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

by Shelley Singer

  The dog struggled to get back on her feet. Lizzie placed an arm under her hindquarters and helped her.

  So she’d named the dog Soldier. Lizzie seemed to be staking out her own territory in the family. Another year and she’d be wanting to fight alongside Samm.

  Jo’s sys buzzed again. She punched on and saw that she had a message from one of the people she had working from the Delta west into Redwood. About time she’d heard from one of them.

  Rica, it turned out, had never worked on the Riverboat Queen. She had in fact, according to a border guard the spy knew, come to Blackjack traveling from the East. That was all he had so far, but he thought there’d be more.

  Jo couldn’t wait to hear the rest, depressing as it might be.

  “Hurry that information up, if you can.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Meanwhile, she’d have to step back a few paces in her pursuit of Rica as a candidate. And as something more, as well.

  * * *

  That night, Jo did show up at the lounge and took a table near the front. She watched me very carefully, but something felt off. The heat was gone. I felt like I was being observed, more evaluated than enjoyed. What had happened? Had I somehow made a fool of myself in her eyes out on the parking lot that night?

  When the set was over, she gave me a quick smile and took off. I was disappointed, and I was worried.

  But after all, I told myself, trying to stiffen my upper lip, Jo had a lot to do, with the casino and the elections. She couldn’t spend all her time pinned against fir trees.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I sure would like to be cannon fodder

  I’d never gotten a return message from the chief about the boys undoubtedly being the mayor’s killers. I thought she’d missed it somehow, so I sent it again.

  Her response came in the time it took me to brush my teeth and get undressed.

  “That leaves the army and skimming. Keep me informed.” Click off. I’d never known her to be this abrupt. She didn’t seem to want to talk to me. What secret was she holding? Oh, the hell with it, that was just plain paranoid. She was busy, or tired, or lost her lover or caught a cold.

  Ah, yes. The army. I was under Newt’s orders to join up. It was true that peeking at them from behind trees wouldn’t give me the whole picture. I would ask Samm to let me in. All I had to do was figure out a way to explain how I knew it existed. Neither Timmy nor Drew had ever mentioned it to me. If I could twist one of them into doing that, it would help.

  The sys buzzed again. Gran. I didn’t want to get into it with her right then so I let the sound run. In case it was something important, I’d listen to it the minute she went away. The message ended in less than a minute. I retrieved it.

  “Rica, dear, I hope you’re being careful. I consulted with Macris—”

  Yes. That was what I was afraid of.

  “—and he said the transits are very difficult for you.”

  No shit.

  “He said there is danger to you and also to someone close to you. Violence is coming. Betrayal. Now I know you don’t believe it. I don’t know why you don’t. You’ve gotten true warnings before.”

  A few. A few very ambiguous ones.

  “So be careful. And get back to me as soon as you can.”

  I would. Much later that night when I knew she’d be asleep and I could just leave a message. I adored her; I wanted to talk to her. But not right now. Not when things were looking so, well— difficult. I could fake cheer and confidence for a quick send, but not in a real conversation.

  Before I went to sleep, I sent a message to Sylvia: “What’s new in your life?” She wouldn’t answer, but still— what if she did? I knew she wouldn’t say “leave me alone.” She had never been that direct. Which I thought, when my obsession was at its strongest, had to mean she was ambivalent. Of course when my brain was working I understood that it didn’t have to mean that at all.

  * * *

  I’d promised to get up early the next morning and help Timmy and Fredo move. Nothing heavy; they’d hired some underemployed local muscle for that and everything but the two of them and their cats was already at the house. I was going to help them unpack and organize.

  The first thing Timmy said to me when he and Fredo, juggling a carrier containing the yowling cats, climbed into my car: “Did you hear about Newt?” Had he run away, too? No such luck, I was sure.

  “Newt Scorsi?” I didn’t want to seem too familiar with who he was.

  “Yes, of course. What other Newt have you heard of?”

