Django Durango

“Hey Cleo! Look at this.”

“Sounds like it depends,” Dixie said. She read on. “‘Included in this order (but not fitting inside the module) is a small petrolatum packet for just about any survival use you can imagine.’
Read on…

“So Dixie? That’s a pretty…” Cleo twirled her hand around, pretending to think of the right word, “Confederate codename.”. She was curious to know if Dixie was aware of or oblivious to the implications behind it. She knew it might be unwise to start this conversation in the van on the way to a robbery, but if Dixie’s codename implied what she thought it might, then she’d probably never work with Dixie again. It’d be better to know if she should be watching her back now than be betrayed later.

Their crewmates on this job, a man called Savoy and a woman named Chartreuse, looked upon this disaster in the making silently. Savoy had a look of deep “oh no” on his face, but Chartreuse looked like she had a ringside seat to a sold-out fight.

Dixie raised an eyebrow at the question. “Are we really gonna talk about this now?” she asked.

“All right, well, my controller wanted to call me Plantation Slavery but it got cut off in the computer,” she said. Chartreuse snorted at this snide remark, but then stifled herself quickly when she saw no one else laughed. Dixie shrugged, spread her hands, and gave Cleo a what-do-you-expect-me-to-do-about-it look. Savoy’s eyes darted between Dixie and Cleo, waiting to see where this was going to go. No one said anything.
Read on…

“We should approach quietly,” Method said.

“You would say that,” Madness said.

“Of course I would.” Method replied evenly. “It’s the only logical way to go.”

“Except running in guns a-blazing and scaring the shit out of everyone so they don’t have time to think or fight us.”

Method started in on some deadpanned reasoning involving fight-or-flight response and the variables it brought into the situation but Madness’ eyes glazed over. Cleo and Dixie glanced sidelong at each other, sharing a look of acknowledgement that they had brought this on themselves.

Twins. You rarely ever got the ones with the telepathic link that put them in perfect sync. Instead, you usually got a pair of fuckin’ Geminis, at odds on everything up to and including the hiest plan.  Siblings – especially twins – were always way too comfortable with each other and not comfortable enough with anyone else. It created problems. A lot of times, siblings were so concerned with each other that they couldn’t fit anyone else into their awareness. Or like today, they’d be too busy trying to argue to agree on a course of action.

Cleo and Dixie usually avoided jobs where the other crewmates were visibly siblings. The jobs had been coming up dry lately. The Syndicate had grown by several hundred agents and that meant the job distribution was thinner. So they took the job with these twins (whose codenames really ought to have been enough of a fuckin’ clue that it was a bad idea) and now they were gonna pay for it.
Read on…

“What about this job?” Dixie said, holding her phone up for Cleo to see across the table. “Codename Braum. Doing an art gallery in Topeka.”

“Why would we subject ourselves to driving through Kansas?” Cleo asked, not looking up from her smash burger combo. She was not helping to search because a hamburger required two hands to eat and she didn’t want to get grease on her phone’s screen.

“Wait, Topeka is in Kansas?” Dixie asked. frowning.

“It’s the capital of Kansas, honey,” Cleo confirmed patiently. Then, curious, she asked, “Where did you think it was?”

“I don’t know.” Dixie’s face scrunched up, wondering that too. “Not Kansas. How valuable could the art from Kansas be?”
Read on…