Runner: The Fringe, Book 3 (2 page)

“They didn’t recognize Laura as a dog.” He considered. “Well, more so a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Disgusted that he was talking to himself yet again, he yanked a beer from the pantry, popped the cap and sipped. He checked the kitchen audvid. Jynx hadn’t moved. She had nice legs. Her sandal-clad feet were grungy, but one quick shower, a fresh dress—she rolled onto her back. A long, low growl rumbled through his chest.

“Nice rack.”

Not too big, not too small, her breasts would just about fill his large hands. Lilac motton clung to her body like a drawn-out caress. Her lacy bra pressed against her thin layer of clothing like an inviting whisper.

“Must be exhausted. Poor, evil IWOG doctor on the run for three weeks.” Sipping from his long-necked bottle, he watched her sleep.

Jynx hadn’t gotten far from her lab on Banna. Hell, she could have traded one tumble for a ride off Corona on any trader’s ship.

Knocking back a swallow of beer, he decided she just wasn’t the sort to trade with her body. Regardless of what Roberts said, Jynx was a lady. Foster could tell by the way she spoke and carried herself. She might be an evil doctor, but she was still a lady. An IWOG lady.

“Don’t think I’ve ever met one of those out here.”

Tossing his head back, he polished off his beer and chucked the bottle to recyc. After shutting down the kitchen, he went to his bedroom.

“Not a whole lot of bona fide IWOG ladies on the Fringe.”

Not that her status mattered. He’d deliver his package in a week and be off on another job. Gods knew how he needed the money.

Foster lingered at the audvid in his bedroom as he cleaned his teeth. Would be interesting to make it with an IWOG lady. Just once. Just to see if she was any different from any other woman in the Void.

Frowning, he thought of Laura again. Not a lady by any stretch, but ex-IWOG consumer, like he was. Laura came on like gangbusters, then went suddenly, shockingly shy when he’d tried to close the deal. He wasted weeks on her. Even let her live on the ship for a while. He reprogrammed all the autofires to reassure her, and what had that bitch done? Robbed him blind. Laura swiped a fortune after balling him senseless. While he lay utterly spent, Laura removed everything that wasn’t bolted down on the
Damn You
, crammed it in a shuttle and took off.

To his utter chagrin, he liquidated all his accounts to buy back his own electronic tricks at auction, and his shuttle, but at triple what he’d paid originally.

Laura, forever after in his mind as “That Bitch”, stripped him so naked he couldn’t believe she’d left him a pair of boxers, let alone a pair of pants.

Because he’d trusted someone, he’d opened himself to a world of hurt. Never in his life had he called a woman a bitch. But Laura’s deliberate playing of him earned her the title of “That Bitch”. If he ever laid eyes on her again, he’d shoot first and ask questions later. Laura made him doubt the motives of half the population by sheer virtue of being female.

Laura reduced him from a major player with loads of cash to a man with a bare-bones ship and little else. After draining his accounts, he had the
Damn You
back at full-throttle and his reputation, but that was all. On the brink of retirement, he’d been forced to start all over with only his ship and his rep.

Anger and embarrassment flared. He took a deep breath to push the uncomfortable emotions away. Foster blamed no one but himself. He never should have trusted Laura. She lucked out and caught him at a low, lonely point.

“When I was using the little brain.” He glared down at his pants. “Ain’t putting you in charge again, buddy, no matter how much you sit up and beg.”

He checked the audvid again. Jynx Brennan was small, blonde, delicate and lady-like. She had the softest, sweetest, most honey-rich voice he’d ever heard in his life. She was
everything
he’d lusted after in his youth on Banna.

“Won’t be fooled again.” He undressed, shut off the audvid and tumbled into bed.

Chapter Three

Blazing lights startled Jynx awake. On her feet in an instant, she realized she didn’t have to run today. She didn’t have to worry about finding something to eat or a place to hide. Her mad dash for freedom ended after a disastrous three weeks.

Tears threatened as she slumped to her bunk.

Clenching her fists, she dug what remained of her chipped fingernails into her palms. Another pity party wouldn’t help one iota. Her face, raw from crying, couldn’t really stand any more salty tears. Nor could her self-esteem.

“I’m a smart woman. I can find my way out of this.”

