CHAPTER FOUR
Pinnkus wasn’t far from Ringbar, only a thirty-hour trip, probably the reason Geri and Freki had picked the latter as our rendezvous point in the first place. Following standard bounty hunter protocol, I transmitted my new credentials and my imminent arrival to the authorities as we headed in for a landing.
I was a bit concerned that Freki might have forgotten about the deep-record aspects of Commonwealth paperwork when he created my fake ID, and I had a couple of explanations ready in case I was called on it. But the accreditation went straight through without a hiccup, and the controller welcomed me to Pinnkus with about as much enthusiasm as bounty hunters were ever welcomed anywhere.
Not only did my new employers have money, they also apparently had some decent connections.
Most of the Spiral’s major cities utilized a mixture of cabs and quick-rent runaround cars, trucks, and vans for citizens and visitors to use. Havershem City was somewhat unusual in that quick-rents constituted nearly the entire public transportation sector, with virtually no cabs anywhere.
The official explanation was that Pinnkus citizens really liked to drive themselves. Given Havershem City’s reputation as a popular place for criminal organizations to make deals and hammer out disagreements, I was more inclined to assume it was so that there were no inquisitive cab drivers playing unwanted witness to the city’s shadier activities.
Still, the needs of privacy notwithstanding, there were a fair number of surveillance cameras scattered through the metropolitan area, mostly at the edges of privately owned businesses. Freki’s disclosure that Tera C had been seen in the city had been accompanied by a video clip from one of them, which meant we knew exactly where to start looking.
Where to start looking and, more importantly from our standpoint, where to start sniffing.
“Do you really think you can pick up her scent here?” Geri asked as he, Selene, and I worked our way through the pedestrians toward the taverno in the video clip.
“Your own video shows she was here,” I reminded him. “Unless Freki’s able to find another shot of her elsewhere, this is where we start.”
“Right, but that was several days ago,” Geri reminded me. “Even on Pinnkus the tavernos wash the tableware and napkins and scrub down the tables more often than that.”
“But they probably don’t clean the chairs,” I said. “A single brush of her hand against the leg of the chair she was sitting on, and we’ll have her.”
He pondered that one a moment. “Except that our only shot shows her outside the place,” he said. “We don’t have anything from inside, so we don’t know where she was sitting.”
“See, that’s why we’re the professionals and you’re just the one with the money,” I said, smiling at Selene. We’d already come up with our jump-off plan, one that fortunately didn’t involve any chair leg guesswork.
But sometimes stealth was part of the job, and Geri didn’t strike me as the stealthy type. The more we could keep him out of the loop, the better.
“Right. The professionals.” Geri snorted. “So why are we really here? Don’t give me that crap about getting a scent off some damn chair leg. No one on the run is going to come back to the same taverno just because she likes the appetizers.”
“Actually, that’s not the case,” I told him. “Targets often fall into patterns without realizing they’re doing it. Plus, we don’t know that she is on the run.”
“With a six-year-old bounty on her head?” Geri asked pointedly. “Either she’s on the run, or she’s abysmally stupid.”
“Or she came here looking for something,” Selene offered.
“Like what?”
“Who knows?” I said. “Maybe they came through here six years ago and lost or hid something important. Maybe they met someone here and Tera’s trying to reestablish contact.”
“The Icarus never came anywhere near Pinnkus.”
“How do you know?” I countered. “You said the ship disappeared. It could have done a six-week grand farewell tour of the Spiral, complete with synchronized cartwheels, for all you know.” I pointed to the small awning and the four outside tables just ahead. “Here we are.”
Freki’s video had only shown a bit of the taverno’s exterior, which hadn’t looked all that impressive, and seeing the whole façade didn’t improve my assessment of the place very much. The door was serviceable but nothing special, though it looked like it could take a pretty good impact without breaking. The white-brick walls on either side were mostly intact, though some of the bricks closest to the door had clearly taken a stray shot or two over the years. Two of the outside tables were occupied by couples, and I could hear enough conversational buzz drifting through the open door to suggest there was also a fair number of patrons inside.
“Selene’s going to wait out here while you and I make sure it’s safe,” I told Geri. I stepped into the doorway—
And braked to a sudden stop as Selene grabbed my arm. “Fear,” she whispered urgently in my ear. “There’s fear in there. Terrible fear.”
