Chapter Thirteen
Jedi Sentinel: Cult of Fear
“I think I killed someone!” Tooka gasped as she stumbled through the door to Gatts’ office and caught herself on the reception counter.
The sheriff was inside, feet up on her desk, just getting to know a glass of Merezane Gold. “You think you killed someone?” she asked in lieu of greeting. “Seems like the kinda thing a person would be sure about.”
Tooka filled her aching lungs before clarifying. “I mean, I did kill someone, but they were gonna kill me! Or abduct me. It was unclear. You gotta come to the treehouse; I won’t go back by myself.”
“And you definitely need to go back,” Gatts questioned her, “to your treehouse?”
“I live there, Gatts,” Tooka retorted. “Are you the sheriff or not?”
“Yeah, I’m the sheriff,” the older woman sighed, still sipping her beverage. “Which is why I gotta ask… have you been drinking tonight?”
“What?! No!” Tooka denied the charges, then stopped and sniffed her patchwork vest. Also her breath. “Maybe a little, but this was mostly splash damage. I quit my job tonight, got in an altercation with Jerash. You know how he can be…”
Jerash was being a real pill. He’d made Tooka the warm-up act for a ventriloquist, given her make-up table to a mime — who arguably needed it more than she did, but whatever — and he’d had nothing but mean-spirited criticism for her valachord number, all since that night when Skeeves nearly blew up his club. Tooka suspected this was retribution, either because of her relationship with Skeeves or because he knew she’d been involved. It was enough to make a girl regret disarming some bombs.
So, yeah, she’d been spying on him.
Listen, the only defense against manipulators like Jerash was information and Tooka needed more of it. Was it her fault that Jerash was very loud on a call? For someone with a tiny mouth, he really could project. And was it her fault that the floor of his office was so easy to hear through… when one held a glass to one’s ear… or an improvised listening device made from a droid’s audio scanner? She could hardly be blamed if she overheard a conversation or two.
“So glad to see you’re still alive,” Jerash’s voice dripped with sarcasm, seasoned with a little wry humor for deniability. “I hear things have finally gone off the deep end, over there, but being busy is no excuse for late payments.” Then, in a lower register, “Where’s my money?”
It sounded like a woman’s voice on the other end. She laughed demurely. “Are you shaking me down? How quaint. Your payment isn’t late, Mister Alben. It isn’t coming. I’ve moved on to bigger and better things. Your services are no longer required.” Tooka had never heard a woman speak so dismissively to Jerash. She kinda liked it.
The Bith liked it less so. “And what am I supposed to do? Keep a common street hustler on my marquee to avoid blowback from a testy Jedi?! You know how he can be, and you put me in this ridiculous situation. I deserve compensation!”
Tooka didn’t hear the rest; there was too much rage-blood pounding in her ears. There’d always been something fishy about this gig, like maybe Jerash was trying to get on Xen’s good side ahead of that awful plot against Skeeves, but this was worse. That woman must’ve been Serenity Corp and they were bribing Jerash to employ her! And for what? Some kind of ludicrous blackmail against Xen? She’d never wanted to be a pawn in this game, a damsel for Xen to rescue. She’d always done things on her own, taken care of herself, and the moment she let her guard down —
Blast it! Jerash was off the call and headed downstairs. Tooka hastily concealed her listening device and pretended to be tuning her valachord. “Oh, you are here,” he hailed her from the doorway. “Look, I’m moving you up the schedule. You’ll be opening for Matildo first thing.”
“That hack?!”
He nodded. “And I’ll need you to keep on closing out the night, too.”
“First and last? I’ll be here all night for two sets!”
“Yep, and I’m splitting your tips among the other performers. There have been complaints that you’re not pulling your weight.”
“There have not!”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Take it or leave it, kid. How bad do you want this job?”
She called his bluff. “Fine, I’ll do it. As long as I get to be here every day.”
“Yeah?” his itty bitty jaw dropped. “I mean, great. That’s great!”
“I’m happy you’re happy!”
“As am I!” He turned to leave, then lobbed a final volley over his shoulder. “Oh, and Harlow could use some help with his janitorial duties. I’m sure you won’t mind tending the refresher between sets.”
“You two-faced slaghole moof-milker!” It all rushed out of her at once, quite before she realized what she was saying. “You never wanted me here in the first place! Just fire me, if you wanna fire me!”
He spun around like a target in a shooting gallery. “I thought you’d never ask! You’re fired. If I see you on my property again, I’ll have you incarcerated right next to your uncle Skeeves.”
