Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  “Before you throw me out, could you please get these handcuffs off? If you don’t have a key, I’ll show you how to do it with a nail.” The speech exhausted him more than the trip to the door. He put his head down to catch his breath and managed to roll over on his pack.

  “Are you kidding?” a fleshy older woman said, showing a brilliant set of perfectly aligned teeth. “In this place? Standard equipment, hunneh.”

  They helped him up and took him back to the kitchen and performed first aid at the sink. Valentine embraced the sting of the iodine. It proved he was alive.

  When he had stopped the flow of blood from face and lip, he looked around the homey kitchen. Baskets of onions and potatoes lined the floor, rows of preserved vegetables filled racks in the kitchen, and bulbs of garlic and twisted gingerroot hung from the ceiling, fall’s bounty ready for winter.

  The madam introduced herself as Ladyfair, though whether this was a first name, a last name, a stage name, or a title, she didn’t say.

  “There’s a little washroom just off the back door, next to the laundry room and past the hanging unmentionables,” the madam said as Valentine rubbed his free wrist. “You just make use of it. There’s a flexible shower hose. Just the thing for a fast cleanup.”

  Valentine, feeling a little more human, realized he stank. An unpleasant presence was making itself felt in his underwear.

  It’s not just an expression. They really kicked the shit out of me, Valentine thought.

  When he came out, a towel around his waist, he glanced into the front parlor and noticed that the porch light had been turned off. A thick head of hair looked through the heavy curtains from the edge of a window.

  Valentine rubbed his sore neck. The attempted hanging wasn’t so bad; the pain was from the hard jerks from the rope during the fight. He wondered if he had whiplash.

  They presented him an old pair of generously cut khaki trousers and some serviceable briefs. “We have a little of just about everything hanging in the basement,” Ladyfair said. “You’d think we were a community theater. We do everything but produce Shakespeare.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t. The Bard had his bawdy side.”

  “You just come back now when you’re up to it. You seem like a better quality than that rabble, and a smart business is always looking to improve the clientele. Seeing as that disgrace took place right on my front lawn, I’ll offer you a freebie when you’re feeling more recovered.”

  “I appreciate you taking me into your house.”

  “Oh, it’s not my house. We’re a limited liability partnership, young man. Quite a few make that mistake, though. I suppose I’m the old lead mare of the house, though I’m still very much involved on the cash generation side of things. There are some that have learned to appreciate a woman without teeth.”

  She winked.

  Bordello co-ops. What will they thing of next? Valentine thought.

  “Then I’m grateful to the whole partnership. Novel idea.”

  “Not really. I’m surprised. Your necktie party insisted you were a fan of professional gentlemen’s entertainment. Said you used to visit a place called the Blue Dome. They said it was only fitting that you get hung up on the doorstep of a whorehouse, so to speak.”

  Valentine shrugged. “I don’t suppose you could give me their names,” Valentine said.

  “You’ll remember we haven’t even asked yours.”

  “David will do,” Valentine said.

  “Well, David, if you want names, nobody gives a real name here. You should really hurry on. Mr. C, our banker and lawyer, is removing the rope from the tree, but if they come back . . .”

  “Were they Southern Command?”

  “They were in civilian attire but had fabric belts with those clever little buckles our heroes in uniform wear. One of them was drinking and kept talking about General Martinez and about how things are going to change for the better once he gets in, so I suspect at least some of them were.”

  A prettyish young “entertainer” came into the kitchen with the placard that had been hung about his neck. “You want this as evidence?” she asked with a strong Texas accent.

  It was an ordinary wood bar tray, much ringed and weathered though carefully cleaned, with black letters burned into it:

  David Valentine,

  Condamned Fugitive

  Law and Order Is

  Coming Back to the UFR

  Whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to pencil out the letters before setting to work with the wood burner. “Back to the UFR” was rather crowded together.

  “David Valentine,” Ladyfair said. “It sounds rather dashing and romantic, as though you should be riding around in a cloak, holding up carriages with a pistol and donating the booty to the peasantry.”

