“I’m Juno.”
She gave my threads the once over. “What brings you here, Juno?”
“You.”
She gave me an odd look.
I said, “I was walking by, and I saw you and your friends come in. I followed you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I want to get to know you.”
“Are you sure?” She smiled the same coy smile I’d seen her get when she read her romance novels.
“Yes.”
“I’m Natasha.” She put her hand out for a formal shake. “What do you do, Juno?”
“I’m a cop.”
“What kind of cop?”
“I work vice.”
She raised her eyebrows at that. Thoughts of her father’s business must’ve been running through her head. “So you chase down drug dealers?”
“Yeah. Drugs, prostitution, gambling.”
“And you think I would be interested in a guy like that?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
The early morning sunlight beamed through the window, toasting the blanket beyond comfortable. I got up, cranked the aircon, and crawled back into bed. Natasha rolled over and laid her head on my shoulder. I held her and stared at my bedroom ceiling. Geckos came out of the walls to sip water from a ceiling leak. Most days I’d chase the pests away, but today I felt generous. I started to think up pet names for them.
The rage that lived in my gut was blissfully silent. I felt drunk on a night of fantasies come true. I held Natasha tight, my mind rocking to the rhythms of last night’s lovemaking. I ran my fingers into her hair. I thrilled on the smell of her, the way her body curled against me.
Natasha said, “Juno.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know who my father is?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re after him, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you trying to use me to get to him?”
“No.”
“Then why are you with me?”
“Because I want to be.”
Paul and I watched the monitor. All the Yashins were home. Another couple weeks had gone by, and we still hadn’t decided what to do about Pavel Yashin. I was more than ready to run him in, but Paul kept insisting on waiting to see if he could lead us to a bigger bust. Even after this morning, when the lieutenant gave us both a hellish reaming for our lackluster performance these past six weeks, Paul still remained unfazed.
Pavel Yashin was pacing the house, from one room to another. Paul kept flipping channels trying to keep up with his restless movements.
“The guy is getting desperate,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s like he’s sitting on a time bomb with all that dope in his basement.”
Yashin had stopped trying to sell it on the streets since his two dealers got clipped by Bandur’s outfit. Now, he was spending most of his time on the phone trying to find a buyer-nothing but hang-ups so far. Paul changed to channel E. Yashin’s wife, Gloria, was in their bedroom, kneeling in front of an altar made of candles and pinned-up pics of the Virgin Mary. She kept her long-sleeved nightgown buttoned to the top. She crossed herself, and then the room and slipped into bed.
Paul said, “No wonder Yashin goes for hookers. She’s such a prude.” It was true. We’d been spying for a month and a half, and we hadn’t even seen them kiss.
Over to F: Natasha was reading again, another romance novel. My heart thumped in exhilaration. I watched her read, unable to stop despite my mounting guilt over deceiving her by intruding on her privacy. It looked like she’d be staying in for a change. She’d been out every night for the past two weeks, half those nights with her friends, the other half at my place. Paul didn’t know about us. I told him I was seeing somebody but didn’t tell him who. It was getting harder to cover my tracks. Yesterday, she sat in bed and wrote me a letter. If you zoomed the cam in, you could read my name. I had to erase that section of the recording to keep Paul from seeing it. I’d eventually have to come clean with him.
Back to B: Pavel Yashin wasn’t there. Paul ran through the channels hunting for him, stopping on F. There he was, standing in Natasha’s doorway. Somehow, he’d managed to open her door without her noticing. She was on her bed, engrossed in her book, unaware of his presence. He just stood there, staring long enough that I started to feel uneasy. Eventually, he pulled the door shut as silently as he’d opened it. She kept twirling her hair all the while-lost in her fictional world.
Paul jumped back to B in time to see Yashin settle on the couch. “What was that about?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
“That is one strange family, Juno. You ever notice how they don’t talk to each other.”
“Yeah.” My stomach clenched. What am I getting into with Natasha? Why was it that I had such a thing for women with problems? Tall, dark, and fucked up. That was my type. I needed to be careful around her. We were having a good time together, but I didn’t want to fall for her. I really didn’t.
Yashin poured a drink for himself, downed it in a hurry, and poured another. He placed a call. A holo of Ram Bandur flickered into his living room. Both Paul and I perked up. Why would he be calling the man who killed two of his dealers?
Yashin said, “I have a proposition for you.”
“What is it?”
“I have surplus product that I thought you might want to take off my hands.”
“Is that why you’re poachin’ my territory? Just ’cause you have some extra shit you want to dump, you think you have the right to sell in my territory. You steal from me and then you want to do business?
"FUCK YOU!”
Yashin winced at the fury coming from Bandur’s cheery-faced hologram. “I’ll give you a good price,” he said.
“What you got?”
“Eight hundred kilos of O.”
“What you askin’?”
“Kilo for kilo.”
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me! What kind of fucked-up deal is that? I did you a favor by not killing you for poaching my territory. Is this how you show your ’preciation, you cocksucker?” Bandur hung up.
Paul smiled wide. “This is our chance, Juno.”
“What chance?”
“When Yashin sells the opium to Bandur, we’ll nail both of them.”
“Bandur didn’t sound too interested in buying.”
“Kilo for kilo-that’s hardly a bargain.” One kilo of opium for a kilo of pesos. “They’re just negotiating. We have to be patient.”
I took one last bite and put my fork down.
“Do you want some more?”
“No, I’m full.”
Natasha had cooked up a chicken with apricots over rice. She was nervous about it. Her mother taught her how to prepare it, but her mother used ’guana instead of chicken. When I’d asked her why she didn’t use ’guana, she said it was a special occasion. I thought the chicken was a little dry. I told her it was delicious.
Natasha took her brandy to my couch and pulled her feet up. “What was your family like?”
I joined her on the couch. She listened with rapt attention as I open-booked my life for her. I could tell her anything-judgment free. I told her about Tenttown. I told her how my father would tie me up while he beat my mother. I showed her the rope-burn scars. I told her how I was always getting kicked out of school for fighting. When she asked if I had any regrets, I told her that I wished I had killed my father before his liver beat me to it.
“Really? You wouldn’t feel guilty killing your own father?”
“The bastard deserved it. I deserved the chance to kill him myself. His liver robbed me of my vengeance. It was my only chance to see the world as a fair place.”
She wouldn’t let it drop. She kept asking questions about my father and how I could possibly kill him, my own flesh and blood. He beat my mother. I didn’t know how much plainer I could make it.
She asked me if I’d had any happy times when I was growing up. I told her about how my mother and I used to make shabbakia together. Natasha had never heard of it. No surprise there. Nobody had ever heard of it. I’d never seen the honey-soaked pastries anywhere on Lagarto, not once. It was an Earth thing. Moroccan was what my mother would say. I didn’t even know how my mother learned to make it, but whenever she managed to scrape a few coins together, that was what we’d do. It would take the entire day, buying the ingredients, mixing the dough, forming it into rosettes. Then we’d stack up the trays and carry them to the public deep fryers. Next we’d bring the hot golden pastries all the way back to our tent and soak them a pot of honey that sat over the fire. I was amazed Natasha was still listening when I told her that we’d finish it off by sprinkling the shabbakia with toasted sesame seeds.