Ex-kop k-2

by Warren Hammond

  “Who's that with Ian?” I asked.

  “That's Liz. She and Ian go together.”

  She took Ian's elbow, and they walked past our table, taking up posts near the bar. Her hair stuck to her back, water beading down into her waistline. Josephs noticed me watching her. “You want me to introduce you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You afraid Maggie'll walk in and see you talkin' to her?”

  Holy shit, he was pissing me off. Maggie was like a daughter. “How many times do I have to fucking tell you? There's nothing between me and Maggie.”

  “You serious?”

  “Yes, you dumb shit. What have I been saying?”

  “Then why are you meeting her?”

  “I don't know. She says she has a job for me.”

  “What's the job?”

  “Didn't I just say I don't know?”

  “Yeah, I guess you did. Shit, it's good to see you, Juno. There aren't many guys that've been around as long as you and me. The force has changed since you and Paul been gone. Now they got all these political types that don't know shit runnin' things.”

  I gave a disinterested “Uh-huh.” Everybody knew the Koba Office of Police had gone to hell. Cops were calling their own shots these days. They were all working solo, taking kickbacks from drug dealers, bookmakers, slavers, gene traders-you name it. They were all out for themselves. It wasn't the bribes I objected to. Cops took bribes back when Chief Chang and I ran the force, too. Hell, we encouraged it. The difference was that when we were in charge, the bribes were for the force as a whole, not for the individual. In our day, cops were just the collection agents. The money was pooled and divvied up fair. KOP was unified, and as such, it was a political force in this city. The pimps, the dealers, the mayor, the crime lords, they all had to negotiate with us. Chief Chang was a power broker of the highest order.

  And I was his enforcer. I tore a path of shattered bones through KOP's rank and file. Through fear, I brought stability. With violence, I brought order. Chief Paul Chang's control over KOP was absolute.

  Our reign came to an end when KOP's then chief of detectives, Diego Banks, made a power grab. That was almost a year ago, or a year and a half going by the Earth calendar. He plotted the murder of Chief Chang and forced me into retirement. KOP was his and his alone. But the new chief had a problem keeping the dirty money flowing into cop pockets the way Paul Chang did. Paul was in tight with organized crime. Paul took a percentage of their profits in exchange for freedom from prosecution. Banks didn't have the same standing with the cartels that Chief Chang did. He couldn't negotiate anything close to the same rates. When cops realized the money wasn't flowing down from the top like it used to, they started keeping their bribes for themselves.

  It didn't take long for KOP's chain of command to fracture. Entire squads went rogue. Chief Banks couldn't maintain order. Corruption and dysfunction ruled the day. And when the new mayor rode the resulting wave of public dissatisfaction into office, he sent Chief Banks packing and replaced him with Chief Karella, a political type who looked good for the cameras, but knew next to nothing about running a police force. The police empire Paul and I built was crumbling away. KOP was turning into jungle, just like the rest of this city.

  As thoughts of our fallen empire dissipated, I found myself studying Ian's woman, Liz. I watched her entertain the group of men gathered around her, the whole lot of them competing for her attention.

  “Maggie should be along any minute,” said Josephs. “She always stays a little later than Ian, like she's tryin' to prove she's a better cop than he is.”

  “She is better,” I stated.

  Josephs made an exaggerated smirk as he mock jerked off. “Fuck that. There's no way she's a better cop than Ian.”

  “Who has the higher case-solved percentage?”

  Josephs threw his hands in the air. “Who gives a shit about numbers? Everybody knows the brass throws her the easy cases.”

  “You actually believe that?”

  “You know how rich she is, Juno. How else can you explain the fact that she made detective in under six months? She's got those kiss-asses wrapped around her finger. Now I hear the brass likes her for squad leader. Can you believe that?”

  “She'd be better than Ian. The guy's a pussy,” I said.

