No one ever believed Jacob when he told them what he did for a living.
He was a short, almost girlishly slender man. With his black-rimmed glasses and slacks and his gray sweaters, he resembled a professor at a university or some other sort of academic. Whenever he said that he was a bounty hunter, people would just look at him incredulously and chuckle. Bounty hunters were supposed to be huge manly men, the sort of men with horrific scars and eyepatches and stubble on their square jaws. Not someone who looked like he belonged in a library poring through Greek plays.
But a bounty hunter was what he was and he prided himself on always bringing back his quarry, dead or alive. Nor was he limited to just other Gulliverians. He would take down Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians as well. Size didn’t matter to him. A bounty was a bounty, as long as he was paid. And secretly, he enjoyed the challenge of bringing down giants and giantesses. It never failed to please him when he saw the shock in their enormous eyes as the titans tumbled to the ground, incapacitated in one way one or another. The best had been a towering bruiser who had been massive even for a Brobdingnagian and who was wanted on a dozen different charges, from assault to homicide. After an utterly terrifying chase through several Gulliverian towns, Jacob had managed to outsmart the giant by leading him straight to the authorities. The next thing that the thug had known, he was in shackles and on his way to a Brobdingnagian jail.
It wasn’t just his intelligence that made him a match for practically any quarry. He was also a skilled engineer, mostly self-taught, although he had learned a great deal in college before he dropped out. Most of his weapons he designed himself and he was proud of each one. That was what he doing the day that his phone rang…sketching out the schematics for new prototype weapons. Jacob was trying to decide the specific neurotoxin that he should include in a modified tranquilizer gun when he heard Sally answer the phone.
From where he was sitting, he could see her head tipped to one side as she spoke into the phone, her curly chestnut-brown hair spilling down over her back and shoulders. Sally had started off as his best friend, then his secretary, then his lover. Right now she was acting as a secretary, talking into the phone and typing up notes on her tablet. Jacob put down his mechanical pencil just as she hung up.
“You got another one,” she said.
“What’s this bounty for?”
“Two Brobdingnagian felons who’ve been using Lilliputian cities as their personal playgrounds. They’re calling themselves ‘Jack and Jill,’ which is a pretty terrible joke if you ask me. Anyway, the Lilliputian government is willing to pay you a large amount to bring them to justice.” Sally’s long crimson nails tapped on the tablet. “Of course, you still have those two other bounties. But it’s up to you.”
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