by Lisa Smedman
“So the missionaries were showing her travelogues while they mind-probed her?” I asked.
“It would appear so.”
“Then they’re looking for a place,” I concluded.
“It would seem so, but why?” Parminder gave a delicate shrug. “I must confess I’m at a dead end with this one. I thought perhaps you could provide me with a lead. Some background on the victim—on your ‘grandmother’—that would help me to figure out what the missionaries might have been looking for.”
“No joy there,” I said. “Mama Grande was pretty vague about her past. She lived in the present and seemed to have short-term memory only. I’ve told you everything I know, even about the AFL smuggling her out of Aztlan.”
Parminder sighed. “I see. That’s it then.”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it'?” I didn’t like the sound of that one. “Don’t you have any more leads?”
There was a lengthy silence. I could tell that Parminder was debating whether or not to tell me something. I was just about to remind her again of the debt she owed me when she reached a decision. “Forensics found something interesting during the autopsy of Rosalita Ramirez,” she began carefully. “Tiny fragments of black volcanic glass—obsidian—in the wounds. The murder weapon was tipped with stone that splintered when it struck bone.”
I suddenly felt queasy. I mentally grasped for some sort of professional objectivity, and at last found it. “You’re telling me that Mama Grande was killed by a weapon from the stone age? Who the frag would use something like that?”
We had to wait a moment while the waiter delivered our food. It looked delicious, but I suddenly wasn’t hungry any more.
“An Aztlaner,” Parminder answered quietly. “Their priests traditionally carry maeauitls—obsidian-edged wooden swords. It’s a holy weapon, just like a Sikh’s kirpan dagger. Maeauitls are also carried by elite Aztechnology security personnel as ceremonial weapons. They look ineffectual, but are deadly killing tools.”
She didn’t need to remind me. I pushed the image of Mama G’s mutilated body from my mind.
“What about the two missionaries?” I asked. “Did forensics find obsidian in their wounds, too?”
“No. The autopsy points to their cause of death as probably magical in nature—either a death touch or slay spell. But it was definitely an Aztlaner hit. The removal of the skin was a practice sacred to the god Xipe Totec. In ancient times, the flayed skin was worn by priests worshipping the arrival of spring—the renewal of the Earth’s ‘skin’ of vegetation.”
“Priests again,” I noted.
The whole thing was starting to get to me. Whoever had murdered Mama G and the two missionaries had announced themselves not just as an Aztlaner but specifically as members of that country’s priesthood. They’d done the killings with a deliberate signature, using a highly distinctive weapon and method of mutilating the bodies. It was too heavy-handed to be a frame. Instead it smacked of the deliberate arrogance of someone who felt as confident as if they were on their own turf. And that meant that the killer had nothing but contempt for the Lone Star’s ability to bring him or her to justice. Or for my own efforts.
“So Aztechnology or the Aztlan priesthood are involved in this?” I asked.
“I can’t confirm that,” Parminder said hastily. “And you didn’t hear any of this from me officially. But I will tell you this. Our primary suspect in both murders is protected by diplomatic immunity. We can’t touch him. It’s case closed. Just like . .
“Just like the last case we worked together,” I said softly. “Only for different reasons. And once again, the killer walks.” My eyes narrowed. “Who is this suspect and what do you have on him?”
I didn’t really expect her to tell me. I was surprised as all frag when she did.
“Domingo Vargas. He’s a mage, a priest—and a consular official. Recently appointed to the Seattle consulate, just two weeks ago. I have a witness who places a consular car at the Charles Royer Station at about the time of the homicides, and he’s the only one of the Seattle diplomatic staff who has magical ability and who carries a macauitl as part of his ceremonial gear. He’s likely the one who killed and flayed the victims.”
She played with her wine glass, turning it in obvious frustration. “Because of diplomatic immunity we couldn’t enter the consulate and question Vargas. Nor could we question him at the airport when he returned to Aztlan on this morning’s Tenochtitlán flight, since Aztlan has extraterritorial privileges over the Air Montezuma hub at SeaTac. We had no choice but to simply let him go.”