Tooka grabbed her stuff and stomped out past him, into the main room. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in this gaudy temple to the gods of bad taste!” She snatched a bottle off the bar; one swallow went down her throat, but the rest she hurled into the liquor shelf. Booze and broken glass splashed over everything, including Tooka.
“I just had that fixed!” Jerash wailed from the hallway.
“Take it out of my last week’s wages. I wouldn’t come back here to collect it, anyway.”
“So, you killed Jerash?” Gatts asked coldy.
“No! I don’t know who I killed,” Tooka insisted. “It was just some sleemo who was waiting in my house when I got back. You wanted to know why I smelled of booze.”
“Right, right,” the sheriff swirled what remained in her glass. “Booze. And how did you dispatch this rogue?”
“Does it matter?!” Tooka couldn’t believe this. She knew Gatts had been on a bender since that thing with the escaped cultist, but she’d never refused to do her job before. “As a citizen of this, I dunno, planet? Whatever your jurisdiction is, as a citizen of it, I insist you investigate this crime!”
“Keep your adorable little outfit on, Miss Watanaya.” Gatts downed her drink and put her boots on the floor. “Let’s go to your treehouse and take a look at this corpse you’ve created. Not like I had any other plans for this evening.” She tossed a datapad on the counter before putting on her gunbelt and hat. “You can record the details in there on the way, so your auntie Gatts can have a nice, quiet walk, yeah?”
Unbelievable.
The sun had still been up when Tooka returned home, as was her ire. Perhaps that’s why she’d ignored Tiptoe’s attempts to warn her of the danger. Her toy elephant dropped into her path like a loose acorn and bounced about, piping excitedly through her trunk. “Whatever you’re on about,” a sour-faced Tooka told her pet, “my day was worse.”
She’d stepped over the panicky pachyderm and climbed the ladder into her treehouse. This time, she remembered to scan the room before finishing her climb and making herself at home. Unfortunately, the intruder was waiting in the dark corner behind the door. He kicked it closed the moment she was inside.
“Don’t bother looking for this,” a hooded figure in black told her, revealing the blaster she kept in the kitchen cupboard. “Or this,” the vibroblade from her bedroom. He tossed them both out the window. “They wouldn’t have done you any good, anyway. Believe me.”
Tooka said the only thing that needed to be said. “Get out of my kriffing house.”
He ignored her. “Tell me, what is it about this Jedi that inspires such unshakeable loyalty? After the day I’ve had… I could use the advice.”
She inched away from him, toward the sitting area, not taking the bait.
“Come on!” he implored her. His eyes were like hot coals. “What is it? Jedi mind tricks? I know a better one. The selfless hero bit? I do nothing but help people! What is this hold he has on you townies?”
Tooka needed to buy a little time. “It’s not hard, psycho. He treats people as equals. He’s a quiet, decent person. And, yeah, he helps people who need help, even when there’s nothing in it for him, even when they don’t deserve it.”
“Have I done any different?” the stranger asked, arms wide. “I help people overcome their fear. I helped that traitor Brigg rise from dead end rock-breaker to richest man on the planet and look what good that did me.”
Tooka regretted smashing that bottle of booze; she needed a drink. “You realize I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, right?”
“Do you know what it’s like to have your life’s work corrupted, misused by the people you trusted, and then ripped right from your hands? Those ingrates only have the courage to rise up against us, because I freed them from fear!”
He advanced on her, hands innocently behind his back. She retreated into a wicker chair. “The only thing Xen’s ever done wrong is getting mixed up with you psychos!” The street hustler jumped up and grabbed a ring that hung from the ceiling. Her weight pulled it down just a bit, releasing a bolt on a mechanism that held a tripwire in place.
Free of its restraints, the wire sprang out of her baseboards and snapped across the floor. Furniture flew like trash in a gale as Tooka lifted her legs up and over the fray. Her unwanted guest, however, took it all in the face. Also the ankles. He hit the floor with bone-cracking force.
Tooka twisted the ring and released another catch, this one on a box concealed in her rafters. Her hold-out blaster dropped into her waiting hand as her feet hit the floor. She leveled the weapon at her enemy and repeated herself. “Get out of my kriffing house!”
“Oof!” the stranger laughed, wiping blood from his nose as he hobbled to his feet. “That’s the moxy I could’ve used yesterday! Shoulda started with you. What’s it gonna take to turn you against your troublesome uncle Xen, huh? He left you here to pay the price for his misadventures. What more can you possibly own him? Hey, how’d you like to be free from fear?”
