Firefly--The Magnificent Nine, page 2
Whenever anyone aired a grievance, Gillis would make sympathetic noises and promise to get to the bottom of the problem. Sometimes he even made good on the promise, which was rare in an elected official. He was generally well liked, which was rarer still in an elected official.
So it wasn’t a bad life, and Gillis had reason to be satisfied with his lot.
Until, that was, Elias Vandal came along.
The same Elias Vandal who was currently holding a knife on him.
For Gillis, and for the rest of the inhabitants of Coogan’s Bluff, Vandal and his Scourers had pretty much ruined everything.
***
Elias Vandal had a face like an unfinished meal. The right side of it was blemish-free; you might even say ruggedly good-looking. Unfortunately, the left side was such a mess, you hardly noticed the intact side.
Something had chewed, or burned, or clawed, or in some other manner ravaged the left side of Vandal’s face extensively. Now it was covered from temple to jawline in a mass of waxy tissue, like a flow of molten lava that had solidified. A twisted hammock of skin half hid his left eye, and the white of the eye itself was so bloodshot, it seemed inaccurate to refer to it as “the white” at all; it should have been “the red.” The left corner of Vandal’s mouth was drawn up in a perpetual sneer. The nostril above was broader than its counterpart on the right and puckered around the rim like a dog’s butthole.
Oddly, Vandal’s left ear had not been damaged during whatever heinous mishap had befallen him. Its flawlessness was marred only by the earring that dangled from its lobe. An earring that, unless fake, appeared to be fashioned from a genuine human knucklebone.
This was the face that now loomed before Gillis, while the knife pressed harder against the little dewlap of flab that hung below the mayor’s chin. A bead of blood welled at the knife’s tip, but Gillis barely felt the pinprick of pain. He was too mesmerized, and frightened, by Vandal’s face—and by the thought that it might be the last thing he ever saw.
“So let me get this straight,” Vandal snarled. “We came here, what was it? A month back? Somethin’ like that. And we had us a discussion, did we not? Did we not?”
Gillis, realizing that some form of response was being sought, nodded. Given the position of the knife blade, it was the tiniest of nods.
“We did,” said Vandal. “And what was the upshot of said discussion? Refresh my memory, Mr. Mayor.”
“I said…” Gillis’s mouth felt parched, his tongue like a dry sponge. Meanwhile the sweat continued to ooze from every pore, dampening his shirt collar and armpits. “I said I needed time. Weren’t a decision to be made lightly. I said I’d canvass opinion throughout town. Get some feedback. Let you know.”
“Let. Me. Know.” Vandal spun out the words slowly. “And here I am, ready to be let known. I’ve given you plenty of time, ain’t I? Given you all the time in the world to talk to these here good people.”
Vandal swept his free arm around, indicating the patrons of Billy’s Bar, who numbered perhaps twenty. All were staring at him and Gillis. None had taken so much as a sip of their drinks since Vandal and a half-dozen of his gang, the Scourers, had swaggered into the establishment a few minutes earlier. Each was watching their mayor squirm in Vandal’s grasp and quietly thanking the Lord that he or she wasn’t in Gillis’s shoes.
“Them and their kith and kin,” Vandal said. “Seems to me like you oughta got this all squared away by now. What’s there to quibble over? You have wells. Aquifers runnin’ hither and yon beneath the soil. Decent water supply. Enough to keep your crops irrigated and your whistles whetted. The kind thing to do—the right and proper thing to do—would be to share some a’ that bounty with folks less fortunate than yourselves. In that category I most surely do include my boys’n me.”
The Scourers jeered in agreement. One of them was behind the bar, having usurped the position of the bartender and owner, Billy Kurosawa. While Billy looked on helplessly, the Scourer was tucking into some of his best bourbon, necking the liquor straight from the bottle. Another of the Scourers was sat between an elderly married couple, Jake and Sally Buchholz, with an arm draped around the shoulder of each like he was their long-lost son or something. Mr. and Mrs. Buchholz sat stock still, with identical looks of frank terror on their faces.
