KOP Killer (22 page)

They needed the kind of doctor who wouldn’t think twice about installing a robo-snatch in Maria’s fifteen-year-old sister.

I crossed the street, dodging offworld pedestrians, and gave the door a loud rap. The door swung open. A teen stood in the frame, the boy assistant I’d seen here before, the one with the milky eyes. Like poached eggs with dishwater yolks.

“The doctor in?” I asked with a grin.

“No.”

“I can wait.” I stepped over the doorjamb and forced him aside.

He put his hand on my elbow. “You’ll have to come back later.”

I started up the stairs. “Doc! You in, Doc?”

“You c-can’t d-do this.”

I ignored his stutters. “Doc? Where are you, Doc?” I hit the top of the stairs and started down the hall, pushing open doors on the way. “Doc?” I threw open another door. Tanks on tables, tanks on the floor, stacked all around. Body parts were growing inside, flesh clinging to circuitry, growing around it, enveloping it. Fingers. Hands. Legs. Suspended organs swam in fish tanks.

“Who the hell are you?” A woman’s voice.

I spun around to face her. “Hey, Doc, it’s me. Remember?” I waved at her with my half-arm.

“I tried to stop him,” said the teen, his milky eyes gone sour.

She motioned her servant away with a toss of her hand, kept her eyes on me. “What are you doing here?”

This woman cut off my hand. Cut it off without asking me. But I needed information. Needed to know if she’d done the work on Lizard-man. I needed that name. I capped the well of anger inside me with a casual smile. “I had time to rethink this missing hand. Sorry I was so rude before, but it was quite a shock, losing a part of me.”

She squinted suspiciously, her crow’s-feet sinking deep into the sands of her face.

I opened my mouth, words stalling in my throat. It wasn’t too late to play it straight. To drop the charade and ask my questions like I was a regular cop. Except I wasn’t a cop, meaning she had no reason to talk to me.

“You still got that replacement hand?”

She nodded like she’d expected that question. “Have you had your dressings changed?”

“No.”

“Come.” She stepped down the hall.

I took a last look at the lab, a shiver tickling the hair on my neck. I followed her into an exam room. It could have been the same one I was in before, but muddled memories made it difficult to pin down. I sat on the padded table and unbuttoned my shirt.

She was dressed most undoctorly—silk shirt, tight pants, like she was ready for a night on the town. But the stressed buttons and taut fabric of her shirt didn’t fit right over her rack.

Her shirt was wrong. My brain scratched at it. I was missing something.

I took off my own shirt, and she pulled up a stool. Seeing the bloodstained bundle of bandages, she spoke with a scolding tone, “What happened here?”

“Got in a bad scrape.”

She let it pass with a head shake and an unfriendly smirk, her chilly bedside manner on full display. Made me want to ask what she thought she was accomplishing with her glasses and salt-and-pepper hair. Why play the middle-aged doctor when you weren’t going to back it up with a warm personality? Or any personality at all.

She yanked tape and started unraveling. “I know you said you don’t do work to order but—”

“I don’t,” she interrupted.

I continued on as if I hadn’t heard her. “In my line of work I could use something with a little punch, if you know what I mean.”

“Be more specific.” Her face stayed flat when she talked, her voice unreadable.

“I’m talking weapons.”

She took her eyes off the bandages and looked square at me.

“Maria told me about some of the work you do for her hooker friends, so I figured maybe you do stuff for bodyguards like me?”

“You’re a bodyguard?”

“Bodyguard. Bouncer. Whatever pays.”

She pulled off the last of the bandages, exposing the blood-caked cap affixed to the end of my arm, and the viny tendrils holding it in place. She dug scissors from a drawer and clip-clipped the air.

“Those sterile?”

“I’m a pro. I won’t cut you.”

I tensed as she leaned in and snipped the first tendril. She pinched the severed piece in her fingers, and I felt a tug as it pulled free. Barely felt it at all.

“So you want a self-defense system?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve done weapons before.” I waited for her to elaborate, for her to say she once did a hand that could morph into a steel trap. She snipped another tendril. “You never told me how you hurt your arm.”

“Didn’t Maria tell you?”

“No.”

I had a lie ready. “I took a day job at a bottling plant and got my hand caught in the machinery.”

