Rogues Page 16

  The four men stood up. They were all dressed, though one had taken off his shoes and placed them under his chair. One of them was wearing a police uniform and had his hand on the pistol in his belt. He was out for a little on-duty nookie and bit of blow it seemed.

  By then, Leonard had come through the door. The cop pulled his pistol and I shot him. I hit him in the arm and he fell down on the floor and started going around in circles like Curly of the Three Stooges. He was yelling, “Don’t shoot me no more, don’t shoot me no more.”

  Blood was all over the place.

  The other three men acted as if to run, but Leonard resorted to foul language that had to do with their mothers. They sat back down, as if still waiting their turn. Their mothers be damned.

  I said, “Where’s dickhead? Buster?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “He asked you a question,” Leonard said. “You don’t say, and we find him, we’re going to shoot all your toes off. And then your dick.”

  By this time the man in the bed had got off Tillie and was standing beside the bed with one hand over his pecker.

  Leonard said, “I had a turkey neck like that, I’d keep it covered too. Fact is, I’m an expert on dicks, and that is an ugly one.”

  “He does know dicks,” I said.

  The man in the police uniform had quit spinning and had stuck his head up under a chair. He said, “I’m hit. I’m hit.”

  “No, shit,” I said.

  I went over and saw that Tillie was breathing hard. I pulled the blanket at the end of the bed over her. I looked at the naked man with his hand over his privates and I just went berserk. I don’t know what happened to me, but I just couldn’t stand to think people like this existed, that they could sit in chairs and wait their turns to top some drugged girl. I kicked the naked man in the balls and hit him in the head with the pistol, and then I went after the other three, but not before I kicked the police officer on the floor once, and heeled his gun under the bed. I started hitting those three guys with the pistols, one in either hand. I was hitting so fast I looked like Shiva. They tried to run for it, but each time they did Leonard kicked them back into play, and I just went to work. I felt wrong. I felt savage. I felt awful, and yet, I felt right.

  It didn’t take long before all of them were bleeding. Two were on the floor. One had fallen back into his chair. The naked man on the floor wasn’t moving. He was lying on his side and had thrown up all over the place, and the air was thick with the stench of vomit.

  “Okay,” Leonard said. He walked over and put his gun against the shoeless man’s nose. He was the one that had sat back down. “Where is Buster?”

  The man didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. A door opened at the far end and two men came in. One had a shotgun. He cut down with it, but we were already moving. I dropped to the floor behind the bed, and Leonard leaped through the door he had kicked down, landed out in the hallway. From under the bed I could see the man’s legs, and I shot at them, three times in rapid succession. I hit him somewhere because he yelped and fell down. I shot him again, this time in the top of the head, cracking it apart like a big walnut. The other man had a handgun and he had been firing it all this time. So far he had hit the bed, killed the barefoot man in the chair behind me, and had put some holes in the wall.

  From under the bed I saw Leonard’s feet as he came through the other door, the one I had kicked down, and then he was on that bastard. I got to my feet and started around, tripped over the policeman who had, without me seeing him, started crawling toward the open doorway.

  “Stay,” I said, as if speaking to a dog.

  He stopped crawling.

  By the time I got around to Leonard he had already taken the man down. Somehow the man had shot himself in the foot. I kicked him in the head, just to let him know I was in the game, and then Leonard reached down and took the man’s pistol. Considering this guy’s aim it was probably best to have left him with it. In time he would have shot himself again, maybe in the head.

  “You stick,” I said to Leonard.

  “All right, but I hear too much gunfire, I’m coming. Right after I kill the lot of them.”

  I went through the door the two had come through, and by now I could hear yelling down below in the auditorium. The gunfire had roused things up, and was probably more exciting than anything they had seen tonight.

  When I got into the room upstairs I saw that it was well tricked out for an old building. Lots of modern furniture, including a big couch. It was pushed back from the wall and I could see feet sticking out from behind it. I walked over there and laid my guns on the coffee table and grabbed the man by the ankles and pulled him out face-first. He tried to hang on to the floor, but this only resulted in his dragging his nails across it. He was a long lean man in a plaid sports coat with hair the color of black shoe polish. I said, “You Buster Smith?”

  He said, “No.”

  I got his wallet out of his back pocket and looked at his driver’s license. “Yes you are,” I said. “I bet you always got caught when you played hide-and-go-seek as a kid.”

  He got to one knee. “I did, actually.”

  I went over and got my guns, said, “I wouldn’t try anything. I shoot you, then Leonard will shoot everyone else, and we’ll have a hard time explaining things. But you’ll be dead.”

  We didn’t go to jail.

  That’s the important part. Let me tell you why. So when it was done and everyone was hauled in, including me and Leonard, they waltzed us into the police chief. This is after interrogations, searches, a rubber glove up the asshole, just in case we were hiding hand grenades. He was a nice-looking guy with his black hair cut close to his head and one ear that stood out more than the other, as if it were signaling for a turn. He sat behind a big mahogany desk. There was a little sign on the desk that read: police chief.

