Okay, they want me alive and reasonably healthy, if not happy about it. They may also want me to lose weight. Why? Unless it’s because they want to make me harder to recognize. Twenty-odd pounds or so with a good shave and haircut would do the job pretty well. They might even force me to have cosmetic surgery. Now the question is, just whom have I annoyed lately?
Gus couldn’t think of anybody on-planet who would go to this kind of trouble. Sure there was Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan and, worst of all, Raul Laporte, but Bowlby lacked the spine for wet-work, Spike wouldn’t act on his own and Laporte wouldn’t bother keeping him alive. On Zarathustra anybody wanting revenge would just kill him and dump him in the wilderness for the scavengers to work on. Or, if they had the means, dump the body in an M/E converter.
He glanced at the sanitary closet. Whoever these people were, they had money, or access to people with money. The kind of money Victor Grego had, but Grego didn’t make the list of his personal enemies. And even if he did, Grego would never have risked keeping him alive, he was much too smart for that; he would have just sent Gus to Em-See-Square and be done with it. Laporte certainly had the kind of money to swing abductions like this, not to mention the stones and probably the hide-yhole, but he wouldn’t bother to keep Gus alive, either.
So, it had to be somebody from off-world that wanted him alive and functional, more or less. That only left Terra. While the hirsute attorney had visited several planets since leaving Terra, he hadn’t made any enemies of note on any of them, at least as far as he knew. He had spent most of his time bouncing planet-to-planet defending petty thieves and doing the odd divorce case before being appointed Colonial Chief Prosecutor of Zarathustra. Granted, he had passed on defending several high-end mobsters, but they just went and found themselves another shyster.
Terra was a different story. It had been well over thirty years since he left the world of his birth. He had been a young lawyer working as an assistant district attorney. Not the youngest in the office, but close to it. Prosecuting attorneys collect enemies on a near daily basis. So, the question was which one wanted him alive and healthy?
Actually, he had no doubt as to whom and why. At the top of his suspect list was the Hoshi Campanili Family, the premier criminal organization of Australia. Gus had run afoul of the capo and his crew back when he was a young ADA.
He had been only twenty-three, fresh out of law school with a wife and two year old daughter when Gus had caught the attention of the chief prosecuting attorney of Sydney. After passing the bar he was offered a position with the DA’s office. He accepted and worked zealously, often at the expense of his home life. His wife, Yennisa, understood and supported him. In his second year as an ADA, an informant brought him evidence of several different crimes committed by the Campanili Family, and by Hoshi Campanili personally.
Gus had worked day and night building his air-tight case. By the time Campanili was brought to trial, even the capo’s lawyers knew he wasn’t getting off. He had called for the jury to be sequestered to avoid bribery or intimidation, rooted out another Assistant District Attorney on the take and even managed to get a judge who could not be bought. At trial’s end, Hoshi Campanili received twenty years in maximum security.
Two months later his wife and child were killed in a freak aircar collision. The other driver had fled the scene. That was when Gus started drinking in earnest. Word came down from Investigations that an open contract had been taken out on Gustov Banner. After a great deal of discussion, Gus was talked into going into the witness protection program. He was given a new identity, money, and an open ticket to any planet he wanted to go to. Marlon Gustov Banner became Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard. He had started growing a beard and shipped out to Mars, where he remained for a couple of months before moving off-world again, though not before exacting a little additional revenge of his own.
For the next twenty years Gus went from planet-to-planet, drinking and defending petty criminals, never staying on any world longer than two years, and never defending any client involved in organized crime. Shortly after making planet-fall on Zarathustra, Gus learned that Hoshi Campanili died a month after his release. Brannhard finally felt he could stop running and settled down. After a near legendary celebration at the Damnthing Bar and Grill, where he met Jack Holloway, Gus hung up his shingle where it remained until his appointment as Colonial Chief Prosecutor.