  I just shook my head.

  “Well, he’s going to run for mayor!”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine how that ugly, nasty gnome could hope to win. Kill Zack? Steal votes?

  “Well,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “That ought to make it an interesting contest.”

  When we got to the house, the handyman Daniel was already there, standing on a ladder shoved into some tarp-covered shrubs and slapping a coat of white on the stucco. Fredo unlocked the door; we walked into a daunting mess. The living room was filled with boxes and furniture placed haphazardly but, I realized after a quick look, all of it had been dropped in the appropriate rooms.

  “Drew said he’d come,” Timmy said, “but he ended up having to do something else today. Lizzie promised to help after school. Such nice children.”

  My ears perked up at the “something else.”

  We worked for a couple hours, shared the lunch Fredo had packed with the painter, a man with a shy smile, red ears and a day’s beard, laughed and listened to music, watched Roberta and Harvey tiptoeing around the rooms looking spooked and going all puffy at the slightest noise, pawed through boxes, and hung clothing and put musty and very old books and disks and doodads on shelves.

  Lizzie showed up around three. She’d left Soldier at home because, she said, she didn’t think she should walk so far yet. She jumped right in, unpacking bathroom boxes and filling the drawers and medicine cabinet with more skin creams and shampoos and unguents than I’d ever seen in one house before. The guys could have opened a notions market.

  From time to time during the day, Newt as mayor of Tahoe oozed into my mind, a disturbing image.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, I found myself staring at the inside of a kitchen cabinet, wondering what I was supposed to be doing. A box of dishes sat near my feet, but there was something else…

  Oh, right. Timmy wanted shelf paper down first. I rummaged in the box with the garbage bags and wrapping paper. There it was. Sky blue with little white flowers.

  Fredo struggled into the kitchen carrying a large rattling box of pots and pans.

  “Fredo, have you seen the scissors?”

  He dropped the box in the middle of the tiled floor, sighing. “Let me think— oh. Yes. They’ll be in here.” He pushed a box labeled “mess drawer” out from under the table with his foot, squatted and pulled it open. He lifted out can openers, corkscrews, whetstones, chopsticks, graters, nut picks, and laid them on the brown tile counter, finally uncovering a yellow-handled pair of scissors. “Here you are, Sweetie.”

  “It was nice of Drew to offer to help,” I said. “What was it he had to do today?” Very casual. I couldn’t care less.

  Fredo waved a hand vaguely. “Oh, you know…”

  I smiled and cocked my head, waiting.

  “Come to think of it, I don’t know. Maybe he went with the sheriff’s escort party. They took the Rockies to the border this morning.” That was interesting. “But maybe he didn’t.” He pivoted toward the doorway and yelled, “Timmy! What was Drew doing today that was so important?”

  Timmy appeared in the doorway. His eyes flickered toward me and back to Fredo. “Who knows? He’s nineteen. Probably has to do with a girl.” A quick smile, and he cocked his head at me. “Rica? Take a walk with me, honey.”

  A walk? Why would we take a walk now? I waved the scissors. “I was just going to start—"

  “Plenty
of time for that. Come on.”

  I followed him out through the living room onto the small front deck. We sat on the steps.

  He took my hand. “I wanted to thank you again for helping today.” He hesitated, then gave me a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. I gripped his pointed little chin and returned the kiss. The affection was real between us, we both felt it, but why did he look so sad?

  “You’re a good friend, Rica.” He looked away. He seemed to be gathering strength to say something that would go along with that sad face, and I didn’t want to hear it.

  He turned back to me, still avoiding my eyes. “You want to know what Drew is doing today. Why?”

  My mind flashed to Hannah. She had told Timmy. No, they weren’t friends. She had told someone who had told him. I stopped myself again. No. Timmy was worried about Drew’s crush on me and wanted to talk about it. I had to say something. This was going to be hard. I did my best to look innocent, puzzled, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  “Just chit-chat, Tim. I know how much Drew likes you. I was a little surprised that he did something else today.” Then, with no idea of where this conversation was going, I turned it back on him. “What’s so serious about all this? Is there something I should know that nobody’s saying? Some secret I stepped on a corner of?”

