"What are we going to do?" asked Blossom.
"Stay calm," said the Bandit. "I'll handle this."
He waited until the two military vehicles that were approaching the bank pulled to within 50 yards, then made another quick adjustment to his arm and pointed it at them—but just as he was about to fire, the male customer launched himself at the Bandit's legs, knocking him to the floor. The Bandit brought his real hand down on the back of the man's neck, a killing blow that resulted in a loud crack! Then he got to his feet, stood in the doorway, pointed at each vehicle in turn, and calmly blew both of them away.
"That should discourage anyone from playing the hero before our transportation arrives," he announced.
"How will they know what happened or who to blame?" asked Blossom.
"We'll tell them," answered the Bandit. He pointed at the wall behind the cashiers and carved out the name SANTIAGO with a laser beam.
"That should do the trick," agreed Dante.
The old woman spoke up for the first time. "That will fool no one," said Gloria Mundi. "I know who you are."
"I'm Santiago," said the Bandit.
"You're the One-Armed Bandit," she replied, "and I'll tell everyone I know who are. Santiago's been dead for more than a hundred years."
"I'm sorry you feel so strongly about that, ma'am," said the Bandit regretfully. He turned to her and pointed his finger between her eyes.
"Wait!" shouted Dante,
"What is it?" asked the Bandit.
"Santiago doesn't go around killing old ladies!"
"Santiago doesn't leave witnesses who can identify him."
"She's a crazy old woman who thinks she saw God once," persisted Dante. "No one will listen to her!"
"She's a threat to our continued existence," said the Bandit. "She's got to go."
"I agree," said Matilda.
"Is that how you want it to begin?" demanded Dante. "With Santiago killing a half-crazed beggar woman?"
"How do you want it to begin?" she shot back as the empty airport transport pulled up, avoiding the smoking shells of the two Democracy vehicles. "With a description of each of us on file with every soldier and bounty hunter on the Inner Frontier? We need the Democracy to be searching for clues here while we're setting up shop in the Albion Cluster."
"This isn't the way we're supposed to start," said Dante bitterly.
"We're in the revolution business," replied Matilda. "This is a war. There are always civilian casualties."
"What war?" croaked Gloria Mundi. "You're a bunch of bank robbers, working for the One-Armed Bandit!"
"That's it," said Matilda. "We have no choice. She has to die."
"What if she promises not to tell the authorities what she saw?" asked Dante.
"Would you believe her if she did promise it?" asked Matilda, staring at Gloria Mundi.
"No," admitted Dante, his shoulders slumping. "No, I wouldn't."
"Well, then?"
"Damn it, Santiago doesn't kill helpless old ladies!" repeated Dante.
"I hope you don't think I want to do this," interjected the Bandit. "But it was you yourself who pointed out all the unpleasant choices Santiago would have to make and all the unsavory things he would have to do."
"I didn't mean this."
"We both know Santiago will have to do far worse things before he's done," said the Bandit.
Suddenly they heard a humming sound and turned to see the source of it. Virgil Soaring Hawk had just aimed a burst of solid light between Gloria Mundi's eyes and left a smoking hole in the middle of her forehead.
"Enough talk," said the Injun. "Let's get the hell out of here."
Not an auspicious debut, thought Dante as he stepped over the old woman's corpse and carried his briefcase out to the vehicle. Not a promising start at all.
20.
Candy for the billfold, candy for the nose,
Candy for the client, as the business grows.
Candy by the bushel, candy by the ton;
The Candy Man supplies it, come and share the fun!
If he had a name, no one knew it. If he had fingerprints, they had long since been burned off. If he had a retinagram on file, it was rendered meaningless when he replaced his natural eyes with a pair of artificial ones, which had the added advantage of being able to see far into the infra-red.
They say he began his career out on the Rim, and later moved to the Spiral Arm. No one knew how many addicts he had created, and no one knew how much money he had made, but estimates of both were astronomical.
He began with cocaine and heroin, both grown on his own farms on the Rim, then moved to more and more exotic designer drugs and hallucinogens. He finally stopped when he got to alphanella seeds, but only because there was nothing more addictive—and expensive—in the entire galaxy.
There were warrants for the Candy Man all across the Outer Frontier, up and down the Spiral Arm, and throughout the Democracy, so it made sense that he eventually turned up on the Inner Frontier, the one place where there was no price on his head.
That lasted about three Standard months. By then he'd taken over a rival drug lord's territory, and had killed three of the enemy and a pair of the Democracy's undercover agents. There was no place left to run to, so instead of running he surrounded himself with a quasi-military operation. Only the very best, the very wealthiest clients ever got to see the Candy Man face-to- face. He rarely did his own selling, and even more rarely did his own killing. (He did do his own accounting, and no one in his employ ever got to see his data files.)
He divided his time among half a dozen worlds, and even his most trusted underlings never knew when and where he'd show up next. He owned an impregnable mansion on each world, and three meals a day were prepared for him at each of them, just to confound any potential assassins, As an ambitious young man on the way up, he'd taken all kinds of chances; now that he was no longer poor and no longer in such a hurry, he saw no percentage in taking any chances at all.
The Bandit and his party had never heard of the Candy Man when they touched down on Beta Cordero II. They had spent a leisurely month getting there, approaching it by a wildly circuitous route to give the crews Matilda had hired time to build what appeared to be a large, luxurious private hunting lodge. There was no way the casual, or even the acute, observer could spot the three subspace antennae, or the generator that not only supplied light and power for the lodge but for its underground computer complex. There were three guest houses; two were what they seemed, the third was an arsenal, currently four-fifths empty but soon, they hoped, to be filled with whatever weaponry Santiago needed to accomplish his goals.
The Bandit walked quickly through the lodge, ignoring the huge living room with the four-way fireplace crafted out of shining alien stone, checked his sleeping quarters, and declared it acceptable. He then summoned Dante and Matilda to cozy paneled room he had claimed as his private office.