Buying fruit

After ordering the Jones brothers to gather what possessions they had and make their way back to the ship to assist Michaels in his work.

Knowing that he could get a lot of the things that he needed; cutlasses, hammocks and some more salted pork besides that left behind by the previous owner, at a discount price, Brenan focused on acquiring fruit and vegetables, which were two foodstuffs that Davy had yet to begin to sell, and hoped that he would be able to get that over and done with before nightfall.

Davy had helped him out by providing him with the name of a local food merchant, and Brenan found the man to be agreeable enough that he ended up buying a large amount of onions and sourgrapes, the latter being a small, green citrus fruit which were highly nutritious in relation to the amount of farmland needed to grow them, which was one of the reasons why they so frequent on these smaller islands, as the amount of arable land was rather restricted and imports could often be quite infrequent.

Like the name suggested, the “grapes” were pretty sour-tasting, but once you managed to dig through the thick rind the pulp and the juice was very nourishing, and Brenan had secured several crates of them to be delivered the next morning.

Stepping out of the merchant’s shop, Brenan stopped just outside the heavy front door and leaned his right shoulder against the arced doorway to watch the crowd going by, noting that the onset of evening seemed to have done little to dwindle down the amount of people moving about.

Turning his head to his left, Brenan spotted a stunning redhead moving through the crowd and for a moment thought that Red had arrived early and was looking for him. This redhead however looked to be a little more than half Red’s age, and with a somewhat less voluptuous frame, even if the combined top and jeans that she was wearing made it perfectly clear that what she had suited her perfectly.

Due to how the thought of Red made him continue to keep his gaze fixed on the redhead as he once more tried to make sense of what he felt towards his new first officer, Brenan eventually grew wise to the fact that the redhead seemed haunted by something, and when she threw a look behind her shoulder he followed it until he spotted two burly men making their way through the crowd about twenty feet behind the woman, moving through the other people with **** rather than her method of nimbly slipping past those who got in her way.

If there was a rushed quality to the way in which the woman was hurrying to make her way down the street, there was definitely ominous about the two men who were following her, although Brenan couldn’t make it just what it was at first. While both of them were dressed as civilians, their short-cropped hair and the collected, almost violent, manner in which they made their way after the redhead that made them appear military in their composure.

Still, it wasn’t until he spotted the two deep cuts into the right ear of one of the men that Brenan knew for certain that something was very wrong.

To have the lobe of your ear cut twice like that was the standard punishment in the Veertorian army and navy for minor disciplinary infractions relating to carnal activities, most usually **** which wasn’t authorized by the commanding officer.
And since the common attitude among Veertorian officers towards **** was that it was an acceptable pastime for soldiers and sailors to engage in, the presence of those barely noticeable scars on the man’s ear suggested that he was either very keen on it or had just been unlucky.

Suspecting that the redhead would start to run as soon as she got the space required to do so, Brenan stood back and waited as first she and then her pursuers had gone past him, after which he slipped out onto the street and began to shadow the two men.

After a while, the redhead turned onto a side street going out from the main one and began to pick up her pace as the crowd thinned out, with the two sailors and Brenan all doing the same.

Suddenly, after one last terrified look past her shoulder, the redhead broke out into a sprint, seemingly running as fast as she could as she turned another corner and disappeared down an alleyway.

“The bitch is getting away!” The slightly larger of the two muscular sailors, who was also the one with two unmarked ears, cried out, and they too began to run. Brenan kept moving forwards in long, quick strides until the men had disappeared round the same corner as the redhead, after which he rushed up to it and peeked around it. Observing how they ran up to and around another corner further down in the alley, Brenan made another quick dash, moving quickly now to ensure that he wouldn’t loose the trail.

The process of Brenan chasing the two men who were in turn chasing the redheaded woman continued on as they all progressed through the mazelike system of alleys and backstreets, with the whole thing coming to an end when the redhead finally took a wrong turn and ended up at the end of a dead-end street.

Having dropped back a little, Brenan leaned in from behind the mouth of the alleyway, the redhead’s frightened screams ringing in his ears, and watched as she struggled against the grip of the smaller of the two men. He felt a bad taste at the back of his mouth as he spotted how the redhead’s top had been torn open so that the right one of her flawlessly rounded breasts had come out into the open.