Ex-KOP

by Warren Hammond

  “You can say that again,” I said with a shiver. Ian and Liz's incestuous relationship was giving me a case of the heebie-jeebies.

  “Liz was my anonymous caller. She's the one who called me at the beginning of all this and told me Adela didn't do it.”

  I nodded. Maggie's reasoning was flawless. It tracked.

  She said, “She told me she knew who the real killer was. I wish she'd called sooner, before the conviction.”

  “I'm sure she didn't want to call at all. She didn't want her brother to go to jail. She was probably just hoping they'd find Adela innocent.”

  “I always knew Ian was an asshole,” she said, “but I had no idea he was so …”

  “Fucked up.”

  “Yeah.”

  We turned onto a wider walkway that led back toward the shore. Every time you come to an intersection, take the wider walkway, and you'll be on the shore in no time. That was what they'd always tell the offworld tourists who were afraid of getting lost in Floodbank's never-ending maze of convoluted walkways. It didn't always work, but it was as good a system as any.

  “So the question is why. Why did Ian kill them?”

  Maggie stopped short. I picked up an alarmed vibe from her. I felt it reverb right through me. I looked straight ahead, and there was Hoshi, already reaching for his piece. Shit!

  Maggie spun around and bolted a half step ahead of my own panicked footfalls. Standing and fighting was the wrong move. He was already reaching. He'd fry us both before we could draw a bead on him, and with my left hand, I doubted I could hit him with all the time in the world. We sped back the way we came, our arms spread wide for balance. The slatted walkways pitched and lurched as we slammed one foot down after another. Water splashed up as our feet made contact with the platforms and drove them down into the water. Entire homes began to rock from the disturbance. We wound left and right through the haphazard warren of strung-together homes, the lack of any kind of straightaway our only saving grace. Hoshi would have to get close, very close in order to get off a clear burn.

  Maggie was gaining distance ahead of me, which was a bad sign. It meant Hoshi was likely gaining ground behind me. People were clearing out of our way; our rope-stretching, wood-scraping, water-slapping approach had the locals grabbing ropes and leaning out over the edge, some of them pulling their feet up off the walkway until we safely passed underneath. We hit an intersection, and Maggie wisely took the wider path. We were near the outer edge of Floodbank, and a narrow walkway was likely to dead end.

  She took another turn, and I went the opposite way, knowing Hoshi would stay with me. Maggie would get away clean. I was losing sight of her anyway. My guess was Hoshi's eyes were glimpsing my fleeing back on and off, and at this point, likely more on than off. He'd be opening fire soon.

  I cranked up my speed for one final lung-burning push. I could hear him behind me. He sounded so close. I kept my eyes scanning the edges, looking for a gap that was big enough. …

  There! I dove. The platform under my feet gave way, and I lost my balance, my dive turning into more of a slide. I skidded across the walkway, splinters digging into my stomach. I scrabbled forward, my head already underwater. I lunged down, my feet the last to feel the cool water. I kicked straight down, knowing lase-fire couldn't penetrate deep into the water. I swam deeper, my feet tingling with the anticipation of being fried off. Flashes of diffused light went off all around me as Hoshi took potshots into the water. I needed air, and I needed it bad. I spun my body around and swam in the opposite direction of my dive. I stroked, once, twice, wanting to put distance between me and my entry point. Shit! I need air! I kicked straight up. My head cracked into an oil drum. River slime oozed across my face. My legs kept driving me up as I slid around to the side and found a pocket of air under somebody's floor.

  I sucked air, my lungs struggling to keep up with demand. I could hear somebody's feet dancing across the floor above me. I couldn't control my breathing. I was being too loud.

  “Officer! Officer! I can hear him! He's under there!”

  The house rocked as Hoshi jumped onboard. I sucked a last breath and went back under. I swam down until my ears hurt, then aimed my body in the same direction as the current. I propelled myself with long strokes, my clothes dragging my pace down to one that just barely outran the current.

