She herded the five remaining brawlers to the jail and put them all into one cell.
"The door's busted," she said, as if this might be news to them. "So, I'm putting you, Tom, in charge until I get back. If any of you leaves the cell before I get back I'll track you down, tie you up, and leave you in here until Hell Week is over. Understood?" Legs waited until everyone awake nodded his head. "Good. Anyone that behaves while I'm gone can leave when I get back."
"Okay, Sheriff."
"Yeah."
Smiling, Legs said, "Good. Good." Then she turned and left.
Hell Week started in—Legs glanced at the large, old-fashioned, round-faced clock in the steeple of the bank storefront at the far end of Main Street—fifteen minutes. Twenty if she could find an excuse to loiter on the clean metallic street, or meander into one of the saloons innocently hiding behind the customized plastic storefronts that advertised their wares and entertainment. Quite a few saloons lurked between where Legs stood hesitating in the wooden doorway of her sheriff's office and the station's docking ports.
Still no sign of Corin. Legs automatically checked the foot traffic on the street. Four miners and two clerks from the bank: just the usual population for Purgatory Station. But everyone was tense, electric. Normal for noontime at the start of Hell Week.
As soon as she reached the docks, the word would be sent out that the biannual supply ship had arrived from Earth, and most everybody in Purgatory's local space would head for the station. They'd gather and party and fight, and conduct business and fight, and drink and fight. New business alliances would emerge, and old feuds would flare. Miners would change employment, looking for something better, and celebrate by tearing up a bar. Legs would have to knock heads together, pile drunks like tailings in the jail's cells, forego sleep, and generally stay busier than a wildcat miner with a one-ton hopper and a hundred-ton claim.
Sure as shooting, some tomfool idiot would try some stupid something and wind up residing in a cell for the rest of Hell Week, or worse, have to be shipped off for real justice.
Delaying was useless. The sooner Legs got Hell Week started the sooner it'd be over. Besides, like everybody else, she'd get a chance at a few treats off the ship: foods that couldn't be grown in the vats on Purgatory Station or in the outlying hydroponic farms, new textiles, new entertainments. She headed for the moving sidewalk in the center of the street. Maybe she'd get lucky and nothing worse than drunk-and-disorderly would go on.
Maybe Purgatory Station, out here in the -hinterlands of the Kuiper Belt, would suddenly become the crossroads of the solar system.
"Morning, Sheriff," Kimble Phelps shouted from behind her. "No, sorry, it's afternoon."
Plastering a smile she didn't feel on her face, Legs turned to find Purgatory Station's dignified banker walking toward her. She quickly tapped the controls on her garters, adjusting the length of her legs down to match his. "Afternoon, Kimble."
Damnation, but why'd she have to meet him on her way to the docks? His presence just reminded her of all the other problems she had sitting on her desk.
"Expecting trouble?" he asked, tilting his head toward her skirt, as they stepped onto the moving sidewalk.
"Yup." She continued walking on the moving surface of the sidewalk, as did he. "Hell Week."
Kimble glanced proprietarily back at his bank, before turning the full force of his heavily jowled smile on her. "A man or woman'd have to be a fool to mess with our sheriff."
"Yup." Legs kept the smile on her face, but didn't really want to encourage him.
"Maybe it won't be so bad, this time." Kimble darted behind her in preparation for his upcoming exit from the sidewalk. He whispered hastily, "Perhaps if you get some free time, Letitia, we could have a drink."
She tipped her hat in good-bye as he stepped from the sidewalk. The sunlight from the fake sun in the distant station roof glinted off his shiny balding head. She readjusted her legs to her normal stride, and set off at a brisker walk.
But it was too late. Kimble had reminded her of all the problems waiting for her, along with Hell Week, and she couldn't prevent herself from rehashing them in her mind.
Corin Minerva, her deputy, was more a hindrance than a help. Constantly late, incompetent, and insolent, she'd have replaced him months ago, if not for the fact that his family was the wealthiest on the station, and they had found the proper political pressure to make him her problem, until they could unload him on some unsuspecting university back on Earth, or Mars, or somewhere else closer in toward the sun.
