by Chloe Garner
If it had been Nuke’s reputation on the line, she’d have taken his word for it that he could handle the Bell brothers, but it was Jimmy’s club, and it wasn’t right for Jimmy to go by and not acknowledge the threats the men were making.
They got into the cab and Jimmy gave the driver an address. It didn’t match the one on the paper that Sarah had taken out of his pocket and returned; she assumed it was within walking distance, and she was proven right about thirty minutes later as they stood in front of a dilapidated warehouse.
“How do you want to play this?” she asked. “You want me invisible or with you?”
“Let’s see if anyone’s home,” he said. He knelt for a moment, coming back up with a small gun that she just held in her hand when he handed it to her. Nowhere to conceal it, and no point.
“I hate these clothes,” she observed, winning a tick at the corner of his mouth as he stepped up to the door and knocked.
The door was metal and most of eight feet tall, but it was hollow, and showed significant signs of corrosion around the bolt. Sarah could have gone directly through it, in her boots. There were plenty of things sitting against the building, just here, that would do in a pinch.
They waited.
There was some shouting inside and Jimmy took a step back, glancing at Sarah without turning his head.
“How long since you’ve stormed a door?” he asked.
“Six months,” she said. “No more. Taking back a barn that the bandits hadn’t set fire to, yet.”
He nodded.
“And without boots and a rifle?”
She smiled without amusement.
“Never.”
He nodded.
The door opened.
“What do you want?”
“Blake Bell?” Jimmy asked.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Are you Blake Bell?” Jimmy asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m the Easter fairy. What do you want?”
“Who is it?” someone yelled from inside.
“Some snot-snob knocking on the wrong door,” the idiot in the doorway yelled back.
“Get rid of ‘em,” the unseen voice said, and the man turned back to Jimmy.
“Not interested.”
Jimmy drew a bored breath.
“I’m going to give you one more try, and then I’m just going to assume you’re Blake.”
“Who sent you?” the man asked. “We only take money in person.”
Jimmy shook his head and Sarah laughed. Wrong answer.
Jimmy drew and fired, and Sarah shouldered the body out of the way as it fell. There was alarmed yelling inside, and they walked down the dim hallway.
“Ricky?” the man inside yelled, coming out into the hallway. “What’s going on out there?”
“Blake?” Jimmy asked.
“Who are you?” the man asked, his feet skidding sideways as he narrowly avoided falling.
“Jimmy Lawson,” Jimmy said, shooting. Sarah kept moving as Jimmy shot Blake twice more, looking into the room he’d come out of.
“Just the two of them,” she called back. Jimmy nodded, squatting to check the man’s pockets. Sarah stood, loose and listening, as Jimmy went back to the door, pulling the first man further into the building and closing the door.
“How good are you at improvised fires?” he asked.
She snorted.
“Better than you,” she said, going back into the warehouse portion of the building and starting to dig through what was there.
“You like electrical?”
“Elegant,” he said. She nodded, picking up a lighting fixture and taking out a knife to strip the insulation off of it. He continued to search the building, not finding anything, but not able to be still until they were out. She knew the feeling.
She handed him his gun as he went past her, then she stood and looked around the warehouse.
“Being extorted is bad enough,” she said. “Being extorted by slobs is just insulting.”
Jimmy came to stand next to her.
“How was the office?” she asked.
“Just as bad.”
“Let’s do this there, then,” she said.
The office was full of papers and refuse. Jimmy dragged both men into the room, stashing them under a table and wiping his hands off on their clothes, and Sarah put the fixture under a pile of cardboard flats, looking around, calculating.
“How long?” he asked.
“Is that wall drywall over hollow or is it over cement blocks?”
He went to knock on it, shaking his head.
“It’s barely drywall at all.”
She nodded.
“Won’t take but a few minutes to catch and go up,” she said. “This is going to be a big one.”
“All right,” he said.
She plugged in the fixture, taking a step back to the audible sound of sparks. There was popping and crackling, and then a red glow from under the boxes. Thirty seconds later, the boxes were a molten pile of flame, and Sarah turned away. Jimmy held out an arm, only just touching her shoulders as she went past him. He steered her, unnecessarily, but with a sense of contact that she wasn’t leaving him behind, out the front door, and then they both turned to watch for one more minute as the sounds inside the building grew louder.
“It’s not the best message it could have been,” Sarah said.
“They’ll get it, anyway,” Jimmy said, putting his hands into his pockets and starting to walk away. She matched his stride, letting her arms swing naturally. It was a bad neighborhood - not the kind of place where an upstanding member of the business class would be comfortable - but she could at least be relaxed, if alert.
When they hit the first street with a full set of streetlights, Jimmy took one hand out of his pocket and collected hers with it.
“That was fun,” he said.
“We’re a good team,” she answered.
“No one better,” he said after a moment, his thumb running across her knuckles. Behind them, she heard sirens with some satisfaction. If there hadn’t been sirens, it would have meant that the fire hadn’t gotten big enough to draw attention, but if they had been much earlier, it was possible that they could have rescued the warehouse.
