Kop (20 page)

No answer. I knocked again…still nothing. I took the keycard out of my pocket and waved it at the reader. I held up three fingers for Maggie then mouthed, “One…two…three…”

We stormed in, weapons raised in two-handed grips…. Empty.
Damn.

Maggie holstered her weapon.

My piece was wobbling in my hands. I self-consciously put the gun away. “Let’s search the place.”

“Don’t we need a warrant for that?”

“How do we know what we need a warrant for until we know what he’s got in here?”

She gave me a sly grin. She was catching on. Maggie rifled the dresser drawers while I checked out the bed. The sheets were stained brown in several places. The blanket looked chewed upon. I lifted the mattress. Bugs ran for cover, disappearing into mattress holes.

Maggie closed the last of the drawers. “There’s nothing in the dresser. Find anything?”

“Not yet.” I upended the mattress and braved the insects by reaching into any hole big enough to fit my hand. I felt them skittering over my skin as I probed around the moist insides of the mattress. Every time I pulled my hand out, I flicked my wrist and sent the hangers-on skipping across the floor.
There! Something…plastic.
I managed a grip and extracted a shopping bag.

Maggie said, “What are you waiting for?”

I opened the bag. Lying on top was a magazine. The cover showed some actress with her mouth cut out. A quick thumb-through showed mouthless celebrities on every page.

I went back into the bag and grabbed hold of two bundles of money. Talking to myself as much as Maggie, I said, “Where the hell did he get that?”

I passed a stack to Maggie who ran through the bills. “They’re all ten-thousands. There has to be at least a million pesos here, maybe two.” Enough money to buy a house…a nice house.

Maggie turned the bundle over. There was something on the bottom. She stripped off the rubber band and unfolded a
photograph of Lieutenant Dmitri Vlotsky saluting in uniform—Vlotsky’s address scribbled on the back. “What the hell?”

I reached into the bag and removed a roll of cloth. I began unwrapping the plain white fabric with red stains at the center. We both knew what we’d find, but I continued with morbid obligation. I pulled over the last fold of cloth, exposing a piece of red flesh—Vlotsky’s lips.

Maggie asked, “What’s that string for?”

There was a string running from the backside of one cheek to the other.

“I don’t know. It’s like a…” I couldn’t finish.

“Like a mask,” she said.

“Yeah. A mask.” An image of Ali Zorno standing in front of the mirror with Vlotsky’s lips strung over his ears, his patchwork face reflecting back a set of normal lips, seared itself into my brain.

Maggie shivered the horror away and said, “We’ve got the bastard, Juno. When Abdul matches this up to Vlotsky’s body, we’ll be able to give the case to the DA. Between that and Pedro’s testimony, Zorno won’t stand a chance. He’ll be executed.”

“Zorno’s just the hitter, Maggie. This wasn’t a serial killing. He was hired to whack Vlotsky. That’s where the money came from. He got half the money up front along with Vlotsky’s picture and address, the other half after he did the job.”

Ali Zorno: psycho for hire. Paul’s mayoral suspicions came to me front and center.

Maggie asked, “How are we going to get him to talk, tell us who paid him?”

“He won’t squeal,” I said. “I say we tail him—see who he talks to.”

Maggie looked skeptical. How could we let a serial killer roam around untouched?

She was right, but I was tasting mayor. I was already envisioning Mayor Samir’s head on a platter with me as the waiter. I’d be damned if I let him take KOP away from me and Paul. We took it a quarter-century ago. It was ours.

W
E
put everything back the way it had been, locked the door, and went back down to the building manager. I slapped the keycard on the counter, told the old hag, “We were never here.”

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.”

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 was 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.