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It was a rare day when a girl walked into Sam's bar and the first thing he noticed was the weapon she was carrying. Today it made sense, though: She herself was nothing special -- long legs and a decent ass, maybe, but the rest of her was pretty much stick-straight, plain, boring. How the fuck had a kid like her, barely into her twenties, gotten hold of a Legion machete?
It was one of the nicer ones, too, not one of the lawn mower blades with a handle tied on that they gave recruits. Sam considered the wall of weapons behind his bar, most of them confiscated from previous unruly patrons, or won in not-entirely-fair games of chance, and thought that a machete like that would be a fine addition to the collection. He'd put it ... there, right above Sweeper, the hunting shotgun he'd taken off some young merc who couldn't hold his liquor. It would definitely impress the hell out of his mostly-NCR clientele, especially if he came up with a story about wrestling it off a disguised Legionary who was bothering some girl. Yeah. Story like that would get him laid at least twice. Then maybe Major Jimenez would get jealous enough to start paying him some serious attention instead of the light flirtations they exchanged whenever she stopped by.
Meanwhile, the new girl set her Mojave Express bag down beside the bar stool -- oh, she was green if she thought it was a good idea to put any of her possessions on that floor -- and asked, "What's on the menu?" She only had a slight accent, but the sound of it spread a grin over his face as he passed her a list of what he had. She was tribal, and that made her easy pickings. That machete would be on his wall tomorrow morning at the latest.
He didn't get tribals in his place much. The NCR had done a good job of cleaning them out about five years back. Once he'd been sure the civilized clientele was there to stay, Sam had told Ike to find someone else to mop up the Big Horn Saloon and hightailed it south to Bullhead City to open up his own place before anybody else did. Once he'd established Sam's Place as an oasis for the enlisted, he didn't even have to run the shiftless tribals off himself most of the time -- the troops were more than happy to remind them that this was no longer their territory and kick them back onto the road.
The girl flicked her eyes over the menu for only a second -- definitely not long enough to actually have read anything -- and handed it back to him. Obviously she was just pretending she could read, and would probably order something common and hope it was there. "Just a beer, thanks," she said.
Goddamn, could he call them or what? "That's fifteen caps," he told her, just to see if she'd pay it.
She didn't even blink. "Pretty sure I've got that on me." Oh, this wasn't even going to count as a challenge.
"Only pretty sure? The Express pay you that little?"
"They pay me fine. I've just been on the road a while, and when I'm traveling I'd rather carry supplies than money. Caps make too much noise." She rattled the handful she'd pulled from her bag to make the point, then counted them carefully out onto the counter. It was like watching a little kid buy his first Nuka-Cola.
"Where you been?" he asked her as he set the beer down in front of her. He reached for the bottle opener by the cash register, but she waved him off and cracked it open smoothly with a spoon from her pack. He wondered who'd taught her that one, or if drinking was the only civilized thing tribals knew how to do.
"Out to Anza-Borrego by way of the Boneyard and Dayglow."
"Dayglow, huh? Didn't all the zombies scare you?"
"Actually, the ghouls were all pretty gracious." Okay, that was a surprising display of sophistication compared to the usual savages he got in here, but goddamn, that was still a low bar. Sam wasn't worried. She might just not know enough about shufflers to be afraid of them.
"Still, hell of a long walk."
"Lots of stuff to see, though. There's some pretty country out that way. I even got to see a yao guai with three cubs." If she was that excited about that, he imagined she'd probably spent all her time in the big cities with her mouth hanging open.
"Yao guai's good eatin'," he replied, trying to keep the conversation on her level. "Four at a time's a tough fight, though."
She smiled a little and shook her head. "Nah, I don't pick fights with anything while I'm working. I just keep to high ground, stay out of sight, and look as far down the road as I can. Keeps me out of most trouble, and this --" she patted the hilt of the machete he'd been coveting -- "gets me through the rest."
He stifled a scornful laugh -- little girl like her was lucky to know which end of it to hold -- and instead lied smoothly, "Sounds like you know how to handle yourself. What's your name, kid?"
"Mel." It probably wasn't her actual name, but he was willing to bet he couldn't pronounce her real one anyway.
"And I'm Sam. Welcome to Bullhead City." He let her finish that beer, then sold her two more at "half price" before he spotted Major Jimenez sauntering in. Was she swaying her hips more than usual for someone -- for him? -- or was she just in a very, very good mood? Either way, she had his complete attention.
He brought her a free drink -- well, paid for by the profit he'd made from the courier girl -- and actually managed to chat her up uninterrupted for quite some time. Turned out they both had family in Junktown, loved "Big Iron" and despised "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie", and read anything with Grognak the Barbarian on the cover. He was even starting to have some hope she had actual interest in him.
It was a productive conversation, but eventually, Major Jimenez got drawn into the other officers' carping, so Sam returned to Mel at the bar. She was reaching the end of her third beer and starting to yawn a little. Good.
"So, Mel, how much would you take for that machete?"
She blinked in obvious surprise. "It isn't for sale."
