I rolled onto my back… fussed with the pillow… readjusted the sheet… flipped the pillow… pulled the sheet back up.
No more of this bullshit. I sat up. No matter how desperate I was to sleep, it wasn’t going to happen. I had too many derailed trains of thought, too many poisoned memories.
Niki and Paul.
What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?
I grabbed my pants and struggled to pull them on one-handed. Damn nuisance. I carefully zippered over my skivvyless package and coaxed my still-sore muscles out to the hall. That run-in with Mota and Panama in the Cellars had taken a toll on these tired bones. I ambled down to Deluski’s room and shook the curtain on his door, brass rings jingling on the steel rod.
“Yeah?”
I poked my head through the curtain. “I need your phone.”
He picked it off the dresser and tossed it my way. I snatched it out of the air left-handed and headed back to my room, pleased that I hadn’t tried to make the grab with my missing right. I was finally catching on.
I kept the light off, stripped off my pants, and dropped back into bed. I punched in a name: Dr. Angel Franklin.
Born ninety-three years ago. Smooth-skinned bastard kept himself young. Offworlders were damn good at defying time, their bodies riddled with antiaging drugs and a steady supply of replacement organs. Their life expectancy was more than double ours.
He was originally from Earth, someplace called Slovakia, wherever the hell that was. Started the fourteen-year journey to Lagarto in ’sixty-nine.
Fourteen years. Nobody made that trip anymore. Not since the brandy market tanked. The Earth-Lagarto trade route was called the sucker’s rainbow now, named for the fourteen-year stream of immigrants who arrived after the economy collapsed. All of them setting off for the promise of work and a new world. All of them following a rainbow cut through the heavens to the pot of gold called Lagarto. A decade and a half’s worth arrived after the collapse, my great-grandparents among them, all of them caught in transit after the pot of gold had already been looted and picked clean.
Yet Dr. Angel Franklin made the same voyage. Why coop himself up inside a metal tube for more than a tenth of his life to come to this green hell?
I checked out his professional history, and the question answered itself. He lost his medical license in ’sixty-eight, revoked for ethical violations. That was all it said. Ethical violations. He’d set off for Lagarto just a few months later.
He’d come here to practice medicine, or his twisted version of it, away from the rules and the regulators, to a place where rules were for sale.
I heard the clacks of high heels on tile coming this way. The curtain swung aside. Backlit explosion of hair. Miniskirt silhouette. Maria. “You like the place?”
I set the phone on my chest and turned on the light, carefully propped the pillow under my head to keep from aggravating my burned scalp. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not often.”
She walked over and slumped into a chair by the bed. Her breasts were squeezed into a faux-leather halter top.
“Long night?” I asked.
“Long but quiet.”
“Business slow?”
“Not bad. By quiet, I meant no problems.”
“Chicho know you’re gone?”
She shrugged her shoulders and turned up her palms. “I don’t know. I doubt he’d care this time of night. The johns are all gone except for the all-nighters, and they never cause trouble. Any luck with whatever you’re working on?”
I mimicked her don’t-know gesture.
“You know, you never told me what you were after in all this.”
“That’s because it keeps changing.”
“What’s the latest?”
“I’d settle for catching the bastard who did this to me.” I waved my right arm. “That, and stopping Mota.”
“What about expanding your protection business?”
“That can wait.” Despite my promise to Maggie, I couldn’t bring myself to say I was giving it up. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure that was a promise I could keep. “What do you know about the doctor?”
“No more than you already know.”
“Keep away from him.”
“Her.”
I shook my head. “She’s a he.”
“Really?”
“Stay away from him.”
“Why?”
“He works with Mota.”
“On what?”
“No idea, but don’t trust him with your sister.”
“Where else am I supposed to get the work she needs?”
“I’m sure the johns love her just the way she is.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, absent sincerity. She unstrapped her shoes and kicked them off. “Can I use your shower?”
“Help yourself.”
She stood and disappeared into the bathroom. A knob squeaked and pipes clanked somewhere under the floor before I heard the sound of sputtering, drizzling water.
I didn’t want her getting any ideas when she came out. I picked up my pants, and after thinking on it a bit, decided to try the lying-down method of pulling them on. A minute’s labor proved the method promising.
I brought the phone back to Deluski, woke him up to tell him we were leaving in an hour.
Back in my room, I reached for my shirt when Maria came from the bathroom, towel wrapped around her, wet hair slicked back, her cheeks stripped of rouge, her lips bare. She crinkled up her brows in disapproval, like she was upset I’d dressed. “You have a comb?”
I shook my head no as I pulled on my shirt. I sat on the bed and started on the buttons. Why so many?
She took a seat at the end of the bed and combed her hair with forked fingers. Free of her high hair and her makeup mask, she looked like a different person, loud features turned plain, muted. I put my eyes on my buttons.
“You were married for a long time, weren’t you?”
I gave a slight nod, a bare-minimum response for a subject I didn’t want to discuss.
“Did you love her?”