“Now,” said Vandal to Gillis, “I made you what I would term a fine offer for full and exclusive ownership rights for the wells at Coogan’s Bluff. What offer did I make?”
“You told us we could sell them to you for zero credits,” said Gillis.
“Correct. The princely sum of zero credits. And in return, you’d start buying your water off me, every single drop of it. But that’s not all you’d get in return, is it now?”
“No.” Gillis shook his head, using the action as cover to put a sliver of distance between its blade edge and his skin. “No, you told us we’d get to keep our lives, too.”
Vandal grinned. Not all his teeth were present in his mouth, and those that remained were jagged, yellowed, fangsome things, dangling from his gums like stalactites. His breath would have made a sewer worker gag.
“Ask me, that’s a veritable bargain,” he said. “What’s there to dicker about?”
“Nothing. It’s just… Some things you can’t rush, Mr. Vandal. Big decisions like this, they take careful broaching. Finessing. I’ve not been able to speak to everyone yet. Some homesteaders around here, they live far out in the barrens or up in the hills. Not easy to reach. I need a little more time. A few days, is all.”
Vandal’s grin broadened, before abruptly vanishing.
Gillis knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was about to die. He prayed it would be quick. Vandal claimed to have been a Reaver once, however, and if there was one thing Reavers were renowned for, it was the agonizing slowness and disgusting humiliation of the deaths they inflicted.
“Hear that, boys?” Vandal said, addressing his Scourers. “Mr. Mayor here needs a few days. After all the many days we’ve already allowed him. Sound to you guys like a delaying tactic? Sure sounds to me like one.”
“N-No,” Gillis stammered. “I swear. Just got to do this right, you know what I mean? Spread the word. Let democracy take its course.”
Vandal reared back. Gillis winced in anticipation of the killing blow.
Suddenly the knife was no longer at his throat. Vandal was holding it up beside his own head. The weapon had a distinctively unusual shape. The blade was curved like a sickle. The polished-wood haft, not much thicker than the blade, completed the semicircle.
“Know what?” Vandal said. “Three days. That’s it. Three more days. That’s when we’ll be back next, at sunup, and by then you’d better have had formal papers drawn up, handing over the water rights. Else you’ll be seeing plenty of liquid, Mr. Mayor, but none of it the aqueous persuasion, if you get what I’m saying.”
“Blood,” said one of the Scourers, a huge, apelike ogre of a man. “He means blood.”
Vandal rolled his eyes. “He gorramn knows that, Shem, you backbirth. Don’t need it explaining to him.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Shem, it must be said, did not look like being the sparkliest firework in the display. His eyes were too close together, his ears too far apart. “I see. Gotcha, boss.”
Vandal helicoptered his arm in the air, and the Scourers made for the exit.
Just as Vandal was leaving, one of the townsfolk got to his feet, shoving back his chair with a scrape.
He was a frail old man, seventy if he was a day, thin as a twig. His skin looked as desiccated as the landscape surrounding Coogan’s Bluff.
“Now you listen here, you bastard,” said the old man, one Cecil Hanratty by name. He was the seniormost resident of the town, considered cantankerous by some, forthright by others. He had lived in Coogan’s Bluff practically since the place was founded. His age-faded eyes glittered. “You can’t take what ain’t rightfully your’n. Our water is ours. It belongs to us. It’s a gift given us by God, and we ain’t sharing it with no one, no how. ’Specially not some half-assed bullyboy like you.”
Vandal had halted in his tracks to listen, head canted to one side. He looked curious, almost resigned.
“You done, old-timer?” he said.
“No, I ain’t,” said Hanratty. “Alliance hears what you’re up to, Vandal, comin’ into half the settlements on Thetis and intimidatin’ your way into ownin’ their water, they’re going to send in Enforcement and they’re going to crush you and your band of halfwits like bugs.”
Vandal turned. “That a threat?”
“No, it’s a fact.”