  I needed to surface. I looked up and targeted a patch of light. My right hand smacked a rope that stung my broken fingers. My foot kicked that same rope a second later as I slipped past and approached the light. I broke the surface and launched into a gulping, choking, and panting fit. Again, I was being too loud, but I couldn't stop my painful wheezing.

  I listened intently, but I didn't hear anything outside of the Floodbank norm. I looked up at the source of the light, a round hole maybe a meter over my head. Recognizing the oval shape, I noticed the flies and the smell for the first time. Son of a bitch. I decided to move on before the light was eclipsed by some wide-mouthed brown bomber.

  I let myself float with the current, leaving the shitter behind. I ducked and dipped under ropes and oil drums, moving from home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood, glad that the filth and garbage I was passing through was obscured by the darkness. Progress was slow as I kept hitting impassible thickets of crisscrossed rope that forced me to backtrack and choose another path.

  It took me an hour to reach the end of Floodbank, my head finally coming up with open river ahead. I swam to a dock ladder and climbed up.

  I checked my phone. Dead. They built them to be rain-resistant, but holding them underwater for so long must've been a different story.

  I started on the long, soggy walk to Tenttown.

  twenty-four

  I TRUDGED through the Tenttown mud. My head was itching. I hadn't realized I'd cut myself when I torpedoed that oil drum, but I clearly had, because my skin was crawling up there, crawling with maggots. Leave an open wound exposed for even a couple minutes and you were likely to get infested. Fucking flies. Lots of planets have flies of one sort or another, but Darwin sure whipped up a special batch for us.

  So Ian and his pop weren't entirely estranged. Pop must've called when we left, told him we were snooping around. He told him we were asking about Michelle. From there, Ian must've suspected that we'd made the Michelle-Liz connection and therefore, the fish market might be a likely destination for us. Likely enough to send Hoshi over to check it out, but, in his mind, not likely enough to warrant more attention than that.

  It itches so bad. My scalp was driving me insane. I resisted the urge to scratch, knowing I'd just make it worse. I hoped Maggie had made it back to the tent so she could play nursemaid like Niki used to do. Niki. It still didn't seem real—the jungle, the orchards, any of it. It had happened so fast. It couldn't be real. The drizzling rain was real. The maggots eating my scalp were real. But that scene in the jungle, it couldn't be. Niki was still alive. Her spine was coming along nicely. I told myself she'd be her old self soon, but the empty feeling in my gut persisted. I noticed that the knot in my stomach had uncoiled. Gone was the cramping, a hollow left in its place. I thought about having a drink but nixed the idea. I didn't want to dull the emptiness. It felt wrong to dull it. Like I'd be dulling the memory of her. It felt right to suffer.

  Besides, I had a job to do. Adela Juarez was going to get gassed in two days. I was going to get arrested for Raj's murder. And Maggie? Ian was going to kill her. Bringing down that kind of heat on himself was the last thing he wanted, but we were leaving him no choice. And it wasn't just Ian. There were other forces in play, the offworld travel agent, and the offworld serial with fourteen murders to his name.

  I found Maggie sitting on a rock outside our tent.

  “What took you so long?” she wanted to know.

  Maggie did a horrible job patching me up. She started by dumping enough fly gel on my head to kill a damn swarm. Then she nicked me twice when she shaved the hair around the wound. And then she got all squeamish about cleaning out th
e dead maggots. When she was finally done with my head, she practically tweezed her way into my intestines as she pulled out the handful of splinters in my stomach.

  “Good as new?” she asked.

  “Good as new,” I repeated.

  “Sorry it took so long.”

  “You did great, Maggie. Thanks.”

  She called Customs again to see if the woman she'd been dealing with had finally gotten approval to share their records on Jungle Expeditions. The woman had indeed gotten approval, but in typical government fashion, she hadn't bothered to pull the records yet. When Maggie complained, the woman got all pissy, and Maggie ripped into her with an uncharacteristic loss of temper. She kept poking the woman's holo with her finger while she made her demands clear. “You will get me my data, and you will do it now.” When the woman put Maggie on hold, her holo turned into a logo for the Office of Customs. I could see that Maggie was preparing for another fight as she waited for the woman to come back on the line. Luckily for the woman, she never did. She served up one of her underlings instead, who came on the line and streamed the names and numbers into Maggie's digital paper pad.

