His thoughts turned to memories as he leaned his head back against the locker. He remembered two other partners in particular; one of them, Boba Fett, could be anywhere in the galaxy now. There was no stopping Fett, or apparently even slowing him down. The last glimpse of Boba Fett that Zuckuss remembered had been through the narrow hatch of an emergency escape pod, just prior to being jettisoned from another ship similar to this one.
There had been another bounty hunter in that escape pod, one that had fumed with a murderous anger the whole time that the pod had been hurtling through space, toward some yet-unknown destination. That had been Bossk; both murder and anger were things that came naturally to Trandoshans. But it had made for cramped quarters inside the little durasteel sphere. Tem-pers had flared, both his and Bossk's, and they had kept from killing each other only by agreeing, once the escape pod came to rest on the nearest planet, that they would go their separate ways. And so they had.
He was both glad and somehow sorry that his partner-ship with the cold-blooded, fiery-tempered reptilian Bossk was long over. There was no amount of fun that was worth the risks that came with an association with a creature like that.
Zuckuss shook his head. At least I'm still alive, he thought. That has to count for something.
He wondered where Bossk was now ...
2
He didn't need to kill him... but he did. Bossk thought it was a good idea, not just to stay in practice for the bounty hunter trade, but also to make sure that no one in the Mos Eisley spaceport knew the circumstances of his arrival.
The broken-down old transport pilot, a shambling wreck with a spine bent nearly double by too many high-g landings, had come gimping up to Bossk, obvi-ously looking for a handout. "Wait a minute," the old man had rasped, digging a yellow-nailed paw through the grey wisps of his beard as his rheumy eyes had peered closer at the figure in front of him. "I know you—"
"You're mistaken." Bossk had taken passage aboard a number of local system freighters, all under assumed names, to reach the remote planet of Tatooine. There had been plenty of times in the past when he had flown his ship Hound's Tooth directly here and had made no attempt at concealing his identity. Right now, circum-stances were different for him. "Get out of my way." He shoved past the beggar, heading for the perimeter of the spaceport's landing field and the low shapes of the build-ings beyond. "You don't know who I am."
"I sure do!" The beggar, dragging one foot-twisted leg behind himself, tagged after Bossk. They crossed the landing field, streaked with blackened char marks from thruster engines. "Bumped into ya out in the Osmani system; that was a long while back." He struggled to keep up with the Trandoshan's quick strides. "I was pi-loting a shuttle between planets—that was the cheapest gig I ever worked—and you lifted one of my passengers right off the ship." The beggar emitted a phlegm-rich, cackling laugh. "Gave me a damn good excuse for blow-ing my schedule, it did! I owe ya one!"
Bossk halted and turned on his clawed heel. From the corner of his eye, he spotted some of the other passen-gers that had disembarked with him, now glancing over in this direction as though wondering what the raised voices were all about. "You don't owe me anything," hissed Bossk. "Except a little peace and quiet. Here—" He dug into a belt pouch and pulled out a decicredit coin, then flipped it into the dust beside the beggar's rag-shod feet. "Now you've made a profit on our little encounter. Take my advice as well," growled Bossk, "and try to keep it that way."
The beggar scooped up the coin and followed after Bossk. "But you're a bounty hunter! One of the big ones! Top of the biz—or at least you were."
That brought blood up into Bossk's slit-pupiled gaze; he could feel the muscles tightening underneath the scales of his shoulders. This time, when he stopped and turned around, he reached down and gathered up the front of the beggar's rags in his clenched fists and lifted the inso-lent creature up on tiptoe. He didn't care if anyone was watching. "What," he said quietly and ominously, "do you mean by that?"
"No offense." A gap-toothed smile showed on the beggar's seamed humanoid face. "It's just that everybody in the galaxy knows what happened to the Bounty Hunters Guild. It's all gone, ain't it? Maybe there aren't any big-time bounty hunters left." The smile widened, like an overripe fruit splitting open in the heat of Tatooine's dou-ble suns. "Except for one."
Bossk knew which one the beggar meant. It didn't im-prove his temper to be reminded about Boba Fett. "You're pretty free with your little comments, aren't you?" Hold-ing the beggar up close, he could smell the encrusted dirt and sweat on him. "Maybe you should be a little more careful."
"I'm no freer with 'em than anybody else in this dump." Dangling from Bossk's doubled fists, the beggar nodded toward the sun-baked hovels of Mos Eisley. "Everybody around here talks their heads off, however many they've got of 'em. Pretty gossipy bunch, if you ask me."
"Did I?" Bossk felt the points of his claws meeting through the beggar's wadded rags.
"You don't have to, pal. 'Cause I'll tell you the way it is." The beggar appeared completely unafraid.
"Place like Mos Eisley, ain't much else to do except talk. Mostly about each other's business. Maybe your busi-ness, once they know you're in town. Lots of 'em would be real interested in hearing that a certain bounty hunter named Bossk just arrived. Without a ship of his own, traveling on an ordinary freighter, and"—the beggar leaned his head back to survey Bossk with one squinting eye—"not looking like he was doing too good at the moment."
"I'm doing fine," said Bossk.
"Sure you are, pal." The beggar managed a shrug. "Appearances can be deceiving, right? So maybe you got some real good reason for coming here, all incognito and all. Tricky guy like you, maybe ya got some big plan up your sleeve. So you probably want to stay incognito, right? Is that a good guess, or what?"
Bossk forced his anger down a few degrees. "If you're so smart, why are you a beggar?"
"It suits me. Nice clean outdoor work. You meet lovely people, too. Besides, it's only a part-time thing for me. It's a good cover for my real business."
"Which is?"
"Finding things out," said the beggar. "In a place like Mos Eisley, somebody like me is just about invisible. It's like being the plaster on the walls. So when crea-tures don't notice you, don't know you're even there, you can find out some interesting stuff. Stuff about other creatures—like you, Bossk. I didn't just recognize you, like pulling something out of my own personal memory bank. I knew you were coming here to Ta-tooine; I got friends all through this system and out on the freighters. They let me know you were heading this way. We kinda keep an eye on interesting characters like you, when they show up in these parts. Let's face it, no-body comes to a backwater world like this, unless they got a good reason. It's not exactly the center of the uni-verse, you know. So it figures that you've got some kind of a reason for coming here." The beggar scratched the side of his head with a dirty fingernail.
"Couldn't be any kind of job for Jabba the Hutt—he's dead, must be a coupla weeks now. Ain't nothing worth bothering with out in what used to be his palace. And there's nobody around here with a bounty on his head—and believe me, I'd know if there was." The expression on his grizzled face turned slyer."So maybe it's just kinda your personal business, huh?"