The rain had calmed to barely a drizzle. The sky was brighter than normal. Still couldn't see the sun, but I could pick out the bright spot behind the clouds. The skiff puttered out from one of Koba's innumerable canals and began motoring across the Koba River. I looked over at one of Koba's bridges stretched over the water to our port side. The bridge's walkway was clogged with merchants pushing carts loaded high with rattan rugs, fern-frond hats, monitor-bone carvings, and countless other varieties of handmade schlock, the whole lot of them heading to the Old Town Square to take advantage of the semi-rain-free weather, all of them hoping to sell an item or two to one of the few tourists on planet.
Coming around the bend, I could see the walls surrounding the Zoo. Mexican scientists were the first to settle Lagarto. They'd come all the way from Earth to study our lizard-dominated ecology. Not since dinosaurs ruled the Earth had there been a planet where reptiles were the highest form of life. They set up what was, at the time, a first-class research facility on the banks of the Koba.
They loaded the facility full of biological specimens-no telling what they could learn from alien biology. After all, Lagarto had one of the most developed ecologies of all the discovered planets. They were going to cure the incurable and unlock the secrets of Darwinian evolution. The scientists dissected every species. They extracted oils from every organ. They injected earth-bacteria, instigated cancers, spliced genes, and created laboratories so full of reptilian mutants as to make Dr. Moreau proud. And in the end, what did they learn? Nada.
I took a hit off my flask, thinking not all was for naught. When they ran out of tequila, they started experimenting with the local fruit…
Scientists flocked to farming when the brandy boom hit. There were fortunes to be made. The research funding dwindled year after year, and then when it was finally axed altogether, the handful of die-hard scientists who were still doing research at the facility opened up all the cages as a sign of protest. Thousands of species of bug and lizard infested the buildings. That's when us Lagartans took to calling it the Zoo.
It sat abandoned for many years, until well after the economic collapse, when crime had begun reaching epidemic levels. The government needed more prison space and rather than build a new prison, they converted the research facility into a jail. People liked the idea of throwing criminals in the Zoo-poisonous lizards and nasty bugs crawling all over.
I slapped a five-hundred on the skiff's pilot, hopped onto the dock, and climbed the long staircase leading up the riverbank. The Zoo lay before me, its ten-meter walls topped with broken glass set in cement with the jagged edges up. On the corners stood tall towers crowned with glassed-in booths for the zookeepers. I remembered that Ian used to work here. After he'd failed the KOP physical on his first try, his father set him up as a guard until the next go-round. He did a year, maybe two, as a zookeeper before finally coming over to KOP.
I walked through the front gate. I stayed inside the yellow lines painted on the asphalt as I stepped across the no-man's land between the outer walls and the facility itself. Just outside the yellow lines, I could see the evenly spaced laser heads embedded in the ground, ready to fry anything bigger than a fly that crossed their path. There were plenty of rotting lizard parts littering the trail, some of them still smoking. I strode through the entrance. A zookeeper sat at the desk. “What you want?” he asked.
“I'm here for visitation. Adela Juarez.”
The guard gestured at the scanner. I stepped through as another guard checked his monitor and saw that I was unarmed. He made me wait a minute while the system looked up my DNA. My identity established, he signaled me through. I walked through a series of gates, finally entering the prison proper.
When I reached the warden's office, nobody bothered to greet me. I knocked and entered, immediately catching an earful from the block super about how I didn't have the authority to enter that office. The food stains on the front of his shirt and the piece of what could be fish stuck in his beard told me he was more upset about me interrupting his early lunch than anything else. I went back into the hall and waited for a good five minutes before he came out with a wiped face and a bulging stomach that exerted maximum button stress. He called to one of the zookeepers and assigned him the job of being my personal escort.
The guard opened the gate and led me down a long corridor, past the infirmary and the library. The walls were alive with mossy growth. I couldn't see the floor through the ferns. As we waded through the overgrowth, the floor popped with activity, insects and lizards both going airborne. I brushed a beetle from my shoulder. I felt something in my hair that I swiped away with a swat.
I heard somebody screaming. His protestations echoed through the block for a few seconds before they were drowned out by cheers. Probably rape. Maybe guard-on-inmate, maybe inmate-on-inmate. No way to tell.
We took a set of steps down a level. The stairs had been recently torched to keep them fern free. Each step we took was accompanied by a poof of ash that quickly turned my pant legs black. A right turn took us onto death row, though it wasn't really a row. It was more of a square with evenly spaced cages arranged into rows like desks in a classroom. Each cage was a simple cubical structure, the entire cage composed of latticed rebar. My escort snatched up a wooden stool and zigzagged me through the cages, the soon-to-be-dead peeking out through the openings. My escort set the stool next to a cage near the center then moved out of earshot to allow some privacy.
I took a seat on the stool, lifting my feet up onto the rungs to keep them off the infested floor. I looked through the food hole at the face of young Adela Juarez sitting on her cot. Her eyes looked like they'd aged years since her interrogation. She passed a pot through the hole. I took it from her hands and knew not to check inside. I held the almost full piss pot up for the guard who came and took it off my hands.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name's Juno Mozambe.”
“You a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Are you here to take pictures?”
“No. I don't work for the press.”
“I know that. My father ran the vid station for the Libre. I'd know you if you were a reporter.”
“Then why did you ask if I wanted to take pictures?”
She shrugged.
I honed in on her eyes, looking for that same dark twinkle I saw in her interrogation, that little something that said there was a whole lot more to her than what was visible on the surface. I saw sadness, and I saw fear, but I couldn't find that same spark that I knew so well from looking into my wife's eyes. A couple months in this cage must've driven it out of her. Time I got this over with. “You killed your parents.”
“You gonna tell me who you are?”
“A friend sent me.”
“What friend? Did Raj send you?”
From the case file, I remembered that Raj Gupta had been tagged as the accused's boyfriend. She'd claimed she was with him all night the night her parents died. Problem was the kid didn't back her up. He admitted that she was at his house earlier that night, and that they had sex in his bed, twice. But then he went on to say that she left a little after midnight, which gave her plenty of time to get home since her parents weren't attacked until 1:52 A.M. It was an analysis of the maggots retrieved from the Juarezes' wounds that nailed down the time of attack so accurately. The maggots had just reached fifth generation and from there, it was simple math: one hour and twenty-three minutes per generation, plus a mere four minutes for initial infestation. Lagartan flies act quick.
I could imagine the look on Adela's face when she'd found out her boyfriend didn't alibi her. The little vix thought she had the kid pussy-whipped. She thought he'd do anything she said to keep getting between her legs. She must've thought she was the hottest lay on the planet. Turned out her boyfriend was thinking, “Not so much.”