  “Well now, Hap Collins.” he said.

  I recognized him. A little older. Still fit. James Dell. We had gone to school together.

  “It’s been a while,” he said. “What I remember best about you is I don’t like you.”

  “It’s a big club,” Leonard said. “Hap even has a newsletter.”

  “Me and Jim dated the same girl,” I said.

  “Not at the same time,” Jim said.

  “He dated her last,” I said.

  “That’s right. And I married her.”

  “So, you won,” I said.

  “Way I like to see it,” James said. “You boys raised some hell. And you shot people. And you hit people. And Hap, you killed a guy. I also got word there’s two boys with broken legs over in No Enterprise. They gave themselves up to the sheriff over there.”

  “Nice guy,” I said.

  “One of the men you shot was a police officer,” said James.

  “I know. He was waiting in line to rape a young woman. How is she by the way?”

  “Hospital. Touch-and-go for a while. But she made it. Apparently she’s no stranger to drugs, so maybe she had some tolerance. Hadn’t eaten in days. Buster Smith, we talked to him. He came apart like a fresh biscuit. He was only tough when his money worked for him. That cop, by the way, he was the police chief.”

  “Oh,” Leonard said. “Then what are you?”

  “The new police chief. I should also mention that the mayor is the one that caught a stray bullet and is as dead as an old bean can.”

  “Mayor. Police chief. We had quite a night,” I said.

  To make this part of the story short, we had to stay in the jail till our friend Marvin Hanson could get us a lawyer, and then we got out, and then we got no billed, in spite of the fact we had hunted the bastard down and caused quite a ruckus. The former police chief was dead, by our hand, and the mayor was on the deceased list as well, by a stray slug, and the others that had been in the row of chairs were all prominent citizens. It was best to take it easy on us, let them cover their own dirt in their own way.

  Thing was simply this: the crime being done t
o Tillie was so bad they let us pretty much skate on self-defense. Hell, after all, it is Texas.

  Brett and I climbed into bed and she lay in the crook of my arm.

  “Tillie is going to be out of the hospital tomorrow,” Brett said.

  She had spent about three months in there. She had been in a bad way. I had to say this for the kid, she was tough as yesterdays fajita meat.

  “I have to go get her then,” Brett said.

  “All right,” I said.

  “I know you don’t like her.”

  “Correct.”

  “You didn’t have to do what you did.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “For me?”

  “You and her.”

  “But you don’t like her.”

  “I don’t like a lot of things,” I said, “but you love her. You think she’s a bent twig, and maybe you’re right. No one deserves that.”

  “But she sets herself up for it, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She does. I don’t think she’ll ever change. Sometime soon, she doesn’t, she’s going to be dead. She picks men like ducks pick June bugs. At random.”

  “I know. I tried to be a good mother.”

  “I know that too, so don’t start on how you failed. You did what you could.”

  “I did set her father’s head on fire,” Brett said.

  “Yes, you did,” I said. “But by all accounts, he had it coming.”

  “He did, you know.”

  “Never doubted it.”

  “I love you, Hap.”

  “And I love you, Brett.”

  “Want to lose five minutes out of your life the hard way”?” she said.

  I laughed. “Now that’s not nice.”

  She laughed, rolled over and turned off the light. And then she was very nice.

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the thirty-four years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions In Time.” His other books include the novels In The Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of SF. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and a new novel, Dancing With Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a Web site at: http://www.michaelswanwick.com and maintains a blog at www.floggingbabel.com.

  Here he takes his famous rogues Darger and Surplus, con men extraordinaire, to a surreal Post-Utopian New Orleans full of pygmy mastodons, sea serpents, and lots and lots of zombies, where they learn that making money—literally—may be easy, but hanging on to it and staying alive is very, very hard.

  TAWNY PETTICOATS

  Michael Swanwick

  The independent port city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie laborers to docks where cargo was loaded into wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses. So none thought it particularly noteworthy when, for three days, an endless line of young women waited in the hallway outside a luxury suite in the Maison Fema for the opportunity to raise their skirts or open their blouses to display a tattooed thigh, breast, or buttock to two judges who sat on twin chairs watching solemnly, asked a few questions, thanked them for their time, and then showed them out.

  The women had come in response to a handbill, posted throughout several parishes, that read:

  SEEKING AN HEIRESS

  ARE YOU …

  A YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 21?

  FATHERLESS?

  TATTOED FROM BIRTH ON AN INTIMATE PART OF YOUR BODY?

  IF SO, YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO GREAT RICHES

  INQUIRE DAYTIMES, SUITE 1, MAISON FEMA

  “You’d think I’d be tired of this by now,” Darger commented during a brief break in the ritual. “And yet I am not.”