“So why tell me all this?” I asked. I couldn’t scan it. The data was too little, too late. The Azland government had pulled rank on the Star, and now the suspect was gone.
Parminder sighed. “Because I owe you one. And because I wanted to let you know how hopeless it was, and what you’d be facing if you continued to investigate this murder. These people play for keeps—and they don’t care who knows it. You’ve hit the wall and there’s nowhere else to go with this one.”
I hate being told I can’t do something. Especially by someone who I knew had already given up once before, rather than fight the good fight. I was grateful to Parminder for letting me know what I was up against, but she could keep her advice.
I thanked her for the information, drained the last of my drink and pushed my untouched meal away. I decided to leave Parminder with the tab. I figured she owed me at least that much.
I left the restaurant even more determined to find out why Mama G had been killed. I swore that I would do whatever I could to bring her murderer to justice—even if that justice wasn’t to be found in Seattle.
Only problem was I didn’t know where the frag to begin.
7
The desert air was hot, even at midnight. We were somewhere between San Angelo and Austin, a few dozen klicks from the Aztlan-Canadian American States border. Along that border, two armies faced each other across an eight thousand-meter-wide buffer zone. Armed to the teeth and constantly on alert, the Texas Rangers and the Aztlan Border Patrol (a division of Aztechnology Corporate Security) each waited for the other to make the first move.
Ever since the dragon Dunkelzahn’s election to the presidency of UCAS, things had been especially tense between Aztlan and the United Canadian American States. The CAS, which lay between them, was growing increasingly fretful about Aztlan using it as a stepping stone in any attack on UCAS. But the Azzies seemed more concerned with protecting their own borders than with expansionism. There were rumors that they had been vigorously searching for something in this area of late. I hoped we wouldn’t run into them—that whatever they’d been looking for would prove a distraction.
Like the border patrols, we were waiting for someone else to move first. A smuggler would be making a run into Aztlan some time tonight. When the fireworks began, we’d motor. And pray we made it through in one piece.
Rafael and I sat on one motorcycle, the AFL “coyote” who would be guiding us on another. Both were dirt bikes—Yamaha Sidewinders with knobby tires to grip the sand and lots of juice to pull us through the tight spots that lay ahead. Both had been painted a flat matte black so that their metal would not reflect the glare of a searchlight. We’d killed the engines while we were waiting for the show to begin—no sense providing any more of a heat signature than absolutely necessary. An infrared-sensing surveillance drone could be overhead, even now.
I was still a little leery of our guide. He gave his name as José, although he was a different José than the one who had first put Rafael in touch with his grandmother. He was human and appeared to be in his forties, with graying hair and stubble on his chin. He wore black jeans and a black shirt with a tear in one arm, and a grimy yellow bandanna around his neck that he pulled up over his mouth to keep out the dust when he rode. His cowboy boots were also black, with tinkling spurs that he’d assured me were real silver. He wore a glove on his left hand, but his right was bare so that the vehicle control r
ig jack in his fingertip could make contact with the input stud on his bike.
“José” had first contacted us two days ago—on the evening following my meeting with Parminder. He’d responded to Rafael’s posting on the Salsa Connection, in which Rafael had mentioned that his “banana pepper bush” had died. Rafael had asked if peppers were ever shipped into Aztlan, as well as out of it.
My plans were hazy, at best, and fell back upon standard police procedure: track down my chief suspect and question him. I figured that, if I could confront Domingo Vargas face to face, I at least had a chance—albeit a toothpick-skinny one—of confirming whether or not he had been responsible for Mama G’s death.
I didn’t hold any illusions about the feasibility of my plan. I knew the chances of confronting Vargas on his own turf were slim to nada. But I had to try—had to give it my best shot. I owed Mama G that much.
And assuming I did manage to force a confession from Vargas, then what?
I honestly didn’t know.
