Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  There was so damn much that wouldn’t, Taiesha reminded herself. Why are we here?

  For Ramon Izquierdo. For my daughter, too, and Tremaine. And for that little girl with the snub nose, and for all the rest of them that are still breathing, so they’ll have a ghost of a chance.

  She pulled in a deep breath. This time around, when she glanced at her clients, she saw them for what they were—bits of anomie, ready to murder again and again. The two pirates stood at the foot of the gallows, now nearly erect, but the bailiffs hadn’t covered their heads yet. Michael Dysart, the teenager, looked like he might be sick any minute. The other one, Wilson, grinned at Taiesha. Licking his lips, he said, “You look yummy.”

  “Shut your mouth,” the judge instructed. “I’ll tell you when it’s your turn to talk.”

  “You go to hell,” the pirate snarled back.

  “Gag him,” Hebert ordered.

  That took a couple of minutes and three of their burliest bailiffs, but that was because the condemned man kept trying to bite them. Then both buccaneers were dragged on up the thirteen steps and positioned on top of the trapdoor, with nooses around their scrawny necks. When the bailiffs had finished, the judge got up on the platform too. He took a theatrical tour of the gallows, circling both men. The teenager nearly fell over, just trying to keep him in sight, but the older man was much too busy caterwauling around the muzzle they’d strapped to his face. He nearly drowned out the rowdy crowd on the dock, where it looked like the whole damn town had turned out to watch the proceedings.

  They hadn’t allowed any locals to stay aboard ship, not for this. Moreland and their three witnesses had been sequestered below decks, and everyone else had been herded ashore.

  So far, none had admitted to knowing the two raiders. Still, they might either one have some unknown connection to Atwater’s residents. That’s why the Queen’s captain stood ready to cut the big riverboat loose from the landing. They could always continue the hangings offshore, once they’d gained a safe distance from anyone trying to interfere.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the judge, using the Queen’s PA system. The sound of his voice boomed out, eliciting howls from dogs and small children, and still more excitement among the adults, who were treating the whole thing like some kind of holiday. Maybe it was. No one seemed to be working today.

  “Your attention, please!” the judge went on. “These proceedings are serious business. I must ask for your forbearance while we complete the legal niceties.”

  That got a laugh out of some of the onlookers. Townies, not sea rats. However, the general noise level did drop dramatically, if not the tension Taiesha felt.

  Oh, God, she thought, panic rising. God, help me, she pleaded. Her hands knotted up on their own as she fought for control, and her heart turned into a giant-size fist. It knocked at her ribs again and again while Hebert once more pronounced the death sentence for each man.

  Sweet Jesus, why was he taking so long?

  Next, Hebert solemnly asked each man if he wanted a priest or a preacher of some kind.

  The kid merely shook his head.

  Wilson, unmuzzled, proceeded to spit at the three nearest bailiffs. His Honor, however, stayed well out of range as he inquired of the boy, “Michael Dysart, do you have anything you’d like to say?”

  The teenager squeaked out: “I never ate nobody!”

  “You lyin’ sack o’ shit!” Wilson spat his way as well. And at that point, without waiting till both their heads were bagged, or giving Wilson his chance to speak, Judge Hebert nodded. Jerome hit the big black release lever. The trap door crashed downward. Both men dropped, and a loud double crack echoed over the water.

  Taiesha shuddered, hit hard by the sound of their neck bones snapping. That was how Kayla finally died, she remembered. A broken neck was what ended it. How in hell could her own heart have kept on beating after that?

  She turned away from the gallows, only to find herself facing Mac-Clure. When he smiled, she lashed out without thinking, catching the Scotsman across the face.

  Crack!

  But he never said a word. He simply stepped back and let her sweep past him and on down the stairs to her own tiny stateroom, the one place where she could be truly alone.

  That’s where Bobby Rishwain found her. A rangy balding man with a tiny Vandyke beard, he wore a black eye patch and looked like a pirate himself, only cleaner and with better teeth. He wore black cargo pants and a genuine Izod shirt sporting their green lizard logo—the kind of thing no one had seen in a store in a decade or more. God knows where he got it, Taiesha thought as she let him in. It was a lovely light teal green in color too, something she envied. Her own wardrobe didn’t have much in the way of pastels.

