Sam and I got along beautifully, like kindred souls, really. Once I told him the long, sad (and totally false) story of my life, he took to me like a big brother.
“Gar,” he told me more than once, “we’re two of a kind. Always trying to get out from under the big guys.”
I agreed fervently.
I’ve been a grifter all my life, ever since I sweet-talked Sister Agonista into overlooking the fact that she caught me cheating on the year-end exams in sixth grade. It was a neat scam for an eleven-year-old: I let her catch me, I let her think she had scared me onto the path of righteousness, and she was so happy about it that she never tumbled to the fact that I had sold answer sheets to half the kids in the school.
Anyway, life was always kind of rough-and-tumble for me. You hit it big here, and the next time you barely get out with the hide on your back. I had been at it long enough so that by now I was slowing down, getting a little tired, looking for the one big score that would let me wrap it all up and live the rest of my life in ill-gotten ease. I knew Sam Gunn was the con man’s con man: the little rogue had made more fortunes than the New York Stock Exchange—and lost them just as quickly as he could go chasing after some new rainbow. I figured that if I cozied up real close to Sam, I could snatch his next pot of gold before he had a chance to piss it away.
So when Judge Myers asked me to keep an eye on Sam, I went out to the Beethoven habitat that same day, alert and ready for my big chance to nail the last and best score.
Amanda Cunningham Humphries might just be that opportunity, I realized.
So now I’m bringing a tray of lunch in for Sam and Mrs. Humphries, setting it all out on Sam’s desk while they chat, and then retreating to my own little office so they can talk in privacy.
Privacy, hah! I slipped the acoustic amplifier out of my desk drawer and stuck it on the wall that my office shared with Sam’s. Once I had wormed the earplug in, I could hear everything they said.
Which wasn’t all that much. Mrs. Humphries was very guarded about it all.
“I have a coded video chip that I want you to deliver to my ex-husband,” she told Sam.
“Okay,” he said, “but you could have a courier service make the delivery, even out to the belt. I don’t see why—”
“My ex-husband is Lars Fuchs.”
Bingo! I don’t know how Sam reacted to that news, but I nearly jumped out of my chair to turn a somersault. Her first husband was Lars Fuchs! Fuchs the pirate. Fuchs the renegade. Fuchs and Humphries had fought a minor war out there in the belt a few years earlier. It had ended when Humphries’s mercenaries had finally captured Fuchs, and the Rock Rats of Ceres had exiled him for life.
For years now Fuchs had wandered through the belt, an exile eking out a living as a miner, a Rock Rat. Making a legend of himself. A homeless wanderer. The Flying Dutchman of the asteroid belt.
It must have been right after he was exiled, I guessed, that Amanda Cunningham had divorced Fuchs and married his bitter rival, Humphries. I later found out that I was right. That’s exactly what had happened. But with a twist. She divorced Fuchs and married Humphries on the condition that Humphries would stop trying to track Fuchs down and have him killed. Exile was punishment enough, she convinced Humphries. But the price for that tender mercy was her body. From the haunted look of her, maybe the price included her soul.
Now she wanted to send a message to her ex. Why? What was in the message? Humphries would pay a small fortune to find out. No, I decided; he’d pay a large fortune. To me.
Mrs. Humphries didn’t have all that much more to say and she left the office immediately after they finished their lunch, bundled once more into that shapeless black coat with its hood pulled up to hide her face.
I bounced back into Sam’s office. He was sitting back in his chair, the expression on his face somewhere between exalted and terrified.
“She needs my help,” Sam murmured, as if talking in his sleep.
“Our help,” I corrected.
Sam blinked, shook himself, and sat up erect. He nodded and grinned at me. “I knew I could count on you, Gar.”
Then I remembered that I was supposed to be working for Judge Myers.
“He’s going out to the belt?” Judge Myers’s chestnut-brown eyes snapped at me. “And you’re letting him do it?”
Some people called Jill Myers plain, or even unattractive (behind her back, of course), but I always thought of her as kind of cute. In a way, she looked almost like Sam’s sister might: her face was round as a pie, with a stubby little nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Her hair was light brown and straight as can be; she kept it in a short, no-nonsense bob and refused to let stylists fancy it up for her.
Her image in my desk screen clearly showed, though, that she was angry. Not at Sam. At me.
“Garrison, I sent you to keep that little so-and-so on track for our wedding, and now you’re going out to the belt with him?”
“It’ll only be for a few days,” I said. Truthfully, that’s all I expected at that point.
Her anger abated a skosh; suspicion replaced it.
“What’s this all about, Gar?”
If I told her that Sam had gone bonkers over Amanda Humphries, she’d be up at Beethoven on the next shuttle, so I temporized a little.
“He’s looking into a new business opportunity at Ceres. It should only take a few days.”
Fusion torch ships could zip out to the belt at