  “Not anymore he's not.” Josephs insisted. “If you told me that a couple years ago, I would've agreed. Shit, I don't know how he survived those first couple years on the street. Remember how his pop used to talk about him? He built him up like he was some tough-as-nails bruiser. Said he was the baddest guard at the Zoo. I remember thinkin' that we could use a guy like that, and then the kid shows up lookin' like the gun on his belt was goin' to tip him over. But I'm tellin' you, that wussy boy you knew is long gone. He's toughened up, turned into a real ass-kicker. I wouldn't have a second thought goin' on a drug raid with him backin' me up. That's how much I think of him. You know me, Juno, I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it. All the young guys look up to him.”

  Josephs popped a pill and swallowed it dry. “I don't know why you're stickin' up for Maggie, but you gotta know where she stands. Everybody wants Ian as squad leader. Nobody respects Maggie. She's just a rich girl playin' detective. If the brass gets their way, and she ends up squad leader, nobody's gonna do a goddamn thing she says. She ain't got the balls for it.”

  Josephs ranted on. I could care less what he thought of Maggie. Half of it could be true, and I still wouldn't care. Maggie and I had worked together before. She'd earned my respect. She was a smart cop and a tough cop. And she was something I never was-a clean cop.

  Like marbles finding the low point of a floor, I found that my eyes had gravitated over to Liz. Around her, I counted six guys, all puppy-eyed. Even the passed-over badge bunnies were staring at her, except they were all dagger-eyed.

  “Are you gonna stare at her all night or are you gonna let me introduce you?”

  I unhooked my eyes from Liz and turned them back on Josephs. “What good would that do?” I was fully aware of the fact that I'd left the door open by not just saying no.

  “You have to let me introduce you, Juno. I mean, do you see that body of hers? You wanna know the best part?” Josephs got a sparkle in his eye as he answered his own question. “She's into cops, Juno. I'm telling you, she can't resist 'em.”

  “I'm not a cop anymore. Besides, I thought she was with Ian.”

  “Sure, she and Ian are an item, but a woman like that's not exclusive.” Josephs leaned in close, like he was telling a secret. “Couple months ago, I came down here and tied one on. I mean I got ripped, wound up closin' the place. So then I walked down to the corner to wait for a cab. I was standin' in front of that seafood place; you know the one with the fishnet over the door?”

  I nodded.

  “So I was just standin' there waitin' for a cab to come along. I flagged one down, except it turned out that it wasn't empty. Liz got out, and we got to chattin', you know about cops and shit. Next thing I knew, she brought me upstairs. She's got a place right above the restaurant. She brought me in and poured us a couple. I was sippin' mine slow, but she was suckin' the shit down like there's no tomorrow. Before I knew it, she was all over me. She started doin' things to me, Juno. Things I never seen before. You wouldn't believe the shit she's into. I'm tellin' you, that was a night to remember-fuckin' A! You gotta meet her. You won't regret it.”

  I looked over at Liz as Ian suddenly stepped out from her circle of admirers. A holo appeared in front of him, Lieutenant Rusedski of homicide.

  “Somethin's up,” said Josephs.

  My phone rang. A holographic Maggie materialized in an empty chair. “I can't make it,” she said. “I have to go down to the South Docks. There's been a murder.”

  THREE

  The hommy dicks all cleared out, Liz trailing out with Ian. Must be a big case to warrant the whole squad going down to the docks. It was too bad. I'd been looking forward to seeing Maggie. We hadn't been seeing
much of each other since Niki's “accident.” That was what I'd tell people it was. An accident.

  My glass was drained. I dropped a couple bills on the table and hit the street. My almost dry whites soaked through in seconds. City lights reflected off the smothering low-hanging clouds, adding a smidge of gray to the black sky.

  I headed down the block, my feet taking it slow. It was time I went to the hospital for my nightly visit. My stomach roiled at the thought. I hated that place. Niki didn't belong there with the invalids and the cripples. I'd get her out soon, I told myself. She'd be good as new. It would be like turning back the clock.

  I began planning the best way to get there from here. Knowing roads were useless during the rains, I tried to imagine a map of the city's canal system, but I couldn't think straight; instead of canals, all my mind could see was hospital corridors and plastic tubes.

