9: Good People Doing Bad Things
Stella doesn't feel good, letting him believe she saved his life out of moral compunction.
But it does feel kind of good, letting him believe it.
It doesn't make her feel good, this feeling good. It's better than feeling bad and it's better than feeling dead, which is what they'd both be feeling if not for her own self-preservation skills.
But she doesn't like the way his eyes follow her around the room. She doesn't like the haunted domestic scene that the ruined kitchen builds around them. And she doesn't like the strange courtesy with which he asks her, "What do you propose for our next course of action?"
He's still sitting on the floor, as if he doesn't trust a chair from an age he doesn't belong to. Just a chair, but she remembers it's a chair from an era that destroyed itself. Destroyed them too. Stella doesn't expect to make it to forty.
Makes it all the worse that she doesn't know how far she's already made it.
Her fingers are itching to clean out her guns, but she's not taking apart her two best advantages. He may believe she saved his life out of moral compunction, but that doesn't mean it's true and that doesn't mean that he likes the way she went about doing it. He doesn't. He may say that her value to Caesar is behind compare, but that doesn't mean she can believe him. Even if he believes.
He's still waiting for an answer. "I thought you were the renowned strategist."
"I would like to hear your view."
He looks believable. Sounds believable. Doesn't mean she can believe him.
She points to the small mountain of furniture piled against the door. "Someone wants to shoot you -someone did shoot you -which means they probably want to shoot me too."
"Then perhaps we should retire to the upper floor," he proposes, strangely delicate in his suggesting. "If not to recover, then to secure all other entrances." He pauses. "It does not need to be an either/or. In fact, it should not be."
Makes sense. She still makes him walk up the stairs first.
Upstairs, they close all the shutters, the glass in the windows long since shattered. They upend couches, dressers, and coffee tables, stand them up against the windows like soldiers at their posts. The silence disturbs Stella, scrapes up too close to battered sunglasses and the wordless offering of her lighter for his cigarette… She wants him here but she wants him anywhere but…
"I'm curious," says the Legion spy and for once, just once, she is grateful. "You talk of scavenging and how I have no talent for it."
"You call it scavenging," she says from the other end of the bookshelf they lever against the stairwell door, "I call it salvaging," and she brushes a few lost poker chips out from beneath the couch to make her point, "and you suck at it. So?"
"I was wondering what you 'salvaged' at Nipton."
He takes her silence as encouragement. "I know the mayor had a safe and a stash," he continues. "I know you would have searched for both. What did you find, little salvager?"
"This again?" A mad giggle escapes. "Yeah, they were bad. They were bad people doing bad things. But they were trying to stay alive, stuck between two big guys who really didn't give a shit about them personally. People do bad things all the time when they're trying to survive."
She pauses again. "Maybe there were some good people doing bad things there too."
"If they are good people doing bad things," he replies, "can you really call them good? I'm curious," he says again, "why you don't extend the same pardon to the Legion."
Stella looks at him. She doesn't see the absence of a snake-smile because she's so used to seeing it there. "I can imagine you did some pretty bad things, just to stay alive in the Legion," she tells him, "but that doesn't mean I've gotta forgive you. Doesn't mean I should."
The bed, depressed and damp as it is, is calling where he can no longer hold her attention. She's not its only audience. She takes a step in its direction, when:
"One bed," he notes with his old false courtesy.
"Your eyes work," she says with her old false awe.
The snake-smile returns, even if she never noticed it play truant. "I can be a gentleman."
"I'm sure," she says, "especially when I'm on the bed and you're on the floor. Good night."
The bastard had been smiling ear to ear before the lights went out.
The bastard had been smiling ear to ear when Boone had staggered to the hotel door and pounded his fist on the rotten wood. No vacancy. Now there was one. Two, but barely anyone knew. Too shy to talk. But Manny had been smiling ear to ear. Always had a freaky knack for smiling at inappropriate times, things, tragedies. Boone didn't smile, ever, had seen too many things, too many tragedies, too many times. So they made up each other's differences.
Andy used to say Boone wore a goofy grin whenever she was with him. Now the crippled ranger doesn't have the guts to meet his eyes, like the rest of this fucked up town. But it's Manny smiling ear to ear that's burned onto the back of Boone's eyelids, grin clouding up his crosshairs in the dusk.
Ear to ear. Can't get it out of his head. He'd like to slit the bastard's throat ear to ear.
Thinking about it.
Thinking about it when the door opens and the light goes on. Cliff'd probably shut the power off when he'd turned in for the night, but she turns the light on and he'll notice this about her later, that she turns the light on whenever she enters a room and is just as likely to leave it lit. But he doesn't know this now and he remembers watching all of the Novac people walk yawning into their bedrooms earlier that evening.
Thinks it's his comeuppance finally come for him.
Hopes.
Not going down without a damn good fight. Shop door swings shut; he's got a back slamming into metal hinges, barrel of his rifle across a throat, hands locked on stock and muzzle. Cat-green eyes flash at him just before he realizes that the body he's got locked down against the door is too small, too soft…
Hasn't touched a woman in weeks. Hasn't touched a woman that wasn't his wife in—
He throws himself away from her as if he's been burned, stumbling backward until his ass meets weathered spikes of teeth. "God damn it," he swears and he means it, means it all, God damn it all. "Don't sneak up on people like that."
She's got one hand in a pocket and he doesn't know if she's pulling something out or putting it back. Either way, he's ready. "I opened a door," she says, annoyed. "In what world is that sneaking?"
"My world," he answers, realizes how stupid it sounds only after it's out. "What do you want?"
