“Might makes right, huh?”
He shrugged. “The end justifies the means or whatever cliché works for you, kid.”
“None of it works for me! People have to be treated fairly and justly—no exceptions.”
“Now, don’t get all messianic on me,” he chided.
“Or Marxist?” I snarled.
“Jesus, Marx… fucking Jew bleeding hearts.”
I shut up. Anything else Domino had to say on that or any other subject wasn’t something I needed to hear.
Domino kept me with him most of the day. After finishing his lecture on how things worked, he took me around the operation to see it all in action. It was pretty educational, if not always in the way he intended. Domino may have been convinced there was no right or wrong, but my conviction of the opposite grew a little stronger. I was stuck in the Land of the Dead just the same as he was, so I can’t claim to have been a better person; but as I listened to him and watched how he treated his ‘pigeons’, I realized there was a difference between us. As badly as I had lived my life, I wasn’t the sort who would knock a little guy down and then ride him for falling to the ground. Small as it was, that difference was important to me. There wasn’t much else I could take comfort in, in those days, and I’ll tell you that as many times as you can stand.
One other source of irritation, one that intensified all of my other woes, was that it took Chepito forever to get me a gun. The man swore up and down he was working on it, and I took him at his word since I could trust his greed for what I had in that sack, but if Domino was giving me tension headaches with his lectures in amorality, then Meche was giving me migraines. For one thing, she made it hard to even talk to her. She kept up her ice queen act and she kept bringing up that damned gun.
“Ready to turn over your heater?” she’d ask, or something like that, whenever I showed my face in her office.
“I would if I had one, baby,” I said, not that she ever believed me. I can’t say I blamed her, considering how our first meeting had turned out, but her attitude was giving me more trouble than I needed.
Once, when Domino was nowhere around, I tried to break her reserve with the news that was making me want to pop.
“I found a vessel!” I said.
“How?” she asked, coolly disinterested. “Did you pull an inner tube out of the big crane wheels?”
“No, Glottis found it when he—”
For an instant, Meche was what I thought of as her normal self. “Glottis is alive!?” she interrupted excitedly.
“Yeah! He—inner tube?”
But the moment passed. She told me not to make ‘jokes’ about escaping. The kids might believe me. Which was sort of a good point, actually, not that I intended to even mention the ship to those diablos. I wouldn’t have wanted them to get all worked up before it was time to go. That would have been a sure way to get Domino suspicious.
For similar reasons I kept away from the ship after that first visit. For the most part, I stayed were there wouldn’t be a problem if Domino found me. I also wanted to be sure he wouldn’t have any trouble finding me. I didn’t want him to have any reason to exert himself or his suspicions. There wasn’t anything I could do to help the work, anyway. Glottis was the master, and any help he needed he could get from the mechanically-skilled prisoners and the remnants of the ship’s crew. I would only blow the whole scam if I was found anywhere other than where I was supposed to be.
One evening, as he marched out of the sea with the others, Chepito gave me the good news. He pulled me into deeper shadows beside a shed on the fringes of the compound—kind of pointless since he dispelled all shadows—and said, “Here’s your new best friend,” as he pulled a wicked-looking semi-automatic from his tattered clothing. I handed over the swag. “Nice doin’ business with you, Cap’n,” he said and went on his way. He started laughing before he got out of earshot. He probably figured he suckered me.
I checked over the gun. It was a little different from what I was used to. Since it fired chemical darts, it used a gas cylinder which made it feel more like a toy than a real weapon, but it was free of rust and it worked. I made sure it wasn’t loaded and that the chamber was empty, then tried cocking it and pulling the trigger a few times. It popped in a reassuring way. I didn’t want to hand Meche an obvious dud. If she took it as a sign of trust, then it was worth what I paid Chepito.
I went to find Meche. It was early enough that she should still have been in her office. She was, putting away the day’s busywork.
“Here,” I said, handing her Chepito’s gun butt first. “What good’s a relationship without trust?”
“True,” she said, taking the gun with one hand while seeming to make some kind of adjustment to her hat with the other. “A relationship without trust is like a gun without bullets.”
I was in a car wreck once. It happened in an instant, but once I saw it coming time slowed to a crawl. The same thing happened when Meche took a sproutella dart from her hat band and loaded it into the gun. It must have taken just a fraction of a second, but it seemed like five minutes as I stood there slack-jawed, unable to believe what I was seeing.
Meche kicked her chair away as she stood up and pointed the gun at my face. “Guess you didn’t realize a smart girl always keeps an extra round in her hat for mad days,” she snarled. She waved the gun minutely toward the inner door. “Get moving!”
“Meche,” I said desperately, “you don’t know wha—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she snapped. “Move!”
“Meche, if you’d just lis—”
“Enough, Manny!” She gave me a hard shove toward the door with her free hand.
“If you’d just listen to my escape plan first…” I said as she drove me into Domino’s office.
When we came in, me with my hands in the air and Meche pushing me along with the muzzle of the gun, Domino seemed more amused than alarmed. “Trouble in paradise, kiddos?” he drawled with a hint of a chuckle.
“You’re letting us go right now,” Meche said, jabbing the back of my skull with her new cannon, “or your boy Friday here gets it!”
Domino got up from behind his desk. He moved around the perimeter of the room, seeming to keep away from us while actually getting closer. Meche didn’t seem to notice. “Well, I hate to see you go, Manny,” he said insincerely, “but the ‘lady’ does seem to have made up her mind.”
“I’m serious,” Meche insisted. “I’ll shoot him!” She again jabbed the muzzle of the gun, hard, into the back of my skull for emphasis.
“So go ahead and shoot him, you sainted bitch!” Domino snapped. I felt the gun drop away from my skull. “The pinko bastard doesn’t really work for me, anyway.”
“But… but I thought…” Meche stammered, confused. She stepped uncertainly forward, coming between me and Domino. She looked at me, the light seeming to dawn, then back at Domino. “I’ll shoot you, then.”
But as she brought the gun up, Domino jumped forward to grab her wrist and wrench her arm behind her back. “No, you won’t,” he said softly, as to a lover, into her ear hole, “you’re too good, remember?” He gave her arm a savage twist—Meche gasped in pain—grabbed the gat with his other hand as it fell and pocketed it. He propelled her toward the door.