Justice in an Age of Metal and Men

by Justice in an Age of Metal

  “That’s…” She seemed to search for an appropriate word. “An interesting choice.”

  “It is, but not really one I can imagine myself making. I’m not interested in lady folk, you know.”

  “Aw…” She smirked that annoying smirk again. “This isn’t your desire to be the perfect traditional Texas cowboy rearing its head again, is it? Maybe your repressed heterosexuality is trying to break free in your dreams.”

  I pulled off my hat and scratched my head. “Even if I were into the ladies, I don’t think Mrs. Brown would do it for me.” I paused and considered what Trish had said. “And I don’t have repressed sexuality.”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ve seen how you look at Johnson when he’s not paying attention.”

  I nodded. There was no use denying it.

  “I’ve also seen how he looks at you.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I used to be a detective of sorts, J.D.,” said Trish. “I’m observant.”

  “I suppose you are. We likely wouldn’t be out here if you weren’t, would we?” I meant it as a compliment. Justice was being served by our investigation and some good might have come from it.

  She turned away. “If it’s too much work, I can just drop you off at the station, you know.”

  “Too much work?”

  “Weren’t you planning on napping all day? Isn’t that pretty much all you do?”

  I felt my face get flushed—maybe from embarrassment, maybe from anger. “Just so you know, deputy, I do a hell of a lot out here. Just live outside the city a while and you’ll see how the law doesn’t mean what it used to. For Dead Oak, I’m the line between justice and chaos. The lawmen that are left are hardly more than flunkies following orders. Without me out here, people start making their own law. When people do that, you can bet it’s just as good as no law at all.”

  “Even Johnson?”

  “What?”

  “Even Johnson is a flunkie?”

  “Maybe. Truth is, I think he just follows orders. I don’t think he gives a damn about me or the justice I keep.”

  “I suppose that could be true.”

  “Might be.”

  “What if the city took an interest again?”

  “In Johnson?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “What if Austin sent lawmen out to help you maintain order.”

  I stared at her. “Miss,” I said, “that’s just about the worst of all the options. Some of us fought hard for the rights of us outlanders. You city folk start sending your law out here and we might as well have lost that war.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “It was a draw.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh?”

  “Doesn’t seem like a draw.”

  “I’m glad you noticed. People around here don’t think any of you city folk are even aware we’re out here.”

  She looked down at the floor. “Most aren’t. A few people in charge are starting to take more notice.”

  That didn’t sound good to me. I started to wonder again just exactly why Trish had moved out of the city. I didn’t ask, though. I figured my chances of getting a straight answer were pretty poor.

  “Well,” she said, “I’d love to continue this conversation, but we’re closing in on that skidder.”

  “How long was I out, anyway?”

  “‘Bout ten minutes is all.”

  “Huh.” I shook the grogginess from my head. Something felt wrong but there wasn’t time to think on it.

  I looked up and my glasses zoomed in on what looked like a speck in the distance. It was a kid on a skidder much like the one I’d encountered that morning. It left a trail of wispy black exhaust, and two impressive flames trailed behind it. He was flying low, hugging the Colorado Husk.

  “Can you ground him?”

  “Not without scattering him and his skidder over a kilometer of wasteland.” She frowned and closed her eyes for a moment. “I can’t seem to lock onto him. He must have a modded bike.”

  “No kidding.”

  It was pretty obvious that the bike was modded. They called those things skidders for a reason. They’d go so fast and were so likely to fail that if you rode one you were eventually going to end up skidded across the ground in a spectacular show of destruction. We didn’t even bother to collect skidders when they went down. Animals take care of the human remains, and there weren’t usually enough serviceable parts left to bother collecting the bike.

  The blue flames were the first tipoff that this was a modded bike. Stock machines would usually forego the use of combustible fuels, but modded bikes often leaned toward dependence on old tech from a time before cheap, efficient gravity manipulation became popular. Some even used fossil fuels, despite the obvious inefficiencies. Based on his speed, it was something powerful. A shielded drive core would explain Trish’s inability to bring it down nicely. I wondered what other modifications that thing had.

