We rode past Mdoba’s docked boat. His bikini-clad girlfriend Malis was on the deck grooving to a tune. She didn’t see us. She was too involved in self-involvement. We landed on an empty pier. Maggie and I hopped off without waiting for the skipper to tie up.
I broke into a heavy sweat as the two of us kept up a brisk pace on the walk to the Kapasi brothers’ falling-apart home. Sneaking up from the outside, we checked the front and back windows-nobody home. I went for a basement window, closed my eyes, and stuck my head through the jungle shrubbery that had overrun this side of the house. Thorns scraped my skin; twigs slapped my cheeks and forehead. I pressed my face against the glass, straining to see through the basement window…holy fuck.
I reached a hand back through the brush and gave Maggie a come-here finger curl. Mosquitoes bit on my face as she rustled her way through the shrubs. Her cheek slid against mine into position at the window.
I tried to keep a cool head as we took in the scene. A dozen laser-clawed and razor-jawed monitors thrashed in their pen. Their metal teeth sparked as they gnashed on the bars that ran floor to ceiling. Their laser-claws scratched at the cement floor in a frenzied scramble to push through the gaps. A piece of meat flew through the bars and landed on the floor where it was torn into a half dozen pieces.
Outside the pen, Sanders Mdoba’s oversized frame was on all fours, lase-blade in hand, sawing through human bone. Body parts lay all over, blood streaming into a floor drain. He successfully severed an arm and slid it through the bars, then moved to the head, his lase-blade slicing clean through neck flesh, getting hung up on the vertebrae. He sawed the blade back and forth, finally cutting through in a cloud of bloody steam. He stood up, his tent-sized clothes stained red and black, and tried to shove Sanje Kapasi’s larger-than-normal head through the bars. It stuck momentarily, monitors snapping at the backside, until Mdoba used a shoulder to shove it the rest of the way through.
I counted the remaining limbs-three legs, one arm. Jhuko and Sanje Kapasi.
Maggie and I pulled free of the jungle scrub. We jogged around to the front door and into the house. We strode purposefully through the house as lizards screeched all around us. I slinked through the basement door and crept down the stairs, Maggie following sure-footedly. Mdoba was hacking through ribs, the lase-blade blinking on and off from overload. I moved up on him from the rear, the racket from the monitor pen covering my approach. Smoke-filled air made my eyes water. Mdoba pulled a side of ribs free-BBQed at the edges. I pushed my piece into the middle of his back, sinking it into his ample flesh. He froze. Maggie moved around front, her piece held level.
He let the blade drop from his hand; the beam flickered out. He put his hands over his head and submitted to the frisking like a pro. I relieved him of his lase-pistol. When he saw who I was, he tried to act all buddy-buddy saying, “It’s good to see you, Juno. How’s Niki?”
I led him upstairs without speaking. He tried to bullshit me the whole way, telling me he was here doing Bandur’s business, and that Sasaki was gonna be pissed when he found out I’d interfered.
I made him sit on the kitchen floor. Sanje Kapasi’s prized monitor strained at its chain, the smell of carnage driving it near insane. I thought about frying it just to shut it up.
Mdoba rested his back on the wall, looking defiant instead of defeated. It would be tough to break him. My stomach sickened at the thought of torturing him. Maggie was waiting for me to take control, but I procrastinated as I tried to summon my temper. I was drawing blanks. I wanted a drink.
I told myself, fuck this. Just do it already. I tucked my piece away and moved in on him, my fists ready to do some damage.
Living room lizards suddenly went berserk. Somebody was here. Maggie wheeled on the kitchen door, her body in a crouch, her weapon extended. I stuck my piece under Mdoba’s double chin, pushing through the fat and pressing on his Adam’s apple.
Matsuo Sasaki came into the kitchen with his muscle, chef-killer Tipaldi. Both their hands up.
“What are you doing here?” I wanted to know.
“Paul called and gave me the news that Mr. Mdoba betrayed us to Mr. Simba. We called his girlfriend, who was gullible enough to tell us where he was.”