I peered into the taverno’s gloomy interior. As my eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight outside, I could make out a dozen or more figures gathered together around a table near the taverno’s center. Farther out toward the edges were a few more figures, apparently uninterested in whatever the big attraction was in the middle. “Human?” I whispered back.
I heard the subtle sounds of fluttering nostrils as she sniffed at the air. “Ulkomaals,” she said. “One male, one female. It’s overwhelming everything else. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I assured her. “Surprises can be fun, too.”
“Are we going in, or aren’t we?” Geri growled from behind me.
“We’re going in,” I said, gently unwrapping Selene’s fingers from my arm and giving her an equally gentle push out of the doorway. Her job was out here.
Mine, apparently, was in there. Making sure my Fafnir 4 plasmic was riding loose in its holster, I walked inside.
I’d seen the people gathered around the table from the door. What I hadn’t seen until I was a few steps inside was that the table itself was only occupied by two men, facing each other from opposite sides with a deck of cards and a mess of poker chips in the middle. Seated midway around one side of the table and about a meter back from it was a pair of Ulkomaals, the male and female Selene had identified, their hands clasped tightly together. As I moved closer, I saw the dull white of plastic restraints connecting their wrists.
Prisoners, in other words. Not all that surprising for a place like Havershem City. Neither of the poker players was wearing a uniform or a security company badge or armband, which probably made them bounty hunters.
So why had they paused in the middle of delivering a package to play cards?
One of the men standing between me and the table was wearing a very familiar jacket. I angled to the side until I could see enough of his profile to be sure it was really him. It was.
Damn.
But I needed information, and he was the most likely source. “Hey, Jasper,” I greeted him as I stepped casually to his side.
He looked at me, the dramatic frown he liked to give strangers to prove he was a serious badass dissolving into wide-eyed disbelief. “Roarke?” he demanded. His eyes dropped briefly to my left arm, then came back to my face. “You—I heard you were dead.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I said. “Who told you that?”
“I—well—everyone.” His eyes flicked to the door, paused for a second look as he presumably caught sight of my new shadow. “Your new partner?”
“My new employer,” I corrected. “What’s going on?”
Jasper looked back at the card game as if resetting his brain. “Right. Okay. On the left is Boff. He caught those two Ulkomaals you can see straight back from the table.”
“Yeah, they’re not hard to pick out of the crowd,” I said. “What were they wanted for?”
“Escaped house slaves,” Jasper said. “They were trying to get to Buulviv. That’s their City of Refuge on Pinnkus.”
I nodded. Every Ulko enclave throughout the Spiral had a City of Refuge where Ulkomaals could petition for a judicial hearing before the local elders. Until that petition was heard and adjudicated, no other species or governmental authorities could interfere. “Do they have a case?”
Jasper shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care. On the right is Oberon. You may have heard of him.”
I winced. Every bounty hunter in the Spiral had heard of Oberon. His specialty was recruiting participants for the death matches so dearly beloved by some of the nastier criminal kingpins. The badgemen had been after him for years, but he’d always managed to stay just far enough inside the law that no one had been able to take him down. The fact that a lot of his clients were aliens who operated under vastly different legal structures than the Commonwealth didn’t help.
Luko Varsi, I knew, also had a hand in some of those operations. Yet another good reason for us to hate working for him. “Let me guess,” I said. “He’s trying to steal the Ulkomaals from Boff?”
“He’s trying to buy them,” Jasper said, as if that was an important distinction. I doubt it mattered much to the Ulkomaals. “Boff’s one of those hunters—” he sent me a significant look “—who gives, you know, half a damn about the packages he picks up.”
“Like me?”
His lip twitched. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to have picked up on the look he’d given me. “Yeah, something like you,” he said. “Or maybe he just cares about his reputation. Anyway, he didn’t want to sell. Oberon offered to play him a little poker—loser gets the pot, winner gets the Ulkomaals.”
I peered at the table. Between the players’ stacks and the scattering in the current pot, there were a lot of chips out there. “Any idea what the table stakes are?”
“About ten thousand more than the bounty on the happy couple,” Jasper said. “Why, you thinking about getting into the game?”
I smiled. With ten thousand in my wallet and another fifty thousand or so back at the Ruth, getting into a high-stakes game was actually possible for once.
But doing a head-to-head against a man like Oberon was never a good idea. Especially when there were better ways. “Whose deck are they playing with?” I asked.
Jasper frowned at me. “Why?”
