"Oh, I've been waiting, all right." Grimly brooding anger tinged Bossk's words. "I've been waiting for this moment for a long time."
"Don't make a big deal about this," said Fett. "I just came here to do business with you. That's all."
"Yeah, and that's the moment I'm talking about. The moment when I've got something that you want."
Bossk leaned back in the booth's thinly padded seat and regarded—with growing satisfaction—the other bounty hunter sitting across from him. The feeling was the kind of satisfaction that came just before even stronger, more pleasurable feelings: the savoring of tri-umph and the satiation of one's appetite. He could al-most taste them, like the sweet saltiness of blood leaking through his fangs. Turnabout, thought Bossk, isn't just fair play. It was the peak of one's existence, at least for a creature like him. Trandoshans were famous throughout the galaxy for their ability to carry a grudge.
"Not only that you want," continued Bossk. "But that you need."
"Careful." Boba Fett's voice remained flat and un-emotional, as though all of Bossk's taunting had had zero effect on him. "You might be overestimating the value of the goods."
"I don't think so." Bossk set his own massive claws down on the table. "You wouldn't have come all this way—and back to Tatooine, which is hardly full of pleasant memories for you, is it?—if there hadn't been a pretty good reason for you to do so. You especially wouldn't have risked coming here with the odds stacked against you the way they are—what with every bounty hunter left over from the old Guild, and a bunch of new ones, all gunning for you."
"For somebody who's as far out of the loop as you are these days, Bossk, you seem to know a lot about what's been going down."
That remark got under Bossk's scales. "Look," he said, voice harshening, "I may not be working as a bounty hunter these days—" It galled him to have to make even that much of an admission of his prior defeats. "But that's all because you stole my ship from me. If I still had the Hound's Tooth, believe me, I'd be on top of this game."
"I didn't steal the Hound from you," said Boba Fett mildly. "You abandoned it, and I took it over. A piece of junk like that really isn't worth stealing."
"Junk!" His claws dug into the tabletop as he started to push himself up from the booth's seat. "That's the best ship in the galaxy—"
At the edges of his slit-pupiled vision, Bossk was aware of the others in the cantina looking once again in his and Boba Fett's direction, some of them glancing surrepti-tiously from the corners of their eyes, others more boldly. Bossk's raised voice had alerted them all to the possibility of imminent violence, which was always one of the chief sources of amusement for this crowd. He had always known that they didn't come here just for the clattering and whining music from the jizz-wailer band, still setting up and sound-checking their gear over in the corner.
"Junk," muttered Bossk sulkily. With an effort of will, he forced his temper below the boiling-over point as he sat back down. Boba Fett was playing the usual round of mind games with him, just as the other bounty hunter had done so many times before. It was all part of Fett's usual negotiating strategy, a way of getting a psychologi-cal advantage over an adversary. Whoever angers you, owns you —that was one of Boba Fett's operational mot-toes. Bossk had heard it before, and had fallen for it often enough, that he knew it was true.
"It's served my purposes," said Fett. "Well enough."
Bossk raised one of his scaly eyebrows. "It's not here with you, is it?" His voice lifted with hope. "I mean, here in the spaceport."
"Of course not. I had to get here in something of a hurry. I didn't have time to creep along in that pile of..." Fett paused for a moment. "That valuable relic."
"Don't start." Bossk let his shoulders slump. "I just thought. . . that maybe I'd gotten it wrong from my information sources. That you'd been detected as being aboard N'dru Suhlak's Headhunter." Bossk tried turning his opponent's verbal tactic around. "You know, that's kind of a new low, even for you, Fett. Using a hunt sabo-teur to ferry you around. I never knew anybody in the old Bounty Hunters Guild who would've touched one with a gaffi stick, except to beat him to death with it."
Boba Fett didn't rise to the bait. "Circumstances, rather than desires, dictate my actions. That's why I'm still a bounty hunter, and you're not."
"Don't worry about that," replied Bossk testily. "I'm going to be in the game again—and real soon. Aren't I?" To be on the safe side, he tilted his head back and scanned the crowd in the cantina, trying to spot any crea-ture with whom Fett might be working. The chances of that were slim—most of the other top-rank bounty hunters would have been out searching for Boba Fett in-stead, scheming on turning him into the kind of hard merchandise for which Kuat of Kuat had posted such an impressive price. And Fett himself, as Bossk knew from his own past experience, rarely took on partners; Bossk was still amazed at having heard of him being in league with a relative second-rater like Dengar. "That's why you're here. You're going to make that all possible for me, huh? Even if you didn't bring the Hound back with you, so you could return it to me."
"You can have your ship back—when I'm done with it." Boba Fett shrugged. "And if there's anything left of it then."
Bossk ignored the comment, as being just another of Fett's infuriating verbal gambits. "Okay. So you came here to take care of some other business with me, right? Let's see if we can make this mutually rewarding. Be-cause it's not going to happen unless it is." Boss leaned across the table, letting his eyes narrow to slits. "How much you going to pay?"
"You're mistaken." The other bounty hunter gazed right back at him. "I wasn't planning to 'pay' anything."
"Plan again, pal." Bossk grated out the words. "I've got what you want—what I found inside that cargo droid aboard your ship—and I've got a real good idea of what it's worth. Because there are other creatures besides you looking for it, and they're offering a nice high fee on delivery."
"So why didn't you sell it to them? From the looks of it, you could use the credits."
"Because . . ." His fangs ground together, as though they had seized upon Boba Fett's throat. "I figured I could get even more out of you. And even if I couldn't get more—even if I couldn't get the same—I still wanted to get it out of your pockets. I wanted you to pay, Fett. Be-cause I know that's worse for you than if I killed you."
"You're right. I don't find that prospect at all pleas-ant." Boba Fett reached under the table. His hand came back up with a blaster pistol in it, which he pointed be-tween Bossk's eyes. "So why don't you just hand the goods over to me, and that way I won't have to kill you."
"Are you crazy?" The sight of the weapon, hanging motionless right in his face, had frozen him as well. Glancing out of the corner of his sight, Bossk saw that all the mingled hubbub of conversations in the cantina had suddenly died, with every creature there turning and looking in the direction of the rear booth in which he and Boba Fett sat. "I thought you wanted to do business."
"That's what this is." Boba Fett raised the weapon's muzzle a fraction of an inch higher. "Consider it my final offer."
The show was too good to ignore; the cantina's other patrons had started buzzing and whispering, excitedly pointing out details of the confrontation to one another.
"You are crazy." The blood in Bossk's veins, never warmer than the surrounding atmosphere, had suddenly chilled. "Look ... let's think about this."
"There's no need to," said Fett evenly. "It's a straight-forward proposition. Hand over the material that you found inside the cargo droid, when you were rummaging around in Slave I, and I won't kill you. What could be fairer than that? Mutually rewarding as welclass="underline" I'd have what I came here for, and you'd still be alive."