“That dumb cunt.” Mdoba wheezed.
I shoved my weapon deeper into his throat.
Maggie butted in. “You can’t have him. We’re going to arrest him.”
I shot her a warning look.
Sasaki didn’t take offense. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that, Maggie. You see, the criminal justice system doesn’t offer a punishment severe enough to fit the nature of Mr. Mdoba’s betrayal.”
Maggie’s eyes drilled into Sasaki. “You’re going to kill him.”
“Why of course we are, but not until we’ve had a spot of fun. You don’t know the kind of anguish we’ve felt since your chief told us how disloyal Mr. Mdoba has been. But fear not, I will give you the opportunity to speak with him first. However, you will limit your questions to Mr. Mdoba’s involvement in any schemes masterminded by our Lojan friend, Mr. Simba. It is only along these lines that our interests overlap with police interests. You will not question him on any illegal activities outside of that realm. Is that satisfactory?”
Maggie stayed silent.
“Deal,” I said, glad to be relieved of torture duty.
“Excellent, Juno. You’ve always been most…practical.”
“Where’s Ben? Shouldn’t he be here?”
“That he should, but he had to stay home. He’s suffering from an infection in his reconstructed nose. The doctors told him not to swim, but he didn’t follow their instructions, and now he is suffering magnificently.” He turned to Tipaldi. “If you’ll do the honors, Tip.”
Tipaldi darted in, dropping knucks on Mdoba’s nose, barely giving me time to step back. A few quick shots and he had Mdoba seeing double, his nose swollen beyond the confines of his already fat-swollen face. Tipaldi pinned Mdoba’s arm under his own and dragged Mdoba’s heavy form across the floor. Mdoba was squealing now, his heels kicking at the floor, failing to find purchase.
Tipaldi yanked and pulled the resisting Mdoba into the monster’s reach, holding Mdoba’s hand out as a snack. It came back less three fingers.
Maggie turned her back. I eyeballed the whole scene. I’d done worse. Four fingers later he was ready to talk-the reward: a quick death instead of a part-by-part dismemberment.
Sasaki told Tipaldi to get him cleaned up. “You can’t expect a lady like Officer Orzo to look at such a mess.”
Tipaldi found a couple towels and wrapped what was left of Mdoba’s hands. Maggie stayed planted where she was, her back turned on the ugliness.
I wiped the sweat off my face, and spoke slow and clear. “You work for Simba.”
“Yes,” Mdoba answered.
“When did you start working for Simba?”
He couldn’t answer, the pain too great. Tipaldi slapped him lucid. “Two years ago,” he croaked.
“Why?”
Again he couldn’t answer. Tipaldi slipped him a needleful of morphine. I waited a few, until he started getting happy. “Why did you start working for Simba?” I repeated.
“He paid well.”
“What did he want from you?”
“He wanted somebody high up in Bandur’s outfit to pass him information on what we were doing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a traitor or nothing, but the money was good. Besides, I was hired by Papa Bandur, not that pussy kid of his.”
“What other kinds of work did you do for Simba?”
Mdoba went into a coughing fit. His belly rolled with every hack. After a glass of water, he was talking again. “I was helping him get his shipping company going. Shit, it was a sweet deal, Juno. He has some bitch on the Orbital that buys up people, ships ’em to the mines.”
“What kind of people?”
Mdoba had entered a morphine euphoria. His words were coming out fluidly now. “All kinds. It don’t matter. Kids are good, because
they’re easy to kidnap. Some people even sell their kids cheap.”
“What happens to them?”
“They send ’em to the mines. From what I hear, the ship captains keep the pretty ones for themselves. You ever heard of a harem? They used to have ’em on Earth. They knew what they was doing back then. A harem’s when you got all these women and they do whatever you say; they have to please you. You know what I’m saying? Beat ’em, rape ’em-whatever you want.”
“You don’t treat women like that!” My piece was in his mouth.
Mdoba ranted garbled pleadings, begging mercy.
Tipaldi and Sasaki didn’t move to stop me. Maggie said, “Juno.”
