The Dollars Trilogy Fandom Event 2024

Finally Tuco got up with a sigh—the water was probably getting cold, Blondie thought.

“Alright, your turn.”

Blondie gave the secondhand water an unenthused look (also got a clear view of Tuco’s dripping, glistening body as he reached for a towel; then looked away).

He could probably make them change out the water, though that seemed like more trouble than it was worth. It wasn’t like he wasn’t used to the idea of conserving bath water (he remembered years of pre-Sunday-morning scrubs as a child, splashing off in the family’s tub behind a curtain) but he hadn’t had to share his water with anyone in years and he wasn’t keen to go back to it, particularly not if he was starting with Tuco.

“Come on, get up,” said Tuco, now mostly dry and with the towel draped carelessly around his shoulders, giving Blondie a shooing motion. “I know you smell bad, I’ve been sharing a blanket with you, amigo.”

Blondie grunted and flopped an arm over his eyes. “I’ll wash up later.”

“Water’s still warm now. Come on, smelly man, I know you won’t do it if I don’t make you.”

“I will,” said Blondie, trying and failing to not sound like a grumpy child.

He felt hands on him and reflexively straightened up, batting them away. Tuco caught him by the arms and hauled him up, cackling. They wrestled together for a moment, Tuco bodily shoving Blondie towards the tub.

“Take off your clothes off or I’ll dunk you in like that!”

Blondie sputtered, tried to wriggle out of Tuco’s bare brawny arms, and felt Tuco lift him up. “Put me down! Alright! Alright.”

Tuco released him and watched expectantly.

Blondie turned him away. “Get dressed!”

He undressed and sank into the tub quickly, while Tuco was getting dressed again. The water felt good once he was in it.

And it's already the last day! Making one drawing per day have been a challenge to me, but it was really fun! It was an amazing event and i absolutely loved what everyone did for each day. This fandom has something really special, and i love it <3

Blondie heard the phone in the outer office ring and Maria's muffled voice say “Sentenza & Biondo, how can we help you?” It was quiet for a while, and then the phone on his own desk started to ring. He sighed and picked it up. 

Before he could get a word out, a voice on the other end said, in a heavy Mexican accent, “Are you Sentenza or Biondo?”

“Biondo.”

“Can you put Sentenza on? I heard he's better. No offense.”

“He's, uh… not with us anymore.”

“Oh. Sorry.” 

“'S alright.” Blondie took a moment to wash down a propranolol with his watery coffee. “You want a consultation?”

“Nah, skip it. I'm at the police station right now. They're gonna arrest me for murder. But I didn't do it!”

“Sure,” Blondie muttered. He reached for a pen and notepad. “Name?”

“Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Juan María Ramirez."

“Right.” He scribbled down the first and last names and shrugged on his olive-green blazer, which he had forgotten to have dry-cleaned for the fourth week in a row. “Don't say anything. I'll be right there.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were only about twenty officers in the Betterville Police Department, and Blondie knew all of them. The one who met him at reception was named Wallace. He was the kind of cop who made the cameras in the interrogation rooms necessary. “You here for the Rat?” he asked.

“If the Rat's name is Ramirez, then yeah. Who's prosecuting?” 

“Mortimer.”

“Christ. You guys are taking this seriously.” 

“Murder's a serious crime.” Wallace led Blondie back to one of the little interview rooms and opened the door for him. “Your lawyer's here,” he said.

Tuco sat up from where he was slouched in a corner of the room. He was a shorter man dressed in a brown jacket, chinos, and flashy white pirarucu boots. He had gold rings on his fingers, a gold tooth, and a gold crucifix on a chain around his neck. “Hey,” he said to Wallace, “you got an ETA on that cheeseburger? I'm starving in here, man.”

“It's on its way.” Wallace motioned Blondie towards the table in the middle of the room. “Don't take too long, we want him booked tonight.”

“Yeah, alright.” Blondie sat down at the table and waited for Wallace to leave the room before turning to his new client. He opened his brown leather briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers and a pen. “Fee agreement,” he said. “Take a look, say if you want me to explain anything.”

Tuco nodded, took the papers, and signed the bottom one without reading a single word. “I don't know if you had a chance to look into my record,” he said. 

Blondie nodded. “It's pretty bad. You're not getting bail with those priors. Or a plea deal.” He put the fee agreement back in the briefcase and took out his notepad. “And Mortimer’s prosecuting. Likes to play hard ball and he's the best trial attorney in the state.”

