.” The Gold Bug was a very small casino down on Stateline, right next to Scorsi’s Luck. The Colemans owned 60 percent of it and the rest was owned by Newt and a few other investors. Newt wanted it. He wanted to own more of his side of town. When Judith had refused to sell all of their percentage to him, he bought out the other small shareholders and then tried to negotiate enough of the rest so he would have the controlling interest. Judith had ignored his offers.

  There wasn’t much more to it than that. A few little bits and pieces of a few more shops. Judith read her notes, Jo added some thoughts, including a clause that said they would continue discussing several other deals Scorsi wanted. She knew they’d never get to them. The treaty was just a move to keep Scorsi at bay a little longer and keep him out of their hair. It might or might not work.

  In half an hour they had a draft. Lizzie, grinning with approval, declared it “dark.”

  Jo asked, “How do we negotiate this thing, Judith?”

  “I think we send it to them— hand-carry it— and wait for a reaction.”

  Drew brightened. “Let me be the messenger. They can send Ky and you can send me.” Kyron Scorsi was Newt’s nephew. About Drew’s age. “We can meet somewhere and I’ll hand it to him. Then if they want to answer, we can meet again. Neutral back-and-forth until the real negotiations start.”

  The first time Jo and Judith had mentioned a treaty, Drew had been interested. If it ever got to real negotiations, Jo knew he’d enjoy taking part. Maybe he’d be a diplomat someday, when they truly had use for such a person.

  But this courier job? It could be dangerous and Drew was a one-armed man. “I like it. Except, Drew, you’re injured. Kyron’s a tough guy. He might decide to slap you around just for fun.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Lizzie said, scowling fiercely. Jo was beginning to worry that Lizzie’s act of violence, horrified as she had seemed at the time, had given her a taste for it. She was eager to go after the Scorsis, one way or another. Like Samm. Did Jo now have two warriors to hold back?

  “Could we?” Drew obviously was in love with his courier idea.

  Jo decided not to argue, since Judith didn’t seem to mind. It was agreed that Drew and Liz could carry the treaty.

  Judith flipped to a new page in her notepad. “What’s going on at the intelligence end of things, Jo?”

  “Obviously, since we didn’t see either the attack on Blackjack or the border raid coming, we could do better.” They had a half dozen people working at Scorsi’s Luck. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to be doing a very good job; none of them had gotten close enough to the family to learn about the plan for the attack on Blackjack. She needed more people, or smarter people. Jo wanted input from the others. They promised they would think about it.

  “Finally, then,” Judith said, “the mayor’s race. The election’s in a month. We need to come up with a candidate— a willing one.” They all laughed. Nobody wanted to end up hanging dead and upside down from a tree.

  Samm stopped scowling about their incompetent spies and brightened. “I may have someone. One of my soldiers. Her name is Hannah Karlow. You may have seen her at the poker tables. Thin woman, long scar on her cheek.” Well, thought Jo. She’s a busy one. “She mentioned it to me last night at the table. Only half joking, I think.”

  “I know her,” Jo added. “I just talked to her a couple days ago myself. She’s a fixer. I asked her to get the elevator running again. She promised to do it soon. Maybe she even will.”

  Samm nodded. “A fixer would make a popular candidate.”

  “I know she’s one of your soldiers, but how well do you know her? Do you think we can trust her?” Was she really theirs and would she stay theirs? She didn’t need to trust a fixer or even a soldier, but a mayor? That could matter.

  “I don’t know for sure. We can have her watched for a few days, see what we pick up.”

  That sounded good. “Okay,” Jo said. “Let’s do that.” A few days might not tell them much, but if it didn’t work out with Hannah one of them would have to go after the office. She wanted to avoid running herself, or trying to convince Judith or Samm to run. They all had too much to do right now and other campaigns to think about. There were a few employees they were sure they could run for other offices, but a fixer-soldier would carry a lot of charisma, and charisma was what won elections. Charisma and fear. And even though no one else was running yet, she was assuming someone would.

  A flood of almost sexual pleasure washed through her. Intelligence was frustrating— especially when it didn’t work or only worked sometimes. Like love. But the game of politics? Better than romance. More fun than poker. More interesting than Twenty-One. She’d studied
propaganda, negative versus positive campaigning, charisma and core issues, promises— a chicken in every pot— made and delivered or made and reneged on, the outsider as threat. Fear. Drew had once sat talking to her about the last presidential election before the final end of the USA. A man named Cooper, from Utah or Wyoming, she couldn’t remember which, had run for President preaching hate under the guise of protective leadership, deliberately stirring up fear of terrorism or moral destruction by anyone who was the least bit unlike whoever Cooper was talking to at the time.

  He’d won, and become President. He was assassinated less than a year later by a man who didn’t seem to belong to any group at all. But Jo never forgot, after that history lesson from her nephew, that Cooper had won. And while she didn’t think she’d ever try to turn one group of Sierrans against another, or Sierra against Redwood, she didn’t have to look far to find someone Sierrans could worry about. She didn’t mind raising an alarm about Rockymountain. Or, rather, having her candidates do it.

  Jo pulled herself out of her cheerful thoughts of political gamesmanship and noticed Drew was looking pale. “If there’s nothing else, I think Drew needs to rest.”

  “Good idea,” Judith said. “Drew, when are you planning on going back to work?”

  “Waldo wants me to go in tomorrow.”

  “That seems too soon.”

  “Maybe, Mom.” He grinned. “But you do want me to keep an eye on Rica, after all.”

  Jo laughed. That was obviously going to be a hardship for him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Who knows what kind of dirt he’s got inside him?

  Ky Scorsi was nowhere in sight. Just like that germ to be late. Drew and Lizzie were a few minutes early. It was always better to get there first, stake out your territory, get a fix on the field. Ky was stupid. Arrogant. This was exactly the kind of shit that was going to beat the Scorsis in the end.