by Lee Killough
Janna rolled her eyes at the fake accent. Toros usually had Hispanic ancestry. Except most of those ancestors immigrated several generations ago, and she doubted even the grandparents spoke Spanish at home any longer. The Toros she dealt with before, in fact, knew only a handful of real Spanish words. The rest they made up.
“Real people?” the fem spat at them. “You’re cockroaches!”
Blonde Scorpion sniffed. “That’s not nice, puta. What if we tell old Chopsticks ju been threatening customers? Ju’ll lose your job. Or maybe we’ll just report him for saving paperwork and digidough by using slighs in the kitchen he can pay off in food. Ju want us to do that to him and joor dishrag friend?”
Janna toed aside the pot. “What do you know, Mama. Toros. Just who we wanted to talk to. Did you let your boz in the rear door, choomba?” she asked the cook. “You know a certain standard of hygiene is required in the kitchen of a restaurant. Does Mr. Wu know how you’re dirtying his?”
Baja sneered. “It was clean ‘til ju come in, puss.”
At Janna’s shoulder Mama said, “A word to the wise. Detective Brill already hammered an Orion today and I bet she wouldn’t mind making it a hat trick with you two. Or would you like to sit down out front and have a chat with me?”
The two in jackets tensed and the cook’s hand twitched, as though to reach for the knife on the near-by chopping block. Janna balanced on her toes and let her hand drift to the opening of her jacket, adrenalin rushing hot and cold through her.
Then Scorpion laughed. “Hammered an Orion? Acemundo! I guess we got some time to spare, eh, Baja? Ju buyin’, leo?”
“Coffee.” Mama ushered them out.
Breathing again, Janna eyed the cook and asked the fem, “Are you all right?” She would never have taken the fem for a sligh, with hair that bright and exhibiting such defiance.
Like the sligh by the dishwasher they tended to avoid confrontations and attention . . . since the government they considered insufferably snoopy and controlling took a suspicious view of this group who refused to give Brother G any personal information about themselves, including their real names. Even when refusing to being idented denied them the comforts of a legal education, standard medical care, bank accounts, and social care. Forcing them into marginal lives and living by barter. They called it freedom, Janna knew. She called it brainbent. But refusing identation not being illegal — yet — unless they became involved in an actual crime, she, unlike some of her fellow leos, had no quarrel with them.
The fem’s eyes smoldered. “I am, will be, and would have been! I didn’t need you interfering. If they didn’t rack back, I’d have made them lose interest.”
That smolder worried Janna. In her experience it went with getting even. “Be careful how you do that. Don’t give ammunition to the politicians claiming unidenteds are dangerous for society.”
The fem snorted. “We know what the jackasses are trying to do and aren’t about to let any high muckie toad number and file us.”
The threat tone bothered Janna, too. Act on it and slighs could ruin their cause by themselves. Totally wickers, all of them.
Sighing, she left the kitchen.
Mama and the Toros sat at a table in a corner, with the waitress Juli setting four mugs of coffee on the table. Baja laughed as she made her way their direction. “A hearse? Who jacks a hearse?” He had dropped the accent.
Scorpion grinned. “I know . . . some zero who said, ‘I’m freezing to death.’ and grabbed a ride to stone city while he could still move.” He spoke normally, too. “Why tell us about it?”
Janna sat down across the table from the pair and wrapped both hands around a mug, enjoying the warmth before sipping the coffee. “They were tracked as far as E-World next door.”
The Toros stiffened, but only for a moment, then sat back in deliberate nonchalance. Baja snorted. “An ju thin’ we did it?”
“It’s your turf and whoever did it knew E-World has no surveillance.”
“Everyone who knows the store’s closed can guess that,” Scorpion said. “And if you lost the hearse here, the jackers didn’t stay on our turf. You got any more than circumstantial evidence? Any witnesses that can ID us as them?”
Oh, yes . . . Scorpion was one of their jailhouse-trained lawyers.
“The jackers were described as having stars around their eyes,” Mama said.
