by Chloe Garner
Finally, she licked the corner of her mouth and let her hand drop.
“Lawrence didn’t change, while you were gone. Neither did I. We just coped.”
He nodded, easing forward again.
“If life is ever going to be good, it has to change. I’m going to make it better.”
“I know.”
He slid out off of the chair, dropping his knee to the floor and coming to rest with his hip pressed against her knee.
“I’ve never wanted to kill anyone so much as Maxim today. I love you, I want you, and all the rest of this… It’s just business. It’s just making it work. We can do this.”
His eyes were on her face, intense, and she nodded.
Swallowed.
“We’re never going to be easy, but this is the only way. We both know it.”
“We both know it,” he agreed.
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Sarah changed into evening clothes, sleek black with a half cape that went over one shoulder and to the middle of her back, down to her cuff-line. It wasn’t heavy enough, but it reminded her of her duster, and she liked it.
They walked to Golem, Jimmy in a straight-cut black suit, and they stood outside for a moment, watching the lights go by.
“You ever miss it?” he asked.
“Electric light?” she asked. “Smells better, I guess.”
He chuckled.
“Night life,” he said. “Civilization. Not having to run your day by the sun. Cars.”
“Gremlin doesn’t run out of gas,” she answered, and he laughed.
“I guess not.”
He opened the heavy wood door for her and gave his name to the maître d’, who walked them through the heavy, somber interior of the exclusive restaurant, over thick carpet and past draped walls, to an open space in one of the walls. He pulled the curtaining aside and led them into a spacious red room where Maxim and several of the other men were already waiting.
Jimmy went around the room shaking hands and exchanging quiet greetings as Sarah identified the center of the room and took the chair next to it, setting the empty case on the floor next to her and crossing her arms.
Maxim came to sit next to her - not in Jimmy’s seat, he did have the poise to recognize that - and Sarah took out a measure of gremlin and rolled it into a paper. Jimmy came to sit on her other side, putting out a hand to take the cigarette from her before she even lit it. She handed it off and rolled another.
“What is that?” Maxim asked.
“Gremlin,” Sarah said.
“Never heard of it,” Maxim said. “Is it new?”
“It’s the miracle multi-purpose plant from Lawrence,” Jimmy said. “Sarah uses it to bake bread, make tea, and to smoke.”
“Can I try?” Maxim asked as she finished the next cigarette. Sarah gave him a put-upon look and handed it over.
“Watch it,” Jimmy said. “It’s got a kick.”
“Has it?” Maxim asked, and Sarah raised her eyebrow at Jimmy. Jimmy nodded.
“I’d forgotten until I got back. Sarah doesn’t even know. We’ve been smoking it since we were teenagers.”
Maxim took a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the cigarette, taking a slow, appreciative draw, then coughed and thumped his chest with an open palm.
“Wow,” he said. “Wow, wow.”
“Warned you,” Jimmy said, smoking casually. Maxim coughed again.
“I’ve done everything,” Maxim said. “But that… That is new.”
“It’s just gremlin,” Sarah said.
“Wow,” Maxim said, and Jimmy nodded, standing as another man came in.
“William,” he said. Sarah shook her head as Kayla’s uncle eyed the room. She remembered he was a knife man, and while she respected that - a man who was able with a knife was an asset in an awful lot of fights - she still couldn’t see how Kayla was related to him.
Maxim put the cigarette back in his mouth.
“If you don’t like it, I’ll take it,” she said.
“Expensive?” he asked. She shot him a look.
“Just don’t like to see good gremlin go to waste.”
“You never cease to amaze me,” he said. “How do you smoke this like it’s nothing?”
His throat seized and he got up, pouring himself a glass of water from a side board and coming back.
Two more men came in, and Maxim let Sarah ignore him, now, as the level of conversation in the room came up. A few minutes later, he stood, leaving her on her own as he went to go talk to someone.
