Kop k-1

by Warren Hammond

  I moved the car across the street for a better view of the front and got a spot in the shade. I kept the car running with the pedal floored to keep the aircon pumping.

  I settled into my seat. Maggie had her head leaning on the window-probably fell asleep. She’d been up all night.

  I scoped the parade of ex-cons passing in and out of the boardinghouse-zeroed on harelips.

  “Juno?”

  I guess she wasn’t asleep. “Yeah.”

  “How’s your jaw?”

  “It hurts a little, not too bad anymore. It looks worse than it is.”

  “You know I can take care of myself, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Then why did you attack Mark Josephs like that?”

  “I was angry.”

  “You’re always angry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yuan Kim talked to me about you.”

  “The guy’s an idiot, Maggie.”

  “I know he is, but don’t you want to know what he said?”

  “What?”

  Maggie tucked her hair behind her ear. “He said he’s sorry that I have to work with you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He had a lot of reasons.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He said you’re just a hothead, and you’re still working vice because you have no smarts for being in homicide. He said the only way you got anywhere at all was by using muscle to intimidate people, and you’re too dumb to see that nobody is afraid of you anymore. He called you a shaky old man that should have been bounced out of the force years ago.”

  “Gee, thanks for sugarcoating it, Maggie.”

  With an amused look, she said, “There was more.”

  “I can’t wait to hear it.”

  “He said you’re the chief’s bitch.”

  “He said ‘bitch’?”

  Now she was laughing as she nodded her head. “He said Chief Chang tells you what to think. He’d be surprised if you ever had a thought of your own.”

  “Was that it?” I asked as I wished that I’d pounded that asshole when I had the chance.

  “He said you would have lost your job a long time ago if you weren’t the chief’s yes-man. He thinks the only reason that the chief threw this case to you is as a favor, so you could prove you can still perform.”

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s right about you being a hothead, but he’s wrong about everything else, especially the part about you being stupid. He shouldn’t underestimate you like that. I think Chief Chang put you on this case because he wants it solved, and he knows you’ll do whatever it takes to get results. Now, I’ve been honest; you tell me why you got so angry at Josephs that you attacked him.”

  “Hell, I don’t know what to tell you, Maggie. I know you can take care of yourself, and I know you don’t need me to protect you, but when I saw what he did to your picture, it made me angry that he would disrespect you like that. You’re my partner.” I braced for another lecture.

  Maggie didn’t say anything for a while. “Thanks.” She patted my hand-the shaking one-then let her hand rest over mine. I froze. Pull away! My hand stayed where it was. My heartbeat picked up, and my body went prickly.

  She took her hand back and focused on the door.

  I scrambled for words. The silence was stifling. “You surprise me. I thought you’d still be furious with me.”

  She thought before responding. “I guess I’m realizing it’s just who you are. I just can’t believe you’re still alive with that temper.”

  “Sometimes I can’t believe it either.”

  “I looked up your record. It surprises me even more that you’ve never killed anybody.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read.” I let my statement hang. I wished I hadn’t said it.

  “You scare me, Juno.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “No, not like that. You scare me because you bring out parts of me that I didn’t know I had.”

  “Bad parts?”

  “Yeah.”

  FIFTEEN

  I was sick of sitting in the car so I sat on a mossy stoop, sipping an icy soda. The boardinghouse was directly across the street. I kept one eye on the front door and the other on the occasional gecko attracted to the smell of dew gathering on the soda bottle. Maggie would be back in a couple minutes. She’d run out for some food.

  Luckily, the sun had gone under dark heavy clouds. I felt a raindrop on the back of my quivering hand. Yuan Kim told Maggie I was a shaky old man. Does everybody know? It didn’t take long for Maggie to figure out I had a problem. Look at the damn thing shake. It would take a blind man not to notice. What the hell were you thinking? I was like one of those guys who combs his hair over his balding head and thinks nobody will notice the difference.

