Authors: Warren Hammond
I nodded with enthusiasm. Sobriety was a bitch.
She stepped in, her hair and her mini both teased up to hooker heights. She pulled out a couple glasses from a rolltop liquor cabinet and poured. I took a deep swig, and sweet liquid fire burned down my throat. She sat on some kind of hammock apparatus that hung from the ceiling. Swinging, she snuggled herself into the folds, her ass hanging out through a hole in the bottom until she snapped a mesh flap in place.
I took another gulp, just about draining my glass. Damn, that was good. Looking at Maria nestled into that contraption, I mentally cycled through sex positions, trying to figure out how to use that thing.
I was stumped. And glad for it. Made me feel like I still had at least a drop of innocence somewhere inside me.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
Her left eye was decidedly puffy. I searched for other signs of bruising, but couldn’t see through the layers of foundation on her cheeks.
“Sorry I hit you.”
“Goes with the job, right? Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Taking over this alley.”
The ’guana stared at me like he was waiting for an answer. I pulled my shades from my shirt pocket and slipped them on, darkening the iguana’s pink stripe to the color of blood.
I looked at Maria, her brown-sugar skin closer to chocolate now. She gave me a puzzled look, but didn’t ask about the shades. “You’re not in it for the money, are you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Look at you. Those are decent shoes, durable, but nothing fancy. You don’t wear a glitzy watch. You’re dressed in whites like any other joe. If you were about the money, you’d be showing off what you got. That’s what pimps do. Madams too.”
I downed the rest of my glass, stood and walked over to her for a refill. Damn, her perfume was strong.
“You should get that hand fixed.” She poured brandy into my wavering glass. “I know a doctor who works cheap. She does a lot of work on the girls around here.”
“Tit jobs?”
“Yeah. And other stuff.”
“What kind of other stuff?”
“Other stuff,” she repeated with a shrug. “I bet she could fix that hand.”
I took my place back on the bed. “Not interested.”
“She’s an offworlder. Or she used to be. She lives on-planet now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess she likes it here.”
“So how did you end up working for Chicho?”
“He took me in when I was eleven.”
“You hooked for him?”
She nodded. “But I wasn’t very good at it. I was young, so I did well with the pervs at the beginning, but when my tits started coming in, I knew my time was limited. The other girls were prettier, and they knew how to work the johns better than me. I tried to compensate in the looks department by learning how to do my makeup and my hair real good like this.”
I wanted to laugh.
“But even then, I couldn’t compete. So I had to find another way to make myself useful.”
“And you chose security?”
“Why not? I still get to beat men off. I just do it a different way now.” She gave me a mascara-caked wink, her lashes coming together like two rakes. “You never answered my question. You’re not doing this for the money, are you?”
“No.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“It’s complicated.” I had nothing more to say on the subject. I sipped my drink, uncomfortable silence taking hold.
“That was some riot,” she said after a while.
“Yeah.”
“You just about got yourself killed, you know.”
“I know.”
“What were you thinking? The sky was fucking falling, and that’s when you decided to stroll on out?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“You remind me of some of the girls around here.” She poured herself another. “I’m talking about the ones who drink and drug and fuck like they’re on a mission.”
“What kind of mission?”
“I wish I knew. It’s like they’re out to kill themselves, but they don’t have the guts to just slash their wrists and be done with it. Is that who you are?”
“No. I’m on a different kind of mission.”
“That’s what they all say.”
* * *
I tiptoed out, trying not to wake Maria, who was conked out on the sex swing. I hadn’t slept all night. My haunted thoughts wouldn’t allow it.
I found an empty room with a phone and tried to set up a conference call with Wu and Froelich. Wu answered. Froelich didn’t. I’d have to wake up that asshole in person. I told Wu to meet me at Froelich’s boat. It was time I took those two homicide bastards to task. Fuckers thought it was okay to go out gambling and not answer my calls? That shit was going to stop.
I strolled out the door and through the riot’s wreckage, my shades dimming out some of the details. This duller form of reality suited me fine. The morning was hot. A southern breeze carried scorched air from the vast southern deserts that suffocated so much of this planet. Lagarto’s only oasis was here in the jungles of the northern pole. If you could call this lizard-infested, riot-ravaged, poverty-stricken, mold-spotted city an oasis.
