Montezuma Strip (17 page)

“What’s in there?”

“Bathroom, frion,” said the tall boy. “You got to take a leak, be our guests. But watch your booties. The pot leaks, too.”
He laughed again, studiously indifferent but unable to hide the suggestive twinge of sudden anxiety the sergeant detected
in his voice.

“Thanks.” Cardenas hefted his pistol and pushed through the door.

He was ready for another boy; for a gun, for a stick. He was not ready for the two hundred kilos of distilled lightning and
muscle that exploded in his face. The jaguar slammed him to the ground, knocking the wind out of him. Gold dust danced in
his flickering vision as he struggled to aim his weapon. The big cat swatted it across the room where the shorter boy rushed
to recover it.

Cardenas found himself flat on his back, staring up into the jaguar’s face. It snarled, canines that were proportionately
the largest of all the big cats a scant half meter from his face. If he moved, if he twitched, it could rip out his esophagus
like so much garden hose.

“I ought to kill you right now,” the jaguar growled. “A little bit at a time. Bite off your ears first. Or maybe your works.
Chew ‘em up slow.” Nearby, the smaller boy laughed uproariously.

“How’d you find us?” the jaguar asked. When Cardenas didn’t reply a huge paw descended to completely cover the
lower half of his face. Claws contracted, digging into the sides of his cheeks. Excruciating pain shot through the sergeant
as his jawbones were ground together.

“He’s scared shitless.” The taller boy leaned casually against the wall. “He ain’t gonna tell us nothing like that.”

“You’re right,” said a new voice. The jaguar eased off Cardenas. He sat up slowly, his whole body aching from the collision.
The big cat squatted on its hindquarters nearby, tail switching nervously back and worth. Its eyes were now closed.

From the bedroom behind the now open door a woman emerged. A girl, really, Cardenas thought. She was slim, even skinny, with
a faded, pinched kind of prettiness too much time spent on the streets imparts to certain children. She wore a peculiar silvery
suit with the hood pushed back and integral gloves and boots. Hair the color of dirty oak was cut short and bound up on the
crown of her head in a samurai knot that more than anything else resembled an antique shaving brush.

She nodded toward the big cat. “I’ve put him in sleep mode, but I can wake him up fast if you make me. Jaguars are light sleepers.”

Cardenas staggered to his feet. The younger boy had the pistol trained on him. “Then I’ll be careful to move slowly. You’re
not very hospitable to visitors.”

“You’re no visitor,” she snapped. “You’re a frion, a cop, the chill. How’d you find us so fast?”

Cardenas responded with an accusation. “You were the ones at the pet shop and the cockfight. You caused the trouble.”

She shook her head, pushed out her lower lip.
“They
caused the trouble, exploiting animals like that. Not me. Goddamn Neurologic components.”

“Magifying animals is legal in the Southwest, except for the Californias. You may not like it, but that’s the way it is. Magifying
exotics is illegal, though. But you don’t kill the violators. Turn them in and let the law take care of them.”

“I’d rather take care of them myself.” She indicated the
jaguar. “When we found Chimu in San Juana he was being used in a sex show. I won’t tell you how. The people who’d had him
magified were making him do things no cat was designed to do, making him move in ways no cat was designed to move. Twisting
his bones and muscles out of position, hurting him.” She grinned wolfishly. “We freed him to react naturally.”

“It hasn’t come to my attention that anyone in San Juana has been killed by a jaguar.”

Her smile lingered. “After I let Chimu null the two
pendejos
who’d been mistreating him he was hungry. They never fed him properly, either. So I let him eat them. Jaguars are very thorough
diners. When he’d finished there was nothing much left for anyone to get excited about. Poetic justice.”

“You strike me as a very bright young lady. Too bright to be messing around with something like this. How do you program the
animals to react and talk like that?”

“I don’t. I won’t program anything. But I’ll borrow. See.” She touched one switch among the many on her right sleeve. Almost
instantly the jaguar was on its feet, alert and awake.

