The sidewalks were crowded with merchants. Shopkeepers were busy moving racks of wares onto the walk. Vendors on the street side were propping open boarded-up windows, cutting the sidewalk down to a narrow path for pedestrians to navigate. It was like walking through a tunnel with walls made of butchered chickens, cheap sunglasses, stacked cigarettes, and skin vids. I bought some ’mander tacos—extra hot.
We turned into a narrowing alley. On the left, we passed a window filled with fried fish wrapped in newspaper; on the right, skinned iguanas hanging on hooks. We took a left, to the river. At this point, the walkways were made of sandbags, three layers deep. Rank water lapped the sides of the sandbag bridge. Fish innards bobbed on the surface among iridescent swirls of oil. Planks ran from the sandbag bridge to a row of shops on stilts.
We emerged from the market. The river rolled in front of us. We hopped a skiff downriver. Maggie ate quietly. I ate with my left and made a damn mess.
Private Jimmy Bushong from Tenttown wasn’t first on the list of ten enlistees in Vlotsky’s unit, but he lived the closest to KOP station. I checked my watch. Jessie would be running the story on the news any minute. The military was about to be cover-their-ass alerted to Lieutenant Vlotsky’s death. They’d be snapped to attention and engaged in Operation Roundup That Unit. They didn’t like civvy cops and civvy reporters nosing around in their business. I hoped we’d be able to get to Bushong first.
We rode the skiff down one of the canals that ran into the Tenttown neighborhood. The water took on the familiar sewage smell that I remembered so vividly from my childhood. Women stood knee-deep washing clothes. Young children swam naked as youths hauled buckets of water for boiling.
My great-grandparents settled here in Tenttown along with countless other families that made the fourteen-year journey from Earth. They came lured by the promise of work. The brandy market was surging. The plantation owners needed labor, so they advertised all over Earth’s third world, and my great-grandparents answered the call, selling everything they had to buy their way here on a cargo freighter. They came for the high wages, the free housing, and the bright future.
But by the time they arrived, the brandy market had collapsed. Somebody had smuggled a pair of brandy tree saplings offplanet, and soon after, all the settled planets began raising their own fruit. Why pay extra to import Lagartan brandy when the local variety was just as good? Especially when it took anywhere from five to thirty years to ship it in from Lagarto?
In fact, the brandy market had already been dead for twenty years by the time my great-grandparents landed. The plantation owners had sent message to Earth that they didn’t need any more labor, but even at light speed, it still took ten years for the message to reach Earth, and by the time it was received, my great-grandparents were already four years into their journey. When they finally made landfall, they found that all but a few of the sprawling plantations had already reverted to jungle, and all the great riverboats had been sealed up and left to rust.
My great-grandparents were taken to Tenttown, nothing more than a succession of slashed and burned fields upon which do-gooders raised tents for the twenty-four-year stream of immigrants that landed after the economic crash. No jobs, no homes, no medicine, no food—welcome to Lagarto.
Jimmy Bushong’s address was listed simply as “Tenttown.” A half hour’s worth of asking around my old stomping grounds and we located him at a canal party. It didn’t matter that it was still early afternoon. As soon as the sun went down in Tenttown, the youth came out for good times. I checked out the four-piece band cranking out the tunes. I scoped the sweated-up dancers, barefoot in the mud, their whites rolled up to the knee. I took it all in: buckets of shine with enough tin cups to go around, eye-straining strobe lights, mud-coated topless chicks speaking in tongues. My heart swelled with teenaged memories.
We led Jimmy away from the party, to the canal’s edge, which was coated with slippery-wet moss. Reptilian eyes reflected from the water below. Maggie was silent. I took the lead. “You serve under Lieutenant Dmitri Vlotsky?”
“That’s right.” Jimmy was dressed in his whites. His pants were rolled up, exposing mud-caked bare feet. His sleeves were rolled to the shoulder, showing off his Army tats. He had a boy’s face with Army-cut hair. His eyes had been replaced with metallic night-vision implants. He was sipping from a tin cup, drinking shine. My mouth watered.
“Where were you last night?” I asked.
Jimmy said, “Right here. Why?”
“Lieutenant Vlotsky was murdered last night.”