  Maggie immediately dove into the data like she'd never lost her cool. Her eyes swiveled from side to side as she skimmed the records, making sure she'd gotten what she asked for.

  Maggie handed me the pad. I strained to read the names in the tent's lamplight. “Can you make this thing brighter?”

  “Sure.” Maggie took it back for a few seconds then handed the digital paper back to me.

  I looked through the first few names, not recognizing any. These were the 342 Jungle Expeditions clients from the past year, or at least the 342 who had taken the time to list Jungle Expeditions on their customs forms. No telling how many just left it blank. I groaned, overwhelmed by the hopeless prospect of narrowing this list down to one serial killer. I didn't have the energy for it. “There's no way we can get through this list before it's too late.”

  “Got any better ideas?”

  I strained my Niki-hazed brain. There had to be a better way. Going though this list was solid police procedure, but it would take too damn long. And even if we managed to find our offworld serial, we'd still have to flip him to get to Horst, and then flip Horst to get to Ian, and then, as if that wasn't enough, we'd have to hope that somewhere along the way we got the evidence we needed to free Adela.

  It was hopeless. I didn't want to upset Maggie by saying it, but Adela was as good as dead. There just wasn't enough time. I wished we could visit her at the Zoo, let her know that we believed her. It could make a big difference to her to know, before she died, that somebody believed her. If nothing else, I could at least apologize for making her cry. But Adela was off-limits. We couldn't get into the Zoo without one of Ian's old guard buddies calling him. We'd never get out alive.

  “Well?” Maggie asked, waiting for my answer.

  I didn't have any better ideas. Not as long as Yuri Kiper stayed underground.

  Maggie said, “We either go through this list or we risk approaching Liz. You ready to charm her again?”

  God, I didn't want to see her. Just the thought of her made my stomach tumble. I couldn't believe I'd flirted with her. How could I have done that to Niki? Betray her like that when she'd been in the state she was in. I doubted Niki would've cared. She wasn't a prude. But I cared. I cared plenty.

  But Liz could help us. She knew things she hadn't told us. And she was Maggie's anonymous caller. If we asked, she might just tell us what she knew. Then again, I'd already turned down Liz/Michelle's little S&M fantasy once, and she wasn't the kind of woman who was used to rejection. She'd been after me to be her ultimate S. But if I approached her again, she might think I'd make a better M. I pictured myself going in there and trying to play her un-father, trying to get her to open up to me. I could see Liz turning the tables on me, trapping me with one of her bondage toys and then bringing her little brother in, the two of them using me as the Davies family's perv pet.

  Maggie was still waiting.

  “I don't want to see Liz,” I said. I scanned down to the bottom of Maggie's list of offworlders. Not a single name jumped out at me. “Do you recognize any of them?” I asked.

  “No. But I starred the ones who are onplanet right now.”

  I sorted so the starred names topped the list, nine of them. I looked at their dates of entry. Seven of the nine had just arrived over the last couple days. It probably meant that they were all on the same tour. We'd have to check them out one by one, hoping that one of them was our serial. It was the only safe play. Half the damn city was on the lookout for us, but we knew for a fact that these offworlders would be in the dark. Can you imagine tour operator Horst Jeffers telling his customers to let him know if they saw a couple cops snooping around? Not the kind of thing customers on a sex-tour wanted to hear. These people were unsuspecting. These were people we could watch.

  “Can I have that back?” Maggie asked. “I want to compare their entry and exit dates to the barge murder dates.”

  I passed the sheet of digital paper back to her and lay back in my hammock, thinking it would be tough to get any kind of definitive date matches. Most of the barge murder scenes were found long after the actual murders occurred. Some of the time-of-death estimates had a margin of error of a month or more.