Then there was the accounting system. -Somehow—Legs wasn't certain she could blame Corin—the accounting program in the sheriff's office couldn't seem to disgorge any useful, or auditable, information. If she couldn't get it working, she'd have to go see Kimble, and have him straighten it out from the bank's end.
An announcement plastered to the center column of a sidewalk circle at the corner of Main Street and Tin Alley advertised the Purgatory Prattler, blaring today's headlines in tall, bold, black, moving print, and a loud tenor.
Legs snarled at the announcement as she sailed past to take a left on Tin. Elections were coming up the week after Hell Week's biannual outsystem ships run, and, of course, the Purgatory Prattler's best method of drumming up business was rehashing gossip and innuendo, and stirring up trouble. The latest editorial urged someone, anyone, to run against Sheriff Lanier. The implication being that someone, anyone, would be better than a bitter, crippled ex-pilot turned power-hungry, mean-tempered, iron-fisted bitch.
And where the hell was Elmer? Not, Legs reminded herself, that she particularly cared about the big lummox, but, as the station's third-largest employer, Longshanks Limited did merit her concern. Especially when all of its miners, ships, and equipment were overdue at the station.
She stepped off the moving sidewalk onto Coal Street, which was really just a fancy name for the circuitous corridor spiraling down to the docks under Main Street.
Damnation, but she didn't have time to go searching through Elmer's claims to find him and his crew, and verify that they hadn't been attacked by claim jumpers, or mid-system pirates, or joy-riding kids bent on mischief.
Probably they were just extending their tour, while they eked out a promising patch of asteroid. When Elmer got back she'd have to chew on him a bit about schedules and timing, and sending messages.
At the bottom of the Coal Street corridor's spiral, Legs waved open the door that led to the docks. On the other side of the door, in the oily smelling bowels of the station, was the docking gallery, a long cavernous hallway with hatches on either side like soldiers standing to attention in two rows. Purgatory Station's manager, Jim Nutil, and her missing deputy, Corin Minerva, waited for her by the largest hatch.
At least Corin'd be around to help with this.
Mr. Nutil, a small, weasely, stooped, gray-haired man, whined, "Well, I guess we can send the okay to open the hatches now that you've arrived."
As soon as the working light on the doorframe turned green, the hatch's blast doors ground up into the ceiling. Nutil, Corin, and Legs entered the large customs dock, to wait for passengers and supplies from the biannual ship.
Nutil read from his docking pad, and announced that it was a fairly standard run, with the usual cargo of supplies, a crew of five, four returning locals, five immigrants, and one visitor. Visitors were rare, but not unknown.
With Nutil scrutinizing the cargo, Corin checking the crew and locals in, and Legs handling the immigrants and visitor, the inspections went fairly fast.
Legs recognized the four returning locals as new university graduates, coming home to celebrate before making their way into the great, wide solar system. Nobody of importance, or that she needed to worry about.
The crew was the same crew that had been making this biannual run for the past three years. Again no one worth worrying about. The pilot, of course, waited in his ship until everything and everyone else was cleared. Also, he and Legs knew each other
from the war, and traditionally had dinner afterwards to catch up on old times, and gossip about the passengers.
The five immigrants were youngish, ignorant, female, and probably awaiting employment as brides-of-the-common-man, since no mining supervisors or mail-ordering husbands waited for them. Legs tried to remember if and when she'd ever been that young or that reckless. She would have to keep an eye on them the next couple of months to make sure they stayed within the permissive, liberal laws of Purgatory Station. But they all seemed to be fairly nice young ladies. Not much trouble there.
The lone visitor would definitely be a problem. His identification named him Damon Karybdis, traveling salesman for Stellar Cogwheels, a company she'd never heard of before. He was a tall, dark, and handsome blade of a man, with twinkling blue eyes, a false white-toothed smile, suave manners, fashionable debonair clothing, and a hawklike attitude. A predator looking for prey.
