The Merchant’s War

"I don't know! I was only following orders!" Miriam ducked round the side of the station house again, glancing in through the windows. She saw an empty waiting room furnished only with a counter, beyond the transom of which was an evidently empty ticket office. It's not the. station, she realized, near-hysteria bubbling under.

"Into the waiting room," she snapped, bringing the revolver out of her pocket. "Move!"

The inspector stared at her dumbly, as if she'd grown a second head, but Erasmus nodded: "Do as she says," he told the man. The inspector shuffled into the wailing room. Erasmus followed, his movements almost bored, but his right hand never left the man's shoulder.

"How long 'til they get here?" Miriam demanded.

"I don't know!" He was nearly in tears. "They just said to make you wait!"

"They," said Erasmus. "Who would they be?"

"Please don't kill me!"

The door to the ticket office was ajar. Miriam kicked it open and went through it with her pistol out in front. The office was indeed empty. On the ticket clerk's desk a message flimsy was waiting. Miriam peered at it in the gloom. DEAR CUZ SIT TIGHT STOP UNCLE A SENDS REGARDS STOP WILL MEET YOU SOONEST SIGNED BRILL.

Well, that settles it. Miriam lowered her gun to point at the floor and headed back to the waiting room.

"- The Polis!" moaned the inspector. "I've got three wee ones to feed! Please don't-"

Shit, meet fan. Even so, it struck her as too big a coincidence to swallow. Maybe the. Polis are tapping the wires? That would do it. Brilliana had figured out where she was, which train she was on, and signaled her to wait, not realizing someone else might rise to the bait.

Burgeson's expression was grim. "Miriam, the door, please."

"Let's not do anything too hasty," she said. "There's an easy way out of this." "Oh please-"

"Shut up, you. What do you have in mind?"

Miriam waved at the ticket office. "He's not lying about my cousin: she's on her way. Trouble is, if we bug out before she gets here she's going to walk into them. So I think we ought to sit tight." She closed the door anyway, and glanced round, looking for something to bar it with. "I can get us both out of here in an emergency," she said, a moment of doubt cutting in when she recalled the extreme nausea of her most recent attempts to world-walk.

The first car- more like a steam-powered minivan, Miriam noted-rounded the back of the station and disappeared from sight. Almost two minutes had passed since they reached the station. Miriam slid aside from the windows, while Burgeson did likewise. Boots thudded on the ground outside: the only sounds within the building were the pounding of blood in her ears and the quiet sobbing of the ticket inspector.

"Mr. Burgeson!" The voice behind the bullhorn sounded almost jovial: "And the mysterious Mrs. Fletcher! Or should I say, Beckstein?" He made it sound like an accusation. "Welcome to California! My colleague Inspector Smith has told me all about you both and I thought, why, we really ought to have a little chat. And I thought, why not have it somewhere quiet-like, and intimate, instead of in town where there are lots of flapping ears to take note of what we say?"

Across the room, Burgeson was mouthing something at her. His face was in shadow, making it hard to interpret. The inspector knelt in the middle of the floor, in a square of sunlight, sobbing softly as he rocked from side to side wringing his hands. The appearance of the Polis had quite unmanned him.

"Like this: parlez vous Francoise, Madame Beckstein?"

Miriam felt faint. They think I'm a French spy? Either the heat or the tension or some other strain was plucking her nerves like guitar strings. Somehow Erasmus had fetched up almost as far away as it was possible to get, twelve feet away across open ground overlooked by a window. To get him out of here one or the other of them would need to cross that expanse of empty floor, in front of-

The ticket inspector snapped, flickering from broken passivity to panic in a fraction a second. He lurched to his feet and ran at the window, screaming, "Don't hurt me!"

Erasmus brought his right hand up, and Miriam saw the pistol in it. He hesitated for a long moment as the inspector fumbled with the window, throwing it wide and leaning out. "Let me -" he shouted: then a spatter of shots cracked through the glass, and any sense of what he had been trying to say.

The bullhorn blared, unattended, as the inspector's body slumped through the half-open window and Miriam, seeing her chance, ducked and darted across the room, avoiding the lit spaces on the floor, to fetch up beside Burgeson.

"I think they want you alive," he said, a death's-head grin spreading across his gaunt cheekbones. "Can you get yourself out of here?"