Delphus escorted most of Jimmy’s investors back to the room himself, after that, coming in to speak with Jimmy in the dim front corner of the space, then bowing and leaving. Jimmy came back to sit next to Sarah.
“That’s everyone,” he said. “Money up front or after dinner?”
“Hate anyone to have to leave for an emergency and have to make a separate trip,” she murmured, and he stood.
“Gentlemen, if you’d find seats, please, Delphus is preparing our meal himself, but we have a small amount of business to attend to before we eat.”
“Yeah, when do we start pulling absenta out of the ground?” William asked. Several men agreed, and Jimmy looked over at him.
“I told you that you were free to set up times to see your sites with Sarah, any time you like. I’m not stopping you from coming to Lawrence. Not even asking you to refrain.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t got any place for us to stay,” another investor said.
“You’re welcome at the Lawson house,” Jimmy said. “I’ll warrant that there isn’t a hotel suitable for gentlemen such as yourselves.”
“I sent surveyors in eight days ago,” yet another man said. “They’re still working. I haven’t heard anything back from them, but I want to start hiring laborers and equipping them.”
“I wouldn’t expect to hear from them until they’re done and back on the train, Jimmy said. “There’s no communication within Lawrence, as you experienced yourselves.”
“We were all expecting better service from you,” a man that Sarah recognized as a relation to Lise said. Jimmy’s posture went from friendly to stiff in a moment. It wasn’t the specific comment that had triggered it, Sarah could tell. It was the collective tone.
“Gentlemen,” Jimmy said, his voice suddenly very formal. “You are all businessmen, experts in your fields and in your own backyards. I know that I invited you into a world that is unfamiliar to you, with a business opportunity that you found to be more of an expertise of mine, but I assure you - I am not a miner. I do not dig in the dirt and hope. I facilitate investors, such as yourselves, in your efforts to do so. I may make some… light… requests of you, in the name of keeping the peace in Lawrence and making your own claims safer, but I did not sell you knowledge of any kind, outside of Ms. Todd’s opinion of the claims themselves. If you are unable to utilize them, you will find that to be your own problems. You are all competent individuals, and I am quite surprised that you have made as little progress on your own as you say.” He put out an arm toward Sarah. “I made it clear in your invitations, as I told you at the time of the auction, that claims would be settled in cash, and now is the time for that. We are all friends, and I told you that I trust each and every one of you to meet your obligations, but now is the time. Our food will be here shortly, and we would like to be done with this and free to move on to more pleasant discussion as we eat. So if you please.”
Sarah took out her lists, and the men in the room shuffled, still talking to each other as they came to stand next to her, one at a time, and she took their money, counting it briefly and stashing it away, stack after stack. She’d done the math to make sure that the case would be big enough, but she’d been wrong the first time she’d guessed.
Jimmy came to stand next to her as the food began to arrive and the men took to seats.
“We square?” he asked, spreading his fingers across the table by her elbow.
“That’s everyone,” she said, cl
osing the case and locking it. He nodded.
“Very good.” He looked at the room. “Now. We have a legendary meal from Delphus coming in. I will not ruin your meal with business talk. Please enjoy, and then we will discuss more of the future of your claims after we finish.”
He sat and Maxim settled in next to Sarah again.
“Ever had that much money in one place before?” Maxim asked her.
“You underestimate Jimmy,” Sarah answered and Maxim chortled.
“They should be making progress on their own,” Jimmy muttered, and Sarah turned her attention from Maxim, turning her shoulders to discourage him from trying to speak to her again.
“They were all too ready to get out of there,” Sarah said. “Fancy new houses or not, they weren’t interested in being around after the auction. They just want to hire people to do the work.”
“Do we have people who are going to jump, for the right money?” Jimmy asked.
“Apex and Thor have as much work as they can handle,” Sarah said. “There are a few of the other old prospectors, but I wouldn’t trust them so much as keep them at gunpoint until they were out of sight.”