  “Well,” I said. “We could just follow it.”

  She frowned again. “No, I think I can bring it down.”

  I stood up to get a better view of the biker. A blast of hot wind threatened to take my hat, but I held it with my metal hand. My sunglasses zoomed in on the kid again. He kept quickly glancing back at us.

  “Do it.”

  Trish lurched the cruiser forward, threatening to send me off balance. I kept my footing and we closed the distance in a matter of minutes.

  “Just stay up here,” Trish shouted. The wind was howling around us. At this speed, the protective bubble around the cruiser was starting to fail. Heat was seeping in, reminding me of how late in the day it was. Noon had come and gone while we were in Austin.

  Trish pulled out her towline and clipped it to a hook that folded out from her waist.

  The distance closed fast at first, then the blue flames flared and the skidder put up another burst of speed.

  We were higher than he was and about fifty meters back. The tiny bike might have been hard to spot against the landscape, which was flying by at two hundred kilometers per hour. Ahead, I could see a field of onyx windmills blackening the skyline. If we reached it, this job would get a lot harder.

  Forty meters. Then thirty. The cruiser shook beneath my feet, but still I stood. Most of the job was pure intimidation, and I’d be damned if I was going to back down. The kid kept glancing back at me nervously. Each time he did, his bike wavered a little in the air. He started to drop, leveling around fifteen meters above the broken landscape.

  Twenty meters back, Trish moved to the hood of the cruiser. Wind whipped her hair and tore at her clothes. Unblinking, she focused on her prey.

  Ten meters back. The biker swooped low and banked hard to the left, but the cruiser followed. It didn’t turn as sharp, but it made the turn and closed the distance.

  I lost sight of him as he vanished beneath the cruiser, but Trish’s intense look told me he was still there.

  Then she pounced.

  She was fast—faster than any natural could be. I blinked and she dropped out of sight, the towline humming as it gave her more slack.

  I heard the impact, but didn’t see it. The towline, presumably under Trish’s control, started reeling her in.

  Holding onto my hat, I leaned over the side to make sure everything was going according to plan. Trish had the kid in a headlock, but he was struggling.

  A scream pierced the air. At first I thought it might be the kid. Then I thought maybe it was Trish.

  I leaned farther over the side to see what was happening. They weren’t screaming.

  It was the towline.

  The device fought hard to reel in more line, but it was jammed.

  “Aw, hell,” I muttered.

  I pulled the cover off of the reel and swore again. The towline had been tangled with a wad of kudzu. It had bound up completely. It was smoking.

  “Land the cruiser!” I shouted over the side. I didn’t know if she’d
heard me, but the cruiser didn’t slow down. I wondered how I could transmit to her like I had back at the processing plant.

  The skidder jerked to one side, then the other. The fight was still going on down there, and I couldn’t tell who was winning.

  I moved to the backseat, where I’d spotted the manual controls earlier. I pulled the cover off so that I could get a good look at the array of blinking, unlabeled buttons. It was enough to make me swear a third time.

  I needed a new plan.

  Trish was only about fifteen meters out. We were lower. At about ten meters from the ground, we were almost even with the biker. We were going too fast. Hot winds threatened my hat again, but this time I took it off and stuffed it under the seat.

  A lawman doesn’t have many tools. Justice is a funny thing that way. Sometimes all it took were fists or words.

  But, sometimes it took a gun.

  I pulled out my six-shooter. It was heavy in my hand and felt good. It was warm.

  Steadied against the side of the cruiser, I drew a bead on the two of them struggling on the skidder. Blue flames blinded me for a second, but I blinked it off.

  I didn’t worry about hitting Trish. She was pretty much bulletproof. The bike was packed full of explosive fuel, as far as I knew, so I had to avoid hitting it.

