Hammers and Nails

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The kick should have at least hurt him, he wondered, and those punches felt like a car crashed into my guts.

  Reinhardt had been punched by many people, some as tough or tougher than he was. None of them had hit like Tankowicz.

  Mindy derailed his train of thought with a question, “Who’s the client?”

  Reinhardt jumped a little at the bluntness of the inquiry, then composed himself, “Oh, come on, Mindy. What the hell kind of pro would I be if I told you that?” He wondered if Mindy was testing him, just to see what kind of hunter he really was. He resolved himself to showing no fear. “And before you all start threatening to kill me, why don’t you explain to your big boyfriend there what happens to hunters who snitch on clients? It’ll save us all a little time.”

  Mindy shrugged, the rise and fall of her shoulders made her jiggle in a very distracting manner. “I doubt you actually know who it is, anyway. How about you just tell me which account posted the job at Thorgrimm? I already know who posted it here.”

  Reinhardt was not surprised Mindy knew he was in from Thorgrimm. Mindy had as much or more access to the boards as he did. “Why would that matter? You know it’s all spoofed in layers of bullshit.”

  Roland answered, “Well, dumbass, it’s because we are doing stuff like research, recon, and data collection. You know, all the shit you didn’t bother to do before coming after me with nothing but your dick in your hand.”

  That stung Reinhardt’s pride a little. Mostly because it was a fair assessment of his failure. “Oh, fuck you, man. You surprised me is all,” Reinhardt knew better than to get into a pissing match, especially after already getting his clock cleaned in embarrassing fashion, but he just couldn’t help himself. The dark-haired woman in the gauntlets laughed at his outburst. It was a derisive and scornful laugh, and it pained Reinhardt even more than Roland’s insults because it conveyed very clearly that no one was buying his bullshit.

  “You are just lucky he’s trying to turn over a new leaf. If you had tried it six months ago, you’d be nothing but a smear on the sidewalk for pulling that stunt,” she chuckled at the bounty hunter.

  “I’m growing as a person,” the giant added with no hint of irony or humor.

  “Yeah, Roland,” the dark-haired woman condescended, “you’re a real teddy bear these days.”

  Roland decided to stick to business and turned back to Reinhardt, “The account number, dipshit. What was it?”

  Reinhardt thought very hard about the question. He was not enthusiastic about getting tortured or killed over an account number leading to an anonymous dummy ID. Mindy sensed his hesitation. “Relax, Steve. It’s not like the number is going to give us a name, and everybody is just going to assume we tortured the shit out of you to get it, anyway.”

  “Because we absolutely will torture the shit out of you to get it,” the big man added in an effort to be helpful.

  Mindy beamed and jiggled, “Right! So just tell us the number and we can skip the torture part. Lucy is real protective of the carpets, anyway.”

  “Damn right I am!” Lucia said, “You want to pay the cleaning bills, Mindy?”

  Reinhardt tried to reassert himself, “Come on! If I talk, I’ll never work again, you know that, Mindy. I’m not saying I want to get tortured and killed, here, but anything I know has got to stay confidential.”

  Mindy’s response was dismissive, “Based on how badly you’ve fucked up this job, it’s pretty obvious that you won’t know what the hell is going on either way.”

  Reinhardt’s professional pride died a little at this, and the blond assassin continued to twist the knife, “Nobody who has spent more than ten minutes in this town would be stupid enough to take on Roland with just a pistol and some bodywork. Ask yourself a question, Steve: Why would a sixty-five K bounty for a mark on Earth be posted on Thorgrimm?”

  Realization set in and Reinhardt’s face fell as he answered the question for her, “Because no one on Earth would take it for so little?”

  “Exactly,” she shook her head. “I just went to the New Boston Lodge and checked the boards there. The contract was listed at two-hundred-fifty-K here, and nobody took it.”

