A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2), Paul Tomlinson [bts books to read .txt] 📗

know. If he ever smiles at me, I’ll duck.” Danny moved over to his work area and began sorting through the salvaged parts there, seeing if he had what was required for the cooler.

“You folks can’t afford to buy Floyd,” I said, going over to stand next to him. “But maybe you could rent him for a while.”

“Why would you do that for us?” Danny asked.

“I’d do it for you. Because I like you,” I said. I looked him in the eye and the colour rose in his cheeks.

“What would you want in exchange?” Danny asked.

“You replace Floyd’s cooling unit and I think we’ll be able to do some sort of deal,” I said. The wink made him blush again.

“He can stay here tonight,” Danny said. “Put him in the recharging station at the back.”

“You were flirting with him,” Floyd said quietly as we walked towards the back of the store.

“I was? Damn!” I looked down at myself. “Did he steal anything?”

“No, he didn’t. And he’s really not that into you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“He was flattered but not aroused. I can show you my analysis of the sensor data, if you like?”

I shook my head. “It’s not about data. You’ve got a lot to learn about romance, my friend,” I said.

“Perhaps we could learn it together?”

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m the straight man. I leave the pratfalls to you.”

I wanted to have the last word, but I’d got nothing.

Danny came over and turned on the recharger. It wasn’t exactly state of the art – but neither was Floyd.

“I’ll work on the new unit tonight, open him up and pop it in first thing tomorrow. I could connect him up to the computer and run a full set of diagnostics if you want?”

“He came off the assembly line forty years ago,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think they patch software that old.” I said it as a joke, but I really didn’t want this young man poking around too much. Floyd had secrets that we didn’t want anyone discovering. The only way to make sure diagnostic programs didn’t sound the alarm was to completely sever the link between the artificial sentience and the robot that carried it. This effectively left Floyd a prisoner in his own body, unable to interact with the outside world. We had to do it whenever we sold him or turned him in for scrap – and Floyd complained about it every time. He was probably afraid that one day I wouldn’t turn up with the remote control to set him free. I’ve been tempted not to several times. “Just fix the cooling unit,” I said to Danny. “He doesn’t like it when people go poking around inside him.”

Danny looked up at Floyd.

“Are you afraid of me?” the big robot asked.

“I’m a little nervous around you, yeah,” Danny admitted.

“Good.”

I moved towards the door.

“You want me to see if I can find a proper head for you?” Danny asked.

“Is there something wrong with the head I’ve got?”

“N-no – I like it. It suits you.”

I smiled and left them to it. Back at the hotel, there was a bathtub I wanted to fill to the brim with water so hot it would cook me.

I should probably have been paying less attention to the bath and more to what was going on around me. I didn’t notice the four gunmen until they were standing in front of me blocking my way.

“Evening stranger.” Their leader smiled at me. It wasn’t a friendly smile.

Chapter Six

Two of the stooges had been involved in the attack on the robot earlier and the third, a skinny youth with thinning mousey hair and a serious squint, looked like he came from the same mould. When he grinned it looked like his teeth belonged to a much bigger man. The top dog in this pack of strays was a shorter man with a broad flat face and a nose that must have been broken more than once. His hair was slicked back like thick strands of liquorice and he walked with a bandy-legged swagger that wore the heels of his boots down on the outside. As a group they looked like a street gang from a musical staged by amateur dramatists. If they started talking like middle-class suburbanites pretending to be streetwise I was going to start laughing, I knew it.

“Scrack you smiling at?” the bandy-legged one said, putting his face right in front of mine. Close-to, his skin was much more heavily lined than it had first appeared.

“Not much,” I said. “If you’re looking to offer me a good time, you’re not my type.”

“Smart-mouth, huh?” He pushed his face even closer to mine. “You’re on the way to getting a busted lip.”

He was so close I could have drawn his gun and shot him with it. I didn’t shoot him with it.

“Was there something you wanted?” I asked him, staring into his eyes and not blinking. When I was a kid I used to have staring contests with my cousin. She usually won.

“Just wanted to get acquainted,” he said, leaning back a little. “My name’s...”

“Deke Swanson,” I said.

“How you know that?”

It was engraved on his gun, but I didn’t want to tell him I’d seen that. “Everyone around here knows you, don’t they?”

He smiled. He had a ruby set in one of his front teeth. Either that or he’d been eating a candy apple. “I guess they do,” he said proudly.

“Quincy Quigley,” I said. I didn’t offer him my hand.

“Quincy Quigley,” he said, nodding. “And who’s your friend?”

I looked behind me, confused. There was no one there.

Deke flashed the ruby at me again. “Big feller, blue skin, yellow head...?”

“Floyd,” I said.

“Floyd.” He nodded again as if I was confirming what he already knew. “Stupid name for a robot.”

“He wouldn’t let me call him Rusty.”

The stooges looked to Deke to see if it was okay to smile at this. But his expression told them it wasn’t.

“What you doing in Cicada City with a big military robot,