  “How you doin’?” he inquired, folding up into the only chair she could offer him while she herself took a seat on the folded-out bunk.

  “I’m okay,” she replied.

  “Hurt your hand?”

  A heat wave swept across her face as she flexed the appendage in question. Scar tissue resisted the movement, but otherwise everything worked. “Didn’t hit the guy that hard,” she argued.

  He gave her a skeptical look that needed no words to say,

  “Bullshit.”

  She scowled at him. “Why is he dogging my heels like that? He’s supposed to be auditing everyone, not just me.”

  “Maybe MacClure likes you.”

  Taiesha groaned and rolled her eyes heavenward. “Oh, please.”

  Rishwain laughed. He’d made his own offer months back, but he had a wife and two children in Fresno as well as an aggressive nature that made him a good prosecutor but a poor prospect otherwise. Taiesha much preferred men who felt no special need to demonstrate their manliness, who simply had no doubts about it, though Bobby at least could take no for an answer.

  He glanced at the case file laid out on her fold-out desk. “Ah, yes. Our dear Mr. Moreland. A prince of a man. It won’t bother me much to hang him.”

  “Me, neither,” Taiesha replied. “But I’m stuck with him. And I think we might have a hard time with the locals in his case. He’s got this town organized, and his guys have some hardware to work with.” Meaning assault rifles—even antiques like the M-16 from this morning could still produce real firepower. Who knew what else they had?

  Rishwain nodded. “You ever hear how he got to be mayor?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, a few years back, when the Carquinez Dam failed, and seawater started to flood the whole valley? A few places figured out where things were going. They put in desalinization plants. It was mostly to make sure they’d have drinking water, but the sea kept on coming, and the snowfall didn’t. Pretty soon, anyplace without de-sal was dying.”

  Taiesha kept silent, but tipped her head forward to indicate she understood, so Rishwain continued. “Willets was one of ‘em. Danville and Mountain House. Atwater, though, didn’t do it. They thought it was too damn expensive.”

  “But… I thought they had one.”

  “They do,” Bobby said. “But it ain’t theirs. They stole it.”

  “What?” Surely he’s kidding, she told herself. You can’t lift a whole water plant, for God’s sake, any more than you can shoplift a bridge. She got up and began to pace the full length of the bunk, just to use up some of that agitation.

  “You said it. They’re organized,” he went on, watching her turn about in the narrow space. “They found out this new charter community north of Merced had one. Stony Creek, I think they called it. A yuppie commuter town—all gated neighborhoods, everything painted the same color, that sort of thing. So one night about eight years ago, Moreland takes his guys up there, and they raid the place. But they don’t hit and run. No, they stay there a week. They load up all their food and their livestock, and they take the whole damn de-salinization plant apart, and they haul it all home again. Anyone gets in the way gets a bullet.”

  Taiesha turned once again. “How did they manage that? Nobod
y had any gas back then. There weren’t any riverboats, either. Well, not big enough to haul freight.”

  “Horses,” said Rishwain. “And wagons, if you can believe it, made out of old pickups. The yuppies were ready for refugees on foot, with maybe a handgun or two and a half dozen bullets between ‘em. They weren’t prepared for an army of thirty or forty men on horseback, armed with assault rifles, shotguns, and dynamite.”

  “An army.”

  He nodded.

  She sank down again on the bunk, trying hard not to bite a hole right through her lip. “And these Stony Creek guys let ‘em keep all that?”

  “Let them?” He sighed. “I don’t know what all happened, but Stony Creek just isn’t there anymore. More than half the town burned down, and what didn’t, drowned. So I don’t think let is the word for it.”

  “How about piracy, then?” she demanded. “Shit! Why do I have to defend this guy on the murder charge if we can get him on that?”

  Bobby shrugged. “Apparently, San Francisco thinks we need farmers way more than yuppies. Besides, there’s no witnesses left, and no paper trail. There’s no physical evidence either, so, really, what can we do?”

