We flipped through all the cameras: nobody home. We left it on the kitchen: button D. Paul turned off the recorder.
I tilted my chair back. “I guess this could take a while.”
Paul looked apprehensive.
“What is it, Paul?”
“Do you like being a cop?”
I held up my cast. “Some days better than others.”
“You ever wonder what we accomplish?”
“What do you mean?”
“We bust all these pimps, hookers, and pushers and what does it ever accomplish? As soon as we lock one up, there’s another one ready to take their place. What’s the point?”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Lagarto is always going to be poor, Juno. The pols are always telling us times will get better, but you know they won’t. Our currency is worthless. You saw it yourself. It takes so much of our money to be worth anything that you can’t count it all. Yashin had to weigh it; you understand that? We don’t even deal in single pesos anymore. Our smallest denomination is a hundred. Offworld money isn’t like that. Pols say it’s just a trade ‘imbalance.’ No fucking kidding. We have nothing to trade. We export a few illegal drugs to the Orbital and the mines, maybe a little food. That’s it. We get a few tourists coming down here looking for a good time, but half of them are too afraid to leave their hotels. We can’t make anything that offworlders can’t make for themselves faster and cheaper. Their tech is centuries ahead of ours, I mean centuries. We’re using fossil fuels for god’s sake. What does that tell you?”
I knew he was right, but I spewed the same shit the pols did just to piss him off. “That’s where you’re wrong. We keep whining that offworlders have all this tech we can’t afford. We don’t have to buy it; we can build it ourselves. All the information we need is on the nets.”
Paul was heating up. “What the hell have we done with the information we have? Nobody even understands it.”
I tried to keep a straight face as I egged him on. “That’s why they’re starting to teach tech in schools. Those kids are whizzes. We’ll catch up in a few years.”
“Jesus, Juno, you know most kids can’t afford to go to school. You know that better than anyone. School is worthless anyway. When I got my degree, they taught us all kinds of useless tech shit like how an antimatter drive works. You see an antimatter store around here? What the hell good does it do to know how antimatter works when we don’t have any?”
I toed the optimist’s line a little longer. “So what if we don’t have the resources of other planets. We just need to make a few products that we can export. Then we can import all that other stuff in.”
“That’s just it,” he said excitedly. “We can’t even do that. Any information on the nets is years old by the time we get it. They can’t transmit any faster than the speed of light, so whatever information we get is already out of date by ten years or more. So say we take a year to learn to build whatever it is that you think we can export. That’s eleven years already, then we have to ship it fourteen years back to Earth. You think they want a twenty-five-year-old product? It’d be worthless.”
“So you’re saying we have no hope?”
“That’s right. No hope at all. And what do people with no hope do? They abuse drugs, gamble…sell their bodies, that’s what. Now tell me how a couple vice cops can accomplish anything?”
We broke out the booze, put our feet up, and watched the screen—still no action.
“Okay, Paul. If you’re so sure we’re wasting our time, why are you sitting here on your day off?”
“So I can learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Learn how to run a drug operation.”
“You want to be a pusher?”
“No. I just need to understand how it works.”
“Why?”
“So I can harness it.” Paul’s fist was clenched; his smile was dangerously high-wattage.
I wanted to know what he was talking about but was afraid of where it might lead me. I’d noticed a tendency in myself to follow Paul, no matter how crazy his ideas were. I told him, “You are seriously fucked up.” We laughed as I poured another round. “Whoa, somebody’s home.”
A woman came through the back door into the kitchen. She had long legs, long hair, and was dressed to the nines. She kicked off her shoes, losing a few centimeters in height. She just left the shoes in the middle of the floor. She stopped at the fridge, popped some ice into a glass, and headed for the living room. I flipped channels to B. She pulled open the liquor cabinet and poured enough to cover the cubes. She took a sip and headed upstairs. I flipped back and forth between E and F until she showed up on F.
