Hard Merchandise Page 4

  "I'm looking for a place to stay." With his massive, scaled shoulders hunching over the drink, Bossk leaned closer to the bartender. "Someplace quiet."

  "So?" The scowl on the bartender's lumpish face didn't diminish; he continued wiping out an empty glass with a grease-mottled towel. "We ain't running a hotel here, you know."

  This time, Bossk slid a coin across the bar. "Some­place private."

  The bartender laid the towel down for a moment; when he picked it up again, the coin had vanished. "I'll ask around."

  "Appreciate it." Bossk knew that those words meant the negotiations were concluded, and successfully. The

  Mos Eisley cantina actually did have some chambers for rent—dark, airless holes, down beneath the cellars and subcellars where the barrels of cheap booze were stored— but only a few creatures, even among the establishment's regular habitues, knew about them. The cantina's man­ agement preferred keeping them little known, and empty more often than not; it cut down on the amount of raids and general hassles from the Empire's security forces. "I'll check with you later."

  "Don't bother." The bartender slapped something down. "Here's your change."

  Bossk didn't even bother to look. He palmed the small object, feeling the outline of a primitive all-metal key, and slipped it into one of the pouches on his belt. He al­ ready knew the way to the chambers beneath the can­ tina, down one of the narrow stairs tucked behind a crumbling stone wall.

  Carrying the drink with him, he slipped into one of the booths along the far wall. It wasn't too long before somebody joined him.

  "Long time, Bossk." A rodent-faced Mhingxin sat himself down on the other side of the booth's table. Eob­bim Figh's long-fingered hands, like collections of bones and coarse, spiky hairs, set out a multicompartmented box with an assortment of stim-enhanced snuff powders. "Good to see you." Figh's sharp-pointed nails dipped into the various powders, one after another, then to the elongated nostrils on the underside of his wetly shining snout. "Heard you were dead. Or something."

  "It would take a lot to kill me, Figh." Bossk sipped at the drink. "You know that."

  "Boba Fett is a lot. Lot of trouble." The Mhingxin shook his tapered head. "Shouldn't take him on. Not if you're smart."

  "I'm plenty smart enough for Fett," said Bossk sourly. "I just haven't been lucky."

  Figh exploded into high-pitched laughter, a squealing gale that sent clouds of acrid snuff rising from the box on

  the table. "Lucky! Lucky!" He slapped his narrow paws beside the box. "Luck is for fools. Used to tell me that. You did."

  "Then I've gotten even smarter than I was before." Bossk could feel the expression on his muzzle turn ugly and brooding. "Now I know how important luck is. Boba Fett has luck. That's why every time I've encoun­tered him, he's won."

  "Luck?" Figh shrugged. "Little more than that. What. I think."

  The awkward Basic of the creature sitting across from Bossk irritated him. "I don't care what you think," he growled. "I've got plans of my own. Plus, I've got the odds on my side now."

  "Figure that? How so?"

  "Simple." Bossk had had a long time to brood over the matter. "Boba Fett's run of luck has gone on way too long. It's got to end; maybe it's already ended. Then it'll be my turn." He nodded slowly, as though already tast­ ing blood seeping between the fangs in his mouth. "And it'll be payback time for Boba Fett."

  That produced another bout of snickering laughter from Figh. "Long time coming. That payback. Not the only one—you."

  Bossk knew that was true enough. The breakup of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, for which Boba Fett had been largely responsible, had left a lot of creatures throughout the galaxy with a simmering hatred for Fett. He hit us all, right where it hurts. Bossk nodded again, even slower and with eyes narrowed. In our pockets. The old system, under the Guild, had spread the wealth out, not evenly— Bossk's father, Cradossk, as head of the Bounty Hunters Guild, had always done better for himself than any of his followers—but well enough that no hunter went com­ pletely hungry. All that was changed now; a lot of former bounty hunters were either dead or had dropped out of the trade, getting into other lines of work that were ei­ ther closer to or further from being legal. The criminal

  organization Black Sun had reorganized; the Empire had picked up some new recruits, as had the Rebel Alliance.