  Taiesha had no idea what to tell him. She did have to get her case ready, however, and shooed Bobby out of her stateroom before heading into the Queen’s tiny closet-size lab. There were no chairs at all in there, and no room for them either, so she braced herself on the bulkhead, leaned over the DNA sequencer’s keyboard, and called up results on her last set of samples—the swabs she’d used on the ration wrappers her witnesses handled while eating their lunch.

  No, not hers, she thought. Bobby’s. As assistant D.A., it was his job to prosecute, his right to bring in the victim’s kin, and his responsibility to question them about the dead boy. It was her job to minimize, undercut, or disprove what they told him, especially if it could hurt her client.

  Taiesha truly hated that.

  The other three Izquierdos were victims too, and in this particular case, they had their half-starved backs to the wall. Well, maybe she could change that. The new Population Control laws required registration for everyone, including their DNA profiles. A lot of the refugees hadn’t been able to, though, or else ducked it to stay out of trouble. The problem was, unregistered kids had no access to health care. They couldn’t go to school, either. But if she herself did the filing, if she paid the fees, the surviving cousins would at least get a fair shot at a future.

  She laid her results out on the counter, side by side.

  Good, she thought. All three profiles were clean. I can fill out the paperwork, get Mom to answer a couple of questions about the girl’s parents. .. but then her eye traveled a bit, and she realized what she was seeing there.

  “Oh, shit!”

  There was no way around it. Taiesha thought hard about throwing the whole goddamn thing out, and maybe the DNA sequencer too, but she couldn’t quite make herself do that. Instead, she requested a conference in chambers, and waited while Judge Hebert, Rishwain, the three Izquierdos, and Eric Moreland were all rounded up. Iain MacClure sauntered in too, but played statue thereafter. Still, his presence, all by itself, made her nervous.

  The two Izquierdo kids looked just about scared to death, and they wouldn’t come near Moreland. He kept on griping about his restraints until Hebert told him that he’d either shut up or he’d get muzzled too.

  Rishwain, mostly, was puzzled by all this, and she couldn’t tell what the judge thought. She focused instead on Catrina Izquierdo, pale and silent and yet defiant. She sat and glared at Moreland as if she thought she might be able to bore a hole right through his forehead by means of sheer willpower.

  “What’s this about?” said His Honor, once everyone settled down.

  Nausea coiled through her gut, but Taiesha stood up and presented the judge with fresh copies of her DNA results. Her own, she handed to Rishwain. Then, turning to Mrs. Izquierdo, she said, “You haven’t registered, have you?”

  “What?” Mama pretended to misunderstand, but Taiesha had seen it, the way her narrow nostrils flared and the way her eyes squinched when she spotted the bar codes on those papers. She knew what they were, and she knew what they meant.

  “The Global Population Control laws have been in force for more than eight years,” said Taiesha. “The law says that you have to register with the state, you and the children. You’re refugees, so you may not have realized that. But the fact is, you all have to register. And provide a DNA sample.”

  “But… we don’t do nothing wrong!”

  “Yes, I’m afraid you did,” Taiesha told her. She glanced at Rishwain, who still hadn’t figured it out, and said, “You know what the law says about having kids?”

  Mama shrugged, her dark eyes bright with tears.

  “You can only have one, if you clone yourself. Two, if you have them the natural way. You can pass on a hundred percent of your own genome, or you’re allowed to give half of your genes to each of your natural children. Do you understand that?”

  “I… no. No, I don’t. Having children is what mothers do!”

  Probably Catholic, Taiesha thought. They’d fought the Pop Control laws tooth and nail. So had the Mormons, and Muslims, and practically everyone else. But the root of the problem is too many people, and Third Rise is coming. If we blow it, Third Rise will kill us all.

  “You can only have two kids,” Taiesha insisted. “Any more than that aren’t citizens, or even legally persons. They can’t go to a public school. They can’t go to a doctor. And if something happens to them, they’re not protected by the law.”

  To one side, Hebert nodded. Then Rishwain sat up and said, “Fuck!”

