(eng) Mike Resnick - Santiago 02 by The Return of Santiago

Author:The Return of Santiago [Santiago, The Return of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20.

Candy for the billfold, candy for the nose,

Candy for the client, as the business grows.

Candy by the bushel, candy by the ton;

The Candy Man supplies it, come and share the fun!

If he had a name, no one knew it. If he had fingerprints, they had long since been burned off. If he had a retinagram on file, it was rendered meaningless when he replaced his natural eyes with a pair of artificial ones, which had the added advantage of being able to see far into the infra-red.

They say he began his career out on the Rim, and later moved to the Spiral Arm. No one knew how many addicts he had created, and no one knew how much money he had made, but estimates of both were astronomical.

He began with cocaine and heroin, both grown on his own farms on the Rim, then moved to more and more exotic designer drugs and hallucinogens. He finally stopped when he got to alphanella seeds, but only because there was nothing more addictive—and expensive—in the entire galaxy.

There were warrants for the Candy Man all across the Outer Frontier, up and down the Spiral Arm, and throughout the Democracy, so it made sense that he eventually turned up on the Inner Frontier, the one place where there was no price on his head.

That lasted about three Standard months. By then he'd taken over a rival drug lord's territory, and had killed three of the enemy and a pair of the Democracy's undercover agents. There was no place left to run to, so instead of running he surrounded himself with a quasi-military operation. Only the very best, the very wealthiest clients ever got to see the Candy Man face-to- face. He rarely did his own selling, and even more rarely did his own killing. (He did do his own accounting, and no one in his employ ever got to see his data files.)

He divided his time among half a dozen worlds, and even his most trusted underlings never knew when and where he'd show up next. He owned an impregnable mansion on each world, and three meals a day were prepared for him at each of them, just to confound any potential assassins, As an ambitious young man on the way up, he'd taken all kinds of chances; now that he was no longer poor and no longer in such a hurry, he saw no percentage in taking any chances at all.

The Bandit and his party had never heard of the Candy Man when they touched down on Beta Cordero II. They had spent a leisurely month getting there, approaching it by a wildly circuitous route to give the crews Matilda had hired time to build what appeared to be a large, luxurious private hunting lodge. There was no way the casual, or even the acute, observer could spot the three subspace antennae, or the generator that not only supplied light and power for the lodge but for its underground computer complex. There were three

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