Legs pegged him as a game sharp, or con man, come to fleece the hicks in the sticks. She briefly considered putting him in quarantine for the ship's weeklong layover, but there was no guarantee that he'd choose to leave at that point with the ship, and not stay to make trouble for six months. Or more. Better to let him loose on the station, to discover the difficulty of skinning those who'd learned the hard way through their own ignorance and experience. He'd either give up, or end up in the hoosegow. Either way though, she'd have a rough week of it. Couldn't be helped.
"So, you're the sheriff?" Karybdis flashed a brilliant white-toothed smile as he made an obvious show of leering at her legs. "Must be a mighty nice place here."
Little did he know it was her there's-going-to-be-trouble outfit. The short skirt enabled her to get at her prostheses' controls easier. She didn't smile back. "Out the lock, take Coal Street all the way up to the top level. Tin Alley will take you to any of the three big streets running the length of the station: Main, Small, and Parallel. There's five other alleys that connect the big streets up top. I'm sure you'll find your way around."
She waved the scanner to pick up his face and palms, and nodded to him, while frowning. "Enjoy your stay in Purgatory."
Mr. Karybdis turned his attentions to the new immigrants. Legs was glad to see him head out, up Coal Street, to find himself a hotel room.
A short, thin, nearly bald dark-skinned man finally exited the docking tube. Legs adjusted her height to his. Jack Dixon, pilot-owner of the Ocher Dust, grinned maniacally. "Legs! Still sheriffing, I see."
"Yup." Legs grinned back. "And you're still space jockeying."
Nutil left to finish releasing the cargo to its various owners. Legs waved Corin to leave, before she wafted Jack through customs on waivers and political license.
"Tell me about this Damon Karybdis," Legs said as they walked up Coal Street.
"Spotted him right off, but there's not much to tell." Jack frowned. "He kept pretty much to his room for the six-week trip. As far as I can tell he doesn't drink, drug, gamble, pilfer, or engage in any known vice."
"Which just leaves the unknown ones."
"Pretty much. He isn't a man-of-the-cloth, of any variety or stripe, not even counterfeit. He's not a wanderer, as far as I can tell. He's too flashy and annoying to miss, but too exceptional to be the simple salesman he says he is."
"He's trouble."
"That's what you've got the skirt for." Jack raised one dark brow questioningly. "So how's the old war-wound doing?"
"No trouble lately," Legs said as they turned to walk up the short Tin Alley toward Main Street. "I installed that last update you brought, and haven't had a whisper of trouble with them since."
Jack slapped one hand over the Prattler's announcement speaker on the center column of a sidewalk circle at the corner of Main Street and Tin Alley. But he couldn't drown out the tenor voice shouting, "Won't Someone Take On Sheriff Lanier?"
"Idiots," Jack muttered.
Legs shrugged. "They're entitled to their opinion. And to broadcast it, as long as they don't interfere with my duties. In any case, they have to know they're scraping bottom here just to get anyone to take this job."
"They're damn lucky to get you. They ought to realize it." Jack stalked angrily down the moving sidewalk.
They stopped by the jail, and let all the brawlers go, before heading for the high-rent neighborhood near the bank.
The Struck It Rich was Purgatory's most exclusive tavern, which only meant if you needed credit, go elsewhere. The thick, steamy smell of seared vat-steaks and powdery soft slow-baked hydroponic potatoes washed over them as they entered. Tall faux-wood stools clustered near tall faux-wood tables taking up most of the floor space. To the right stood a long bar, that was also the kitchen, and took up one whole wall. On the left a wall of real wood backed intimate booths. Directly opposite the door another row of booths lined a transparent picture-vista porthole with a panoramic view of the stars. If you knew where to look you could pick out old Sol and all the planets. Legs and Jack walked to their usual booth, with a scenic overlook.
As they relaxed against opposing wooden benches, and scanned the menu in the tabletop, Legs asked, "So how's the home life?"
"Cora's fine. She's still after me to quit the long hauls, but she doesn't want to give up the bonus money. Tony and Mari are doing well in school. Garick's talking real sentences now." Jack punched his order into the order pad, his usual. "So when are you going to settle down and have a pack of little sheriffs?"
Sighing, Legs punched in her order, her usual. "Whenever the big lummox finally nerves himself enough to ask."