"I'll trade you for this combat knife," he said, gesturing toward the lower right-hand corner of his display, at the knife he'd nicknamed Mr. Carver. That one he'd actually bought with his own caps. It might even be worth more than the machete, but he was sure that if she took the trade bait, he could win it back from her easily enough once he got his cards out.
"No, thanks." She smiled, but her voice was firm.
He looked away from her long enough to call a "good night" after Jimenez when she left -- alone, he noted happily. Then he turned his attention back to Mel. Time to try a different offer. "Gonna be a sandstorm tonight." That was even actually true. "You should probably stay in here till the morning. Want a bed?"
"How many beds do you have?" she asked him a little warily. So she'd been on the road long enough to know that old trick. Still, she really shouldn't flatter herself; Sam liked women like the major, with curls, big tits, wide hips, pretty laughs and prettier faces, and Mel had exactly none of those things. Hell, he hadn't even heard her laugh. "Fun" must not have been a thing in her tribe.
"Enough upstairs that you can have one to yourself," he reassured her. "I'll let you have one for the night in exchange for that machete."
"How about if I do your washing-up instead?" she countered.
He agreed, even though she had three beers in her and was likely to drop things. By the time she fell into bed, it'd be easy enough to slip the machete away from her, and that was worth a few broken glasses. Sam had never resorted to outright theft before, but goddammit, he was sure that machete was the key to securing Major Jimenez's affections, and it wasn't like some ignorant tribal was going to do anything worthwhile with it anyway.
When he finished putting up all the chairs and mopping up the worst spots on the floor, he turned to Mel, who'd finished rendering his glassware spotless without dropping even one and was now wiping down the bar. He hadn't asked her to do that, nor had he expected her to put that much effort into the washing-up. Hell, he wouldn't even have expected it from a California kid. If she'd had the slightest hint of charm, he'd have offered her a job. As it was, she probably belonged out in the wilderness with the other primitives. But the machete was staying here.
"Do you play cards?" he asked her innocently, pulling the deck from his pocket and offering her a seat at the newly-clean bar.
"Only for fun," she replied, and even after three beers, she still turned down all his cajoling to try a little friendly wagering. "I need to get to bed now, anyway. I want to get going as soon as the sandstorm blows over."
Sam watched her go upstairs and then retired to his own room in the back. After eating some stew, trying to decide what to call the machete when he put it on the wall, flipping through a few magazines, jerking off to the idea of Major Jimenez sitting on his face, and taking a shower, he decided he'd let enough time pass. He collected Mr. Carver from his wall of prizes and crept quietly upstairs to the line of beds on the left side of the room, all empty tonight except for Mel's.
She lay on top of the covers on her side, slightly curled -- if she'd been shorter, she'd have looked like a child, and this was indeed going to be like taking candy from a baby. She still had the machete strapped to her hip, but if he slit her belt, he could slide it off of her without her ever being the wiser. He'd hide the cashbox and some high-end bottles, too, and then in the morning he'd blame a burglar for the whole unfortunate affair.
He got as far as slipping Mr. Carver underneath her belt and finding an existing crack in the leather to make his task easier when suddenly he felt a cold, sharp edge at his throat and realized the courier had pulled a second, smaller blade on him. Where the hell had she been hiding that?
"You're not good with the word 'no', are you?" she asked him, sounding way too calm and coherent for someone who should have been drunk and fast asleep.
"How did you -- "
"You're not as subtle as you think you are. So I only drank the first beer and swapped the other two for empties in my bag while you were trying to pick up the major. Speaking of, what's she going to say when she finds out you're cutting women's clothes off in the middle of the night?"
Fuck. Fuck. She'd actually noticed how bad he wanted Jimenez? And she was right -- it wasn't like I wasn't trying to take her pants off, just steal her machete was a particularly good defense. Saving his maybe-possibly-budding relationship, however, needed to be second priority for the moment. "Any way I can convince you to put the knife down?"
Mel eyed him for a moment, then said, "Put yours down first, keep your hands where I can see them, and then give me an extremely good reason to believe you won't try this again on the next person you think you're smarter than."
He released Mr. Carver instantly and put his hands at his sides. "Well, I've never tried this before and I'm apparently not very good at it," he mumbled. "I'd rather not get embarrassed like this in front of anyone else."
She said nothing.
"And you can keep my knife so you can be sure I can't use it to try again. And -- and a free bottle of whatever you want downstairs." Sam tried to tell himself he wasn't babbling in fear, but she kept that knife damn sharp and showed every sign of knowing how to use it. If one of his patrons was going to kill him, he'd rather it be a beefy NCR gunner in a drunken rage, not some quiet little tribal girl.
"I do like whiskey," she said thoughtfully. Finally she pulled back the blade and said, "Go back to your room and stay there until I've left. Touch me or my stuff again and I'll make an exception to my rule about not fighting while I'm on a job."
He retreated in shame. When the sandstorm stopped howling outside, he waited an hour, then opened his door and called out to see if she was still there. No answer. He called out twice more, then came out warily and verified that she was gone. She had taken the whiskey he'd promised her -- and only the one bottle, he noted to some relief -- and left her little knife on his wall where Mr. Carver used to be. Sam let it stay there, called it Easy Pickings, and found ways to change the subject whenever anyone asked where it had come from. Especially Major Jimenez.