"So tell me about the Knave of Hearts," Sophie said, making another turn. She was following our standard procedure, which was to never drive directly back from a business meeting, just in case we were being tailed. "Who is he?"
"The family has been a minor set of players in the Confederation for a very long time," I said, going deep into my memory. "You met his father, the so-called King of Hearts. His mother is the Queen, and while I doubt Mike Pressman is fully involved in the family business, I'd suspect he'd be called the Jack. But the Knave is the one who's currently really dangerous. The King and Queen, they became famous in the Confederation for being breaking and entering thieves, although the Queen was quite a beauty in her day. It's what earned her nickname, and her husband became the King after they got married. They both more or less retired before I came on the scene, but I see how they did it now. In their shop they had, in addition to the normal tools you'd expect an HVAC repair facility to have, a lot of carefully disguised other goodies. The one I noticed first was a canister that had no chance to contain coolant, it was totally shaped wrong. Instead, it was a disguised pressure container for a plasma cutting torch. I saw the rest of the setup broken down on the bench, but it was all there. The Pressman’s used their company as a front, doing pretty standard burglaries and thefts until the Knave got involved."
"What did he do differently?”
"He's not into straight burglaries," I told her. "In fact, the Knave steals in a whole different way. He's a bit of a confidence man, a bit of a Lothario, and one hundred percent thief. He gets his way in by seduction normally, and from his reputation, he’s very, very good. From what I know, and I only know him by reputation, he works his way into the woman's heart, and turns her into whatever he wants her to be."
"Damn," Sophie seethed, echoing my own personal feelings. I had always detested the methods employed by the Knave, even during my own days of being a bit of a womanizer. I never used emotions to try and get to my targets, and I never, ever twisted a woman the way the Knave did.
"That's not the worst," I said, as Sophie finally made the last of our misdirection turns and started back towards Mount Zion. "The worst part is, he's married. His reputation is that he looks young, maybe just twenty-three or four, but he's actually pushing thirty or so. It's part of his game, he comes off as this barely out of high school guy, but he's actually got a wife at home."
"How can his wife be cool with that?" Sophie asked, disgusted.
I shook my head. "I don't know. From what the rumors have told me, she's the same as him, a Mata Hari type who left the business when she couldn't pass as a teenager anymore, and wasn't quite old enough for the MILF act yet. But if this guy is the one who I think has been seeing Tabby, your friend is being played."
"So what do we do?"
I clenched my fists, the knuckles cracking as I thought of all I'd like to do to the man. However, he did have a wife, and I don't like killing people with families, if it can be avoided. I know how hypocritical that sounds, and I know I've killed men with wives and even children, but they were jobs I never enjoyed doing. "Let's go to the bell tower," I said, thinking. "I have an idea."
"You going to fill me in on the idea?" Sophie asked as she made the turn towards Mount Zion. "Please tell me it's painful and slow-acting."
"Slow-acting it isn't, but painful? You can say that for sure," I said, thinking of some of the alternative lessons I had gotten from some of my instructors over the years.
There's an old song from the Wu-Tang Clan member Redman that includes the line six million ways to die. The line is actually older than that, but he's probably the most famous user of the line. In any case, the truth is there are less than that, but the number is still pretty high. While I doubt there is anyone in the world who knows all of the different ways that the human body can be killed, the really creative methods are actually quite useful. Any idiot can pull a trigger, just look at the gun violence statistics. The same is almost true for bladed weapons as well. Even the most pacifistic person can be pushed to the point they'll bury a knife in someone's guts, especially if you don't give them a chance to think about it first.