The eggs arrived, and I forced myself to choke them down despite the rebellion put up by my stomach.
I looked out the window. The sky was starting to brighten with the dawn. I could see the hospital from here. How could she do that to me? Maybe I shouldn't have saved her when she took her swan dive. Maybe I should've just let her die. That was what she wanted. That was what she told anybody who would listen. She had the shrinks convinced. Three separate ones came to me, each of them telling me she had the right to refuse medical treatment. It took all my powers of persuasion to bring them around to my way of thinking, a little cash flashing here, a little knuckle cracking there. It was hard enough getting her medical needs met; I didn't need a legal battle, too.
But why did she have to fight me like that? If that was the way she was going to be, maybe I should just give Niki her wish, let them yank the plug and wash my hands of it altogether.
My eggs wanted to come back up. I sucked some coffee down hoping it might settle my stomach. Stop thinking like that, I told myself. I couldn't let them pull the plug. I couldn't lose her. This was Niki we were talking about. There was still hope for us. I was certain of it. Broken and battered as the two of us were, I knew we still had a future. We were meant to be together.
And there was no fucking way in hell I was going to let some punk wannabe enforcer take her from me.
I called Maggie, told her we needed to meet.
The smell of acid burned my nose. I moved around to the upwind side of the fountain and watched the small team of city workers scrub the upper reaches of the statue from precarious scaffolds surrounding the four intertwined iguanas. The iguanas were sculpted to look like they'd climbed each other's bodies until the whole lot of them had lifted themselves off the ground. They were held up by their tails, which braided down and disappeared under a pool of black water at the fountain's base. The top halves of their bodies were stripped down to bare stone as the city workers had already scoured away the layers of molds and mosses. Their lower halves were still coated with furry growth that looked like wooly pants.
I saw Maggie approach from the far side of the fountain sporting designer duds and rain-speckled hair. The knot in my stomach started twisting at the thought of having to fess up.
“My god, what happened?” were the first words that came out of her mouth when she spotted my mummified hand.
“Did you get yourself scanned?”
“I'm clean.”
“Good.”
I had to be sure I wasn't bugged, so I'd gone down to an offworld tech shop to get myself checked out, and came up bug free. It made me sick how much money the scan cost. If I had to keep spending like this, I'd have no chance of making my next payment. After breakfast, I'd called up to the Orbital and asked what would happen if I missed a payment. They said that they'd keep the spine tanked for as long as it took for me to pay in full; only then would the bastards ship it down to the surface. I argued for half an hour, trying to convince them that they should ship the spine as soon as implantation was medically possible, but they held firm, telling me that their policy was to keep possession of all parts until receiving payment in full. The best they could do was to waive the additional daily tank storage fees until I paid up. The possibility of Niki lying there while there was a perfectly good spine ready for implantation made me sick. She deserved better than that. I had to make those payments.
“Did you break something?” she asked.
“Actually, it was Ian that did the breaking. He found out about me meeting the girl. He and Hoshi met me outside the Zoo.”
Maggie's face turned angry. “How did he know?”
“One of the guards at the Zoo called him, one of his old buddies.” It had been a long time since Ian had worked at the Zoo, but he obviously still had at least one supersized contact there. I could just picture Ian talking to the guard: “Anybody comes to see the girl, you call me right away. Got it, boy-o?”
“Oh damn,” she said. “I'm sorry, Juno. I should've warned you that he used to work there.”
“Don't worry about it. I knew he used to be a guard, too. His father used to brag about it all the time. But that was years ago. Neither of us had any reason to believe that he'd be tracking visitors.”
Maggie nodded, her face tight.
This would be the tough part. I just had to spit it out. “I lied to you, Maggie, about Adela.”
“What about her?”
“I didn't get a confession out of her. In fact, she was quite insistent that she didn't do it.”
Maggie brushed it off. “That's okay, Juno. I understand.” And then she looked at my hand.
I wasn't going to let myself get off that easy. “It's not that. I didn't lie because Ian broke a couple fingers. I…” I struggled to find the right way to say it. “I needed the money. I thought if I just told you that the girl confessed, I could get you to pay up fast.”
Maggie dismissed the whole thing, “Money doesn't mean anything.”
Only a rich person would say something like that. I was getting frustrated at how painless she was making this. I'd been ready to spill to her about Niki, about how I couldn't afford the payments, about how desperate I was to get her out of the hospital. I needed to make Maggie understand why I'd lied to her. I needed to tell her. Yet I stood there, in the drizzle, unable to find words, her quick forgiveness catching me totally off guard.
Maggie took my good hand in hers. “I understand, Juno. It's okay.”
“But-”
“I understand,” she repeated.
I blinked rainwater out of my eyes and began to see that she understood far more than I'd thought. She'd probably already guessed that I'd lied about the girl, maybe picking up something in my voice when I'd tried to bullshit her. She was making it clear that she didn't care. She knew about Niki's accident and knew the kind of financial pinch I was in. She wasn't going to make me debase myself by saying it.
I squeezed her hands back. “Thanks, Maggie.”
“Now, is there anything else?”
I filled her in on my late-night rendezvous with Ian, telling her first about Liz and the offworlder, and then about how Ian threatened Niki's life, and finally the deal he offered. I left out the part about Niki not telling me.
Maggie listened to the whole story without saying a word until I was done. “So where do we go from here?”
“I don't think it's wise to kill him until we know more about the rest of his cop clique and what it is they're into.”
“Christ, Juno.” She was shaking her head. “We're not going to kill him. Killing him won't give us the evidence we need to exonerate Adela Juarez. She's going to die if we don't get evidence that'll free her. Besides, killing isn't what you're about anymore.”
I didn't think I was “about” anything. But whatever it was that I was “about” I was pretty sure it didn't live up to Maggie's image of me. Ever since we'd worked the Vlotsky murder together, she'd gotten the notion that I'd turned a new leaf. I liked to think she was right. That I was still capable of good deeds and selfless acts. And when it came to that one case, maybe I had done some good.
“We have a chance to do something important here,” said Maggie. “If we do this right, we can save an innocent girl and get some dirty cops out of KOP.”
I nodded my head even though I wasn't so sure about Adela being innocent. I couldn't shake the first impression I'd had of her as I'd watched the interrogation vid. There was no way I could've misread her eyes. I'd spent most of my adult life looking into those same eyes. In my mind, Adela was still the one with the lase-whip in her hand.