  A rare flyer skimmed the rooftops. On its underbelly, a neon sign flashed the tour company's name. You didn't see many tourists during rainy season. As the Koba River's water level steadily rose, the tide of offworld tourists would do the opposite. Constant rain kept all but the most hardy offworlders happily floating in space. Thinking of the boxy camera tucked under my arm, I bet there was one more offworlder who wished he'd stayed in his climate-controlled orbital home.

  I found that my feet had stopped at a doorway. They'd stopped on their own, without any conscious orders from my brain. I looked up through the fishnet, to the window above the restaurant. Liz's window. Warm, yellow light beamed out into the rain. I took a minute to stare at the window, ignoring the rain that splattered my face. Then I crossed the street, stopping and turning around when I reached the other side. Now I could see the utilitarian drapes… a tilting lamp, but nothing else. I saw shadows shifting on the ceiling. I liked to think they were cast by her, moving through her apartment in that clingy open-backed number, but I knew that the bucketing rain was probably just fucking with my vision.

  The hospital loomed in my mind, its smell, its sterility. I started walking again, but in the opposite direction.

  I baby-stepped my way down the moss-slick steps to the pier, where a pair of uniforms stopped me. I reflexively reached for my badge, finding an empty shirt pocket. “I'm here to see Maggie Orzo,” I said.

  One of the cops recognized me. “She know you're coming, Juno?”

  “Yeah. She knows.”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “She's probably where they found the body, somewhere inside that barge over there.”

  At least a dozen uniforms were on the pier, most of them scanning the ground with bobbing flashlights. They wandered aimlessly around, as disorganized as flies, looking for clues, but not having the sense to form into proper grid-search lines.

  I stepped up to the antique vessel. Back during the brandy boom, it was part of a fleet of barges that ran on the river. It was hard to picture it in its heyday: its engines chugging, its deck bustling with river rats, its spider-leg robotic arms swinging pallets of fruit containers on and off deck. Those days were long gone. Now it was just one more abandoned hulk, another reminder of this world's once proud past.

  I slip-slided up the algae-coated gangway and made my way sternward, across the waterlogged deck, careful to avoid tripping over cleats and lizard nests. Once inside, I shook off the excess water and climbed a set of narrow metallic stairs that led to the bridge. Electronics were scattered about the floor. Ruptured control panels sprouted entire gardens of wires that stretched out from round holes where gauges used to be. Rain sprayed through broken-out windows. I looked out, down onto the broad deck. Robotic arms stood tall around the eye-shaped deck, reaching up and out like eyelashes.

  Flatfoots hovered around a doorway, peeking in on what had to be the crime scene. I tapped a couple shoulders to move them aside. Battery-powered lights sat on the floor, giving the cabin a strange bottom-up lighting pattern that my eyes took a few secs to adjust to. Just inside the cabin was a body, nothing more than a bloated gray sack of skin wearing police blues. In the middle of the cabin was a blood-spattered block of wood surrounded by a pool of watery blood. The floor was littered with small gray sacks-former lizards. One was still alive, its front half trying to walk, its back half a gray blob acting as deadweight.

  Ian stomped the half-dead gecko into the decking then turned to face me. “Get out.”

  I disregarded the order. “Hey, Maggie.”

  Detective Magda Orzo tiptoed from dry spot to dry spot until she stood by my side. She was overdressed as always-a pressed blouse, pleated pants, and matching pumps-expensive duds, probably offworld manufacture. The ensemble looked snappy despite its saturated state. She spoke to me in a serious voice. “So far, it's just like the first one I told you about.”

  I had no clue what Maggie was talking about, but thought it best to play along. “Sure looks like it, doesn't it.”

  Ian confronted his partner. “What's he doing here?” He was pointing at me.

  Maggie responded without pause. “I asked Juno to come. I thought we could use another opinion.”

  Maggie was lying. She hadn't asked me to come. She'd cancelled our appointment, and she'd never told me about the “first one” or any other one. Whatever the job was that she wanted me to do, she didn't want Ian knowing about it. To keep up Maggie's charade, I'd have to play the part of the wise old detective-which itself was a lie. After a long pause, I asked, “What have you got so far?”