I looked at Maria. She’d stopped combing. With no makeup to cover it, a faint mark from one of my knuckles still showed on her cheek.
“It was complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“It just was.”
“Knowing how it ended, if you could, would you trade away your time together?”
I didn’t know. I suspected I never would.
“Would you?”
A larger truth came to mind. “If I could, I’d trade my whole life away.”
She combed her hair again, her fingers catching on a knot. She worked at it with two hands until she pulled it free. “You’re a strange man.” She held her hand over the floor and shook a couple strands off her fingers. “Never heard of anybody taking over a group of brothels, but not going for freebies.”
I went back to the buttons. Stupid things were tricky as hell.
“Christ, will you let me do that?”
“I got it.”
She tugged on my sleeve. “Get over here.”
I stood and stepped in front of her, smelled shampoo and hints of perfume trapped in her hair.
“You didn’t line ’em up right. It’s all out of whack.” She undid the misaligned button. And another one. She reached inside my shirt, her hand warm against my chest.
“You don’t want me,” I whispered. “I’m damaged.”
She slid her hand down my stomach, tingles drifting south.
“I’m damaged,” I repeated. “Broken.”
She touched my arm. “It’s okay. I’m damaged too.” She freed the towel, terry cloth falling down to her waist. Her hands were back on my chest, wandering downward, as were my eyes.
Now I understood why she’d quit hooking. Why she had to quit hooking. I wanted my sunglasses. I needed a shield, needed something to dim this painful reality.
I answered with my hand, fingers touching, squeezing, caressing, as if her breasts weren’t scarred. As if she hadn’t let some cheap, back-alley plastic surgeon hack her up. I touched them with my lips.
As if they were normal.
I touched with my half-arm.
As if I had a hand.
A clique of girls came into the library, voices at volumes only teens could achieve. Plaid skirts, SJD Academy embroidered on matching white blouses. Upon spotting the librarian’s stern stare, they silenced themselves, faces contorted with suppressed laughter. They dropped books on the counter and busted back out the door, laughter like shattering glass. Maggie watched them go, a quirky smile on her face.
“Remind you of your school days?” I asked.
“The early days.”
“Before your father died?”
She nodded, eyes sobering, the smile unquirking. “Find anything?”
“Not yet.” I went back to the holo-pics, jumping one-by-one, holo after holo, Franz Samusaka’s former schoolmates flashing by. Zits and chin fuzz. Slicked-back hairdos and caterpillar mustaches. Two more years of senior photos to go and so far, no sign of Lizard-man.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
She responded with silence, its barren emptiness ballooning in my chest. I couldn’t do anything right. I said what needed to be said anyway. “Your help means a lot to me.”
She didn’t meet my eyes. Instead, she pretended to be interested in checking her earrings, like she thought they could’ve fallen out since we’d been sitting here.
I groped for something to say, desperate to find something that could penetrate the wall standing between us. “Where’s Josephs?”
She drummed the table with her fingers. “Sleeping in. He said he’d meet up with us later.”
“Does he know we’re going to Yepala later?”
“I thought we could surprise him.”
“He’s going to throw a goddamned fit.”
A sly grin formed. “Looking forward to it.”
Deluski came through the double doors, back from the bathroom, and dropped into a wooden chair scarred with carved graffiti. Tall shelves stood behind him, rows and rows of mildew-stained books, the aging paper making the room smell old.
I stole another glance at Maggie’s smile, soaking in as much of it as I could before I voice-ordered the yearbook forward, one holo shifting into the next, kid after kid, the same damn repetitive poses: the smile-into-the-camera look, the thoughtful chin-resting-on-fist look, the looking-off-into-the-future look. I stopped on a name. The kid I didn’t recognize, but I did the name: Ang Samusaka.
“A brother?” asked Deluski.
“Looks like it. Why don’t you go ask the librarian?”
He stood and went to her desk. Maggie leaned my way. “How long you going to keep him under your thumb?”
I rubbed my smarting arm. “I set him free already.”
“Really?”
“He destroyed the video himself.”
“But he’s still working for you?”
“He wanted to see this case through. Kripsen, Lumbela, and the others were his friends. After this is over, I don’t know. If he’s smart, he’ll go back to being a regular cop.”
“Think he’s smart?”
I shrugged my shoulders. We’ll see.
“You know, it’s nice to see your eyes again.”
It took me a second to realize I wasn’t wearing my shades. Paul’s shades. I’d worn them long enough that I could still feel the plastic resting on the bridge of my nose, stems hooked over my ears. Ghost shades to go with the ghost pain in my hand.
“You done hiding?” she asked.
I tuned into my own breathing, air moving in and out, lungs inflating and deflating. I tuned into the other signs of life. My heartbeat. The ache in my missing hand. The pleasant memory of recent sex.
She waited for my answer. I put my good hand on her knee, felt the warmth through her pants. “I’m done hiding.”
“That’s good.” She patted my hand. “That’s real good.”
