I went off the path, shoes slip-sliding over scorched, muddy earth until thick, black jungle stood tall all around me. I took a swing at it, my fist busting through leaves and fronds, rage filling the hole in my chest.
Niki and Paul.
Paul and Niki.
Screaming, I lunged deeper into the jungle, arms swinging like sickles, breaking stems under my feet. I grabbed with my left hand, ripped and pulled at the foliage, clumps of torn greenery coming free. I struck a thin tree with my right arm, took hold of the skinny bastard and tried to uproot the fucker, but a thousand vines refused to let it go. I punched at the vines, chopped at them with the blunt blade of my right arm, and yanked at the tree again. I kicked and pushed and yanked and shoved. The bastard was coming down!
I pulled with all my might, sweat dribbling in my eyes, lungs sucking air. The damn tree wouldn’t budge. The jungle never budged.
I let it go and raised a leg to give the stubborn bastard a last karate kick. Ended up on my ass.
I stayed there, waiting for my lungs to quit heaving. Waiting for the sweat to quit dripping. Waiting for my heart to quit ripping into a million little pieces.
April 26, 2789
Another day of darkness would begin soon. I’d tossed and turned the night away with sparse dozing, turbulent thoughts, and disturbed images.
Niki and Paul. I told myself that it was a long time ago. Paul had spied on her just like I had. He’d watched her sleep and talk on the phone, watched her put on her makeup and eat her breakfast. It was natural for him to develop feelings, wasn’t it? He’d split up with Pei, and Niki and I were fighting like we always did right after we were married. They were both lonely.
I told myself again that was a long time ago. I shouldn’t care. I told myself they were dead. I should let them rest.
I told myself a lot of things, but none could yank the thorn of betrayal embedded in my heart.
My wife. My best friend.
I could feel the pressure building in my blood and behind my eyes.
Breathe. Just breathe. This was a perfectly nice bed. It would be a damn shame to smash it up; a shame to rip into the mattress and tear out the stuffing; to snap the frame under stomping feet and demolish the walls with a bedpost sledgehammer. All of it a damn shame.
I had to stop thinking about them.
I rolled onto my side. A lopsided curtain hung over the door, lopsided because the withered fabric had lost its grip on a third of the rings. A triangle of light came through where the curtain hung folded over. I followed the glowing beam’s path past three figures on the wall-two geckos and one Jesus-followed the beam down to where it died on the floor.
A church guesthouse. That was what this place was, where Maria had set us up for the night. It was one of several attached buildings surrounding a courtyard with a fountain and a blinking sign that read, HE DIED FOR YOUR SINS.
Deluski slept a couple doors down. I’d peeked in on him when I arrived. He’d been snoring with a twisted, strangled sheet snaking between and around his limbs. I wasn’t the only one with restless dreams.
I’d also spotted the phone on the dresser by his bed. A cheap, anonymous phone. No doubt, Deluski had used it to erase his movie. First chance he got, he’d connected up and deleted that era of his life.
I stretched out my legs. I could barely see the dimly lit Jesus staring at me from his perch on the crucifix nailed to the wall. He died for my sins. So did Kripsen and Lumbela.
Four dead crew. They weren’t all my fault. Lizard-man got credit for Froelich and Wu. But Kripsen and Lumbela, they were on me, victims of my arrogance. Seize a protection racket. From there, seize KOP. I was fucking insane to think I could pull off that shit. I wasn’t even a cop.
I rolled onto my back… fussed with the pillow… readjusted the sheet… flipped the pillow… pulled the sheet back up.
No more of this bullshit. I sat up. No matter how desperate I was to sleep, it wasn’t going to happen. I had too many derailed trains of thought, too many poisoned memories.
Niki and Paul.
What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?
I grabbed my pants and struggled to pull them on one-handed. Damn nuisance. I carefully zippered over my skivvyless package and coaxed my still-sore muscles out to the hall. That run-in with Mota and Panama in the Cellars had taken a toll on these tired bones. I ambled down to Deluski’s room and shook the curtain on his door, brass rings jingling on the steel rod.
“Yeah?”
I poked my head through the curtain. “I need your phone.”
He picked it off the dresser and tossed it my way. I snatched it out of the air left-handed and headed back to my room, pleased that I hadn’t tried to make the grab with my missing right. I was finally catching on.
I kept the light off, stripped off my pants, and dropped back into bed. I punched in a name: Dr. Angel Franklin.
Born ninety-three years ago. Smooth-skinned bastard kept himself young. Offworlders were damn good at defying time, their bodies riddled with antiaging drugs and a steady supply of replacement organs. Their life expectancy was more than double ours.
He was originally from Earth, someplace called Slovakia, wherever the hell that was. Started the fourteen-year journey to Lagarto in ’sixty-nine.
Fourteen years. Nobody made that trip anymore. Not since the brandy market tanked. The Earth-Lagarto trade route was called the sucker’s rainbow now, named for the fourteen-year stream of immigrants who arrived after the economy collapsed. All of them setting off for the promise of work and a new world. All of them following a rainbow cut through the heavens to the pot of gold called Lagarto. A decade and a half’s worth arrived after the collapse, my great-grandparents among them, all of them caught in transit after the pot of gold had already been looted and picked clean.
Yet Dr. Angel Franklin made the same voyage. Why coop himself up inside a metal tube for more than a tenth of his life to come to this green hell?
I checked out his professional history, and the question answered itself. He lost his medical license in ’sixty-eight, revoked for ethical violations. That was all it said. Ethical violations. He’d set off for Lagarto just a few months later.
He’d come here to practice medicine, or his twisted version of it, away from the rules and the regulators, to a place where rules were for sale.
I heard the clacks of high heels on tile coming this way. The curtain swung aside. Backlit explosion of hair. Miniskirt silhouette. Maria. “You like the place?”
I set the phone on my chest and turned on the light, carefully propped the pillow under my head to keep from aggravating my burned scalp. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not often.”
She walked over and slumped into a chair by the bed. Her breasts were squeezed into a faux-leather halter top.
“Long night?” I asked.
“Long but quiet.”
“Business slow?”
“Not bad. By quiet, I meant no problems.”
“Chicho know you’re gone?”
She shrugged her shoulders and turned up her palms. “I don’t know. I doubt he’d care this time of night. The johns are all gone except for the all-nighters, and they never cause trouble. Any luck with whatever you’re working on?”
I mimicked her don’t-know gesture.
“You know, you never told me what you were after in all this.”
“That’s because it keeps changing.”
“What’s the latest?”
“I’d settle for catching the bastard who did this to me.” I waved my right arm. “That, and stopping Mota.”