Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (2 page)

So every day I was getting thicker and
thicker, from my nerves to my blood vessels to my muscles. But judging by my
increasing number of heart attacks, there was a definite upper limit to how
dense I could become.

“How many guns do you have?” Valia
asked.

“Few.”

My vest was covered in weapons. They
hung from cables and dangled as I moved. I had maybe twenty or so pistols,
rifles, submachine guns, shotguns. All the trigger guards were cut off so I
could fit my fat fingers in them. If someone was going to run away from me,
it’s not as if I could catch them. And if a big fight broke out, which they
often did, I liked to have a lot of weapons handy.

I also carried a large hook and clamp
secured to my arms with heavy chains and a huge electromagnet around my waist.
I had all kinds of tools, really. Fire extinguishers, spanners, screw drivers,
welders, flashlights, first aid kits. I couldn’t remember all the stuff. It
weighed hundreds of pounds but I didn’t notice.

Although we had food with us, on my back
I had an emergency supply of high calorie glop. It all tasted the same to me.

“Does it bother you I’m a woman?” Valia
asked, and it almost seemed like she wanted it to be a problem.

“I don’t remotely care. We got species
on the force that I’m not even sure what gender they are.”

“Where are we going?” she asked, as our
caravan of police vehicles moved forward.

“I pick a new spot every day depending
on the crime reports. You don’t look like you’re old enough to have been alive
during the Colmarian Confederation,” I said.

“How do you know I was?”

“Because that’s a requirement for
joining the Kommilaire.”

“Why?”

I puffed out a chuckle.

“MTB is going to get on you for not
calling me sir, so you might as well start.”

“Why, sir?” she asked with some bite.

“A couple reasons. One, you got records.
And we still have a crime database we can check, if you were alive during that
time. Two, you’re not so young that you’ll let this job get the best of you.
You’ll have some authority and some chances to abuse it. Third, you remember a
time before this.”

I swept my arm outward as we drove. The
streets were filled with people. Starving people did their laundry next to open
sewers. Masses of common criminals worked everything from simple bunko scams to
prostitution to racketeering.

Feral children gawked suspiciously at us.
They were hateful little creatures who hadn’t even learned to speak Colmarian.
They were one of the biggest blights on the city, ripping apart anything not
bolted down and being responsible for a fair amount of violent crime.

“Some folks like to think the Colmarian
Confederation was all bad,” I began wistfully, “but it was never like this.”

“Didn’t you personally destroy the
Confederation?” Valia asked.

I thought about answering, but I was
tired of that subject.

Very tired.

http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/mtbandvalia.gif

My Kommilaire and I reached our
destination and we radioed one another to disembark and fan out. Most areas of
the city actually welcomed us: the law walking amongst lawless Belvaille. But
some areas were rather inhospitable.

I knew not all my Kommilaire were
perfectly legit or righteous. Not much I could do about it, I was short-staffed
as it was. I had never fired anyone. I just moved them to patrols where the
Kommilaire weren’t especially appreciated. When you were busy trying to stay
alive, you didn’t have much time to be dishonest.

Besides, the city didn’t pay that well.
And having personal underworld contacts was helpful for a Kommilaire.

In other words, being a
little
crooked was one of the perks of the job.

The heavy lifter lowered me to street
level.

“They call you the Stair Boys. It’s not
a bad term. I use it,” I said to Valia.

“Why do they call us that?”

“I think it was an old joke about me
being too heavy to walk up stairs so I had to hire people to search the upper
floors of buildings. Which is true. So I guess it wasn’t a joke.”

“What all is illegal on Belvaille?”

I shrugged.

“Just use common sense, really. If
someone’s screaming, it’s probably illegal.”

“Can I ask you…sir, where’s your accent
from?”

“Eh. It’s just the way I talk.”

Even my tongue had thickened. I sounded
like a deaf person who had been born that way.
If
you asked me to say “the thorny thistle shoots the shuttle.” It would sound
like “dadnadadunudu.”

“Okay, find me some law breakers,” I
said into my radio.

“You remember teles?” I asked Valia with
a smile.

“Sir?”

“Teles. You know, back when you could
talk to anyone anywhere without sending up smoke signals. These radios don’t
even have a range across the whole city.”

“I think so,” she answered vaguely.

“What did you do when you were in the
Confederation?”

“I was in the Navy.”

“The Navy?” That was surprising. “Which
Navy?”

“The…Colmarian Confederation’s. Before
it collapsed.”

“Collapsed? How polite. It was
destroyed.”

The Colmarian Confederation, most
backwards of all the galactic empires. When it had embarked on a civil war with
itself, it stayed true to its ways and no faction changed their names or flags.
So the Colmarian Confederation was fighting the Colmarian Confederation who was
fighting the Colmarian Confederation and so on. I don’t know how anyone kept it
straight. Maybe they didn’t try.

I stood in the middle of the street
waiting for the Stair Boys to report back.

“Boss, we got an infraction,” one
radioed, after a while.

I followed the Kommilaire to the
building in question. I could hear a lot of commotion coming from inside.

Every type of weapon existed on
Belvaille. We were at the exact geographic center of fifty years of war. If
someone got mad enough, or drunk enough, or drugged enough, or just plain mean
enough, those weapons would be used.

When I stepped inside the building, all
the shouting stopped immediately.

I wasn't just a Kommilaire. I was the
Supreme Kommilaire. I could sentence anyone to anything. During some of the
worst times in the civil war I had carried out some rather brutal punishments
to maintain the peace.

