“So you’re saying we have no hope?”
“That’s right. No hope at all. And what do people with no hope do? They abuse drugs, gamble…sell their bodies, that’s what. Now tell me how a couple vice cops can accomplish anything?”
We broke out the booze, put our feet up, and watched the screen-still no action.
“Okay, Paul. If you’re so sure we’re wasting our time, why are you sitting here on your day off?”
“So I can learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Learn how to run a drug operation.”
“You want to be a pusher?”
“No. I just need to understand how it works.”
“Why?”
“So I can harness it.” Paul’s fist was clenched; his smile was dangerously high-wattage.
I wanted to know what he was talking about but was afraid of where it might lead me. I’d noticed a tendency in myself to follow Paul, no matter how crazy his ideas were. I told him, “You are seriously fucked up.” We laughed as I poured another round. “Whoa, somebody’s home.”
A woman came through the back door into the kitchen. She had long legs, long hair, and was dressed to the nines. She kicked off her shoes, losing a few centimeters in height. She just left the shoes in the middle of the floor. She stopped at the fridge, popped some ice into a glass, and headed for the living room. I flipped channels to B. She pulled open the liquor cabinet and poured enough to cover the cubes. She took a sip and headed upstairs. I flipped back and forth between E and F until she showed up on F.
She stripped off her gown, showing black underwear on coffee skin. She slumped into a chair and nursed her drink. I fixated on her eyes. I felt like they were speaking to me, like they were calling me. My insides hummed. Her eyes also said something else. It was there, under the surface. I just couldn’t seem to peg what it was.
She slinked into the adjoining bathroom and closed the door.
“Who was that?” I wanted to know.
“Must be Yashin’s daughter. Her name is Natasha. She’s twenty-four. Strange she still lives at home.”
“It’s not that strange. Not everybody marries young.”
“I know, but a looker like that in her prime years? She should be living it up at her own place. She doesn’t need Mommy and Daddy cramping her style.”
I nodded without looking at Paul. My eyes were riveted to the bathroom door, waiting for her to come back out.
APRIL 23, 2762- MAY 31, 2762
Paul stared at the papers tacked up on the walls of our stakeout pad-the results of a month’s spying. The mold-speckled notes detailed Pavel Yashin’s drug trade. “What do you think, Juno?”
“I say we arrest the SOB.”
“We don’t have any evidence.”
“We have all kinds of evidence, Paul.”
“We’ve gathered all this evidence illegally. We can’t use any of it in court.”
“All we need is a surveillance warrant. I told you about Judge Saydak. She’s got huge gambling debts, and she’s selling warrants. It won’t even cost that much. All we have to do is get her to backdate the warrant, and we’re set.”
“But Yashin’s strictly small-time. Don’t you want something more?”
He was right about Pavel Yashin being small-time. He ran a good business, though. He was making weekly trips upriver to meet representatives of the warlords, and placing opium orders. They’d ship the brown sugar by barge to a drop point a few klicks upriver from Koba. Yashin would take a skiff out on the water and send flashlight signals. They’d dump his O overboard, and he’d fish out the floating packages by flashlight. He’d motor the goods to shore and load it into his car. Then he’d drive home, his weighted-down car scraping the pavement at every bump in the road.
Yashin worked solo. He trusted no one. He made an easy target driving around with all that dope by himself. You’d think he’d have some bodyguards riding shotgun, but he was too paranoid to let anybody near his contraband. He’d pull the car into the garage and haul the dope down to the basement, working himself into a heart-attack-intensity sweat.
He had a network of dealers who came to the house to buy his shit, but he wouldn’t let any of them into the basement. He’d go down alone and bring up the right quantities. The dealers would turn around and sell it at high-class hotels and restaurants. Most of them had jobs as waiters, bartenders, or bellhops. That must’ve been how the electric bitch, Mai Nguyen, found Yashin. She’d probably been approached by one of his dealers who had set her up with Yashin. Up ’til recently, his business was small potatoes, but he was hoping that the Nguyen deal would change that.
Nguyen had been looking for a new supplier, one that could deliver high-grade O at a good price. Yashin thought he was just the guy so he made his sales pitch, and she bought it. He wanted to impress her with his ability to deliver in quantity so he went upriver and he bought up tons of product-literally. He sank all his funds into the down payment. He sold Nguyen a fourth of his stock the night we were watching, and he made pricing agreements on six more shipments.
At first, Paul and I were optimistic that if we could keep close to Yashin, we could get another shot at Nguyen when she made her next O buy. Yashin was calling up to the Orbital every day to see if Nguyen was ready for the next order, but she wouldn’t answer his calls or return his messages. After a month of failed attempts to contact her, it had become abundantly clear that she was screwing him over.
We figured Nguyen was too spooked by us to deal with Yashin anymore. She knew we were likely to be onto Yashin, so she had probably moved on to another supplier. She had handled Paul and me just fine that night, but for all she knew, the whole of KOP would be waiting to pounce the instant she made another buy from Yashin. There were plenty of dealers for her to choose from. She could afford to play it safe by ditching Yashin even though she had little to worry about since Paul and I had kept Yashin’s identity from our superiors. We’d been conducting this entire investigation on our own. Paul and I had learned the hard way that when you kept the bosses informed, you’d get your collars stolen out from under you.
When Yashin bought all that dope, he had thought he and Nguyen were going to have an ongoing business relationship, but now he’d finally caught on that she’d hung him out to dry. He was stuck with this huge stockpile of opium in his basement and had nowhere to unload it.
Yashin was unraveling. He’d gone from three to seven drinks a night. He’d overextended himself, and he was having major cash flow problems. He still owed money on his mammoth purchase, and he wasn’t selling it fast enough to keep up on his payments. He kept trying to return it, but the warlord he bought it from wouldn’t hear of it-all purchases were final.
He tried to increase his sales by getting two dealers to start pushing on the street. One had already gotten knifed, compliments of Ram Bandur. Bandur had his initials, R.B., burned with cigarette butts into the dealer’s forehead, chest, and scrotum-antemortem. He wasn’t taking kindly to anybody encroaching on his territory.
I wanted to arrest Yashin while we still had the chance. He’d become vulnerable, and I was afraid the sharks might get him first. Paul wanted to use Yashin to chum the water, see if we could snag us a shark.
I asked, “Just who do you think we can get?”
“We should go for Bandur. We already have him on murder.”
“He’s way too big, Paul. He’s got Phra Kaew under his control. That’s a big neighborhood, and he’s not just peddling drugs, he’s taking a piece of all the gambling and prostitution profits, too. He’s got the money and the muscle to keep us from laying a finger on him. He knows we can’t touch him. Why else would he burn his own initials into a vic?”