“Bad luck.” She dropped another tendril in the trash.

“So what can you do for me?”

She snipped at the tendrils. “I don’t take directions from my patients.” Her tone was as sharp as her scissors. “I go where inspiration leads me.”

“But Maria told me you’ve installed very specific equipment for some of her hooker friends.”

“I let them tell me what area of the body they want me to work on, but that’s all. My practice is not a lunch buffet. Only an artist can be trusted to shape the human body.”

She pulled the cap off the end of my arm. I didn’t look. Didn’t want to know what was down there after so much neglect. I kept my gaze focused on her, pictured her with a saw in her hand, going at my arm.
My
arm. I breathed deep, gritted my teeth.
Get a grip.

She opened up a small pack of gauze, bunched it up in her hand, and poured some alcohol into the center.

I kept my arm still, fighting the urge to jerk free. This butcher cut off my hand.

“Doesn’t look too bad.” She took a deep whiff of my wound. “You’re a lucky one. I don’t smell the rot, but I’d like to get some antibiotics into you just in case.”

“Sounds good.” I tried to sound cool. Calm.

“Be right back.” She went out the door.

I wanted to get out of here, jitters tingling in my feet and legs. I didn’t want her touching me again. But I hadn’t scored any info yet. I told myself I was being paranoid. Just some antibiotics.
You need the antibiotics.
I knew damn well how regular antibiotic injections kept my mother alive a year longer than most.

I could do this. A quick injection, and it would be over. I’d never have to let her touch me again. We could get back to talking about a new hand. Back to steel traps. I could con her into giving me Lizard-man’s name as a referral.

A figure appeared in the door. The teen with the clouded eyes. He had a syringe in his hand. “I have your antibiotics.” He stepped forward, the syringe filled with clear liquid.

Clear. A sick twinge rolled in my gut. It should be brown. I’d injected my mother plenty of times. Always brown.

“I’ll need an arm,” he said.

I pointed at his hands. “Wash those things first.”

“I already did.”

“Wash ’em again so I can see you.”

He nodded glumly, turned around, and moved to the sink, setting the syringe on the counter before running the water.

I slipped up behind him, slow, silent. He shut off the water, reached for a towel. I nabbed the syringe, bit off the cap with my teeth. He spun, tried to back away, but I’d already sunk the needle into his thigh. He let out a squeak as I dropped the plunger. Antibiotics my ass.

Milk-filled eyes curdled. His balance shifted. Legs noodled. I left the needle in his thigh and eased him down into a crumpled mass of angled limbs. Couldn’t afford to make noise.

I moved to the door, listened first, peeked out second. I crept into the hall and headed for the stairs, the sound of a hushed voice ahead. I pressed my back into the wall, moved toward an open doorway, shoulder blades sliding over bumpy plaster.

“Just get down here.” The doctor’s voice.

A pause. She was on the phone.

She spoke again. “I’m putting him under until you get here.”

I stopped at the edge of the door frame. The stairs were so, so close, but I stayed where I was, afraid to cross the open doorway. I couldn’t let her see me. Couldn’t give her the chance to unleash whatever offworld tech she had inside her. Recessed lase-pistols? Plague pins? Who the fuck knew?

“Bye.”

Shit.
I should’ve gone for it already. I heard footsteps.
Fuck.
I backed down the hall, away from the stairs, and ducked through a door. A bathroom. Stalls and urinals. A shower. Three sinks.

I went for the window, turned the handle and pushed open both sides. I looked out, sized up the drop. Two stories down to a dimly lit alleyway. An ankle-breaker if I ever saw one. Damn. Damn. Damn.

“Juno?” I heard her call from the hallway. She’d found her assistant. “Where are you?” A door slammed down the hall. Then another that sounded closer. “Emil Mota told me who you are. Where are you?”

If I was going to jump it had to be
now.

But it was too high. Too damn high. I took off a shoe, dropped it out the window, and ran into the shower.

“I wish I’d known who you were the first time you came in. I wouldn’t have stopped with your hand.” She was in the bathroom, her voice so near, so cold, so cruel.

Heartbeats pounded in my chest, my ears. I peeked through the gap between the mildewed shower curtain and the mossy wall, dewy water soaking into my shirtsleeve.