Foster Nash. No hope there. Not a chance in the Void he’d let her go. It wasn’t about money for him; it was about reputation. Only a handful of men on the Fringe could lay claim to the status of triple-platinum Runner, bounty hunters who
never
lost their prey. He’d earned his rating, and he wouldn’t let anything interfere with keeping it.

Jynx hadn’t been living on the Fringe long, but it didn’t take long to understand a whole different world operated here. On her home world of Banna, everyone followed the letter of the law because every aspect of life was rigidly controlled. IWOG consumers gave up freedom for safety. Or that’s what she’d thought once upon a time. What she really gave up was her privacy.

Here on the Fringe, the local law was an amalgam of IWOG and WAG. Confusing, conflicting. Fringe players lived by their wits. Hustlers and whores, Runners and thieves, everyone looking for an edge. As a born-and-bred IWOG consumer, Jynx found her learning curve brutally short and nasty. Within days, she knew which way the wind blew. Still, even after three weeks, she’d been fooled by a fat innkeeper.

“Reputation matters, girl. You? Nobody knows. No bonafides, no vouch, so I gotta charge you the higher rate.” Into his greedy palm she slipped the last of her script. “Man’s gotta take care of his own out here.” He tucked the crumpled paper into his straining trouser pocket. His gut was so big he couldn’t see that he wore two different colored socks. She didn’t argue. She’d been so happy to find a room, she might have slept with the man in payment.

Her joy hadn’t lasted long. While she dozed in fitful bursts, Foster had suddenly been there, yanking her out of bed and handcuffing her. No doubt that self-serving innkeeper sold Foster her location. He had to. Where else would Foster have gotten a keycard to her room?

Jynx stood and inspected every inch of her cell. A common criminal might slyly work their way out. A surgeon turned general practitioner turned epidemiologist? Not likely. The problems she solved were medical, not criminal. No wonder he’d taken her into custody with hardly a struggle.

“I could have just stepped from my lab into his ship and saved everyone a bundle of time and money.” Frustrated, she wished she’d had a bit more time to acclimate to the Fringe. Wished she had just a bit more script in her purse when she’d fled. Wished she’d been wearing anything but a clingy dress and barely there sandals. With only the contents of her purse, she’d run for three weeks. All in one breath that seemed both long and short.

To her credit, she defied any woman to do better than she did with what she had. Three weeks on a paltry two hundred in script? Most days she spent that much on transport. The day she ran, she’d planned on meeting Brandt for lunch. A bit lost after their brief night of drunken passion, she wasn’t sure if she’d been embarking on the love of her life or a “hey, things happen” speech. Either way, she never got to meet up with Brandt. He was dead by the time she stepped from the shuttle trans to the industrial complex that housed the lab.

“I saw them kill him.” She bit her lip, still shocked at what her psi ability had revealed.

Brandt shared her rare and strange gift—the ability to project. While she sat in the trans, Brandt reached to her mind, she to his, and she found herself looking out through his eyes just in time to see an IWOG officer raise his gun and fire three rapid shots.

Horror flung her from Brandt’s mind. She hung in limbo for a few moments, trying to recover, then forced her way into the IWOG officer’s mind. She watched through his eyes as he systematically strode through the lab, killing everyone.

As the officer ran from the building, he set off a series of explosives. She felt a surge of sexual excitement in him as he watched the fire destroy the entire structure. His perverse pleasure so shocked her, she broke the connection and jumped back into her own mind with a disorienting jolt.

She exited the trans and immediately entered another going in the opposite direction. Terrified, she’d ridden to the commuter hub and boarded the first flight off Banna to Corona, a Fringe planet. While inside the IWOG officer’s mind, she’d found out his orders were very clear—destroy the lab and everyone in it. He’d succeeded. Except for Jynx herself. Her only hope was to disappear before anyone noticed she was still alive.

While in the bustling space port, she’d been horrified to find Roberts on every com unit, decrying the destruction of the lab as an evil terrorist attack. “They will do anything to destroy our way of life,” Roberts said.

For the first time, Jynx noticed something that those around her didn’t.
They
was a very vague word. They who? WAG citizens? Fringe players? Crimes like this were always blamed on the nameless, faceless they.

Frightened IWOG consumers were calmed by Roberts’s cultured, caring and carefully modulated voice. “This vicious attack will not go unpunished. We will find the terrorists and bring them to justice.” Roberts extolled the doctors and lab personnel as dedicated civil servants who worked tirelessly to cure the Tyaa plague. “Their lives were not lost in vain. It is a credit to them that they managed to succeed in their mission. We now have a cure.”