"Who were you expecting?"
Tries to look at her without really seeing her, even as he's wondering if the Legion would be so damned clever as to send a woman to take out a widower.
Probably.
"Answering a question with another damned question makes you a cheat."
"Isn't everyone a cheat in this world?"
Bleakness in her tone catches his attention. Strikes a note too close to what his own vocal chords have been playing lately. Makes him take another look at her; it's really a first look. Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed. Pretty; little good that does her out here. Bad things happen to pretty girls in the wasteland; Boone knows this better than just about anybody. On the Strip, where the Chairmen line up beautiful women like dolls on a shelf and the Omertas keep the riffraff satisfied, she would be safer. Carla would have been safer.
Damn it.
Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed. The weariness in her eyes catches his attention all over again. He wonders what bastard cheated her.
"Look," she says with tired eyes and a tired voice. Life comes in pairs, spotters and shooters, and Boone's been cheated out by two and a half by his last figuring. "I get it. I'll come back and ask the daytime guy if he's seen my man."
Something tells him she's not talking about the guy she goes to bed with. More than that: pictures form in his head, of her sneaking up on the bastard, of the bastard sliding his slick grin over her curves, taking advantage of another pretty girl he doesn't want around…
"Look," the words feel torn from the lining of his throat. "Maybe you shouldn't go. Not yet."
Cat eyes try to read his shades. "Are you going to try and kill me again?"
She already knows he's a killer. Good. Simpler. "No. I'm looking for someone I can trust. You're a stranger. That's a start."
"You trust strangers." She doesn't ask; she merely states. She does that a lot, he'll notice.
"I said it was a start."
Later, he'll notice other things about her: her two uneven braids, hair pulled over to one side so that uneven bangs sweep over a scar he learns about later, the sunburn across her nose because she refuses to wear a hat that could blindside her from an ambush from behind, the way she flicks a shiny lighter that one of the Boulder City khans will palm her on and off, on and off, over and over again like a nervous tick.
Later, he'll get her to the Strip, where she'll be safe, or at least safer, until she decides to stroll on up to another bastard, this one tapping a cigarette against shiny metal railing in the Tops, flicking ash onto the plush carpet.
Later, Boone will watch from afar as she, dressed in a floaty pink dress snatched from House's suite, steps forward and offers that same lighter, flicks on another light Boone bets she doesn't know the consequence of.
Then Boone will see the bastard in the checkered suit see her, really see her, and Boone won't see what she does next, won't hear what she says to him, but he'll see the bastard in the checkered suit's face change until he's smiling ear to ear too.
He's thinking about all this now because the bastard in the red city had been smiling ear to ear before the lights went out. He's sick of anyone smiling that smile.
Vulpes does not mean to sleep, but sleep he does. When he wakes, groggy and grudging of his own failing, he reminds himself that Caesar is the Son of Mars and Inculta is only a shadow a new man stepped forward to fill.
When he wakes, he wakes to steps that shake the floor and her voice, but her words are not meant for him. His eyes open to marching boots and dust shaken from its ancient homes. The courier whispers to ghosts, pacing like a caged creature, golden hair a snarl. "I need more time," she pleads with an audience that Vulpes can neither see nor hear, even as he slowly raises his head. "Give me more time."
Back to the wall, she slides to the floor, cornered by an intangible opponent. "Elijah…"
Her eyes meet his and he knows that there will be no more eavesdropping. "The Old Man, I presume?" he prompts her and she looks at him but he cannot be sure if she listens to him.
His head aches but he knows this is critical and he refuses to be diverted from it. He waits, making his refusal to desert the field without reason clear in his silence, until she swipes something from the floor, too quick for him to register what it is, and tosses it into his chest. Catching it by reflex, poker chips clink together in his palm, wrapped in a shred of bloodstained cloth — his blood; he recognizes the sleeve she had torn from her shoulder for his head.
Still heeding the ghost's angry demands -if he concentrates, he can just barely make out the tiny crackling voice emerging from the device at her wrist, but it makes his head hurt more than before -she jerks her thumb to the door and then to the bundle of currency in his grip; he feels his lips twitch in amusement at this strange domesticity. There is something oddly pleasurable in it, even if she stubbornly insists on maintaining her own illusions by ordering him from the room at silent gunpoint.
Disassembling their fortifications, kicking open the shutters, and clambering out onto the balcony, he leaves without fear of abandonment; magpie that she is, she is not likely to forgo the sizable amount of chips he now carries. Although he doesn't really believe that she sent him out to retrieve provisions; his curiosity set aside, he has decided to cease direct interference and adopt a wait-and-see approach.
She saved his life. Why?
He recalls the position of the nearest Old World machine as he crouches upon a ledge and drops down to the ground. She obviously used the device on her wrist to find him once; she can easily do it again.
He doesn't like leaving her there alone.
It is a terrible idea, he decides, irked at himself for even complying with her orders this far. Mars only knows what she'll find. Mars only knows what will find her.
She saved his life. Why?
He cannot see anything in this red fog. Lifting a hand to shield his eyes, he realizes that he cannot see himself.
Something sees him as he emerges on the other side, eyes watering and sight blurred, the foul taste of the cloud in his mouth despite his best efforts.
A trigger cocks. He expects it's her, caught up and playing her illusions once again. He means to turn around and sneer. He stops. Something is not right.
Heavy, labored, angry breathing.
"Look me in the face, you son of a bitch. Look me in the face so I can kill you."
I'm still here! Feedback always extremely valued. It means the world.
