I went for the window, turned the handle and pushed open both sides. I looked out, sized up the drop. Two stories down to a dimly lit alleyway. An ankle-breaker if I ever saw one. Damn. Damn. Damn.
“Juno?” I heard her call from the hallway. She’d found her assistant. “Where are you?” A door slammed down the hall. Then another that sounded closer. “Emil Mota told me who you are. Where are you?”
If I was going to jump it had to be now.
But it was too high. Too damn high. I took off a shoe, dropped it out the window, and ran into the shower.
“I wish I’d known who you were the first time you came in. I wouldn’t have stopped with your hand.” She was in the bathroom, her voice so near, so cold, so cruel.
Heartbeats pounded in my chest, my ears. I peeked through the gap between the mildewed shower curtain and the mossy wall, dewy water soaking into my shirtsleeve.
I could see her now. She was at the window, leaning through to get a good look down. See the shoe and believe it. Please believe it. Lungs ached to keep up with my double-timing heart, but I kept my breathing slow and constrained, breaths squeezing in and out of my mouth.
She pulled her head back inside the window. Believe, bitch.
Seconds passed. Long, super-stretched seconds.
“It’s me again,” she said. “He’s gone. Bastard jumped out the window.”
A pause. She was on the phone again, the device wired somewhere inside her skull.
“He got spooked and ran. You still coming, Emil?”
Pause.
“We’re going to Yepala. Book a flyer.”
Pause.
“Yes, tonight.”
She slammed the window shut, sealed it with a turn of the handle, and moved out of view. I turned my head, pointed an ear in her direction. I listened for footsteps, had to know when she’d left the room.
I heard the hollow sound of wooden soles on tile. Step, step, step. Then nothing. Shit. She was having second thoughts. For good measure, she was going to do a quick search. She was going to kill me, take me apart piece by piece and kill me.
I heard a zipper, a rustle of cloth, then the sound of liquid streaming against porcelain. I told myself to breathe again. She was taking a piss.
But I hadn’t heard her go into one of the stalls, hadn’t heard any of the doors.
I leaned to the right. Carefully. Tentatively. Painstakingly. I edged my eye past the other side of half-drawn curtain. She stood with her back to me, facing the wall.
Understanding bloomed in my head. Her shirt made sense now, why it didn’t fit right.
A man’s shirt.
She was at the urinal, hands in hose-holding position.
The good doctor had a dick.
I told the kid to cut the shirt into strips. He was the same clothes vendor I’d come to in my underwear after escaping the doctor’s office the first time. He knifed through the shirt, making nice long strips of fabric while I hid behind a row of hanging tees, my eyes zeroed on the doc’s door, phone conversations replaying in my head.
Mota was coming to meet her. Him. She was a him.
The kid finished, the shirt now reduced to a pile of makeshift bandages. For disinfectant, I dunked my stump into a jar of fly gel, a yellow glob sticking to the end. I put my eyes back on the door and stuck out my arm, told the kid to mummy it up good.
Dumbass doctor should’ve fried me the moment he saw me. But he tried to get cute with it, playing the good doctor, sending in his pasty-eyed patsy with a needle. Apparently, violent confrontation wasn’t the doctor’s way. Before this was done, I’d make sure he knew it was mine.
The kid layered on the last strip. He pulled a safety pin from a rusted tin box. “I don’t have any tape.”
“No problem.”
I let him pin it and went back to spying, my bare foot tapping the asphalt.
I spotted a hat poking above the crowd of offworld kids. Panama. I watched it come down the street, bobbing on top of the crowd like a leaf on a river.
My pulse punched my temples, and hate stoked the fire inside me. I wanted my weapon. Wanted to feel its cool grip in my palm, feel its heft, finger the trigger. Just a little squeeze was all it would take to loose the fire burning within. Just a little squeeze.
But I had no weapon. I pinched my lip between my molars and squeezed. Panama approached the doctor’s door. Mota was with him. I could see him now, the crowd thinning enough to expose his smooth strut.
They went inside. I paid the kid and waited.
It wasn’t long before the door opened again. Three of them came out. Mota, Panama, and… I’ll be damned…
Raven hair and silk shirt, offworld tech somehow making both blow in a wind that didn’t exist.
I knew that guy. The gay bar. He’d hit on me.
He wore the same poured-into pants the doctor had worn inside. The same silk shirt that had barely held together over her buxom chest now draped and shimmered over his muscular frame. This had to be the doctor’s regular appearance, his true gender on display.
It must’ve been quite a shock when he spotted me in one of his favorite haunts, sniffing around, asking questions. He knew me. He’d already cut off my arm. He would’ve called Mota, told him somebody was asking about Franz Samusaka. Using the phone in his head, he would’ve transmitted a vid stream of me, and Mota would’ve told him who I was.
Mota would’ve come for me, but he couldn’t. Not then. Not when he was hiding in the Cellars, lying in wait to ambush my boys.
So he told the doc to sic that damn fly on me. That way he could come for me later.
They moved away from the door, and I noticed spinning snake tats on Mota’s and the doctor’s cheeks. The same tats as on Froelich and the dead Samusaka kid. A gay-boy’s club was coming into focus. A matching-tat dick clique.
The crowd quickly engulfed them, everything but the panama hat. I pushed my way through hanging shirts to the pavement and followed with a tilted, one-shoed gait.
I wracked my brain to remember what she’d been wearing. Mota’s girlfriend. When she came out of the club. Silk shirt. Tight pants. I was sure of it. Just like the doctor had been wearing inside. Just like he was wearing right this second.
Understanding brought a knowing sneer. They were all the same person. The gay playboy. The doctor. Mota’s girlfriend. The same person.
Mota was gay. Not bi. One hundred percent flame just like Wu thought. His girlfriend was a man, a drag queen who could raise tits and sink an Adam’s apple; a cross-dresser who could, at will, broaden hips and sprout a big, gaudy mop of hair. A tranny who swapped out everything but the plumbing.
I was sure that with offworld tech even that was possible, but evidently, shedding his thing wasn’t his thing. Even as a woman, he pissed standing up.
The panama hat turned right. I sped up to the corner, then stopped to let the hat reel out far ahead. The crowd was less dense on the side streets. I’d be easy to spot if I didn’t keep my distance.
Mota and Dr. Tranny. Lovers. Mota and Froelich. Lovers. All three together. Franz Samusaka too.
They turned again, and the trio ducked through a gate with armed guards standing on both sides. I strolled straight past, head down, no eye contact with the guards. I hustled to the end of the block and stood outside a schlock shop: porn vids, monitor-tooth necklaces, neckties made to look like brandy bottles.
I fake-studied a rack of palm-frond fans, my true gaze aimed up the block to the guards holding their posts, the red tips of their cigs glowing with every puff. From this angle, I couldn’t read the painted sign over the door, but I knew the place. Bresner’s Sky Cab. The biggest flyer rental company on the planet.
I waited for ten minutes, maybe longer-the shopowner giving me the stink eye-until I heard the roar of liftoff. Earsplitting thunder rumbled down the street. Windowpanes rattled in cheap-ass frames while monitor-tooth necklaces gnashed on their hooks.