  The rain was coming down hard now. It stung like hot needles. My hand swayed back and forth as I let the downpour massage my neck and back. I’d told only Niki and Abdul about my hand. Niki because I couldn’t hide it from her and Abdul because he knew more about medicine than any other doctor I ever met.

  I remembered lying on the cold steel autopsy table. Thinking about it, I could still smell the formaldehyde. I remembered how the gutters that ran down the table dug into my back, making me squirm as he examined me. “Please stay still, Juno. I’m not used to patients that move.”

  “Sorry, Abdul. It’s these damn gutters. It’s a wonder you don’t get more complaints.”

  “I don’t hear the janitors complaining when all they have to do is empty a bucket. You’d be surprised how many fluids come out of a body.”

  Abdul spent more time on the nets than he did looking at my hand. He scanned through terabytes of data on the nervous system. His eyes strained through his thick glasses at floating bubbles of holographic text. He grabbed out the relevant snippets and diagrams and tossed them around the autopsy room until the place looked like a fragmented 3-D comic book. Finally, he pulled up a stool. “Looks like you have some nerve damage, old friend. It’s taken twenty years to manifest itself this way, but it’s just going to get worse.”

  My hand tingled as I thought of wrapping it around that bitch Nguyen’s throat. “Can you do anything for it?”

  “No. We don’t have the right equipment.”

  “Does anybody?”

  “Not on Lagarto. Nobody has anything that sophisticated down here.”

  “Offworlders could fix the damage?”

  “Of course they could. They could even grow you a new hand.”

  By now, the rain had completely soaked through my clothes. I squeezed my hand into a trembling fist-offworlders. Sons of bitches would float across our nighttime sky, a mocking bright light that crossed from horizon to horizon every hour and twenty-three minutes. They could have grown me a new hand. They could have cured my mother’s rot. They even could have repaired Ali Zorno’s harelip. He could have had a childhood without being tormented over his looks. Instead the offworlders sold medicine to us- sold it. It didn’t matter if we could afford it.

  I realized how conspicuous I looked sitting in the sheeting downpour, so I moved into the doorway of the potato woman. She sat on a three-legged stool in her tiny alcove with potatoes piled on the dirt floor. She lightly flogged the potatoes with a long bundle of grass to keep the lizards away. I dripped rainwater into a muddy puddle around my soaking shoes. I picked out a half dozen potatoes, looking for ones that hadn’t sprouted roots.

  An offworld woman hopped into the alcove. She had her normal-person look going. There was no telling what she could morph into, but she currently looked like one of us except for her drop-dead-gorgeous looks. Nobody looked that good naturally. She crowded next to me. I felt warmth kick off her tech-heated skin. Rainwater steamed off her clothes.

  She beamed plumb teeth and luxurious lips. “Some weather you get down here.”

  “Uh-huh,” I responded.

  “And the days are so short here. I thought it wa
s supposed to be summer.”

  “Go figure,” I said.

  The calendar was just one more thing that was fucked up about this planet. The Mexican scientists that first colonized this place were a bunch of sentimental shits. They liked their Cinco de Mayo on May fifth, and they liked their Navidad on December twenty-fifth, so they kept the Earth calendar. They accommodated the fact that our days are only twenty-two hours long by making every month three days longer and leaving February at twenty-eight, giving us a three-hundred-ninety-eight-day year instead of the Earth three-hundred sixty-five. They ignored the fact that Lagarto cycled around the sun every six hundred eighty of our days, yet we would cycle through their three-hundred-ninety-eight-day calendar two-hundred eighty-two days faster. One year June might land in our early winter, like this year. And the next it might be in the dead of summer.

  The offworlder kept up the small talk. “Do you know how to get to a restaurant called the Starry Night? I’m meeting a friend there.”

  I knew the place. “No. Never heard of it.”

  The potato woman volunteered directions, drawing a map in the dirt.