  They lurched to the side again. We were closing in on the windmill field. This needed to be resolved soon or it was going to get a lot more dangerous.

  There was no room for hesitation. I needed to disable the kid.

  When Trish pulled him hard to one side, I shot at his head.

  Even with bulletproof skin and a reinforced skull, a bullet to the head would scramble his brains pretty good.

  The kid flinched at just the wrong second. Somewhere far below, I shot up some quality Texas soil that didn’t even have it coming.

  Trish took advantage of the opportunity. She pounded her fist into the back of the kid’s skull. He went limp. She grabbed control of the bike. The skidder and cruiser, now both under her control, simultaneously slowed and dropped. They landed just in front of the first towering black windmill.

  I grabbed my hat and hopped out of the cruiser.

  Trish heaved the kid off of the bike and slammed him onto the ground.

  “Well done, deputy,” I said.

  She glared at me. “What the hell happened up there?”

  “Towline jammed. I told you to make sure the kudzu was cleared off.”

  “You never said that.”

  “Meant to.”

  The kid let out a moan and shifted. Trish smashed his face into the ground with the heel of her shoe. “Fucker put up more of a fight than I thought he would. Has a death wish or something.” I’d never seen her so mad.

  “Yeah, something’s up with this kid.”

  Trish scrunched her nose at me. “Kid? J.D, this guy is in his twenties. He’s not a kid.”

  There was silence while I sauntered around the skidder and the guy who’d been riding it. The blue flames weren’t just exhaust from the engine. They were an overall theme. Stylized electric blue flames were painted across the body of the vehicle and tattooed all over the kid’s arms. On the back of his leather jacket, two hammers were crossed in an X.

  “There’s a point in life where a person looks around him and starts to take some responsibility.” I pulled out a wad of snuff and slowly inserted it behind my lip. “Not just for his own actions, but for all the shit that goes on around him. This kid isn’t there yet—not by what I’ve seen.”

  My slow circling around the kid brought me back to Trish. When I was next to her, I reached my metal hand around her hip and pulled her close. Her eyes got wide but then narrowed when she felt me unclip the towline from her waist. I followed the line back to the cruiser, coiling it like a lasso as I walked. Once I was close to the cruiser, I grabbed the line and pulled hard with my right arm while positioning my left in just the right way. I got the line into a tiny cutting tool and snipped it off.

  The kid was starting to move again. I lashed the line around his wrists, pulling them back hard. Then I ran the line back to his ankles and tied him up in just about the most uncomfortable pose possible. I pulled each knot hard, giving him as little freedom as possible, in case he had some artificial double joints. It probably wouldn’t matter, but I would have hated to give the kid the idea that he might get away.

  “You know, I have cuffs if you need them.” Trish was shuffling her feet uncomfortably, watching as I quietly tied the kid.

  “Lawman who can’t hogtie his own criminal ain’t much of a lawman, now, is he?”

  From the kid, I ran the cable four meters to his bike. I tied it, making sure it didn’t have any play. There’s a trick to getting metal ropes like that to bind properly when you tie them in knots, and I knew what I was doing. The kid wasn’t going anywhere.

  The controls on the bike were pretty straightforward. I powered the system up and found a button that lit the afterburners.

  The wave of heat shocked the kid out of his beauty sleep.

  “What the—”

  “Watch the language son,” I grumbled at him. “We’ve got a lady present.”

  “Fuck!” The kid wasn’t in the listening mood.

  “Look, son,” I spat a stream of brown chew. “I’m just looking to have that talk we never got to have at the Goat this morning.”

  The kid’s eyes got wide.

  “You ran for a reason, didn’t you? Pretty clever to have your friend bait me while you ducked out the back door. Even better to have your other buddy come back to pick up the bait. Nobody got caught and nobody was around to point fingers at you.”

  He smiled but I could see that he was straining against the towline.

  “It’s black metal, son. Not likely you’ll break that. Might cut it if you have the right tool.”