After my conversation with Parminder, I realized that, no matter how much evidence I gathered against the priest, the UCAS government could never order him extradited back to Seattle to stand trial. He was protected by diplomatic immunity. I had a crazy notion tucked away in the back of my mind that Rafael and I might perform a shadow-style extraction of Vargas ourselves—but assuming we did get him out of Aztlan, what would we do with him? Act as judge and jury ourselves?
I didn’t want to think about that one.
At least I could nose around some and learn what Mama G had been a witness to. I needed to know what the cult missionaries and Atzlaner priests had been so interested in learning—and in subsequently covering up. I needed to know why Mama G had died. I needed answers—as much as Rafael need to kick some Azzie hoop. And so we’d made this journey together.
José’s reply had come back within five hours of our posting. We’d been informed—equally cryptically—that our “shipment” would cost us at least three thousand nuyen, and that we could find what we were looking for at a talismonger’s shop in Houston. And that’s where we’d met the AFL contact—not at the store itself, but sitting at a Tex-Mex restaurant across the street. He’d known us by a pre-arranged signal: he’d instructed one of us to wear a T-shirt with Mama G’s favorite animal on it.
It hadn’t taken us long to figure that one out: snake. I’d scrounged up a T-shirt promoting the Rainforest Reptile Refuge, a kind of SPCA for reptiles that I’d visited once on a trip north to Vancouver. I’d been investigating a case in which a four-meter-long boa had crushed a woman to death. I needed to know more about the habits of snakes so that I could determine if it had been a homicide or an accident. I’d learned that boas are quite docile—if they’re well fed. The pair of gentle giants I’d met had let me stroke their smooth chins, had tasted me with a flick of their tongues, and then had merely watched me, deciding I was interesting but not a threat.
Starve a boa, however, and it can get ornery. Mean enough to take on a full grown human, even. The snake in question hadn’t been given anything to eat for two months. Hubby had “forgotten” to feed it while his wife was on vacation. He’d also gotten his wife to take out a rather large insurance policy before she went away. And he’d done a bad job of faking remorse when his wife was squeezed to death by her favorite pet.
I was getting morbid again. Mama G’s death had done that to me. And now, just a few hours after meeting José, I had placed my welfare—and a good chunk of my savings—in this stranger’s hands. I was trusting him to get me into Aztlan.
All I knew about the man was that he liked Corona beer and, like Rafael, was a wannabe combat biker. He was a fervid supporter of the Houston Mustangs—arch rivals of the Seattle Timber Wolves in this year’s race for the conference championships. He even had a tattoo of the team’s logo—a horse with motorcycle wheels instead of legs, popping a wheelie—on the back of his right hand. The colors were still fresh—the tattoo must have been brand new.
José and Rafael had immediately bonded by going mano a mano in a heated but friendly argument over which team would triumph in this year’s Biker Bowl conference championships, and had quoted a bewildering mass of sports statistics as evidence to support their case. Then they’d begun talking bikes. Four-stroke this and compression that—I knew enough about engines to coax my Americar back onto the road again when it stalled or blew its rad, but was bored silly by engine specs and performance capabilities. All I cared about was whether the bike I was riding on was going to make it into Aztlan. And that had more to do with the desert terrain and the vigilance of the military forces that lay between us and the border than it did the machine. And with Rafael’s skill as a motorcycle rider.
The border was relatively quiet this far out into the desert. The actual line in the sand was marked with a series of barbed wire fences, fitted out with contact sensors, listening arrays, and anti-personnel radar. This “electronic curtain” was said to be sensitive enough to distinguish an individual person, but José assured us that it was unreliable to the extent that half the time it was ignored. Both the Azzies and the rangers had chased after jackrabbits too many times to be bothered with any more false alarms. Larger radar signatures, however, were taken very seriously indeed.
In this stretch of west Texas, the fence itself was in poor repair. Smugglers in T-birds had punched a number of holes in it—holes that were often left unrepaired. All that was required was a distraction of some sort to get the border patrols looking elsewhere, and you could slip right through. Or so José asserted.