She stripped off her gown, showing black underwear on coffee skin. She slumped into a chair and nursed her drink. I fixated on her eyes. I felt like they were speaking to me, like they were calling me. My insides hummed. Her eyes also said something else. It was there, under the surface. I just couldn’t seem to peg what it was.
She slinked into the adjoining bathroom and closed the door.
“Who was that?” I wanted to know.
“Must be Yashin’s daughter. Her name is Natasha. She’s twenty-four. Strange she still lives at home.”
“It’s not that strange. Not everybody marries young.”
“I know, but a looker like that in her prime years? She should be living it up at her own place. She doesn’t need Mommy and Daddy cramping her style.”
I nodded without looking at Paul. My eyes were riveted to the bathroom door, waiting for her to come back out.
ten
APRIL 23, 2762–MAY 31, 2762
PAUL stared at the papers tacked up on the walls of our stakeout pad—the results of a month’s spying. The mold-speckled notes detailed Pavel Yashin’s drug trade. “What do you think, Juno?”
“I say we arrest the SOB.”
“We don’t have any evidence.”
“We have all kinds of evidence, Paul.”
“We’ve gathered all this evidence illegally. We can’t use any of it in court.”
“All we need is a surveillance warrant. I told you about Judge Saydak. She’s got huge gambling debts, and she’s selling warrants. It won’t even cost that much. All we have to do is get her to backdate the warrant, and we’re set.”
“But Yashin’s strictly small-time. Don’t you want something more?”
He was right about Pavel Yashin being small-time. He ran a good business, though. He was making weekly trips upriver to meet representatives of the warlords, and placing opium orders. They’d ship the brown sugar by barge to a drop point a few klicks upriver from Koba. Yashin would take a skiff out on the water and send flashlight signals. They’d dump his O overboard, and he’d fish out the floating packages by flashlight. He’d motor the goods to shore and load it into his car. Then he’d drive home, his weighted-down car scraping the pavement at every bump in the road.
Yashin worked solo. He trusted no one. He made an easy target driving around with all that dope by himself. You’d think he’d have some bodyguards riding shotgun, but he was too paranoid to let anybody near his contraband. He’d pull the car into the garage and haul the dope down to the basement, working himself into a heart-attack-intensity sweat.
He had a network of dealers who came to the house to buy his shit, but he wouldn’t let any of them into the basement. He’d go down alone and bring up the right quantities. The dealers would turn around and sell it at high-class hotels and restaurants. Most of them had jobs as waiters, bartenders, or bellhops. That must’ve been how the electric bitch, Mai Nguyen, found Yashin. She’d probably been approached by one of his dealers who had set her up with Yashin. Up ’til recently, his business was small potatoes, but he was hoping that the Nguyen deal would change that.
Nguyen had been looking for a new supplier, one that could deliver high-grade O at a good price. Yashin thought he was just the guy so he made his sales pitch, and she bought it. He wanted to impress her w
ith his ability to deliver in quantity so he went upriver and he bought up tons of product—literally. He sank all his funds into the down payment. He sold Nguyen a fourth of his stock the night we were watching, and he made pricing agreements on six more shipments.
At first, Paul and I were optimistic that if we could keep close to Yashin, we could get another shot at Nguyen when she made her next O buy. Yashin was calling up to the Orbital every day to see if Nguyen was ready for the next order, but she wouldn’t answer his calls or return his messages. After a month of failed attempts to contact her, it had become abundantly clear that she was screwing him over.
We figured Nguyen was too spooked by us to deal with Yashin anymore. She knew we were likely to be onto Yashin, so she had probably moved on to another supplier. She had handled Paul and me just fine that night, but for all she knew, the whole of KOP would be waiting to pounce the instant she made another buy from Yashin. There were plenty of dealers for her to choose from. She could afford to play it safe by ditching Yashin even though she had little to worry about since Paul and I had kept Yashin’s identity from our superiors. We’d been conducting this entire investigation on our own. Paul and I had learned the hard way that when you kept the bosses informed, you’d get your collars stolen out from under you.
