Drew sat on a bench off to the side, the picnic tables at his back, the wide blue lake to his left, remembering the last time he’d been there. The stupid fight with the Scorsi boys. He opened his book, read a paragraph, set it down beside him.
His mother and Jo, and Samm, too, were so sure that consolidation was right, and the time was now. But Drew didn’t trust political ideas to take real people into account. He’d always thought that political systems tended to rely on people being either stupider and meaner than they were, or smarter and better than they were.
He would stand with family, and he would see. He would watch as things changed, if they did, and make up his own mind. For now, he recognized that he didn’t know. He thought it was a complex question that he hadn’t quite figured out the answer to yet.
What he did know, right now, was that he didn’t like Hannah Karlow. He opened his book again.
* * *
Newt was late to our meeting, but at least this time he wasn’t dragging a giant sandwich along with him. He swaggered into the clearing looking impatient, an important man called for a small purpose.
“This wasn’t convenient, Rica. What exactly is it you want to talk to me about? I have business to take care of.” His big head rolled back on his skinny neck and he eyed me from under his puffy lids.
“Yeah. So do I. I told you I needed to know who else you’ve got at Blackjack besides Bernard. It would have been especially helpful to know about Hannah Karlow.”
“Why? You’ve got your own job to do. She has hers.” So she’d told me the truth, about that anyway. He sat down on the rock beside me and broke a pebble from its surface.
“What about Waldo?”
He looked at me as if I’d suddenly started spinning a plate of chicken on my head. “What about him?”
“Does he give you information?”
Newt laughed. A rusty sound. “He doesn’t have any. That’s a really stupid question. Waldo is nothing. Haven’t you figured that out yet? Is that what you got me out here for?”
“I have to know who’s safe and who isn’t. I have to know what else is going on. You sent me to spy on the army. I didn’t know Hannah was doing the same thing.” Silly sack of drool.
He snickered. “She’s really got Samm in her pocket. He’s going to let her learn to fly their airplane.” He glanced up at me, sidelong. “She found out they really do have one.”
Why did Samm trust that bitch? Was it true? I needed to find out if there really was a plane. “Where do they keep it? The plane?”
He looked exasperated, unsure. “At the airport.”
“Where’s that?”
He picked up a stick and drew a map in the dirt. I studied it for a minute, asked a couple of questions, and felt I could probably find the field. He said it was ten minutes south of Stateline, south of the lake.
“Okay.” I tried to sound reasonable, calm. “If you’ve got the army covered, I can focus on something else.”
“You need to focus on everything.” He was scraping at the boulder with the pebble. Scrape, scrape, scrape… ”You’re the only one the chief sent. I wanted someone here who was official. That’s you. I’ve got people who are loyal to me here and there but…” He shrugged. “Well, they’re just there because they’re there.” He screwed up his forehead, having a hard time explaining his lack of organization to me. Scrape… scrape.
I slapped the pebble out of his hand. It shot across the clearing. He stared at me, his blubbery lips hanging open.
“You can’t…!”
“I did. Now I want a list of everyone you’ve got at Blackjack and what their jobs are.”
He squinted at me. “Not a chance! Why should I trust you?”
“Because you’re paying me. And I’m a merc.”
“Not good enough. I’ve got a lot of plans, a lot of things going on. And I’m the only one who knows about all of them.” He stood up. “And that’s the way it’s going to stay. You know about Bernard, so you can use him if you need to. And now you know about Hannah. Make the Colemans love you. Become a Coleman. That’s your job.” He swaggered back out of the clearing again and I sat there stewing.
So my job was being lovable.
I drove back to the casino and pulled into the parking lot in time for lunch. The restaurant was about half full. Tim was working the shift with Drew and one of the regular day people.
“Hi, Rica! You look annoyed. Everything okay?”
My irritation with Newt must be showing. I shifted gears and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Just thinking about tonight’s show.”
I sat at a table near the restaurant door. Just as I was ordering a club sandwich and an orange juice— expensive but worth it— I noticed Jo and Samm walk by together. Drew noticed them too, glanced at the clock and told Timmy he had to take a break for awhile. He took off his apron, stashed it behind the host station, earning a glare from Waldo, and ran off after them. They walked up the stairs to Judith’s office.
Another big Coleman meeting. Again without Waldo. I wondered what this one was about.
“Drew was in a hurry,” I said casually to Tim, when he brought my small glass of juice.
“Meeting. Family meeting. Big doings today, I hear.”
“Oh? What kind of big doings?”
Timmy arched an eyebrow. “Seems that one of our regulars is going to run for mayor of Tahoe, and the Coleman family, well, let me just say it’s their candidate of choice. And they’re going to start working on a campaign. That’s what Drew told me, anyway.”
“The candidate— anyone I know?” He hadn’t said “employee.” He’d said “regular,” meaning a customer.
“Yes indeed. You were asking us about her just yesterday.”
Juice went down the wrong way. I coughed. It burned its way up through my nose. “Not Hannah Karlow?”
“Why not?”
Was it possible? That Blackjack was running a Scorsi spy as their candidate for mayor?
Newt must have known about this when I’d seen him earlier, but as usual, he was letting me find out for myself.