  Reinhardt winced. He would have preferred not to believe her words because they had very specific ramifications. Ramifications that Mindy was not above drawing out in very explicit terms for all to hear, “It’s not up there anymore. And I think you are realizing why, Steve-O. Nobody on Earth was willing to take a crack at the big monkey here, even for four times what you were ready to die over.” Her head swung in a sad shake, and her cute face pouted adorably, “You’ve been set up, buddy. Whoever posted the bounty is suckering rookies and noobs like you into taking swipes at a real hitter for chump change. You are the second one to try it this week. Still feel like covering for that type of client?”

  Reinhardt did not know what to make of this interaction. It was the single strangest interrogation he had ever witnessed. But the trio had a point, and he conceded it. “Fine. I can give you the account number that was posted to the Thorgrimm boards. Would you endorse a grievance on the client so I don’t get my card pulled? Your word would put a lot of weight behind the claim.”

  “You want me to put my name on a grievance about your client? That’s a tall order, buddy...”

  Roland suddenly realized what was happening. He didn’t understand the rules of the Hunter’s Lodge very well, but it appeared the client may have erred by failing to act in good faith with the bounty. If it was a loophole that allowed Reinhardt to talk, then it was in everyone’s best interest for him to do so.

  “Wait,” he asked, “so because this client is basically trying to get hunters killed with this bullshit bounty, Steve here can talk without getting in trouble?” He turned back to the bounty hunter, “Fucking talk, man.”

  Mindy nodded, “Sort of, yeah. This guy is obviously misleading hunters with a shitty contract. Stevie here probably shouldn’t blab either way, but everybody will be inclined to look the other way if word gets out that the piece of shit is trying to get good hunters killed.”

  Lucia picked up the thread, “So, if the most famous assassin in the galaxy was to file a complaint on this guy, that would almost certainly ensure Mr. Reinhardt here would not suffer the repercussions of talking?”

  Mindy struck a heroic pose, hands on hips and expansive chest thrust forward, “I guarantee it! There is no way anyone is going to have a problem with it if I call this guy out. All we need is for Steve-O here to tell us what he knows...” she paused, “But my endorsement is not cheap. He’s going to have to do a lot better than an account number if he wants to hitch his cart to this sexy-ass pony, that is.”

  Reinhardt sagged in the chair, defeated. His thoughts were wry. Damn, she’s good. The only way out of this mess is to spill and spill hard.

  “Okay. I’m going to reach into my pocket and pull out my comm. It has the contract info still on it. Don’t shoot me or zap me or whatever while I do it, all right?”

  “Just move slowly. Lucia can get real jumpy around overly muscled aggressive types,” even now Mindy could not help but take potshots at Roland.

  Reinhardt did not understand the joke, and he did not care to. With overtly retarded movements, he peeled back the lapel of his jacket and reached into a pocket. His hand re-emerged in a calculated and cautious manner holding his small black handheld. With one hand, he thumbed through the screens until he found the contract for Roland and then handed the device over to Mindy. She took it from his hand with a smile and then looked at the data. Then Mindy pulled out her own comm and thumbed through it, comparing the screens. She frowned at them both for a moment and then looked up to her companions.

  “So, Roland. There have been five contracts taken out on you in the last six days. One at Thorgrimm for sixty-five, one here for two-forty, one on Ariadne for seventy, one on Enterprise Station for one-seventy, and one on Galapagos for forty thousand. None of them have stayed up for more than twenty-four hours.” She lau
ghed, “The ones on Earth and Enterprise were up for less than three hours apiece.”

  “What does that mean?” Roland did not know why the duration was relevant.

  Reinhardt, apparently in a rush to be helpful, answered, “It means that whoever put them up did not want word to get out about them.” He suddenly looked crestfallen, “It means they were just trying to bring in the most eager hunters willing to work for smaller amounts.” His head shook, dejection twisting his features, “They wanted desperate, low-cost chumps and as soon as one guy accepted they took it down so others wouldn’t know it had ever been up.”

  Mindy elaborated, “If a job stays up too long, word starts to get around. Especially when the target is well-known.”

  Lucia nodded, “This guy didn’t want a bunch of people wondering why a bounty for Tank Tankowicz was so small.”