“Murdered? Shit, you serious? Can’t say I’m surprised, but shit, that’s fucked up.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You gonna tell anybody I talked to you?”
“No.”
“Know what? I don’t care if you do tell anybody. My two years is up next month, that’s right, next month. It ain’t worth it to ’em to send me back out on patrol, so I’ll be workin’ a desk while the rest of the Two-Nine is goin’ back to the jungle. Not me, man. I tell you, I’m through with that jungle shit. I can’t wait ’til they pop out these night vision eyes and give me back my biologicals. As long as they didn’t lose ’em like they lost my cousin’s. He had to wait almost a year for them to get a new set grown ‘n’ flown from the Orbital. Say, man, you guys’re cops, you think I got a chance of landin’ a job like that? I’m not talkin’ no detective shit. I know you gotta be smart for that. I’m talkin’ phones, filin’, you know, ’ministrative shit. I did some of that in basic before they sent me out on patrol with the Two-Nine. I was the best they seen in a long time. Sorry to see me go. That’s what they told me.”
I threw the kid a bone. “I can put in a good word. You look me up when they let you out. KOP can use a smart and honest guy like you.”
“You serious? Yeah, you’re serious. Ha, ha, what’s your name again?”
“Just ask for Juno.”
“Juno. Okay. Thanks, man.”
“Why weren’t you surprised about Vlotsky?”
“Yeah right, the lieutenant. We all wanted to kill that asshole. I didn’t sign up for the shit he put us through.”
“What did he do?”
“You see, we was workin’ out of a base upriver, you know, jungle duty. We’d spend two weeks doin’ maneuvers, then one week on the base. Now these maneuvers was fucked up. They’d give us a truck. Four walk in front, four in back. Two guys take turns drivin’.”
We didn’t have time for this. The mils would be here soon. “What about Lieutenant Vlotsky? We just need to know about Vlotsky.”
Jimmy sounded insulted. “Shit. I know, man. You want to know about the lieutenant, but you got to have some background in order to understand; you see what I’m sayin’? I ain’t goin’ to waste your time. You’re goin’ to want to hear this.”
“Sorry. You’re right, Jimmy. Go ahead.”
“Now, when the rest of us are doin’ maneuvers, Vlotsky takes a bedroll, ties it to the top of the truck, and sleeps. You believe that shit? I’m talkin’ all day. I don’t know how he does it—these roads are rough. I couldn’t sleep like that. The truck’d get stuck in the mud all the time. We’d be shovelin’ out, and Lieutenant Vlotsky’d be up their snoozin’ away. Only time you see him’s when it rains, then he sits in the cab.”
Maggie Orzo asked, “What’s the purpose of these maneuvers?”
His metal eyes swiveled inhumanly. “That’s the kicker, man; there is no purpose. We ride around all day lookin’ for this hill, that creek—shit like that. Shit, this ain’t no real war. If it was, we’d be invadin’ and shit, but they never give us those kinds of orders. We could wipe them out inside a year, I guarantee it. Shit, they ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of farmers.”
“They’re drug lords, Jimmy,” Maggie emphasized the words drug lords like it proved something.
“Shit, I know that, but they ain’t so dangerous. There ain’t no money in brandy no more, so they growin’ poppies. So what? Who’s it
hurtin’? They sell most of that O to offworlders anyway. It’s the politicians that make them out to be some kinda threat. You know they do that ’cause they just want to keep those offworlders sendin’ in that aid. Shit, man, they gettin’ rich off that money.”
“That aid keeps us from getting overrun by the warlords. Without it, we’d lose our independence.” Maggie was wasting time, getting into it with the kid.
“You believe that shit? They just talk all that freedom and democracy bullshit to keep that aid money comin’ in. I know for a fact that they don’t want to win no war. If they did, we’d a won it thirty years ago. The politicians hold us back from goin’ all out on the warlords. They know that if we took the warlords out, there’d be no more reason for them offworlders to keep sendin’ in that aid, you hear what I’m sayin’. I’d be surprised if half that money makes it to the Army. Shit yeah! They keep us runnin’ around the jungle doin’ a couple raids here and there to make it look good, but they ain’t serious about winnin’ no war.”