  Valentine probed his teeth, checking for loose gum line or a broken crown.

  “I am fond of novels when idling in bed or tub.”

  Valentine wanted to keep the sign just for the interesting spelling of “condemned.” Might make an interesting memento on his office door. Maybe they’d summed up his life better than whoever would write his eventual obituary—if he died where people noticed such things. Condamned.

  “I’ve troubled you enough,” Valentine said. “I suppose you’ve lost a night’s business because of this. If you’ll let me know what the clothes and bandages cost, I’ll come by tomorrow to repay you what I can.”

  “Nonsense. Here’s a card. If you do find those rowdies, give us a jingle. We’ll give them a little law and order when we testify in court. Dumb sons of bitches didn’t wear those masks when they were in our parlor waiting on you. I’d like to be able to point them out in court.”

  “Cheap too,” the young Texan said. “Kept complaining about not being able to run a tab for their whiskey.”

  Valentine inspected his reflection in a little mirror next to the kitchen doorjamb. He’d probably have some horizontal scarring on the right side of his face to balance out the long vertical bullet furrow long since faded on his left. The asphalt had been sharp.

  Well, he didn’t have much keeping him in the United Free Republics anyway. Besides, he had mail to get back to Kentucky.

  He might as well abandon the guise of a militia corporal; it wasn’t doing him any good. He’d return to Kentucky in the leathers of the Bulletproof clan.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Backwater Pete’s on the Arkansas River, the third week of November: Pete’s is the informal abode of the river rats—the brown-water transportation flotilla of Southern Command and the sailors of the quick-hitting, quick-running motorboats of the Skeeter Fleet.

  Pete himself is long dead, killed during Solon’s tenure for theft of Trans-Mississippi Combat Corps property and smuggling supplies to “guerrilla bands” during the Kurian occupation. His widow followed him to the Reaper-gibbet soon after (hardly a word had to be changed in the indictment or the sentence), but his brother survived Solon’s occupation of Arkansas and rebuilt the old riverside bar.

  Built of ancient gray cypress beams the color of a January cloud-bank, part dockyard, part trading post, part gin mill, and part museum, Backwater Pete’s is an institution. A new brown-water sailor who first sees the fireflies of tracer being exchanged at high speed while bouncing down the Mississippi comes to Pete’s for his first drink as a real river-man. Newly appointed boat commanders and barge captains fete their crews there, and retiring master mechanics say their farewells beneath the pink and lavender paper lanterns and sensually shaped neon.

  The bar is decorated with grainy pictures of boat crews as well as old Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and Playboy centerfolds, immortal icons of wet-haired desire. Wooden models of famous Southern Command river craft—mostly pleasure or sport or fishing boats and tugs converted to carry machine guns and old rapid-fire twenty-and thirty-millimeter “bush guns”—rest on a little brass-railed shelf above the bar. The traditional mirror behind the bar is more a mosaic of shards now, having been broken in so
many brawls and patched together with colored glass it now resembles a peacock splattered against a wide chrome bumper.

  Most newcomers say it smells like tobacco, recycled beer, sun-baked sweat, and mud fresh from a swamp where eggs go to die. The regulars wouldn’t have it any other way.

  On that warm night of a quick-fading autumn the bar saw a stranger. His clothing set him apart immediately: thick blue-black leathers that looked too oddly pebbled for cowhide but not stiff as snake-skin. He wore a small machine-gun pistol in a big soft holster across his midriff and a straight-bladed, sharkskin-handled sword across his back. Vambraces like a motorcycle rider might wear guard his arms, but odd bulges running up from the wrist suggest they might be offensive as well as defensive.

  For all the weaponry, the high military boots with their lace guards snapped over, the scar descending from his right eye and fresh bruising to the left, and the long black hair tied back so it’s out of his eyes, he doesn’t look like he’s after a fight. For a start, he looks tired: the haggard, leeched-out look of a man who has undergone prolonged stress. Then there’s the odd hang of his jawline. A humorous tip to his jaw gives him a slight, good-humored smile.

