by Chloe Garner
“Not until it’s done,” he told her. “I’m not bringing this home.”
“Are you sure it isn’t already there?”
“After I got out of the train station, I sent word to Maxim, and he took the train out. That’s where most of my time went. Waiting on him to get back and send word again. Had to stay where he could reach me.”
“You trust him that much?” Sarah asked. Jimmy nodded.
“I do. Say whatever you want about him, he’s fearless, and a fearless man isn’t going to switch sides easily.”
“He might for enough zeroes,” Sarah muttered, and Jimmy laughed silently, his face creasing.
“I really did think you two would like each other. He’s not in it for the money. He’s in it for the game. The thrill. The money comes because he’s good.”
“I need to get them matched up with foremen,” she said. “If they don’t start digging, we aren’t going to get anything out of the ground before the flood comes and buries everything again, not even proof quantities… Jimmy, I don’t know if we can dig out again and keep everyone believing.”
He nodded.
“I know.”
He flicked his thumbnail against a finger, a motion she knew meant he wished he had a cigarette, but Mary was strict about smoking in the house.
“What did Maxim say?” Sarah asked.
“Trouble left with us.”
“It won’t stay that way.”
“I know.”
“How are your men getting paid, while you’re gone?” Sarah asked. Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “The burial crew, the enforcers. The rest of ‘em that you’ve made promises to.”
“Ah,” he said. “Most of them just have credit with Granger. No place else to spend money, and I trust him to keep fair accounts. A few of them have a payroll coming to them, and Thomas is holding the money. They show up on Mondays and he gives them the money I owe them.”
“Damn sure hope Willie and Paulie are making a good plan for a dorm,” Sarah said. “Not that I wouldn’t mind them staying closed forever, but…”
“You’re worrying about the wrong things,” Jimmy said, plucking at a stray thread on the quilt.
“Am I?”
“They’re sure that, if I die, the project withers.”
“Who isn’t?” Sarah said. He looked up at her, face plain.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He smiled, looking back down at the quilt and working his tongue over his teeth. Looking for words.
“You’re so preoccupied with keeping what you have, you forget to look for ways to get more,” he said. “You accepted the way things were, when we left.”
“You think I didn’t try to fix it?” Sarah asked, not as defensive as the words implied, or even sounded, but touched a bit all the same that he’d imply what he had. He frowned, his brow creasing.
“You played the game according to their rules. Someone came at you, you reacted.”
“And that isn’t what you’re doing now?” Sarah asked.
“They’re playing my game,” Jimmy said. “Trying to stop me, not me trying to stop them. Do you see how it’s different?”
“That’s what makes you Jimmy Lawson and me Sarah Todd,” she said. “We know this.”
He shook his head.
“You have every bit of knowledge in your head that you need to be…”
He looked down, letting the thread drop out of his fingers. Self-chastening. He’d said something he hadn’t meant to.
“Be what, Lawson?” she asked. Like she’d let him get away with that.
He looked at her, smiling awkwardly and running his tongue along his front teeth.
“You…” He licked his lips. Wolfish. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to say what he was about to; it was going to happen. He’d accepted it and she knew it. This was just the game between the two of them. He swallowed.
“There is nothing about you that keeps you from being a second Elaine.”
“You don’t want me to tease you for marrying your mother,” Sarah said, pushing him away instinctively. He leaned his shoulders against the wall, settling with his chin against his chest and giving her a sharp warning look.
“You could be strong like she was.”
“I am strong,” Sarah said, still back-pedaling away from memories she didn’t like.
“Strong like her.”
Sarah shook her head, sort of a wobbling motion that she couldn’t seem to stop.
“You’re like her. You’re the Lawrence of the Lawsons. You and Thomas. I’m just…”
“If you say Sarah Todd, I swear to you…” Jimmy said. “You could be her, if you chose it. She loved you like a daughter, she taught you things she didn’t even teach me…”
“I was eight,” Sarah said. “And she taught me to patch because she didn’t want you dyin’ of a random bullet hole in the middle of nowhere, when I could be there to fix you. That’s all.”
“She saw you, Sarah. It’s just you keeping you from being what she was.”
“You want me to go back to Lawrence, marry Little Peter, pick up the racket where she and your pa left off?” Sarah asked, feeling the tenderness of what he was pushing at and back him away as hard as she knew how.
“No,” he said evenly, failing to take the bait. “I want you to save my life by being a match to me, not just my confidante.”
She looked away.
“I think we have eight years of proof that that ain’t who I am, Lawson.”
Jimmy sighed.
“She believed in you. And so do I.”
He crawled the length of the bed, blowing out the bedside lamp and scrambling with her to get the sheets and quilt out from under them, then she lay alongside him in the dark, staring up at a ceiling she couldn’t see.
“I was afraid you were dead,” she said.
“I came as soon as I could.” There was a soft laugh in the dark. “I find I’ve grown used to you being next to me in fights.”
“And sometimes not even the person you’re fightin’,” she said, and he laughed again, kissing her ear and settling lower into the narrow bed.