Maybe I was underestimating him. Or overestimating the Colemans. It was reassuring that, smart as the Colemans were, they weren’t mind readers and they could be fooled by a good spy.
Chapter Nineteen
It’s not like she’s our candidate or anything
This was news I could give the chief. Hannah Karlow, supposedly working for Newt Scorsi, was the Colemans’ candidate for mayor in a one-candidate race.
On my way to the stairs, I noticed Samm wasn’t working but Drew was hanging around Zack’s poker table, sitting back from the action on a slot machine stool. I moved up beside him. The game was moving fast; Zack was working hard.
“Learning to deal?” I hadn’t intended to startle Drew, but he jumped when I spoke and stared at me for a moment before answering.
“Yeah. Mom wants me to learn all the jobs.”
“There’s a lot to learn.” Was it my imagination, or had he shifted slightly away from me, just an inch or two? And was that a blush on his downy young cheek?
I stood there with him, silent. Worrying about his discomfort. What, if anything, did it have to do with me?
“So you’re going to stay with casino work?”
He looked surprised that I would even ask such a thing. “Yeah. Of course.”
“No interest in anything outside the casino?”
“Like what?”
“Well, I hear someone’s running for mayor here in town. Any interest in anything like that? When you get a little older?”
“Politics?” His gaze was more direct now, as if he were trying to see inside my head. Why? Because he thought I was seeing inside his? “Don’t know. Maybe.”
“You’re smart enough.”
His blush spread and in that instant I knew he had a crush on me. Now that was a dilemma. I liked the kid. A crush might make it easier to get information from him. I’d feel like a rat, but feeling like a rat w
as part of my job sometimes, and I’d have to live with it, wouldn’t I? I could hang onto that crush just enough, and damp it down just enough, to use it without tearing his young heart out. Couldn’t I? Probably not.
“What do you think of the new candidate, this Hannah Karlow woman? Have you heard she’s running?”
“Yeah, I knew that. How’d you find out so fast?”
I grinned, innocent. “News gets around.”
He laughed. “Timmy.”
I shrugged. “So what do you think of her?”
“She’s pretty well known around town. Any fixer would be, but she’s a good one. She can get a broken slot up and running faster than, well, fast. Came in real handy after that raid the other day. And the elevator’s running now.” She must have finished the job while I was out.
The hand ended, one of the players raked in a good-sized pot, and Zack started dealing again.
Drew watched the table, but kept praising Hannah. “She fixes everything from toilets to cars from what I’ve heard. She does work for all the casinos.”
Yes, I thought wryly. She certainly does. Nothing like a fixer to get inside everyone’s works. Not mine, though.
Despite Drew’s positive words, his body language— a doubtful tilt of the head, a tension in the shoulders— told me he wasn’t sure about Hannah.
“Do you think she’ll get elected?”
He shrugged. “She’s known. And I haven’t heard anyone else is running.” Drew turned back to watch the poker play again. Less comfortable talking about politics than about fixing.
I watched with him for a few minutes, not wanting to push the conversation too hard. Then I got back to it.
“Is that usually the way it is, just one candidate?”
“If someone else wants to run, he can, but…” He hesitated. I waited for the rest of his sentence. It didn’t come.
“I heard that your family is supporting Karlow. They’ve got a lot of influence here in town, don’t they?”
“Sure.”
“And I hear the Scorsis are your competitors. Why wouldn’t they support a candidate, too? Another one?”
He took a deep breath and, keeping his eyes on the poker table, rolled out what sounded like a party line. “Well, it’s not like she’s our candidate or anything. She’s running and we’re supporting her. If someone else wants to run, and Newt Scorsi wants to support that other person, that’s up to him, isn’t it?”
“Of course.” I tossed it off like I didn’t much care. But there was no mistaking the kid’s slightly embarrassed look. He knew better, knew she was their candidate, and he wasn’t happy that he had to lie to me. I didn’t much like making him unhappy.
“I like Hannah,” I said. He nodded, noncommittal. “I’m thinking of working on her campaign. Guess I’ll talk to her about it.” I turned and moved away. “See you later, Drew.”
“Yeah. Later.”
So Drew wasn’t crazy about Hannah. Was he the only one in his family who could see through her or did they all feel the same way? Hannah could be stepping into a killer-ants’ nest. They were running her but watching her. If they caught her at anything dicey she might want to toss me onto the hill as a diversion.
I took the finally-moving elevator up to the third floor and retrieved my sys from the pants where I kept it hidden. Holding it in my palm, I stared at it for a moment. It was bigger than the button-sized hear-only Newt had given me, which was stuck to the inside bottom of my back pocket. I would love to keep this one in my pocket, too, but it was more likely to slide out and if I dropped it I’d be exposed as owning something no server could afford to own. Maybe I shouldn’t even be keeping it in my room. Or my car. Maybe I needed to find a tree somewhere in the woods and stash it inside.
The way this assignment was going, some damned squirrel would find it and bury it. I’d just carry it in my pocket and hope for the best.
