It would be just my luck if a member of the IPF saw the flash of my blaster from the street. Chances are the garbage containers piled six meters high would have blocked the burst of light, but I was never one to take any chances. The rodian lay dead at my feet, half sprawled across a pile of discarded drink bulbs. He had struck his head on something hard when he fell, and blood leaked from a deep gash on his green forehead. More obvious, though, was the smoking hole in the chest of his stained green tunic.
I leaned down, tucked my blaster under my jacket, and quickly danced my fingers through the rodian's pockets. "Sorry, Aefeeh, but I told you I'd find your boss one way or another," I told the sightless multifaceted eyes. "It's too bad you opted for door number two."
My hands closed over several items, which I relocated to my own deep pockets. Moving as quickly as I could, I pulled poor Aefeeh deeper into the gathered trash and pulled some loose garbage and containers over him. Looking up and down the alleyway, I spun and when back into the dark bar I had met the rodian thug in only a few short moments earlier. There was still something to take care of.
It wasn't so much a bar, as it was urine-soaked hellhole. Dank, dark and seedy, it was a perfect for conducting illicit business. Which is why it was packed. An auto-wailer pumped out all the hits from fifteen years ago and a gray-skinned iotran bartender slung the watered-down piss that passed for beverages in this jynn-joint.
For a moment I was concerned that Aefeeh had some friends in this place. Seeing me walk back in through the rear door without the greasy green thug might bring a few shock-staves down on the back of my skull. I quickly realized my concerns were unnecessary – guys like Aefeeh never had friends, just partners, and partners that were more concerned about their own asses then the guys they worked with.
Almost as soon as the door swung shut behind me, I saw the one who must have been the rodian's partner. A little chadra-fan zipped out of a booth and ran for the main entrance, risking a peek over his vested shoulder at me as he went. I spat a curse and went after him. Despite the crowd in the bar I made it out into the street quickly, but the chadra-fan was nowhere to be seen. The people on the street were mostly tall, bulky iotrans so the mousy little bugger disappeared easily. I was about to give up when a shout and the roar of a repulsorlift caught my attention.
From a vehicle lot across the cracked traffic-way came a speeder, the chadra-fan at the controls and probably sitting on a box or something. The crowd tried to get out of the way, but at least half a dozen pedestrians were knocked asunder by the speeding vehicle. The speeder pulled into the traffic-way, careened off the side of a parked aircar, straightened out and began pulling away. Before I really realized what I was doing, my blaster was in my hand again and I was firing through the panicked pedestrians at the speeder. My second shot struck the left thruster pod; the third hit the speeder's exposed rear repulsor coils. The chadra-fan lost control of the vehicle as the back of the speeder struck the traffic-way, throwing a shower of sparks over three meters into the air. With the left thruster spewing greasy smoke, the speeder spun on that side, slid across the traffic-way, bounced off a vending cart and came to a crashing halt against a duracrete wall.
"Out of my way!" I shouted, pushing through the inevitable onlookers. I still had my blaster brandished, and quickly tucked it back into the holster under my long jacket. The chadra-fan was trying to pull himself from the wreck, but he was badly injured and not particularly spry. An older iotran woman began helping the small chadra-fan out of the speeder, but I stepped between them.
"I'll take it from here," I said in the local dialect. The woman huffed at me but backed off, and I hauled the little guy from the speeder, dropping him on the sidewalk unceremoniously. I crouched next to the bat-faced thug. "Alright, where's your boss?" I asked him in basic.
"Me no-ey know," came the squeaky reply.
I shook the little guy, and he winced against the pain he was experiencing. "That's what Aefeeh told me, and now he's feeding the scow-rats, so, where's Jyergo?"
I heard the telltale whine an instant before the bolt struck the chadra-fan in the forehead and the thug dropped like a bag of rocks. I looked up to the rooftops behind me and caught a glint of movement before a rain of blaster shots came down. They peppered the ground and the thug, the speeder, and a few closely gathered civilians. I dove behind the damaged vending cart mere seconds before a ball of flame engulfed the speeder, taking my best lead to Jyergo Huthis's whereabouts with it. The blaster shots stopped, and before I lost conciousness I saw the shape of a figure on a nearby rooftop and the shadow of two head-tails.