"Well, now I got two gals here and I got two arms," Hancock said happily, holding out his elbows. "Whadda ya say? Wanna make me the envy of all Goodneighbor?"
"Hah, as if you weren't already," Daisy jibed, but she took his arm all the same. Raina followed her lead, and took the other. Together the three of them strolled toward the State House.
"I gotta say," he turned his face to Raina, "the weed you've been sending by way of Daisy is fine, fine stuff, but I was expecting you were gonna deliver it in person. I wanted ta express my appreciation for your product, ya dig?"
"Uh-huh," Daisy said, "Just don't forget what Nick said about being a perfect gentleman."
"Hey, I never said I meant it in any impure way and I don't wanna make her uncomfortable, like. Everything been okay with you?" he asked Raina.
"There have been…difficulties," she admitted. "The Institute is looking for me, and the only good thing is, they don't know my name or what I look like, just where I live, roughly." They'd been walking while talking, and now they entered the State House, their footsteps echoing in the great spiral stairwell.
"Hey, that ain't good. How'd that happen?" Hancock asked.
"Oh, I know all about it," Daisy said. "Murray brought me a catalog along with the goods, last time. I'm thinking about becoming a vendor. In a small way, just to see if there are any buyers. You remember Murray, right?"
"Can't say that I do—oh, wait, was he that sad sack Lucid who lived over at the Rexford for a while?" Hancock remembered as they climbed the stairs. "The guy who used to work for Vault-Tec."
"Yeah. I used to have a drink with him now and then, give him a chance to talk about the old days with somebody who remembers more than just what was on the radio. He was pretty damn depressed for the longest time, but then Raina hired him to handle the business end of her company. Did him a world of good to have work again, real work. He's a whole different guy." Daisy smiled in a very meaningful way. "He doesn't stay in the Rexford anymore when he visits town either."
"No wonder he's so happy to make deliveries here!" Raina exclaimed.
"Oh, he delivers, all right," Daisy chortled.
"Good for you, Daisy! And for him too, but I'm still in the dark here," Hancock complained as they reached his office. "Hey Fahrenheit," he greeted his bodyguard/deputy mayor, who was regarding a chessboard like a cat regarding a baby molerat.
She snapped her head up, saw him with two women and asked, "Business or pleasure?"
It was a fair question, as he had sometimes brought more than one bed partner at a time, though not usually in the middle of the afternoon. "Business," he replied, and asked Raina. "Any reason Fahr can't stay while we talk?"
"No. If we reach an agreement, everybody in Goodneighbor will know about it, and if we don't, it won't matter," Raina said. She sat on the red sofa, Daisy took the yellowish one, and he pulled up a chair. "Anyhow, what Daisy was talking about is this." She took a booklet from her satchel and handed it to him.
It was about twenty pages long, and on the cover was a big yellow flower. "Queen of the Commonwealth Seed and Plant Company—'Queen of the Commonwealth'? You got an actual company? Color me impressed." He flipped through it, noting the illustrations and the typeface. "I see Piper printed this up for you.
"I know your people kept marihuana alive in your vault, and that's how it survived, but you had all this as well? Damn. I like the company motto, too. 'The common wealth of the Commonwealth.' Like, 'of the people, for the people.' So you're selling seeds and plants, stuff you can eat, stuff that can be made into medicine and chems. Stuff nobody else's got. Of course the Institute's gonna be interested in that. Now they want to know who you are and what else you have up your sleeve, am I right?"
"Yes. A few weeks ago, two Institute agents came looking for the person with access to all those seeds. Actually, there were three of them, but one, the one who led them there, was under duress. We were having a community get-together, and they showed up in the middle of it. Nick recognized one of them and a Railroad agent told him the other was actually a Courser. The first one stabbed their guide before we could stop him. Now the first one's dead, the Courser is brain damaged to the point where he can do simple tasks under close supervision, and the guide is lying low while she recovers."
"So none of them got word back to the Institute before you and your friends took them down," Hancock nodded in approval.
"That's right, but Nick thinks it's safest if I don't stay in any one place for too long, especially near home. Ever since, we've been on the road."
Daisy nodded, "Listen to Nick. He knows what he's doing."
"Yeah," Hancock "He's a guy I got a lot of respect for. If there comes a time you and he need a bolt hole, Goodneighbor's a good place to disappear. Remember that, ya dig?"
"Thank you. I may need to take you up on that offer someday." Now Raina brightened up. "And that brings me back around to my business proposition. I don't have many distributors for marijuana, just a few chosen caravaneers and Daisy here, people who I could trust not to tell where it came from. Raiders are enough trouble already.
"Since I can't be there to grow it or protect it at home right now, and there's no way of knowing how long it will be before I can go back for good, my thought was, why not grow it here? Unlike my settlement, Goodneighbor is better prepared to take on raiders. I would provide plants, seeds and know how. Daisy, you'd act as main distributor, and Mayor Hancock, you would provide a location for growing it and people to do the growing. I'm prepared to take a smaller cut of what could become a much bigger pie, so to speak."
"Umm—I like this idea. I like it a lot, but there ain't much open ground in Goodneighbor for growing anything," Hancock pointed out. It was a good idea, not a get-rich-quick idea but a get-rich-big idea. It was exactly right for Goodneighbor—growing a chem right in their own backyard, what could be more perfect? There were several people who would be interested in growing weed—heh, maybe a little too interested.
"Not a problem. Before it was made legal in the twenty-first century, many people grew it indoors. You have power and water here, so you'd need grow-lights, planters, a big building with room for a curing chamber as well as growing rooms. There's plenty of dirt in the streets right outside your gates. If someone can grow tatoes, they can grow cannabis—they like the same growing conditions. I'd help with setting up and teaching the growers," Raina was glowing with excitement and enthusiasm.