When Yashin bought all that dope, he had thought he and Nguyen were going to have an ongoing business relationship, but now he’d finally caught on that she’d hung him out to dry. He was stuck with this huge stockpile of opium in his basement and had nowhere to unload it.
Yashin was unraveling. He’d gone from three to seven drinks a night. He’d overextended himself, and he was having major cash flow problems. He still owed money on his mammoth purchase, and he wasn’t selling it fast enough to keep up on his payments. He kept trying to return it, but the warlord he bought it from wouldn’t hear of it—all purchases were final.
He tried to increase his sales by getting two dealers to start pushing on the street. One had already gotten knifed, compliments of Ram Bandur. Bandur had his initials, R.B., burned with cigarette butts into the dealer’s forehead, chest, and scrotum—antemortem. He wasn’t taking kindly to anybody encroaching on his territory.
I wanted to arrest Yashin while we still had the chance. He’d become vulnerable, and I was afraid the sharks might get him first. Paul wanted to use Yashin to chum the water, see if we could snag us a shark.
I asked, “Just who do you think we can get?”
“We should go for Bandur. We already have him on murder.”
“He’s way too big, Paul. He’s got Phra Kaew under his control. That’s a big neighborhood, and he’s not just peddling drugs, he’s taking a piece of all the gambling and prostitution profits, too. He’s got the money and the muscle to keep us from laying a finger on him. He knows we can’t touch him. Why else would he burn his own initials into a vic?”
“You don’t think we can take him down?”
“There’s no way. Listen, busting Yashin would be perfect. We could get the warrant and nab him ourselves. We wouldn’t have to share the collar with anybody. Going for Bandur will just get us killed.”
“Okay, forget Bandur. Maybe we can get somebody else. Don’t you want to run this up the ladder, see who Yashin can lead us to?”
“No, I don’t. The lieutenant is already all over our asses. We can’t just keep putting him off. We’re way behind on our quota.”
“So what? We can catch up anytime we want.”
“You’ve been saying that for a month now, but we just keep falling further behind. You said we could run this whole operation on our personal time, but we’ve been watching this screen so much I doubt we’ve put in twenty hours of regular work this whole week.”
“Don’t worry about it, Juno. I can handle the lieutenant. He likes me.”
“He’s not going to like you for much longer if we miss our quota for the second month in a row. Listen, Paul, we don’t need to be greedy. This arrest will give us everything we want. You know how much O he’s got in his basement. A haul like that is the kind of thing they always put on the news. Shit, they’ll take vids of the two of us posing next to that stash. They’ll put you on the fast track for a lieutenancy. What more do you want?”
Paul didn’t answer. He turned his gaze back to the papers on the wall. I couldn’t figure out what had gotten into him lately. I didn’t know what he was thinking half the time. I decided to drop it. We’d just wait and see like Paul wanted. We had what we needed on Yashin. There was no rush.
Paul got up. “I’m gonna run out for kebabs. You want anything?”
“Yeah. Set me up with one fish and one liz.”
Paul closed the door behind him. I poured myself a drink and went back to watching the Yashins. Pavel was sulking on his couch. His wife, Gloria, was packing a suitcase, and daughter Natasha was reading in her bedroom. You’d never see any two of them in the same room.
I stayed on F. Pavel Yashin wasn’t doing anything anyway. Natasha sat on the bed, flowery pillows propping her up. The book’s cover was of a tuxedoed man dipping a woman on the dance floor. Natasha twisted her raven hair around her finger, untangling it every couple minutes to turn the page.
She kept checking the clock and returning to the book. Finally, she got up, reading all the while, like a kid reluctant to give up a favorite toy. She finished the page, bookmarked, and stripped off her clothes—petite breasts on svelte physique. She walked into the bathroom.
She came out a few minutes later, naked except for the towel wrapped around her head. She pulled a pair of red sheer panties up over her coffee skin and blow-dried her hair. She was sitting on the bed, using the window as a mirror, unknowingly looking right into the camera, looking right at me. My heart drummed in voyeuristic bliss.
