Pavel Yashin was pacing the house, from one room to another. Paul kept flipping channels trying to keep up with his restless movements.
“The guy is getting desperate,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s like he’s sitting on a time bomb with all that dope in his basement.”
Yashin had stopped trying to sell it on the streets since his two dealers got clipped by Bandur’s outfit. Now, he was spending most of his time on the phone trying to find a buyer-nothing but hang-ups so far. Paul changed to channel E. Yashin’s wife, Gloria, was in their bedroom, kneeling in front of an altar made of candles and pinned-up pics of the Virgin Mary. She kept her long-sleeved nightgown buttoned to the top. She crossed herself, and then the room and slipped into bed.
Paul said, “No wonder Yashin goes for hookers. She’s such a prude.” It was true. We’d been spying for a month and a half, and we hadn’t even seen them kiss.
Over to F: Natasha was reading again, another romance novel. My heart thumped in exhilaration. I watched her read, unable to stop despite my mounting guilt over deceiving her by intruding on her privacy. It looked like she’d be staying in for a change. She’d been out every night for the past two weeks, half those nights with her friends, the other half at my place. Paul didn’t know about us. I told him I was seeing somebody but didn’t tell him who. It was getting harder to cover my tracks. Yesterday, she sat in bed and wrote me a letter. If you zoomed the cam in, you could read my name. I had to erase that section of the recording to keep Paul from seeing it. I’d eventually have to come clean with him.
Back to B: Pavel Yashin wasn’t there. Paul ran through the channels hunting for him, stopping on F. There he was, standing in Natasha’s doorway. Somehow, he’d managed to open her door without her noticing. She was on her bed, engrossed in her book, unaware of his presence. He just stood there, staring long enough that I started to feel uneasy. Eventually, he pulled the door shut as silently as he’d opened it. She kept twirling her hair all the while-lost in her fictional world.
Paul jumped back to B in time to see Yashin settle on the couch. “What was that about?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
“That is one strange family, Juno. You ever notice how they don’t talk to each other.”
“Yeah.” My stomach clenched. What am I getting into with Natasha? Why was it that I had such a thing for women with problems? Tall, dark, and fucked up. That was my type. I needed to be careful around her. We were having a good time together, but I didn’t want to fall for her. I really didn’t.
Yashin poured a drink for himself, downed it in a hurry, and poured another. He placed a call. A holo of Ram Bandur flickered into his living room. Both Paul and I perked up. Why would he be calling the man who killed two of his dealers?
Yashin said, “I have a proposition for you.”
“What is it?”
“I have surplus product that I thought you might want to take off my hands.”
“Is that why you’re poachin’ my territory? Just ’cause you have some extra shit you want to dump, you think you have the right to sell in my territory. You steal from me and then you want to do business?
"FUCK YOU!”
Yashin winced at the fury coming from Bandur’s cheery-faced hologram. “I’ll give you a good price,” he said.
“What you got?”
“Eight hundred kilos of O.”
“What you askin’?”
“Kilo for kilo.”
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me! What kind of fucked-up deal is that? I did you a favor by not killing you for poaching my territory. Is this how you show your ’preciation, you cocksucker?” Bandur hung up.
Paul smiled wide. “This is our chance, Juno.”
“What chance?”
“When Yashin sells the opium to Bandur, we’ll nail both of them.”
“Bandur didn’t sound too interested in buying.”
“Kilo for kilo-that’s hardly a bargain.” One kilo of opium for a kilo of pesos. “They’re just negotiating. We have to be patient.”
I took one last bite and put my fork down.
“Do you want some more?”
“No, I’m full.”
Natasha had cooked up a chicken with apricots over rice. She was nervous about it. Her mother taught her how to prepare it, but her mother used ’guana instead of chicken. When I’d asked her why she didn’t use ’guana, she said it was a special occasion. I thought the chicken was a little dry. I told her it was delicious.
Natasha took her brandy to my couch and pulled her feet up. “What was your family like?”
I joined her on the couch. She listened with rapt attention as I open-booked my life for her. I could tell her anything-judgment free. I told her about Tenttown. I told her how my father would tie me up while he beat my mother. I showed her the rope-burn scars. I told her how I was always getting kicked out of school for fighting. When she asked if I had any regrets, I told her that I wished I had killed my father before his liver beat me to it.
“Really? You wouldn’t feel guilty killing your own father?”
“The bastard deserved it. I deserved the chance to kill him myself. His liver robbed me of my vengeance. It was my only chance to see the world as a fair place.”
She wouldn’t let it drop. She kept asking questions about my father and how I could possibly kill him, my own flesh and blood. He beat my mother. I didn’t know how much plainer I could make it.
She asked me if I’d had any happy times when I was growing up. I told her about how my mother and I used to make shabbakia together. Natasha had never heard of it. No surprise there. Nobody had ever heard of it. I’d never seen the honey-soaked pastries anywhere on Lagarto, not once. It was an Earth thing. Moroccan was what my mother would say. I didn’t even know how my mother learned to make it, but whenever she managed to scrape a few coins together, that was what we’d do. It would take the entire day, buying the ingredients, mixing the dough, forming it into rosettes. Then we’d stack up the trays and carry them to the public deep fryers. Next we’d bring the hot golden pastries all the way back to our tent and soak them a pot of honey that sat over the fire. I was amazed Natasha was still listening when I told her that we’d finish it off by sprinkling the shabbakia with toasted sesame seeds.