--------
Jimmy handed Merv a stack of bills at the train station the next day. Sarah was still watching the crowd, trying to see who might have had hidden intents, but she caught most of the conversation between the two men.
“See to that boy,” Jimmy said.
“You watch out for my girl,” Merv answered. “Make sure you don’t get her drug into nothin’ you don’t know how to get her out.”
“We have big plans,” Jimmy said.
“Big plans ain’t gonna get you the most valuable things in life,” Merv said, and Jimmy laughed.
“We’ll be in touch.”
“See to it.”
And the big man was off, jaunty down the stairs and back to the trio of horses posted there.
“Can’t believe you kept the purple case,” Jimmy said.
“Felt wrong throwing it away,” Sarah answered.
“Oh, it was the right plan, I just still can’t believe you did it.”
The train arrived five minutes late and they got on, waiting in their seats for most of an hour as the workmen loaded and unloaded it, then they were off with a rocking jolt, Jimmy nodding subtly to the racket of the rails under the wheels.
“We’ll get off before Intec,” he said.
“Why?”
“You’ll need new clothes again,” he said, “and I want to be on the wrong train into Intec. Not the Elsewhere one, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Sarah said. “Because watching the station full time is so much harder than just watching for one train a day.”
He smiled.
“If I do my job, they won’t recognize either of us, getting off the wrong train, but they might, getting off the right one.”
“Your job?”
He looked at her out of the corner of
his eye and smiled.
--------
Sarah wore a thin, gray jacket and brownish pants that scuffed along on the ground behind her from too much length. Jimmy had wanted to cut her hair, but she’d put her foot down, and wore the lot of it up on top of her head, underneath a worn worker’s cap Jimmy had bought for next to nothing from a railway worker. Jimmy was perhaps more shocking in a set of black coveralls. She didn’t know where he’d gotten the ash-gray paint, but the fabric was flecked with it everywhere, and had worn surprisingly quickly in the six hours it took to get from the penultimate stop to Intec.
There was a draping cloth that went over the purple bag, and the case from Lawrence had gotten a treatment with the paint to match Jimmy’s git. Assuming the two of them were actually willing to keep their heads down, getting off the train, Sarah wouldn’t have recognized them, herself.
“How do you feel about ‘Ellie’?” he asked as they waited for the train to come to a stop.
“Don’t know her,” Sarah answered.
“For your nom de couvre,” he said, leaning against his forearm in the doorway.
“Ellie,” she said, seeing the tick at the corner of his mouth. “Only if you go along with Milton.”
“Milton,” he said, the name taking a different, more powerful shape in his mouth. He pursed his lips reflexively, then nodded. “That will do.”
“Milton and Ellie,” she said. “Where are you going with this?”
“When we get there,” he said, stepping onto the platform and letting it take him a step to the side as Sarah hopped down next to him.
Neither of them hunched. There had been an unspoken agreement that they would, and an even more unspoken agreement that neither of them intended to do any such thing.
Sarah was armed to the teeth. Only thing missing was the rifle in the suitcase. If anyone came for Jimmy this time, they were going to have the both of them to deal with, and Sarah wasn’t in a fancy meeting-up dress.
She missed her boots and her hat, but working clothes were working clothes, and she was glad that she was off the couture schedule for the time being.
“Lot fewer guns here,” she observed quietly.
“A lot more threats,” Jimmy agreed in the same tone.
They went through the station house alongside the first of the cargo, Jimmy picking up a polite conversation with one of the men about the date and the weather, and then they were on the road out front. Jimmy hailed a cab, but it took him three attempts to get one to stop for them. They put the cases on the seat in between them and Jimmy gave the driver an address.
From there, they walked almost a mile before Jimmy hailed another cab, gave the man another intersection, and then another three quarters of a mile walking.
Another cab, and another half mile, and by this point Sarah was about done with it.
“Easier to just walk wherever we’re going,” she said. “These are new shoes.”
He smiled.
“My boots hurt, too,” he answered. “But we’re on time.”
“On time?”
A sleek black car slid up to the curb and the back door opened. Jimmy got in and Sarah handed the suitcases in to him, wishing he’d at least checked the driver before committing, but the car had black glass everywhere.
A dark-skinned man sat facing them as Sarah finally got her seat, and a man sitting against the side of the car pulled the door closed behind her.
“Cozy,” Sarah observed.
“Thanks Metric,” Jimmy said. The dark-skinned man nodded.
“An easy enough favor,” he said. “I’ll make it cost you, in the end.”
Jimmy nodded.
“I have no doubt.”
They drove for a time and then Jimmy and Metric shook hands and Sarah got out again, taking the cases from Jimmy and waiting as he joined her on the curb.
“Not far,” he said with forced cheerfulness, walking once more.
Not far turned out to be almost a mile and a half through some of the worst slums Sarah had ever seen in her time outside of Lawrence.
The buildings were tall, to either side, and shadow covered the entire road in the early afternoon. Children played on side streets, yelling obscenities at each other, and young men with facial markings sold things discretely out of their pockets.
“You have contacts here?” Sarah asked.