  “Cat. Or maybe a Bear,” one of the grizzled river rats says to his companions dressed in more typical attire of soft white trousers and light canvas jackets, sockless in their rubber-soled boat shoes. They don’t make room for the newcomer at the bar, river rats being as fiercely territorial as any Dumpster-diving rodents.

  “What’ll ye think a Hunter wants here?” a man with a patchy youth’s beard asks.

  “Someone to push up into a length of trouble,” the oldster says, unaware of just how right he would turn out to be.

  According to Southern Command tradition, Backwater Pete’s served the best tequila on chipped ice in the Trans-Mississippi Free Republics. Not being an expert on tequila, Valentine opted for rum and tea, a concoction he’d grown used to during his sojourn in a Kurian uniform with the Coastal Marines.

  The rum was of good quality, all the way from Jamaica. Valentine reread his accumulated mail over it while his mind subconsciously absorbed the rhythms of Backwater Pete’s. A man in a bar had a choice to be alone, even if he could smell the sweat and engine oil on the man next to him, and he’d dumped his six new companions at a Southern Command billet-flop.

  They were all the reinforcements he was getting, and he didn’t like the look of them. Hatchet men sent to decide what was worth saving and what was worth discarding, plus one young doctor and an ancient nurse.

  He savored his mail like a gourmet meal. The aches and pains from last week’s wounds were forgotten in the excitement of mail.

  He opened the one all the way from Jamaica first, wondering what tortured route it had taken to get to the UFR. Probably landed by some friendly smugglers on the shore of Texas, probably on the same boat that brought in rum, coffee, and fabric dyes. The Dutchmen from the Southern Caribbean were good about that sort of thing.

  There was a picture of Amalee, dated six months ago and stamped by Southern Command’s mails in mid-October, probably on the same boat that made the rum runs. She had deep copper skin and her mother’s wide, bright eyes. She would be seven now.

  Seven.

  Nice of Malita to write. The letter was mostly of Amalee’s do ings and development and included a clipping from the Kings-ton Current, describing the exploits of Jamaica’s “Corsairs” off the coast of Cuba.

  Nothing from Hank in school—Valentine had made a call to make sure he still was in school. He was just getting to be that age where a boy notices all the interesting ways nature arranges for girls to be put together.

  Molly wrote him as well. He had three letters from her, increasingly worried as the months of last summer went by.

  He found a dry piece of bar and penned her a reassuring reply.

  There was one more letter to write. It had to be carefully phrased. Narcisse up in St. Louis would have to tell Blake that there wouldn’t be a visit this year. He’d have to see about sending a Christmas present.

  It was hard to read Blake. Valentine still didn’t know if Blake had strong feelings about him one way or another. Blake was always interested in new stuff. Was a visit from “Papa” a break from his usual routine and therefore a source of happiness, or was it more?

  Valentine shouldn’t have been this tired. Maybe he was slowing down with age. He hadn’t bounced back from the beating he took outside Ladyfair’s little cooperative. Served him right for continuing to wander from office to office and warehouse to warehouse, hunting up help for Kentucky and his old stored gear and their resident ghosts and memories.

  David Valentine even had the dubious honor of a trip back to Southern Command’s new GHQ at Consul Solon’s old executive mansion atop Big Rock Hill to plead Kentucky’s case with the outgoing commander in chief. One way or another, much of Solon’s late-model communications gear survived or could be easily repaired, and old “Post One” didn’t lack for office space and conference rooms.

  The southern half of the hilltop, the old final trenches and dugouts, had filled in and greened over since being churned to mud by big-caliber rounds. The consular golf course was back in operation, and the red brick of the former college a beehive of clerks and radio techs. New, giant radio masts had sprouted both on Big Rock Hill.

