Chapter 16

And that is how my life of crime began.

I'm being dramatic, but not entirely so.

Coot, Bear, and I hit the job market hard and to be honest, it wasn't that exciting. The man in the post office kept giving us escort jobs and we got good enough at those that I stopped broadcasting so that I didn't bore my audience.

To be completely honest, it also felt like we weren't leveling quickly at all.

I had said as much when we were collecting goods in between missions.

"Legit jobs don't pay like crime," Coot said it in a way that made it sound like something everyone knew. While common sense in the real world would have made that obvious, I was still new enough that I didn't expect all the rules to be the same.

Sometimes a person just needs things spelled out for them.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Bear was digging through his bag but answered for the old man.

"We can get jobs that are illegal in nature, but they pay better."

I pointed at the idiot we had been getting the escort missions from. "From him?"

Bear laughed and put his bag away. "No, that guy just hands out the escort jobs. We need to find a guy, same icon as him, but in a place more out of the way. Not," he looked up, indicating the post office we were standing in, "here."

"Why is this the first you guys have said about it?" I think I knew the answer, and wasn't as annoyed as I expected to be when Bear said it.

"You just said you wanted to be the hero of Easter," the big man shrugged. "That and it crime jobs hurt reputation."

He had me there. I had been trying to be popular thinking having the town on my side would make defending them easier. What I hadn't expected was that being noble meant I wasn't going to get leveled up as quickly as I was hoping.

"For better or worse," Coot said, "you live in a video game called 'Wicked West.' There ain't no good guys here, just bad guys and not-so-bad-guys. You might scare some folk by taking on morally destitute work, but that's easy enough to fix."

"What does that mean?" I asked. "Your reputation is your bond. If I murder someone who didn't have it coming to them, people won't forget that."

Coot let out a little chuckle. "In the real world, yes. Not here. There's a guy, moves around. You can find him and he'll fix your rep with a little bit of gold or a lot of bit of cash."

"Or brush your horse," Bear snickered.

He wasn't wrong, but I hadn't connected the dots until he said it. Every time that I brushed Horse, I gained binding with him but also had a slight increase in my positive reputation.

"You're saying that if I become the baddest baddie out there, I can undo it just by brushing my horse?" I didn't believe it.

"It would take a lot of brushing," Coot said, "but yuppers."

"That doesn't make any sense."

Bear's look got serious. "Only bastards hurt horses."

He had said it with such a serious tone that I just left it alone.

"Fine," I finally said as we each got onto our horses. "Let's break some laws. How do we find one of these career criminals?"

An NPC selling hides next to where the horses were tied cast a glance our way. I flipped him the bird.

Coot seemed to care more about somebody listening in than I did. He shifted his horse a little closer to mine and spoke under his breath.

"I know someone like that. They are big jobs, though. Usually meant for bigger gangs."

"You're as new as I am," I pointed out. 'Why don't I know about this guy?"

"I was stuck at that farm for a long time," Coot reminded me of how I met him. "Lots of folks did that mission. The ones that wouldn't help told me to go do other things and where to do them."

Coot stopped there, and his demeanor told me that the story was done.

"Alright, take us to the crime boss."

I bit off more than I could chew with that ride. It took most of the day and we ended up surrounded by desert. I had assumed there was desert in the game, had even heard people talking about it, but this was the first time I had seen it. We went south and west of Easter for close to seven hours before Coot said we were getting close. We had thought to fast travel to the location, but none of us had been there, yet, and we didn't have any access to those fast travels until we found them.

We broke from the main road and started riding along a lake with cacti and low bushes scattered across the rust-colored sand and clay ground. It looked a lot like someone had tried to merge Utah and Arizona together.

It was slow going as our horses fought to stay upright and dry on the uneven terrain. Thirty minutes along the lake, a shack, with more holes than structure, came into view and the icon for the job's guy popped up on my map.

We tied our horses up outside and hopped down. Bear and I turned to Coot, but it was obvious that the old man wasn't going to take a step unless it was while following someone.

"Alright," I said. "Let's do this."

Weeds grew up all around the place. If it wasn’t for the surprisingly fancy looking horse, with its practically radiant white hair, I wouldn’t have assumed anyone was inside.

We pushed through the weeds and up onto the broken boards that once served as a front porch.

The windows were boarded up and the door was barely on its hinges. It swung open freely, but clattered when it hit the wall. My hand was on my right pistol the entire time. It stayed in my holster, but I was beginning to get accustomed to everyone’s shoot first mentality.

The first room looked like some sort of kitchen. It was bare, but there was a basin and scattered canned goods of various ages. A curtain separated the first room from the rest and, according to my map, the man who gave out the jobs was on the other side.

I sent a quick message to Coot and Bear to hang back and keep their guns ready. Then I forced my body to relax and stepped through the curtain.

I wasn’t expecting what greeted me.

He wasn’t quite Colonel Sanders, but the likeness was enough that I was surprised Wicked West could get away with it without a copyright suit lodged against them. While the man with white hair and suit as white as his horse outside looked like the famed restaurant mascot, he lacked the signature beard and glasses. That was where the discrepancies ended, though. He sat behind a table that looked to have been built out of the boards that had fallen off of the porch. In his hand, he held a sawed-off shotgun and it was leveled at my midsection.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t shoot you where you stand?” His voice even matched the southern Colonel’s.

