Authors Note: In this fan fiction I doubt I will include any major roles for any of the characters from the original series. This will be an original piece set in the Cowboy Bebop universe. There also won't be any yaoi, yuri, furries or whatever; I'm weird, but I'm not a weirdo. Anyway, I won't waste anymore time by pointing out that I don't own Cowboy Bebop(whoops, I just did) because that's kind of the point of a fan fiction website, so stating such is pretty redundant. Yeah, well, anyway here's the first chapter, the others will be longer and probably written better. Read & review it... or don't!
Chapter One of
The Bloody Red Blues
The empty pistol clip fell from the butt of my Colt 1911 pistol and clacked down, bouncing against wood floor. 9 bullets fired, 1 dead, 7 wounded. I had tried my hand at bounty hunting before, but the interplanetary travel and ship maintenance ran too expensive for me to keep up with. I gave up the chase a little over a year ago. I miss it sometimes, but I like to be able to keep my stomach full. Ironically I was now standing in front of eight of the most wanted bounty heads placed on the network only hours before. And I didn't even know it yet. The first bullet I sent screaming through the heart of the first man. He was a big, bald and fat bastard. Dressed in blue jeans and brown leather. He looked like he was a biker. Now he just looks dead. Dead men tell no tales, they don't collect no bounty either, as they say. He was out, but the others stayed fair game. I gut shot the first three and knee-capped the rest of 'em in blind panic shots as I dove for cover. 43,000,000 woolongs each I would come to find out. All seven of the live ones. A one-in-a-trillion chance scored me three-hundred mil.
All of this for accidentally walking in the wrong door at a seedy little strip club in the asshole of Mars City. Bored, I went to watch saggy, stretch marked strippers dance around their dirty poles for a while. Smoked some cigarettes and drank some beer. Enjoyed my night off from my dead end, but steady job loading boxes into big rigs.
I drank a few more beers and had to take a leak. I had put it off so long while I quickly put down as many drinks I could. I was heavily buzzed. On my way to the bathroom I took a wrong turn and walked through a door clearly marked Employees Only but in my hurry I didn't take the time to read it; I really had to pee.
Instead of the bathroom I tripped into the a small, wood paneled room. It looked like a small, private old-western saloon. In the middle of this room sat eight men. Each of them around a green felt poker table. Among them was the fat, bald biker man. They stared at me and I stared back at them. Each of us as confused and surprised as the next. I picked up a sickeningly bad vibe in the air. Their eyes all simultaneously shifted to my waist. I looked down to see if my fly was undone, but what I saw turned out to be much worse. My black zip-up jacket was unzipped and tucked under the handle of the pistol I keep hooked under the belt on my pants. They looked back up with me, still wearing blank expressions. Slowly I back away to the door, absentmindedly reaching down to untangle my jacket. Clearly, they took this the wrong way and reached for the weapons left on the table in plain sight that I didn't notice until the last second. The rest is a bright, spinning and loud blur. My instinct reaction was to pull my gun and start unloading in their general direction while launching into a full dive over the bar like I was some sort of action movie stunt man.
Using the thick wooden counter I called the police to come rescue me but by the time they got there the poker players had already bled themselves unconscious lying on the floor. The pigs showed up fifteen minutes later and found me sitting at the deserted bar in the strip club part of the building drinking a fifth of whiskey. Everybody vacated after hearing the gun blasts.
The ISSP officers took me aside for questioning and carted the unconscious bodies off to an ambulance outside, leaving a huge puddle of blood in their wake. I was sitting in the back of one of the squad cars, mulling over in head the story I gave them. It was weak and didn't make as much sense as I had hoped. Walking into a room and randomly breaking out into a firefight isn't the best story to tell the cops, regardless of truth, misunderstanding and innocence. A smiling officer made his way to where I was sitting. I expected him to tell me I was getting hauled off to Pluto for multiple homicide, but much to my surprise he came over to inform me I just rounded up all eight leaders of the infamous Stukov Gang.
Each of the Stukov bosses had racked up nice little record of rape, robbery, murder, trafficking, prostitution and extortion- to name a few. Those sons of bitches have been running amok across the solar system for quite sometime now, involving themselves with crime syndicates, crooked cops(not these cops, thankfully) and any other type of scum you can imagine, supplying them anything they needed from pounds and pounds of drugs to a plethora of weapons that'd make a small army jealous to underage hookers.
The police put my name through computer and transferred the 300 mil into my account. I stumbled into a gunfight, survived and made 300 million woolongs in the process. The tale of my "heroics" is making its way all over the news right now and they're going to do a small piece on it on the Big Shots show tonight. Hell, my e-mail's already being stormed with interview requests from a bunch of magazines and websites I've never even heard of. The way the story is being passed around, they're making it sound like I'm some sort of Lone Ranger who tracked them down and walked into their bar with my six shooters at my side and holstered, ready for a showdown with the big bad criminals, putting an end to their tyranny. All of that's only going to be worse on me.
"Worse on you?" says the skinny, older man sitting next to me at the bar. He's leaning over the counter, his head cocked to the side so he can hear me better in the crowded bar.
"Yep," I say. "I'm a dead man."
"You just scored a jackpot because of dumb luck and you're still depressed?"
I tilt a frosted, glass mug back and down the rest of the cheap piss-water this place passes off as beer. "I've got a good reason."
"And what reason is that?"
I nod him up towards a muted television in the corner that nobody was paying attention to. It is the evening news. Plastered on the side of the screen is my face, my name running across in a marquee under it: Ezra Lambrent. Above all that, a boldface headline reads: GANG BUSTER.
"So?" he asks. His eyes light up now that he knows I am telling the truth.
"Well, those eight guys aren't the entire gang, now are they?" I say. "With my name and face up everywhere I'm as good as dead. They know where I was last seen, my name, what I look like. Not to mention all the syndicates I fucked over. I dealt a heavy blow to their business partners. That's a large dent I put in profits and their whole works."
The man just stares off into space trying to contemplate what I had just said or he was trying to think of something comforting and/or clever to respond with.
"Well, like you said, 'Dead men tell no tales, they don't collect no bounty either.'"
"Yeah, but I don't think that applies on their end of the spectrum."
"Wow," is all he can think to say.
"My account is full of cash but I'm a target. I don't get a chance to enjoy my wealth."
The man reaches into the pocket of his dirty, tan pants and from them pulls out a pack of smokes. He puts a cigarette in his mouth and lights it up just before putting the pack away again not even offering me one. "How do you think they'll do it?"
"Off me?"
"Yeah."
"Right now they're probably angry, wounded, confused, disrespected- did I say angry? Enraged. They might wait until they cool off so they can calculate the proper plan of attack, hire somebody good, somebody who won't mess up..."
"Or?"
I withdraw my own pack of cigarettes and fire one up. "Or they might attack sloppily in a fit of rage, gunning me down in public, killing and hurting whoever so happens to be nearby or in the way. Total disregard for innocent bystanders. As stupid as it sounds, it is just as likely as the other scenario, I suppose. I effectively cut off their head... now the body's just flailing around wildly."
"In that case-" he says. "I'm getting the hell away from you." He hops down from his barstool and makes his way to the door.
"Pleasure talking to ya." I call after him.
Here I am, 26 and at the top of the criminal underworld's most wanted list. A death sentence. A man with more money than he can spend in the short remainder of his life. I order another drink and sit back and watch the news.