Rude gestures

Finding a small tavern from which he’d have an unrestricted view of the alley into which Spider Bitch and her cronies had ventured, Brenan ordered a mug of beer and placed himself by the counter, it was little more than a vaguely finished plank really, that ran alongside the large gap in the front of the tavern, thankful for the fact that his appearance ensured that he wasn’t pestered by any of the other half-dozen customers currently taking advantage of the tavern’s meagre facilities.

In the time that it had taken Brenan to do that, Spider Bitch and the lapdogs had reached the small, boxlike wooden building located at the end of the alleyway, the house or cabin looking pretty sturdy where it stood built more or less into the side of a large warehouse. Brenan had seen that sort of building enough times to recognize it as having originally been built to house the warehouse’s custodian, though it wasn’t unusual for houses of that type to either end up derelict after its original inhabitant found something better or, if the custodian had a poor sense of right and wrong but a keen interest in money, being rented out to hoodlums and cutthroats looking for an inconspicuous place in which to stay.

Brenan took a careful sip of the beer that he’d bought and decided that it was of the kind that tasted the same going down as it did coming back up again, and placed the mug in front of him, his scornful expression being solidified when he spotted how a small, redheaded fellow had just stepped out of the house up ahead.

Even from a distance, Brenan could see the redhead’s smug posture well enough to realize that he hated him, and he pledged to kill him if he’d done anything to Sasha, which was quite remarkable in view of the fact that he’d never talked to her or even seen her, though Brenan was quick to peg it down as being a result of the disgust which he had felt for that sadistic little rat-bastard ever since he’d seen what he’d done to that man back at the Drunken Sailor.

Watching the tense confrontation that followed, Brenan felt confident enough to guess what exactly was happening, and decided that Spider Bitch had at first attempted to strong-arm Carrot Top into giving up Sasha, doing her best to look firm and decisive while her guards lined up in a semi-circle behind her.

When this hadn’t worked, she seemed to have switched to a tactic that involved pleading to the redheaded bastard’s sense of loyalty towards the Veertor Empire, because he suddenly burst out laughing after she’d spent a few moments of speaking rather emphatically, with a lot of hand-gestures being involved on both parts of the conversation, though Carrot Top’s were a lot cruder and involved a lot more pumping of his wrist.

What followed next was that Spider Bitch seemed to have snapped in the face of the psycho-midget’s vomit-inducing mixture of smugness and hostility, because she started speaking at him with such gusto that Brenan almost expected to be able to hear large parts of what she was saying, and the little fucker appeared almost to have been a little shaken in the wake of the talking to that he’d just received.

Little else of not happened except for that Spider Bitch and the Ginger Swine seemed to reach some sort of agreement before Brenan was left to lament the fact that the distance was a bit on the far side and the targets were simply too many for him to take them all without having to reload his Defender as Ginger went back inside and Bitch led her band of decidedly unmerry men back towards the mouth of the alley, where she went on to address two of them, looking very much like she was providing them with instructions of some sort.

Brenan was not particularly surprised when the two men whom Spider Bitch had talked to stayed behind as she and the others began the journey back towards the merchantman, leaving him to reach the conclusion that he had probably had a few hours in which to formulate a plan to rescue Sasha, a plan which he knew already would most likely require that he both found himself a gunnery officer or some other person who knew a lot about how to make things go boom and be transformed into tiny little fragments of what they once were, and approached Davy about borrowing a wagon or cart in which to transport the weapons and the explosives which were going to be used.

“Well, best get to it then,” Brenan muttered as he got up on his feet and walked out of the tavern.