“So we should be advocating bringing in outside experts?”
Sarah grimaced.
Outside experts were like as not to be washed up prospectors from other towns up and down the range. Anyone making money was going to keep on making money for himself. The ones who would turn up to take a wage from a claim owners…
“It’s importing some other sucker’s problem,” she said, and Jimmy nodded, following. She frowned, looking around the room.
“Pete had a little claim he puttered with,” she said, thinking. Jimmy raised an eyebrow at the understatement of the century, but she wiggled a finger, waving him off. “Some of the other homesteaders, especially in their younger years, they’d do it, too. A claim’s cheap, right? If you’ve got enough men to farm the land that’s going to give up a crop, some days there’s nothing to do but watch the gremlin grow. They went up with a shovel and started moving rocks around.”
“And these are the experts we’re going to present to our investors to help them set up mines?”
“I’d trust a local from Lawrence over a stranger from anywhere else, any day. Maybe the boys doing the work start to distinguish themselves, maybe they don’t. Granger’s good at putting together the orders, from back when we had absenta before, and he’s just going to get better at it… I’d rather manage it from within Lawrence, than bring in others, if I’m getting to choose.”
He nodded, tipping his head back to look at the waiter who put a plate in front of him. Sarah looked at her own plate, pursing her lips with the preparation of disappointment.
“Silly food,” she muttered. “It isn’t supposed to be for entertainment.”
“Be civil, Sarah,” Jimmy answered. She caught the way he was looking at her out of the corner of his eye, and she shook her head.
“It’s too much, Jimmy. There has to be a better way.”
“We’ll do it, just as soon as you tell me what it is.”
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After the third course, Jimmy had stopped identifying the sources of food for her. It didn’t improve the experience for her, and she wasn’t impressed. The ability to get strange, exotic, and logistically complex food was not a skill that improved your likelihood of surviving the red desert - it was a soft, fluffy skill that tended to crush quickly when it came in contact with the rock that was Lawrence.
At six courses, Sarah was bored.
At ten, she grew exasperated.
“How much more?” she whispered to Jimmy as the men appreciated something or other that was special about the pink-and-green pattern of textures on the plates coming into the room.
“He’s showing off,” Jimmy said, bemused. “Be patient.”
“How much is this meal going to cost us?” Sarah asked.
He laughed.
“How much money have you got sitting between your feet?” he answered, his nose brushing against her ear. She didn’t look at him, and he ran his finger through her hair.
“How are we getting home?” she asked, sensing something that worried her. He laughed softly, not answering.
Twelve courses in all, then Sarah finally found the table clear in front of her and no wait staff wandering through the room with more. Jimmy stood.
“All right,” he said. “I have held conference with my lovely new wife, and while I maintain that you are claim owners and responsible for your own path forward, she is going to go through the steps she would advocate you consider in moving forward.”
She looked at him sharply as he sat, holding out a flat hand of long, narrow fingers, inviting her to stand.
“You aren’t going to like this,” she murmured. He smiled. Real. Twisted. He knew that putting her on the spot would be volatile, and he was inviting it.
Fine.
She stood.
“Shame on the lot of you,” she said. The room went flat silent. “Shame. You’re supposed to be the best of the best, the ones Jimmy went to because you’d know the value of the absenta in the ground and you’d be the best positioned to go after it. Greenroot digger goes out there and finds a pan of gold, he wakes up dead on account of him not knowing what to do with it. Thought you were supposed to be better than that, but you aren’t. You saw walls of solid absenta and you lost your senses, bid a bunch of money on something you didn’t do anywhere near your due research on, then expected the absenta to jump out of the mountains into your pockets. Ought to just let you get yourselves killed and start over, but it’s bad business, having profitable claims owners die, so let’s start with the basics.”
She gave the room a severe look, angry at the meal, angry at Maxim, and exquisitely annoyed at Jimmy.