Janna watched the Toros for their reaction. She read surprise in their blink, which quickly gave way to wide, delighted grins at each other.
“Orions. Zeros. Lucky we didn’t catch them here.” Scorpion spread his hands. “Case closed.”
“That depends,” she said. “Do you know their colors?”
Scorpion answered without hesitation. “From inside out, red yellow blue. Do we win a prize?”
“Yeah. Another question. We don’t think it was Orions but someone using their colors. You could do that. Would Che like to make trouble for the Orions?”
Both Toros snorted.
Baja said, “That Pluto struts, but the jefe just goes. . .” He waved a hand past his face as though shooing a fly. “Ask him.”
“We will.”
“Maybe Pluto cranked someone.” Mama said.
Baja shrugged. “Quien sabe . . . who knows.”
“Wait.” Scorpion elbowed him. “What about the Wraiths?”
Baja flicked him a stare. “Serioso? We don’t even know they’re real.”
Janna frowned. “Who are the Wraiths?”
“Ask thorny Rose.” Scorpion waved toward the kitchen.
Baja snorted. “She’s not gonna say . . . and she won’t let Dishrag, if he even knows anything.”
“Then I think you better tell us before we decide to move this discussion downtown.”
The two exchanged raised brows. Scorpion shrugged. “They’re supposed to be slighs.”
Janna clamped control on her expression while a chill ran through her. Slighs had a gang now?
Did Mama feel the same alarm? Neither his face nor voice betrayed any. Instead, he looked mildly amused. “Have the Orions cranked them?”
“Could be there ain’t any Wraiths. But out back of the Zanzibar couple of weeks ago Pluto gave this sligh named Viper a black and blue for buying his bounce Maris a drink when he went off to a privacy booth with some castlerow fem who wanted to see what joyriding a ganger was like.” Scorpion snorted. “With Pluto? Big omega. She shoulda come to—”
“You were saying about this Viper?” Mama said.
“Oh, yeah. After that this Viper went around saying his gang the Wraiths was gonna zero the Orions.”
The chill deepened in Janna. A sligh bought a ganger’s fem a drink? Paying how? Calling himself Viper, of all names? And he claimed to have a gang? Were slighs trying to sound as threatening as the politicians characterized them?
“Only. . .” Baja smirked. “. . . he never said it where Orions hang or any Orions were around. If ju got no more questions, we got things to do.”
Janna had plenty more, all about slighs forming gangs and threatening other gangs, but she needed someone more knowledgeable for those answers. A glance at Mama found a suspiciously bright gleam in his eyes but he leaned back in his chair. Signaling no more questions from him.
She gave them a thin smile. “Thank you for your time.” Giving the statement the sarcasm it deserved.
Baja smirked. “Absomente.”
Pushing away from the table in a loud scrape of chairs, they swaggered out of the café.
Mama waved Juli over again to let them ask for coffee refills and order hamburgers. As much as Janna liked Wu’s noodles, a vision of the angry fem scraping them from the floor prevented her from ordering that.
Janna slouched in her chair. “If Toros pulled that masquerade, those two don’t know about it. We’d see some gloating.”
“Yes.” He paused. “I’m wondering if any of the gangs we know did it.”
The gangs they knew. Son of a bitch. Now she understood the gleam in his eyes. She
straightened in the chair. “You’re thinking Wraiths? The Toros aren’t sure they exist.”
“If they do, they’ll want retribution for this Viper’s beating.”
“We’ve already determined the jacking doesn’t really damage the Orions. And for slighs, setting it up, like getting the van, would be difficult.”
“Maybe they didn’t. They might be just hired help who used the disguise to put their fingers up Orion noses.”
She considered that. “Someone else set it up.”
“Nafsinger might have been right about using the hearse for a crime. Consider the planning involved. Not just the van. Those jackers wouldn’t be out in the snow and arctic temps on the chance of the right vehicle coming along.”
Janna shifted mental gears to crime. “So they knew to look for the hearse? How? And the big question, why? What crime would someone use it for? Didn’t we already scratch our heads over that?”