My hand tremor spread over my entire body. Sweaty shivers ran up and down. My face burned red. I pulled my piece free, revealing a newly chipped tooth in Mdoba’s blubbering mouth. I stepped outside and sucked early evening air. My muscles adrenaline-twitched. I struggled to calm my out-of-control thoughts.
Maggie stayed next to me with a look of pity on her face. I’d spent a lifetime proving I wasn’t weak by exacting brutality in abundance, and in the end, I came off pitiful. I gave her my weapon and headed back in.
Mdoba was as calm as could be expected. Sasaki had moved to the stove to prepare tea. Tipaldi was nursing his bruised knuckles with ice from the freezer.
I took a place on the far side of the kitchen-safely out of throttling distance from Mdoba. I concentrated on self-control. “What do they do with the rest of the slaves?”
Mdoba answered, “They make ’em work.”
“Don’t they have robots to do the mining?”
“They need people to run the robots. The more people, the more machines they can run. They don’t need just miners, though. They need people to grow food and shit, same as here.”
“Why can’t they hire labor? Twenty percent of Lagarto is looking for work.”
“This way’s cheaper. Why pay for something when you can get it for free?”
“Aren’t they afraid of getting caught?”
Mdoba’s speech was getting labored. “Who’s going to catch them? Even if somebody found out, it would take years for the message to get to Earth or anybody else that can do anything about it. By the time they send somebody out here to investigate, twenty or thirty years go by.”
“How were you helping Simba get started?”
Mdoba turned to Tipaldi. “More. I need more.”
Tipaldi administered a morphine booster. Mdoba instantly became more relaxed.
I started back in. “How were you helping Simba?”
“He told me how he wanted his own ship. I thought he was crazy. I don’t know how he did it, but he bought a fucking ship. I’d like to see Bandur pull that off. Maybe Papa coulda done it. I seen that man do some amazing shit, but the kid ain’t got it in him.”
“Simba needed approval from the city.”
“That’s right. He wanted me to handle it. He needed somebody that knew Koba. It was a test. You know, to see how I did. If it went well, he was going to see about putting me in charge of Bandur’s operations when he took them over.”
“So you took vids of board members.”
“You know about those? Yeah, it was easy. Everybody’s got something they don’t want people knowing about. I took vids and used them to get the board to vote the way Simba wanted.”
The questions were ticking off my tongue in a strictly professional manner. “What about Peter Vlotsky?”
“I caught that prick screwing hookers, but he didn’t care. It took me a while to figure out that he was getting paid by an offworld shipping company to kill Simba’s business proposal dead. I needed him. He was the fucking chairman. Without his okay there was nothing we could do. He’s got some kind of veto power.”
“What did you do then?”
“Simba gave me the go-ahead to play it rough with Vlotsky. Simba said he couldn’t compete with offworld money, so he said we’d have to use intimidation to get what we wanted.”
“You went after his family.”
“Right. I’d already done my homework on the family. I told him about how Vlotsky had a wife and a son, but the problem with his son was that he was in the Army. How do you whack a guy in the Army? He’s surrounded by guys with guns. So Simba told me to go for the wife, but I told him that if Vlotsky doesn’t care about his wife seeing him fucking another woman then he probably won’t care if we kill her either. We’d be doing the guy a fucking favor.”
“So what did you decide to do?”
“When I mentioned that Vlotsky’s kid was stationed at the base upriver, he told me he knew somebody stationed there.”
“Jhuko Kapasi.”
“You know about him, too? What the fuck are you asking me all these questions for?”
Pieces were coming into focus. “Go on.”
He looked at Tipaldi, not needing to ask. Tipaldi gave him another mini-injection. Mdoba looked at his wrecked hands then closed his eyes. “I checked out this Kapasi. He was a hustler-got sent up to the Zoo for a gambling deal that went bad. He got early release from prison and was sent into the Army. It turned out he was in Vlotsky’s unit.”
“How did Simba know Kapasi?”
“He told me that Kapasi sold him some POWs-farmers that brought a good price when he sold them to the mines.”