“You fill me with confidence.” 

“Well, Sentenza was the best. I don’t like talkin’ as much as he did. But I'm smarter than he was. That's why I'm still here.”

Tuco drummed his fingers on the table. Despite the fact that he'd certainly been through the system before, he looked nervous. “I really didn't do it, you know.”

“Sure,” Blondie said. “But assuming you did—” 

Tuco slammed his hand on the table with a force that almost made Blondie jump. “I’m innocent this time,” he insisted, raising his voice. “And that's the truth! If you don't believe me how the hell is anybody else supposed to, huh?!”

Blondie raised his eyebrows. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Alright then,” he said. “Convince me first.”

Tuco growled. “Son of a whore… You're lucky the Rojos recommended you, otherwise I'd take my chances with the public defender.”

Ah. The Rojo cartel were Sentenza & Biondo's best customers. “This have anything to do with them?”

Tuco avoided his gaze. “Well, maybe. A little. I may or may not have been doing a favor for Ramon at the time.”

Blondie sighed, almost in relief. “If your interests end up going against theirs, ethics-wise I'd have to drop the representation. Best to play it safe. Hope you get a good public defender.” He started to put his notepad back in his briefcase.

“Shit! Wait!” Tuco reached across the table and grabbed Blondie by the wrist. His grip was surprisingly warm and firm. 

“Let go of me,” Blondie growled.

“No, you just listen to me for a minute,” Tuco said. “Are you fucking kidding me, man?! I called you because you're supposed to be the scummiest lawyer around!”

“Sure, but I don't think you're worth pissing off the Rojos.”

Tuco seemed to hesitate for a moment. “...Alright, well, I can make myself worth it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just shut up and listen.” Tuco's wide brown eyes had Blondie pinned to the spot. “The dead guy, Bill Carson. Ramon wanted him roughed up a little and I owed him a favor. So I followed him to the alley behind that strip club downtown, Mirage, I think. But when I found him, somebody else had already shot him. He was still alive, just barely. He gave me something.”

Blondie just glared at him silently.

“A key to a safety deposit box,” Tuco whispered. “With two million dollars inside. Clean cash. I managed to hide the key somewhere safe before they brought me in. I'll give you a cut of the money if you get me off.”

“Phrasing.”

“Oh fuck you.”

“What's the cut?”

“Twenty-five percent.”

“Fifty.”

“Fuck your mother too. Fine.” Tuco let go of his wrist finally and leaned backwards, scowling. “Well? Are you gonna be my lawyer or not?”

He keeps on slow, trying to keep up a facade of detached innocence as he discreetly surveys his surroundings.  Past a wide, squat jail with an alley round the side. The sheriff saunters out on the porch.  He's a big brutal kind of a man, yellow-headed.  Behind him like lean hungry dogs slink two mean-looking deputies with glinting eyes and bruises on their knuckles.  Like a reflection of someone knew once. “Howdy, stranger,” says the sheriff over-amiably. Blondie stops the horse.  “Howdy.” “Coming along right nicely, ain’t it?” Takes him a second to realize what that’s about; he follows the man’s gaze to the scaffold.  “Mm.  Looks like it.” “Not long now till it’s ready.”  That’s self-evident. “She’s a beaut,” says one of the deputies. Not a word Blondie would ever use for it, but all he says, with a touch of irony just for him, is: “Sure.”  He tips his hat, and before any of them can make any further attempt at conversation, he starts back on.  There’s work to be done.

~•~

Tuco’s cooling his heels in a cold, stinking jail cell trying to figure on a way out when he hears the first inklings of a commotion.  It’s a distant shout at first, but sure as the sun rises it grows steadily, becomes a clamor of voices out there in the night, some commanding, some frantic.  “Aw, hell,” mutters one of the deputies, “I’d better see what that’s about.”  He and the other converse mutedly, and then he leaves.  The remaining man eyes the jail cell nastily and then settles back down at the desk.

Not long after comes the low, muffled boom of a far-off explosion, prompting the other deputy up sharply from the desk.  Tuco wonders if the war’s found this place so soon.  

The clamor multiplies quickly; it sounds like half the town.  New light comes faintly through the high, barred window, wavering and orange.  The deputy paces and curses and paces and looks at the window and paces some more.  Tuco feigns sleep.  He swears he can feel the man’s eyes on him. “Shit,” the man says, and leaves.