  Timmy wasn’t as good at the game as I was. He flushed and looked away. Did I see tears in his eyes?

  “No secret.” He picked a spray of pine needles off the step and began to play with it, twisting it around his index finger. “But there’s a lot going on around here, with all the elections and things. And those mercs who invaded the casino. And the dead mayor. And who’s running for what and who wants who to do what.”

  “Yes. But it feels like there are things going on that no one’s talking about.” I hunkered down, leaning closer to him, and put my hand on his knee. Clumsily, self-consciously. “People disappearing all day and no one saying why. Hannah taking off that way.” I forced myself to grin and shrug. “I’m as curious as the next person, Tim. I’d rather be in on the secrets than on the outside. Anyone would.”

  He nodded, but I didn’t think he was buying it. I was in trouble. I might as well have been trying to lie to Gran. But I kept going. I had groundwork to lay. I had no options.

  “Listen, Tim, when I first came here, Judith talked to me about defending Blackjack. It was all pretty vague. I just thought she was talking about protecting the place from more raids. But then I overheard something in the restaurant the other night. Well, actually, it was a while ago. And I’ve wondered about it ever since.” I hesitated, as if I were reluctant to let him in on the secret.

  “Overheard?” He cast a quick sideways glance. “From who?”

  “I don’t know who they were and I don’t remember much about them. A couple of men. They weren’t at one of my tables. And I didn’t hear much. Just what one of them said to the other one. Something about how many guns the army had.”

  Timmy nodded again, looked straight at me and said, “You don’t remember who they were or what they looked like?”

  “No.” This, I knew, was possible but barely believable. In a population of a thousand, including tourists, you tended to remember faces and you were pretty sure to see them again.

  “And they were talking about an army?”

  “Yes. And they mentioned Samm’s name.”

  Timmy sighed and leaned away from me. My hand slipped off his knee. “Where are you going with all this, Rica?”

  “Do the Colemans have an army?” He didn’t answer. Desperately, quickly: “Because I like it here, and I think Judith and Jo would keep me around longer if I got more, well, you know, involved.”

  “You want to join an army?” He didn’t say “the” army. He was being careful not to admit there was one.

  “I’d like to see what it’s about.” I nodded enthusiastically and pumped up the energy in my voice.

  “If you think Samm has something to do with it, why don’t you talk to him? Or Drew?” There was that hint of dampness in his eyes again.

  “I didn’t want to be too pushy, since I can see this is not something everyone knows about.” Limp. Amateurish. Tim shook his head.

  “Rica, I love you to pieces. I want us to be friends. And so I’m not going to talk to you about this anymore.” He stood up. “It’s almost time to go to work, now. Let’s just do that.”

  During the five-minute drive back to Blackjack with Tim, I chatted about Waldo, sneered about Hannah, but Tim was quiet. When we got to Blackjack, he trudged toward the restaurant and I went to my room to change.

  I didn’t know what to believe and Timmy’s sadness hung over my thoughts, brushing at them like a black velvet curtain. The idea that I had somehow lost Timmy’s trust sent me into a fit of irrational misery. Irrational because I deserved to lose it. His life and Fredo’s, their loyalty, were bound up in Blackjack. Was I really as disgusted with being a spy as I felt today?

  I couldn’t think about that for very long, so I began hunting for less depressing explanations for his behavior. Maybe someone had told him to talk about the army with no one, and he felt bad that he couldn’t answer my questions. I laughed out loud. That was just pathetic. I knew there was more to it than that. Jo seemed colder, Tim was unhappy about something, and all the hairs on my spy pelt were standing on end.

