“You heard the gentleman.” Lunt made the word sound worse than son of a Khooghra. He turned to the two deputies. “Well, you have them; what are you waiting for?”
Jack watched from the door as they put the sacks into the aircar, climbed in after them and lifted out. Then he came back and sat down at the table.
“They don’t know anything about court orders,” he said. “They don’t know why I didn’t stop it. They think Pappy Jack let them down.”
“Have they gone, Jack?” Brannhard asked. “Sure?” Then he rose, reaching behind him, and took up a little ball of white fur. Baby Fuzzy caught his beard with both tiny hands, yeeking happily.
“Baby! They didn’t get him!”
Brannhard disengaged the little hands from his beard and handed him over.
“No, and they signed for him, too.” Brannhard downed what was left of his drink, got a cigar out of his pocket and lit it. “Now, we’re going to go to Mallorysport and get the rest of them back.”
“But…. But the Chief Justice signed that order. He won’t give them back just because we ask him to.”
Brannhard made an impolite noise. “I’ll bet everything I own Pendarvis never saw that order. They have stacks of those things, signed in blank, in the Chief of the Court’s office. If they had to wait to get one of the judges to sign an order every time they wanted to subpoena a witness or impound physical evidence, they’d never get anything done. If Ham O’Brien didn’t think this up for himself, Leslie Coombes thought it up for him.”
“We’ll use my airboat,” Gerd said. “You coming along, Ben? Let’s get started.”