She had more questions, but I refused to answer until she answered some of mine.
Her favorite flower was a lily. Her favorite food: lamb.
She told me she’d had a big brother who died of pneumonia before she was born. She wished he were still here. She would’ve loved having a brother. She was proud of the fact that her mother saw to it that his first name would be her middle name. That way her brother would always be with her.
She liked school. She didn’t like sports. She loved to read. She hated to play games-cards, dominoes, mahjong…She didn’t like any of them.
I asked about her father. She told me he was a bellhop who dealt O on the side until he made enough money to start his own drug business. When I asked about her mother, she said her mother didn’t know what her father did for a living, and if she did, she’d have to Hail Mary for eternity. She thought her mother had to know on some level, but it was too scary for her to confront, so she just stayed away from the basement.
I wanted to ask more about her father. I’d seen the strange ways she’d interact with him. I knew she was holding something back, but fair’s fair. I held back the fact that I spied on her every day.
I woke with the sunrise, Natasha’s arm across my chest. I traced the scar on her wrist with my finger.
“That tickles,” she said as she pulled her arm away and rolled over.
I curled up next to her, “Where did you get that scar?”
She tensed under my hold. “I ran into a glass door when I was little. I thought the door was open. It was stupid.”
I tried to sound natural but came off guarded. “Oh…that must’ve been awful.”
“It was.”
The room began
to warm with the sun beaming in. I didn’t want to let go of her but I forced myself to get up and turn the aircon to full. By the time I went back to the bed, Natasha was already up and getting dressed.
I didn’t want her to leave yet. “Do you want some coffee?”
“Sure.”
The sink was full of dishes from the previous night. I worked around them, rinsing the coffeepot and starting some water on the stove. “You like it black, right?”
Natasha came out buttoning her shirt. “Yeah.”
I was pulling two mugs out of the cupboard when Natasha came up behind me and put her arms around me. “Are you my knight in shining armor?”
I wanted to be. “I don’t know… Am I?”
“When are you going to arrest my father?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“We need more evidence,” I lied.
“How soon will you have it?”
“Why do you want me to arrest your father?”
“Because I hate him.”
“Why?”
After a pause she repeated, “How soon?”
“I don’t know.”
She held on to me while I poured the coffee. Then we sat across the table from each other. I watched her blow on her coffee before each sip. She barely moved her lips as she blew, like she knew a pucker would be unbecoming. She was all cool grace on the surface, but if you looked close, you could see what I now thought of as the slow burn smoldering behind her eyes.
I asked her, “What about your mother?” She puzzled at my question. “Do you hate her, too?”
She put the mug down. It clunked on the table. “I don’t want to get into it.”
Another week had passed. Natasha and I had seen each other every single day. We would meet for lunch. We would meet for dinner. We would talk for hours.
For me, the highlight of the week came two days ago. I’d left Natasha at my place while Paul and I spent the day beefing up our arrest numbers. We busted a pair of pimps that we’d busted six months earlier, and then we nabbed four dealers, all of them repeats of earlier arrests. As long as nobody paid much attention to the fact that we’d begun arresting the same people over and over, we’d be able to keep up our numbers indefinitely.
After Paul and I had finished a long work day, we went back to the stakeout pad to fast-forward through a day’s worth of video. Nothing new. I’d finally arrived back home at a little before midnight. Natasha was still there, but she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. I didn’t want to wake her, so I went quietly into the kitchen to grab a snack. I flicked on the light. The counters were covered with platters stacked high with shabbakia.
Tonight, I pulled a piece free from a cluster of rosettes that had stuck together. I took a bite and savored every bit of it. I said, “I still can’t believe you made this for me.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you tell me another one of your stories?”
She loved cop stories, the ones where the good guy catches the bad guy. Her fiery eyes would glow as I spun the police tales. Some nights, we’d stay up the entire night, her curled up on my shoulder, me churning out yarn after yarn. It didn’t take long for me to run out of stories, so I began making them up. The one time I’d admitted that most of the stories weren’t true, she’d just hushed me and made me tell her another.
I was eighty-sixed on stories. I had to think on it for a few. I ate another piece of shabbakia while she waited for me to start. I couldn’t come up with anything else so I started with this: “A little while back, Paul and I caught a tip on an offworld buyer who was on the surface looking to score some O.”
“Really, an offworlder?”
I licked my fingers. “Yeah. Her name’s Mai Nguyen, and she has two badass bodyguards…”
I told her how we found Nguyen and her heavies at a hotel and tailed her out to an abandoned factory where a big drug deal was going down. When the seller turned out to be her father, she was tip-to-toe captivated. To Natasha, he was the baddest of all bad guys. I told her the whole story-the abandoned factory, the flycam, how I wound up shitting myself when I got zapped, how everybody got away.
She kissed the scars on my hand and said, “That was the best one yet.”