  Moreland’s gaze bounced back and forth like a ping-pong ball.

  Taiesha licked cotton dry lips, hating all of this. She told the woman, “I took DNA samples on all three of you, and we also have one from the body of your son, Ramon. You had three children, didn’t you?”

  Now Moreland got it, but still didn’t understand what it meant.

  “NO!” Mama cried. “I have two sons. That’s all. Lupe, she is my niece. My sister’s child.”

  “No, she’s not.” Taiesha pointed at Mama. “She’s your daughter. You may have taught her to call you Aunt Trina, but she’s yours. The DNA proves it.”

  “But…”

  “Hey.” That was Moreland. “What’s this all about? What do I care if she has two kids or three?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Taiesha told him. “Sit tight.”

  Then she turned to the judge. “Only two of her kids can be legal. But she’s still within the grace period, due to her refugee status. So she can simply go ahead and register two of them right now.”

  “I can?” said Mama. She wrapped her arms around the girl, who wriggled in protest. The boy swallowed hard but sat tight.

  “Yes, you can,” Taiesha said, “but only those two will come under the law’s umbrella. So if you decided to register both of your sons, then we can prosecute Mr. Moreland for killing Ramon. But your daughter’s illegal. And if Mr. Moreland decided to shoot her too, well, we couldn’t do a damn thing to him.”

  That gave the mayor a happy thought, so much so that she longed to kick the man. Not in the shins, either.

  Dame Izquierdo looked like she might fall through the floor. “Is that true?” she demanded, staring at Hebert.

  “It is,” His Honor assured her. “I’m sorry to say so, but Ms. Daniels has it right.”

  “If, on the other hand,” Taiesha went on, “you register your two surviving kids, then it’s Ramon who’s illegal. We wouldn’t be able to try Mr. Moreland for shooting him. But if he were to do any harm to these children, then he’d have to face the full force of the law.”

  “We could hang him,” said Rishwain. He sounded almost as unhappy as Taiesha felt, and she suffered a twinge of guilt as he shot a hard glance her way. I should have given the man a heads-up, she thought.

  “But… I don’t know what to do,”
Mama cried to the judge. “Tell me, what do I do? ¡Dios! Do I have no right to justice for my boy? That man killed him!”

  “Sure did,” said Moreland, enjoying himself.

  Mama snarled at him. “He didn’t break into nothing. And he didn’t steal nothing. He was just there hunting rats! For our supper. Your warehouse got plenty of rats. What you kill him for, you stinking bastard?” Then, spouting Spanish invective, she leaped at him. So did the boy, and it took all of them and a couple of bailiffs to pull them apart while Taiesha snatched the girl out of the line of fire. Finally, Mama subsided, but only because of Jerome, who now stood right in back of her chair and kept one of his oversize hands on her shoulder. The boy had retreated into the corner already occupied by MacClure, and stayed there, so everyone left him alone.

  Moreland’s face was bleeding where Mama had scratched him, but Taiesha made no move toward getting that treated. She rather hoped he’d get a flesh-eating infection and die of it.

  Releasing the girl to her mother, she told the woman as gently as possible, “You have to make a decision, and you have to make it right now. You can either get justice for the son you’ve lost, or protect the two kids you have left.”

  In the end, there was really no question. What else could any mother do but try to protect her living children?

  Moreland, of course, was a total asshole about the whole thing. He laughed at the poor woman and the two kids in between his insistent demands that they take off his shackles and cut him loose. When Jerome finally did so, the mayor promptly spun about. Seizing Taiesha, he whirled her around in a dizzying circle and damn nearly took out the judge with her feet.

  “That will be quite enough!” Hebert bellowed, backed up by Jerome.

  Moreland set her back down again, quite unrepentant. He told Taiesha, “Y’know, you’re a hell of a lawyer! I tell you what! We’re gonna throw us a party tonight. Gonna celebrate, big time! You’re invited, too. Whaddya say?”

  Taiesha wanted to hurl her breakfast into his face, but restrained herself, saying only, “We’ll see.”