Spintered Reality - part sixteen

“So who is this broad?” said Dolph over his left shoulder, addressing his agent which stood just behind him.
“She’s a nobody,” came the answer.

“If she’s a nobody,” said Dolph impatiently, as he tugged at the sleeve of his racing suit, “Why am I seeing her?”

“Because,” came the answer from F. Bishop Cauch’in, Dolph’s agent, “She is a nobody that knows a somebody.”

Dolph finished removing his racing suit, hung it in the closet behind him and turned around to face his agent, long time advisor, and sometime friend.

“So, I…what?…give her a tour of the track, an autographed picture and you get rid of her right?”

“Not this time, I am afraid,” replied the agent in his proper Amarrian accent, “This woman is not one of your ‘groupies.’”

F. Bishop Cauch’in, or “Bishop” as everyone called him, was a lanky Amarrian that compensated for his appearance by the almost calculated smoothness of his movement. He was bordering on late middle/early old age, but his mind was as sharp as it was devious. Where his association with Richard Sirrelli was concerned it was truly a case of “It takes one to know one.”

“This broad,” he said, placing a mocking emphasis on the way Dolph had dismissed her in his usual misogynistic demeanor, as you so charmingly put it, “is here not just because of who she knows but also what she knows.”

“And jus’ what does this woman,” said Dolph, attempting a rather poor imitation of Bishop, ‘know that I don’t know?”

“Quite a lot I should imagine,” came the properly intoned reply, “that not being an incredibly difficult feat to accomplish.”

“Was that a dig?” asked Dolph.

“No. Merely a statement of fact, said Bishop, then continued….

“It seems that Ms. Blackwolf, the woman in question, has a penchant for going fast, and the means to do so. It also seems she has the means for removing that crown as ‘king of racing’ that you always assume is so firmly placed upon your head.”

“She thinks she can beat me?” Dolph shot back angrily.

“Richard Serelli thinks she can, and in matters such as these he is rarely wrong,” said Bishop as he took a seat at the long leather sofa that occupied most of the rooms west wall.

“Do you think she can beat me?” said Dolph looking down at his agent.

“I think,” replied Bishop calmly, “that if she has the ability to remove the racing crown from your head, she also has the means to keep it there – that’s what I think. Now sit down.”

Dolph took a seat in the large overstuffed leather chair opposite Bishop, every aspect of his posture making it seem as if he were granting Bishop an audience, when in fact, if anything, just the reverse were true. The fact of the matter was that where Bishop’s services as an agent were concerned, he went where the money was, and for the moment the source of the money was sitting across from him…for the moment.