But it was possible that the contract was still in effect. Hoshi had sons who might want to make good on the father’s wishes, and when the news of Zarathustra’s shiny new status as a Class IV Inhabited planet hit Terra, news pictures of the new Colonial Governor and his appointees put Gus back in the crosshairs, beard or no beard.
So why take me alive? It was possible the Campanili heirs wanted to administer their retribution personally. Of course, there was also that little thing Gus did before leaving Terra. That meant either taking him back to Terra, or bringing the Campanilis to Zarathustra; assuming they were not already here. No, if they were here I would already be dead, thought Gus; I have to get out of here, but how? He looked about at the trash, Extee-Three and the sanitary closet. A desperate plan began to form.
XVII
“Name.”
“Thaxter, Leonello S.”
Blue light.
“What does the ‘S’ stand for?”
“Sylvester.”
Blue light.
“Good, now answer ‘yes’ to the next question. Are you a member of the species Fuzzy sapiens zarathustra?”
“Yes.”
Red light.
Dr. Mallin turned away from the veridicator controls to address the man on his left. “Okay, we have our baseline. You can ask your questions, Mr. Coombes.”
Leslie Coombes, the Colonial Chief Prosecuting Attorney pro tem stepped forward. “Thank you, Dr. Mallin.” While Leslie Coombes covered for Gus, he wanted somebody familiar with the psycho-sciences and veridicator operation he could trust. Dr. Ernst Mallin qualified on all three counts.
“Mr. Thaxter, it has come to our attention that you may possess some knowledge regarding the whereabouts of the missing Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard. Do you know where he is?”
“No. How would I? I’ve been in the pokey for the last two years,” Thaxter snarled. The steady blue light of the polyencephalographic veridicator indicated he was telling the truth.
“Do you have any idea who might possess this kind of information” Coombes asked.
Thaxter considered his response while the light fluttered between blue, red and shades in between. Finally, the light settled on blue and Thaxter asked, “What’s in it for me? I ain’t no rat, y’know.”
Coombes expected something like this and had discussed it with Governor Rainsford in advance. “For your cooperation, provided the information proves useful, we can make certain concessions regarding your sentence.”
“I’m not lookin’ for time off,” the mobster barked. With a possible death sentence hanging over his head at the end of his current sentence time off was the last thing he wanted.
“Of course not, Mr. Thaxter,” Coombes said. “But we could add to your time. A year or two, maybe more if your information is good enough.”
“Thanks, but that ain’t what I’m after.” Thaxter looked around at everybody in the room. There was the Colonial Marshal, a few uniformed policemen, Dr. Mallin and Leslie Coombes. “I want Rose safe from retrial at the end of her stretch. When her twenty is up, she goes free. That’s the only cheese I’ll bite.”
Coombes was taken aback. He had expected Thaxter to look out for himself, not his sister. “I’ll have to speak with the Governor before I can make a deal like that. But even if he goes for it you will have to give us something that will lead to our recovering Gus Brannhard. Alive. No guesswork or theories.”
“Why do I gotta keep remindin’ you mooks that I’ve been locked up for the last two years? Mallin here helped put me there! Even with the prison grapevine guesswork and theories are all I’ve got.”<
br />
Coombes knew Thaxter was telling the truth even without the steady blue of the veridicator globe. Still, nobody knew the ins and outs of the local underworld better than the former crime boss.
“We’ll come back to that. Do you know anything about the rumored threat to your life?”
Thaxter laughed. “Aside from the legal one in eighteen years? Nah. Nobody would dare. Even in jail I have some juice. Enough of my former associates are in there with me that I am well protected.”
Coombes was curious. “Wouldn’t one of them want to take over your operations when they get out?”
“Assuming they ever get out, you mean. Look, when one of my boys gets nabbed, they clam up and leave my name out of it. The veridicator can’t catch a lie if they don’t talk. As a reward, they get their full pay to take care of their families while they sit in stir. Anything happens to me, the money goes away. Even while I am in prison.” Thaxter could see Coombes’ next question in his eyes. “Call it a trust fund. All set-up by my brokerage business and all very legal. But if I die, the money goes into probate and the payments stop. All those cons still drawing pay won’t stand for me getting killed and everybody who matters knows it.”
