Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [54]
She shook her head, polished off another glass, took the bottle from Chatty, and tilted it, regarding with profound sadness the few remaining drops that trickled into her glass.
“Well, whatever it is, it ain’t worth it, so why put yourself in trouble, I say.” She shrugged. “Maybe Drub just fell down a repair shaft in some orchard someplace and the kretch ate him.”
“Kretch?” said Leia sharply.
The orange eyes glittered in unholy amusement. “How long you been in town, Pretty-Eyes? You’ll see the kretch mighty quick. As for old Drub, what was it to him what the high-ups are hidin’, long as there was no money in it? And you can be sure there wasn’t, else the big corporations’d be sellin’.”
She smiled beatifically as Leia signaled and another bottle materialized on the stain-repellant lexoplast of the bar. “Why, thank you, darling …” She nodded toward Han and leaned forward to whisper confidentially, “You’re way too good for the likes of him.”
“I know,” whispered Leia, and Oso Nim cackled with delight.
She saddened again, and tossed off another drink. “Well, the whole scene’s turned to garbage now anyway. Pity, ’cause eight, ten years ago this place was really movin’. You’d get twelve, fourteen ships a week in on the sly, goods slippin’ in under the ice, and this place was as jammed at noon as it was at midnight, maybe more. The Slyte was one who knew how to run things. Since he left it’s all turned into nerf-feed.”
Odd, thought Leia, as she sought out the Smoking Jets’ plumbing facilities a little while later. As far as she could ascertain from Oso Nim’s increasingly foggy conversation (Han had ordered still another blue glass bottle, and Chatty was absorbed in the second half of the doubleheader), Nubblyk the Slyte had departed, the “game”—i.e., smuggling—had drastically declined, and Mubbin the Whiphid, a friend of Drub McKumb’s, had vanished, all in the same year … the year after Palpatine’s death and the breakup of the Empire. A year later—when Drub McKumb had returned to Belsavis—he’d vanished, too.
Her aunt Rouge’s housekeeper had frequently observed, Just because you keep soap in the pantry doesn’t make it food.
The temporal proximity of the events could have been coincidence.
And yet …
With every possible inch of arable ground in the volcanic rift given over to cash crops, lots in town were small and buildings like the cantina—and the older stone house upon which it was built—were squinched right to the property lines, leaving no room for sanitary accommodations aboveground. An old-fashioned manual hinged door at one end of the bar bore the universal symbols, and behind it a thoroughly insalubrious stair plunged by the light of a minimum-strength glowpanel into the grotty obscurity of the foundations. Though most of the warm springs over which the old houses had been built had been diverted long ago, the heat belowground was even worse than above, the air held a lingering whiff of some sour gas and the dense black-red stone of the walls was patched with a crop of molds and fungus that made Leia glad she hadn’t ordered a salad off the cantina’s small food menu. At the far end of the narrow passageway something moved, and Leia, nervously activating the small glowrod that hung at her belt, got her first look at what had to be a kretch.
It was half again as long as her hand, possibly the width of three fingers together, and the color of a scab. Two sets of jaws—one above the other—were large enough that