“C’mon, Li. It’s not that bad.”
“Oh, yes it is! After five years, they’d bang a beehive.”
“But you said yourself that the mines are booming. Those guys come down from the asteroid belts every year. Every year. And there’s more of them all the time. You can’t expect me to believe you can’t make your payments. We both know you’ve got plenty saved up. You could set Ramona up for life if you wanted to.”
“It’s not like that, Juno. Do you see this place? It’s falling apart.” Li lifted one of the silks, showing the molded-over wall that stood behind it. As he poked at the soggy parts, crumbling clumps of plaster fell to the floor. “I’m telling you, I’m flat broke. You’ve always been fair to me and my mother. Just tell me you can help my girls. It’s them I’m worried about. You can make an exception for Li’s girls, can’t you? I won’t ask for much.” He batted his lashes.
“When are you letting Ramona go?”
“Today.”
“Let me talk to her.”
Li stepped out, coming back ten minutes later with Ramona on his elbow. “I just told her the news and helped her pack her things,” he said. He sat her down next to him, his arm around her shoulder. Ramona was looking scared and teary-eyed, and she had a sloppily packed carpetbag resting on her lap. She was rubbing the back of her arm where Li had probably pinched her to get those tears flowing.
“Do you have a place to stay?” I asked her.
“I have a sister,” she said.
“See what you’re making me do to her?” Li said. “This kind of thing is going to keep happening if I don’t get some financial relief.”
I pulled the money from the envelope Li had given me. “Go find your sister,” I said as I handed Ramona the cash. To Li, I said, “I’ll see you next month.”
I was back on the street. The heat hung heavy on my shoulders. Sweat dribbled down my back. I cut down an alley. Geckos ran rampant on jungle-crept walls. Some street kids spotted me and scrambled to hide their glue jars-huffers. I didn’t pay them any mind. They were too poor to afford the good stuff.
Next stop: Fusco’s. He ran a gambling den on the roof of his apartment building. I’d heard he put up some tarps so he could stay open rain or shine. Sounded like more profit to me. We’d have to hash out a new rate.
Phone rang. The display told me it was Paul Chang, chief of the Koba Office of Police. Officially, he had been running the show for more than ten years; unofficially, he had for over twice that long. Twenty-five years ago, we were partners.
“Yeah,” I said.
Paul’s smiling hologram appeared alongside and kept step with me. It didn’t move its legs. It just skimmed along like some freaky ghost. “I need you to work a case.”
“What kind of case?”
“Homicide.”
No good. There was no money in homicide. Sure, sometimes you could land a big payoff when somebody wanted you to lose some evidence, but emotions ran high on homicides. You could never tell what was going to happen. A lot of cops would look at the big payoffs and buck for spots in homicide, but they wouldn’t think about the risks. Murders were mostly poor-on-poor anyway, no money to be made from either side. The real money was in vice, where I’d been for almost my whole career. No major scores, but low risk and steady income.
“Send Josephs and Kim,” I said.
“They’re already at the crime scene. I don’t want them working this one. I need you. ”
“Why?”
“Quit jerkin’ me, Juno. You taking the case or what?” The expression on Holo-Paul didn’t match Real-Paul’s clearly annoyed tone. Instead, it smiled personably. That was why I hated this holographic shit. They’d scan your looks into the system so they could construct an image that looked like you and beam it from the Orbital to anywhere on the planet. Sounded good until you found out that they didn’t adjust the image to your emotional state. They’d just give your holo this canned, perpetually pleasant attitude. Somewhere in Paul’s office was a happy-go-lucky me, smiling and acting all cheery instead of showing my actual sweaty and out-of-breath mug.
Paul wanted me to take a case. Reasons to say no ticked through my mind…I’m behind on my collections…I made lunch plans with Niki…I don’t enforce for you anymore. Instead, I asked, “Who’s the vic?”
“He’s an Army guy.”
“Where?”
“The alley outside the Lotus.”
I knew the place, a snatch house a few klicks from here. “Be there in twenty.”
“I’m partnering you up on this one.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. No way, Paul.”
“She’s new. She needs to learn the ropes.”
“Are you nuts? No way I’m taking on a green.”
“Listen, there’s nothing I can do. She has family pulling strings.”
I started to cave. “How green?” I asked.
“This is her first case.”
“First homicide?”
“No, first case.”
“First case! Holy shit, Paul. I don’t care who her family is. I’m out.” I accelerated my pace, but Holo-Paul stayed right on my hip.
“I know how it sounds, but she’s tough, and she has a good head on her shoulders. Without her family greasing things, she’d still make detective as fast as anybody. You have to do this one for me, Juno.”
“I work alone, Paul.”
“Listen, we can talk about this later. I’ll send her out to meet you at the Lotus. Her name’s Maggie Orzo. You check her out, scope out the crime scene, then come by my office, and we’ll talk it out.”
“No.”
“Juno?”
TWO
I couldn’t say no to Paul. I’d do anything for him, and he’d do the same for me. That was the way we were. The reason that it was usually Paul who was doing the asking, and me doing the doing was simply because he had far more ambition than I did. He was the one that had set out to change the world all those years ago. I’d just gone along for the ride.
It was too hot to walk, and I’d left my car at home, so I hopped into a taxi that smelled like the inside of a brandy bottle. Jiggling tassels hung down with decorative panache from the top of the windshield. The dash was covered by shiny decals of the Virgin Mary in various poses, all with bigger than normal eyes and a smaller than normal nose-supposed to make her look noble and compassionate at the same time…hard to look noble on a shiny decal.
I was bounced about as the driver jerked the car down Koba’s traffic-choked streets. He followed a ribbon of flood-warped pavement that ran flush with the river. I looked out the window. The garbage-littered riverbanks were peppered with adults napping under makeshift lean-tos while their kids panhandled on the road. On the river, fishermen in docked boats gutted their morning catch and tossed entrails into the water, setting off the splashing frenzies of monitors fighting for the free meal. The gator-sized reptiles thrashed in the black water, creating a roiling mass of whipping tails and snapping jaws.
The Lotus Club was on the other side of the river. We hit a jam-up just before the bridge intersection. It looked like a car accident. Two drivers were out of their cars, screaming at each other, their faces red with the strain. The fading aircon threatened to suffocate us until the driver dropped the windows. Children immediately reached into the cab with their palms up. I looked straight ahead.
I called Niki. Her happy-to-see-me hologram sat next to me as I told her I wouldn’t make lunch. I hung up without telling her why. I’d try to finesse that one later. She didn’t want me taking any risks. She was always telling me I was getting too old for it.
The car accident cleared, and the driver gunned it over one of the half dozen riblike bridges that arced up over the city’s backbone, the Koba River. Rejuvenated aircon pumped out the chill as I took in the city, a haphazard sprawl that sat buried under a wavy brown cloud of polluted jungle haze. Koba was Lagarto’s capital city, its one and only political, cultural, and economic center. My eyes scanned from neighborhood to neighborhood, each one bordered by canals that spiderwebbed through the city, evidence of our once proud agricultural history.