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.
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 the 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 amp;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.