  I waited while he discovered that truth on his own. He was stubborn, so I gave him some credit.

  “So, I just have a few questions.”

  The kid kept struggling. Turned out he did have a few double joints. If he hadn’t been properly hogtied, he might have been able to rotate his arms all the way around in front of him.

  My glasses finally got a good read on the kid’s face, the screen flashed a name and address.

  “Little Sammy Clevins,” I said, slowly. “I knew your mother back in the day.” She had been an addict, ruined by men and drugs. I’d helped her get into rehab about a dozen times, but I wasn’t sure it ever took.

  Sam looked like he was testing out a theory that he could glare me to death.

  “Got yourself in a bit of trouble, Sam.” I leaned casually against his bike. It was a damn fine skidder. I ran my finger along its graceful curves and admired the immaculate paint job. “Now, the good government of Texas doesn’t much care what you do with your spare time, but there are still a few things you and I both know are illegal. How about you just give me a list of what you might be up to these days and I’ll let you know what concerns me.”

  The kid continued his silence. Behind him, waves of hot Texas air were making the sea of windmills dance. It was thirsty weather. In more ways than one, I needed a drink.

  I flipped a switch and a belch of blue flame rolled out in the kid’s direction. The bike lurched forward a few meters, dragging the kid with it. I walked casually to where the bike had landed, and I turned to face the kid.

  “So,” I said. “Questions?”

  He glared at me. His left eyebrow let up a little wisp of smoke. Apparently, blue flames are pretty hot.

  “You know anything about that Daniel Brown fella? Guy who was killed last night?”

  “I don’t—” I reached for the switch again. “Sorry. I mean, yeah. I’ve met him. I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking! Jesus, what the—”

  I flipped the switch. The kid turned fast enough that most of the heat just scorched the back of his jacket.

  “What the hell do you want? That fucking hurts!” He
was grasping at a higher octave.

  “I’m sorry, son. I guess I thought I heard some bullshit. I’m sure it won’t happen again.” I found a dial on the control panel and clicked it up a notch. I guessed that the dial would up the fuel that vented into the engine, causing a bigger burst. The whites of the kid’s eyes told me I was probably right.

  “Sheriff.” Trish’s voice was barely audible compared to the roar of the two skidder engines. “I’m pretty sure torture’s against the protocol. Don’t you think?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her and she backed down. There was no protocol that far out in the wild. The fact that she didn’t know that just reinforced her status as a shiny-headed city girl.

  “Boy.” I brought out my best scowl. “You’d best be telling me everything you know.”

  The kid had the audacity to throw a pleading look Trish’s way. I reached for the switch.

  “No, wait!” He winced, cowered on the ground, and tried to inchworm his way as far from the bike as possible. “I’ll talk. Pinche culero. I’ll talk. I didn’t kill the guy. I don’t know who did, all right.” His voice was about as high as I expected it to be in this situation.

  “All right,” I backed away from the button. “Talk.”

  “Bunch of us got a call to go talk to the guy about some business. We found him at the bar, got him out back, and had a little discussion. A rough one.” He cleared his throat. “That’s it, man. That’s the last I saw him.”

  “Your buddies find him later? Maybe finish the job?”

  “No, man. Well, maybe. I stayed at the Goat. Sucked down some cold ones and headed home when that fuckin’ preacher man showed up and started giving everyone a hard time.”

  “What preacher?”

  “I don’t know, pendejo. Just some fucker who likes to bug anyone who’s havin’ a good time. He’s trouble, you know? There’s just something wrong with the guy.”

  “Why not rough him up a little too?”

  Sam bit his lip. His eyes searched the horizon. “Dude always has backup, you know. Always lookin’ to baptize someone whether they want it or not. Couple of my guys got into some bad shit with them.”

  I couldn’t think of any reason to care about some religious wacko trying to forcibly convert a bunch of unrepentant gangsters. The idea amused me, actually. “So, who sent you to rough up Mr. Brown?”