Diver Down: Assignment Darklanding Book 11 by Scott Moon & Craig Martelle

Author:Scott Moon & Craig Martelle [Moon, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-17T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Dickles Gets Serious

P. C. Dickles looked over his shoulder, feeling guiltier than he’d ever felt in his life. This was wrong, dangerous, and humiliating. But what else could he do? The mines were his life. There was no other way to save them.

He paused near the Mother Lode, hiding in the shadows to avoid men he knew from the mines—two supervisors and a group of line workers. When their drunken revelry had moved past him, he pulled up the hood of his jacket and hurried toward his objective. The neighborhood around the saloon wasn’t the best. There were worse and that was where he soon found himself—right in the middle of the poorest Unglok slum.

The people he sought were human, although the longer ShadEcon operated in Darklanding, the more natives they accepted into their ranks. Business was business, especially when it was smuggling, extortion, and scams.

Once, about a year ago, he’d been to the ShadEcon representative seeking a loan to bail out one of his workers. The old sheriff had been on the local mafia’s payroll, receiving a kickback from each customer who sold their lives to ShadEcon to pay “legal fees.”

Thankfully, the loan hadn’t gone through and it turned out his employee hadn’t needed it after all. Death had a way of erasing debt.

The building was low and narrow, almost an afterthought plugged in between two warehouses. He went inside and stood like a fool. “Hello? Am I in the right place? I was given this address by…”

A small man with two oversized bodyguards stepped through a curtain of plastic strips, the kind used in warehouses where goods were moved too frequently for a regular door. Something about the way the bodyguards pushed aside the plastic strips made Dickles think of a mortuary.

“Doesn’t matter who sent you,” the small man said. He snapped his fingers and pointed where he wanted his bodyguards to stand. One man had a shotgun, the other a baseball bat.

“I guess not. Are you…”

The small man waved his hand and shook his head. “No need to be so formal. Names? What do names matter?”

“Right. Gotcha. You probably don’t even have a name,” Dickles said, realizing immediately he had offended the man.

“What are you trying to say, that I don’t have a father? I’m a bastard, is that it?”

“No, I just was trying to agree I don’t need to know who you are.” Dickles fumbled the words. He wanted to be gone from this shady “office.” He wished he’d never come.

“Relax, Dickles. It was a joke. Jokes are good. They keep people from killing each other,” the small man said. “You want a submarine. I have a submarine. We should make a deal.”

“Okay, great. Can I see it now?”

“Hold on, now you don’t trust me? I thought you were a stand-up guy. What’s with all the suspicion? You must be a cop,” the small man said, intensely disappointed.

“I’m not a cop.”

“Good. Let’s talk business. What can you offer me for the one and only small-space

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