A Quick Death in Texas, Preview: Van's Plan

"Hi I'm here to flush a guy's head down the toilet, and kill everyone that tries to stop me. Anyone have objections?"

“How long have they been your neighbors?” asked Van.

“It’ll be 4 years, once we’re past this hot season,” Carillo said.

“Bein’ the reason why I’m havin’ trouble with all this,” Rooster spoke up stronger this time. “Been here an awful long time for any o’ this, y’ain’t think?”

“I was abducted when I was 16, it took 9 years for a Consortium-backed project to make my rig work properly. Plans take time, especially with people like this,” Van said.

“People like this?” Rooster asked.

“The ones who made me, like this,” he said.

His words hung in the room.

“Senor,” Carillo said. “Why are you here?”

“Dudley Ellering was implicated as being member of an interstellar antisocial collective calling themselves The Unseen Mutual, in an email chain discovered on the cellphone of a Quinton Timmins, an officer-level member of the Third Exchange’s Insomnia chapter. He was attempting to sell the biological clanheir of the Sendra Clan at auction, an action that’s thrown both the Exchange and Insomnia as a whole into chaos, given that one of the lynchpins of that station’s powerbase has been infiltrated by slavers.”

“The kingpin of this organization is a man named Brian Charles Grafton, a burned Terran Interior Ministry agent that headed a black operations outfit called Project Retriever, functionally a Murder Inc for high-status Loyalist Terrans in the government and even House Arissiyans- put the call out for a name, face and location in the Freelands, and someone like me would be by in months, maybe even weeks, to either put a black bag over your head, or twist it off entirely.”

“Ongoing analysis of what my peers in the Sendra have managed to pull from the chain indicates that Ellering is attempting to establish your town as a base of operations, both for the Mutual, and for his own personal use. He intends to rot what you have from the inside out. I’m here, because I’m going to kill every single person on that address list, starting with Ellering.”

Again, his words hung in the air. Save this time, the ice in his eyes broke, as he glanced sideways.

“Starting with him, after Timmins, anyway,” he said. “Already got Timmins, killed the fuck out of that guy.”