LITMIR.BIZ

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about other paying gigs?” Ryan asked. “Local work.”

      The girl brought Lumpy’s rum. He grinned at her when she set it down. She ignored him as if he were an insect. She took the .22 round Ryan handed her and walked away without a word.

      “Whoo,” Lumpy said, “that is purely fine. Where was I? Oh. Jobs. Well, the crews bring in plenty slaves. You could sign on for Monitors, but I reckon you’d have the same objections to that you have to signing on for pirates.”

      He shook his head. “Can’t think of much. I do some odd jobs now and then since I lost my nerve, fish some. I can fix a few things, and that’s not always something you want slaves doing, know what I mean. But that’s just me, and I barely scrape by. There’s five of you.”

      “Six, actually,” Mildred said. “But who’s counting?”

      Lumpy shot back his rum and shook all over like a wet dog. He set his empty on the table upside down with a clack. It seemed to Ryan the single shot had hit him pretty hard. Of course, he didn’t know whether it was his first of the day.

      “Spring for another?” Lumpy asked, looking around with eyes even less clear than they had been when he sat down.

      J.B. signaled the server for another, then he leaned his leather-clad elbows on the table.

      “So how about this Monster Island,” he said. “How about getting passage there?”

      Lumpy shrugged. “Same story as the mainland. Go for a pirate, or pay your way. Gas, brass or ass—nobody rides for free.”

      “So what do you think, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

      “I’m thinking,” he admitted.

      “You considering turning pirate, Ryan?” Mildred asked.

      “Would you like signing up as Monitors better?” J.B. asked.

      She scowled.

      “Everything lives off other things,” Jak said. “Want eat, gotta kill.”

      “Unusual loquacity, Jak,” Doc said. “And unusual eloquence. Albeit in the service of a doctrine of moral expediency.”

      Jak scowled furiously.

      “Don’t worry,” J.B. told him. “I didn’t get it, either.”

      “I did,” Ryan said. “Haven’t we done plenty of things to stay alive we weren’t thrilled about?”

      “Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Steeping in shame to stay alive. I remember...the sows....”

      “Stay with us, Doc,” J.B. said. “The sows’re long since gone for bacon.”

      For a moment Doc gazed around, wild-eyed, as if seeing hell-knew-what bizarre landscape peopled with alien monstrosities, instead of a surprisingly clean but still seedy gaudy house and the faces of his friends. Then the mad light left his eyes. He seemed to deflate.

      “Ah, yes,” he said again, with a sad smile. “Long gone.”

      “Should we be discussing stuff like this...you know?” Mildred asked, waggling her eyebrows ridiculously and looking sidelong at their guest.

      “Don’t mind him, Millie,” J.B. said. “He’s too sunk in rum to know what we’re talking about. Or care.”

      Lumpy had, indeed, tossed off his second shot like water and now slumped in his chair like a half-empty sack of oatmeal. His own eyes stared without focus at the tabletop. He drooled over a hanging lower lip.

      The doors burst open and four Monitors swaggered in. They were dressed and armed like the crew that had braced Ryan and his friends on the docks, and their heads were likewise shaved. Which was a little more curious this time out, since one of them was a woman, who wasn’t unattractive in a blade-faced kind of way. She seemed to glare around a lot more truculently than her three companions, as if suspecting she had more to prove than they did.

      Heads didn’t turn when the Syndicate sec team blew in. Conversation didn’t falter, but it dropped an octave. And heads huddled down a little closer in collars, where applicable, or chins closer to collarbones where not. Ryan realized he wasn’t the only man in the gaudy who was suddenly keenly aware the four were the only ones in the house with easily accessible weapons.

      He smiled, ever so slightly. Not that a measly twist of wire with a dab of goo sealing it would stop him doing the necessary thing.

      But then, he wasn’t in any rush to throw his life away, either. He looked away from the four as they ceremoniously paid for their drinks at the bar, and back to his comrades.

      “We all know finding an easy living isn’t easy,” he said. “Finding a hard one isn’t always easy, either. We’ll do what we need to to survive, bottom line.”

      “We always do, Ryan,” J.B. said.

      “We don’t have to make a decision tonight,” Ryan said. “But in the morning, we’ve got to move. So we need to know by then which way we’re moving.”

      Krysty patted his hand. “Something’ll come up, lover,” she said. “It always does. One way or another.”

      “Krysty’s right, as usual,” Mildred said. “But it’s the ‘or other’ part that worries me.”

      J.B. grinned at her. “What, Millie? You looking to live forever?”

      “Made a good start on it already, John,” she said. “Even if not quite on a par with Doc.”

      Without waiting for permission, Lumpy waved at the good-looking server for yet another rum. Ryan took it in; his one eye seldom missed much. He didn’t object. He might have more questions to ask before they were done with Lumpy.

      If the stupe doesn’t drink himself under before I think of them, he thought.

      Lumpy glared at the Monitors. “Bastards,” he muttered. “All they do is keep a man down.”

      The Monitors drank, neither lingering nor rushing, then they sauntered out of the gaudy without a word to anyone. As soon as the door slammed shut, the conversation picked up. The piano player, who’d been engaged in low tinkling, struck up a brisk tune.

      “Fuckin’ Monitors!” Lumpy exclaimed. “Drink! Sweetcheeks, get them sweet cheeks over here! I need a drink.”

      Behind the bar, McDugus Fish’s lugubrious face fisted in annoyance. In the corner Ryan saw a gleam of eyeball as his daughter looked to see what the fuss was. She never missed a stroke, though. A real trouper, that girl; Ryan had to give her that.

      The expression on her face like a rain squall on the ocean, the black-haired, jade-eyed server approached. “I need another rum,” Lumpy declared, as if suspecting she was keeping one from him.

      She nodded and turned away. “And I need some of that, too,” he said, and grabbed her left ass cheek.

      She froze. All the color drained out of her face. She seemed unsure what was actually happening.

      The bar went dead still. The piano player turned into a statue with her hands hovering over the keys. McDugus Fish’s face went red, then white.

      The door opened. The belligerent female Monitor strode back inside, followed closely by a heavily muscled black Monitor an inch or so shorter than she was. She stopped dead. A smile winched its way across her sharp features.

      “So,” she said, not loudly, but the gaudy had gone so still she might as well have shouted. “What do we got here?”

      “Oh, shit!” Lumpy gulped. His face went puce. He let go the server’s rump and tried to jump to his feet, but booze had addled his coordination as much as his sense. His legs tangled with those of the chair and they both went down in a clatter and a tangle.

      He disengaged and jumped quickly. Moving like a striking mongoose, the female Monitor flowed across the floor.

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