Chloe smiled with an effort. “Nope. No males?”
“Well, I got one, but he’s pretty. He usually does the fellas that likes fellas.”
“That fucking sucks!” Chloe said irritably. “What the hell did the rangers want with a sexdroid?”
The proprietor snickered. “I’ll give you two guesses, but the last don’t count. They was saying he was defective, but I sure as hell ain’t had no complaints! If you ast me, the bastards just wanted to take him.” He narrowed his eyes. “Say, ain’t you been here before?”
“Don’t think so,” Chloe said, swiveling around and heading for the door. “I’ll check next time I’m out this way and see if you’ve got anything for the ladies.”
She kept going until she was several buildings down from the brothel and finally stopped to consider what to do. If the rangers had collected him, he could be halfway back to Earth by now, god damn it!
It occurred to her after a few moments that the proprietor might have meant local rangers rather than space rangers and a spark of hope flickered to life. Deciding it couldn’t hurt to check, she glanced around until she saw a drunk stagger out of a bar down the street a little ahead of her and caught up to him as he wove his way along the edge of the street. “Where would I find the ranger station?”
The drunk paused and turned bleary eyes at her. “What’d you be wantin’ with them bastards?”
Chloe narrowed her eyes at him. “Business—mine. You look like you’d know.”
Anger flickered in his eyes. “Smartass bitch! Find ‘em yerself!”
“How about I just blow your dick off?” Chloe growled, settling a hand on the butt of one of her pistols. “I’m pretty sure I could hit the nasty little worm even from here.”
He studied her uneasily. “Alright! Fine! I’m thinkin’ you need a lesson yerself and them’s liable to give it to you. Mean sons-of-bitches! Bunch of crooks, if you ast me! They’s down at the edge of town. Cain’t miss it. Says frontier rangers over the door.”
Chloe turned to head back in the direction she’d come from.
“They ain’t gonna let you inside with them guns.”
Good to know! Without pausing, Chloe marched down the darkening street until she saw the building the drunk had told her about. Ducking into the last alley along the street, she removed her pistols from the holster and knelt to tuck one in the top of her boot beneath her flight suit. After a short debate, she unzipped the front of the suit and tried slipping the second into the waist. It slipped to her crotch before she could even get the damned thing zipped again. Disgusted, she took it out again and shoved it into her sleeve.
It wasn’t exactly well concealed, damn it! But she wasn’t going in without a weapon when the old coot had already informed her they were outlaw lawmen. She knew the type. They were worse than most of the men they brought in, using the law to cover their own crimes. No doubt they’d gotten the recall alert and had taken Damon so that they could collect the compensation that would’ve gone to the proprietor.
The rifle, she decided, was completely out of the question and, reluctantly, she leaned it against the wall of the building, dropped her holster and headed toward the ranger station, trying to decide what sort of story she should tell them.
There were four of them seated around a game table as she entered the station. One look at them was enough to banish any doubts she’d cherished that the old bastard had lied to her. All four men turned to look at her when she came in, their hands on their own guns. They relaxed fractionally when they saw she was female.
Big mistake!
They looked her over like she was a choice piece of meat, but she wasn’t flattered. Her skin crawled. “Who should I speak to about a robbery?”
“That’d be me, ma’am,” one of the men answered, getting up and adjusting his dick in his pants without any self-consciousness.
“Where was you when you was robbed?”
Chloe struggled to get the fucking pistol out of her sleeve and finally managed to get it in her hand. “Oh, I wasn’t robbed. I came to rob you. I want my sexdroid back! Who’s got the keys to the cells?”
All four men stared at the pistol and then started laughing. “Girly! Do you even know how to shoot one of those?”
“I think I do,” Chloe said doubtfully. “You pull this thing, right?”
She shot his hat right off his head. When she did, all hell broke lose. The four men dove in every direction. Unfortunately, the damned head ranger charged her like a bull. She managed to get off two more shots, but they went wild. Even as she fired the third, the ranger slammed into her hard enough he knocked the breath from her and carried her against the wall behind her. She tightened her hand on her pistol instinctively, flailing her arm around to keep him from grabbing it and firing it several more times, grimly determined to empty the damned thing before he could take it away from her and shoot her with it if she couldn’t manage anything else.
One of the men yelped, marking one shot that had found a target. “Git the god damned gun! That stupid bitch shot me in the leg!”
Gritting her teeth, Chloe managed to lift one leg high enough to stomp the ranger’s foot. He bellowed in her ear loud enough it rang. Since she’d been trying to ram him in the groin with her knee, she wasn’t particularly happy about it either.
She still had the pistol in her boot, she thought a little despairingly as the man finally managed to grab her arm and wrest the pistol from her.
Things were beginning to look really bad when Jared and Kane burst through the door—literally. The door splintered, shards of wood flying in every direction. The rangers, who’d just begun to relax, grabbed for their pistols. One of them managed to shoot the ranger holding Chloe in the back. He screamed, let go of her and clawed at his back. Chloe dropped to the floor the minute he let go of her, scrambling frantically to get her pants leg up and grab her other pistol. A body slammed into the wall above her head and landed on her shoulders hard enough to flatten her.
