“You don’t treat women like that!” My piece was in his mouth.
Mdoba ranted garbled pleadings, begging mercy.
Tipaldi and Sasaki didn’t move to stop me. Maggie said, “Juno.”
My hand tremor spread over my entire body. Sweaty shivers ran up and down. My face burned red. I pulled my piece free, revealing a newly chipped tooth in Mdoba’s blubbering mouth. I stepped outside and sucked early evening air. My muscles adrenaline-twitched. I struggled to calm my out-of-control thoughts.
Maggie stayed next to me with a look of pity on her face. I’d spent a lifetime proving I wasn’t weak by exacting brutality in abundance, and in the end, I came off pitiful. I gave her my weapon and headed back in.
Mdoba was as calm as could be expected. Sasaki had moved to the stove to prepare tea. Tipaldi was nursing his bruised knuckles with ice from the freezer.
I took a place on the far side of the kitchen-safely out of throttling distance from Mdoba. I concentrated on self-control. “What do they do with the rest of the slaves?”
Mdoba answered, “They make ’em work.”
“Don’t they have robots to do the mining?”
“They need people to run the robots. The more people, the more machines they can run. They don’t need just miners, though. They need people to grow food and shit, same as here.”
“Why can’t they hire labor? Twenty percent of Lagarto is looking for work.”
“This way’s cheaper. Why pay for something when you can get it for free?”
“Aren’t they afraid of getting caught?”
Mdoba’s speech was getting labored. “Who’s going to catch them? Even if somebody found out, it would take years for the message to get to Earth or anybody else that can do anything about it. By the time they send somebody out here to investigate, twenty or thirty years go by.”
“How were you helping Simba get started?”
Mdoba turned to Tipaldi. “More. I need more.”
Tipaldi administered a morphine booster. Mdoba instantly became more relaxed.
I started back in. “How were you helping Simba?”
“He told me how he wanted his own ship. I thought he was crazy. I don’t know how he did it, but he bought a fucking ship. I’d like to see Bandur pull that off. Maybe Papa coulda done it. I seen that man do some amazing shit, but the kid ain’t got it in him.”
“Simba needed approval from the city.”
“That’s right. He wanted me to handle it. He needed somebody that knew Koba. It was a test. You know, to see how I did. If it went well, he was going to see about putting me in charge of Bandur’s operations when he took them over.”
“So you took vids of board members.”
“You know about those? Yeah, it was easy. Everybody’s got something they don’t want people knowing about. I took vids and used them to get the board to vote the way Simba wanted.”
The questions were ticking off my tongue in a strictly professional manner. “What about Peter Vlotsky?”
“I caught that prick screwing hookers, but he didn’t care. It took me a while to figure out that he was getting paid by an offworld shipping company to kill Simba’s business proposal dead. I needed him. He was the fucking chairman. Without his okay there was nothing we could do. He’s got some kind of veto power.”
“What did you do then?”
“Simba gave me the go-ahead to play it rough with Vlotsky. Simba said he couldn’t compete with offworld money, so he said we’d have to use intimidation to get what we wanted.”
“You went after his family.”
“Right. I’d already done my homework on the family. I told him about how Vlotsky had a wife and a son, but the problem with his son was that he was in the Army. How do you whack a guy in the Army? He’s surrounded by guys with guns. So Simba told me to go for the wife, but I told him that if Vlotsky doesn’t care about his wife seeing him fucking another woman then he probably won’t care if we kill her either. We’d be doing the guy a fucking favor.”
“So what did you decide to do?”
“When I mentioned that Vlotsky’s kid was stationed at the base upriver, he told me he knew somebody stationed there.”
“Jhuko Kapasi.”
“You know about him, too? What the fuck are you asking me all these questions for?”
Pieces were coming into focus. “Go on.”
He looked at Tipaldi, not needing to ask. Tipaldi gave him another mini-injection. Mdoba looked at his wrecked hands then closed his eyes. “I checked out this Kapasi. He was a hustler-got sent up to the Zoo for a gambling deal that went bad. He got early release from prison and was sent into the Army. It turned out he was in Vlotsky’s unit.”
“How did Simba know Kapasi?”
“He told me that Kapasi sold him some POWs-farmers that brought a good price when he sold them to the mines.”
“What about Kapasi’s sister? Did he sell her to Simba?”
“Yeah, he sold her, too. He ran that crazy gambling scheme that blew up in his face, and he had to pay off some big debts before he went to jail, so he sold her to Simba. That was when Simba was just getting started on the slavery thing.”
My brain locked the pieces into place. “So you approached Kapasi.”
“Yeah. I told him I’d pay him to snuff Lieutenant Vlotsky. He got all excited about it. He told me how big a prick Lieutenant Vlotsky was and how the lieutenant screwed his whole unit over on some operation. I thought he was onboard. He’d kill Chairman Vlotsky’s kid, and I’d go tell him he’s next if he doesn’t vote our way, but Kapasi fucked the whole thing up.”
“How?”
“I gave Kapasi half the dough up front. I was going to give him the other half after he did the job. He was running around in the jungle with Vlotsky for days. How hard could it be to pop the guy?”
“He didn’t do it?”
“He didn’t do shit. I don’t know if he ain’t got the cojones or what. I figured that a guy who sells his sister as a slave won’t mind killing somebody, but this guy must not like to get his hands dirty. I called him on it, and he said the unit was going on leave. I thought, ‘Good, then I can do it myself.’ I told him to send my money back, but the fucker kept it, and he called me a couple days later and told me he killed Vlotsky. What kind of fucked-up job is that?”
“Then what?”
“A few days later, I got tipped off that there was a witness. I tried to get Kapasi on the line, but the Army had him in some kind of lockup. They were worried that Vlotsky’s murder was Army-related. It cost me a fucking fortune in bribes to get him on the line. I told him that somebody saw him kill Lieutenant Vlotsky. He told me there was no way anybody saw him kill Vlotsky since he didn’t kill him. Can you believe this asshole? I said, ‘If you didn’t kill him, who did?’ He told me he gave the front money to his old cellmate from the Zoo to do the job. He was going to keep the second payment for himself. ‘For the referral,’ he said.”
Mdoba asked for more water. He coughed most of it up before carrying on. “I about shit on the spot. He told me about Zorno. You already know about him since you killed him.”
Holes were filling in lightning fast. My brain raced to keep up-Simba hired Mdoba to fix the board’s vote; Mdoba hired Kapasi to whack Lieutenant Vlotsky; Kapasi subcontracted the job to lip-obsessed serial killer Ali Zorno. “Why’d you come here to Kapasi’s house?”
“Kapasi went back on leave today. The Army decided he had nothing to do with Vlotsky’s death, so they let him go. He called me, asking for the second half of his payment. I acted real nice and told him he did a great job, and I’d be there as soon as I could. I met him here and told him I wasn’t going to pay him. You should have seen him getting all pissy about it. Why should I pay him for hitting Vlotsky when he didn’t hit nobody?”
“What did you do to him?”
“I shot him. He had it coming to him. Then his dumb-fuck brother got all pathetic, crying and shit, so I burned a hole through his chest to put him out of his misery. I figure he’s better off dead. His momma shoulda smothered him the minute she popped him out and saw he was a retard, am I right?”