I chartered a skiff and rode the Koba River. A single lightbulb swayed on the end of a wire that hung from the rusted roof, golden light oozing out across black water. Pairs of monitor eyes reflected out of the darkness, accusing me with their cold, reptilian gazes.
Arriving at the dock, I handed the pilot some bills and climbed a ladder to the pier. I wandered the stalls, passing tables full of fresh fish on ice and racks of gutted ’guanas on hooks.
Spotting a small tub full of squirming salamanders, I stopped to order a taco. I stood by as the cook skewered two ’manders and dunked the squirming pair into a jar of peppery batter. They came out completely coated, their battered legs and tails wriggling as they went into the fryer. Next, she held a flatbread in one hand and used the other to spatula on a thick swath of aromatic paste made from local spice. My stomach growled as she spooned on the riverfruit salsa. Then came the sprinkle of bitter cloverweed leaves. I waited as the fryer bubbled, the smell of grease and wood smoke making my mouth water. Finally, she pulled the skewer out of the fryer, crisped ’manders impaled on the end. Folding the flatbread into a taco, she used the bread to pinch the golden-brown critters off the slender rod. “Hot sauce?”
I nodded, paid up, and bit through the flatbread, crunching on the ’manders in the center. Tangy. Must be juveniles. The older ones tasted muddy.
Wu stepped up just before I took another bite, and I decided to take a bite of him first. “Hey, asshole, you left us hanging last night.”
“Sorry, but me and Froelich, we were upriver—”
“I don’t want to hear it.” I chomped into my taco, hot sauce dripping out the other end. I walked as I chewed, forcing Wu to follow.
“Kripsen and Lumbela filled me in on last night,” he said.
“Did you thank them?”
“For what?”
“For doing your job.”
“What? Now I’m supposed to be the leg breaker?”
“You and Froelich should’ve been there. And you motherfuckers better quit dodging my calls.” I chomped off another bite and kept at him, my words slurred. “I thought you were supposed to be the badass of this gang, but when the serious shit comes down you’re nowhere to be found.” I licked hot sauce off my lips, my tongue on fire. “You know what you are? You’re a pussy.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me up close, our noses almost kissing. “You take that back.” His temples were pulsing, the scar across his forehead darkening.
“Pussy.” I grinned while I chewed, daring him to try something. His nostrils flared, and his lips pinched down so tight that they resembled the scar on his forehead. He didn’t take a swing. He couldn’t. I pressed my taco hand into his chest and pushed him out of my way, leaving a grease stain over his heart. If he didn’t like being called a pussy, then he better grow a pair and do what he was told.
I was walking again. My appetite was gone, but I forced myself to take one more bite before tossing the scraps into the weeds with the candy wrappers and broken bottles. Wu trailed behind me, but not far—I could hear his shuffling footsteps. Sulking bastard.
“This it?” I pointed my bobbing finger at a listing barge. Froelich had once told me how some of the lower compartments flooded decades ago, making the old junker sit cockeyed in the water.
“Yeah,” Wu mumbled as he stepped up alongside me. “His place is on the second deck.”
“Let’s wake him up.”
We climbed the long gangway, and reaching the top, we started across the slanted decking, our shoes sinking into spongy moss. We ducked through a bulkhead and went up a set of rust-eaten metal stairs that—due to the barge’s tilt—sat at an awkward angle.
“Heard from pretty-boy Mota?” asked Wu.
“No. But we don’t have to worry about him anymore. Not after last night.”
“Good. You know he’s a fag?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Around.”
I kept one hand on the sweating steel wall as we headed down a long corridor that leaned heavy to starboard. My shoe slipped and I went down, my knees crumpling, my left side smacking into the deck.
Christ.
Wu laughed, the sound of his delight echoing up and down the corridor.
I slowly stood and evaluated the damage. One ankle felt a little gimpy, and my hip would surely bruise, but no more than that. “What the hell happened?”
“You fucking fell.”
I pushed my shades up to the top of my head and studied the floor.
There’s the culprit.