The girl raised her left arm. The jaguar mimicked the gesture perfectly with its left foreleg. She made a circle with her
hand in the air. So did the big cat. When she tilted her head to one side, the animal did likewise. When she took a swipe
in Cardenas’s direction, he felt the simultaneous
whoosh
of air as the cat’s claws missed him by centimeters.

“I don’t work through chips,” she told him proudly. “I’ve got a steady-state broadcast unit in the suit that records the actions
of my muscles. The animal’s controller receives the information and transposes my movements accordingly. My suit reads my
movements and gestures and conveys them to the broadcast unit, which passes the action digitally to the Neurologic controller
in the animal, which matches my movements gesture for gesture. Unlike in the old paraplegic outfits, the stim filaments in
my suit are coded for pickup, not distribution.”

“Pretty clever,” Cardenas admitted. “So the animals are only imitating your movements, your gestures, and not reacting to
some embedded program.”

“That’s it, frion.”

“So they haven’t killed anyone. You have.”

Her smiled vanished. “You’re awfully stupid for such an old cop, but then you were awfully stupid for coming here in the first
place. You still haven’t answered my question.” She straightened and grabbed for him. The jaguar rose on its hind legs and
wrapped a paw around Cardenas’s right hand. “Tell me, or I’ll have Chimu pull off your fingers one at a time.”

He could feel the pressure, as if his hand had been encased in a heated vise. “Take it easy. What difference does it make?”

She approached and pushed her face close to his own. The jaguar was right next to her, its fangs wet and sharp. “That’s my
business.” She touched a control and when her hands started going through his pockets, the jaguar did not mimic the gestures.

She found his wallet, which she tossed to the tall boy, and his police vorec, which she gave to the shorter one. Eventually
she found the slip of paper containing the directions.

“Mira
this, Twotrick.” The tall boy took the paper.

“Mierdel
Okolona letterhead.” He wadded the paper into a ball and threw it aside.

“I guess I’m not surprised. It’s my fault. I should’ve expected it.” Her hands balled into tiny fists.

Cardenas felt the bones in his fingers grinding together as the jaguar’s paw contracted. He wanted to scream but clenched
his teeth and sucked it in.

“No more of this,” she muttered. She looked and sounded suddenly tired. “No more.”

“Hey, Gagrito!” The shorter boy looked up from where he’d been playing with Cardenas’s vorec. “You ain’t giving up, are you?
The game’s just getting good and started.”

“Ball it, Gluey,” she shot back. “It’s no fun if they know. But we can still endgame,
verdad?”
The shorter boy jammed
the vorec in his pocket as he hopped off the bed, nodding eagerly.

When she looked back at Cardenas there was a horrific blankness in her eyes, as if he were no longer there. He knew that look
but had never encountered it before on the face of one quite so young.

“We’re leaving.” Her voice had grown distant, surreal. “You can stay and keep Chimu company.”

“Now wait….”

She held up her balled fist and he winced at the increased pressure on his hand. “My range is about twenty meters. As soon
as we’re on our way down in the elevator the connection will be broken. Then Chimu will be on his own. So will you.”

They left hurriedly, Gluey favoring Cardenas with a last nervous giggle as he shut the door behind him. The sergeant stood
there gazing at the jaguar, his right hand throbbing with pain in the animal’s grip. It could be counted on to react suddenly
and instinctively when the girl’s control was released. Striking at its eyes might buy him a second or two, Cardenas thought
tensely. Probably the three ninlocos were already stepping into the battered, rickety elevator. He had only seconds left in
which to do something, anything.

The jaguar’s posture, standing erect on its hind legs, was completely foreign to the animal. For the moment it was being ordered
to hold on to him, and that was all.

So he kicked it as hard as he could between its hind legs.

The gesture was remarkably productive. The paw clutching his right hand let go and the animal dropped and rolled onto its
back. Cardenas sprang for the door and wrenched at the handle as the big cat yowled thunderously behind him. The handle wouldn’t
budge.

They’d locked it from the outside.

Already the jaguar was scrambling back onto its feet. Having previously been introduced to the taste of human flesh Cardenas
doubted it would stop with just killing him. Not that the final disposition of his corpus would matter to him once he’d been
eviscerated. He looked around wildly, then
sprinted to his right even as the cat was digging into the floor with its claws, gathering itself to leap.