“Seemed more like a threat, I’d say. And I don’t take kindly to threats. I’ll show you in a moment how unkindly I take to threats, but first let me address your point about the Alliance. Alliance don’t give two turds ’bout a boondocks planet like this. Alliance ain’t going to dispatch no cruiser, no shuttle, no gunship, no nothin’ to Thetis. Don’t matter how loudly you holler, it ain’t gonna happen. Your mayor here is well aware of that, ’cause otherwise he’d have sent ’em a wave already, and he hasn’t. May as well ask for divine intervention. It’s about as likely. Now…”
He tossed his knife in the air, making it somersault, catching it.
“As for them as threaten me…”
The knife somersaulted again.
Hanratty glared defiance at him.
Vandal swung his arm to the side, the knife leaving his grasp. It spiraled across the room in a perfect arc, whirling like a boomerang. And like a boomerang, it described a full circle and returned to its thrower’s hand, Vandal catching it dexterously by the haft.
Hanratty was still standing. The knife’s looping flight had taken it directly in front of him. It had seemed to pass him by, missing by a whisker.
Only it hadn’t missed.
Hanratty raised a trembling hand to his neck. A ribbon of blood sprouted across his throat at an acute angle. His expression was one of shock and incomprehension. He knew something had been done to him; he just couldn’t fathom what.
Then his head slid sideways, shearing away from his neck. It fell to the sawdust-strewn floor with a heavy thunk. His legs crumpled a split second after, his decapitated body collapsing backwards, blood spurting from severed arteries. There were shocked cries and gasps of horror from the locals.
Vandal flicked the knife so that the blood on its blade flew off. Three townspeople close by were spattered. They flinched and grimaced.
“I bid you all farewell,” Vandal said, with a courteous bow. “Three days. You better have what I want ready for me by then, or… well, I guess some of us don’t need to make threats, do we?”
He nodded over at Hanratty’s two-part corpse and sauntered outside.
***
Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to say anything. Everybody turned to Mayor Gillis.
“Miz McCloud’s gonna come through for us,” Huckleberry Gillis murmured, mostly to himself. “She’s got to.”
“Jayne Cobb,” said Temperance McCloud, a woman whom Jayne had not seen in fourteen years and who, back then, had gone by the name Temperance Jones.
He paused the recorded message so that he could study her face. An added wrinkle here and there, hair a little coarser and flecked with gray, but otherwise she was exactly as he remembered. Her eyes were still lively, green as jade and twice as lustrous. They were the eyes of a smart, wily woman. The mouth looked hard, but that was a mark of inner determination. Temperance—the Temperance he had known—was somebody who got what she wanted, more often than not through polite persuasion, but when polite persuasion failed, by force. Sometimes force of will, other times sheer brute force.
Jayne’s heart was beating with an odd rapidity. He felt a mite dizzy.
He unpaused the message.
“Kind of a blast from the past, huh?” Temperance McCloud-formerly-Jones went on. “I’m maybe the last person you expected to hear from again.”
“Damn straight,” Jayne said under his breath.
“I know it’s been a long time, Jayne. Heck of a long time. And I know things between us didn’t end exactly how either of us mighta preferred.”
Jayne did not comment on that, just pursed his lips tightly.
“It’s not like I cut and ran,” Temperance said. “May have seemed as I did, but that weren’t my intent. We were good together, you an’ me. So good. It’s just it was gettin’ too much for me. I was gettin’ a-scared. Of what I might be with you. Of how bein’ with you was makin’ me think of my future in new ways.”
She shook her head as though trying to shake loose the thoughts that were crowding into it.
“Look, I ain’t callin’ for to rake over old coals. God knows there ain’t no benefit for me in dragging up ancient history, and none for you neither. All I’ll say is when I think of us, I think of that ancient Earth-That-Was saying: ‘That is most precious which lasts least long.’ Heard that one? It’s kinda become the code I live by these days.”
“Maybe you do, Temp,” Jayne muttered. “Maybe the rest of us not so much. The rest of us, you have something precious, you hang on to it for as long as you can.”
“Jayne, the reason I’m reachin’ out to you now is… I need your help.”
Jayne looked hard at the videoscreen. He couldn’t tell whether he was angered or unsurprised.