He stared out across the desert through a pair of binoculars. “It looks pretty quiet,” he said. “I don’t see anyth—”
The scream of engines split the night. The noise almost deafened me, even though my cyberear’s automatic noise-suppression system cut in almost immediately. Something flashed past overhead, tearing open the skies with a booming thunder that made all three of us duck.
“—frag was that?” Rafael shouted at José.
Our guide grinned. “A Texas Rangers Phantom IV jet.” He slipped the binoculars into a saddle bag and pulled his bandanna up over his mouth. “It’ll have scrambled in response to some activity nearby. I’d say our smuggler is about to make his run.”
I wondered for the millionth time how the Aztlan Freedom League got its information about smugglers, holes in the fence, and border patrol movements—and prayed that all of it was accurate. I guessed that the Phantom was the “air cover” José had been joking about earlier.
As the jet’s roar faded into the distance I heard another noise: the distinctive whine of a low-altitude vehicle. The sound was coming from behind and to our left, and approaching fast. My low-frequency boosters also picked out the grumble of heavier engines, somewhere beyond the border that lay ahead of us.
“Something’s headed this way,” I told José, pointing in the direction of the higher-pitched sound. “It’s making for the border.”
In another moment, the sound was close enough for the others to hear. “Let’s snag that flag,” José said, slamming the kick start of his bike with a booted foot.
Rafael laughed at the combat biker expression José had used and reverentially touched the Seattle Timber Wolves flag he’d clipped to his belt “for luck.” His huge bulk shifted as he hit his own kick start, and I wrapped my arms around his waist as he settled back on the seat. “Ready to rumble!” he called out.
By the light of the half moon I saw something moving across the desert. Fast and low, maybe a meter or so off the rock-strewn, washboard ground. About the size of a very large automobile, it rode on four thruster jets that left boiling dust in its wake. It was well to our left, a good klick or two away. Already it was almost even with our position.
As the fighter jet screamed past overhead once more, José surged forward on his dirt bike, aiming it at the border. Rafael gunned our bike and sent it roaring after him. We accelerated rapidly, dust spraying out behind us.
I
clung fast to Rafael’s broad waist and concentrated on keeping my feet on the pegs, which were rattling with each bump and lurch of the bike. I leaned into the turns with Rafael as we zoomed around rocks and other obstructions. I prayed each time we hit a bump and were airborne for a second or two—to which spirit or god, I wasn’t sure. But at the same time, I felt exhilarated. The warm wind whipped through my hair and ballooned out the back of my jacket. The smell of desert dust and motorcycle exhaust filled my nostrils. I could sense Rafael’s eager joy at the wildness of our ride. It was infectious, and I couldn’t help but give in to it. I whooped, and he fed the bike more gas, sending it scrambling up a low rise with a high, throaty engine whine.
José glanced back at us, making sure we were still following, then gunned his bike across the rise and disappeared down the other side of it. As we topped the hill behind him, I looked to the left and saw the T-bird, still screaming straight ahead at full thrust. It was slightly ahead of us now, aiming at the fence like a bullet.
The Phantom IV made one more pass overhead, deafening us with its sonic boom. The jet must have had its radar-controlled weapons systems locked on to the T-bird, but its pilot did not open fire. I guess José was right: the Texas Rangers liked to put on a show of force, but unofficially approved of the smuggling of illegal goods into Aztlan. The shipments messed with the country’s economy and morale, even if only slightly.
The Azzies, however, were another matter. With a civil war going on in their country, they took smuggling much more seriously.
Now the T-bird had reached the fence. It plowed through the barbed wire, tearing it open and dragging a tangle of it behind. Metal fence posts bounced and tumbled after the T-bird for several meters, plowing holes in the dirt. Then one snagged on something, and the remains of the fence tore free. As the smuggler raced on into Aztlan territory, the Phantom IV turned in a screaming arc over the buffer zone and disappeared behind us into the night, away from the border and back into CAS air space.