The cheap plastic window shattered as Cardenas flew through it, arms crossed protectively in front of his face, the frame
snapping like cardboard, the fragments of inexpensive transparency cutting his hands and arms. The big cat, never hesitating,
followed.

The cable he’d noticed from inside the room felt like it was going to slice through his armpits as he slammed against it and
convulsively curled his arms, his body and legs swinging wildly five floors above the alley. He felt a claw rip his pants
leg. Screeching, yowling, twisting, the jaguar plummeted earthward. The last sound it made was an audible
thud
as it struck the unyielding pavement far below.

Cardenas dangled suspended in the sweltering night air, his muscles aching. He could feel warm wetness beginning to trickle
from beneath both arms. Across the alley a window opened and a face appeared. He yelled in its direction. Dimly aware that
while his lips were parted and moving, no sound was emerging, he tried again.

The window slammed shut, the face disappeared. Cursing, he began to pull himself hand over hand along the cable, heading for
the building to which it was attached. There was a roof there, lower than the room from which he’d so precipitously exited.
His progress was agonizingly slow, but steady.

They wanted him admitted to the hospital but had to settle for patching him up. Via vorec he supplied the night shift with
a thorough description of the three ninlocos as well as their modus. Then he called Sisu Okolona to warn her that the trio
now had her address. Having spoken of “ending the game” the girl called Gagrito might decide that the best way to punish Neurologic
was to try to take some sort of revenge
on its corporate head. Okolona assured him she would take the necessary precautions and not to concern himself because her
home was quite inviolable. An army of ninlocos couldn’t force their way in.

Thus reassured somewhat, he allowed the biosurges to go back to work on him. They repaired the bones of his right hand, though
it would be in a cast for some weeks, and sealed the wounds beneath his arms where the cable had cut. By midafternoon of the
following day he’d pulled rank to get himself discharged.

The first thing he wanted to do was talk to Okolona in person again. He should have called for assistance when he first saw
the gate in the cactus fence slightly ajar, but decided not to. Probably it simply hadn’t shut all the way after its last
use and Okolona had assured him with confidence the previous night of her home’s impregnability. Such technocratic xanadus
generally were.

No servant appeared to greet him, but when he identified himself the door clicked open to grant admittance. Only when he stepped
inside did he feel the gun in his back.

A familiar giggle sounded behind him. “You oughta be dead, frion. Why ain’t you dead?”

“I’m quicker than you think,
niño.”

“Not quicker than your own gun, I bet. Waft.” Cardenas started forward.

They were all in the big room that overlooked the river. Sisu Okolona sat on the big couch, with her edgy paramour close by.
Twotrick leaned against an exquisite Victorian sidebar, picking at his nails with a titanium stiletto. Her silver suit dirty
and greasy, the girl Gagrito stood confronting the couple on the couch.

The manservant who had greeted Cardenas on his last visit lay sprawled in a hallway nearby, his blood filling the grout lines
between the black pyrite tiles.

The girl glared at him. If she wasn’t insane she was borderline, Cardenas saw instantly. There would be no reasoning with
her.

“You officious prick. What’ve you done with Chimu?”

“He’s not hungry anymore,” Cardenas told her quietly, looking for an opening.

“Mierde
.” She turned back to the couch. The mistress of the grand house looked utterly self-possessed, as always. “That’s the last
animal whose death you’re going to be responsible for.”

“I am not responsible for the death of any animal,” replied Okolona tightly. “Neurologic only builds the components, the majority
of which are given over to perfectly legitimate uses.”

“Legitimate, yeah. Like making hamsters jump through flaming hoops and parakeets recite Shakespeare. Forcing animals into
unnatural activities that age them prematurely. You cold, heartless bitch; you wouldn’t know a ‘legitimate’ animal if it jumped
up and bit you on the ass.” The fury of her response startled Cardenas.

Okolona was unruffled. “I cannot supervise every application of every component the company manufactures. It is an unfortunate
but inescapable fact that this world is home to some immoral people.”

“Unlike you, of course,” Gagrito practically spat.