  Somebody was running down the street. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was Zorno. There was something about the way he ran, upright with his arms barely moving at his sides. His gait was clumsy and uneven. His legs were running, but the top half of his body wasn’t. He tried leaping over puddles only to land in their centers, kicking up big splashes that he didn’t seem to mind. His sopping shirt clung to the broad shoulders of a man that looked like he’d loaded barges for a living. Lieutenant Vlotsky never stood a chance against this guy. Once those gorilla arms clamped around his neck, it would have been impossible to break his grip. Only an offworlder would’ve had the strength to do it. If they didn’t just electrocute you.

  Zorno made it to the door of the boardinghouse and stopped to shake off some of the water. He wrung out his shirttails and pant legs, his mouth frozen in a lopsided snarl. He looked over, seeing me and my bag of potatoes. He grimaced and turned into the building like somebody who has had people staring at him all his life and didn’t like it.

  I interrupted the potato woman’s direction-giving to pay. I noticed Maggie was back in the car and hurried through the rain and sat down uncomfortably in my wet clothes. “He’s inside. He saw me buying potatoes. When he comes out, you’ll have to follow him; he might recognize me. I’ll call you, and we’ll keep the line open the whole time. I’ll follow in the car at a safe distance. You keep me updated. You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “This is for real, Maggie.”

  “I know.”

  Maggie kept the wipers going. My eyes strained through the water-blurred windshield. Maggie used her napkin to wipe off the fog that formed on the inside. We waited, and we waited.

  After two hours, I started feeling antsy, so I rang up the Zoo. Zorno had only been out of jail for a few weeks, yet he’d landed a contract for a hit. I was figuring that he must have made some contacts in prison.

  I got prison guard Fatima DuBois on the line. Her image sat in the backseat. I conferenced it so Maggie could participate.

  I said, “We need to talk to you about Ali Zorno.”

  DuBois wore her hair up, streaks of gray ran throughout. “You mean Fishhook? Yeah, I know the guy. They never should have let him go. He has no business being on the street. He just isn’t stable.”

  I got chummy, making her feel like she was one of us cops rather than a cop wannabe. “You’re sure right about that. People like us can just spot ’em, can’t we?”

  “You bet we can. They ought to get rid of juries and put us in there. Regular citizens can’t tell if somebody’s guilty. They have to guess. They don’t know guilty like we do.”

  “You’re onto something there, Fatima. Can you tell us who he associated with?”

  “Why?”

  “We’re looking at him for a murder. We’re hoping we might find somebody that he was friends with, somebody he’d confide in.”

  “That’s kinda tough. He was mostly a loner. The only guy he ever seemed to talk to was his old cellmate.”

  “Can we talk to him?”

  “Nope. He was released a year ago.”

  “What’s the cellmate’s name? We’ll try to look him up.”

  “Kapasi. Jhuko Kapasi. Check with the Army, he went in-”

  I stopped listening to her, the name sinking in. Kapasi. What the fuck?

  The sun eventually burned through the clouds and doused the street with rays that made wet cars twinkle as they drove by.

  Maggie said, “I can’t believe they were cellmates.”

  “I can’t believe it either.” My brain short-circuited every time I thought about it. Our hitman was cellmates with our original suspect. I slouched into the seat cushions.

  Maggie was pumped. “What about Kapasi’s sister? Brenda Redfoot was looking at Zorno for her disappearance. Can you believe it; Kapasi gets sent up to the Zoo and ends up rooming with his sister’s killer. Can you imagine his grief, losing a sister like that and not knowing that the murderer was sleeping in the next bunk? He was the last person he saw every night; the first person he saw in the morning. Do you think Zorno knew?”

  “I’m sure he did. Serials have long memories. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kapasi told him about how he had a sister that disappeared. Zorno would have figured it out-probably played it real cool asking questions like, ‘How old was she?’ and ‘What did she look like?’ Meanwhile he’s sitting there the whole time, knowing what he did to her. He probably still has her lips stashed away somewhere.”

  “Do you think Kapasi hired Zorno to kill his lieutenant?”