Funny how she still knew that math.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing next?” she asked.
“Going back to the hotel, sending our clothes out to be cleaned, taking a shower, and then going to bed, wet and naked.”
His face hadn’t changed - she checked - and a casual observer would have been offended, perhaps, on her behalf that he could treat it that casually, but she heard the catch when his throat tightened, unable to maintain perfect control.
“You have a cigarette?” he asked.
“Takes two hands,” she answered, and he glanced down at their hands.
“Never mind.”
“You know I’m not asking about tonight,” she told him, and he shrugged his jacket up, checking the street in both directions as they crossed.
“I have more contacts up north I want to go see, while we’re out. Trip takes too long to just take one meeting.”
“I count two,” Sarah said, just to be difficult.
“Three,” he answered, topping her, and she smiled despite herself.
“Who?” she asked.
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, then licked his lips.
“Are you willing to just go?”
“Have been,” she asked. “But I’m still going to ask.”
They were back walking along the road, cars rushing past them, just winsome shadows.
“I want to go up to Intec,” he said. “Descartes left word for us at the hotel that he wanted to see us.”
“How long?” Sarah asked.
“Two days up, two days back. Don’t know how long we’re there.”
She nodded.
“Thank you.”
“Intec was good to us,” he said. “I have business
es and interests all up and down the coast, but Intec was mine. Descartes and I ran in different circles - this will be the first time I meet with him publicly - but…” His grip went firm on hers, the way he would have held a gun. “I’ve been avoiding going back. Because I’m going to want to stay.”
She turned her head at this. Surprise.
She shouldn’t have been surprised, but there it was. She’d thought that Lawrence was the homecoming. He’d said as much. That Intec would still feel like home to him just felt rude, even if it hadn’t been that long.
He read it and didn’t have to answer it.
“I’m sorry you can’t do both,” she said, and he nodded.
“I could keep track of everything else along the coast easily enough. When something went bad, I just went and dealt with it. But Lawrence… It really is cut off from everything. Even with modern transit, it’s a week away from anything.” He paused. “It was hell convincing the guys that it was time to go back.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” she said, and he nodded.
“Your whole world has always been that town.”
It was true. Even in Oxala, with all of its amenities and perks, she’d always had an eye toward Lawrence. She’d always known she’d go back, never feeling the loss, leaving Oxala, at anything more than a superficial level.
“It was where you were,” she said.
There was a silence.
“Yeah,” he finally said.
“It’s complicated,” she said, filling the space and looking for what belonged there. The words weren’t right, but it was better than silence.
“It’s choice,” he said. “If Lawrence becomes what I have in my head, I won’t regret walking away from Intec for a second.”
“That’s a high fence,” Sarah said, and Jimmy nodded.
“They all are. If they weren’t, I’d go find better ones.”
She smiled, and his hand relaxed, his fingers going back to playing across her skin.
It was never going to be easy.
Easy didn’t suit either one of them.
Happy didn’t suit either one of them, either, but here they were… happy. Just for a moment.
Better than a whole lifetime of regular Lawrence, but still not enough to keep her away.
“If we don’t have resistance, we don’t know who we are,” Jimmy said, his thoughts winding right alongside her own. She nodded.
“Good thing we’ve got each other.”
--------
Jimmy bought a car outright with cash from the investors. Sarah knew next to nothing about cars, so she sat in the manager’s office and ate complimentaries while Jimmy negotiated. In the end, Jimmy handed over a stack of cash and came back with a dangling set of keys.
“It’s yours,” he said and she looked up from where her chin was planted on her fist, her eyebrows up.
“Try that again?”
He nodded.
“I spent your money on it, it’s your car. I’ll drive for now, but consider it a symbol.”
“A symbol,” she said skeptically, and he nodded.
“The future,” he said, offering her his forearm. “Let’s go.”
They put her bag into the trunk and set off up the coast under a drizzle of rain. Trees crowded both sides of the road, and Sarah was feeling the same pressure of people she remembered from her first days at Oxala, like there was too much noise and she couldn’t simply cover her ears.
The drive was easy, quiet. They got a late lunch at a seaside stand that sold paper-covered grease bombs, then they stopped at a hotel overlooking the ocean for the night. They made it to Intec by dark the second night, stopping at a gate in front of a dark house up on a hillside. Jimmy leaned out the window, pressing a button, and the gate opened as lights illuminated the outside of the house.
“Jimmy?” Sarah asked.
“Welcome to Lawson Manor,” he said.
The driveway wound up a shallow hill, passing two sculptures and a fountain, and the house loomed bigger and bigger in front of them. Sarah shook her head.
“No wonder Lise was testy,” she said. Jimmy’s snort was his only answer. He pulled the car through a waiting garage door, and the garage lit as the door closed behind them.
