This is rapidly becoming a novela.
…one of the things Odis had told us was that he hadn’t been running with a big crew. But it wasn’t a nice one. If I had gotten the full briefing beforehand I would have left him tied up, and somewhere more convenient to the cops. Odie was part of a snatch gang.
If you haven’t heard of snatch gangs before, good. They’re nasty. It’s a real bad world out there these days, and some people like the idea of having other people doing all the work, whether they want to or not. They’ll pay a lot of money for fresh workers, too. And there’s always a bunch of idiots out there who think that New California’s a great hunting ground.
Well, it’s not. But we have to work at keeping it that way. The problem is, some of the gangs sell to the Universal Dominion — the mages have a standing bounty on any magic-user handed over to them, and it’s one bill they always pay promptly — so we have to get rid of them on the quiet. But since we do get rid of them on the quiet, we keep getting new idiots showing up.
This bunch was the latest batch. Punks and mooks from all over, running from the fighting down south or the badlands up north. Their boss — the one who stabbed me — was from up there. ‘Posh Fred, ’ they called him; and Smith had been just a little too quick to give a blank look when he heard the name for the first time. I figured it was probably some kind of Mormon diehard thing.