“We could’ve hung together,” sulked Bossk. “If we’d been smart.” He couldn’t-and didn’t-blame himself for that much; he had tried to keep the other bounty hunters, or at least the younger and tougher ones, together after the Bounty Hunters Guild had broken up. That had been the whole point of the Guild Reform Committee that he had put together-with himself at the head, naturally-right after he had eliminated old Cradossk, in
the traditional and time-honored Trandoshan fashion. The old lizard would’ve wanted it that way, Bossk told himself. And if Cradossk hadn’t, who cared? He was still just as dead and out of the way now.
“Smart, lucky-big ifs,” said Figh. “For you. For Boba Fett, not ifs.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.” The drink’s intoxicants had fueled Bossk’s anger. “Like I said, I got plans.”
“Plans take money. You got?”
Bossk glared at the Mhingxin, wondering just how much he knew. “Enough.”
“True?” Figh gave a doubtful shrug. “Not so heard around here.”
The murder of the beggar, whose body Bossk had left in the alley at Mos Eisley’s perimeter, was starting to seem pointless. Or at least pointless beyond the simple pleasure of snapping another creature’s neck in his fists. It was beginning to seem that everybody in the spaceport had a line on his financial condition.
“You heard wrong, then.” Bossk decided to bluff it out. “Use that little rodent brain of yours, for a change. The old Bounty Hunters Guild had a huge treasury stashed away, before it fell apart. Who do you think wound up with all those credits?”
Figh smiled unpleasantly. “Not you.”
“Look, just because I didn’t land here with my own personal ship-that doesn’t mean anything. I got my own reasons for wanting to keep a low profile.”
The Mhingxin uttered a common, low-slang expression for bovine waste material. “Broke, you, that’s the truth. What heard, more than one mouth. Smiling and laughing, too. Nearly as many enemies, you, as Boba Fett. All that killing.” Figh shook his head, rudimentary snout whiskers fluttering. “Stepping on toes. Probably why your bad luck. Nobody wish you good luck.”
Bossk felt the urge rise in him to reach across the table and do the same thing to Figh that he had done to the beggar he had left in the alley. He restrained himself; the consequences wouldn’t have been insurmountable, but he didn’t need the expense right now of paying the bartender to take care of the mess. Plus-now that Bossk thought about it-there was a certain value to having an information source like Figh around.
“So tell me something.” Bossk leaned across the table, clawed hands folded around the drink in front of him. “Since you’ve heard so much about my state of affairs. If I didn’t get the Bounty Hunters Guild treasury, then who did?”
“Everybody knows. Not even worth charging you for.” Figh’s sneer split one side of his face. “The credits gone, and so is Gleed Otondon. Figure out.”
That jibed with everything Bossk had been able to find out while he had been making his way here to Tatooine. He could still remember the annihilating fury that had boiled up inside him when he had attempted to access the mountain of credits that had been stashed away from the vanished Guild and had found the accounts completely ransacked. Whoever had been responsible, and who now had the credits that should rightfully have been in Bossk’s pockets, had not only known the crypto-security codes for the accounts, but also exactly what banking and financial-center worlds they had been located at. Obviously an inside job: some of the accounts had been emptied just a few minutes before Bossk got to them and found them bare. So it must have been somebody who had been at the top levels of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, Bossk figured, one of his father Cradossk’s most trusted advisors, a creature that would have been in a position to snoop out the access codes and the other information necessary for locating all those hidden credits. And stealing them, brooded Bossk. The injustice of it still rankled. If anyone was going to steal that money, it should have been him.
Whoever it had been, though, it obviously wasn’t one of the younger bounty hunters that had gone with him into the Guild Reform Committee. None of those had had access to that kind of information in the old Guild; they had all still been trying to scrabble up the ladder to those levels, with the places and positions of influence all occupied by their elders.
That had been the reason why so many of them had welcomed the breakup of the old Guild, and had even helped bring it about; even Bossk had seen the personal advantages in revolution, of smashing the system in place and putting in a new one with himself in charge, supported by the younger and tougher bounty hunters. It just hadn’t worked out that way. We should’ve killed ‘em all, thought Bossk in retrospect, right at the start. Too many of the elders in the old Guild had survived the breakup, and had gone on to form their own spin-off fragment, the so-called True Guild. All that had been accomplished by the existence of two splinter groups was a war of attrition between them. The elders had been a lot tougher than the young bounty hunters, Bossk included, had expected; tough enough, at least, to have thinned out the Guild Reform Committee’s ranks pretty drastically, at the same rate that the True Guild’s members had been picked off. If the goal had been to reduce the number of bounty hunters alive and working in the galaxy-and Bossk had heard rumors to that effect, about whoever had been behind Boba Fett’s entry into the old Guild-then that goal had been well and bloodily achieved.