Red, blue, yellow. Noisesome cars with all manner of personality. Perhaps a dozen of them, plus one…
“That’s yours,” she said, jerking her head at it. Jimmy nodded.
Sleek, black, low.
Fast.
She shook her head.
“Wouldn’t have figured you were the type.”
“There were only eight imported to this continent,” Jimmy said. “The only other person in Intec who owns one is Descartes, and he gave it to his son as a wedding present.”
“They just sit here?” Sarah asked.
“We have a guy who comes through once a week and does maintenance on them,” Jimmy said.
“You boys really did take to the big city,” Sarah said, feeling another piece of her die, of her beliefs about Jimmy and Lawsons die, looking at that fleet of cars.
Jimmy got out and waited, tossing the keys across the roof to her, then getting the bag out and walking for a door at the end of the garage.
She followed, her full cape no substitute for her duster.
She missed Gremlin and Flower, buckboards and buggy whips and brass-tipped boots.
Jimmy opened the door, only looking briefly at her face as she went by, leaving her to her thoughts. She looked back at the pearl-white car he’d bought for her and shook her head.
It stood out exactly the way she’d intended Flower to stand out.
Damn him.
Lights came on as she went into the house, white floors, white walls, pillars dividing a kitchen space from a large living space with glass walls, three stories high, overlooking the valley of Intec.
Lise would look a dream here, strewn casually across one of the white leather couches in the dawn light.
Sarah felt dusty and out of place.
“Can I get you anything?” Jimmy asked. “I’ll order dinner in, unless you really want to go out again tonight.”
She looked at him, remembering he was there.
Thought through the threat of leaving to go get a hotel for herself, stay someplace that at least acknowledged upfront that she didn’t belong there, but it was insulting for no purpose.
Well.
Not for no purpose.
He just didn’t deserve it, yet.
“What are you having?” she asked.
“There’s vinna,” he said. A native alternative to wine, it came in various colors, Sarah remembered. She’d liked it well enough.
“That’s fine.”
He nodded, going to the refrigerator and getting out a bottle and two glasses.
“You really are slumming it, Lawson,” she said.
“If you think any of this matters to me, I’m insulted,” he answered, going to sit on a couch. He waited, and she eventually sat down at the other end, watching as he set the glasses on an end table and poured pink fluid into each.
“You don’t like it here,” he said. No need to make it a question.
“You’re making a point, bringing me here.”
“It’s just home,” he said. “It isn’t home the way that Lawrence has always been, but this was our first real home after we left.”
Sarah looked around.
“Little Peter was married by this point?” she asked.
“No,” Jimmy said. “Lise came to a party here that we threw as a housewarming, and that was when they met.”
She nodded.
“I hired one of Intec’s top designers,” Jimmy said. “It was just land, back then. Little ranch house. Too far out of town to be worth too much, yet. They used heavy equipment to get the shape of the land right before we even started building.”
She snorted, torn between leaving and putting her feet up on the couch to show off how little she cared. She did neither, taking the glass Jimmy o
ffered her and standing, going to stand at the window.
“Made a big statement,” she said, “up here above everyone else.”
“The entire ridge is lined with rich men’s houses now,” Jimmy said. “We were the first, but they’ve been moving up here one by one ever since. You couldn’t buy this land with the money we took from the auctions, anymore.”
She shook her head.
“Sounds like you.”
He laughed.
“It serves a purpose,” he said. “Very well. We put a stake in the ground, up here. Told everyone that we weren’t going to come to society, so society came to us. I nearly bankrupted us, on this. Sunny said… Well, of all the words she’s ever said, those were the most passionate. Thought that I was going to ruin us.”
She turned her head partially, just listening to his voice.
“But you don’t care,” she said.
“No,” he said. She heard him stand, and then he was standing next to her, just his reflection and hers above the sparkling city below. “No. I’d have been happier in a little apartment down in town, right in the middle of everything, where you can just disappear if you want to, and no one would ever find you.”
She smiled, not feeling any lightness at all.
“Instead, you came up here, built a pedestal, and put a spotlight on it.”
“I knew you’d understand.”
She shook her head.
“You can’t keep Lise in that little house,” she said. “She’s going to rebel and just get on a train. With or without Little Peter.”
“You moving in mattered more to me than whether or not they stay,” Jimmy answered. “And you keep reminding me that we have more pressing housing concerns than my big brother’s wife.”
She sipped the vinna, finding it sweet and notably alcoholic. People had wars over who could name more adjectives about the stuff, but she didn’t care for it any more than that.
“Are you going to figure out whose baby it is?” she asked. She didn’t know why now was the time to ask, but somehow, standing in Lise’s real house, it felt like she had to talk about it.
“Yes,” Jimmy said. No mercy. She swallowed.
“And if it’s yours?”
“I’ll take it,” he said. She looked over without turning her head, not quite able to see him, then looked at his reflection. His face was hard, his eyes outward. This wasn’t about Sarah.