A beat.  Two.  Three.  Tuco waits till he’s certain, then rises quickly with a low grunt of pain.  This is his break.  He scans the desk, picks out the keyring, then scans his cell for something to try and grab at it with.

A face appears in the window and startles him backwards.  A familiar face, when he looks, and stunned, he opens his mouth. Blondie holds a finger to his lips.  Tuco mouths at him wordlessly, trying to make some kind of sense of what he’s seeing, but he doesn’t speak.  Maybe he’s dreaming.  Or, hell, maybe that two-faced sonofabitch has just come to gloat one last time.  Yeah, that sounds right. Then Blondie’s wedging a kind of a metal hook round the bars of the window, and just before he drops back down, he winks.  Alright.  So it is a dream.

There’s a clatter of hooves, of wheels, a thunderous groan of straining rock and metal.  A crash, and open air.

~•~

The cell wall collapses into the alley exactly as he’d planned, the horses clattering onwards still trying to drag the thing behind their hitched cart; hurriedly he frees the chain attaching the hook and lets them go off into the street. Tuco stumbles out into the alley, his eyes wide.  He moves stiffly.  Blondie thinks of the deputies’ bruised knuckles and bites down hard on his cigar.  There’s no time for getting mad now.  He’s got a second horse waiting and he jerks his head for Tuco to mount, half-wondering if he’ll have to pull him up in his own saddle.  But with a wince, Tuco manages it. They ride.  Rounding a corner, they catch a glimpse of the buildings he’d set ablaze, crowds watching and crying out, the fire squadron trying to douse the inferno.  They plunge onwards into the dark, and no one sees them leave and no one follows.

Tuco, mercifully, waits until they’re well out of town before he starts yelling.  Less mercifully, they’ve dropped to a pace slow enough he can hear it in full. “Blondie, what the hell are you doing here?” “Oh, just saving your neck.  Again.” “Saving my neck.  Yeah, after what you did–” he stops.  “What the hell?” he says again. Blondie doesn’t answer.  Not much of a question anyway. “Why–how come you were in the right place at just the right time?” “Just lucky, I guess,” he says, and deigns not to mention newspapers and wanted posters skimmed in every town, ear pressed to the rumor mill.  It’s still not untrue. Tuco huffs.  After a minute he says, without malice, “You really are a two-faced sonofabitch.” Maybe so. It strikes him, then, the realization: Tuco hasn’t yet broken off to go their separate ways.

They make camp in a low scrubby wood and sit round a low fire with the night huddled very dense and very black around them and they look at each other sometimes across the flames or just stare into the fire.  Blondie’s doing a lot of the latter, biting down too hard on his cigar, trying not to fidget.  He thinks Tuco’s eyes are on him.  He hasn’t checked in a while and he hasn’t got the nerve now.  Beneath the crack of wood he hears the occasional shuffle of movement, adjusting and readjusting.  Antsy.

The line in the territory between justice and murder is thin. They both know. Wanted dead or alive is dead sooner or later, and the lawmen don’t take their time. The old rope-cutting con had relied on that: any bastard trying to make a buck could be judge, jury, and executioner, and if not him then someone else the next morning if he drug his bounty in alive like Blondie had. In and out of town in a flash. Judge, jury, and executioner.  Blondie’s killed half a dozen men for Tuco now and he’s not sorry for a single one.  

“What are you thinking about?” Tuco says at length. He wants to go back and kill those three sons of bitches.  Which is plain foolish because he can’t. “Nothing worthwhile,” he says, which is true, and Tuco scoffs but lets it go. They lapse into silence.  The night presses thicker and thicker at their backs.

