Chapter 6: Boone

Chapter 6: Boone

It's me again, Mr. New Vegas, reminding you that you're nobody 'til somebody loves you, and that somebody is me. I love you. It's that time again, ladies and gentlemen time for me to put on my newsman fedora. Word out of Camp Golf is that many NCR Rangers can expect re-deployment in the near future. One anonymous soldier said it was part of a new strategy. Also, Caesar's Legion continues to fortify its position in Nelson, where it remains a constant concern for Camp Forlorn Hope and the nearby town of Novac. The preceding segment was sponsored by the Silver Rush: feel the rush of a warm laser in your hand. In New Vegas, sometimes you've got to feel just a little bit sad if you want to feel happy. Frank Sinatra knows this better than most, and all he asks for is One for My Baby (And One More for the Road).

Cass and I walked into the lobby of the motel, and I was met with the overwhelming sense of "green." The wallpaper, peeling and cracked in places, was a pale green with a faded and barely visible floral pattern. The moldy and torn couch pressed up against the far wall was made out of dark green leather. The floor tiles were various shades of green, some light, some dark in no discernable pattern that I could really see. The lamp in the center of the slowly spinning fan on the ceiling was made out of green smoked glass. Tiny green dinosaur toys miniatures of the giant dinosaur outside littered nearly every surface in the room. Even the radio, crackling slightly but unmistakably tuned to Radio New Vegas and playing some Old World song, was green.

I continued to be overwhelmed by the color green when I got a good look at the woman sitting behind the front desk. Part of that was the lighting, I'll admit, but it was mostly the dark green dress she was wearing. She was middle-aged, with grey hair held up on the top of her head in a bun, and was surprisingly large. She wasn't fat, just plump; the only thin part of her was her long thin nose, upon which was perched a pair of extremely large glasses, with thick lenses that made her half-opened, heavy lidded eyes look positively enormous. When we walked in, she turned from her magazine, looked up at me and smiled wide, with dimples in her cheeks the size of golf balls.

"Well, welcome to you," she said with the voice of a very tired, sweet old lady. "You look tired from the road. Why don't you relax a spell, let this fine town take care of you? Oh, but where are my manners? I got to thinking about making a good impression and plain forgot to tell you my name! I'm Jeannie May. I take care of folks here at the motel, long as they aren't trouble makers."

"Hey there," I said, reaching the front desk and finally getting a word in edgewise. "I'd like to rent a room." Somehow, she managed to smile even wider at that.

"Well, I think that's a splendid idea! I'll give you a good flat rate, and you can stay as long as you like. At least until the busy season comes. Does that sound good?" I nodded. "Alright, it'll be 14 caps a night," she said, pulling a key from a hook on the wall behind her. She placed it on the desk as I pulled out a stack of 20 bottlecaps; I kept them in groups of 20, to make it easier to count them out. "Your room will be the one upstairs, closest to the lobby side. Let me know if there's anything I can do to make your stay better for you."

"Oh, it's not for me," I said, picking up the key and tossing it to Cass. She caught it in midair. "Go on and get settled. I'll catch up."

"Thanks. I owe ya," Cass said, strolling out of the lobby. I turned back the Jeannie May.

"Before I leave, I wanted to ask you a question."

"Of course. What can I help you with?"

"I'm looking for a man in a checkered coat. Have you seen anyone like that pass through here recently?" Her smile evaporated instantly, and her face screwed up, almost as if she suddenly smelled something foul.

"Well, he might've been wearing a fancy outfit, but he wasn't any sort of gentlemen to me. Had his nose stuck up so high in the air, you couldn't see it above the clouds. City folk, they always think they deserve better than what they got. He even insulted my motel asked him to leave that very day. Those hoodlums he was with weren't much better, but they seemed to know Manny for some reason"

"So where can I find this Manny?"

"He's one of the snipers that help protect the town. Your best bet to find him is up in the dinosaur's mouth."

The inside of the dinosaur was not what I was expecting. I opened the door to a gift shop, and every single shelf on every wall was filled from side to side with those same tiny dinosaur toys I'd seen in the motel lobby. And the man who ran the little shop, Cliff, seemed oddly fixated with the things; I only asked him if it was alright if I went up the stairs to talk with the sniper, and somehow he managed to steer the conversation towards asking me if I wanted to buy one of the T-Rexes. I declined, and I heard him mutter something about how nobody ever wanted to buy the T-Rexes as I made my way up the stairs towards the sniper perch.

I slid the door open and immediately tensed up as I heard the unmistakable click of a pistol's hammer being cocked.

"Whoa, hey! Don't shoot!" I said, making sure my hands were in the air and away from Roscoe as the door continued to slide open. A revolver was pointed directly at me, but was quickly decocked and put away. The man was holding the revolver in one hand, and had a silenced, scoped hunting rifle in his other. He was huge; even without the red beret, I could've told you from his build that he was ex military. He had a heavy-set and clean shaven jaw, and I couldn't tell if it was just naturally wide or if he was chewing tobacco. He looked at me with a frown from behind a pair of sunglasses.

"Goddamnit!" he said, his voice gravelly, weary, and low. He turned back in his chair, and looked out through the dinosaur's mouth, towards the general direction of the Colorado river. "Don't sneak up on me like that. What do you want?" He spoke quickly and tersely, wasting no words on unnecessary pleasantries.

"I was told there was a sniper nest up here."

