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“You aren’t going anywhere.” Auerbach opened the nightstand drawer, took out a.45, and stuck it in the waistband of his trousers. Then he pulled out another one and offered it to Penny. “You know how to handle it?”
“I know how,” she said. “I don’t need it. I’ve got a.357 magnum in my handbag. But I still ought to leave. What can you do if they pour gasoline all over the downstairs and toss in a match?”
“Not much,” he admitted. “You really made some people like you a hell of a lot, didn’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “If you leave, where will you go?”
“Somewhere,” Penny said. “Anywhere. Someplace where those bastards can’t find me. I’ve got plenty of money-not enough to make ’em happy, but plenty. You’ve seen that.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Rance agreed. “It doesn’t do a dead person much good, though. How long can you last on the run? You’ve got no place to run to, and you know it. You may as well stay here. You’ll have somebody to cover your back.”
Penny stared at him, then looked away. “God damn you, Rance Auerbach, you just made me want to cry, and I haven’t come close to doing that in more years than you can shake a stick at. The crowd I’ve been running with isn’t what you’d call chock full of gentlemen.”
“Gentleman, hell.” Auerbach felt himself flushing; he hadn’t been so embarrassed since the day he’d found out where babies came from. “All I am is a broken-down, busted-up cavalry captain who knows better than to let his troops get out of line.”
Penny Summers came to attention and saluted, which jerked startled laughter out of Rance. “Call it whatever you want to call it, then. I don’t care. But I don’t want to get you into trouble on account of me.”
“You won’t,” he answered. “Worst thing your pals can do is kill me, and two weeks out of every month I’d reckon they were doing me a favor if they did the job. I haven’t been afraid of anything since the night the Lizards shot me. Oh, I know how that sounds, but it’s the Lord’s truth.”
“I believe you,” Penny said. “I nursed you back then, remember? I changed your bandages. I looked underneath. I know what they did to you. It’s a miracle you aren’t pushing up a lily somewhere in Colorado.”
Cautiously, he touched his shattered leg. “If this here’s a miracle, God’s got a nasty sense of humor,” he said. He glanced toward her. “You gave me the bedpan, too.”
“When you needed it.”
He laughed his ruined laugh. “Every once in a while, you made like you were giving me the bedpan and then you did something else instead.”
“When you needed it,” Penny repeated in exactly the same tone of voice. Mischief sparked in her eyes. “You think you need it now?” This time, she was the one who didn’t wait for an answer. She set a hand on his chest and pushed. He didn’t have much in the way of balance, not with one wrecked leg he didn’t. In spite of flailing his arms, he went over on his back onto the bed.
Penny crouched above him. She undid his belt, she unzipped his fly, and she pulled down his chinos and his briefs. Then she took him in hand and bent her head low. “Jesus!” he said hoarsely as her mouth came down on him, hot and wet. “First time you did that, they set off an explosive-metal bomb outside of Denver just when I was shooting my load.”
“Sweetheart”-she looked up again for a moment-“when I’m through with you, you’re going to feel like they set off an explosive-metal bomb inside of you.” After that, she stopped talking for the next few minutes. And she turned out to be exactly right.
She went into the bathroom to wipe off her chin. Auerbach went in himself after she came out. When he emerged, he had a cigarette going. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “Damn things are hell on your wind,” he said, “but I don’t have much wind anyhow. And I like ’em.”
“You had enough wind there,” Penny said. “Let me have one of those, will you?” He tossed her the pack and a book of matches. After she lit her cigarette, she smoked it in quick, nervous puffs.
Auerbach sat down on the bed. His breath caught as his leg twinged when he shifted position, but he didn’t feel too bad once he’d stopped moving. He laughed a little. Maybe afterglow was good for aches and pains. He wished he were able to experiment more often. Had he been younger, he could have.
But afterglow lasted only so long and meant only so much. After he stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray made from the casing of a five-inch shell, he said, “I didn’t want to pry too much before, but now that they know you’re here, I reckon I’ve earned the right to know: just who are they, anyway?”
By the way she nodded, Penny had been expecting the question. “Yeah, you’ve got the right to know,” she agreed. “Like I pretty much said, I was a go-between for some ginger smugglers. Ginger’s not illegal here-I don’t think it’s illegal anywhere people still run their own affairs.”
“It’s sure as hell illegal everywhere the Lizards run things, though,” Rance said.
“Oh, I know that,” Penny said. “I didn’t have any trouble. Lizards don’t know everything there is to know about searching people, especially women. So I delivered the goods, and the Lizards paid me off, and…” She laughed out loud. “And I decided to go into business for myself.”
“Did you?” Auerbach asked. “That’s not quite what you said when you showed up on my doorstep, you know. No wonder they aren’t very happy with you.”
“No wonder at all,” Penny agreed. “But I decided to take a chance. I didn’t know if I’d ever get another one, you know what I mean? So I kept the money. Those people can do without it a hell of a lot better than I can. The only thing I wish is that they never got wise to me.”
“I believe that.” Auerbach’s comment was completely matter-of-fact. Only after he’d spoken did he wonder how he’d come to take thieving and everything that went with it so much for granted. This wasn’t the life he’d had in mind when he went off to West Point. He’d always known he might die for his country. The idea had never fazed him. But getting shot up and discarded as useless, left to live out the rest of his days as best he could-that had never crossed his mind, not then. “God damn the Lizards,” he repeated, this time for a different reason.
“Amen,” Penny said, “I wish there had been some way for me to give ’em poison to taste instead of ginger.”
“Yeah.” But thinking of the Lizards one way made Rance think of them another way. “Christ! Those damn chameleon-faces aren’t going to come after you along with the real people you stiffed, are they?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t think so, though. They’ve got enough trouble telling one p
erson from another one, and they hadn’t seen me all that often.” She lit another cigarette. Rance watched her cheeks hollow as she sucked in smoke. They’d hollowed the same way while she’d been… She forced his mind back onto the Lizards, saying, “If they’d been after me, they’d have blown up this apartment house instead of the airfield outside of town.”
“Different batch of Lizards,” he said, before realizing she already knew that. He chuckled. “Okay. A.45’ll stop those bastards, too, believe you me it will-knock ’em ass over teakettle. Your gun’ll do the job on a Lizard, probably better than it would on a person.”
“I can take care of myself,” Penny said. He just looked at her and didn’t say anything. Under the rouge on her cheeks, she got redder still. If she’d been so sure she could take care of herself, she wouldn’t have come to him for help. She stubbed out the cigarette, a sharp, savage gesture. “Well, most of the time I can take care of myself, goddammit.”
“Sure, babe. Sure.” Auerbach didn’t want to argue with her. He hadn’t particularly wanted her here-she’d walked out on him, after all, and never looked back: never till she needed him again, anyhow. Now she’d walked back in without a backwards glance, too, and he’d discovered he was glad she had. In crassest terms, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d got so much.
“We’re all right, the two of us,” she said, as if she’d picked the thought out of his back pocket. “We’re both a couple of wrecks, and we deserve each other.”
“Yeah,” he said, one more time. But there was a difference, and he knew it even if she didn’t. He’d been wrecked. If the Lizards hadn’t done their best to kill him, he’d probably be a colonel by now, maybe even a brigadier general if he caught some breaks along the way. Penny, now, Penny had wrecked herself. Even after she’d left him, she could have settled down. He’d always figured she had. But no-and so she was here with him.
She said, “The Lizards didn’t do that much harm, not when you look at the whole country. Things’ll be all right. And when you look at you and me, things’ll be all right there, too, for as long as we want ’em to be.”