The enthusiasm was contagious, it seemed. Daisy said with a delighted smile, "I'm willing—and there are several warehouses with nothing much in them but trash."
"There are Triggermen using them at the moment—so yeah, there's nothing in them but trash. They'll have to be cleared out first. Then there'll have ta be somebody levelheaded in charge, somebody to watch over the day-to-day…", Hancock thought aloud. "Who would—ah! I know exactly the right person. Fahr, would you send somebody ta ask Bobbi No-Nose to swing by?"
His lieutenant nodded and left the office.
He turned back to the rest of the party. "Bobbi No-Nose and I go back a ways, but it's been a while since I cut her in on anything. She's tough, she's gotta good feel for people and with her running it, what has to get done will get done. While we're waiting on her, why don't you help yourselves to drinks."
"I brought something to add to the refreshments," Raina said, pulling a few wrapped bundles out of her satchel and laying them out on the coffee table. She started unwrapping them as Daisy watched.
"Oh, are these sourdough pretzels?" Daisy asked. "It's been ages—and they're not prewar stock! Did you make them?"
"Yes, I did. We came across a stockpile of salt, so I used some for this. I bet it's been a while since you had anything like this, either." She showed the Lucid woman a square of something fluffy looking and white. "It's candy, whipped up out of egg whites, honey and dried tarberries."
"Let me break off just a little bit," Daisy said, popping the treat in her mouth. "Heaven! Forget the weed, all you have to do is sell this and you'll die rich."
Raina laughed and it was like her smile, sweet, warm, joyous and a little goofy. "Then you don't want to try out these?" The third bundle was joints, and a lot of them, too. "I branched out into different strains since the last shipment."
"You brought the weed and the snacks for when the munchies hit!" Daisy chortled.
"Give me a year or two, and I'll bring popcorn," Raina promised.
Hancock slipped a Mentat into his mouth and let it dissolve on his tongue while they talked. Letting his eyes half close, he regarded Raina.
Yeah, she was attractive and he'd had more than a few impure thoughts about her, just the kind of casual thoughts a guy might have about screwing somebody he found attractive. Thoughts like that just came with having balls. Where she was different was that he wanted to find out more about her, to watch her face and make her smile that sweet smile of hers, to make her laugh like that. What intrigued him most was, she knew who she was and exactly what she was supposed to do with her life, and that was rare. She liked herself, and that was even rarer. She was something else…
Maybe, if he hung around her enough, some of that self-esteem and self-confidence would rub off on him. Hell, it had been a while since he'd skipped town for any length of time. Maybe it was time to blow the stink off, and what better way to do that than hitting the road with a couple of friends, one old and one new? Maybe he'd bring that up with Nick when they met at the Third Rail later…
Meanwhile, Nick Valentine walked down the avenue to the Memory Den, nodding to the Neighborhood Watch as he passed them. His hand went to the pocket where he'd stashed his souvenir from the party in Sanctuary which Kellogg and the Courser had so memorably crashed. Curie and Raina had autopsied the Institute's hatchet man before burying him under a ton of compost, as much to remove everything nonorganic as to see what had killed him. Raina was big on compost being all-natural, but flexible about what went into it.
From Kellogg's brain, they had removed a device which was cozying in between the hippocampi, the collective seat of spatial memory. From Raina and Curie's cryptic comments about those lobes, they were pretty seedy-looking, as though Kellogg should have been senile to the point of drooling. As he obviously hadn't been, they thought the device was some sort of artificial memory storage.
So he had asked for it so he could take it to Amari and see what she could make of it. Knowing what Kellogg knew about the Institute, and how much they knew about who they were looking for—that could prove invaluable. On entering the Den, he spent a few minutes flirting with Irma as usual before he went down to see Amari only to find her talking to Deacon.
"Hey, if it isn't the Sleuth of Steel! How are you, Nick, m'man?" Deacon greeted him.
"Just fine, Deacon. What brings you here?" Nick replied.
"That little party gift I took home to show the folks. You know the one, about yea big…" He held up his hand, showing his thumb and forefinger pinching air to indicated the chip from the Courser's head. "Because of the wires getting borked when the ladies took it out, we're having trouble reading what's on it. I thought Amari could help, so here I stand before you."
"You know Deacon?" Amari asked. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Then perhaps you know how he came into possession of that chip, because I certainly don't believe the story he's telling."
"I swear, Amari, an anvil dropped right out of the sky and hit him in the head. Lucky it was one of those glancing blows and not a direct hit, or his brains would have been strawberry jam," Deacon.
Amari scoffed. "As if you ever even saw strawberry jam. The closest you've probably ever come is the filling in a Fancy Lads Snack Cake."
"The boy is telling the truth," Nick said, hand on his heart and tongue firmly in cheek, "I know because I was there, and the second anvil struck the next guy full on. Turns out he had this in his head, and I want to know what's on it."
He handed over a sealed test tube in which the device floated, preserved in an alcohol solution. "I can wait my turn, though."
"Is that…part of a hippocampus?" Amari asked.
"Uh—I'm afraid so. Y'see, after the first one came out damaged, we didn't want this one ruined, so it was easier to take a chunk of brain with it," Nick explained.
"What is going on here? Who were the men these came out of? Why should I have anything to do with it?" the doctor protested.
Deacon sighed. "Shall we tell her? I only tell the truth when I can't be bothered to make up something more interesting."
"I think in this case, the truth is more interesting than anything you can come up with," Nick replied. "Doctor Amari, we have a young friend who is wanted by the Institute…"
A/N: TBC…. I know I haven't been as active in thanking my readers and reviewers as I should be. I appreciate both my long term readers and those who have just discovered 'Hiding,' and I hope to get caught up with that and more this coming weekend.
Thanks,
Scrib.