“I’ve never been busted out of jail before.” That does make him look up.  Of all Tuco’s bullshit stories there’s a scant few he figures might be true; one was of a judge’s wife who’d been so enamored with him that she’d broke him out of his cell in the night.  He had mostly believed that because it sounded believable, because Tuco’s dodged death more than any man ought and he can charm his way out of just about anything.  Blondie’s loathe to admit it but it’s sure worked on him. He opens his mouth before he can think better and then stops, wonders if asking would just salt the wound. “What,” Tuco says tiredly. His eyes narrow, cautious.  “You said something once about a judge’s wife...” He barks out a laugh, harsh and sudden.  “And you believed that?” Blondie looks down.  Maybe it’s the fire but his face burns. “You of all people oughta know,” Tuco mumbles after a minute.  His voice is almost gentle. “Yeah.”  He doesn’t try to explain himself.  No point.  After a long minute he says, very quiet and half-strangled and for no good reason, “I don’t like lawmen much.” He can feel eyes on him, piercing, for a long beat. “You used to be a bounty hunter.” Now it’s him who laughs, almost sheepish.  “And you believed that, huh?” “Weren’t you?” He shrugs.  “A little.  Here and there.”  He sucks in a breath, lets it out in a slow sigh.  “Heart wasn’t in it.” Judge, jury, and executioner.  Sometimes he wishes it bothered him more.

A long minute passes.  Across the fire, Tuco stands, and Blondie stiffens.  He’s not sure what he expects.  Maybe for him to saddle and mount and ride off into the night.  Maybe just for him to bunk down for the night.  Not for him to walk round the fire and stop in front of him, wavering in the orange gloom.  Blondie stares at his boots. “Blondie?” He looks up at last, one of the few times he’s ever been able to do that given their heights.  The look on Tuco’s face is raw and indecipherable.  It seems like a question but Blondie doesn’t know what he’s trying to ask.  Then he toes cautiously at the dirt by his side, and Blondie nods slowly, shuffles over to let him sit.

A hundred thousand dollars.  It’s an almost obscene amount of money.  He's never been one for buying much more than the bare necessities; Tuco had always ragged him for never spending the money they made pulling the rope trick.  There hadn't been anything he wanted that badly, and there's certainly not anything he wants now that costs that much.  He doesn't even know what people put that kind of money into.  Land, probably, but land’s got to be managed, tended, looked after, and consequently stuck close to, and he has no desire to do that.  Might be useful to have a place to come back to, but his hideouts in the past have all been temporary–caves and old shacks and abandoned farmhouses–and it's suited him just fine.  Even a permanent hideout has to have somebody to look after, which means hiring somebody, and he's got no desire to do that either.  So he does what he always does: he keeps moving.  He’ll figure out what to do with the money on the road.

In one town he tries to gamble some of it but despite his well-practiced poker face, he's not much of a card player.  Too cautious.  He wins a little and then gets impulsive and goes all in on a bad bluff and loses it.  He isn't even angry.

In another he spends a night in a too-fancy hotel getting drunk on champagne behind his locked door before he discovers he hates champagne and remembers he hates being drunk.  Spends another half a day nursing the worst hangover of his life, spends the second half lying around doing nothing but feeling sorry for himself and consequently bored out of his skull, sleeps horribly on the overplush bed, and checks out at the crack of dawn the next morning, thoroughly disgusted with himself and convinced the life of the idle rich isn’t for him.

He leaves a considerable chunk of it in a sack outside a San Antonio mission.  He considers a note but doesn't know what to say.  Considers signing somebody else’s name, but that won’t go over and he knows it.  So he just leaves it in the night and rides off without so much as getting off the horse, and if he sees a half-familiar figure in the window watching him go, he decides not to make anything of it.

Each inkling of civilization he passes through (and at this point he skirts it) he hides all of it he doesn't need someplace outside of town, but then he has to go pick it up again and that gets old fast.  It's heavy.  It weighs him down.  It puts a target on his back, has him sleeping with his hand on his gun more even than he used to, has him waking up at every little sound, has him watching every lone stranger on the range with eagle’s eyes and his jaw set too firm.  One night setting up camp he gets so sore at the sight of those money bags it makes him almost sick. He buries all but a couple thousand in a dozen different places all across the desert and accidentally-on-purpose halfway forgets all of them.  He hurls his shovel off the top of a ridge and listens to the distant clatter it makes in the depth of the canyon and he only sort of feels better.

He tries bounty hunting for a while, legitimate, but in truth he was never as much as a bounty hunter as he let Tuco think.  His heart wasn't in it then and even less now. He scans newspapers and wanted posters and tries not to feel twisted-up inside when he doesn't see what he wants.  He spends hours looking over maps.  Thinks of going to Flagstaff where the high mountains are coated in snow, thinks about going to California to see the ocean.  It does sound nice.  Get away from all this, from the heat, from the dust, from the memories.  Somewhere nobody’s ever seen his face before.  Something stops him, and it's nothing to do with money.