“Finding who’s behind it may tell us.”
Across the room, the tiara braids of the sligh fem appeared in the service window. “Order!”
“But you don’t think that’s these possible Wraiths.”
“I think they just abetted.”
Unlike the slighs she knew, who would never knowingly commit an illegal act . . . aside from setting up schools and practicing medicine without a license for the benefit of other slighs. Certainly not become involved in something with the potential violence of a jacking.
“If they’re the jackers, they’re—” He broke off while Juli set platter in front of them.
“Hey, I ordered before they did!” protested a burly customer two tables away.
“Special order here,” the waitress said.
Maybe Toro the cook filled it fast in the hope of sending them on their way sooner. Thought of him handling their food prompted Janna to peel back the bun to check the burger for suspicious additives. Even seeing none, she made her first bite a cautious one.
She noticed Mama did the same, then piled half the onion threads on his burger before replacing the top bun and starting in on it. “They’re a new kind of sligh,” he said around a mouthful. “We need to see if they’re real, and if so, who hired them. As soon as possible, too, since we don’t know the perpetrator’s timetable.”
“We’d better update Quist and Roos.”
She called Roos on her cell, propping it against the coffee mug so she could eat while she talked.
As Roos came on the screen, the other detective’s eyes narrowed accusingly. “You’re having lunch. A real lunch. That looks like a burger.”
“A very good one . . . pure beef, with a side of onion threads. Delicious, even though a Toro made it.”
“So you found one.”
“Actually, several.”
Roos grimaced. “That’s better than we’ve done. Except for jefe Che’s place, there aren’t any area rentals with garages that we can tie to Toros.”
“You can stop trying to. The way we read the Toros, they’re not involved in the jacking.”
Roos scowled. “Who then?”
Should she mention the Wraiths? No. Not without something to substantiate their existence. “We don’t know . . . except they might be just hired help. There’s also good reason to believe the hearse didn’t end up in a garage but left the area in that Ar-Sal van you saw behind E-World.”
“What!”
Janna pictured detectives in the squad room whipping around at Roos’s screech. It brought Quist in a nano to peer over his partner’s shoulder.
As Janna explained the reasoning, and why that might mean the hearse had been targeted for use in a crime, their jaws dropped, followed by lips clamping into grim lines around muttered curses.
“We need to check Traffic for that van around ten or later Thursday night.”
Quist disappeared . . . presumably for his computer.
Roos fairly breathed fire. “It sat there all fucking day . . . with us just yards from it? And we hardly glanced at the fucking thing! Why the fuck didn’t we check it out? Why? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Janna said nothing, knowing the hundred kinds of fool Roos felt, and the futility of offering any words of comfort.
Across the table, Mama had opened his slate — tapping and swiping with one hand while using the other for the burger and onion threads — and gave her a wry smile.
Eventually Roos exhausted invective and blew out her breath. “So . . . not only do we not know who the jackers are, they’re just tools. We have no idea who wanted the hearse, if it was targeted, or why.” She raised her voice. “Quist! What about Traffic?”
His voice reached Janna from a distance. “Jesus, Bear! Give me a minute or two since we don’t have a tag.”
“Zipwits!” Roos banged her forehead with the heel of her hand. “We didn’t even record the fucking tag!”
“I’m checking Swygart and Twenty-first, but there’s no Ar-Sal van from twenty-one forty-five up to twenty-four hundred.”
Mama said, “Tell them the tag is: SXH 752.”
Janna relayed that, then eyed him. “That was fast. Where did you catch it? Can you tell where they’re headed?”
“Where they came from. I’m backtracking from E-world, starting at Twenty-first and Swygart on Thursday.” He tapped some more . . . frowned . . . whistled through his teeth.
“What?”
“It came out of the New Heartland Park Annex. Running the registration now.”
“Heartland?” Janna frowned. “There’s no racing this time of year.”
