Stellar Ranger
Page 20
“It won’t work, Lobang. You’ve been with me all along. Part of my whole operation, drugs, murder–”
“I never killed anybody.”
“You tried to kill the ranger! You saw me kill the drug dealer and Picobe. That makes you an accessory!”
“We’ll see. The tangler?”
Tuluk suppressed his anger. It wouldn’t do him any good at the moment. The window went down. He stuck his arm out and tossed the tangler past the driver’s window.
“Very good. Sit back and enjoy your last two minutes of freedom, M. Tuluk.”
* * *
Cinch watched the limo circle and come to a soft landing ten meters away. The driver’s door opened and Lobang stepped out, his hands held high, fingers spread.
“Face down,” Cinch called. “Keep your hands away from your weapon.”
Lobang obeyed. He laughed as he did so.
“What does he think is so fucking funny?” Wanita asked.
“I expect he’ll tell us that in a minute.”
One of Kohl’s hands relieved Lobang of his pistol. When he was clear, Cinch said, “Okay, you can get up, Slow and easy.”
The big man obeyed, still grinning. “That present I mentioned. In the backseat. The door can be opened from the outside now.”
“Good. Why don’t you be the one to open it.” It was not a question.
Still smiling, Lobang ambled to the limo’s rear compartment and opened the door.
Inside sat Manis Tuluk, and if looks were knives, everyone outside the limo would have been flayed to the bone.
“Why don’t you step out here, M. Tuluk?” Cinch said.
“I had him toss his weapon earlier,” Lobang said. “He shouldn’t offer any trouble.”
Cinch shook his head. Did it sound as if Lobang had picked up twenty or thirty IQ points since last they’d talked? Damn.
Cinch reflected for a moment, He knew then what he suspected was true.
Kohl came over to stand in front of Tuluk. He had a pressure bandage wrapped around his upper arm and a piggyback stupecomp pumping what it thought would best help heal him and make him feel better into a vein on the other arm. “You know Manis, I wanted to kill you for what you did to Baji, but the ranger talked me out of it. This way you get to suffer. They’ll put you in jail, confiscate all your money and property, and even if you don’t get lethal injection, you get all the years you have left to think about it. You’ll die poor and alone in a cell. I like that better. That way, you get to suffer.”
Kohl started to turn away.
* * *
It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Tuluk was going to kill the ranger, to use his one shot on him, but Kohl’s little speech brought it for him instead. He might go down, but he was going to get there after Gus Fucking Kohl bit the dirt.
He snatched the compact tangIer from his belt and swung it up to point at Kohl–
* * *
Cinch wasn’t expecting the move but he was close enough to Kohl to shove him aside and he did so. The push moved Kohl enough so that Tuluk had to reset.
Time seemed to slow down as it did when it came to sudden life and death choices. It stretched thin, time did, like tar in hot sunshine.
Sound went away as Cinch’s vision sharpened into crystalline razors, but all he could see was the tiny weapon in Tuluk’s right hand, the weapon that left ghostly trails of itself as it moved to track Gus ...
Martial artists strive for a state they call zanshin, the space where they are aware of everything and no conscious thought intrudes. Cinch achieved that state.
For one small part of a second he stood facing an enemy empty-handed.
In the next part of that same second, his pistol was in his hand and he pressed the trigger. There was no sense of having reached for it or drawn it, it was just there.
He didn’t hear the gun go off, wasn’t aware of how many times he fired, but he saw dots appear on Tuluk’s body and he counted them.
Six of them. Onetwothreefourfivesix–
Tuluk fell, still mired in slow time, and the weapon he held discharged at the ground. The dust achieved unbelievable cosmic patterns as the invisible beam hit it, psychedelic designs from a wirehead’s dream.
“Daddy!” he said.
When Tuluk hit the ground, time sped up and returned to normal speed.
* * *
“You asshole!” Lobang said. “Couldn’t you have taken him without killing him?”
“Shut up, Iggy.”
Wanita moved up to stand next to Cinch. She looked down at the body, then at the ranger. “What did you call Lobang?”
“Iggy. He’s with the Intergalactic Drug Enforcement Agency.”
“What?!”
“An undercover agent.”
“Come on!” Pan said.
Cinch looked at the muscular man. “Did I get the right agency? You are Iggy, right?”
“That’s right, shitstomper. And you just fucked up the best arrest I have ever made. You are going to pay for that.”
“I don’t believe it,” Wanita said.
“My commander warned me there was interest in this case from another agency. When I uncovered the drug operation, I figured it was IGDEA. I wasn’t sure who the inside man–or woman–was until today.”
“If you kept your goddarnn nose out of things, there wouldn’t have been all these problems,” Lobang said. “I was handling things just fine.”
Wanita blinked. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us before it got to this point? He’s a ranger, on your side!”
“When you are a deep cover op you don’t tell anybody anything. You never know whom you can trust.”
“You let that man kill people,” Kohl said.