The building was a combination bar and
gambling hall. I knew it well. It was jammed to capacity, with about a
half-dozen of my Kommilaire in mid-struggle with various patrons. But everyone
was now frozen and looking at me.

The outlaws, who knew they were outlaws,
and knew I knew they were outlaws, put their heads down and whispered prayers
to their outlaw gods. But for everyone else, this was high entertainment.

MTB read off the crime, his nostrils
flaring like he had caught the scent of approaching justice, and it was as
tantalizing as cooked meat to a starving man.

“Boss, Sav-juhn had his door closed when
we came by.”

I looked at Sav-juhn, the barkeeper and
owner of the establishment.

“Get an adjudicator in here,” I said to
MTB.

The crowd started quietly placing bets
amongst themselves when I said that. Adjudicators were part of the judicial
branch of Belvaille. They kind of argued on behalf of the criminal like
lawyers. All of them dreamed of being real judges and having real offices and
not having to stomp around with us. But I dreamed of being able to pick my own
nose with my own fingers.

The adjudicator who was riding with us
today was a young man named Nelstle. He dressed like a judge in flamboyant
robes and thus was perpetually in a state of near-trip. Robes weren’t meant for
street patrolling.

“His door was to remain open,” I said to
Nelstle.

“My patrons don’t want to sit with their
backs to the open street,” Sav-juhn replied.

“Your patrons murdered four of your
other patrons in the last two months. I doubt they care about noise,” I growled.
“That’s why your door was to remain open, based on a previous ruling.”

“Erroneous testimony,” Sav-juhn yelled.

“Sham! Sham!” One of the gamblers
chanted. A Kommilaire hit him on the side of the head with a truncheon.

“Your Honor, coercing witnesses!” Sav-juhn
said at the abuse.

Nelstle looked.

“Not my jurisdiction,” he answered.

Unless we actually brought a charge,
Nelstle had no power. Adjudicators didn’t really do a lot but they made the citizens
feel better. Like it wasn’t just Kommilaire making things up as we went
along—which is exactly what it was.

“Five hundred thumb fine,” I demanded.

Some of the patrons cursed or cheered
and swapped money based on my initial fine. They continued to wager.

Thumbs were the colloquial term for
Belvaille’s currency. Our scrip. The exchange rate was set by the local Ank Reserve.
They were called thumbs because they used to be tubes about that size, until
that proved to be too unwieldy. Now they were a complicated metal-plastic weave
fabric. But the old name stuck.

“Your Honor, that’s excessive,” Sav-juhn
pleaded.

Nelstle pondered this like he was
running for office.

“Was this a good faith bilateral
contract?”

Someone. Somewhere. Had copied a legal
dictionary and sold it to all the adjudicators. They were completely insufferable
now, throwing around cryptic phrases and pretending that was helpful.

I stared at him.

“Two hundred thumbs and probation,”
Nelstle finally said.

“What’s ‘probation’ even mean? That’s
too little. Four hundred and he keeps the door open for a month.”

“Three hundred,” Nelstle countered.

“Deal.”

The trial concluded, everyone exchanged
money again.

“What if I don’t pay?” Sav-juhn asked.

“I throw you in jail. The Royal Wing.”

Sav-juhn’s face drained. I had the
ability to order public executions. But that was nothing compared to prison. We
didn’t have enough forces to patrol the city but we didn’t even bother with the
Belvaille penitentiary. It was a whole other world.

In fact it was a whole other body of
mass. The Royal Wing was a freighter floating next to Belvaille. We handed off
prisoners via shuttle. They accepted them. No one left.

Ever.

One of my Kommilaire went to Sav-juhn to
collect the money and I walked to the entrance. From the back of my waist, I
took my electromagnet and pressed it against the building’s thick front door.
It took a moment to activate and secure itself.

I turned to the street, took a few steps,
and ripped the metal door off the building. It didn’t even break my stride.

Some people ran outside to see what
happened, including Sav-juhn.

“New guy, disconnect that for me,” I
said, pointing to the magnet on the ground.

“One day, Hank, someone is going to get
a big enough gun and blow your brains out,” Sav-juhn sneered.

The Kommilaire seemed ready to grab him based
on that vague threat.

Valia stopped disconnecting me from the
door, curious what my reaction would be.

“I’m sure they will,” I said
matter-of-factly.

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A few days later two gang bosses were in
my living room sitting facing each other.

I had allowed each boss to bring one,
and only one, enforcer with them. So they picked the biggest, meanest guys they
could find, and they were practically standing nose-to-nose.

“You two want a breath mint?” I asked
the pair, at their display of machismo.

“We’re here under a white banner,
Dimi-Vim, have your man sit down, you’re making Hank nervous.” The boss who
spoke was Vone. He was an angular man. His face and muscles looked like they
were cut with a chisel from some hard stone in long gashes. He was kind of ugly
as a person, but would have been artistic as a statue.

The white banner he mentioned was gang
protocol. It allowed for safe envoy and negotiations. It also meant I was
dealing with them as Hank and not as Supreme Kommilaire.

“I’m not worried about Hank, I’m worried
about you. You’ve already broken one agreement and cost me two men,” the other
boss, Dimi-Vim, responded. He had a lot of hair on him. Just about every square
inch except for his actual eyeballs was covered with brown hair. Or fur. I
wondered if he trimmed it.