“I have contacts everywhere,” Jimmy said. “Everyone comes from somewhere.”
Intec had the smell of any port city. The breeze came in off of the bay and up the hills, smelling salty and humid and vaguely fishy and oily, but here, the smell off of the buildings was stronger. Cement, dusty brick, and too many people, the smell of sweat and oil and smoke and stale food. A pair of little boys ran across the street in front of them, one chasing the other with a malicious expression, and Sarah had half a mind to grab hold of both and demand they tell her what was going on.
People shouted at each other, audible through open windows, and men and women hurried past in working clothes, on their way to or from jobs somewhere else in the city. There was no parking, and there wasn’t much traffic. Everyone here would walk.
A block further along, Jimmy turned into a building and started up a long bank of stairs.
“Buildings this tall have to have elevators,” Sarah said.
“I wouldn’t want to wait for one,” Jimmy answered. “We’re only on the fifth floor.”
She nodded, listening hard. Everywhere, she heard anger, violence, the hallmarks of hopeless desperation, but she hadn’t heard the sound of a gun, yet. Outside of the children, she hadn’t seen a fight, yet, either. As much as she preferred the open space of Lawrence, she couldn’t say for sure it was safer than here.
Four sets of stairs later, Jimmy pulled out an old-styled mechanical key out of his pocket and unlocked a door, letting her into a dim apartment. She set the bag down in the front hall and went to look out the window. The glass was cracked, and what would have been blinds were hopelessly bent and tangled up above the window, but it would keep the wind out, and that was something.
Jimmy stood in the center of the room in his black coveralls, and Sarah shook her head.
“All right, Lawson. Tell me what’s going on.”
--------
They sat knee-to-knee in the middle of the empty living room, take-out food containers sitting to either side.
“I don’t know a lot,” he said quietly.
“Tell me what you found out,” she answered.
“There’s a man, Silas Prosper, who paid the men who broke into the house. He may or may not know who paid him, because he’s a known broker for this kind of work. Completely neutral. I used him once when I needed anonymity for a job.”
“Neutral means undefended,” Sarah said. Jimmy smiled.
“I do like how you think. No, neutral in this case means everyone likes him. Too many little factions who need him to do big jobs when they can’t pull their own labor. More like Granger. Silas does work everyone needs him to be able to do, so he’s untouchable.”
“To you, maybe,” Sarah said.
Jimmy smiled again, just a quick moment of real happy, then he shook his head.
“Last resort,” he said. “This… In Intec, there’s a way of going about things. We aren’t going to upset that unless we really have to.”
She shrugged, and he dipped his head, looking hard into her eyes. She tipped her head.
“Dammit, Lawson, you know I’m not going to do anything without your say-so.”
He nodded.
“All right.”
“So who has an interest in shutting you down?”
Jimmy looked away.
“Any of the investors who caught wind of what we pulled off. Someone with big bets in the absenta market who doesn’t want to see it upended by a big new supply…”
“Our supply has the potential to effect the market?”
Jimmy nodded.
“Easy absenta’s gone, everywhere. There are a few lit
tle pockets that are still producing, but as far as I can tell, no one has found absenta like your Pete did anywhere else, up or down the range.”
Sarah blinked.
“I shot him in the chest for finding that absenta.”
Jimmy’s eyes went hard.
“You did.”
“Absenta, the money that it brings, it upsets everything.”
“I thought of the market, but…” Jimmy shook his head. “Sarah, I’ve been looking at this all wrong. I can’t rule out the investors or the absenta market players, but…” He blinked quickly. “As far as anyone outside of my investors knows, I’m the only one who knows how to find absenta.” He scratched the back of his jaw, a quick, nervous motion, like a dog flicking fleas. He shook his head again, not looking at her. “There’s no reason that the absenta should only be there by Lawrence, is there?”
She paused.
Considered.
“No. The range… Well, I don’t know, but the range is like as not to be the same all the way up and down. If I had the data that your pa kept on Lawrence’s claims for every other city up and down the range…”
“You could do it again,” Jimmy said. Licked his lower lip, his eyes gone again. Suddenly they were back on her, hard. “Sarah, I don’t think it was about me. It’s not about the plan. It’s about the knowledge. They tried to scare us off at the wedding, sent a message with Granger. And then they tried to lay a trap to kill me. When Pete found that whole mine full of absenta, your very first instinct was to shoot him. Did you even pause?”
“Not for a second,” Sarah said. Jimmy shook his head.
“He isn’t going to, either.” Jimmy looked away again. “He’s not wrong, either…”
“Two steps back, here,” Sarah said. Jimmy sprung to his feet.
“We have to get you out of here.”
“Like hell,” she said, jerking her hand away from him. “You’re gonna tell me what’s going on.”
He paced, now.
“Sarah, he’s trying to kill the knowledge of how to find absenta like you’ve got. If you’re right…” He shook his head. “I was aiming too low. For everything…” He laughed, almost maniac.
“Jimmy,” Sarah said. He didn’t look at her. She stood. “Jimmy.”
He went still. Turned to look at her. She raised her eyebrows.
