Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [82]
Then, a moment later, he heard the old man say, “Two thousand now, plus fifteen when we reach Alderaan …”
Trevagg breathed a sigh of relief. That meant a delay here, while they raised the cash. Probably they’d sell the speeder the boy had mentioned, or the droids, or all three. That only left the question of Balu.
The brown-haired human and the Wookiee were obviously not for hire as assassins. Judging by such of the conversation as he could hear, Trevagg guessed they were only smugglers anyway. The Wolfman was engaged in a sharp altercation with a lampreylike thing beside him, whose vibrations caused Trevagg to back quickly away, and, nearby, the hookah smoker felt too eerily dangerous, too deadly. That left the Rodian …
“Docking Bay Ninety-four,” he heard the smuggler say, and the old man repeated it, “Ninety-four,” as Trevagg returned to his booth with his own drink and Nightlily’s, double-strength and dosed with a Love-Wallop pill Trevagg had had the foresight to slip into his pocket before leaving the office. He knew how much Wuher charged for them. There would now, he knew, be plenty of time.
Riches, he thought, and the beautiful creature leaning on his arm, crooning softly, “Oh, my love, my love.” Maybe he’d even spring for a first-class ticket for her. It was, after all, the least he could do.
He wasn’t surprised, or particularly upset, when the stormtroopers showed up. He even felt a kind of scorn for them as they looked around, for of course the old man and the boy had vanished. So, incidentally, did several other patrons, including the hookah smoker. The Rodian didn’t, Trevagg observed, and slipped one hand from Nightlily’s soft waist to feel in his belt pouch for the money he’d brought. A hundred credits, he had been told, was the current going rate for the down payment on a man’s life.
He would be glad, he thought, to get this annoyance out of the way. To make sure Balu was not going to cheat him out of the reward that was rightfully his.
Unfortunately, just as Trevagg was rising to go to the Rodian’s table, the Rodian himself got up, with a shift in aura that told Trevagg that this was indeed a hunter, closing in on his own prey. That prey, it turned out, was the brown-haired smuggler, who after a prolonged altercation shot the Rodian neatly with a blaster drawn under the table.
Nightlily shrieked again and clung to Trevagg’s arm; Wuher’s helper ran to guard the remains even as the smuggler and his Wookiee companion tossed the barkeep a couple of credits and took their leave: “Sorry about the mess.” After a momentary pause, the band took up its tune without missing a bar.
Disgusted and annoyed—because the Wolfman had also left by this time—Trevagg gathered the flustered and languishing Nightlily on his arm. So much, he thought, for trying to shortcut middlemen. When he contacted Jub Vegnu to arrange information to the City Prefect about intercepting the old man and the boy at Spaceport Speeders, he’d mention the need to dispose of Balu for an extra hundred creds. That should take care of any competition for the reward for the old man’s hide.
And in the meantime, thought Trevagg, slipping his arm around the trembling bundle of aromatic sensuality that fate had dropped into his lap, there was the matter of this girl, and getting a room at the Mos Eisley Inn, to consummate what she thought would be the start of a wonderful marriage—the more fool she!—and what was, in actuality, merely the more delectable of the two hunts upon which he had engaged today.
Really, Trevagg thought, as he guided Nightlily’s tipsy steps along the gold and shadow of the street outside, he might have retired from the trade, but he was still quite a passable hunter after all.
What with the commotion of Imperial troops coming into Mos Eisley to search for a pair of droids, the sudden rumors of a Sand People massacre on an outlying farm, and the firefight at Docking Bay 94 ending with a smuggling craft’s illegal liftoff, nobody found Feltipern Trevagg’s body until the following afternoon.
“Didn’t anybody