  “The infinite variety of ways in which women can be beautiful is indeed amazing,” Surplus agreed. “As is the eagerness of so many to display that beauty.” He opened the door. “Next.”

  A woman strode into the room, trailing smoke from a cheroot. She was dauntingly tall—six feet and a hand, if an inch—and her dress, trimmed with silver lace, was the same shade of golden brown as her skin. Surplus indicated a crystal ashtray on the sideboard and, with a gracious nod of thanks, she stubbed out her cigar.

  “Your name?” Darger said after Surplus had regained his chair.

  “My real name, you mean, or my stage name?”

  “Why, whichever you please.”

  “I’ll give you the real one then.” The young woman doffed her hat and tugged off her gloves. She laid them neatly together on the sideboard. “It’s Tawnymoor Petticoats. You can call me Tawny.”

  “Tell us something about yourself, Tawny,” Surplus said.

  “I was born a carny and worked forty-milers all my life,” Tawny said, unbuttoning her blouse. “Most recently, I was in the sideshow as the Sleeping Beauty Made Immortal By Utopian Technology But Doomed Never To Awaken. I lay in a glass coffin covered by nothing but my own hair and a strategically placed hand, while the audience tried to figure out if I was alive or not. I’ve got good breath control.” She folded the blouse and set it down by her gloves and hat. “Jake—my husband—was the barker. He’d size up the audience and when he saw a ripe mark, he’d catch ’im on the way out and whisper that for a couple of banknotes it could be arranged to spend some private time with me. Then he’d go out back and peer in through a slit in the canvas.”

  Tawny stepped out of her skirt and set it atop the blouse. She began unlacing her petticoats. “When the mark had his trousers off and was about to climb in the coffin, Jake would come roaring out, bellowing that he was only supposed to look—not to take advantage of my vulnerable condition.” Placing her underthings atop the skirt, she undid her garters and proceeded to roll down her stockings. “That was usually good for the contents of his wallet.”

  “You were working the badger game, you mean?” Surplus asked cautiously.

  “Mostly, I just lay there. But I was ready to rear up and coldcock the sumbidge if he got out of hand. And we worked other scams too. The pigeon drop, the fiddle game, the rip deal, you name it.”

  Totally naked now, the young woman lifted her great masses of black curls with both hands, exposing the back of her neck. “Then one night the mark was halfway into the coffin—and no Jake. So I opened my eyes real sudden and screamed in the bastard’s face. Over he went, hit his head on the floor, and I didn’t wait to find out if he was unconscious or dead. I stole his jacket and went looking for my husband. Turns out Jake had run off with the Snake Woman. She dumped him two weeks later and he wanted me to take him back, but I wasn’t having none of that.” She turned around slowly, so that Darger and Surplus could examine every inch of her undeniably admirable flesh.

  Darger cleared his throat. “Um … you don’t appear to have a tattoo.”

  “Yeah, I saw through that one right away. Talked to some of the girls you’d interviewed and they said you’d asked them lots of questions about themselves but hadn’t molested them in any
way. Not all of ’em were happy with that last bit. Particularly after they’d gone to all the trouble of getting themselves inked. So, putting two and four together, I figured you were running a scam requiring a female partner with quick wits and larcenous proclivities.”

  Tawny Petticoats put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Well? Do I get the job?”

  Grinning like a dog—which was not surprising, for his source genome was entirely canine—Surplus stood, extending a paw. But Darger quickly got between him and the young woman, saying, “If you will pardon us for just a moment, Ms. Petticoats, my friend and I must consult for a moment in the back room. You may use the time to dress yourself.”

  When the two males were secluded, Darger whispered furiously, “Thank God I was able to stop you! You were about to enlist that young woman into our conspiracy.”

  “Well, and why not?” Surplus murmured equally quietly. “We were looking for a woman of striking appearance, not overly bound to conventional morality, and possessed of the self-confidence, initiative, and inventiveness a good swindler requires. Tawny comes up aces on all counts.”

  “Working with an amateur is one thing—but this woman is a professional. She will sleep with both of us, turn us against each other, and in the end abscond with the swag, leaving us with nothing but embarrassment and regret for all our efforts.”

  “That is a sexist and, if I may dare say so, ungallant slander upon the fair sex, and I am astonished to hear it coming from your mouth.”

  Darger shook his head sadly. “It is not all women but all female confidence tricksters I abjure. I speak from sad—and repeated—experience.”

  “Well, if you insist on doing without this blameless young creature,” Surplus said, folding his arms, “then I insist on your doing without me.”

  “My dear sir!”

  “I must be true to my principles.”

  Further argumentation, Darger saw, would be useless. So, putting the best possible appearance on things, he emerged from the back room to say, “You have the job, my dear.” From a jacket pocket he produced a silver-filigreed vinaigrette and, unscrewing its cap, extracted from it a single pill. “Swallow this and you’ll have the tattoo we require by morning. You’ll want to run it past your pharmacist first, of course, to verify—”