Read Dragonback 05 Dragon and Judge for Free Online

said.
    "I don't think so," Mustache said. "I paid good money to be
alerted when Virgil Morgan's box was opened. It was. You were the only
one who left the bank." He picked up her comm clip. "You want to call
Morgan and tell him to show or we kill you? Or would you rather I do
that?"
    "Okay, look," Alison said, feeling sweat breaking out on her skin.
This was not what she'd signed up for here. "I don't know any
Virgil Morgan. I'm a thief—okay? I tap into bank computers and find out
which lockboxes haven't been opened for a while. Then I go in and clean
them out."
    "Right," Mustache said contemptuously. "And you just happened to
pick Morgan's box first?"
    "What first?" Alison countered. "This is the fifth box I've opened
at that bank this week."
    "And the manager didn't notice anything strange about that?"
Sideburns put in.
    "The manager's a Trin-trang," Alison said scornfully. "And the two
tellers were Compfrins. They couldn't pick out a human face between
them."
    "So you've been here a week?" Mustache asked.
    "Three weeks," Alison corrected. "I came in from Pintering on the Missing
Link ."
    "You have a payment receipt, of course?"
    "As a matter of fact, I do," Alison said. She did, too, since one
of the first lessons her father had hammered into her was to always, always carry proof of having been somewhere else. "You want to see them?"
    "Maybe later," Mustache said, looking at Sideburns again. "What do
you think?"
    "I think we should call the boss and see what he wants to do,"
Sideburns said, pulling out a flat, palm-sized UniLink. Punching a
couple of buttons, he held it up to his ear.
    Slowly, Alison looked around the room. A UniLink instead of a comm
clip meant that the boss was off-planet, and that he liked the kind of
privacy that a UniLink's heavy encryption provided. Whoever had
accidentally sicced Mustache and Sideburns on her, it wasn't just
somebody with a casual grudge against Virgil Morgan.
    "Semaline, sir," Sideburns said. "We just had a ping on Morgan's
lockbox . . . no, sir, it was a girl. She claims not to know Morgan, that
she taps bank lockboxes for a living."
    He listened a moment, then looked at Alison. "Empty your pockets,"
he ordered. "Everything on the table."
    Alison complied, laying out her set of keys, her makeup kit, her
wallet, her small multitool, and her pen and notebook. Sideburns
gestured to the keys, and Mustache picked them up and sorted quickly
through them. He paused a moment at the one Alison had showed the
Trin-trang, then continued on. "No bank keys here," he reported when
he'd reached the end.
    "How'd you open the box?" Sideburns asked.
    "How do you think?" Alison retorted. "I picked the lock."
    "Right in front of them?"
    "I'm good at what I do."
    "She says she picked it," Sideburns relayed. Again he listened a
moment, then gestured to the wallet. Mustache tossed it to him, and he
opened to the ID. "Alison Kayna," he read aloud. "No, sir, not to me."
    He looked at Alison. "He wants to know if you do anything besides
simple lock picking," he said.
    Alison shrugged. "Sure. Combinations, time-beats,
freeze-darks—pretty much the whole range."
    "Let's find out." Sideburns glanced around, pointed at a
half-curtained doorway leading to the cafe's back room. "There'll be a
safe somewhere back there. You're going to open it."
    Alison didn't miss a beat. "Oh, no, you don't," she said darkly.
"I know how these little games work."
    "What, you think we're cops ?" Mustache scoffed.
    "I'm not doing it," Alison said firmly, folding her arms across
her chest. "And you try to repeat what I just told you and I'll
flat-out deny it. You cops are all alike."
    Mustache gave a theatrical sigh and dropped his hand to his side.
    And suddenly there was a gleaming pistol six inches from Alison's
face, pointed squarely between her eyes. "Listen to me, little girl,"
he said quietly. "You're, what, fifteen?"
    "Fourteen," Alison managed between suddenly dry lips. In that
single heartbeat she was back on Rho Scorvi