The smell ripened fast. I rubbed a peppermint leaf paste onto my upper lip. The menthol odor did a fair job of masking-made it bearable. Lizards flocked up from the basement and down from the attic. Flies gathered outside the windows, bumping the glass, probing for an opening.
The phone rang a few times, but nobody came. Generations of flies hatched, fed, and swarmed around the house. The lizards eventually moved on, heavy stomachs dragging on the carpet. I raided his liquor cabinet, waited until the deep dark, and then I stepped over his remains and left the same way I’d come in.
Just like old times.
Time to get my other plans rolling.
The room had an hourly rate, but I’d gone ahead and paid for the whole night. I lay sideways on the hotel bed with a rolled up a towel as a headrest. I didn’t want to touch the pillows. They were crawling with brown bugs. I didn’t even know what those things were. What a fucking hole this place was. It was the kind of place you’d go when anonymity was more important than amenities.
I was staring at the ceiling, well aware of the phone that sat within my reach. All I had to do was call.
A shiver of doubt ran through my mind. I was so sure a couple days ago. Killing Kim was easy. He deserved it. This was different. This involved innocents. Niki told me it was okay to go through with it. I could stop the slavery ring. It would be for the greater good. She was right, though I wasn’t naive enough to believe that slavery would stop. But I could cripple the trade for years, maybe decades.
I sat up. Four hits of brandy brought my nerve back. I couldn’t worry about the guilt. You either have guilt or you don’t. I already had it. It wasn’t a cumulative thing. One more destroyed soul wouldn’t make a difference.
I made the call.
A holo of Manuel Hidalgo’s pimp appeared in the hotel room.
I asked for a male, straight hair, light complexion.
A half hour later, Hidalgo was at the door, secret-compartment pumps strapped to clean-shaven legs, miniskirt cut to skivvy-showing height, and at least two weeks of geological makeup applied layer over previous layer. He pranced in and lisped. “You pay up front, five hundred pesos.”
I pulled out forty thousand, set it out on the bed for him to see. I let my right show in full shaking glory.
“Look who’s the rich boy. Are you trying to impress me?” His S’s whistled.
I added another forty thousand to the pile.
“What’s going on here? Who are you?”
“I’m your savior. Do you really talk like that?”
“No.”
“Then cut it out. How much do you owe?”
“Who are y-”
I slugged him in the gut. The air burst out of his lungs. A kick took his legs out, and he thudded to the floor. His wig fell off, landing like a dead cat. He tried to roll away. I grabbed him by the hair and shoved the wig in his mouth.
“You listen to me, asshole! You work for me now. You will never ask me any questions, and when I ask you a question, I expect an answer. Do you understand?”
He was sucking air through his nose. I pinched it shut. “Do you understand?”
He nodded, his nose tugging at my wobbly hand.
I let go and yanked the wig out; saliva strands clung to the synthetic hair. “How much do you owe?”
“Hundred and ninety thousand.” Lispless.
“I have eighty thousand on the bed there. It’s yours.”
He nodded again, confused.
“Here’s what you’re going to do. You will pay off your debts using that money as a first payment. You will not gamble with any of my money. You will quit prostitution, and you will absolutely not go back to doping. Do you understand?”
“Why?”
“No questions!” I slapped him hard. He yelped. I slapped him again. I said, “Do you understand?” He was guarding his face with his hands now, peeking at me through his fingers. “Do you understand?” My voice was insistent.
“No,” he said with a whimper. “I don’t understand, and that wasn’t a question.”
“You’re right,” I said with a leer. “That wasn’t a question. What don’t you understand?”
He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, trying to avoid any semblance of a question. “I don’t understand what I’d have to do to earn that money.”
“Here’s what you have to do,” I said. “You have to go to the spaceport tomorrow morning and apply for a job with a new company called Lagarto Lines. They have a freighter to crew and you will offer your services as an engineer. You can do that can’t you?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know. Tell me you understand. Tell me you will do it.”
He was slow in answering. His eyes moved back and forth between me and the money. I saw the way he looked at the money. I had him. I just had to wait him out. He studied me. He studied the money. I kept waiting. Finally, he said, “I’ll do it.”
“If your bookie asks you where you got the money, you will tell him you stole it from one of your tricks.”
“Okay.”
I nodded. “You better be smart enough to realize that this is the best day of your life. You do as I say, and your debt will disappear.”
“If I don’t?”
I stomped on his hand. “No questions!”
He screamed. He held his damaged hand up in the air. One finger stood badly out of whack.
I whispered in his ear. “I’ll be watching you.” Then I walked out.
Maggie, Abdul, and I pored over the financials, an exhaustive workup on their assets and liabilities. Niki brought in tea every few hours. Spreadsheets and loan documents floated all over the room. Maggie ran computer analyses and hypotheticals on the numbers. Abdul hmmphed and uh-huhed through the data. My brain had given up trying to understand any of it hours ago. I just waited patiently for their analyses.
I told them both my plan. What I needed to know was if it would work. They were skeptical at first, shocked by the utter audacity of it, but the deeper they delved into the reports, the more enthusiasm they showed for the idea. My assessment was proving accurate.
Carlos Simba: He was stretched skin thin. Every asset he had was put up as collateral for the four loans he took from offworld banks to buy his freighter. He was barely keeping up on his payments. Taking over the Bandur organization was creating a huge cash drain. He was paying out far more in payroll than he was taking in, while Bandur’s former pimps, dealers, and shylocks were taking advantage of the outfit’s disorganized state by reporting reduced profits or not paying Simba at all.
Chief of Police Diego Banks: His grip on KOP was tenuous at best. Paul used to pay his police followers with money from a Bandur slush fund that Simba was now regularly raiding to make his freighter payments. As a result, Chief Banks had been forced to trim down the payouts to cops. Cops were grumbling, one step from mutiny.
Mai Nguyen: She was out of the O racket all together. She had legitimized her drug business eleven years ago by converting 80 percent of her holdings into two legit companies, one a restaurant chain that serviced the Orbital and the mines, the other an employment agency that was used as a cover for the slave trade. She had used the restaurant chain as collateral for the two loans she took out to buy into Simba’s new shipping company.
If they could stay the course, they’d solidify their power. Slave money was already flooding in with the new shipping line. They’d been severely limited trying to smuggle a containerful here and there. Now they had their own slave ship. I spent three nights at the spaceport and counted 206 slaves passing through a fence hole in the dead of night.
The path to my revenge was obvious: end the slave trade. If I could do it, both Simba and Nguyen would default on their loans. The effects would domino from there. The banks would seize Simba’s assets, and his organization would implode. There were a thousand crime-boss wannabes out there just waiting for such an opportunity. Simba and Tipaldi wouldn’t survive for long before somebody did to them what they’d done to Bandur and Sasaki.