  My mind said, “No. It was the mayor. Paul couldn’t be wrong about this.” My mouth said, “Could be. We know Kapasi had motive. If somebody gave me a bum gun and sent me into combat, I’d be angry enough to kill.” I left it at that. I was stringing her along, letting her think whatever she wanted. It was the mayor who was behind this. Kapasi and Zorno being cellmates was just a coincidence. It had to be.

  Maggie started questioning herself, reasoning it through. “But why hire Zorno when you could kill Lieutenant Vlotsky yourself? Maybe Kapasi was just a tough talker. He didn’t have a violent background. He was just a scam artist. He didn’t have the guts to do the job himself, so he hired Zorno. Little did he know that the guy he hired, the guy he roomed with in prison, killed his own sister.”

  “Where’d he get the money? That was a large pile of cash we found in that mattress.”

  “Kapasi was dealing opium and running games in the Army. He used the profits to buy Zorno. That has to be it. Maybe he sold the mystery POWs back to the warlords. That might net him enough money.”

  Pieces were falling into place. I tried to mentally poke holes in her reasoning, but the more I poked, the more her theory made sense. But it had to be the mayor that bought Zorno. Paul needed it to be the mayor.

  Maggie asked, “Can we get in to see Kapasi?”

  “Not yet. Paul’s trying to get the mils to let us in to see him. He’ll tell us when he gets through.”

  Maggie nodded.

  Zorno came out and tromped in our direction. I sank down as far as I could with this creaky old body. I felt his shadow crawl over me as he passed by.

  Maggie waited impatiently for ten seconds and stalked out after him. I immediately rang her up. I set it up as a hologram-free phone connection.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” she said.

  “Okay, Maggie. I’ll be just a step behind you.”

  I U-turned onto the street and crept up behind her. Where is he? Don’t worry about him…just keep your eyes on Maggie. Maggie had to double-time to keep up with him. Her shirt was instantly perspiration-stained under the arms and down the center of the back.

  A flyer roared overhead. Zorno paused to watch, and Maggie ducked into a shop in case he looked back. I pulled to the side, letting traffic roll by. The flyer buzzed the rooftops. Offworld pass
engers were sure to have their heads pressed against the glass, looking down at us savages. It was painted camouflage style, as if that thing could ever blend into the surroundings. There were at least a dozen offworld resorts on Lagarto, and one of their main attractions was a flyer ride out to the remote jungle for a monitor shoot. Offworld tourists would rough it in airconned tents while trappers let caged monitors loose right outside the tent flaps for them to pop with scattershot lase-rifles that couldn’t miss.

  The resorts were offworld owned and operated. This was our planet, yet Lagartans were relegated to cleaning the rooms and washing the dishes at cut-rate salaries. Paul never saw that one coming. He always thought Lagartans would be the main benefactors of increased tourism. It had never occurred to him that offworlders would develop their own resorts and keep millions of tourist dollars from entering the Lagartan economy. Zorno watched until the flyer dropped out of sight then renewed his fast-paced walk.

  Maggie turned into a vacant lot that kids used as a playground. I pulled over to the side and saw Zorno already on the far side of the lot. Damn, he’s heading for Floodbank. That neighborhood floated on pontoons-no cars. When the rainy season came, the Koba River flooded that area. It stayed underwater for three-fourths of the year. It was a large expanse of useless mud for the rest of the year.

  “Maggie, I’m going to have to ditch the car. I’ll follow on foot.”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.”

  I left the car curbside and hurried into the lot. Maggie was out of sight. I said, “I’m on foot. Where are you?”

  “I’m about to cross the canal bridge-the one by the church.”

  I jogged until she came back into view then slowed to a quick march as I tried to bring my breathing back under control. I closed the distance between us so I could keep her in sight once we started into Floodbank’s intricate system of makeshift walkways.

  Following the Lagartan economic collapse, the unemployment rate ran sixty percent, yet for years immigrants like my ancestors continued to arrive, victims of the incredibly slow speed of interstellar travel and communications. They arrived at the spaceport, received their papers, paid their citizenship fees, and were bussed to Tenttown. Here’s a tent with a little free space. You and your family will like it here. Disease and starvation took out a third of them.