  Roland agreed, “Because it would scare off whatever poor mark had taken the suicide mission in the first place.”

  Reinhardt was just about done with the confidence-crushing turn the interrogation had taken. “Are you done with me now? I’d like to go ahead and file the grievance,” his face darkened, “and then I’m going to go hunt this piece of garbage down and kill him.”

  “You want to hunt him down?” Lucia asked, knowing the answer before asking.

  “Obviously,” Reinhardt sneered, “He tried to get me killed, right?”

  “Maybe, Maybe not,” Mindy shrugged, “He probably would have been happy if you succeeded, but I doubt he expected you to. The question is why he is tricking low-rent hunters into taking on Roland.”

  Reinhardt growled, “I’m not ‘low-rent,’ you tanker-titted bimbo! I’m just a little inexperienced is all...”

  Mindy’s eyes flashed with reptilian malice, “Careful, boy. You mouth off to mama and you’re like to get a spanking.”

  Reinhardt gulped. For a moment he had forgotten that the tiny woman was the top-ranked hunter in the galaxy, boasting a three-digit kill count including several high-ranking politicians and the Pirate King of frontier space. His gaffe was ill-timed and in bad taste, but he refused to show weakness. “All the same, Mindy, I intend to go after this piece of shit and get my sixty-five thousand creds on top of my pound of flesh. If you all are done with me, I’d like to get started. Now.”

  Roland grumbled, “Asshole, you came here to kill me. Don’t act like you are the aggrieved party in this. I am still confused as to why Mindy and Lucia here haven’t let me tear you apart as a message to the rest of your ilk.”

  “Taking orders from the ladies these days, Tank?” it was a cheap shot and Reinhardt knew it. But he couldn’t resist.

  “I’m growing as person. You can thank the ladies for that.”

  “Shit,” Lucia hissed, “Now I want to kill him, too.”

  Reinhardt made a mental note to work on keeping his stupid mouth shut. It was Mindy who saved him, which surprised all of them. Rare indeed was the problem for which Mindy did not think wholesale murder was a viable solution.

  “Awwwwwwww, Mom? Dad? Can I keep him? I promise to take care of him!” She let the joke die and her gaze turned feral, “I think we can put him to very good use...”

  Steven Reinhardt did not like the sound of that at all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wade Manson was one of those rare people in the galaxy who did not hate meetings. Quite the opposite, he rather enjoyed them. Meetings were almost never productive in the manner those who set and scheduled them wanted them to be, but they were absolute gold mines if you wanted to get a feel for the plans and machinations of those who attended.

  Whenever The Board met, it was always a tense affair. With Pops Winter dead, the tension had increased with exponential fervor. The Combine losing The Chairman had been like Rome losing Caesar. Without his iron-fisted control over the interlocking interests of individual syndicates, the remaining bosses were millimeters away from going after each other’s throats. The Combine and its ruling ‘Board’ had been assembled to prevent exactly that species of unprofitable foolishness, but without the terrifying omnipresence of Pops Winter the irascible and avaricious nature of its constituents was going to de-construct the powerful association into a swarm of squabbling gangsters.

  Wade was not sure if the Combine could exist without Pops. Then again, he wasn’t sure he needed or wanted it to. Something about managing illicit activities as if they were a business had always struck a sour note with him. If he had wanted to go into business, he’d have done it. Wade was more self-aware than the average Boss, and he could admit to himself without reproach that he was a criminal because he was good at crime. As a businessman he had always been mediocre at best. But he figured he ran his rackets better than anyone because he approached crime like the criminal he was. So many of the Bosses pretended to be businesspeople. They put on airs and talked about quarterly projections as if that meant anything when the revenues were stolen or extorted. Wade didn’t even try to excel at business, he found that if he got very good at stealing and extorting the numbers took care of themselves.

  Yet, here he was. He sat under bad lighting in a shabby room at the center of an old office building in Dockside. Normally, they would have met in the lush conference rooms of Belham Tower in Uptown, but without the glue of the Chairman to hold the mask of civility together, neutral ground had become the new rule for Board meetings.

