Liberty (Flash Gold, #5)

Liberty

(The Flash Gold Chronicles, #5)

by Lindsay Buroker

Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Buroker

As I write this, it’s been nearly two years in
our world since I left poor Cedar in jail. Many of you have written
and asked when the final adventure would come out. I’m glad I can
tell you that it’s finally here! Thank you for your patience. Thank
you, also, to my editor, Shelley Holloway, and my cover designer,
Glendon Haddix at Streetlight Graphics. We hope you enjoy
Liberty
.

Kali McAlister did her best not to glare as the
young Mountie constable patted her down and removed wrenches,
hammers, pliers, and other tools from her overalls. It wasn’t as if
she would bring
pliers
to break Cedar out of jail. She
could easily make explosives from the components in her cave
workshop. Besides, she wouldn’t stage a breakout during broad
daylight with dozens of horse-drawn wagons plodding down the street
right outside the door.

“What’s this?” The
constable withdrew a folded piece of paper from Kali’s pocket, his
upper lip curling toward the sparsest mustache Kali had seen on
anyone over eighteen.

“Blueprints to my airship
engine.” She scowled at him, plucked the paper back out of his
hand, and returned it to her pocket. “Unless you want to volunteer
to come up and help me with the installation, then you’ve no need
to paw over it with your muck forks.”

“Volunteer?” The
constable scratched his pockmarked jaw.

“Muck forks,” the second
Mountie in the office snorted as he sat with his heels kicked up on
a desk, reading the day’s
Midnight Sun
. “You’re not
supposed to let visitors insult you, Brandt.”

“That right? I thought it
was just the prisoners we had to get particular with.”

“You’re an authority
figure here, a representative of the Northwest Mounted Police.
Respect is paramount.”

“But she’s a woman.”

“Women ain’t nothing but
mantraps. Don’t be fooled.”

Kali rolled her eyes at
this time-wasting exchange. “Can I go see him now that you’ve
absconded with all of my tools?” She waved at the pile on the
table.

“Absconded?” the
constable objected. “Ma’am, you can have them back when you leave.
We just can’t have you using them to aid a criminal.”

Kali ground her teeth at
the word criminal. Cedar had put an end to a notorious killer, and
yet they had him in jail. Based on something that may or may not
have happened two thousand miles away and in another country. It
wasn’t right. “Yes, I was figuring to use that tape measure there
to help him escape.”

The constable picked up
the tape measure and frowned at both sides, as if expecting it to
secretly be some gadget capable of creating holes in walls.

“This way, right?” Kali
pointed toward the closed door at the back of the office.

She had been in the
building before, walking with Cedar as he’d turned in the head of a
known murderer, and she knew where the two jail cells were, but she
did not presume to stride back there. Even if she was frustrated
with these two and the situation as a whole, they might find it
suspicious if she seemed too eager to get to Cedar. She didn’t need
them thinking too hard on whether or not she could be trusted. She
had been with Cedar at the mill, helping him to catch up with
Cudgel Conrad, and she was as much to blame for the building
catching fire as he was. If the Mounties realized that, they might
lock her up too. It would be much harder to free Cedar if she was
locked up in the adjacent cell.

“Yes, that way.” The
constable put down the tape measure and opened the door.

It led into a short
hallway with the cells waiting in a tiny room to the left. Kali
followed him into the tight space, where an oilcloth window let in
limited light. The cells occupied the dark side of the room,
standing side by side, iron bars walling in the prisoner. Cedar
must have heard her exchange through the door because he stood
alertly by the bars.

He smiled broadly at her,
the gesture slightly reminiscent of the goofy smile from the day
before, when he’d asked her if she would porch sit with him and
only him, and she had said yes. Exasperatedly. The Mounties had
been dragging him away at the time, and it hadn’t seemed the most
important issue to discuss.

“Cedar.” Kali nodded to
him and fidgeted with her hands. Maybe she should reach through the
bars and give him a pat—or even a kiss? He wasn’t at his most
appealing, with his clothing rumpled and a couple of days’ worth of
beard growth on his usually clean-shaven chin, but he always
tolerated her in her tool-filled man clothes, so who was she to
judge? But she hesitated, aware that the constable had followed her
into the small room and now leaned against the doorjamb.

“Kali.” Cedar lifted his
hand to tip an imaginary hat.

“I came to see...” She
had come to see if he wanted her to break him out, but that would
not be wise to admit with a Mountie looking on. “How are you
doing?” she finished.

She needed to talk in
private with Cedar. How could she get the constable to wander back
up to the front room for a few minutes?

“Tolerable. But nobody’s
come to explain what my situation is, precisely. Whether I’m to be
jailed permanently or, ah, worse. And if I have any legal
recourse.” He grimaced.

Kali knew there were
lawyers in town, but had only heard of cases involving squabbles
over mining claims. Would they be able to do anything if Cedar was
being held because of the murders he had been accused of committing
in the United States? Was that even the reason the Mounties had
arrested him? Or was it because he had killed Cudgel in the middle
of town? As if that lowlife scalawag hadn’t deserved to die.

“Commissioner Steele had
to go out to a claim site,” the constable offered. “He’s supposed
to be back this evening.”

“At which point, I’ll
find out exactly why I’m being held?” Cedar raised his eyebrows
toward the constable, who stuck his hands into his pockets and
looked away. All of the Mounties in the area ought to know he had
been helping their organization, bringing in the heads—and
sometimes the whole bodies—of criminals, long before Steele had
shown up to take over the position of commissioner.

That they had arrested
him now after he’d been in the territory for nearly a year… it was
ridiculous. Intolerable. Kali bit back a growl.