Maggie started to speak, but I cut her off before she could parrot more bullshit propaganda. “Tell us about Vlotsky.”
“Nobody likes the lieutenant. For my first few months, things was pretty smooth, but then things got real bad when they swapped in six new soldiers. Two of them enlisted like me, but the other four got sentenced.”
Maggie interrupted. “What do you mean sentenced?”
“Yeah, you believe that shit? These assholes are criminals—I’m talkin’ hard-core. Some dumb-fuck judge gives them shorter jail terms in exchange for service. I guess they’re havin’ trouble recruitin’, so now they got to start sendin’ convicts.”
Jimmy leaned in close like he was telling us a secret. “Now, Kapasi is the baddest of these convicts. The others, they do what he says. They started by shakin’ the rest of us down. You know, they’d take our shit, eat our food. We went to Lieutenant Vlotsky and told him what was happenin’. He didn’t do a goddamn thing. It took me a while to figure out what was goin’ on. One day, I went into Vlotsky’s tent to pick up some reports. I didn’t know he was there, so I just unzipped my way in. He had this big-ass pile of brown sugar right there on the floor.”
Maggie sounded shocked. “Lieutenant Vlotsky was an opium addict?”
“Damn straight he was. That’s how come he sleeps all day. It didn’t take no genius to see that Kapasi was his supplier. That’s why the lieutenant let him get away with all that shit.”
I told Maggie to take notes; I could barely write legibly anymore. I told Jimmy to give us names. Make Jhuko Kapasi the ex-con ringleader. Make Pardo, Magee, and Deng the other three ex-cons. We’d have to look up their records. Make Cardoso, Jiang, Jiabao, Sarney, Serra, and Jimmy Bushong the non-ex-cons. Maggie entered it all into her digital paper pad, one of her rich-girl toys. The molecule-thick paper was seriously expensive. They only made it offworld. Somebody had explained it to me once. The molecules were white on one side, black on the other. When you talked to it, the molecules would flip from white to black, forming words on the page. The thing could hold an unlimited amount of information. It’d just keep flipping molecules and changing the display.
I said, “Tell us more, Jimmy.”
“Kapasi started runnin’ games when we was on the base, you know, bettin’ games—dice, cards, shit like that. His guys’d be up half the night, and then the next day, they’d take these long naps, make the rest of us do all the work. They started runnin’ maneuvers the same way. They’d stay up all night then sleep in the truck all day.”
“What would Vlotsky do?”
“Shit, man, I already told you, he’d be sleepin’ on the roof. Things stayed real smooth between Kapasi and the lieutenant for a long while. Kapasi wanted to run his games, and the lieutenant wanted a cheap supply of O. But that all changed when they gave us a real mission.”
“What was that?”
“The One-Seven, they’re one of the elite units; they raided a farmhouse where they was storin’ opium. They killed a bunch of enemy, torched the place, and captured six. We was ordered to meet up with them and escort the prisoners back to the base. All the sudden, Lieutenant Vlotsky is awake all day, givin’ orders—Mr. Big Shot on the job. He doesn’t do shit for two years, but now he’s in charge, orderin’ us around. We picked up the prisoners, six of them. I was expectin’ soldier types, but these guys was just farmers.” His metal eyes focused on my partner. “Before you say different, I’m tellin’ you, they was farmers. Anyway, we marched them for two days and tied them to trees at night. We took shifts guardin’ ’em.
“On the second night, me and Pardo was on guard. Kapasi came out of his tent, started the truck, then told us to go to bed. I went to my tent and watched Kapasi load the prisoners into the truck and take off. I waited to see if Lieutenant Vlotsky would get up. He never came out of his tent. He had to hear the truck; that thing is loud. I figure he must’ve been too doped up to notice. When Kapasi came back, he came back without the prisoners.”
“What happened to them?”
“Shit. I don’t know, man. You think Kapasi talks to me? I wasn’t about to ask, either. The next morning, Lieutenant Vlotsky wanted to know what happened to the prisoners, and Kapasi just said, ‘They escaped.’”
This Kapasi was getting more interesting by the minute. “What did Lieutenant Vlotsky do?”