I could see her now. She was at the window, leaning through to get a good look down.
See the shoe and believe it. Please believe it.
Lungs ached to keep up with my double-timing heart, but I kept my breathing slow and constrained, breaths squeezing in and out of my mouth.

She pulled her head back inside the window.
Believe, bitch.

Seconds passed. Long, super-stretched seconds.

“It’s me again,” she said. “He’s gone. Bastard jumped out the window.”

A pause. She was on the phone again, the device wired somewhere inside her skull.

“He got spooked and ran. You still coming, Emil?”

Pause.

“We’re going to Yepala. Book a flyer.”

Pause.

“Yes, tonight.”

She slammed the window shut, sealed it with a turn of the handle, and moved out of view. I turned my head, pointed an ear in her direction. I listened for footsteps, had to know when she’d left the room.

I heard the hollow sound of wooden soles on tile.
Step, step, step.
Then nothing. Shit. She was having second thoughts. For good measure, she was going to do a quick search. She was going to kill me, take me apart piece by piece and kill me.

I heard a zipper, a rustle of cloth, then the sound of liquid streaming against porcelain. I told myself to breathe again. She was taking a piss.

But I hadn’t heard her go into one of the stalls, hadn’t heard any of the doors.

I leaned to the right. Carefully. Tentatively. Painstakingly. I edged my eye past the other side of half-drawn curtain. She stood with her back to me, facing the wall.

Understanding bloomed in my head. Her shirt made sense now, why it didn’t fit right.

A man’s shirt.

She was at the urinal, hands in hose-holding position.

The good doctor had a dick.

twenty

I
TOLD
the kid to cut the shirt into strips. He was the same clothes vendor I’d come to in my underwear after escaping the doctor’s office the first time. He knifed through the shirt, making nice long strips of fabric while I hid behind a row of hanging tees, my eyes zeroed on the doc’s door, phone conversations replaying in my head.

Mota was coming to meet her.
Him.
She was a him.

The kid finished, the shirt now reduced to a pile of makeshift bandages. For disinfectant, I dunked my stump into a jar of fly gel, a yellow glob sticking to the end. I put my eyes back on the door and stuck out my arm, told the kid to mummy it up good.

Dumbass doctor should’ve fried me the moment he saw me. But he tried to get cute with it, playing the good doctor, sending in his pasty-eyed patsy with a needle. Apparently, violent confrontation wasn’t the doctor’s way. Before this was done, I’d make sure he knew it was mine.

The kid layered on the last strip. He pulled a safety pin from a rusted tin box. “I don’t have any tape.”

“No problem.”

I let him pin it and went back to spying, my bare foot tapping the asphalt.

I spotted a hat poking above the crowd of offworld kids.
Panama.
I watched it come down the street, bobbing on top of the crowd like a leaf on a river.

My pulse punched my temples, and hate stoked the fire inside me. I wanted my weapon. Wanted to feel its cool grip in my palm, feel its heft, finger the trigger. Just a little squeeze was all it would take to loose the fire burning within. Just a little squeeze.

But I had no weapon. I pinched my lip between my molars and squeezed. Panama approached the doctor’s door. Mota was with him. I could see him now, the crowd thinning enough to expose his smooth strut.

They went inside. I paid the kid and waited.

It wasn’t long before the door opened again. Three of them came out. Mota, Panama, and …
I’ll be damned …

Raven hair and silk shirt, offworld tech somehow making both blow in a wind that didn’t exist.

I knew that guy. The gay bar. He’d hit on me.

He wore the same poured-into pants the doctor had worn inside. The same silk shirt that had barely held together over her buxom chest now draped and shimmered over his muscular frame. This had to be the doctor’s regular appearance, his true gender on display.

It must’ve been quite a shock when he spotted me in one of his favorite haunts, sniffing around, asking questions. He knew me. He’d already cut off my arm. He would’ve called Mota, told him somebody was asking about Franz Samusaka. Using the phone in his head, he would’ve transmitted a vid stream of me, and Mota would’ve told him who I was.

Mota would’ve come for me, but he couldn’t. Not then. Not when he was hiding in the Cellars, lying in wait to ambush my boys.

So he told the doc to sic that damn fly on me. That way he could come for me later.