  "We could've hung together," sulked Bossk. "If we'd been smart." He couldn't—and didn't—blame himself for that much; he had tried to keep the other bounty hunters, or at least the younger and tougher ones, to­gether after the Bounty Hunters Guild had broken up. That had been the whole point of the Guild Reform Committee that he had put together—with himself at the head, naturally—right after he had eliminated old Cra­ dossk, in the traditional and time-honored Trandoshan fashion. The old lizard would've wanted it that way, Bossk told himself. And if Cradossk hadn't, who cared? He was still just as dead and out of the way now.

  "Smart, lucky—big ifs," said Figh. "For you. For Boba Fett, not ifs."

  "Yeah, well, we'll see about that." The drink's intoxi­ cants had fueled Bossk's anger. "Like I said, I got plans."

  "Plans take money. You got?"

  Bossk glared at the Mhingxin, wondering just how much he knew. "Enough."

  "True?" Figh gave a doubtful shrug. "Not so heard around here."

  The murder of the beggar, whose body Bossk had left in the alley at Mos Eisley's perimeter, was starting to seem pointless. Or at least pointless beyond the simple pleasure of snapping another creature's neck in his fists. It was beginning to seem that everybody in the spaceport had a line on his financial condition.

  "You heard wrong, then." Bossk decided to bluff it out. "Use that little rodent brain of yours, for a change. The old Bounty Hunters Guild had a huge treasury stashed away, before it fell apart. Who do you think wound up with all those credits?"

  Figh smiled unpleasantly. "Not you."

  "Look, just because I didn't land here with my own personal ship—that doesn't mean anything. I got my own reasons for wanting to keep a low profile."

  The Mhingxin uttered a common, low-slang ex­pression for bovine waste material. "Broke, you, that's the truth. What heard, more than one mouth. Smiling and laughing, too. Nearly as many enemies, you, as Boba Fett. All that killing." Figh shook his head, rudi­mentary snout whiskers fluttering. "Stepping on toes. Probably why your bad luck. Nobody wish you good luck."

  Bossk felt the urge rise in him to reach across the table and do the same thing to Figh that he had done to the beggar he had left in the alley. He restrained himself; the consequences wouldn't have been insurmountable, but he didn't need the expense right now of paying the bar­ tender to take care of the mess. Plus—now that Bossk thought about it—there was a certain value to having an information source like Figh around.

  "So tell me something." Bossk leaned across the table, clawed hands folded around the drink in front of him. "Since you've heard so much about my state of affairs. If I didn't get the Bounty Hunters Guild treasury, then who did?"

  "Everybody knows. Not even worth charging you for." Figh's sneer split one side of his face. "The credits gone, and so is Gleed Otondon. Figure out."

  That jibed with everything Bossk had been able to find out while he had been making his way here to Ta­tooine . He could still remember the annihilating fury that had boiled up inside him when he had attempted to access the mountain of credits that had been stashed away from the vanished Guild and had found the ac­counts completely ransacked. Whoever had been re­sponsible, and who now had the credits that should rightfully have been in Bossk's pockets, had not only known the crypto-security codes for the accounts, but also exactly what banking and financial-center worlds they had been located at. Obviously an inside job: some of the accounts had been emptied just a few min­utes before Bossk got to them and found them bare. So it must have been somebody who had been at the top

  levels of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, Bossk figured, one of his father Crado
ssk's most trusted advisors, a creature that would have been in a position to snoop out the access codes and the other information neces­ sary for locating all those hidden credits. And stealing them, brooded Bossk. The injustice of it still rankled. If anyone was going to steal that money, it should have been him.

  Whoever it had been, though, it obviously wasn't one of the younger bounty hunters that had gone with him into the Guild Reform Committee. None of those had had access to that kind of information in the old Guild; they had all still been trying to scrabble up the ladder to those levels, with the places and positions of influence all occupied by their elders.

