I asked why she carried more than one gun. “You might need more than one,” she told me. “Here—take my gun away from me.”
I went through the motions of a standing, face-to-face disarm, bare hands against gun. She avoided it easily and said sharply, “What are you doing? Disarming me, or asking me to dance? Make it good.”
So I made it good. I’ll never be a match-medal shot but I stood at the top of my class in barroom. If she had not given in to it, I would have broken her wrist.
I had her gun. Then I realized that a second gun was pressing against my belly button. It was a lady’s social gun, but perfectly capable of making two dozen widows without recharging. I looked down, saw that the safety was off, and knew that my beautiful bride had only to tense one muscle to burn a hole through me. Not a wide one, but sufficient.
“Where in the deuce did you find that?” I asked—and well I might, for neither one of us had bothered to dress when we came out. The area was very deserted and often it did not seem worthwhile to take the trouble; it was my land.
So I was much surprised as I would have sworn that the only gun Mary had with her was the one she had carried in her sweet little hand.
“It was high up on my neck, under my hair,” she said demurely. “See?” I looked. I knew a phone could be hidden there but I had not thought of it for a gun—though of course I don’t use a lady-size weapon and I don’t wear my hair in long flame-colored curls.
Then I looked again, for she had a third gun shoved against my ribs. “Where did that one come from?” I asked.
She giggled. “Sheer misdirection; it’s been in plain sight all the time.” She would not tell me anything further and I never did figure it out. She should have clanked when she walked—but she did not. Oh my, no!
I found I could teach her a few things about hand-to-hand, which salved my pride. Bare hands are more useful than guns anyhow; they will save your life oftener. Not that Mary was not good at it herself; she packed sudden death in each hand and eternal sleep in her feet. However, she had the habit, whenever she lost a fall, of going limp and kissing me. Once, instead of kissing her back, I shook her and told her she was not taking it seriously. Instead of cutting out the nonsense, she continued to remain limp, let her voice go an octave lower, and said, “Don’t you realize, my darling, that these are not my weapons?”
I knew that she did not mean that guns were her weapons; she meant something older and more primitive. True, she could fight like a bad-tempered Kodiak bear and I respected her for it, but she was no Amazon. An Amazon doesn’t look that way with her head on a pillow. Mary’s true strength lay in her other talents.
Which reminds me; from her I learned how it was that I was rescued from the slugs. Mary herself had prowled the city for days, not finding me, but reporting accurately the progress with which the city was being “secured”. Had she not been able to spot a possessed man, we might have lost many agents fruitlessly—and I might never have gotten free from my master. As a result of the data she brought in, the Old Man drew back and concentrated on the entrances and exits to the city. And I was rescued, though they weren’t waiting for me in particular . . . at least I don’t suppose they were.
Or maybe they were. Something Mary said led me to think that the Old Man and she had worked watch on and watch off, heel-and-toe, covering the city’s main launching platform, once it was evident that there was a focal point active in the city. But that could not have been correct—the Old Man would not have neglected his job to search for one agent. I must have misunderstood her.