  Ian turned his back on us without answering.

  Maggie rolled her eyes at her partner. “About two hours ago, Officer Ramos called in. He said he was walking the pier, and he saw some suspicious activity on this boat.”

  “What kind of suspicious activity?”

  “He didn't say. He just said he was going to investigate.”

  I looked at the bulging body. “I assume that's Officer Ramos?”

  Maggie nodded affirmative. “I figure the killer was at the tail end of the cleanup stage by the time he came investigating. Ramos must've walked in when the gene eaters were in full force.”

  No doubt about that, I thought as I looked at Officer Ramos's overly swollen form. He looked ready to pop. Gene eaters were some scary offworld shit, a strain of microbacteria that attacked DNA. They'd invade cells and reproduce at an absurd rate, destroying every DNA molecule they'd find and ravaging the cells in the process.

  The killer had treated the entire cabin, probably with a fogger. Gene eaters were gaining popularity as a way to destroy blood evidence and any hair or skin cells that may have been left behind. We were only safe now because gene eaters were genetically wired to be sterile at the twentieth generation. Having rendered all DNA evidence ineffective, they naturally died off inside an hour. Otherwise they could wipe out a whole planet. Like I said-scary shit.

  I moved to the center of the cabin, stepping over the unlucky lizards that had come looking for a free meal and wound up becoming the free meal. I leaned over the knee-high wood block in the middle of the floor and studied the blood pooled all around it. The blood looked runny instead of its usual syrupy consistency, a surefire sign that the gene eaters had done their job.

  Maggie said, “Check out the scorch marks on top.”

  I examined the set of centimeter-deep blackened gouges burned into the wood. I tried to count them, but my brandy-clouded brain lost track at five. My attention shifted to a hollow scooped on one side on the otherwise cubical block, wondering what it could be for.

  As if she could read my mind, Maggie answered my unvoiced question. “We think it's for the vic's chin.”

  A picture flashed into my mind. The vic on his or her knees, neck stretched across the block, chin resting in the hollow so the throat could lay flush on the wood. The scorch marks were obviously left by a lase-bladed weapon, most of them probably left by practice chops, the most recent left by the actual beheading.

  “So am I to assume there's a decapitated body around here somewhere?”

  “No. He n
ever leaves the body behind.”

  “Why not leave the body to be gene eaten with everything else?”

  She said she didn't know with a shake of her head.

  “And the scene's always been gene eaten?”

  Maggie nodded a grim yes. Grim, because the obvious conclusion was that the killer was an offworlder. Gene eaters didn't come cheap. A Lagartan would have to cough up a couple kilos worth of pesos to buy a batch. If a Lagartan was rich enough and desperate enough, I could see how he might buy a batch, but Maggie said there were others. How many, I didn't know, but it wouldn't take more than two or three batches to break most bank accounts. There was no way the killer was Lagartan. There were cheaper ways to cover up a murder. I should know.

  “Any idea who the vics are?” I asked.

  “Nope. Not without the bodies. We've tried to match the dates to missing persons reports, but we can't get definitive matches. There're too many missing persons.”

  I knew what she meant. Slavers smuggled Lagartans off-planet to work the belts at a steady rate. KOP probably received three or four missing persons reports a week, and that was just Koba. They didn't count the rest of the planet. Go out to the fringe towns where the warlords were in control, and there was no telling how many people went missing. Koba was the only city on the planet with even partially accurate record keeping.

  I pointed at a trio of coin-sized bloodless circles on the floor. “How about those?”

  “They're from a tripod.”

  “He films it?”

  “That, or he has an accomplice who does the filming. No way to tell.”

  I felt a clap on my shoulder. “Juno.”

  I recognized the voice without turning around. “Abdul,” I said, already grinning.

  “What brings you here?”

  I turned to look at my old friend. “Maggie asked me to come. She wanted to get an experienced detective's perspective.”

  The coroner looked at me with eyebrows arched behind his superthick glasses. Abdul knew I couldn't be serious. He was well aware of the fact that I'd spent far more of my career strong-arming than I did Sherlocking. “I see,” he said noncommittally.