  That had been the reason why so many of them had welcomed the breakup of the old Guild, and had even helped bring it about; even Bossk had seen the per­sonal advantages in revolution, of smashing the system in place and putting in a new one with himself in charge, supported by the younger and tougher bounty hunters. It just hadn't worked out that way. We should've killed 'em all, thought Bossk in retrospect, right at the start. Too many of the elders in the old Guild had survived the breakup, and had gone on to form their own spin-off fragment, the so-called True Guild. All that had been ac­complished by the existence of two splinter groups was a war of attrition between them. The elders had been a lot tougher than the young bounty hunters, Bossk in­cluded, had expected; tough enough, at least, to have thinned out the Guild Reform Committee's ranks pretty drastically, at the same rate that the True Guild's mem­bers had been picked off. If the goal had been to reduce the number of bounty hunters alive and working in the galaxy—and Bossk had heard rumors to that effect, about whoever had been behind Boba Fett's entry into the old Guild—then that goal had been well and bloodily achieved.

  Though now, it appeared as if somebody else had

  done all right by the smashing of the old Guild. It and its successor fragments, the Guild Reform Committee and the True Guild, were long gone—why would any bounty hunter in his right mind stay in either organization when all it seemed to do was target him for death by the other side? The even smaller and less powerful splinter groups, forming after the disintegration of the two main factions, held no attraction for Bossk. He had already decided that it was better to be an independent operator, on one's own or, at the most, hooked up with a partner. The Hunter's Creed, the honor code that had kept most bounty hunters from killing one another off too readily, was over with; from now on, it was every hunter for him­ self. The only thing left of value from the old Bounty Hunters Guild had been its treasury—and now that was gone as well.

  As was Gleed Otondon. That scum, brooded Bossk. Otondon had been one of old Cradossk's chief advisors, a power on the ruling council of the Bounty Hunters Guild. Then he had become the head negotiator for the True Guild splinter group. For all Bossk knew, Otondon might well have been the absolute leader of the True Guild all along, the one that the other old-timers had looked to for their marching orders. If so, Otondon had pulled a fast one on them as well: Bossk knew the whereabouts of all the bounty hunters still alive, the young ones and the old-timers who hadn't yet managed to kill one another off, and none of them showed any signs of having that kind of credits on them. They were all scrabbling to survive, now that the Guild and its off­ shoots were no more. The only one that couldn't be lo­cated, either alive or in his grave, was Gleed Otondon. He had conveniently vanished—conveniently for him­ self, that was; if Bossk had been able to get his hands on him, he would have torn out Otondon's throat and most of his internal organs in pursuit of the stolen Guild treasury.

  The kind of disappearance that Otondon had under-

  gone took credits, a lot of them; the galaxy was stuffed with informants and squealers, and none of them had a clue as to Otondon's whereabouts. Bossk didn't even bother asking Eobbim Figh sitting across from him whether there had been any word in these parts about the missing bounty hunter; that kind of news would only reach Tatooine long after it was common knowledge everywhere else.

  "No talk Gleed Otondon? All those credits?" Figh made a show of feigning sympathy for Bossk. "Can under­ stand. More bad luck for you, eh?" He gave a slow shake of his head. "Silence preferred, no surprise."

  "I'll take care of Gleed Otondon when the time comes," said Bossk. "He'll have his turn. But not right now. I've got other things on my agenda."

  "No—one thing." Figh smiled. "Boba Fett."