“I’d rather be free of you.” She fired a bolt into his leg. The stranger staggered, but stayed standing. She shot him in the shoulder, then the chest. Nothing.
He kicked an overturned chair at her and rushed in behind it, but Tooka was already retreating through the kitchen and up the ladder into her bedroom. “Stop being such a child!” he roared, mounting the lowest rung. Tooka paused at the top, just a moment, until his full weight was on the ladder, then she pulled a concealed lever and all the rungs below her slid right through the floor! The base of the treehouse opened like a gallows, giving the intruder nothing to catch his fall.
Those burning eyes went wide as he crashed through the carefully camouflaged tiger pit in the yard below.
Onto spikes.
“Oh, no, I totally believe you.” Gatts’ sarcasm was not appreciated. “And it’s not even sarcasm. Look at all the blood down there. Either somebody died or you’re baiting this trap all wrong.”
The tiger pit was empty. They’d returned to find everything as Tooka described it in her report, except for the hooded figure. Only his blood remained, and Gatts didn’t seem all that surprised. She was looking up through the trap door into Tooka’s bedroom. “You built booby traps into your own house?”
“Somebody else was gonna do it for me?” Tooka replied, equal parts annoyed and terrified. “Where’s the body, Gatts?! This guy’s after me and I dropped him onto spikes! Where the kriffing kriff is he?!”
“I know even less than you do, kid,” she intoned, walking around the base of the tree, inspecting the ground and the perimeter. “Maybe a pack of terror birds carried the body off. Or maybe he had an accomplice who didn’t want to be implicated when we identified the body. Or maybe he sprouted wings and flew back to his sea cave! Wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve seen, not even on this island.”
Tooka wanted to believe her attacker was resting comfortably in the gizzards of several terror birds, but the accomplice thing seemed more likely and made her feel far, far worse. She wanted the sheriff to find some tracks or scare someone from the bushes or at least tell her it was gonna be alright, but instead… “Whelp, thanks for filing the report. Let me know if anything else happens.”
“What?!” Tooka’s voice escaped her body far higher and louder than expected. “That’s it? You’re just gonna give it a once over and call it a day? ‘Let me know if anything else happens.’ By then, something else will have happened!”
Gatts stepped into her personal space, one hand on her blaster. “I’m not your personal bodyguard, little girl. I’m the sheriff and there’s nothing else for me to do here. If you’re not comfortable sleeping in your treehouse tonight, go stay with a friend. If there’s more to this, it’ll end up on my radar and I’ll take care of it. If not, then you’re worrying over nothing.”
“NOTHING?! I killed someone, Gatts!”
“You sure did.” She patted Tooka on the shoulder. “Nice one.”
“You have to DO something!”
This time, the older woman shoved her, just a little, and Tooka fell backwards into the dirt. Tiptoes came to her defense, butting her tiny head into the hem of the sheriff’s duster. “What is it with you townies, huh?” Gatts glared down at her from beneath her wide-brimmed hat, daggers in her eyes. “You’re always on about something, usually nothing, always trouble of your own making, and I’m supposed to swoop in and save you, or pick up the pieces, or cover for you, which is the furthest thing from my job description! Well, I’m done with it.
“Next time you come to me for help, Miss Watanaya, there’d best be a gunfight in progress. I’m not putting my boots on for anything less.”
The sheriff closed her duster with a flourish that made the street performer envious and stormed off, back toward town. Tooka brushed the dirt from her pants and looked down at Tiptoes, trying to feel something other than fear and resentment. It was the teeny twitching of her pet’s floppy ears that finally did the trick.
Tooka smiled weakly and picked up her toy elephant. “We’ll go stay with Aunt Stobi for a couple of days. How’d you like that? I’ll tell her how brave you were and maybe she’ll make you some treats. And me some treats.”
They climbed up the tree and into her house, a study in disarray. It looked like someone had turned the place upside-down and shaken it. That person had been Tooka, which only made her feel worse. She closed and latched the trap door over the tiger pit before fishing a few clothes out of her bedroom.
When she returned to the kitchen, bagging anything that might spoil in the jungle heat, she noticed something out of place. Even more out of place than all her overturned furniture. Even more out of place than the missing corpse.
A folded piece of sketch paper was sitting on her kitchen counter, waiting politely for her attention. Tooka scanned the room and wished her blaster was still in the cupboard, but she and Tiptoes were alone. She opened the card gingerly, like she was handling a venomous viperbird.
“Thank you,” it read, written in a delicate cursive and still-wet blood.
Written by Daniel Bayn
Cover image by Midjourney
