Blowback by Lyn Gala Page A

captain with her sweet little
smile and fluttering eyelids. Tom had told the captain she was trouble. Women
who tried that hard to distract a man with how they looked…well, Tom’s ma
always said those sort were trying to keep men from noticing something deeper
down. In all his years, Tom hadn’t ever met a woman to prove his ma wrong. But
wave a helpless woman in front of Captain Jonathan Ramsay and you were likely
to fry most of the man’s logic circuits.
    But it wasn’t as if Da’shay was a woman…not exactly anyway.
She looked like a woman, mostly. Some days, that long, black hair and those
dark eyes would pull Tom toward her like a moth, but then her arms and legs
were a little too long and her face had these small features that made her look
like an elf or a little doll. She stood tall enough to look him in the eye,
which Tom appreciated on a woman, but the whole package was disconcerting.
    She’d reach out and catch his arm as she went twirling by,
and her fingers would close with the sort of strength Tom normally expected to
find in a man. More, actually. She’d sailed into the middle of a firefight her
first month on the Kratos , but instead of firing a gun, she’d snuck up
behind the gunhands and started tossing them around like bits of trash. They’d
ended up with broken arms and legs and a few cracked ribs, but the Kratos crew had come out without a scratch.
    And that brought Tom’s mind back to those pictures. She’d
enjoyed killing and that was something Tom couldn’t abide.
    He loved shooting, whether he was shooting targets or people
didn’t really make much difference to him except that people were harder to
hit. He liked protecting crew and showing off his skills. He liked putting his
strength up against another man in a fair fight and walking away knowing he was
stronger, and if they had to call medics for his opponent, that didn’t really
bother him. Tom never pretended that he was a good man. He wasn’t the sort of
ethical man his ma would like him to be—that was one reason he avoided writing
her. However, he never hurt someone who was unarmed, he never took out
bystanders in a fight and he never took any sort of sadistic glee in the
killing of a human being. He might not care about people as much as others told
him he should, but Da’shay…she’d been reveling in her kill. That just wasn’t
right.
    The train’s tracks gave a low-pitched hum that told him that
the train was close and Tom moved toward the ramp, reaching for his money. His
fingers brushed over the small metal disk he still had in his pocket. Looking
over at the trash can, he tried to convince himself to drop it in, but he
couldn’t. If Ramsay was going to go all kinds of girl-stupid on him, he
couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.
    Twenty minutes later, Tom slipped off the train and into the
dark streets without any answers. Someone had broken the lights around the
station and the city had clearly given up trying to fix anything around here.
This was the kind of place where Tom felt most at home. Here, no one looked at
him and wondered what the hell he was doing. They just wondered if Tom was
likely to kill them if they tried robbing him. He was.
    Tom wanted a particular kind of place…some place the younger
ones avoided. He wanted a place where only the most dangerous men and women
went to drink, where trouble was least likely to start because any hothead
would get shot before he could do too much shit-stirring. If he was lucky, he
might even talk a woman into bed. Some of the women gun hands appreciated a man
who could fuck ‘em without ever forgetting that they were killers for hire.
    Most bars gave themselves names like “The Mercenary” to
attract the young idiots, but Tom eventually found a place with narrow windows
about perfect for shooting out of and no front light. A chipped sign simply
stated “Carla’s” in plain lettering. This was what Tom had been searching for.
    He pushed the door open slow,