  The Mhingxin had read that much right, as though Bossk's anger had written the other bounty hunter's name on his scale-covered brow. The image of Fett's narrow-visored helmet, battered and dented, but still as awesomely functional as when it had shielded some long-ago Mandalorian warrior, filled Bossk's gaze when he squeezed his eyelids shut. He had never seen Boba Fett's actual face—very few creatures had, and lived to tell about it—but Bossk could still vividly imagine how the blood would seep from beneath that helmet's hard gaze as he crushed the other's neck in his bare hands. Right now, here in the Mos Eisley cantina, his fists clenched tighter, talons digging into his palms, as he yearned to make the vision of Boba Fett's death a reality. That vision, that death, was all that Bossk could think of; the thirst for revenge, like burning acid poured down his throat, seeped through every fiber of his being. As much as he hated and despised the vanished Gleed Otondon for having stolen from him, that was a matter of mere credits. For a Trandoshan, wealth meant nothing com­ pared to honor. And that was what Boba Fett had stolen from him.

  "My reputation," said Bossk, ominous and quiet. "That's what he took. Over and over and over..."

  "Reputation? Yours?" Another gale of squealing laugh­ ter came from Figh. "Such doesn't exist. Not anymore. Zero on any scale, what creatures think of you."

  A galling realization broke over Bossk. He's not afraid of me —he looked across the table at the Mhingxin with something like horror. That was how much his own reputation had diminished; that was the ultimate conse­quence of his continuing series of defeats at the hands of Boba Fett. A scurrying sentient rodent such as Eobbim Figh could laugh at him, without apparent fear. The humiliation of that fact was like a flood of ice water dumped on the fires of his anger. And more than humilia­tion: if fear hadn't shown itself in the creature sitting across from him in the booth, its dark flower now rose inside himself.

  How can I survive? For a moment, that thought blot­ ted out all others in Bossk's mind. He had his own list, one that he had never before paid much attention to, of creatures in the galaxy that had reason to hold a grudge against him. In his own bounty hunter career, back when the Guild had still been in existence, he had bought his personal triumphs at the cost of stepping on a lot of other hunters' toes, stealing hard merchandise out from under their noses and handing out other humiliations, just as if none of the others would ever have a chance of retribution at him. That list was probably as long as Boba Fett's—perhaps longer, considering that more of them were still alive. Creatures who wound up running afoul of Boba Fett also had a way of winding up dead, their grievances buried with them.

  The other difference, between his list of enemies and Boba Fett's, was that only a few, and those the most foolhardy ones, would take a shot at getting satisfaction from Fett. Better to sit on one's grudges rather than give Boba Fett any more reasons for eliminating someone else from the universe of the living. If Bossk had still

  been in any way rational on the subject of the long-hated Boba Fett, that would have been the advice he'd have given to himself. The same kind of warning no longer held for any of Bossk's own enemies, especially now that it had been demonstrated to the entire galaxy, over and over, that he could be bested in a confronta­tion. Any other bounty hunter who might have previ­ously had second thoughts about settling accounts with Bossk would now be having third thoughts about the matter—and deciding to act on them. If Bossk hadn't had a good reason for keeping a low profile before, that one would do for now.

  "When creatures think zero," continued Figh, "chances of death high. For you."

  One corner of Bossk's muzzle lifted in a s
narl. "Tell me something I don't know."

  Figh stroked the stiff whiskers of his pointed snout. "So not matter of mere emotion, your grudge against Boba Fett. More important. Squatting aquatic avian, un­ til proved that killer stuff in you. Somebody get, sooner, later. Too bad. Only way to get respect of others back, plus keep skin intact, take down Boba Fett. Nothing else do."

  He knew Eobbim Figh was right about that. There was a lot more at stake than just his honor and repu­tation. Once word got out that he was stuck here on Tatooine—and it would, no matter how many gos­sipy street beggars he killed—then he'd be a target for all those other bounty hunters. Some of them might even have conceived the notion that he, rather than Gleed Otondon, was sitting on the treasury from the old Bounty Hunters Guild. That would add a financial motive—always an effective one for bounty hunters— to their personal ones, for seeking him out, murder in mind.

  "Wait a minute." Bossk peered suspiciously at Figh. "How do you know Boba Fett's still live?"