They
take her on her honeymoon.
The wedding was lovely, or as
lovely as it could have been with a couple that were more polite
acquaintances than anything else and two sets of in-laws as stuffy as
a dusty pile of money. They grab her when she sneaks out for a walk
one night, two men, beefy, not even bothered to arm themselves. Her
last thought before they shove the bag over her eyes is to wonder how
much this would ruin her parents' plans.
She comes to in a
small brick room on a sallow mattress, windowless and lit by a cool
yellow lamp. There's a man there, standing just outside the barred
door.
"Kelly Shale," he says, voice nasally, greasy
greying hair half-covering his forehead. She's not sure if it's a
question or a statement.
She counts the days by watching the
guards"one on day shift, one on night. They're probably the same
men who took her, but they stay too much out of her field of vision
to really tell. It takes until the third day for the woman to
come.
'Meil,' they call her. She's young, plain, dressed in
trousers. Her accent is vaguely Eastern European, Kelly hears them
saying something about contact, ransom, refusal to pay.
They
give her food, water, a blanket when the temperature drops one night.
She even gets a bathroom. The worst thing is the boredom, though she
has to admit that the previous days spent talking over dress patterns
and seating plans weren't really that much better.
Just
over a week crawls by before the police arrive, Kelly hears the
shouts and smashes from the floor above her head. Meil runs past the
room, and the man who she supposes is the boss unlocks the door.
"I
only have two," the woman grits out. Her right hand is wrapped
around the butt of a revolver. The man grunts, and Kelly only has
time to press herself against the rough wall before he's on her,
hands closing around her throat. She throws her weight back at him,
tumbling them both forward, but the iron band around her throat
doesn't let. There's a few endless seconds of need, pain,
burning--then an explosion racks down the corridor.
Meil
falls through the door-frame, gun clattering out of her hand and
skirting across the floor as the man's grip loosens in shock. Kelly
doesn't even think before she's wrenching free and heaving forward.
There's a bang, louder than she would have expected, but she hardly
hears it as her finger tightens on the trigger. The figure before her
crumples.
She stands slowly, taking a single step forward
before the pistol drops and she collapses back on the mattress. Her
vision is still fuzzy, breath straining as blood slowly pools at her
feet.
"One bullet left." Meil pulls herself up,
wiping at a dripping cut on her cheek as she reaches again for her
shooter. "We need to get out of here."
"Aren't
you going to kill me?"
There's a moment of stillness
before the woman lifts the weapon, pulls back the hammer, and aims
between Kelly's eyes.
And then another as the chamber clicks
empty.
"Guess not."
Footsteps thump out
across the passageway, spinning Meil around. She flips the cylinder
again and fires out the door, the crack of the gunshot ringing
through the small room.
They
end up squatting in some ranch outside the city. Kelly hasn't quite
worked out where she is, but it couldn't be too hard. It would be
simple to slip away down one of those dank alleys, find a law-man,
hope he doesn't smell the blood and the burning powder on her
hands.
That night she walks up to Meil and punches her square
in the mouth. It's not a good hit, she's never been taught to throw
her fist. It probably hurt her knuckles more than anything else.
The
other woman grins through her bloodied lip, and Kelly grins right
back.
Two
weeks later they grab the till from a general store. Not that much of
an effort, really, Kelly laughs as they walk away from the trembling
man curled up behind his counter.
"Yeah, that's a bit of
money," Meil says. Kelly snorts.
"No it's not. Wind
back time a bit I could have shown you a bit of money."
She
grabs a handful of notes and rips them into confetti before
scattering them on the dirt ground and tucking the gun into her
belt.
They
make headlines the first time they hit a merchant bank, two women
with a shotgun and bag of grenades, even Kelly doesn't find out until
afterwards that they were fake. Meil just laughs when she yells about
it back at the inn they're holding in.
"What if someone
tried something?"
"Well, they didn't."
"God's
sake, we're not immortal."
"We are for now."
Kelly
rips off her coat and lets it fall.
"Everyone gets beat,
Meil."
"Not me." Meil drops the bag of useless
baubles, stepping up and leaning forward to rest her elbows on the
windowsill. "No one's ever going to get me. No one. Because if
anyone ever does, I'll do it first."
She
finds out Meil's last name during one of the quiet times, smoking
together in a dingy motel room as they wait out their
chasers.
'Clark,' it turns out. "Unassuming, isn't it?"
And the accent's fake too, and pretty impressive if she says so
herself for a dame born and raised in Brighton.
"Ain't
got some sob-story drunk for father, w***e for a mother, any stupid
thing like that. It was my uncle who got mixed up with the crap. And
it wasn't like he forced me or anything. He wasn't even doing that
well, any kidnapper who gets himself shot by his captive wouldn't
be."
No one speaks for several minutes.
"I'm
sorry," Kelly whispers into to the quietness of the room. Meil
takes a long drag of her cigar.
"Don't be. Better you
than me."
The
first time she sees Meil cut a man's throat is something else. The
blood is gushing from the torn flesh, body slowly falling limp, and
Kelly doesn't really know how to feel.
"I would have
bailed you out, you know," she says far too casually. "Could
have even done it before anyone realised who you were."
Meil
just lets the sheriff's body fall and spits something about men who
don't know how to treat a woman right, not even a gun moll, not even
one with a knife in her hand.
They're
not rich, or anything close, not when they spend like they're
watering a bloody garden. Kelly imagines sometimes, what it could
have been like if her family had just paid that damn ransom she knew
they could afford. She pictures herself sitting in the living-room
with her husband, children beside her, the dinner she cooked on the
table. Playing the daughter, the wife, the mother, the woman. It
would be a easy life, where she didn't have to worry about the next
job, or wonder whether or not she'll have a head on her shoulders by
the end of the night, or think.
"Why?" she asks Meil
sometimes.
"Why not?"
And Kelly would look
down at the wound she was binding or the cash she was sorting or the
gun she was cleaning, and smile.
In
the end, they last almost three years.
The police catch up to
them as they're cracking into the goldsafe. Meil curses and ducks
under a desk, all the hostages are already tied up on the floor and
Kelly almost laughs out loud when she realises it was probably the
falling shadow that set them off.
She presses her back to the
wall, jarring her shoulder--still tender from a jewellery store hit
a few weeks back where she'd had to take a jump out a window.
Coldness seeps through the soft fabric of her shirt as she shoots her
shotgun empty.
They take Meil just as she gets off five. She's
only got the six-shooter, using her left and pressing her right
against where she's been hit in the side, when the gunfire suddenly
doubles. She's dead before she hits the ground.
They're
surrounded, Kelly knows. She takes three seconds to throw down her
gun and dive across the space, grunting as she feels a shot strike
home and shatter her hip. She looks over to where the revolver
fell.
She's surrounded.
"No one," she
breathes through clenched teeth.
The grip is already stained
with Meil's blood. The guns continue to echo as Kelly presses the
cool steel against her temple and flicks to the next chamber.
"One
bullet left."
She pulls the trigger.
It fires.
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