“Oh, are you OK, Mister Taxpayer?” taunted the guard. “You don’t look OK. I’d come check on you, but it’s my break time and I gotta doughnut to dunk.” It seems he’d taken offense to that earlier comment. He looked to the Tuttles. “If he starts swallowing his tongue, feel free to stick something in that whiny-ass mouth.”
As the trooper sauntered out, Gideon looked at the man writhing on the floor and shook his head. He snickered and scratched at his chin whiskers as he took in the fool of a man.
“I reckon this here is your first time?” He gave Junior an amused glance. “Well, ya came to the right place. We’re ol’ hands at this, ain’t we boy?”
“You said it, Pa,” Junior forced a laugh, but he’d been hoping to change that trend. Unfortunately, his father had insisted on messing with a man who, if he survived, was as dangerous as a rattlesnake in a sleeping bag. He was going to take his son down with him, either ending up face-down in the Tennessee or going away for good.
Blood is thicker ‘n’ water … yeah, right! As long as it benefits his dried up ol’ ass!
“I wouldn’t be here at all if it hadn’t been for some piece-of-shit spacer harassing me.” Ollie groaned as he tried to sit up but then decided that it was a bad idea. Gingerly, he laid his head back down on the magnicrete.
“Yeah, well, we ain’t lost no love for any spacers either,” Gideon’s eyes narrowed as rage filled him. After all, it had been that bastard Thomas who’d set this whole chain of events in motion.
“You can’t hate ‘im any more than me,” Ollie huffed. “Goddamned bastard fucked up everything. My house, my pool, my mermaid.” Ollie’s eyes squeezed together at the thought of his mermaid statue being shot up the night before by that sinister black hovercraft.[vi] It had been his prized possession. Now it lay in pieces at the bottom of his pool. “All I did was try to defend what’s mine. But I’m the one locked up, and Tiger Thomas is still out there running free.”
The Tuttles froze at the mention of Tiger’s name. Slowly, they turned to look at each other and then back to the man on the floor.
“Whaddaya know about Tiger Thomas?” Gideon spoke, his voice measured, as he fought to keep himself calm.
“I told you. He was the sumbitch that fucked up my shit,” Ollie reiterated. “But I got my licks in. He limped away trailing smoke. Those pulse cannons ripped him a new one. If his buddies hadn’t bailed him out …”
“Whoa, whoa!” Gideon waved his hands, a gesture to silence the man. “You gotta pulse cannon?”
“I had three … before last night.”
“You ex-military?”
“No, just bought them off the ultranet.
“Damn! You rich or sump’m?” Junior asked.
“I do alright.” Ollie didn’t wanna brag. Well, he did, but not to two weird-looking rednecks he’d just meant in jail.
“If you’rn rich enough to buy three mail-order pulse cannons, ya do better’n alright.” Gideon’s mind was already working, scheming. “So, you wanna get some payback on that bastard Thomas, do ya?”
“Fuckin’ A, I do!”
“Well, sonny, I think we might just be able to help each other out.” Gideon smiled a big yellow-tooth grin. “What y’all rich folks call a mooch’ly ben’ficial ‘rrangement.” He reached over and slapped Junior on the back of the head. “Well, don’t just stand there, boy! Help that poor man up off the floor! Where’s your manners?”
***
Forrest Frost still ached something fierce, but at least he could move, although his joints were stiff from the aftereffects of Tiger’s shot. As he awaited his discharge from the hospital, he found getting dressed still a bit of a chore. The ghoulish mortician solemnly counseling him on Number Two’s remains did little to help.
“As you know, sir,” the man’s soft baritone voice was as soothing as a throat lozenge, “with the overcrowding situation that exists, new cemetery additions are prohibited. Unless your employee’s family owns a plot in an existing cemetery, I’m afraid his body will be cremated and presented to his family in, what I must say, is a very aesthetically pleasing, decorative urn.”
The undertaker was a beanpole of a man in his early sixties, with deep-set eyes surrounded by dark circles. He had a beak-like nose and massive ears that looked like open hovercar doors. His white, thin hair was wavy and heavily sprayed. His cheap suit hung from his frail shoulders like a scarecrow in a farmer’s field. His perpetual smile was as cold and lifeless as the dead from which he profited.
“The man doesn’t have any family.” Frost rubbed his temple in a circular motion with two fingers trying to massage the pain away. “You can bring his ashes to me.”
“Oh, well, in that case, may I suggest a package that many of our clients have found quite comforting?”
Frost shot a knowing glance to Cee Tee, who was sitting quietly in a nearby chair. Ah, here it was, the sales pitch. There was always a sales pitch. The young man couldn’t help but grin, but Frost kept his face straight.
Oblivious to the secretive looks, the mortician continued right along. “Our Heavenly Journey package is quite popular, and I must say, with everything that’s included, quite reasonable. For the reasonable price of only fifteen thousand points, your lost comrade will be cremated and placed in a pressurized canister. The remains will be placed aboard a spaceship bound for deep space. At a pre-determined point, they’ll be released into eternity with full ceremonial honors, all of which will be recorded so that their loved ones … or in this case, you, as his longtime friend, have a special keepsake memory to cherish for years to come.
“My, my,” Frost feigned awe of the whole spill. “That is
