Emma Bull - Bone Dance

Frances took a step forward—no, it was a stagger, a widening of an unstable stance—and flung her left hand up to her face. The pistol wobbled and sank. Cassidy, glancing at Tom, moved toward her. Then the hand over her face dropped, and showed the blackness of her eyes, and her clenched teeth. She brought the end of the silencer to bear on Cassidy. I heard Dana suck her breath in; but Cassidy stepped back.

Tom had used Mick, the shock of him, to break Frances’s concentration. Then he’d struck at her, hard enough to cut her loose, for a moment, from her muscles. But Frances was in fragile command of herself now, and Tom stood relaxed for the first time since Frances had come into the room. He’d struck and let her go. It was a gesture of contempt.

Mick looked like someone enduring the course of a natural disaster. His once-neat braids were coming loose, coils and streaks of hair stuck in the sweat on his forehead and jaw, and his clean-lined features were marked with weariness and emotion. Sweat striped and dotted the chest of the T-shirt he wore. He must have come from the island on foot, and quickly. At Tom’s command. His hands opened and closed at his side. “Guilty,” he said softly, looking at Frances. And, in an echo of himself, “My family was in Galveston.”

“I was going to tell you,” said Frances. Her eyes were on his face; her voice was low and unsteady. “By deed, if not by word. Feel free to reproach me, but you won’t catch up to what I’ve done to myself. I’ve had more time, after all. But what about you? What will you have to reproach yourself for?”

“You ought to die.” Mick sounded half strangled.

“So should your ally, here. Leave us out of it. You didn’t inform Tom of my arrival out of sheer righteous indignation. Christ, I wish you had. Then maybe you’d have kept all these civilians out of range of my comeuppance. Besides, Tom hadn’t told you I was one of the ones responsible for the Bang, had he? He wanted me to convict myself. He knew you’d hurt more that way. So why did you tell him we were coming? What superior philosophy made it necessary to warn the snake about the scorpion?”

Mick was silent.

“Or was it not philosophy at all?” Her voice was softer now. “You can walk away from him, Mick. Now. I can hold him that long. Take Sparrow and get away from here. There’s nothing he can do to you. If he told you otherwise, it was a lie.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Tom broke in, cheerful. “Ol’ Skin, his experience tells him different.”

“I tried,” Mick said. “He sent Myra and Dusty after me. I dumped my body and rode Sparrow, figuring I could hide out that way, just until things cooled down. But they found me. I got away from them, but I think I was supposed to. He can find me anytime he wants, Fran, and now he can find Sparrow, too.”

“No,” Frances said, and in her voice was the deep sadness I’d heard when she’d told Dusty, I have a damnably long memory. “He just has a hold on you. The longer you stay, and the more dirty things you do for him, the better the hold will be.”

But I had looked up, uncontrollably, at Tom.

“That’s right,” said Tom, to me. “Mick got you away from them the first time I sent my kids. No love lost between Mick and Myra and Dusty, I’ll tell you. The second time, Franny got you away. But while that was going on, I’d sent Mick himself.”

Mick, in the archives, saying, I came back for my jacket.

“You bastard, that’s not true,” Mick said. “You didn’t send me.”

“That got a little screwed up,” Tom continued, as if Mick had never spoken. “Worked out all right in the end, though. I’ve never been able to get anybody on that goddamn island before.”

This time there was no protest from Mick.

“My God,” Frances sighed, “can you hear yourself? Playing Ming the Merciless, gloating over your explanations to the captive hero?”

Tom looked surprised. “Who says you’re the hero?”

“ I do. How can you be so small, Tom O’ Bedlam? How can you have lived so long, and still be so small?”

“I run a city,” he said, his lip curled. “You’re just a little killer.”

She looked mildly insulted. “I’m seeking vengeance for the whole Western Hemisphere. I think that’s positively grandiose.”

Tom leaned into the cushions of the couch and smiled. “Hell, I missed you, Franny. I’d have elected you Goddess.”

“Don’t start,” Frances said softly.

“It don’t hurt to ask. There’s enough here for two of us.” His voice, too, was soft. Albrecht, in the act of pouring himself another drink, made a little noise and turned. “Fran, I know you. I know you better’n anybody. I know Skin here thinks he’s got your number, but he’s just a goddamn puppydog.” And that made Mick flinch, and look to Frances. “But it could be the good old days all over again. I know what you want, Franny.”

His voice, his face, had turned surprisingly sweet. Frances watched him gravely, the line of her dark brows straight, her lips pressed tightly together. The head fight was over. This was the clean, insidious pressure of words and a shared past.

The rest of us sat or stood quite still, waiting for our futures to be decided. I had seen Albrecht’s face when Tom proposed to turn half his city into a courting gift. I had seen Mick’s face. Mick, who a few hours ago had made love to Frances. Cassidy’s expression was of uncomprehending, enduring despair, the look of a man who didn’t expect things to ever be good again. And Dana, beside me, might have been carved out of ice. She hadn’t raised her eyes from the Chinese table since Frances’s pistol had pointed at Cassidy. There was no blood under her faint tan, and her fingers twisted and ground at the silk over her knees.

Chango, was I going to go quietly to the slaughterhouse? My side had the gun. If my side was still on my side. I wanted out of here. She wanted… something.

“I don’t understand,” I said in as conversational a tone as I was capable of. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, besides a change of subject. “Why did you decide you had to bring me in?”

Tom paced slowly to the other couch, and sat down. He was at right angles to me now, and his right knee brushed my left one. A smile grew on his face, in increments. “Because Mick said you were a good fit. He and Franny must have told you all the fun we used to have? I wanted a taste.”

“Take a bite of this, then,” said Frances calmly. She raised the pistol in both hands, firing position. The silencer had a perfectly round black eye that looked into mine.

I wanted to scream. I moved instead. Before I knew I meant to, I found myself rolling over the back of the couch and breaking for the door that Cassidy guarded. The gun made an ugly, flat sound. Cassidy reached the door first—and yanked it open. “Go!” he mouthed. His hollowed-out face was twisted with anguish, like a man facing the medusa. I’d have to take him with me. Otherwise Tom Worecski would dissect him alive, and Cassidy knew it. I grabbed his arm as I hit the door.

It turned into a snake, strong and contrary. No, still an arm, but twisting through mine, jerking it up until my shoulder joint blossomed with fire. His other arm closed around my jaw. He giggled next to my ear.

I couldn’t see him, but I could see the part of the room I’d just left. Frances stood with her gun not quite aimed at us, wearing a near cousin to Cassidy’s expression. Dana, half crouched on the sofa, stared wide-eyed at us. Albrecht had pressed back against the wall, his hands over his face. Mick was still in the office door, one arm reaching, as if he could stop whatever was about to happen. And Tom was sitting, empty, on the couch.