Dengar swiveled the blaster toward the droid. “If there’s any more ‘casualties’ around here, I’ll be sweeping them up with a magnet. Got me?”
SHSl-B leaned back, bumping against his companion. “Understanding,” said le-XE, speaking for both of them. “Completeness.”
“That’s nice. Go take care of your patient,” said Dengar, slipping the blaster inside his own belt. He glanced back over at Neelah. “You enjoying that?”
She had virtually inhaled the rations bar. Her pale fingernails plucked out a few last crumbs from the wrappings.
“Give me some answers,” said Dengar, “and you can have another one.”
She crumpled the foil into a shining ball inside her small fist.
I’m getting soft, thought Dengar. There had been a time when he wouldn’t have bothered asking questions. He wouldn’t have lowered the blaster, either, until there had been a corpse lying in front of him, with a hole burned through its brain. That was what letting himself fall
in love-not with this female, but with
his betrothed, Manaroo-had done for him. That was always a fatal mistake for a bounty hunter. Somebody like Boba Fett survived at this game for as long as he had by stripping those useless emotions out of his heart. To look at Fett, even when he was unconscious on the pallet in the other chamber, was to look at a weapon, an assault rifle fully primed and charged for maximum destruction. Peel away that Mandalorian battle armor of his, and something equally hard and deadly was found beneath. And that, Dengar knew, was the difference-one of them, at least-between himself and the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter. There was still something human inside Dengar, despite his having worked the bounty-hunter trade, with all its spirit-eroding capabilities. That was the part that had looked upon Manaroo, and had decided, despite all the rest of his scrabbling, callused nature, to twine his fate with hers. Manaroo had asked him to marry her, and he had said yes; that human part had wanted to stay human, like a dwindling flame that struggles to keep from being snuffed out. He didn’t want to wind up like Boba Fett, a killing machine with a blind, unfathomable mask for a face.
It was that human part that had also decided to send Manaroo away, once she had helped him get Boba Fett into this hiding place. Their separation from each other would continue at least until this business with Boba Fett was over. Dengar knew the risks in getting involved with someone who had as many grudge-bearing enemies as Fett; there were plenty of diehards from the old Bounty Hunters Guild who had good reason to hate his guts. If they found out that Boba Fett was still alive, they’d be swooping down on Tatooine en masse to finish him off. And me, Dengar had told himself. That hot-tempered Trandoshan Bossk would naturally assume that anyone befriending his longtime rival Boba Fett was an enemy to be killed with quick dispatch. This little hiding place would get filled up with corpses pretty quickly.
Risks meant profits, though, in the bounty-hunter trade. And profits were what Dengar needed if he was going to have any chance of paying off the massive debt load he was carrying and then have any kind of life with Manaroo. He wanted out of this game, and the only way to accomplish that was to keep on playing it, for at least a few more rounds. And the best way to do that, he’d decided, was with a partner like Boba Fett. And that’s what he offered me-when Dengar had discovered him, half-digested by the gullet of the Sarlacc, lying in the suns-baked wasteland, Fett had had enough remaining strength to speak, but not to protect himself. Dengar could have put him out of his misery right then and there, but had stayed his hand when Fett had spoken of a partnership between the two of them. The only card he’d had left to play …
And a good one. We could clean up, Dengar had decided. Him and me. A real good team. It all depended on just one thing.
Whether Fett had been lying to him.
He could have been just playing for time. Time enough for his wounds to heal, and for him to get his act back together. Dengar had been mulling it over ever since he had carried Fett down here. There was no history of Boba Fett ever working with a partner before; he had always been a lone operator. Why should he want a partnership now? What there was a history of was playing it fast and loose with the truth. In that, Boba Fett was no different from any other bounty hunter; it was that kind of a business. Fett was just better at it, was all. What had happened to the Bounty Hunters Guild was proof of that.
Things might be different, Dengar knew, when Boba Fett got his strength back. Fett might not want to repay Dengar with a partnership, for all that he’d done to keep him alive and safe. Dengar’s reward might be a blaster charge right into his chest, leaving a scorched hole big enough to put a humanoid’s fist through. Fett’s obsession with secrecy was notorious in all the scummy dives and watering holes across the galaxy; his past was largely unknown, and was likely to stay that way, given how those who poked into his affairs had a way of turning up dead. That was the real reason Dengar had sent Manaroo away. It was one thing for him to risk Fett’s lethal treachery; he didn’t want the female he loved to wind up facing a blaster muzzle.