  They had stared at his cuts and bruises and listened politely but briefly. A few made noises about thanking him for his efforts in Kentucky. He endured another quick debriefing where he told the same story he told in Jonesboro with the same outcome.

  It was time to take them back to Kentucky.

  His efforts in Jonesboro and Little Rock hadn’t been completely in vain. They’d given him the hatchet man team of “replacement” NCOs and a shipping manifest of matériel being loaded on a barge, though how Southern Command thought he’d get a barge all the way up the Ohio to Evansville was the sort of detail they had been vague on. When he asked, they said someone was “working the problem” and he could meet the barge at Backwater Pete’s.

  The manifest looked promising. Uniforms, or at least fabric to make uniforms. Cases of weapons. Explosives. Even recreational and educational materials for the new recruits.

  Even more reassuring was the vessel and captain listed on the manifest. Whichever logistics officer they’d put in charge of “working the problem” knew his or her business.

  Valentine had last seen the barge tied up on the Arkansas when Consul Solon was still running the Trans-Mississippi from his network of numbered posts. Valentine led his six new charges to the foot of the gangway and called up to the anchor watch.

  “Permission to book a travel warrant?” Valentine asked the rumpled deckhand on watch, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The deckhand sauntered off to get the captain.

  Captain Mantilla may have changed since Valentine last met him during Solon’s brief hold on the Ozarks and Ouachitas. Valentine’s memory of the man had diffused like a rewetted watercolor. But as the captain approached, Valentine noted the mat of hair and the quick, flashing glances that weren’t suspicious, just indicative of a busy man with a lot on his mind—yes, it was him.

  He stood there in gray overalls bearing a camouflage moiré of grease stains and a formerly white but now weather-beaten ivory skipper hat riding the back of his head as though bored with the job. Thick bodied with a bit of a pot, he still looked like a fireplug with a seven-day beard and a couple arms hanging off it.

  “Have to ask my passenger,” Mantilla said. “I expect she won’t mind.”

  “Passenger? Since when do passengers give orders to captains?”

  “Her charter.” Mantilla jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Valentine was shocked to see Dots—Colonel Lambert, officially—looking lost in a big patrol coat and a hat with the earflaps turned down, and fiddling with her dunnage as if deciding what to have handy and what to store below.

  Valentine wondered if she was traveling not so much incognito as low-ke
y, a simple officer looking for transport. Probably on her way to meet a Cat and a Bear team looking to raise hell in Mississippi.

  “Sir,” Valentine said, saluting. “I’m told this boat’s headed for the Mississippi.”

  “Valentine!” Lambert said, brightening. “Not going back already?”

  “Afraid so. Javelin needs these replacements. You’ll take priority, of course. I’ll go on once he’s dropped you downriver.”

  Lambert cocked her head. Her usual brisk manner was gone; she looked like a traveler who’d missed a bus. Little fissures explored her formerly vital, cheerleader-smooth skin from the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  “I think we’re at cross purposes, Major. I’m joining your command. I’m headed to Evansville as well.”

  “Is there a new . . . operation?” Stupid words—she no doubt had to keep quiet.

  “No, I’m joining up with what’s left of Javelin. I suppose you haven’t heard. My whole command was moved under one of Martinez’s staffers. They were going to stick me in an office routing communications where the only decision I’d ever make is what to have for lunch. So . . . I volunteered to go to Kentucky.”

  “As what? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I don’t mind at all. They need a new full colonel out there to act as CO. No bright young officer wanted the job—Javelin’s a dead end as far as Southern Command is concerned. I’m not so sure. Thought I’d be the one to be out there for a change.”

  Lambert had run a sort of special forces unit dedicated to helping allies in the Cause. Kentucky was the second trip she’d sent him on, and whatever had gone wrong in the wooded passes of the Appalachians wasn’t her fault. “You’ve nothing to prove to any of us.”

  “The coffee on this tub’s surprisingly good,” she said. “I think the good captain has connections in every trading port on the river. Let’s hit the galley and get some. Tell me more about these Quisling volunteers you recruited.”