“Whose deck?” I repeated.
“The bartender had one,” he said, still frowning. “I hope you’re not thinking of trying something stupid.”
“I thought you liked watching people get hurt.”
“Not when Oberon’s involved,” he said. “Especially not when I’m in the line of fire.”
“There’s the door,” I said, pointing past Geri. “See you around.”
I’d gotten three steps toward the table when a heavy hand on my right shoulder brought me to a stop. “What do you think you’re doing?” Geri growled in my ear. “Focus on the prize. Tera’s not here, so let’s go.”
“Right behind you,” I said, reaching up with my other hand and digging at his grip. The artificial fingers were purported to be five to ten percent stronger than the ones they’d replaced, but even so I found myself not making a single iota of headway against him. “Three minutes,” I promised. “If it doesn’t happen by then, it’s not going to.”
For another moment he didn’t move. Then, reluctantly, he loosened his grip. “Three minutes,” he agreed. “And don’t expect me to back you up.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” I assured him. I stepped forward, stopping at the inner ring of the observers.
For a minute I just watched, gauging the players’ expressions and body language and getting a feel for the intensity of the play. Boff was the cooler of the two, playing with his head instead of his emotions, while Oberon seemed to be putting more of his ego into the game.
Something brushed against my foot. I looked down, catching a glimpse of an animal as it scampered under the edge of the table. I was just regretting not getting a better look when it unwittingly solved my problem by hopping onto the chair beside Boff and then up onto the table. For a second it seemed to be considering what to do, and then skittered to the edge of the table closest to the Ulkomaals, where some previous customer had abandoned a small plate half filled with crunch nuts. Hunching up on its haunches, it dug in.
I squinted, trying to figure out just what it was. It was furry, bigger than a rat and only slightly smaller than a ferret, with small but dexterous paws. It looked too well-groomed to be a stray or some breed of local vermin. Possibly someone’s pet, then. Boff had glanced over when it first arrived on the table, but had returned his attention to his cards without further reaction. Oberon ignored the creature completely.
So had all the rest of the people watching the game, as far as I could tell. Either they all knew the animal, or else knew enough about the species not to worry about it.
Or, rather, worry about them. Even as I finished my brief visual once-over a second animal hopped up on the table from Oberon’s side. For a moment they faced off over the crunch nuts, as if deciding which one had squatter’s rights to the treats, and then the newcomer made an impressive leap off the table onto the Ulkomaals’ combined lap. The winner shifted position, swiveling its body around to the far side of the plate, probably with the objective of blocking any new attempts by the second ferret to hop back and take another crack at the crunch nuts.
The hand ended, the pot going to Oberon. Boff collected the cards and shuffled, Oberon cut, and Boff dealt the next hand. If this hand and pot were representative of the game as a whole, I estimated they could be at it for another hour before the matter was resolved.
Unfortunately, I only had three minutes.
I waited until they’d gone through the initial bet-and-call phase, drawn their replacement cards, and settled into the serious art of betting. Then, taking a deep breath, I left the circle of observers and started toward the table. As I walked, I casually put my hands together in front of me and gave my left thumbnail a gentle double stroke with my right thumb.
Both players looked at me as I walked up to them. “You have a problem, bubbo?” Oberon growled, glaring at me from under bushy eyebrows.
“No, not at all,” I assured him, flicking a glance at Boff. He seemed more bemused than irritated by my sudden audacity, about the same reaction he’d showed toward the ferret that had hopped up beside him a minute ago. The initial betting had been brisk, I’d already noted, and from my new perspective I could estimate that maybe a quarter of the table’s total number of chips were currently in the pot.
An important hand for both of them, then. Perfect. “Just go on with what you were doing,” I continued. “I’m just curious.” Coming to a halt, I rested my left hand casually on the edge of the table, palm down, then picked up one of Boff’s two discards with my right hand and peered at its back.
I hadn’t gone in for one of the fancy weaponized arms that Geri had talked about earlier, the ones with concealed knives or plasmics. But I had added a couple of modifications that I’d figured would be useful if and when I decided to return to the bounty hunter life. Since one of the highest casualty rates in the profession stemmed from unwarily stepping around corners, I’d put in a thumbnail that could be transformed into a mirror.
It was also quite serviceable for reading the faces of cards turned toward it. The six of diamonds I was holding, for instance.