“What about Kapasi’s sister? Did he sell her to Simba?”
“Yeah, he sold her, too. He ran that crazy gambling scheme that blew up in his face, and he had to pay off some big debts before he went to jail, so he sold her to Simba. That was when Simba was just getting started on the slavery thing.”
My brain locked the pieces into place. “So you approached Kapasi.”
“Yeah. I told him I’d pay him to snuff Lieutenant Vlotsky. He got all excited about it. He told me how big a prick Lieutenant Vlotsky was and how the lieutenant screwed his whole unit over on some operation. I thought he was onboard. He’d kill Chairman Vlotsky’s kid, and I’d go tell him he’s next if he doesn’t vote our way, but Kapasi fucked the whole thing up.”
“How?”
“I gave Kapasi half the dough up front. I was going to give him the other half after he did the job. He was running around in the jungle with Vlotsky for days. How hard could it be to pop the guy?”
“He didn’t do it?”
“He didn’t do shit. I don’t know if he ain’t got the cojones or what. I figured that a guy who sells his sister as a slave won’t mind killing somebody, but this guy must not like to get his hands dirty. I called him on it, and he said the unit was going on leave. I thought, ‘Good, then I can do it myself.’ I told him to send my money back, but the fucker kept it, and he called me a couple days later and told me he killed Vlotsky. What kind of fucked-up job is that?”
“Then what?”
“A few days later, I got tipped off that there was a witness. I tried to get Kapasi on the line, but the Army had him in some kind of lockup. They were worried that Vlotsky’s murder was Army-related. It cost me a fucking fortune in bribes to get him on the line. I told him that somebody saw him kill Lieutenant Vlotsky. He told me there was no way anybody saw him kill Vlotsky since he didn’t kill him. Can you believe this asshole? I said, ‘If you didn’t kill him, who did?’ He told me he gave the front money to his old cellmate from the Zoo to do the job. He was going to keep the second payment for himself. ‘For the referral,’ he said.”
Mdoba asked for more water. He coughed most of it up before carrying on. “I about shit on the spot. He told me about Zorno. You already know about him since you killed him.”
Holes were filling in lightning fast. My brain raced to keep up-Simba hired Mdoba to fix the board’s vote; Mdoba hired Kapasi to whack Lieutenant Vlotsky; Kapasi subcontracted the job to lip-obsessed serial killer Ali Zorno. “Why’d you come here to Kapasi’s house?”
“Kapasi went back on leave today. The Army decided he had nothing to do with Vlotsky’s death, so they let him go. He called me, asking for the se
cond half of his payment. I acted real nice and told him he did a great job, and I’d be there as soon as I could. I met him here and told him I wasn’t going to pay him. You should have seen him getting all pissy about it. Why should I pay him for hitting Vlotsky when he didn’t hit nobody?”
“What did you do to him?”
“I shot him. He had it coming to him. Then his dumb-fuck brother got all pathetic, crying and shit, so I burned a hole through his chest to put him out of his misery. I figure he’s better off dead. His momma shoulda smothered him the minute she popped him out and saw he was a retard, am I right?”
Maggie was watching now. The repulsive torture scene not quite so repulsive anymore.
Mdoba rattled on. “Once I finished feeding the Kapasi brothers to the lizards, I was gonna open the cage and let the monitors loose. Let ’em shit the evidence all over Loja. Once I hosed that basement down there was no way it coulda gotten traced back to me.”
After another dose of morphine, I asked, “What’s Simba’s relationship with Mayor Samir?”
“They’re working together.”
This final confirmation announced Paul’s vulnerability in bright lights. “How so?”
“Simba approached Samir before the elections, asked him, ‘Why split the power four ways when we can split it two?’ You see what he meant? Bandur runs the drugs, gambling, loan-sharking, and prostitution in Koba. Chief Chang runs KOP. Mayor Samir runs the city government, and Simba runs his slavery operation. Get rid of Bandur and Chang, and you got only two left-Simba for the illegal shit and Mayor Samir for everything else.”
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