For the umpteenth time, I was wishing I knew how sophisticated Blackjack’s techspy system was, or if the casino even had one, and how thoroughly they watched their employees. The path the chief and I used was routed through ringers and baffles, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure that a sniffer hadn’t been planted. I’d run the squeeze a couple of times and hadn’t found anything. That was all I could do, along with using a lot of code.
The chief didn’t answer so I left her a message. What I told her was this: “Thinking of getting involved in politics here. A friend named Hannah Karlow is going to be running for mayor, with the support of my boss. She’s a keeper.”
“Keeper” was our code word for double agent. To rhyme with sleeper.
I lay back on my bed and let things run through my mind again, hoping the fog would start to clear. Had Newt Scorsi killed Madera so he could run a candidate of his own undercover as a Coleman candidate? Was he that smart? I thought, and a scratchy thought it was, that maybe, under his secretive, slimy exterior, he could, indeed, have a real plan going.
The whole thing was giving me a headache.
The Colemans were making a mistake, that was clear. Judith should be running for mayor. Jo. But then, a candidate could be defeated, tossed out of office, neutralized politically or even killed. It was safer and stronger to be the power behind the candidate. To fill the public offices, including the appointed town cabinet, with your own people and run things from behind the scenes. That way, you weren’t the one who got killed, or exposed as a fraud or a crook. That way, your power could go on and on and on.
Or Jo planned to go for something wider-ranging than mayor of Tahoe. That wasn’t the only job on the ballot. Some of the council seats would be opening up. I didn’t know a lot about Sierra politics; I certainly didn’t know how many council members she already controlled and what it would take to own the majority.
I left another message for the chief: How many knights do the queens own? That was as vague as I could get without dumbfounding her. We didn’t have a code word for the council, I hadn’t thought we’d need one. But I knew they met at a round table. And “the queens” was a term I thought she wouldn’t have much trouble with.
Okay. That was done. I dropped my sys in my front pocket and went back out to the elevator. I had plenty of time to look for the airport, sniff around, and get back in time for my shift.
The airport wasn’t that easy to find.
After driving south of Stateline for ten minutes, I still saw nothing but a screen of trees and brush beside the road. If there was a field in there somewhere, I couldn’t tell. The signs that must have pointed the way years ago were all gone now, scavenged or lying somewhere in the underbrush, rusting to dirt. There weren’t enough planes flying for anyone to bother maintaining or replacing them. The few people who did fly would know where the airport was, and no one else would care.
Then I got my first hint: a fence. New-looking, eight feet tall, solid wood, visible behind the trees. I drove another five minutes. The fence ended and there was nothing but trees again.
Somewhere, there had to be an opening. I pulled up alongside the road, nosing into the brush as far as I could, and began walking back along the fence.
There it was. An iron latch with a lock hanging open from it. Sloppy, but I could have climbed over if I’d needed to. And a barely car-sized opening in the brush and trees. I yanked the latch and the gate swung open. Tarmac. A couple of hangars. The place looked deserted, but I decided not to make a stir by bringing Electra through, just in case someone was around.
The airport had one runway, a road parallel to that and connecting roads I thought were called “taxiways” where the planes moved from still to slow to position to fast enough to move to the runway and finally take off. Or something like that. Gran had shown me a small abandoned fallen-down airport once, up in Sonoma County, and explained some of it.
Several buildings stood at the back of the field. “Stood” was a relative term. One small building looked like it had been an office of some kind, a long time ago. The windows were boarded up, a qua
rter of the roof rotted and fallen away. Two hangars that seemed to have most of their parts loomed over big piles of what must once have been other hangars.
There was no cover of any kind between me and the hangars, so I ran across the runway, listening tensely for a shout, and skidded to a stop in front of the nearest one. The front was missing. It was empty. Moving to the next one, close by, I saw that it was complete and completely closed up. A new-looking patch was screwed to one wall. I walked around the side and found a small, human-sized door. A big, new-looking padlock hung from a shiny hasp, but there was a window. Boarded up from the outside, and not very well. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring a crowbar, but those piles of collapsed hangars might offer something I could use. No one seemed to be around. I had time to do some breaking and entering.
I went to the closest pile and began shifting pieces.
Ouch. Okay, I’d be leaving some of my blood behind. I hadn’t thought to bring work gloves, either.
After several minutes of hard labor, nicks, scratches, and strains, I unearthed concrete rubble and— luck at last! A loose piece of rebar sticking out of the chunks. I grabbed hold of it, wiggled it, pulled, and it came free. A three-foot rod.
One of the boards on the hangar window had a knot in it. I jabbed at it until the knot fell out, leaving a small hole. Couldn’t see anything through it, but it gave me a place to stick the rebar. The board came away, and it was easy to get leverage on the others. I could see why the knothole hadn’t let me get a look inside; the window was opaque with dirt. No other way. I covered my face with my shirt and swung the rebar, shattering the glass.
It was in there, all right. Cutest little Gullwing II. Pristine. Just like the one that had so frustrated the Rocky border guard. Probably, I thought, the very same one.
I propped the boards back across the window again and managed to stick a couple of nails back in their original holes. Anyone who went inside would see the broken glass, but at least no one could tell at a casual glance from the outside, that someone had come by to have a look.
Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy Page 17