Then she took two dresses out of the closet—one red, one black. Go for the black. Like she heard me, she hung the red dress back up, took the black one off its hanger, and slipped it over her head. The dress hung loose, but clung at all the right curves.
The smell of greasy meat preceded Paul’s entrance. He glanced at the screen. “You watching her again?”
“Yeah. Can’t take my eyes off her.”
Natasha dabbed on just a touch of makeup and pulled a pair of heels out of the closet—black with thin straps.
“She is hot. I’ll give you that, but she sulks too much for me. She looks like a real downer.” He tossed me a kebob.
I unwrapped it from the soggy paper.
Paul took a bite. Sauce dripped down his chin. “Yashin up to anything?”
In response, I licked my fingers and kicked it over to B. He was up out of his seat, pouring himself another drink.
“Where’s the missus?” Paul wanted to know.
“She’s packing. She must be going to stay with her mother again.”
“Again? Shit. Natasha’s going out; Gloria’s going to her mother’s. He’s gonna have another one of his party nights. We won’t learn a damn thing tonight.”
This would be the third time this week. Yashin had a thing for young poon. Once he was home alone, he’d call down to one of the prosty joints and get them sent over two at a time, the younger the better.
I finished off the first kebab. “You want to call it a night?”
“Yeah, we can record it. Scan through it tomorrow.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“You wanna hit the bars?”
“Not tonight, Paul. I’m beat. I just want to have a quiet night.”
“Are you shittin’ me? Since when do you want to stay home?”
“Since tonight.”
We hopped separate cabs. I told my driver to let Paul get out ahead of us then made him turn the cab back. I had him wait three doors down from the Yashin house. No more than a minute later, another cab pulled up. Two women with tall hair sat in the back. After a couple honks, Natasha came out the door and down the walk. She took the front seat.
I made the driver follow them. They stopped in
the Old Town Square at a restaurant called Afrie’s—chic and ritzy. The women got out of the cab deliberately, showing plenty of leg. I waited a few, tossed some bills to the driver, and went in.
The place was done up in style. The floors were covered with thick rugs that you sank into as you walked. The chairs were upholstered with monitor hide. Nice. The lighting was dimmed down with candles on the tables, setting the right mood. People dressed in fancy clothes. I looked like a square in my white linens. The maître d’ pretended not to notice. “Will you be dining tonight, or would you like to go to the bar?”
I scanned the restaurant and didn’t see her. “The bar.”
“Excellent, sir. Let me show you the way.”
I parked on a stool at the bar, ordered house brandy on ice, and checked out the room. I saw the three of them sitting in a round booth. The two tall-haired women were laughing over their drinks. Natasha sat opposite them, watching and smiling when they looked her way. I could see she was too smart for them. They bored her, but she was too polite to let it show.
Natasha sipped at her drink, which was already almost gone. It was some kind of special rainbow-colored drink with pieces of fruit on the rim. I was mesmerized by her. She had the goods—gorgeous, sophisticated, mysterious. I was flying high.
For the first time I noticed the man next to me. What the hell? His forehead was glassed in with three goldfish swimming about. Offworlders would come up with the strangest shit. This place was a big offworlder hangout. At the end of the bar was a super buxom broad with vampire fangs. A table of quintuplet-clones in low-cut sundresses with cat faces—whiskers, fur, and all—giggled at the pumped-up muscle-head miners flexing in front of a mirror. Offworlders looked like models most of the time, but when they went out partying, they’d pull out all the stops, morphing into the freakiest characters. I can’t believe they get off on that shit.
I felt self-conscious in my linens. I was tempted to run home for a change of clothes, but a mental survey of my closet yielded nothing but more of the same. I asked the bartender to bring Natasha a second drink. I watched as he poured, scooped, shook, then blended the drink into a tall glass. He put some fruit on the rim, stabbed it with a straw, gave me a nod, and headed for her table. I picked up my drink and took a swig.
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