Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [21]
Ordinarily, Porcellus stayed as far away from Jabba’s court as was possible within the confines of the palace, for the vicious and violent rabble of bounty hunters, mercenaries, and intergalactic scum terrified him. But tonight he leaned his shoulders against the arch of a doorway, thin and graying and nervous-looking in his unspeakably stained cook’s whites, listening to the jizz-wailers—he’d always been fond of good wailing—and watching the dancing and hoping desperately the beautiful Oola wouldn’t drop dead of some unknown cause as Ak-Buz had.
It crossed his mind to wonder what had killed the sail barge captain, but in this awful place, who could tell?
Jabba, laughing horribly, hauled on the dancer’s chain. Oola shrank back, unable to control the revulsion on her face—it was quite clear that what he intended was not to feed her more vegetable crepes—and for a time the Hutt amused himself, playing her like a fish before triggering the trapdoor and dropping her into the rancor’s pit below. She gave one hideous scream and everyone rushed to the grille to see the show; Porcellus shrank back into the archway, shaking like a weed stem in a windstorm. The casualness, the offhanded quality of her murder terrified him … The Hutt had killed her with as little reflection as he expended on the next paddy frog he gulped.
Just so, thought Porcellus, pale and almost sick with shock, would he kill his chef, if the slightest rumblings of indigestion brought the word fierfek back to his mind.
That was the night the bounty hunter brought in the Wookiee.
It was a mop-up operation, really. The Wookiee—well over two meters of shaggy hair and ill temper—was partner to a Corellian smuggler named Solo whose inanimate body, frozen in carbonite, had been decorating Jabba’s wall for months. At one time Porcellus had toyed with the notion of unfreezing the man and bargaining for assistance in an escape, but at the last minute he’d lost his nerve. There was no way of knowing how cooperative he’d be even if Porcellus could keep him hidden long enough for him to shake off the blind weakness of hibernation sickness, and the thought of what Jabba would do to him if he was caught in an escape attempt had brought him into a sweat.
Jabba had advertised bounty on the Wookiee at fifty thousand credits, and was prepared to actually pay half that. After protracted negotiation with the bounty hunter—a ratlike scrap of a creature in a leather breathing mask—which included the hunter’s threat to set off the thermal detonator it conveniently had in its pocket, they’d settled on thirty-five. At that point Porcellus retreated to his kitchen, reflecting that he was unsuited for financial dealings of that sort and wondering how he would manage if this particular bounty hunter came to the kitchen demanding beignets or Chantilly crème.
The kitchen boy, Phlegmin, was stone dead in the middle of the receiving-room floor.
Darkness seemed to tunnel in around Porcellus’s vision—darkness that smelled of rancor. The next moment a huge hand shoved him aside and Ree-Yees, a sleazy Gran swindler and minor member of Jabba’s court, barged into the receiving room, three eyes bulging on their short stalks as he stared down at the kitchen boy in disbelief.
“I had nothing to do with it!” shrieked Porcellus. “He never ate a thing in this kitchen! He never so much as touched a dish!”
Ree-Yees, on his knees pawing through the goatgrass in the open packing box beside Phlegmin’s body, took no notice.
“Hey,” snuffled a basso rumble from the doorway. “He sleeping?”
It was a Gamorrean guard. The same Gamorrean guard, Porcellus