  Wade noticed one conspicuous absence and remarked upon it before serious business got discussed.

  “Wait a minute, where’s Tank?”

  It was a silly question. Wade knew exactly why the fixer was absent, but he wanted to make sure that the other Board members were thinking about it. Tankowicz was the usual go-between for these meetings and his guarantee of safe passage was a universally respected institution. Everybody felt safe when Roland set up the meetings because everyone knew he never lied and he always kept his contracts.

  “Tank doesn’t need to know about this meeting. He’s too chummy with McGinty.” It was the Widow who spoke. Next to Pops, the Widow was the most respected Boss in New Boston and the front-runner for the chairman’s seat, “Somebody hit Richter two days ago and we think it might be Big Woo.”

  Wade locked his face to suppress his smile as her response indicated his plan was working perfectly. The board relied upon Tankowicz too much, and if what Reynard had told him about Tank was true, killing him looked to be a brutal and uphill battle. But Reynard had opened Wade’s eyes to the fact that there were more ways to bring a man down than just killing him. Sometimes, breaking a man and taking everything he had worked for was better than killing him. This spoke to the deep unrelenting hatred Manson bore the giant fixer, and Reynard’s plan was masterful in its deviousness.

  “What, Tank ain’t neutral no more?” The question was served with heaps of faux innocence.

  The Widow cast him a dark look, “Don’t overplay your hand, Wade. We know you hate the man. But he has been part of this landscape for almost three decades, and most of us are old enough to remember what happens when he is not afforded the correct level of respect. Or have you forgotten about the last time you ran afoul of him?”

  Wade’s right hand still ached before rainstorms, a reminder of the time Roland had crushed it at a meeting not unlike this one. The remaining bosses chuckled at the quip, and the Widow continued. “He has no dog in our fight and having him witness our struggles during this transitional period would not be productive. We are not discounting him, we just need to discuss some things that it is best Tank doesn’t know about.”

  The Widow was well into middle age, having sailed through her sixth decade and staring down the barrel at her seventh, but she was rich enough to have had every cosmetic enhancement money could buy. She looked like a youthful fifty, or a hard-run forty-year-old, with unlined skin and a figure that testified to her love of extensive gene therapy and obsessive exercise. Her long hair was midnight black, and her eyes sparkled like sapphires. She dressed in extravagant style revealing her man
ufactured figure in a manner powerfully sexual without being sleazy or desperate.

  Still, for all that, she was not beautiful. She could be attractive in the right light, and she enjoyed cycling through a prodigious string of gorgeous men and women as amorous companions. But there was a hardness to her face, and a stiffness in her posture conveying a horrible, terrible, menace. This was a woman who killed without conscience and consumed for the sake of consumption itself. She was a vain woman who required far more than physical beauty or untold riches to feel good about herself. Like everyone else on the Board, she needed to exert physical power over other people. It wasn’t enough for her to be rich and pretty, she needed to be feared.

  Wade could respect that in his own dysfunctional way. But with Richter gone, the Widow would require careful management.

  “No skin off my nose, lady,” Manson dipped his head in a bow not remotely respectful, “Tank can go rot for all I fucking care.”

  “Let’s just attend to business, shall we?”

  That was Ricardo Silva, the current Boss of the Woke Fields district. It was a minor territory, mostly residential. But it held many mid-level entertainment districts and a steady stream of loan-sharking cash kept the area viable and profitable. The docile nature of the blue and white-collar residents meant that it was also a low-conflict area, making Woke Fields an attractive territory for a Boss who was not interested in working all that hard. Silva fit the bill perfectly, and he continued with the business of the day, “ladies and gentlemen, we have lost five Bosses and the Chairman in the space of less than a year. Big Woo has gone independent, and there is open fighting in Quinzy and Summertown. Dockside is still recovering from the attempts by The Brokerage to take over, and let’s be honest, no one here believes that those attempts are over with. It also looks like McGinty has been negotiating with Dockside assets to encourage them toward adopting his model of mercantile and guild-based enterprise.”