“No. No, I didn’t let him.”
“No?” Pan put in. “What about Picobe? And Ulang?”
“Both done before I could stop him. I tried, but he did them before I could intervene.”
“Bullshit, son, you could have had him under lock as soon as you knew about the drug operation.”
Lobang shook his head. “We wanted the entire connection. If we’d bagged Tuluk then, we wouldn’t have gotten the seller, found out about the distribution net.” He looked at the drug seller’s lover. “I’ll be wanting to have a little talk with you when the shitstompers–the Stellar Rangers, that is–are done with you.”
“People died because you didn’t put him in jail when you could have,” Wanita said.
Lobang shrugged. “Tuluk’s people. Scum, just like he was. I’m sorry, officially, but this is the way the game is played. The ranger knows how it is. Ask him. Sometimes you have to give up the little fish to catch the big ones.”
Cinch nodded. “Was that you took a shot at me and Kohl when I first got here? Put a bullet through the car’s door?”
“I had to make it look good. You weren’t in any real danger. I was the long-range rifle champion of my unit three years running. It would have taken a bad ricochet for you to get hit.”
“A risk you were willing to take,” Cinch said.
“You stuck your nose into my operation. I had to protect my cover. That’s how the game is played.”
“So is this,” Cinch said. He slammed a hard right fist into Lobang’s solar plexus. The bigger man lost his ability to breathe and bent over, clutching at his abdomen with both hands. He tried to tough it out, straighten out–
The hammer blow to the back of Lobang’s skull didn’t do Cinch’s hand any good, nor would it do any permanent damage to the drug agent, but he felt pretty damned great about it nonetheless. The big man stretched out and hit the ground facedown. With any luck at all, he would have a broken nose to go with his headache; and if he wanted a rematch when he woke up, Cinch would be happy to oblige him.
He even let Sutera Kutjing have two good kicks to Lo
bang’s ribs before he pulled him away. No doubt Sector HQ would get a nasty cornminique from IGDEA about this. If they sent hard copy, Cinch would have it framed and hung on his wall when he got a place of his own.
Too bad he couldn’t put Lobang’s head next to it.
WANITA STOOD behind the bar, drawing a glass of Hitch. Cinch smiled at her as she slid it toward hirn. He looked at the glass but didn’t reach for it. The pub was closed and they were alone.
“So what now?”
He shrugged. “Well. Both Tuluk and the guy who would have dealt his chem are dead. They were the main problems.”
“Baji?”
“The Stellar Rangers have other things to worry about. Gus can do a better job there than we can.”
“Pan will be glad to hear that, despite everything.”
“The girl isn’t beyond rehab. If she’s lucky, she’ll grow up and get past this. I hope so for Pan’s sake as well as hers. I’ll still put in a word for him with the rangers, if he’s interested.”
Wanita nodded. “And Lobang? Or whatever his real name is?”
Cinch managed a wry smile. “He’ll bitch to his bosses about the ranger who sucker-punched him but he won’t make too much noise. Whatever he said about the operations, he was out of line. He could have stopped Tuluk before people started getting killed. At the very least, he was greedy, looking for a promotion-making arrest. “
“Or maybe he wasn’t looking for a promotion,” Wanita said.
It was Cinch’s turn to nod. “Yeah, I thought about that. Really big money sometimes has enough weight to crush even a good lawman’s resolve. Whether Lobang went native or not, we’ll never know. In the end he did turn Tuluk in.”
“Could have been just to save his own ass,” she said.
“Could have been. No way to tell.”
Wanita wiped at the already clean bar. “Well. I guess that about covers it all, doesn’t it?”
Cinch looked at her. “Almost. There’s us.”
She stopped wiping the bar. “What about us?”
“Well. I’m a ranger and I’m not too bad at it and not quite ready to give it up. But there’s no rule against rangers having SOs or spouses.”
Wanita grinned widely, “Why, Cinch Carston, what are you saying to me?”
Cinch flushed, something that still surprised him when it happened.
“Thank you,” she said. “That might be one of the best offers I’ve ever had. But I’m a pub owner and I’m pretty good at that, too. I can’t see myself tagging along behind a man who might get his ticket canceled every time he walks out the door. I think I would go crazy with worry pretty fast.”
Cinch nodded, not speaking. “I understand.”
“Listen, I like you, Ranger, a whole bunch. If you decide you want to become half-owner of a backwater pub on a one-rocket planet, I’d like a chance to reconsider your offer. If you get tired of being a professional hero, there’s a place for you here.”
They both smiled. He said, “That is one of the best offers I’ve ever had. Thank you.” They both knew where they stood, and it wasn’t a bad place. A little sad, maybe, but he could live with it.
“So, when do you ship out?”
“Three days.”
Wanita put the bar rag down. “Well. I guess we’d better get busy, you only have three days. I hate to think I let a man like you walk out of here under his own power.”
Cinch laughed. Things were looking up. At least one thing was, anyhow.
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