I reached down to touch a glob of yellow goop that had been smeared under my shoe. I held my fingers to my nose for a smell. “Fly gel.”
“Somebody must’ve spilled.”
The gel killed flies and eggs. Lagartans used it to clean cuts and abrasions. Without it, an open wound would be squirming with maggots inside five minutes. Lagartan flies acted fast. And they were damn good dive-bombers, expert at dropping their eggs from the air.
“There’s more up there,” said Wu.
We followed the sporadic trail of drops to a door painted sloppily with the name
FROELICH
.
“Did Froelich cut himself last night?” I asked, uncertainty creeping up my spine.
Wu shook his head no and opened Froelich’s door. I followed him in, my hand on my piece. He flicked on the lights. The cabin was small—bed, kitchenette, toilet—and from the entry, it slanted downhill to the left.
The nightstand had been toppled, contents spilled on the floor. Oils and lubes. Condoms and cock rings. My eyes turned to a splatter of gel that marked the far wall, more gel on the floor underneath, and then a trail leading behind the bed, as if somebody had thrown something against the wall, where it fell, then rolled down the slanted decking.
Wu and I stepped slowly around the bed, following the trail to a severed head. Coated in fly gel, it rested where the wall met the floor, a vertebra poking out from a savagely chopped neck stump. I toed a gooey ear with my shoe, rolling the head faceup.
Hemorrhaged eyes stared from behind the gel mask. His mouth was agape, the black hole clotted with gel.
Froelich.
six
“N
O,”
said a shocked Wu. “No fucking way.”
I pulled my shoe away, and Froelich’s head rolled face-down, his vacant gaze aimed at the floor but angled to one side, his nose acting like a mini-kickstand. What was that on his cheek? A tattoo?
I squatted down for a closer look. A ring of interlocked snakes, two of them, each one swallowing the tail of the one in front. Where did that come from?
“No fucking way,” repeated Wu, shaking his head slowly from side to side.
Froelich was dead, reducing my crew by 20 percent. My gut was heavy with dread. Events were reeling out ahead of me, and I had no way to rein them back in. I’d lost control.
Mota.
Had I misjudged that pretty-boy son of a bitch? I couldn’t believe he’d take it this far. Would he actually kill one of my crew? A fellow cop?
Wu’s face was as pale as my own, his scar a faint pink line. “He was my partner,” he said, his voice barely audible.
I sat on the bed’s crumpled sheets and tried to see it another way. Maybe it wasn’t Mota who did this. Froelich had enemies, lots of them. It might not be my fault. It might not have anything to do with me. That tattoo on his cheek was some weird shit, wasn’t it?
And why kill Froelich? Cop killings brought too much attention. Killing me was the smart move.
Unless Mota couldn’t find me.
Or he was crazy.
* * *
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Maggie’s hands were on her hips, her jaw jutted. We stood in a private corner of the barge’s deck, behind one of the cranes, isolated from the hommy dicks and the med techs. I leaned on the rail, the deck’s listing slope making it the only comfortable way to stand.
I hid behind my shades. “I don’t know anything about this.”
“Don’t give me that. Talk.”
I didn’t know what to say. That I was back in the protection business? That I broke a good kid’s legs last night? That I already got one of my crew killed?
Wishing it all away, I looked out at the river, at the black water flowing gently in the starlight. I tuned into the way the barge swayed with the silent current, my mind syncing with the lazy rocking. Maggie asked another question, but I wasn’t listening. The river. It was calling me. The mad spark lit inside me. I recognized it this time. I felt reality leaking away, and I let it go. Gladly.
I stared straight down at the water. It stared back. Smiling, inviting. All I had to do was jump this rail. After a quick drop, the river would welcome me with a burst of spray, a celebration of liquid confetti. I’d drop below the surface and let her hold me in her cradling hands. Sinking, I’d let her carry me in her cool flow until she ushered me away from this world.
A finger poked my arm. “Talk, dammit. What do you know about this?”
I was transfixed by the water. Seduced. I didn’t want to break the trance.
“I’m talking to you, Juno.”
The trance crumbled. Dizzy, I gripped the rail and willed my melting knees to lock.