The man behind the desk — Bob assumed it was Harvey himself — looked like he’d be at home with a big ol’ stogie sticking out of the side of his mouth, but as we all know cigars are illegal now. He looked like the kind of guy who knew how to get a cigar on the black market, though. Maybe Bob would ask him about that someday.
“Can I help you, Mack?”
“Probably,” Whelan said. “I’ve had my cargo ship hijacked two or three times too often in the last month, and I’m looking for something to discourage people from doing that.”
“Ever own a gun before?”
“Nope. I figure that’s why the frickin’ ship gets hijacked so much.”
Cigar Man let a thoughtful silence linger over the proceedings and walked over to a display case filled with large handguns. He unlocked the back of the case, slid a door open and reached inside for one of the larger ones.
“This one’s pretty simple and real effective. You’ll find the simpler these things are, the more effective they are,” the shop owner said. “This baby could blow a hole right through the other guy’s hull if you had to.”
“No, thanks,” Whelan said. “With my luck I’d blow the hole in my own hull. I told you I’m new at this.”
“Treat it with care and respect and nothing stupid will ever happen — but point taken,” Harvey said, if it was Harvey, and he reached for something a little less formidable. It was smaller but still a bit menacing. “Here’s something that can keep the hijackers off your butt without damaging anybody’s hull. Best of both worlds.”
Bob held the pistol lightly in his hand, feeling the heft of it. Then he held it straight out and looked down the sight, like he’d seen in his friend Pete’s old movies. He felt safer already.
“Yeah, I think this one will do just fine. Wrap it up.”
“OK, sir, today’s Tuesday, fill out this form and you can take delivery Friday.”
Something churned in Bob Whelan’s gut. “Friday, I'll probably be four light years from here.”
“Then you shoulda come in Saturday,” the shop owner said patiently. “Three-day waiting period. You know that.”
“Every frickin’ time,” Whelan muttered. “All right, I’ll pick it up when we get back, then. Or is there a way to take possession sooner?”
“Well ... The firing permit doesn’t kick in until Friday anyway, so under those circumstances you can probably get an administrative judge to grant you a waiver. You know anyone in Special Forces? That helps.”
“Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact,” Bob said. “Wait a minute. What’s a firing permit?”
“Well, I just assumed you might want to fire the gun if you have to,” said the shop owner. “That’s a different permit than just owning it.”
“Who wants to own a gun but not use it?”
“You’d be surprised. Some folks just want the thing around so they can point it at anyone who gets out of line, so they buy just the owner’s permit. You know, a guy tries to hold up your store, changes his mind when he sees the gun — he don’t know you can’t fire it legally. Plus, the firing permit’s an extra hundred-fifty, so some folks just don’t bother about it.”
“A hundred-fifty! I’d like to meet the politician who came up with that idea. On second thought, no I wouldn’t,” Bob said. “So I can take the gun with me tomorrow but I can’t shoot it until Friday?”
“That’s how it works.”
“Every frickin’ time,” Whelan said. “I just know I’m gonna need the thing on Thursday.”
* * *
It was raining in Seattle. So what else is new? It had been raining even harder the last week. The weather babe on TV said dissolving the moon with an imaginary bomb had created all sorts of problems with pressure systems colliding and stuff.
Pete Wong had slept two hours later than normal again, but he wasn’t tired anymore — the past couple of days he had stayed in bed more because of the emotional fallout from chasing all over the galaxy looking for the imaginary bomb ignition disk that had been hijacked from his freighter, and then from being a little too close for comfort when interplanetary terrorists set it off on the moon.
That was enough adventure for one lifetime, his partner, Bob Whelan, said, and he was right — we’re just freighter pilots. If we wanted that kind of excitement, we would have joined the military a long time ago. I’m a spacer, not a cop. Still, Snooky wasn’t the kind of person who would ask for help unless she needed it a long time ago and was just now feeling desperate enough to ask for it. Pete Wong sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy.
The phone rang like an old-fashioned bell. He stared at it and let the bell jangle a couple more times. Pete Wong loved old movies and was convinced people were more cheerful on the phone in the old days because they were responding to a friendly, beckoning bell and not an electronic gerbil or a tinny recording of a bad pop song. He was thrilled to death when someone finally thought to make ring tones that rang like phones did in the old movies. After the third ring, he picked the phone up.
“Hello; Pete Wong.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m climbing the walls over here. I think vacation’s over.”
Pete chuckled. Relaxation didn’t come easy for the man who owned that gruff voice. “Mornin’ Bob. Do we have a shipment?”
“Yeah, I figured you’d climbing the walls by now, too, so I got us a shipment to Proximi Centauri 3,” said Bob Whelan. “I figured you weren’t going to let me talk you out of going right out there to see what Snooky’s problem is.”
