Garret's Gambit by Dale Mayer (best sci fi novels of all time txt) 📕

“So what?” he said. “That’s just the life I live.”

“Got it,” he said. “It kind of sucks though, huh? You never really know which name to answer to.”

“Fuck off,” he said. “You guys ain’t nobody to talk.”

As they waited and watched, now with the weapon in Kano’s hand, they searched the second man. “One set of ID, a little more money than you, but not much. Both of you stooges are broke.”

“That’s the reason we’re doing this,” the second man said, in a quiet voice. “And we really just want to get the hell out of here.”

“If you don’t offer up something useful,” Garret said, “then we can’t let you go.”

“What do you want?”

“The guy who hired you,” Astra said. “Are you that stupid?” Both men just glared at her. “Listen, assholes. She’s my sister, and I want her back, now.”

“I’m sure you do, but we don’t know anything about her disappearance.”

“Well, presumably the guys who took her are the ones wanting to keep track of who comes here,” Garret said. “So you need to tell us who that is, before I even think about letting you go.”

“You don’t understand. We’ll never get any more work, if we do that.”

“Well, he won’t be hiring you anymore anyway, so you’ll have the same problem either way. We’ll find this guy no matter what. It’s just a matter of whether we find him sooner or later.”

“But, if he finds out we snitched on him, it won’t be good for us,” he said.

“It’s already ugly,” Garret said, “because we’ll make sure your faces hit the news today, and they’re already writing you off as people who may have turned on them.”

“We’re not snitches!”

“But they don’t know that, do they?” Garret said.

Kano looked at the men. “You said you’re broke, right? A little money must go a long way then, huh?”

“So you’ll pay us then?” asked the second man, eyeing him. “We might do a deal then.”

The first man hit him. “Look, Sonny. We’ll get in a shit ton of trouble this way.”

“We’re already in a shit ton of trouble,” Sonny said, “just in case you didn’t get the memo.”

The first man looked directly at his buddy. “We’ll never get more work after this. You know that. Not with them anyway.”

“Not too many choices for us,” Sonny said.

“I know, but this isn’t going well.” With a long exhale, he turned to Garret. “How much?”

“You tell me,” he said, with a sigh. “Everybody’s got a price. What’s yours?”

“One thousand pounds,” he said instantly.

“Interesting figure,” he said. “And you answered pretty quick. Why?”

“That’s what we were supposed to get for this job, which we won’t get now, thanks to you.”

“That’s a decent amount for watching a hotel room. Especially the room of a woman nobody has anything to do with,” Garret said.

“A thousand pounds between the two of you isn’t a hell of a lot of money either. Particularly if you’ve already been given half of it up front,” Kano said.

“A thousand pounds each and we walk,” the first man said.

Garret laughed at him. “Didn’t take very long to find your price, did it?”

At that, a hard knock came at the door. Kano walked over and let Jonas in. “They’re trying to sell the information they have for one thousand pounds,” he said. “Each.”

“Wow, that’s almost insulting.”

“It is, but these guys are lowlifes. All we can hope to get is the next rung up the ladder.”

“Which sucks because we really need several rungs up the ladder.”

“They don’t know anything,” she said. “They’re just losers anyway.”

“We know enough,” Sonny said.

“Do you?” she said, with another sneer. “Prove it. Why should anybody give you anything anyway? You should just get a life sentence for being two-bit losers.”

“Hardly,” the first guy said, getting into it. “You’re the one who’s a loser.”

She rolled her eyes at that.

Garret reached out, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and said, “You have anything to say or not?”

“Only if I get one thousand pounds,” he said.

Garret shoved him over to Jonas. “Personally I would just deep-six them. Don’t even bother about a trial or anything. Nobody’ll miss these punks anyway.”

“You can’t do that,” the second man said.

“Sure we can, … Sonny. You don’t have anything useful to offer. So, as far as we’re concerned, you’re nothing but cheats. You’ve already turned on your boss, so we couldn’t trust anything we got from you anyway,” he said, with a sneer.

The man studied him for a long moment. “We got something good,” he said.

“Don’t do it,” the other guy said.

“We don’t really have a whole lot of choice,” he said. “Think about it. We got to get out of this.”

“It doesn’t matter if we get out or not. We’ll still be gone.”

“Which is why we need to get what we can,” he said. He looked at Jonas. “You MI6?”

“Yes,” he said.

“In that case,” he said. “We just want freedom.”

“Not sure that freedom is something you can have,” he said.

“We have rung number one and rung number two,” he said, looking back at Garret. “We don’t know who is above them.”

“So, who’s the first one?” he asked, and the man gave up the guy’s name easily enough.

“His name is Larry. He runs a bunch of cons here in town.”

“Larry Overhaul?” Jonas asked.

They looked at him and nodded.

“He does a lot of smuggling from the mainland over here, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

Jonas looked back at Garret. “That checks out.”

“Sure, but that’s minor stuff. Nobody’s talking about why my sister’s gone missing,” Astra said. “Without something hard, these guys shouldn’t get squat.”

“She has information they want,” he said.

“Do they have her?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. They tried to snag her, and she ran.”

“Well, that would be good,” Astra murmured, feeling a sense of relief take over. Her sister was flighty, but, since the pregnancy, Amy had changed in many ways, and one of the things that she’d been adamant about was that she needed to leave. And she had, so maybe it was for