“He told Central Command that twenty men came out of the jungle, armed to the teeth, and took the prisoners back—you believe that shit? He didn’t tell them the truth, ’cause then he’d have to explain why he didn’t get up when he heard the truck. He don’t want his superiors knowin’ he’s a hophead.”
“Was Lieutenant Vlotsky angry at Kapasi?”
“Shit yeah! The lieutenant fuckin’ came to life. He got on the radio every day volunteerin’ us for missions. He wanted to prove somethin’ to Central Command. You know, he was tryin’ to get their confidence back after he lost the prisoners. I’m tellin’ you, he was on that radio all day. It took a couple weeks, but he landed us another mission. That’s when things got real fucked up.”
“What was the mission?”
“They told us to attack a distribution center on the river. We scoped the place for an hour—counted four guards, all armed. Lieutenant Vlotsky split us into two teams of five. He told us to avoid the road and charge the place from two different angles. He sent some guys back to the truck to retrieve the weapons. They was just cheap Army-issue lase-rifles, just like the ones we learned on in basic.
“He had us sync our watches, and he told us to get into position and attack in exactly ten minutes. ‘Kill the guards and burn the place,’ is what he said. He would wait with the truck. We creeped right up to the jungle’s edge. Then when the time came, we flew out of the jungle. We was tearin’ across this open space, gettin’ real close, and the guards hadn’t spotted us.”
Jimmy was fully into the story, his ball-bearing eyes sliding back and forth between us with robotic precision. “Both our groups stopped, and we raised our weapons. We had them in a wicked crossfire. I pulled the trigger and nothin’ happened. I’m tellin’ you, nothin’ happened. I figured my gun was frozen and looked around and everybody was fiddlin’ with their guns. None of ’em worked. The guards on the dock saw us and ran for cover while we’re all tryin’ to figure out what the fuck’s wrong with our guns. Deng turned and zoom, he’s off for the jungle. I was thinkin’, shit yeah! So the rest of us dropped our guns and ran after him. I’m tellin’ you, you’ve never seen a bunch of guys run that fast in your life. The four on the dock finally figured out that we was runnin’ away, so they quit hidin’ and started firin’. You ever been shot at? Their laser fire was burnin’ the humidity out of the fuckin’ air. Shit, the steam can kill you without you even gettin’ hit. They taught us that in basic. They came close, but we hit the jungle fast. The worst that happened to us was we got our eyebrows singed. We went back to rendezvous with Lieutenant Vlotsky, but he was gone, and he took the truck with him. You bel
ieve that shit? Lieutenant Vlotsky rigged the guns. The fucker set us up.”
“He rigged the guns?” I was dumbfounded.
“He sure as shit did. Now I can understand him doin’ somethin’ like that to Kapasi for takin’ the POWs and makin’ him look bad. But sendin’ all ten of us in to die? That shit ain’t right.”
We had our killer’s motive. I asked, “When did this happen?”
“Couple weeks ago. We was left out in the middle of the fucking jungle. We marched south for half a day and got lucky meeting up with the Two-Six. We hitched a ride back to the base. The day after we got there, in came Lieutenant Vlotsky ridin’ that truck. You should’ve seen the look on his face when he saw us standin’ there. He was shocked; there was no doubt about that. Then he acted all happy to see us. He made up some story about bein’ attacked by the enemy, and he had to run for it. He even showed us the scorch marks on the truck. You believe that shit? He left us for dead and shot up the truck hisself. He told us how he came back for us when it was safe, but we was already gone. He thought we was dead.
“We was due to go back out to the jungle a week later, but Lieutenant Vlotsky got us this leave time instead. He knew he couldn’t go back out to the jungle without payin’ for what he did to us. He told Central Command how we was involved in all this heavy combat, and we needed some time off. I heard he even asked for a transfer. Central Command came through with the time off, and here I am.”
“Do you think Kapasi killed Vlotsky?”
“Kapasi might have killed him. Shit, we all wanted to kill him after what he did to us.”
“You say you were here last night. Can anybody back that up?”
“Yeah. Do you want to talk to them now?”
We headed back to the party. The music pulsed. Mudspattered dancers glistened with sweat. I lost a shoe suctioned into the mud. Maggie and I proceeded barefoot.
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