“But the Annex—”
“He’s got the tag wrong,” came Quist’s voice. “I’ve got it at Twenty-first and Swygart at two fifteen this morning, but . . . the vehicle is a white van! Two individuals in it. Damn. Wearing ski masks!”
“Tell him it’s the right tag,” Mama said. “Keep tracking it. They just altered its appearance. Probably skinned the sides with static film, then peeled that off before leaving E-World.”
“The film won’t stick in these temperatures,” Janna said.
“It will if applied where it’s warm . . . and the Annex has sheds—”
Janna cut in. “That can be heated so racing teams that want to work on their cars off-season can do so and test run them on the track when the weather is good.” Sheds larger and more substantial than the term suggested, plenty big enough to garage a van.
Which she should have remembered after that the summer three years ago when she spent almost every weekend at Heartland with Vice detective Dale Talavera, guests of his siblings’ racing team, watching vehicles that like motorcycles, still ran on wheels and fuel distilled from hydrocarbon plants.
“Here’s the registration,” Mama said. “Markakis Racing.”
“I’m cutting you off to make another call,” Janna told Roos, and disconnected to look up Talavera’s number and call him.
As the wait for him to answer lengthened, she wondered of if he were was still on the undercover assignment that ended their summer together.
Then just when she expected to be sent to v-mail, his face came on the screen . . . more rugged than handsome but with the warmest of smiles. “Brill. Been a while.” Warm voice, too.
“Yes.” And almost asked, How long have you been out from under? Why didn’t you call? But it had been a dalliance, not a relationship, and undercovers, she knew, often came out changed from when they went in. “You’re looking good.”
“You, too. Is that the Celestial Bistro I see behind you?”
“It is.” Okay, enough small talk. “I need some racing chop . . . or Ben and Sisi’s contact numbers if you can’t answer my question.”
“Ask away.”
“Are any of the teams working in the Annex this time of year?”
A brow rose. “One or two masochists, maybe.”
“Markakis?”
Talavera snorted, shaking his head. “Not Polo. Teams like my siblings’ need jobs to finance their racing, but his family has mega money. So this time o
f year, he migrates south to drive for teams in South Africa and Australia. Why?”
“A van that’s turned up in a current case is registered to Markakis Racing.”
“He might have loaned the shed to someone. He’s generous.”
“We’ll check with him. Thanks. Stay sharp out there.”
“You, too.”
She called Roos back.
Whose eyes glittered. “We got ‘em!” She pumped a fist in front of her face. “Quist tracked the van back to Heartland, too. We’re rounding up some uniforms and heading out there. Dust or you’ll miss the fun!”
“We’re on our way.” Janna disconnected and shoved the last of the burger into her mouth.
Mama continued to play with his slate.
“What are you doing? Come on!” She pushed back her chair and stood.
He held up a hand, watching the slate. “No. Wait.”
Wait? She scowled at him. “Why?”
“I asked Traffic for all record of those tags between Thursday and right now and they moved that van much later than I thought. That makes me curious.” He looked up. “I’m also curious why the van went through Twenty-first and California three times.”
Three times? She sat back down. “Okaaay. That is odd. I presume the first time was Thursday?”
“Right . . . turning onto Twenty-first on its way to the Swygart intersection. The second time was at two seventeen this morning, turning north on California from Twenty-first.”
Which fit with the two fifteen sighting at Twenty-first and Swygart that Quist found. But, turning north? “And the third time?”
“Heading south on California at two fifty. Followed by Twenty-second and California, Twenty-third and California, etcetera. Headed for Heartland.”
She frowned. “But first went somewhere north for forty-three minutes.”
“Interesting, yes? So let’s see where that was.” He typed on the screen. “Okay, I’ve got it at Hillcrest and Thirteenth. Then. . .” He swiped the screen and spread his thumb and index finger twice. “Crossed over I-70 . . . passed Eleventh at two twenty-five, then . . . returned through Eleventh at two forty.” He looked up. “What do you suppose they did for fifteen minutes?”
Janna sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance they temporarily lost their sense of direction and that’s when they realized their mistake.”