"Well, friend," said Dimitrios, "I'm about to show you. Keep your hands away from those pistols."
Dimitrios whirled and fired three blasts into the upper corners of the room, and three holographic cameras melted.
"Do you still want to see how good I am against someone who knows I'm here?" asked Dimitrios.
The man held his hands out where everyone could see them and then sat down.
"Hey!" yelled Manolete, approaching the bounty hunter. "You destroyed three very expensive cameras."
"You didn't prepare the contract we discussed," said Dimitrios. "I told you I wouldn't let you make those holos if you didn't turn half over to the charities I named."
"You said I couldn't show them."
"Well, now you can't."
"I'm going to remember this!" promised Manolete.
"I hope so," said Dimitrios. "And the next time you promise a contract to someone, you'd better deliver it."
Some of the customers began leaving, giving Dimitrios a wide berth.
"Look at this!" growled Manolete. "Now all my clients are leaving! Get that body out of here!"
"You didn't mind that body when you thought you could rerun his death every night," said Dimitrios.
"Just get him out of here and don't come back!" yelled Manolete. He turned to Matilda. "You get out of here too! You're fired!"
Matilda climbed down from the stage and approached Manolete. "Why are you firing me?" she asked.
"You're connected with him!" he said, jerking a thumb toward Dimitrios. "That's reason enough."
"Well," she said, "as it happens, I would have quit tonight anyway. He's going on to another world, and I'm going with him, so I don't mind being fired. But I mind your reason for it, and I mind your attitude."
"What are you going to do about it?" demanded Manolete pugnaciously.
"I'm going to give you a present."
He frowned in confusion. "What present?"
"Remember the trade we talked about earlier?" she said. Before he could react, she kicked him hard in the groin. He groaned and dropped to his knees. "You don't even have to pay me extra for that."
She turned her back on him and walked to the door, then waited for Dimitrios to sling the corpse over his shoulder and join her.
He summoned a robot car, loaded Jacobs into the back, and ordered it to take them to the spaceport.
"You know," she said, "that's just the way I think Santiago would dispatch an enemy."
He shook his head. "What I did was legal and moral. You've watched too many bad holodramas. I don't know how good Jacobs was with his weapons, so why give him a chance to prove he's better than me?" He paused. "Or take that man who got up and half- threatened me. It's easier to frighten him off with a display of marksmanship than kill him to prove a point."
"Yeah, I suppose so," she said.
"Don't look so depressed," he said. "I told you I'm not a candidate for the job. You ought to be pleased that I'm good at what I do, and that I'm willing to join your army."
"I am," she said. "But . . ."
"But what?"
She signed deeply. "But I still need to find a general."
"Finding him won't be so hard," replied Dimitrios. "Recruiting him will be the difficult part."
Which was as wrong a pair of predictions as he'd ever made.
12.
He used to be a lawman, a master of his tools;
His name was The Rough Rider, his game was killing fools.
He used to be a hero, backing up his boasts—
But now he lives a private life, hiding from his ghosts.
His real name was Wilson Tchanga, and there was a time when he was the most feared lawman on the Inner Frontier.
They tell the story of the day he followed eight members of the notorious Colabara Gang into a small warehouse on Talos II, and less than a minute later he was the only living soul in the building.
They talk about the evening he saved an entire Tradertown from Pedro the Giant, a nine-foot mutant who had gone on a rampage with a laser pistol and was in the process of burning the place down when Tchanga showed up to stop him.
It was when he rode an alien steed halfway across Galapagos V to hunt down an escaping killer that he picked up the sobriquet of the Rough Rider, for the terrain was positively brutal. Men envied him, women loved him, children worshipped him, and criminals all across the Frontier feared him.
He never did become a bounty hunter, because he wasn't in the game for the money. He believed that when you saw Evil you stood up to it, and for twenty years he never flinched, never backed down, never once worried about the odds before he marched into battle, burners blazing, screechers screaming.
And then one day Varese Sarabande, who was only 26 at the time, called him out, just like a cowboy in the Old West, and because he was the Rough Rider he stepped out into the street like Doc Holliday or Johnny Ringo might have done a few millennia earlier. They went for their guns together, but Varese Sarabande was faster, and a moment later Tchanga lay writhing in the street, blood spurting from an artery in his neck.
They saved him—barely—but as he lay in the hospital recuperating, he finally came to the realization that he was mortal, and that whatever guardian angel had been protecting him over the years had taken up residence on some other lawman's shoulder. He was 43 years old, and he had painful proof that he couldn't outgun a 26-year-old outlaw like Sarabande. And he knew in his gut that he couldn't beat a strong young man—or woman—in any kind of a fair fight, with weapons or without.
His body, which had resisted age for so many years, suddenly felt decades older as he lay there. He was just a day from being released when a gang of three men burst into the hospital, shot two security guards, and began robbing the pharmacy of its narcotics. A young nurse suddenly entered his room, tossed him a burner, and told him what was happening.
He refused to leave his bed.
They almost had to pry him loose from the hospital the next morning. He resigned his job before noon, withdrew his savings—he didn't transfer them to another world, because he didn't want anyone to know where he was going—and left before the day was over.
He set up housekeeping under a new name on Bedrock II, but the Spartan Kid found out he was there and went gunning for him to pay him back for killing his father and two brothers.
He ran.
He wound up on Gingergreen II. No one knew who he was, no one bothered him, and he lived in total obscurity for three years. Then a thief tried to sneak into his house under cover of night, and he killed him. Shot him dead as he stood there, then shot him 30 or 40 more times. And since he was using a burner, he inadvertently set the house on fire.
They saw the blaze and found him still firing into the charred, unrecognizable corpse. He went berserk when they tried to take his weapon away, threatened to kill them all, and finally collapsed as he was about to turn the burner upon himself.
He spent a year in an asylum, and when he came out he was 50 pounds lighter and his eyes were still haunted by visions that no one else could see. This time they knew who he was, but even the young toughs who wanted to make a reputation knew that they couldn't make one by killing this emaciated, fear-ridden old man, and so he was left to live out his years in a kind of peace.