He turned slightly to look at me, appraising me with a scowl.

"I think you'd better leave."

"Hang on are you Manny?" There was a very long pause.

"No." There was another pause, and then he added "You don't know who I am?"

"I'm looking for Manny, because I want to ask him some questions. But if you're not him, I guess I'll leave."

"Wait," the cold sniper said as I was turning to walk back out the door. "You just got into town, right? Maybe you shouldn't go. Not just yet." I raised an eyebrow.

"Why not?"

"I need someone I can trust. You're a stranger. That's a start."

"You only trust strangers?" I asked, confused.

"I said it was a start," he practically spat. "This town nobody looks me straight in the eye anymore. I need the kind of help I can only get from an outsider." I thought about what he said, and I had to admit there was a string of morbid curiosity in my brain that wanted to pursue this conversation. So I closed the door, and regarded him carefully.

"Ok then. What do you need?" I said. I figured, it couldn't hurt to at least listen to what he had to say.

"I want you to find something out for me. I don't know if there's anything to find, but I need someone to try. My wife was taken from our home by Legion slavers one night while I was on watch. They knew when to come. What route to take. And they only took Carla. Someone set it up. I don't know who."

"So you're trying to track down your wife?"

We, the representatives of the Consul Officiorum, have this day bargained and purchased from Jeannie May Crawford of the township of Novac the exclusive rights to ownership and sale of the slave Carla Boone for the sum of one thousand bottle caps, and those of her unborn child for the sum of five hundred bottle caps, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged. We warrant the slave and her young to be sound, healthy, and slaves for life. We covenant with the said, Jeannie May Crawford, that we have full power to bargain and sell said slave and her offspring. Payment of an additional five hundred bottle caps will be due pending successful maturation of the fetus, the claim to which shall be guaranteed by possession of this document.

Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus et al.

Administrators of M. Lichinius Crassus, Consul Officiorum ab Famulato

I knelt there in stunned silence for a few minutes, just reading the note over and over again. I felt ill.

I banged on the door to Jeannie May's house hard enough to make sure she'd hear it, even if she was asleep. About a minute later, she opened the door, rubbing her eyes. She was wearing a robe, and didn't have her glasses. She blinked wearily and tried to focus on me. When she realized who it was, she looked concerned.

"Well, hello" she said, slightly perplexed. "It's awful late to be coming around here for a chat is everything all right? Is something the matter?"

"Oh, everything is all right," I said, putting on my best poker face. "But there's something I think you need to see."

I made sure I didn't have any bits of Jeannie May's head on me as I walked back into town. When I'd gotten her into position, I'd barely put the beret on when the back of her head simply exploded. She collapsed, Boone's bullet killing her instantly.

There was still no one around town I didn't even see Victor anywhere as I made my way up the stairs and into the dinosaur. As I reached for the door to the dinosaur's mouth, I hesitated, and rapped on the door instead.

"Who is it?" I heard Boone ask.

"It's Sheason." The door opened with a click.

"That's it then," he said as the door closed behind me. "How did you know?"

"I found this," I handed him the bill of sale, and gave him his beret back. He took a look at it, and the scowling expression on his face remained unchanged. He crumpled the letter in his hands, and tossed it onto the floor.

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's just like them to keep paperwork." He handed me a bag of bottlecaps. "Here. This is all I can give. I think our dealings are done here." A thought crossed my mind.

"Wait, do you think anyone's going to connect you to that bitch with the hole in her head? You're not an outlaw now, are you?"

"No," he said simply. "People die out there. Often enough that no one worries about blame. They're too anxious to forget it happened in the first place, I guess. Besides," For the first time since meeting him, I saw him smirk. "I was on break when it happened."

"So, what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know," he gazed out at the desert. "I won't be staying, I know that. Don't see much point in anything right now, except hunting legionaries."

"What, all by yourself?"

"Yeah," he said simply.

"You're a sniper though, right? Don't snipers work in pairs one sniper, one spotter?" I asked, honestly not really sure. I'd seen something about that in an old holotape movie about snipers in the Old World, but I didn't know if that was accurate or not.

"Yeah. Normally. But if I'm going to hunt Legion, I'll do it alone. What about you?"

"What about me?" The question caught me a bit off guard.

"You're hunting for someone, I can tell. It's why you helped me." That was surprisingly perceptive. I wouldn't have called that.

"Yeah, you're right. I'm looking for the man who shot me. A guy in a checkered coat, travelling with some Great Khans. Have you seen him?"

"No. Sorry. Talk to Manny. He works days."

I knocked on the door to Cass' room. I was still emotionally drained from the discovery in the motel lobby, and somehow watching the bitch responsible for selling a woman and her unborn child into slavery getting her head blown off did nothing to make me feel better. So I decided there was only one thing I could do.

When Cass opened the door, it looked like she'd been drinking but that wasn't really a change, she always looked like she was drinking. Her suede jacket had been discarded somewhere, as had her cowboy hat; her red hair fell down loose around her face and down her back. She leaned against the doorframe, a half finished bottle of whiskey in hand.

"Hey, Shea," she said with a smile. "What's up?"

"I need a drink," pointing at the bottle. "May I?"

"Sure," she said, putting the bottle in my hand. I tipped my head back, and poured the rest of the bottle down my throat. It burned in the best possible way.

"Thanks," I told her, placing the empty bottle back in her hand, and walking down the motel stairs, back to my car.