It was a quiet evening at the Tide Water Bar and Grill. Although we had gotten a lot of work done today, there was always more. Always more things to fix and patch up. Always more bills to pay. Always more people who just wanted a favor. It seems like we never catch up.
Ah well, Uncle Carl wouldn't have given up so I'm damned if I will! He's been gone about three years now and I miss him terribly. Not as much as Etta does (or Ethan) I'd wager, but still ...
Anyway, Etta is in the kitchen dishing up the last of supper for the late crowd. Digger is tending bar and I'm just grabbing a couple of minutes rest before I head back over to the office. The door opened and in walked the sorriest looking young woman I had ever seen. She looked like it had been a long swim through a hard squall.
I call for Etta who hustles the poor thing into the kitchen to get her cleaned up. After she gets her dried off and put something to eat into her (I swear, Etta would feed the Devil before she lit into him!) I tried to ask her a few questions. I mean we need to know who her people are so we can let them know she's alive.
But she doesn't seem to know who or where she is. Strange. She wasn't a native so that pretty much ruled out a lot of places. And she had some sort of strange implant. And it was pretty fancy, some sort of storage device is all we could figure out. The worst news was that there was something wrong with it. But we didn't have the tools to try and fix it, even if we did know what was broken.
So we sat down at a table in the bar (after putting Jenny to sleep, that's the only thing she knew, that her first name was Jenny) and tried to decide what to do. Several ideas were bounced around but either we didn't know the people to do it or we didn't have the scrip to get it done. Simon decides he might know some people who could peek into her implant and went to make some calls. I wasn't too keen on this idea. I know what sorts Simon hangs out with and while it's okay for him and he keeps Red Sky out of it, I didn't want poor Jenny involved with those sorts of people (if you know what I mean).
About the time we figure out there isn't much we can do to help her (mechanically speaking) a really geeky scientist type walks into the grill. Turns out he's got a work order to look at an implant in a "Jenny." Seems Patterner was poking his rostrum in again. Not that we minded in this case. So we take her up to the room she's in and he starts his diagnostics.
After he left and she'd gotten back to sleep, this seedy, slick suit type shows up with a couple of goons. But he's really slick, he doesn't enter with them he just seems to show up in one of the booths. And he acts really threatening. Making innuendoes and threats. But we turn to look where he's pointing and sure enough, one of his goons has Brittany on his knee, playing with her. The sweetheart doesn't know what kind of trouble she's in and I know I'd better be real careful. I had these situations and I always seem to find myself in them.
More to follow