“According to Warden Redford, somebody already tried to kill you in the pen,” Marshal Max Fane pointed out.
Thaxter chuckled. “You mean Ricardo Profit, that son of a Khooghra? A small-time off-world punk who didn’t know who he was messin’ with. The only reason he’s still breathin’ is because I put out the word not to change that. He makes a real nice example of what could happen to the next brain donor who wants to try and take me on.”
Coombes had wondered how Thaxter avoided jail as long as he had, not to mention survived after his conviction. Now he knew. All the same, can you think of who might want you out of the way?”
“You mean aside from Victor Grego, Jack Holloway and all those Fuzzy lovers?” Thaxter considered. In fact he had a very good idea who would want him dead, but doubted he would act on it. Still, the threat was out there, and as his brother-in-law Conrad Evins liked to say, nothing exists in a vacuum. “The only guy I can think of in a position to profit from my death is Raul Laporte. I don’t see him trying for it, though. Too much risk for too little gain.”
“Wouldn’t he be in a position to take over all of your former… businesses?”
“Too many people would be after his ass if they found out he was the one who ordered the hit,” Thaxter explained. “People still loyal to me. Even more so since I never ratted any of them out in the plea bargain that bought me twenty more years of breathin’.”
Coombes started to realize that Leo Thaxter was far smarter thanhe had given him credit for. “Very well, Mr. Thaxter. The Governor is expecting my call. I’ll return in a moment with his decision.”
Coombes stepped out and quiet conversation went back and forth in the room. Dr. Mallin took the opportunity to ask Thaxter what triggered his antisocial tendencies. Thaxter was in the middle of explaining what a drunken bastard his father was when Coombes returned.
“Mr. Thaxter, I have the Governor’s approval. If your information leads to the recovery of Gus, alive, the death penalty is off the table for Rose Evins.”
“Okay, good, the only mugs I can think of who might be willin’ to try to put Brannhard in a box are Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan and Raul Laporte. Bowlby doesn’t have the stones for it by himself, but I wouldn’t put it past him and Spike to cook somethin’ up together. But they don’t have the leg-breakers to do the job. For that they would have to go to Laporte.”
“What about Laporte?” Coombes prodded. “Would he be up for it?”
“Maybe, but Laporte is the smartest and slickest of the bunch, and he doesn’t take unnecessary chances. Even I don’t know for sure if he ever killed anybody. He doesn’t like kidnappin’ on general principles. If he grabbed up Brannhard personally, then Brannhard is dead and gone. You’ll never find a body. The only other way he would get involved would be as a facilitator, or middleman.”
Coombes leaned forward. “Middleman?”
“Yeah. Say somebody came forward and said, ‘Hey, we need to grab this guy, can you help us?’ Well, Laporte would provide transportation and a hidey-hole, for an unreasonable fee, of course, but he wouldn’t get within a country mile of the actual crime. And anybody ready to implicate him would come up missin’ fast.”
“Yet you don’t know if he ever killed anybody?” Dr. Mallin asked. He found the criminal mind fascinating.
“I never seen it, and he never told me if he did,” Thaxter said.
The veridicator globe remained a steady blue.
“Bowlby or Spike would brag on it to me if they ever whacked somebody, but Laporte keeps his mouth shut.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t get the word,” the Marshal said. “Ivan Bowlby was found dead in his studio three days ago. Overdose. We kept it out of the news until today.”
Thaxter shrugged. “Hmph. Sounds like the way he’d go. That son of a Khooghra didn’t have the sense to leave his own product alone.”
“Do you have any idea where this ‘hidey-hole’ of Laporte’s might be,” Coombes asked.
“No.” The globe stayed blue. “Only that he once said it was one-hundred percent secure and impossible to find. That was all he would ever say about it. Like I said before, Laporte keeps his mouth shut when it comes to business.”
“Okay, anybody else?”
Thaxter thought for a moment then shook his head. “Was there a ransom demand?”
“None.”
The mobster shook his head. “Then, no. Gus Brannhard’s dead and I doubt you’ll ever find his body. Somebody as big as Brannhard is good for only two things; getting’ out of the way or holding for a payday. No ransom demand, then no more Brannhard.”
Coombes was afraid that Thaxter might be correct. “Are you absolutely certain nobody would have another motive that would require Brannhard being kept alive?”
“Not on this planet.” Thaxter considered other possibilities. “Back on Terra or Baldur or Thor a prosecutor might get grabbed for questionin’, say, for information about an upcoming case, or to shake up the prosecution. Occasionally there might be a bounty, in which case the target would be kept alive…until the bounty was paid, of course. Nobody on Zarathustra would try nuthin’ like that. Especially Spike or Laporte. The only other guy I can think of who would be crazy enough to try somethin’ this big is Hugo Ingermann.”
“Ingermann skipped planet,” Max Fane said.
“You think I don’t know that?” Thaxter yelled. “He was my damn lawyer when he took off. But maybe he came back.”
“Ingermann would be pretty easy to spot,” Fane pointed out. “Between defending your little crew and making off with the CZC sunstones, he’s the most hated man on Zarathustra. That 50,000 sol bounty Grego put on his head would keep him as far away from this planet as he can get.”
“Ha! No wonder you cops never seem to catch anybody.” Thaxter laughed.
“We got you,” said Max with a smile.
Thaxter looked around the room. “Yeah, after how many years? Look, ain’t any of you ever heard of cosmetic surgery? Ol’ Hugo could walk through this room right now and you wouldn’t know him from Adam.”
“Do you know he did this for a fact,” Coombes asked.
“Nah. If I had anything on that rat-bastard I’d give it to you for two centisols and a tin of Extee-Three. But if I was him, I’d do everythin’ I could to be unrecognizable, and 250,000 sols can buy a lot of high-end work.” Thaxter smiled wryly. It didn’t look pleasant. “I thought about gettin’ some work done myself someday. Figured it would make my retirement safer.”
* * * * * * * * *
Out in the Armored Personnel carrier a different conversation was taking place.
“Remember the deal, Clancy,” the Gunnery Sergeant warned. “You sit pat for one month and you cash in big. Open your mouth before then and you’ll never see your daughter again.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Clancy said. He was a large brutish man with an unpleasant face that bore a striking resemblance to one Leo S. Thaxter. Clancy Slade had made planet-fall nine months earlier from Gimli in the hopes of cashing in on the open lands only to find that out they had already been leased back to the Charterless Zarathustra Company for the next thousand or so years. Having no place else to go and a family to support, Clancy took any job that came his way; ranch hand, farm hand, stock man and security guard. It was that last job that brought him to Raul Laporte’s attention.
At first Clancy’s resemblance to Leo Thaxter went unnoticed due to the thick beard that framed his face. Then, two weeks earlier, Clancy shaved off the beard hoping to get a better job at the Charterless Zarathustra Company. After his interview he went to his job as a security guard at The Zoroaster, a mid-level hotel in Mallorysport.
Raul Laporte was exiting the hotel after interviewing a new secretary and almost slammed into the glass door when he saw Clancy walking up the stairs. Laporte quickly had the security guard checked out and learned he had a wife and daughter and was in need of cash.
Initially, Laporte had played with the idea of using Clancy to trick Leo Thaxter’s old crew into thinking he had broken out of prison and was picking up where he left off. Unfortunately, Clancy was insufferably honest and wanted nothing to do with Laporte. Then Laporte met Ivan Dane and his associates. Dane wanted Thaxter out of Prison House and needed a double to pull off his caper. Since Clancy was of no use to him personally, Laporte accepted the finder’s fee and turned Clancy over.
Clancy, finding himself in a room faced with six men, all wearing masks, knew he was in over his head and refused to cooperate. That’s when his daughter was kidnapped. Now he was waiting to change places with a convicted felon.
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