“But it didn’t have a happy ending. The bad guys got away.”
She smiled that delicious smile of hers. “They didn’t get away. The story’s just not over yet.”
ELEVEN
JUNE 29, 2787
I was early-couldn’t sleep. Thoughts of my past had kept me awake all night.
I sat on the north dock, waiting for Maggie Orzo. A half hour ago, the dock had been bustling with fishermen loading bait into their boats. Now it was mostly quiet, just the peaceful slosh of waves and the creak of ropes pulled taut by the boats they tethered. Slowly, the stars dimmed and disappeared as the first of the sun’s rays kicked off the five hours of daylight.
I called down to HQ and had them pull Kapasi’s record: sentenced to five years for running a gambling ring. Released to the Army after three. The prosecutor’s name was Wilhelm Glazer.
I rang up Prosecutor Glazer. I could tell by his voice that I woke him, even though his holo looked wide awake with a holographic diploma floating over its shoulder-pretentious jerk.
I asked, “You remember a guy you busted for running games named Jhuko Kapasi?”
“Yeah, I remember him. He was running ’guana fights. I sent him to the Zoo for a nickel. Why are you interested in him?”
“We’re looking at him for a murder.”
“Is he out? Has it been five years already?”
“No, he got two years cut off his sentence to serve in the Army.”
“That figures. I want to know who came up with that idea-an Army of ex-cons. Dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. Someday they’ll join in with the warlords and attack us. ”
“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
“Not the guy I sent up. He was strictly a hustler, but you never can tell what a few years in prison will do to a man.”
“I need to know what he’s been up to lately. Can you tell me who he ran with back then that we could talk to?”
“I don’t know anybody that could help you there. He made more enemies than friends with his hustles. He lived with his brother who raised the ’guanas in the basement. You could try to talk to him, but I don’t think you’ll get much out of him. He’s slow-some kind of retard. My guess is he’ll still be living at the house. He was living with a younger sister named Isabel who used to take care of him. She was maybe sixteen, and a real looker, but she disappeared the same day Kapasi got sentenced. It must’ve been tough for the poor retard to lose a brother and a sister the same day. He didn’t have any other family to speak of.”
“What do you mean she disappeared?”
“I mean she disappeared. She went missing. The police got on it, but they never found her. If you ask me, she was lookin’ at a life of taking care of her half-baked brother all on her own, and she took off. Can’t say I blame her.”
“Can you think of anybody else Kapasi may have associated with?”
“No, that’s it.”
I hung up after getting the brother’s name, Sanje Kapasi. I already had the address.
Maggie arrived with coffee. She was dressed smartly, loose-fitting blouse over color-coordinated ironed pants. Her clothes were too good for a cop, but not fancy enough to betray how rich she was. “Good morning, Juno,” she said with a casual smile, her hair still damp from a morning shower. She was pretty, there was no denying it. I had to remind myself of how easy it was to look that good with her kind of money. To her, getting nipped, tucked, lifted, and lipoed was as easy as getting a haircut.
“Morning, Maggie. Thanks for the coffee.” I took the coffee with my left and took a sip-too hot. I wanted to take off the lid and get it to cool faster, but there was no way to do it without spilling. I’d just have to wait a while.
We chartered a b
oat to take us to Loja, two hours upriver. The river was the fastest way. There were no good roads to Loja; the damn things would get overrun by jungle so fast that the government couldn’t keep them clear.
Loja was founded at the junction of the Koba and Vistuba Rivers. It was only a fraction of the size of Koba; still, it was the second largest city on Lagarto. In its glory days, it was a bustling port, but now it was just a hollowed-out husk of a city. The smart people migrated downriver by the boatload and left that second-rate town to rot.
The Army would be interrogating Jhuko Kapasi by now. No way we’d get to see him, but with any luck we’d be able to get something out of the brother, find out what kind of rackets he was into. Jimmy Bushong’s story repeated in my mind. Jhuko Kapasi: hustler ex-con, running games in the Army and selling O to his lieutenant. One night he took six POWs out in the jungle and came back without them. His lieutenant was so incensed that he sent the whole unit into combat with sabotaged weapons. And now that lieutenant was dead, lipless.
And somehow the mayor was involved. Paul’s instincts were rarely wrong. My hands clutched. I felt juiced, back in the game. Paul needed me to connect this to the mayor. One way or another, I’d do it. Who the fuck does the mayor think he is, making a play for KOP? That’s Paul’s turf.
Maggie and I sat on mildewed cushions and rode slowly away from the dock. Buoys bobbed on either side, guiding the way. Once in deeper water, the driver opened up the throttle and turned into the current. The sun rose but was quickly overtaken by thick clouds from the east. The city gradually faded behind us, and we were alone on the river, leaving a wake of black-green water rolling into the reeds and mangroves of the riverbank.
I sprayed on a thick coat of bug spray and relaxed into the cushions, settled in for the ride.
“Juno, can I ask you something?” I could barely hear Maggie’s voice over the motor’s roar.
“Yeah.”
“Are you dirty?”
I hesitated-damn it. Then I looked at her expectant eyes: second mistake. “Yeah, I’m dirty.”
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