I nodded, as if to myself, and set the card back onto the table. Picking up Boff’s other discard—this one the three of spades—I looked at the back and did the nodding thing again, this time adding a sort of under-the-breath uh-huh. I set the card on top of the other, smiled genially at the two players, and started to turn away.
And froze at the familiar sound of a gun being drawn from a holster. “Freeze,” Oberon said softly.
Make that two guns being drawn, I mentally corrected myself as I heard a similar sound from Boff’s side of the table. “Easy, gentlemen,” I cautioned, holding my hands chest high where both of the players could see them, also making sure the left thumbnail was pointed straight at the ceiling where no one could see its reflectivity. It was designed to look mostly opaque except from straight on, but this was no time to take unnecessary chances. “I was just curious about whether or not the cards were marked.”
“They’re not,” Oberon growled. “So get out of here.”
“Sure,” I said. I took a step— “But they are, you know,” I added over my shoulder.
“Stop,” Boff said, his voice very soft. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Gregory Roarke,” I said.
“Really,” Boff said. “I’ve heard of you. Also heard you’d retired.”
I shrugged. “It didn’t take.”
Boff snorted gently. “Does it ever? Turn around.”
I turned back to face them, still keeping my hands up. Both were pointing guns at me, all right, Oberon with a Golden 6mm, Boff with a Victori plasmic. With his free hand, Boff cut the deck and slid off the top card. “What is it?”
I picked it up, again setting my left hand where the thumbnail could catch the reflection. “Nine of clubs,” I said, holding it up where the two players could see it. I glanced over the top of the card—
And felt my breath catch in my throat. On the far side of the table, past the ferret that was nibbling on the crunch nuts and partially blocking the players’ view, I saw that the second ferret was still nestled in the Ulkomaals’ combined lap.
Chewing industriously on the plastic restraints holding the two aliens’ wrists together.
It made no sense. None. I’d used those restraints dozens of times in my years of securing prisoners, and while I’d never tried licking or biting one of them I didn’t believe for a single second that the plastic could possibly taste good. Not even to street animals, where the need to scrounge questionable food encouraged lowered gastric standards.
But it was happening. The ferret was gnawing away, its relatively tiny mouth and teeth able to bite into the plastic without shredding the neighboring skin the way a prisoner’s own teeth certainly would.
“This one,” Boff said, sliding another card off the deck.
I snapped my attention back to him. “Sure,” I said. I reached over to pick it up—
And stopped short as Oberon wrapped his fingers around my wrist. “Enough,” he said. “I don’t know what your game is, but it’s over. Chucks?”
“Yeah, boss?” one of the onlookers standing behind him replied, taking a step forward.
“Take this hopper outside,” Oberon said. “Explain to him why interrupting me is a bad idea.”
“Sure, boss.” Smiling unpleasantly, Chucks drew his own gun and took another step forward—
“No, let’s explain instead why rigged games are an even worse idea,” an authoritative voice came from directly behind me.
I turned. Geri was standing there, straight and tall, his whole muscular bulk poised defiantly against the two weapons still pointed at me. Unfortunately, all that muscle wouldn’t do a damn bit of good against a plasmic and a 6mm.
Fortunately, the gold InterSpiral Law Enforcement badge displayed in his hand would.
I looked at his face, my brain trying to wrap around this new development. Were Geri and Freki really…?
No, of course they weren’t. The badge was a phony, the authoritative voice a carefully constructed affectation, the whole scene nothing but a last-second plan to extricate their tame bounty hunter before I lost another limb. Or worse.
Only now Geri had stepped way over the line. Impersonating an ISLE officer was a serious felony. Even worse, on a world with as much organized crime as Pinnkus, faking official credentials without having any official authority or backup could be quickly fatal.
“So here’s what you’re going to do,” Geri continued into the crowd’s sudden silence. “You’re going to split the money back to the two of you, back to whatever the situation was before you came in here. Got it?” He gestured with the badge. “Oh, and you’re going to start by putting those guns away. Do it fast enough and I’ll forget to run your permits.”
Boff and Oberon looked across the table at each other. Then, with the strained grace of men who don’t have much choice, they returned their weapons to their holsters and started counting their chips. It was all over, or nearly so.
There was only one problem. The ferret chewing on the Ulkomaals’ wrist restraints hadn’t finished.