Spellbound, Jynx watched Roberts’s beaming face. Of course they had the cure. They’d discovered it months ago. They’d been refining a delivery system in an effort to inoculate all the civilized worlds in the Void. Reports of the plague were rare, but over ten years, it had slowly seeped from Tyaa to gain an ever-greater foothold in the surrounding planets. Quarantining entire towns had been the only way to stop the progress of the disease.

Jynx had left behind her general medical practice to focus her considerable talent on eradicating the Tyaa plague. Three years of her life for what? Why was Roberts lying? Why had Roberts ordered the destruction of the lab? Jynx didn’t hang around to ask. She’d fled Banna before anyone knew she was still alive.

So far she hadn’t hurt a soul. She hadn’t so much as inconvenienced anyone. She’d gone out of her way to slip by unnoticed until she could fully understand what a life on the run in the Fringe entailed.

Determined to escape, she made another circuit of her cell.

“Only way out is with one of these.” Foster jingled a set of six keys on a loop attached to his belt with his right hand. In his left, he carried a tray of food. “Trust me, you have a better chance of teleporting yourself planet-side.”

He tucked the keys deep into his right front pocket and winced. Carefully, he withdrew his swollen index finger.

“I could look at that for you.” She nodded at his finger.

With a seductive scowl, he asked, “You interested in my pants or my shiny keys?”

Ignoring his blatant posture, she said, “Your finger. Even from here I can see you’ve been bitten and that the wound is infected.”

“What’s it to you?” He lowered the tray to the front of her cell, then pushed it under the door. A notch in the durosteel bars made a perfect hole for the passing of the tray along the textured metal floor.

“I
am
a doctor.” Once he backed away from the front of her cell, she picked up the molded plastic tray and set it on the battered tabletop. Even though the round metal table was bolted to the floor, it wobbled as if someone had worked desperately to pry it loose. Idly, she wondered why. A weapon, perhaps?

“Epidemiologist. One who studies the origin and spread of disease. I know that because I looked it up.”

Surprised, she considered him through the bars. “I’m classified as an epidemiologist when that’s not exactly what I do.” She nodded to the green tray. “Thank you, for the food.” The garishly bright meal looked edible. It smelled a bit odd but not disgustingly so, just different, somewhat pleasing. “Whatever Roberts told you, I trained first as a surgeon, then a general practitioner.”

Settling herself to the bolted-down chair, which also wobbled, she took a bite and closed her eyes. Delicious. After the horrid fare she’d been eating for three weeks, this practically rated five stars.

“I can set broken bones, stitch up wounds and bring a child into the Void. Not that you would be in need of the latter.” She nodded to his finger again. “I can take a look at that fight-bite and possibly help you.”

His startled gaze revealed her guess correct; he’d been injured in some kind of physical altercation. She’d certainly seen enough of those types of wounds during her residency in the seedier part of Banna.

Recovering his take-charge attitude, he lowered his voice to a mildly curious yet boldly flirtatious edge. “And in exchange?”

“I want to take a shower and wash my clothes.”

A lusty smirk darted across his face. “I’d like nothing better than to toss you into the shower. Making your dress disappear for a few hours also sounds like nothing short of fun.” He stretched, displaying the muscles from his neck to his knees, but mostly ensuring she noticed the bulge in his tight pants. “Problem is, you’re in there, and I’m out here.” He shrugged his massive shoulders, settling himself into a solid, immovable block. “That’s the way things are gonna stay.”

Ignoring his sexual tone and provocative display, she kept her manner civil. “That’s fine. I noticed the cell at the other end has a shower. Mine doesn’t. Put me in that cell, and I’ll gladly look at your finger.”

He considered her request for a long time. He looked at her, the cell at the far end, and back at her. She knew he ran it through his mind again and again, looking for an edge.

“Mr. Nash, you know I do not have a weapon.” Using her most practiced doctor tone, she pointed out the obvious facts. “You are transporting me to a brutal death. Even were I to somehow elude you, I couldn’t fly your ship. As you so aptly put it, I’m dead in the Void. I’d like my last week to be as pleasant as possible. I’m not demanding silk sheets and a handmaid, only that you move me to a cell with a shower.”