“Can I bring you
anything? Are you comfortable enough in there?” she asked, while
still debating how to get rid of their audience. She nodded toward
the small cell, made smaller by the fact that Cedar loomed well
over six feet tall. “Not much for furnishings, is it? I see they
gave you a mule’s breakfast to lie on.” She waved at the mattress
and the single ratty blanket wadded up on it. Strands of straw
poked out at the edges.

“I’ve slept on the ground
plenty.” Cedar glanced toward the Mountie. “It’s not any worse than
that. Admittedly, my height is a touch problematic in this case.”
He glanced toward the mattress. The bottom foot of him probably
dangled off the end if he lay straight.

“Well, I can’t fix your
bed, but I can at least stimulate your mind.” Kali fished out the
folded blueprints. “I’m aiming to put the engine in my ship soon.”
She launched into a long explanation of the horsepower and
mechanical specifics of it and what the capabilities of the
finished airship would be.

Cedar looked on while
wearing a faintly puzzled expression. She knew he wasn’t as
interested in machinery as she was, but she kept talking,
intentionally making that talk about as interesting as reading a
technical book on engines. As she did so, she watched the Mountie
out of the corner of her eye. He stifled a couple of yawns. After a
few minutes, he pushed away from the doorjamb, muttered something
about being right back, and wandered up to the front office.

“Here, you can see for
yourself in the blueprints,” Kali said as he disappeared through
the doorway. As soon as he was out of sight, she lowered her voice
and whispered, “Do you want me to break you out tonight?”

Cedar stared at her as if
he didn’t comprehend. Why else would she have come to speak to him
if not to extricate him from his uncertain fate? The punishment for
murder was death, wasn’t it? She couldn’t leave him here if that
was to be his fate.

Finally, he shook his
head. “You can’t be made a criminal on my behalf. It’s already a
miracle that they haven’t found anything to blame you for,
considering you were at my side in the mill.”

Not to mention the pirate
airship she had nearly crashed into the city a couple of months
earlier… It did seem unfair that he was behind bars while she
walked free. Not that she
wanted
to be incarcerated. But
she wouldn’t let them hang or shoot Cedar, either. He was her
business partner and… more. Even if they’d barely had time for
more
yet. Between his obsession to find Cudgel and her
obsession to build her airship and escape the North, they hadn’t
had many free hours. But now, Cudgel was dead and the airship was
nearly done. The only problem was these bars keeping them
apart.

“I wouldn’t be planning
to get caught,” Kali said.

Cedar smiled, though it
was a wan gesture compared to the warm one he’d offered when she
first entered. “We’re known to spend time together. If I disappear,
and someone has sawn a hole in my wall from the outside, they’ll
know it was you.”

“How will they prove it?
They won’t have any evidence. And surely you’ve got other
acquaintances that you might have finagled into breaking you
out.”

“Not many. Bounty hunting
is a solitary business, one that keeps me in contact with the law
often, so most of my acquaintances are Mounties. They’re not known
for cutting holes in their own headquarters building.”

“They sound repressed. If
I make a tool using some of my—” she lowered her voice to a
whisper, “—flash gold, it could be quick, maybe not make any
noise.”

His brows rose. “Did you
manage to get it back? I didn’t see Cudgel run out with it, but he
was invisible at the time.” His mouth twisted in acknowledgment of
the oddness of that statement.

Kali had grown up with an
alchemist for a father, so she wasn’t so startled by the magical,
even if this had been her first time witnessing a powder that could
turn a man invisible. “He dropped it in the mill during the
hullabaloo. While everyone was busy arresting you, I sneaked back
into the fire and found it.
Half
of it. That mongrel made
off and did who knows what with the other half.” She clenched her
jaw, momentarily forgetting that she had come to speak to Cedar of
rescues.

“Is the half you have
left enough to power your airship?” he asked quietly.

“I’m not sure. I hope
so—though I’d like to find the missing half too. I’m not sure if
its power lasts indefinitely, and since I don’t know how to make
more, I’ve been wanting to keep all that I have. Since my airship
engine is designed to run solely on the power it supplies, rather
than on the steam from coal or wood...”

“Perfectly
understandable. I reckon you shouldn’t waste any of your gold on my
cell wall.”

Kali shook her head. That
would hardly be a waste. A waste was having the gold stolen in the
first place. It was enough to make her wish Cudgel would come back
to life so Cedar could kill him again. Perhaps not in front of the
whole city this time.

A clank sounded up front,
and someone bumped against the door.

Kali leaned close.
“Milos,” she whispered, using his real name so he’d realize how
important this was. “There’s not much time. Enough jokes. Tonight,
be ready. I can—”

“No,” he said firmly.

“But—”

The door opened. Nobody
came through at first, but the sound of a conversation finishing up
drifted back.

Cedar reached through the
bars and clasped her shoulder. “I don’t aim to go peaceable to my
hanging,” he whispered. “I’ll figure something out, get a chance to
slip out on my own. Then I’ll hide among the willows until you’ve
got your airship completed. I’ll join you, and we’ll go south
together. I’ll still be your security man, and we can sit on the
deck together and enjoy the sunsets in a warmer locale.”

Kali opened her mouth to
object—did he truly think the Mounties would slip up and let him
escape? They knew him well, and they knew how competent he was. She
was surprised she had even been permitted this time alone with him
to conspire.

Before she could voice
her words, the constable walked into the hallway.

“Ma’am, you’ll have to
finish kissing him and skedaddle. The commissioner is coming back
soon.”

“Kissing?” Kali asked.
What about their positions made the man think they’d been doing
that? Though she supposed it was better than him being aware of
their true conversation.