Free Clementine by Cherie Priest Page B

helped himself to the coffee (a quarter a cup, or a dollar for the whole carafe) and to the breakfast (a dollar a plate, and his men had already eaten theirs).
    As he sat on the edge of the bed and made short work of the offerings, he told them about the note and the warning.
    Lamar twisted his mouth into a frown and said, “That don’t make any sense. Who would hire the Pinks to come after us?”
    “I don’t know,” Hainey said around a mouthful of eggs. “It’s bothering me too. God knows we didn’t hire ’em, and who on earth gives a good goddamn if the Free Crow gets stolen, except for us?”
    Simeon shrugged and said, “Nobody, except whoever stole it.”
    The captain pointed his fork at the first mate and said, “Exactly. That’s all I can figure, anyway. Except at first, I was bothered because of the money. It costs money to hire the Pinks and get them to act as your enforcers. You’d think that people with money could just buy or build their own aircraft; but then I got thinking.”
    “Uh oh,” Simeon grinned.
    “What I got thinking is this: The Free Crow was the strongest bird of her kind in the northwest territories—or at least, she’s the toughest engine anywhere close to Seattle. And I don’t think I flatter myself too much when I say that nobody in his right mind would swipe that ship out from under me for no good reason at all; so all I can figure is, this must’ve been a crime of opportunity. Somebody out west needed that ship to perform a specific task.”
    “What kind of task?” Simeon asked, tipping half a cup of coffee into a tin and taking a sip.
    Lamar answered thoughtfully, before the captain could reply. “Something heavy. Someone needed our bird to move something really, really heavy from northwest to southeast.”
    Hainey set the fork down on the edge of his plate, and Simeon froze with his cup at the edge of his lips in order to ask, “How’d you come to that conclusion?”
    The engineer said, “Ain’t you seen her flying? She’s weighed down with something, and weighed down bad. Otherwise, we could’ve never stayed as close behind her as we’ve been doing so far. She ought to have outpaced that nameless bird by a week, but she’s never got more than half a day on us. And when she moves, she looks like she’s carrying so much cargo that she can’t hardly lift herself up.”
    Hainey took one more bite and chewed it slow, before saying, “Which means she picked up something in Seattle, because she didn’t have anything but a few crates of guns when we lost her. All right, it’s coming together now. So Felton Brink, may he rot in hell, he takes the Free Crow because he has something heavy he needs to move—and ours is the only engine tough enough to carry it.”
    “And whatever it is,” Simeon concluded, “it’s important enough for somebody to put the Pinks on our tail in order to keep us from taking it back. But who? Where’s Brink taking our bird?”
    Lamar’s frown deepened. “The Pinks do a lot of work for the military, don’t they? The Union uses them to shut down draft riots, and move money around. I’ve read about it, here and there.”
    Simeon said, “So the Union could sure as hell afford to pay the Pinks.”
    “But that doesn’t mean they’re behind this,” Hainey was quick to say. “They might be, sure. It might be worth our time to ask around, if we can. But we’ll have to balance our time real careful. If we’re going to stay on the Free Crow ’s trail, we need to get ourselves together, swipe that Union bird, and get back in the air.”
    “Sounds like a plan to me,” the first mate declared. He down-ed the last of his coffee and left the tin cup sitting on the basin.
    Hainey stood up and pulled a shirt over his undershirt, then reached for his sharp blue coat. “Let’s see about the horses and that rotten coach, and head out to the service yards. We don’t have all day before the Pinkerton op finds his way into town, and I’d