I held Niki from behind. My liquor and lovemaking high starting to fade. Niki asked, “Is she pretty?”
“Who?”
“Your new partner.”
“Yeah, I suppose she is.” I tried to sound casual despite the guilt I was feeling.
“I thought so.”
“What makes you say that?”
Her voice turned cold, accusatory. “I haven’t seen you this horny in a long time.”
Her words doused the last embers of my high, and my eyes stung from the smoke. I tried to blink them normal, but they stayed stung. I rolled away from her, looking up at the ceiling, but not really looking at it, mostly just looking up. Was this all we had? She’d needle me, and I’d say ouch, then I’d needle back, the two of us constantly yanking each other’s strings, neither one of us able to stop.
MARCH 3, 2762-MARCH 9, 2762
’Sixty-two was the year everything changed. For better or for worse, I still wasn’t sure. I never set out to change the world. Shit, it had never crossed my mind that it was even possible.
I was a vice cop and I thought that was the greatest gig there was. A cop’s take-home afforded what seemed to me to be a good life. When the bus was inconvenient, I could take a cab and not worry about the cost. I didn’t have to barefoot it anymore. I could afford to buy two pairs of shoes a year, and not the crappy ones with the laces that snap off in a month. Best of all, I was renting my own place, a place with actual walls and a floor that was raised off the ground. After spending my whole life in a tent, I felt like I was living large.
I’d even been able to afford a proper death for my mother. Once the rot had set in, there was no way to save her, but with my KOP paychecks, I was at least able to pay for her antibiotic injections. Without those shots, the rot would have spread to her face, and she wouldn’t have been able to have a wake when she died. Most rot sufferers would be so disfigured by the time they died that they had to be cremated, but my mother was buried whole. She meant something.
I was just your average clock-punching cop with aspirations of being nothing more. Things were good. Other vice dicks were making names for themselves and rising through KOP ranks while I was content to work the shit details. I wasn’t scoring any flashy busts, but I was doing my job, arresting one pimp or pusher at a time.
Paul Chang was different. He was a dreamer, a big-picture guy. He never cared much about the daily grind of police work or about the individual victims we saw. To him, such things were just pieces of a pattern, cogs in a system that he needed to understand. Paul was all visions and designs. I was all nuts and bolts. But for some reason, when the two of us were partnered together, we were electric, instant best friends.
Our big break came when we caught a hot tip from Chow Lin-an opium dealer who we’d flipped a few months earlier. We pinched him for pushing, which carried a minimum seven. We held the evidence and told him he could serve the seven in prison or serve seven working for us. He made the easy choice and kept pushing while he passed us information on the side.
He put us onto an offworlder named Mai Nguyen who had just come down to the surface from the Orbital. He told us she was a big offworld buyer who smuggled O up to the Orbital and sold it to the freighter crews that passed through the Lagartan System. He heard she was on the surface, shopping for new suppliers.
It took Paul and me a full day to pick up her scent. We bribed hotel clerks all over the city, finally scoring a hit at the Nirvana Palace. We staked out the place for an hour before spotting her leaving from the back entrance. Like all offworlders, Mai Nguyen was easy to pick out. She was physically perfect. She had a doll’s face, an athlete’s legs, and cleavage up to her chin. She strutted down the grassy steps accompanied by two heavies who came out into the steamy heat wearing thick jackets, gloves, and long pants. Nobody dressed like that on Lagarto. It could mean only one thing-the suits were covering some serious technological voodoo. Retractable finger blades? Recessed lasers? Mechanical limbs stronger than a crane? Who the fuck knew? You never could tell with offworlders.
They turned and walked onto the street. Crowds gave them a wide berth, making them easy to tail. They strolled into the Old Town Square, a busy thoroughfare crammed with souvenir shops and sidewalk stands. Hawkers flocked around them, peddling chess sets with lizard-shaped pieces and old bricks with jungle scenes painted on.
Mai Nguyen stopped at a small stand and bought a cloth that she used to mop her brow and cleavage. Her goons stayed on her heels with their perspiration-soaked jackets buttoned all the way up. She weaved from booth to booth trying on sandals. She finally found a pair to her liking and talked the old woman into a trade: Nguyen’s shoes for the sandals. The old woman gladly stuffed paper into the toes of Nguyen’s shoes then slipped them on.
They stopped for dinner at an Asian place on the square. Paul and I sat on a park bench and watched them through the restaurant window. “Some drug dealers,” I said.
Paul looked at his discount store watch and chuckled uncomfortably. “Tell me about it. So far, it looks like a nice family on vacation.”
Paul was knotted with frustrated ambition. He came onto vice after only two years as a beat cop compared to my three. He became fast friends with our lieutenant, passed all the tests with high marks, and got reports done on time but was still passed over when promotions were handed out. I told him it was because he was young, but we both knew the real reason. You had to earn your stripes with a big bust, simple as that. He wanted to nail Nguyen. An arrest of an offworld trafficker would put our pictures all over the news and land him a lieutenancy, maybe even get him his own squad.
Nguyen and her keepers finished their dinner and ambled back to the hotel, stopping once so that one of the thugs could buy a shellacked monitor head mounted on a slab of wood with its jaws spread wide enough to bite off a limb.
I wasn’t worried about promotions for myself. Since I’d never graduated from school, I would never rise above sergeant anyway. I just liked the idea of bringing down an offworlder. Lagartans have always held a grudge against offworlders, and I was no exception. I hated the way they’d act like they were superior coming down here showing off their far-out tech and their bottomless bank accounts.
Nguyen was from the Orbital, or Lagarto Orbital-1 as it was officially known. The Lagartan government came up with that name. They numbered it like someday there’d be an LO-2 and an LO-3. They’d originally built it as a trading post for brandy exports, but it had ceased being a trade route hot spot long ago and therefore its successors had never been constructed. However, in recent years, the Orbital had been returning to prominence thanks to the flourishing mining operations in the asteroid belts. Freighters were coming through regularly now, which meant big opportunities for drug traffickers like Nguyen.
Two days of tailing her finally paid dividends when she and her goons came down the hotel’s back stairs in the middle of the night with three large cases. They flagged a cab and counted off enough offworld bucks to convince the driver to rent out the car. The driver danced to the sidewalk counting his good fortune.