Bone Dance

“We been through this before. I need you like a goddamn dog needs shoes, A.A. I figured if I let you run all the little shit, it would keep you out of my way. But if that’s not workin’ anymore, I can find some other asshole to run the little shit. So you just sit behind your big desk and buy movies that you think’ll help you get rid of me, and stay the fuck out of my way.”

He was stroking Dana absently, as if she were a cat on his lap. She had her face turned into his shoulder; whatever expression was there, none of us could see it. Albrecht watched Tom and Dana with a look that reminded me a little of Cassidy. I was glad I had my back to Cassidy.

“It’s not Hellriders,” I said to Albrecht.

“Nobody ever thought it was,” said Tom. “But we didn’t want to discourage you right off, if you thought you needed an excuse to come up.” He frowned over Dana’s head, and gazed around the room as if he missed something. “So where’s Her Highness?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t fuck with me. You know what I’m talking about.”

My hands closed in reflex over my knees. The right one hurt.

He saw it; it made him happy again. “Well, shit, Myra and Dusty work for me, you know. When Fra

“She told you who it was?”

“She didn’t have to. Dusty told me some of the stuff Myra said when she wasn’t Myra, and I knew right off. There ain’t anybody jaws on like that but Fra

That didn’t explain how he knew someone had come up with me, or how he knew I wasn’t really there to sell A.A. Albrecht a faked videotape. The only thing that did -

“I expect she’s listening at a keyhole,” Tom said cheerfully. He stared at me as he added, louder, “So, Fran? You come in here, or I’m go

Maybe she wouldn’t care. But I thought I ought to tell her, at least, that he hadn’t started yet. “I’d hate that,” I said. “Besides, you haven’t finished my hand.” Stall. You’ve lost the advantage of surprise, Frances. At least pick your moment.

“Thatagirl,” Tom called out, “come on in and have a seat. Hell, we got us enough folks for a party.”

I twisted around on the couch. The door beside Cassidy swung slowly open to admit Frances, alone, with her pistol. Why hadn’t she shot — ah, of course. She wasn’t here to kill Tom’s body. The head fight had begun already; I could see it in Frances’s tight-closed lips, the net of squint lines around Tom’s eyes.

I wanted desperately to know the range of a Horseman’s powers. Because I’d thought of another solution to the problem of isolating Tom Worecski. Frances could eliminate Tom’s options for switching bodies. Bang, bang, bang. Bang. Maybe she’d meant to all along, and it was my bad luck I’d ended up here, as one of Tom’s options.

“Someone gave us away,” I said to Frances.

“I was begi

By logic, someone in the room ought to have wrenched it out of her hand by now. No, if anyone approached her, anyone who wasn’t Tom, she could shoot. Tom could order one of them to get the gun. I began to think I ought to be doing something besides sitting and watching, but what could I do? I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t part of this fight. It had nothing to do with me. I was caught between the two of them.

“Go sit beside your friend, babe,” Tom said, and Dana let go of him. Her face, when she had her back to Tom, was vacant with fear. She sat down close to me and clung to my sleeve, where Tom couldn’t see it.

“Put it down, Fra

“Oh, I don’t know. A loud noise, some nasty stains — it would have a certain nostalgia value at the very least.” The room was cool, but there was a light gloss of sweat above Frances’s eyebrows.

“Huh. I thought they were the good old days. But I figured you’d got religion or something. All the fun we used to have, and here you are, with a self-righteous stick up your ass, out to blow my brains out for bein’ just as bad as you.” He took a step forward, gri

I’d heard that before, from Mick about Frances. She’d denied it. And I remembered what Tom Worecski’s death sentence was for. I must have moved; Tom’s gaze flicked to me and back to Frances.

“You didn’t tell anybody?” he said. “Oh, my. Let you who are without sin cast the first stone.”

Frances also gri

Tom snorted. “You loved it. You always figured you had a right to run the world. You thought being part of the committee that was go

“That’s not true.” Frances spoke without heat, as if he’d misstated the time and she was correcting that. But the heat was there, underneath, unspoken, a slow tide of it. “You had to lie to get me to sign on. You never once pla

“Shit, Fra

“A loner to the very end.” Her right hand was trembling, barely.

“Is it true?” Tom asked the air. “Was she really pure as the driven snow, even though she executed half the damn launch sequence her own self?”

“We were supposed to hold and wait to abort,” Frances snapped, her face white. Some of it was surely whatever Tom was doing to her head. But she looked like a woman watching a rerun of her worst nightmare. She had done it. She had lived with it all these decades. And she’d dedicated herself to seeing that the people who’d shared the blame wouldn’t live with anything anymore. I’d been right all the time, to be afraid of her.

“I’ll bet the jury’s done deliberating,” Tom said. “Awful sorry I couldn’t get twelve of ’em, but one good one oughta be enough for this. Whattaya say, Skin? I

In Albrecht’s darkened office, someone moved hesitantly toward the door. It was Mick Ski

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?”