“That’s fine,” I said, raising my voice. “Officer,” I belatedly remembered to add. “But I, for one, would like to know exactly how a marked deck got into this game in the first place.” I turned, putting my back to the table, and pointed toward the bar at the far end of the room. “You—bartender—where did those cards come from?”
The look on Geri’s face was priceless, though I probably would have found it far more entertaining if I hadn’t been the one it was directed toward. He’d had the situation wrapped up in a neat bow, and now here I was threatening to open it back up again.
And not just the wager, but also the temporary and probably unstable inactivity the crowd had been forced into. A number of these patrons were probably locals, and if they thought the staff had taken sides in a bounty hunter confrontation there could be unpleasant consequences.
But I needed to buy the ferret some time. Oberon wasn’t going to give up on throwing the Ulkomaals into a death-combat cage just because some badgeman had told him to. One way or another, he’d get the aliens away from Boff. Unless they got out of here right now, they were dead.
“They came from the bar,” someone spoke up. “The bartender—that one there—he got the deck from under the bar.”
“Dani brought it over,” someone else said, pointing to a large woman in an apron with tired eyes and a defiant set to her mouth. “She brought the chips, too.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Dani protested. “Louie gave me the cards. I just delivered them.”
But it was too late. The crowd was stirring, the unpleasant mutterings starting to become louder and more focused. I had the impression Dani wasn’t one of the taverno’s favorite servers, possibly with the kind of attitude or smart mouth—or even just a steadfast refusal to be dumped on or hit on by the customers—that encouraged people to think the worst of her.
And now, too late, I realized that freeing the Ulkomaals at the cost of endangering an innocent bartender and server was nowhere near the high moral ground I thought I’d been occupying.
Some of the customers were starting to get to their feet now even as the group surrounding the card table began moving toward the bar. The crowd was getting ugly, and it was up to me to stop them, however I had to do it. I opened my mouth, ignoring the warning look on Geri’s face—
“No,” a deep, cultured voice cut through the rising din.
I turned toward the voice. Seated alone at a table near the bar was a squat, broad-shouldered creature with a sort of squashed lizard face. A Kalix, I tentatively identified him, though I’d never actually met one. A reasonable enough species, if I remembered correctly, though not above shady activities like smuggling or bounty hunting.
The crowd’s advance seemed to falter a little. “Neither is to blame,” the Kalix continued. “After the human male set the card box on the bar, but before the human female picked it up, another human male took the box and replaced it with another.”
“Sure he did,” someone said scornfully. “And you’re just saying something now?”
“I do not know all the customs of humans,” he said. “In Kalixiri card games, the dealer discards the first two cards before dealing. I thought perhaps humans discarded the entire deck.”
“Don’t be stupid,” the same voice bit out.
“What did he look like?” someone else asked.
The Kalix shrugged. “He was human,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “Beyond that, I cannot say. Sadly, all of you look alike to me. I only know he immediately exited the establishment.”
Someone snarled something derogatory. A couple of others flung curses or insults at the alien.
But the situation had been defused. With no clear target for their anger and blood-lust, the crowd reluctantly started to dissipate back to their chairs.
I looked back at the table. Boff and Oberon were still sorting through the chips, both clearly intent on making sure neither of the others swiped more than his fair share from the pot. The two ferrets were nowhere to be seen.
Neither were the Ulkomaals.
I turned to Geri. His eyes were hard, his expression that of someone who would gladly forego the money he’d already paid out in exchange for the satisfaction of bouncing me a few times off the taverno’s brick wall. “That went well,” I said.
Geri’s eyes flicked back over my shoulder toward the two bounty hunters and the Ulkomaals’ empty chairs then returned to me. “You pull something like that again,” he warned softly, “and I mean ever again, and I will cut you into small pieces and feed you to the street rats. Do I make myself clear?”
“Completely,” I assured him, feeling a shiver run up my back. So, even angrier than just ready to bounce me off a wall. Good to know. “Though if you do that, you won’t ever get a line on Tera.”
He snorted. “I don’t have a line on her now.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Come on—Selene’s probably already halfway to her place by now.”
We made our way to the door…and as we reached it something made me look back at the table where the Kalix was sitting.
Just in time to see the two ferrets hop up on the table and scamper up his arms, where one of them settled comfortably on each shoulder. The alien spotted me looking at him, and I could swear he gave me a microscopic nod.
And then we were outside, and Geri was looking around. “So?” he demanded. “Where is she?”
“No idea,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Let’s find out.”