Jack looked up in surprise. "Since when did you get to be so patient? Why don't you just ask him yourself?"
"You should have seen him the last time I asked him out." Legs leaned back against the high hard-backed bench, smiling and shaking her head. "You've never seen anyone so embarrassed and flummoxed. It took him ten minutes of uhms and uhs to say yes. He spent the evening acting uncomfortably scared I was going to forget propriety. If I asked him to marry me he'd probably die on the spot from apoplexy."
"No fool like an old fool, I suppose." Jack shrugged. "What could he be afraid of? He can't believe those stupid yarns about grounded pilots. It's not like he hasn't seen you in action, in and out of the war."
"That may be the problem."
"Hmm." Jack sounded noncommittal. "Perhaps. You can be scary when riled. But his record wasn't any better."
She waggled her eyebrows and grinned. "Maybe he still thinks I'm the enemy."
"There is that. I'll see what I can get out of him. I'm not the enemy after all." Jack winked.
"Got to find him first. He's five days overdue. Him and his crew. Not a word, not a peep out of them for three weeks now. If I haven't heard from them soon, I'll have to go looking for them."
Jack looked surprised.
Their food arrived, and they scooped their steaming platters off the autocart before it trundled off. They ate in the companionable silence of two very hungry, very good friends. Over a dessert of banana-split cake, a special treat available only as long as the bananas brought by the Ocher Dust lasted, they discussed the Ocher Dust's crew and passengers. There was little gossip this trip; the crew and passengers had behaved themselves. Legs had a few tidbits on Purgatory denizens known to Jack to pass along, nothing very titillating.
As they were exiting the Struck It Rich, Jack said, "It occurs to me that Karybdis may be a diversion. Perhaps the one you should be watching is one of the immigrants or one of the local yokels."
"Already ahead of you. I'm keeping an eye on everyone here. It's going to be a long week." Legs glanced at the door of her office, halfway down the street. There was work to be done, and she needed to get to it.
"See you later," Jack said.
"Tomorrow."
At first light, Legs pulled herself up to a sitting position in her hammock bed, and massaged the stumps of her legs. The prosthetic disks sat on the table underneath the hammock, the jeweled aluminum and filigreed circuits glinting in the
spreading light of the false dawn. She picked them up carefully by the tan plastic handholds, attached them to their permanent couplings on the ends of her legs, and turned her legs on.
After stowing the hammock in its cabinet, Legs punched her usual breakfast of juice, protein strips, and toast into the kitchen nook set in the corner of the room. Wishing once more that the coffee maker in the sheriff's office worked. While waiting for breakfast, she opened up and looked out the window.
Her room over the sheriff's office looked out on Main Street. From her strategic position at the exact midpoint of the length of the street she could see to both ends. Hell Week was in full swing beneath her.
Miners, floozies, families, and company CEOs swarmed the street, moving in the strange tides, swirls, and eddies of crowds everywhere. On the opposite side of the central moving sidewalk a river of people flowed toward the bank; on the near side a similar river drifted in the opposite direction. Nearly everyone had come in to Purgatory Station from the surrounding space.
The usual smell of sidewalk lubricant had been replaced by a myriad of perfumes, colognes, and musky sweat, the miasma of a large number of human beings in close quarters. Legs caught a whiff of a familiar sharp cologne, and kept a snarl from her face only with supreme effort.
"Hey, Sheriff! Any quotes for the Prattler?" A suave, darkly dressed man stood on the porch beneath her window holding a recording pad up toward her.
Trying not to growl, sneer, or reach for her -ministunner—which was really what Langdon Kade, owner, reporter, and staff of the Purgatory Prattler, deserved—Legs said, "Morning, Langdon," and retreated back into her small room.
During breakfast, she checked through the list of arrivals. Elmer wasn't on it. Nothing from Longshanks Limited was on it. And contrary to what it looked like from her window, only about two-thirds of the inhabitants of Purgatory local space were on the station.
Legs used the accounting program problems as an excuse to stay in her office for a while after breakfast. She did have to get the accounts to balance, and soon she wouldn't have time to mess with accounting. Hiding didn't help any, though. People just drifted into her office as suited themselves.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 18