  My head hurt. I closed my eyes and tried to close it all out, leaving myself alone with my hollowness.

  Maggie whispered, “Are you asleep?”

  “No,” I said without opening my eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No.”

  “I'm sorry I got you into this.”

  “I know.”

  “We'll get him, Juno. It'll be over soon.”

  I wasn't so confident, but I still said, “Yeah.”

  “It'll be over soon,” she repeated.

  She was right about that. It was only a matter of time before Ian's crew started asking around Tenttown. Seen an old dog with a shaking splint of a right hand walking around with a long-haired beauty wearing high-priced duds? Shit, they could be surrounding this tent right now. Ian could come barging through those flaps any second with his biceps-by-'roid and his boy-o charm. The possibility that we might survive was growing more remote by the minute. And if we did manage to pull through? That almost scared me more than Ian. What the hell would I do then?

  Maggie interrupted my self-administered career counseling. “Pick a name: Peter Wynn or Jacque Benoit.”

  “Benoit. What do I win?”

  “A stakeout with a lovely lady.”

  twenty-five

  DECEMBER 4, 2788

  I TOOK a seat next to Maggie at the bar. We were both tech-naked. No phones, no weapons, no digital notepads, nothing. You want to surveil an offworlder, you have to go low tech, and there was nothing more low tech than our eyeballs.

  We'd been following Jacque Benoit all day. We watched him eat breakfast. We watched him drink coffee on the square. We watched him spend his afternoon meandering through the Phra Kaew market. We watched him hurry to the bank, just barely beating closing time.

  He was a regular on Lagarto. He knew where he was going when he walked. The shop owners all knew him, nothing but hugs and smiles when he walked in. Maggie and I would hang across the street while the shop owners would serve him tea and snap their fingers at houseboys who would carry in one high-priced item after another. He made a fair number of purchases: handmade pottery, a set of monitor hide chairs, a wool rug.

  We tailed him back to the hotel restaurant, where he was sitting in a group of four men, all offworlders. His hair was more white than blond, and his teeth were whiter still. I looked over the other three, sitting there with their unblemished skin and their whiskerless faces. When they smiled, their faces beamed cool attitudes, and when they talked, they were all debonair charm. They were drinking imported coffee. Just like offworlders to come all the way down to
the surface only to drink their orbital-grown coffee.

  Maggie and I sat at the bar and tried to blend in. Maggie was wearing a set of whites that we had picked up in Tenttown. Loose-fitting cotton pants, with a matching V-neck top that had embroidered flowers bordering the V. She'd donated her jewelry to a panhandler and dumped her shoes for a pair of jellies. Lastly, she'd pulled her salon 'do back into a pony, and her conversion from blue blood to blue collar was complete. Me, I was dressed like usual, in whites of my own, except I had purchased a cheap panama to cover up the bandaged bald patch on my head.

  Maggie held up two fingers for the bartender then turned to me. “I think that's Peter Wynn sitting on his left.”

  “Who?”

  “The other guy from the list. The other one that matched six murder dates.”

  “Was that the largest number of matches?”

  “Of the group that's currently onplanet, yes. But of the entire three hundred and forty-two there were three who matched eight of the barge murder dates.”

  “You realize how low the odds are that one of these guy's is our serial?”

  “Yeah. Maybe we should give up on these guys and go see Liz. This time tomorrow, it'll be too late for Adela.”

  “Let's give it another hour before we move on and see if he exhibits any serial killer behavior.”

  “And what exactly is serial killer behavior?”

  “You know, putting on a necklace made of human ears or masturbating over a dead animal.”

  Maggie smiled. I didn't, didn't feel up to it. Making a joke was one thing, but laughing at it was another entirely.

  “Ooh, that looks good.” The second Maggie said it, I realized how hungry I was. I looked across the room at the clay oven that served as the restaurant's centerpiece. The cook had just pulled out an earthenware dish. Looked like fish in a brown sauce, spiced with cinnamon and cumin by the smell of it. The cook turned his attention back to the oven and rearranged a series of dishes to get at a round of bread.