“Mining is gambling. You don’t do it unless you’re stupid or you know that you might lose. If you fail, no one’s going to care but you. If you make it, everybody you ever met is going to be looking for a way to steal it from you. Everything’s one-sided. Failing is easy. Succeeding is hard. And dangerous. Everyone’s going to steal from you, everyone’s going to lie to you, and if you aren’t good, you’re not going to stick around very long.”
“That’s every day for us,” William observed, and Sarah dipped her head to acknowledge him.
“Why we thought you were the people to come to,” she said. “You can handle the risk, the danger, you know the lay of the land, as it were, dealing with the grayish sort of people who go after business risks where dying is on the list of outcomes. But you saw the absenta, didn’t you? Lost your minds. Got back to your houses that afternoon and realized, as much as you wanted to go swing the damned pickaxe at the wall, you didn’t want to spend another minute in Lawrence than you had to, and you left with no plan. Bunch of crybaby idiots, the lot of you, and you deserve to fail, but Jimmy and I, we plan on getting paid to keep your mines pulling absenta out of the ground and putting money into your pockets. Which means, if we have to, we’re going to drag you down the road a ways before we let you fail. So listen carefully.
“You need a foreman. A man you trust, who’s going to live at the mine and make sure it’s working and safe. This is a guy who’s risking his life for you to bullets, cave-ins, and a dozen other things you’ve never heard of. You pay him like that, and you expect him to walk within no less than two years. Someone’s going to offer him more money, or he’s going to decide that there’s more to life than looking at rocks, even if they do happen to sparkle blue. He’s going to go spend the money you’ve been paying him on something that makes him happier than cold nights up in the mountains. Plan on it. That man is going to tell you what you need. If he’s honest, you give him every piece of equipment he asks for, every digger he wants. If he’s lazy, if he’s swindling you, if he’s related to the guy selling you stuff, you watch him as close as you like, but if you get a reputation for not having the right equipment - if your diggers turn up dead - you’re going to have a h
ell of a time getting people up into the hills for you, absenta or not. We’ve got a landslide of men sitting on our doorstep, right now, hoping for work and adventure, but that’s going to lose its shine fast, and if you aren’t paying them right and equipping them right and keeping them alive, you’re going to shut down, it doesn’t matter how much ore you pull out of the ground.
“I can recommend a few good foremen to get started, but they’re only going to last you a few months before they decide that farmers aren’t miners and they quit on you. You need to watch your diggers and find one of them who’s suited, and get them trained. Fast. Whatever happens, you keep pulling rocks out of the ground, keep going after the absenta. Men sitting around eating your food and taking your coin are the fastest way to make a mine look like a waste.
“Some of you aren’t going to find anything. Some of you, it may be because you hire inept men. There’s no guarantee that any of you start pulling riches out of the ground, and there are a hell of a lot of reasons that can happen. You obviously don’t know anything about mining, or else you wouldn’t be sitting here, whining to Jimmy about Jimmy not doing your prospecting for you. He’s enforcement. Certainly his esteemed friends know what that means. If you don’t know anything, the only way to succeed is to hire people who do know, and then pay them and watch them, and be ready to jump.”
“A good business lesson, but a bit scant on details,” William said after Sarah sat.
“Why teach any of you?” Sarah asked. “You want a mine. You hope it makes you rich. Doesn’t matter if you understand how to make it work or not.”
“I’ll take the best guy you’ve got, then,” someone said. It was intended as a joke, and a polite ripple of laughter drifted around the room, then a sort of quiet intensity formed that Sarah read as realization.
“You write down a bid,” she said, looking at each of them. “You tell me what you’re willing to pay a guy to get your camp set up and to look after your diggers. I take it home and I put the top number in front of my top guy. If I run out of interested foremen before I run out of bids, the rest of you are on your own.”
She heard Jimmy’s chuckle, which she ignored as she settled into her seat again, giving him a hard look. His chin dipped a fraction. Approval.