I took my hand back and reluctantly, remorsefully forced my brain out of the moment, back into the past, focused it on my first sight of the lizard-man, standing in the doorway, Wu’s lower jaw in his hand. I conjured up the killer’s face as I navigated from pic to pic. Searching for that wild mop of hair. Those disturbed eyes. That cold gaze.
Seven years of class photos. Samusaka’s class and the three years before and after. Close to the end now, the last year of San Juan Diego Academy’s privileged but troubled youth cycling by.
“That’s it.” I rubbed tired eyes. Lizard-man wasn’t a student here. He knew Samusaka some other way. Knew about the party pad where he killed Samusaka and later posed Froelich and Wu’s bodies some other way.
Deluski came back. “Ang was Franz’s brother. Graduated last year. Last the librarian heard, he was living in a hotel off the Square. She hears the kids talking about it. Sounds like he hosts a lot of parties there.”
“Anything else?”
“I made a quick call to a cop friend I used to work with-”
“Did you use your new phone?”
“Yeah.”
I felt an uptick in my pulse. “Why the hell did you do that? You should’ve borrowed the school’s.”
“I wanted to see if-”
“Ditch the phone.”
He rolled his eyes. “The phone’s anonymous.”
“Not anymore. Dump it.”
“This was a friend I called. He’s not going to tell anybody.”
I pointed my short arm at the trash can.
He rolled his eyes and tossed in the phone. The loud, metallic clunk drew a scolding stare from the librarian. Librarians must practice that shit.
“You know Maggie still has her phone. Mota could track us through her.”
She shook her head no. “Mine’s anonymous. I hid my police issue under the seat of a taxi.”
I smiled at the thought of Mota following a taxi all around town. “What did your friend tell you?”
“I had him look up Ang to see if he has a record. He wasn’t in the system except for a call he put in to report a B-and-E at his parents’ house. I checked the date. It was only a month before his brother was killed. Think we oughta check it out?”
Hotel Koba. Ten minutes of asking around the school had scored us the name of the place. We followed the arrow down a set of stairs to a basement door and pushed our way through. Stone floors and sculpted light fixtures. Thick rugs under monitor-hide chairs. A front desk made of polished wood with a backdrop of gold-tinted mirrors.
“Ang Samusaka,” I said to the desk clerk, a teenage girl in a purple hand-me-down uniform with overly long sleeves folded up at the wrists and a worn-through collar.
“Let me see if he’s in.” She touched a number on an airborne holo-grid to her right. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“No.”
Lines in her forehead arched at my curt response. “Um.” She gestured at her earpiece. “It’s ringing right now.”
We waited.
“He’s not answering.” Not He’s not in, but He’s not answering.
“No problem. What’s his room number?”
She hesitated until Deluski waved his badge. “Three-o-three.”
Maggie pushed the elevator’s up button, and steel doors slowly cranked open with a metal-on-metal scrape. Inside, a chambermaid struggled with a tippy towel hamper that was missing a wheel from one of the front corners.
I reached with my half-arm but came up short. Dammit. Deluski beat me to it, used his big hands to lift the cart’s front end over the gap between the elevator and the floor.
We stepped into the now vacated elevator. The humid stench of soggy towels clung to the walls. The elevator bange
d and groaned up to the third before the doors took their time scraping open. We walked down the hall, shoes sinking deep into plush carpet.
Deluski rapped on the door. A punk kid answered, dark skin and fried eyes. No shirt, no shoes, wrinkled pants. Not him.
“We want to talk to Ang Samusaka.”
“Ang!” he called over his shoulder before wobbling back inside.
We strode into the young Samusaka’s suite and closed the door behind us. The room stank of burned herbs. Damn early for that shit. Another kid slept on the sofa, and to his left, a rolled herbstick burned on a saucer, and next to it a plate with a half-eaten frybread. The punk who let us in sat and called for Ang again before snatching up the bread.
A bedroom door opened. Ang came through fastening his pants and nabbed a shirt off the floor. He gave it a shake before pulling it over his shoulders. “Who are you?”
Maggie moved toward him, her shoe avoiding a food scrap on the floor. “We want to talk to you about your brother.”
He pulled his shirt over visible ribs and started buttoning. “He’s dead.”
“We know.”
“Who are you?”
Deluski pulled his badge, gave Ang a quick wave.
Ang rolled his eyes while his friend dropped his jaw and swiveled burned eyes between Deluski and the smoldering herbstick. The punk tossed the frybread back onto the plate. “Um, I’m still hungry. I’m gonna get some more food.” He nudged the kid sleeping on the sofa. “C’mon, Jose.”
Jose’s lids slowly cranked open like the hotel’s elevator doors.
“Cops are here.” The punk shook Jose’s shoulders. “C’mon, we gotta go.”
Jose’s lids couldn’t hold, lashes dropping back down like they were weighted.
The punk ditched him and slunk out.
Ang took a seat. “You gonna tell me what you’re doing here?”
Maggie pointed at the herbstick. “Put that out.”
Ang leaned over and mashed the ashy end into the plate.
“Your brother was murdered.”
“Cops said he ODed.”
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