“I was told you had work.” I wanted to say more. Specifically, my instinct was to beg him not to shoot me and fall to my knees, but that kind of reaction hadn’t been working out too well in this new world. My second instinct was to dive to the side and pull my own pistols, but that plan also wouldn’t get me what I was looking for.

“And who might the person have been who told you these misleading truths?” Not-Colonel asked.

“My gang told me,” I shrugged. “Said he overheard someone while doing another job.”

“Are you with the law?”

“No.”

“Bounty hunter?”

I shook my head.

“Got any problems with breaking the law? Robbing? Murdering?”

“None,” I answered. If he had been a lie detector, reading my pulse and all that, he would have sensed my trepidation. It was a remainder of my real-world acclimations. I was able to restrain those feelings after some practice and adjustment to Wicked West, but my heart still liked to do its hummingbird imitation anyway.

“That your gang shuffling around outside?” He waved the shotgun toward the curtain behind me.

I nodded.

“Well, then at least you ain’t entirely dumb,” He set the shotgun down on the table. I noticed he hadn’t released the hammer, but at least it wasn’t in his hands anymore. “Come on in,” he said a little louder.

Coot walked in with Bear right behind him. The space was small, and when they fanned out behind me, they filled the room around the table.

“You want work?” He didn’t give us any time to answer. “Then I have work. Mean work, not for the faint of heart. Any of you fight in the war?”

I still wasn’t entirely sure what the year was in-game, but I thought I’d heard someone say it was somewhere in the mid-1890’s. To my memory, the only war he could mean was the Civil War.

I shook my head. “I’m too young.” That statement also too Bear out of the equation.

“What about you, old timer?” He turned his attention to Coot.

“Nah,” Coot drawled. “I was in Mexico, running shine for the banditos.”

I had no idea what that even meant, but the Not-Colonel slowly grinned. “My kind of folks, it would seem.” He offered a hand to me. “I am Foghorn Lee, associate of the Midlands.”

“Fog-“ Bear started to laugh and I smacked him hard. Funny, dumb, tongue-in-cheek names aside, he still had a sawed-off shotgun in reach that could take out two of us before we could draw.

“What’s the Midlands?” I asked to try and divert Foghorn’s attention from Bear’s slip.

“Have you been under a rock, girl?” He shook his head, “Nevermind. The Midlands are the gang that runs moonshine and guns throughout the country. Ain’t nothing we ain’t robbed, and we are damned good at it.” He held up a finger. “Once you’re in, you’re in for good. Whether you do a job for us again or not, if you squeal, you’ll bleed. Is that understood?”

If I were treating this like a video game, I would just have accepted the promise blindly, but for better or worse, this was our new reality. I gave a look to Bear and Coot. When they both nodded, I answered.

“We’re in. What you got?”

He tossed a picture on the desk.

It looked like every sepia-tinted death I had experienced since I had arrived, but it was shaped like a postcard instead of taking up all of my field of view. I picked it up and passed it to the other Flamingos.

The picture was of an elderly woman with a scarred right eye that looked like it didn’t work anymore. Underneath the picture was a name: Anita Keller.

“Anita is someone who was working for the Midlands,” explained Foghorn. “She is the matriarch of the Keller Plantation. Her history with us has been mostly in the running of our booze in St. Emile, except recently we asked her gang to act as muscle for us. While defending our boys from a job that went south, she caught wind of a lot of Federal money getting moved. The way things like that work around here means she’s supposed to tell us or, more precisely, me. Then I would assign them and some of our other partners to take it and redistribute it. Instead, she chose to hold onto this information, and I have reason to believe she is going to act on it soon. I want you to go to her home, destroy everything she loves, find out what she knows, and do the robbery yourself.”

That was a tall order. None of us could hide our surprise. Coot’s mouth dropped open while Bear took a step back.

My look of surprise didn’t go unnoticed.

“Yes,” Foghorn said, “it is a large job, especially for only three of you. Her plantation has a large number of her own gang holding up there. Its almost a fortress, but here’s the thing; they are expecting an army to show up. They won’t know what to do with three folks they’ve never seen in association with myself arriving. Get out there, get the location of the move, and let me know, just in case you don’t make it.”

“What’s in it for us?” I asked.

“Double the cut everyone else, except me and the boss, would get. You do the work, you get the pay. Does that work?”

My head shook. “I’ve got a cook, she’ll need pay too.”

Foghorn nodded. “The,” he squinted at us and smirked, “Pink Flamingos each will get a double of the cut. Are you taking the job?”

Outside, we climbed back on our horses. “This sounds like we’re about to die a lot.”

“Shoulda asked for triple,” Coot mumbled.

“I’m still feeling all this out,” I answered. The line on the map appeared right after we agreed to the job, but that gave us no indication of the distance. Expanding the map made me sigh.

“Do you boys know where Hardy is?” I asked.

“South of the planes?” Coot said. “Little hilly, reminds me of northern Iowa, a bit.”

“A day’s ride?” Bear joined me in sighing. “And none of us have the fast travel.”

Thunder roared as the sky grew darker.

“We had better get going,” I said. “Coot, you’re in charge of tunes.”

Coot took a deep breath.

“I want hold ‘em like they do in Texas, please.” His voice was somewhere between horrible and almost alright. “Fold ‘em, let ‘em hit me, raise it, baby, stay with me…”

This was going to be a long ride.