  Still, I either had to keep trying or quit the job. I’d have to find my information somewhere else. I needed an informant I didn’t feel rotten about using. Someone stronger than Tim. Someone who didn’t remind me of Gran. If my cover was not yet entirely blown I’d made a mistake by sneaking around talking to an employee. It was better to bluff, to go right to the top like an honest woman.

  I would talk to Samm, that night, when the soldiers returned from what I assumed was another day of war games.

  Let’s see… Hey, Samm, I heard you’re raising an illegal army and gee, I sure would like to be cannon fodder for dear old Blackjack…

  I wondered how far I could stretch the role, how convincing I could be about my passion to be part of the group. Could I derail whatever suspicions there were about me or was it past that?

  There was no doubt I’d been rushing things. This was no ordinary job spying on ordinary people. It would have been safer to hang around for several months getting deep inside the family. But Newt wouldn’t wait— and keep paying— for that, not with elections coming up in just a few weeks; and the chief seemed to be losing interest. Unless I decided to give up making merc wages for half a year, I didn’t have that kind of time. And I was already too deep inside the family for my own comfort.

  I was buttoning my white shirt when my sys buzzed. Gran.

  “Hi, Sweetie, just saying hello. Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine, Gran. How are things at home?”

  “I drank too much Sonoma red with Petra last night.”

  Petra was another one of her old political friends.

  “Wish I’d been with you. Sounds like fun.”

  “It was. She told me the funniest story about something that happened over in Berkeley yesterday.”

  Lots of funny things happened there. A long tradition, Gran said.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it was only partly funny. A bunch of foreigners were run out of town for trying to buy people. Can you imagine?”

  Uh oh. I felt a chill. “Foreigners?”

  “From Rocky, that’s what Petra said. Wearing strange uniforms! And she said some of them talked like godders. That’s the part that isn’t funny. First they tried to get the mayor and a couple of her cabinet members to make a deal with them. Something about putting a lot of volunteers from Rocky on the police force or the sheriff’s department. Something like that.” Gran tended to let details slip away from her. “The mayor told them three cops were enough and they kept pushing— they kept saying, ‘but we’ll work for free’— until the mayor told them to go swimming in a dead-pond. Then, you’ll never guess what
they did.”

  “You said they tried to buy people.” I was due in the restaurant in five minutes, but I wanted to hear every word of this.

  “Yes! They went right out on the road and tried to buy a woman and her two children. Offered her money to move to Rocky! She hit one of them with her walking stick, they had the nerve to complain to the cops, and the cops told them to go home to their own obnoxious country. I guess they did.”

  Scratchy assholes. I told her we’d had our own little bunch of Rocky drones in jail in Tahoe for the past couple of days, and that the sheriff had taken them to the eastern border just that morning.

  “Not the same ones, then. Curious. Well, I have to go feed the fur-folk.”

  “And I have to feed some humans. Talk to you soon, Gran.”

  There were way too many Rockies wandering around the western countries.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Didn’t mercs ever retire?

  “Jo, I just can’t do this!” Timmy was actually wringing his hands. She’d never seen anyone do that before. It was remarkably irritating.

  “Did you even try?”

  “Yes, of course. She was at my house, helping us move in, for god’s sake. And she asked why Drew wasn’t there.”

  “I assume you didn’t tell her he was training with the army.”

  “Jo!”

  She knew she sounded sarcastic; he didn’t deserve that. She was feeling frustrated about Rica. She still hadn’t heard anything from her western spy. Now she was not only feeling ambivalent about Rica, she was feeling guilty about treating Timmy this way. Jo didn’t like messy feelings. Yes or no, love or hate, win or lose— that was how she liked things to be. And damned if they ever were.

  She softened her tone. “Well what did you say, and what did she say and how did it feel to you?”

  His eyes flickered downward. She knew she shouldn’t trust whatever he said next. “Like a friend asking a friend… about a friend.” He looked back up into her eyes again, begging. “I can’t spy on her. I like her. Do you really think she’s a spy?”