“Now, I ain’t a woman who asks for help just any old how,” Temperance said. “If you recall anything ’bout me at all, you’ll recall that. I wouldn’t even be askin’ if it was just me involved. It ain’t. It’s others. Coupla hundred of us, all told. We’re in deep trouble, the kinda trouble the Feds’ll be no use settlin’. The kinda trouble that calls for a man of your talents, Jayne.”
“You mean my talent for bein’ your stooge, Temp?”
As though Temperance had anticipated him asking this question or one much like it, she said, “I ain’t talkin’ ’bout that first job you pulled for me, nor any of the others we did together, where you were the muscle and I was the brains. That was that. The Jayne Cobb I need now is the Jayne Cobb who was tricky and underhand and could think his way out of a bad situation when he knew he couldn’t fight his way out.”
Jayne was not sure if he recognized himself in that description. There might be some truth in it, but then Temperance wasn’t above massaging the facts and ladling on the flattery.
“I’m on Thetis these days, and we have ourselves a predicament here now. There’s a guy, name of Elias Vandal, who’s musclin’ in on our town, fixin’ to steal our water. Water’s all-important on Thetis. It’s the line between life and death. Vandal’s got a gang backin’ him up, call themselves the Scourers. He’s got ordnance and numbers. Most of all he’s got a reputation. A bad one. It’s his reputation as does most of the heavy lifting for him. Everybody round these parts is just about piss-your-pants terrified of him, and with justification. Vandal says jump, folks chuck themselves off a cliff. That bad of a reputation.”
Temperance hesitated. Her eyes widened. She gnawed her lip, seeming reluctant yet resigned.
“I need my boy named Jayne,” she said. “I need you to get together some people, some hired guns. I know you can. You have contacts. Leastways you used to, and I doubt as you’ve changed much in all this time. I need you to come to our rescue. No one in this town—Coogan’s Bluff, it’s called—has the testicular circumference to resist Vandal. We got a lily-livered mayor and a bunch of farmers who can handle a pitchfork but not a weapon in anger. I’ve tried mobilizing an opposition and ain’t had no joy. Vandal and his mob’re going to overrun us and take our water and our livelihoods and maybe our lives. I’m askin’ you—I’m beggin’ you—in the name of what you and I had, come and save us, Jayne. Please. We don’t have long. You’re our last, best hope.”
The message ended. The screen image froze on Temperance gazing imploringly out.
Jayne sat back. His mind was awhirl.
One phrase Temperance had said stood out above all the rest.
My boy named Jayne.
It had been a running joke between them. Temperance had teased Jayne constantly about his name. He had started out growling at her to stop going on about it. After a while, as she carried on, he only acted as if it annoyed him. Secretly he liked it.
***
Jayne met Temperance Jones at a dive bar on Persephone. He was just a kid back then, wet behind the ears but already garnering a name for himself in certain shady circles. It was said about Jayne Cobb that you could hire him to do anything you required, and you’d get what you paid for. As long as you paid, that is. If you didn’t cough up the credits, woe betide you. Jayne had a code of honor: you honored your side of a bargain, he’d honor his. You welched on a deal, though, and you’d better run, because no power in the ’verse would save you from his wrath.
His meeting with Temperance at the bar was no happy accident. She was looking for a man. Not in that way. She was looking for a man who would teach her soon-to-be-ex-husband Kelvin a lesson in how to treat a woman. The lesson was similar to the one Kelvin had been giving her during the six ugly months of their marriage, delivered with fist and foot, sometimes his belt.
Jayne was glad to take on the assignment. He didn’t tell Temperance why he needed credits so badly. He never told anyone. People did not need to know about his sick brother Matty and the medical bills that were crippling their mother. That kind of information a fella kept to himself, lest it be exploited as a weakness.
Besides, men who hit women were pretty high on Jayne’s scumbag list. It was the sort of job he might have done for free, if money weren’t such an issue for him.
And he could not deny that Temperance herself was a beguiling proposition. She was perhaps four or five years older than him and sophisticated, but with a ruthless streak. That and the black eye she was sporting made Jayne feel appreciative of her and protective. She was enough of a femme fatale and enough of a damsel in distress to make a young man’s head spin, although he would realize this only in hindsight.