“Funny you should mention that, I was just thinking about her,” Pete replied.
“I just bet you were,” Whelan leered. Bob wasn’t really a dirty old man, he just talked like one most of the time. “Well, if you want, we can get some business that’s heading for PC-3, but first I wanna know what you’re getting us into. I’ll call Bax and we’ll meet you at Betsy, what, around noon? It’s 10 now.”
“Twelve sounds good.”
“OK, see ya then,” Bob said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the meantime.”
“Thanks for the leeway,” Pete Wong said as he hung up the phone. The little chuckle ended in a frown. He was wondering what he was getting his friends into, too.
* * *
It’s hard to believe the people who made the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Commando Cody serials got the future of spaceflight right, but there she was — the Betsy Ross, resting on the ground like some huge, elongated mushroom, smoke oozing lazily from behind the mushroom’s cap. The ImagDrive that powered the ship needed no fuel, of course, because it was simply a computer outfitted with an imagination; the smoke was exhaust from the power generator that created the ship’s heat and electricity. Sometimes Pete had to chuckle when he looked at Betsy; it was a bit like he’d entered a time warp and landed in 1930s Hollywood every time he showed up for work.
“Hiya, Pete!” He was surprised he hadn’t seen the source of that huge, enthusiastic greeting before he heard it. Baxter Hetznecker, a huge, enthusiastic bundle of energy, was the largest man he’d ever seen who could still move with anything resembling agility. How could this big galoot with the temperament of a St. Bernard puppy be a trained killer? At the end of the adventure of the imaginary bomb, Baxter had been revealed as the retired commander of training for Special Forces — retired because his passion for good food led him to exceed the force’s weight restrictions — and his skill with a laser rifle had saved their lives more than once. Still, no matter how often he told himself the truth, Pete Wong still thought of Baxter Hetznecker mainly as the ship’s cook and a good drinking buddy.
“How goes it, Baxter?” he said.
“Unbelievable! Did you know they have an ImagCoaster installed next to the Space Needle now? They got 50 different rides from all over the galaxy!” Pete laughed; he thought Baxter’s obsession with roller coasters had been part of his undercover persona, but now it appeared it was absolutely authentic.
“I’ll check it out next time we’re in town, Bax,” he said. “Bob here yet?”
“Oh yeah, he’s inside checking out the computer,” said the big man with the shapeless face. “You do anything neat this week, Pete?”
Wong shrugged. “Slept a lot and thought about Snooky.”
Baxter’s smile turned into concern. “Yeah, we gotta go rescue her from whatever it is you were starting to tell us about last week at the bar.”
“Bob didn’t let me get very far,” Pete said. “I don’t blame him, we were just done with one big deal and who needs to think about another one right then? But I guess I get to finish telling the story now.”
“First things first,” said Bob Whelan, rubbing his hands with an oily rag as he stepped out of the ship onto the boarding ramp. “Did she ever tell you her real name, or is that only for her very most special friends?”
Snooky was the toughest little package on PC-3 — Bob liked to say she had the narrowest hips in the galaxy — and Snooky’s was the first and best tavern in the encampment, but nobody they knew had a clue what name she was born with, and some believed she didn’t remember herself.
“I didn’t ask her, tell ya the truth,” Pete said. “‘Snooky’ is as good a name as she needs anyway, I guess.”
“So, hero, what are you getting us into this time?”
“What do you mean ‘this time,’ boss? You’re the one who nearly got us vaporized a half-dozen times last month.”
“Yeah, yeah, but you’re the one who’s talkin’ about life and death today. Spill it.”
The Chinese-American co-pilot sighed. “It has to do with some company that’s been buying up the property around the bar. She says they started talking to her a couple of weeks before we were out there. You know Snook —”
“Not as good as some people,” Whelan leered.
“Shut up. She’s not gonna sell and that’s that.”
“Well, good for her,” Baxter said. “It’s her property. It’s a nice bar.”
“Well, the problem is, these people have talked a little tough with her,” Pete replied. “She told me about some not-too-subtle threats and the like.”
“Great, they’re probably Mafia,” Bob rolled his eyes. “Ah, what the hell, we survived terrorists and the army shooting at us, we may as well take on organized crime next.”
“The Mafia don’t really exist,” Baxter said with a straight face. “They told me so themselves.” He was kidding. Wasn’t he?
Ignoring the implications of his big friend’s remark, Bob Whelan said, “Well, anyway, I got us 25 tons of ImagPro heading out to Proximi Centauri. Let’s get it on board, and then we’ll see what we can do for Snooky.”
Next: Chapter 3. The problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment