'You don't have to go into details,' I said, 'but… '
'But you want details. That's the lot of the victim. Moore jumped me back at the hotel, and we were just into the preliminaries when I nearly bit through one of his testicles. Nobody wanted much to do with me after that. Except Tommy, here.'
She scowled at me. 'I was stupid. I should have gone along with Moore. He almost killed me. He picked up an ax?but his men stopped him. They wouldn't have been able to, except that the pain was a little too much for him.'
'I should imagine,' John said.
'They led him away and that was the last I saw of him. They kept me tied up like that for hours. Every once in a while, some cretin would come in to paw and slobber over me, but that was the extent of it. Then they brought me here.'
She sat on a chair and pulled on her high black boots. 'I'm okay, really,' she said.
'When did they bring you here?' I asked, setting Winnie down.
'About two hours ago. It took a while for Tommy to work up his nerve. He had strict orders not to fool with me.'
From the front room came the sound of Sam's key beeping. I went in and found it on the kitchen table. Dim Willie had probably been fiddling with it and had inadvertently set off the beacon. I briefly filled Sam in on the situation and told him to come in over the main road. Everyone came out of the bedroom.
'I wonder why they kept this with you,' I said to Darla. 'Didn't they know it could have been sending a homing signal?'
'I didn't know it was here. The last time I saw it, it was lying on the dresser in Moore's room. I bet Willie picked it up when Tommy and he came to get me.'
'Dumb,' I said.
Darla shot a look at Sean. 'Are all the men here as stupid as these two and the rest of Moore's brood?'
Sean winced. 'Quite possibly.'
'What I want to know, Jake, is how you got Geof Brandon down the hole in the outhouse,' Liam said.
'Yes,' Fitzgore said, his face screwed up in intense curiosity. 'How the devil did you do that?'
We spent the next day holed up at Sean and Liam's farm. The place belonged to Sean. His wife had left him, you see, and… but that's another story. (They were called 'wives' here; the Outworlds were rather socially retrograde in many respects.) Anyway, Sam was at some backwoods garage getting his stabilizer foil repaired and the spare roller put on, but we were in contact. Meanwhile, the Home Guard, or whatever the hell they were called, was looking for me. I was a material witness and possible suspect in the homicide of a defecting Colonial Authority official, Dr. Van Wyck Vance. The murder allegedly occurred on board the Laputa, which, by the way, had come through the pirate attack with moderate casualties despite sustaining heavy damage. The news reports made no mention of the fate of Mr. Wilkes or of his possible bearing on the case. Beautiful. However, the cops were of two minds about the whole matter. Some were on Captain Pendergast's payroll and some?the local ones, mainly?weren't. Muddying the whole business and making everyone nervous about just how to proceed was Pendergast's involvement in all this. There he was, running antigeronics, which nominally were controlled substances even here. The operation was an open secret, but a trial or investigation would have opened up several cans of worms and nobody wanted to do that. Meanwhile… everyone, I mean everyone, knew exactly what the hell was going on beneath all the pretexts and posturing. They knew about the Roadmap and about Winnie, and the cops really didn't know how they felt about all that.
Moore was raising a stink about the loss of his property. Claimed he was just doing his civic duty in detaining me. But why had he sequestered me in a shack in the woods? Why had he not immediately contacted the authorities? Well, er, um.
There were numerous meetings in the woods among various parties. Sean's friends in the Guard agreed not to arrest me just yet and sat on a warrant sworn out on Seahome. Jurisdictional disputes flared. The 'Get Jake' faction tried a local magistrate, but he was taking the waters at a spa on some resort planet. Gout, you know. (They had diseases here that hadn't been seen for centuries back in Terran Maze.) More meetings in the woods. Old Zack tried to put a lien against Sam, but to do that he had to dispatch a flunky in a fast roadster to the capital planet. But there he got ensnarled in red tape, and by the time the papers were processed, we were… But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Sam was for making a break for the nearest portal, guns blazing. I had a hard time, but I talked him out of it, pointing out that we had pretty much run that stratagem into the ground. Frankly, I was getting a little tired of it. I wanted to settle this. We had grounds for filing numerous charges against Pendergast, Moore, and?if he was alive?Wilkes: Abduction, Illegal Detention, Criminal Assault, Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse (they had it on the books), Criminal Conspiracy, and, as a nice little fillip, Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor (Lori's drinking). You name it, we could file it. Also, we had a dandy civil case against the shipping company that owned the Laputa and an absolutely open-and-shut one against the outfit that ran the Bandersnatch and a bunch of other businesses (a.k.a. Zack Moore). All of this was on the advice and counsel of a backwoods lawyer by the name of Hollingsworth, a stocky, barrel-shaped fellow with mutton-chop sideburns down to his shoulders. He drank gin straight from the bottle from the time he woke to the time he passed out in the evening. He also ran a chicken farm.
We made known our intentions to proceed against the aforementioned parties. Nervous laughter from the other side. Surely you jest, they said. Try us, we said. Grumble, grumble. Well, they came back, what about the minor you transported across planetary boundaries? And we said; what about your child labor laws? Okay, they're consistently flouted, but do we really want to get into that? Child labor laws? they said. What child labor laws? Oh. Those child labor laws. No, we don't want to get into that.
'Why do they bother to pass laws around here,' I asked Hollingsworth, 'if nobody's interested in enforcing them?'
'Are you joking?' he said, pointing to his shelves of leatherbound legal tomes. 'What would lawyers use to line the walls of their studies if we didn't pass any legislation? Have you priced wallpaper recently?'
The legal shadowboxing went on for two days, at which point the cops got fed up. Listen, they said to me. We will be looking in this direction. You take your truck and your friends and your funny-looking monkey and head in that direction. And don't stop till you… well, just don't stop.
I said fine. I gave the order: Make all preparations for getting under way. Aye aye, skipper. But first I had to deal with Sean and Liam.
'What do you mean you're coming with us?' I asked innocently.
'We've talked it over, Liam and I have. We'd like to join your expedition, if you'll have us.'
'Well, look. You two are great drinking buddies, and you're good men to have in a fight, and if it were up to me?'
'We'll pull our weight, Jake, make no mistake about that. We're already outfitted for the trip. Liam and I were planning to vacate this fairyland very shortly on our own. We had our sights on a newly discovered planet that just got listed for colonization?not that we care about lists, mind you?'
'But why would you want to leave this beautiful place?' I asked him, gesturing toward the neat little intensive-agriculture plots and the brightly painted buildings. 'This is nice!'
Sean heaved a sigh. 'Since Dierdre buggered off, it's palled on me. Besides, the bank owns all the equipment. The note is rather large, and the payments have become a burden.' He swung his legs up to rest on the rail of the front porch and teetered back on the chair. 'Ah, Dierdre, Dierdre,' he said wistfully.
'Have a drink, Sean,' Hollingsworth said, passing him the gin bottle.
'There's another problem,' I said. 'We're already crowded in the truck.'
'Hey, that's no problem,' Carl put in. 'They can ride in the back seat of my Chevy.'
'Chevy?' Liam said, looking around for someone to explain.
'We have a vehicle, Jake,' Sean said after having guzzled approximately one-sixth of the liter of gin.
'You do?' I said. 'Well, it's a free road.'
'But we don't want to go if you don't want us to,' Sean told me.
'What the bloody hell's a Chevy?' Liam persisted.
'Sean, it's not that. It's just-'
'Of course you can come with us,' Susan gushed, sitting down in Sean's lap and running her hand through
