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It wasn't much of a story really, but there wasn't any reason not to sketch it out for Campsie's benefit. In leaner times, I have sometimes worked as a bounty hunter, tracking down Goblins who have skipped their bail, perhaps, or who have otherwise escaped from the long and loving arms of the law. I had a special line in returning punks who had made it to the surface, where few Goblins care to go. Indeed, it was bounty hunting in my early years which gave me much experience in presenting myself as a human up there, and which I still rely upon to this day. Of course, anyone making it up to the surface without risking being detained by the border cops is likely to have done so using the same hidden stairways and passages used by the smugglers; no doubt smuggling fugitives out of the Lower Realms is nearly was lucrative as smuggling goods in. While of course there is an official force charged with policing Goblin activity on the surface, they are usually far too busy - at least, so they would have you believe - to apprehend a low-level criminal who could be conveniently forgotten about so much more easily. This particular punk I had tracked down to a back alleyway in New York City a long time ago. Back then, Pow Drumfin was a slimy little weasel, a bit-part player in a much larger organisation, although I did recall that the gang he had been working for had been engaged in a very sophisticated – at least, for the time - smuggling operation. He had skipped bail, a bounty had been posted, I needed a few bucks and his name came up. Anyway I had grabbed him and bounced him down to the Lower Realms - not without him unsuccessfully trying to fill me full of lead beforehand - and turned him over to the cops for the reward. Easy money, at the time. From my reading of the newspapers afterwards, supported by the usual indiscreet water-cooler chatter at police stations and courtrooms, he had been put away for quite a stretch. By now, of course, it wasn't beyond possibility that he had done his time, completed his parole and was now holding down a steady and legal job working behind the scenes at a nightclub: a nightclub where proscribed and probably smuggled technology was - quite by coincidence - being used. Naturally, I didn't believe a word of any such coincidence.
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Part 25