Ex-Kop (10 page)

“Before you c—came this afternoon.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that he'd k—kill me if I didn't get … you to do what he … says. He said I couldn't … get away.” She smiled. “He's r—right about that.”

I didn't find it funny. “Did he … ?” I pointed at the air hose.

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Why d—do you think?”

I knew why, but I couldn't bring myself to believe she'd go that far even though the facts were staring me in the face: she wanted to die. She couldn't do it herself. She wanted me to defy Ian so he'd come and make good on his promise. She let me think there was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about. I'd sat across the table from him, asking for money, not knowing he'd been here, in this room, with that tube pinched between his fingers. …

My insides were boiling. My hand was fucking gyrating. I shook the bed's railing, wanting to rip it off and slam it to the floor. “How could you do that to me!”

Niki's eyes targeted mine. She spat furious words that got mangled by the pump. I drowned out her garbles with shouts of my own. Curses flew out of my mouth like angry bees from a shaken hive. A nurse popped her concerned head through the door. I sprayed a few curses in her direction, and she went running for help.

Niki gave up trying to speak. She stared at the ceiling, feigning boredom. I shook the bed until I got her attention and launched into a fresh tirade, the words coming out of my mouth so fast that I had no idea what I was even saying.

Finally spent, I dropped into a chair and wiped sweat from my brow. The nurse was back with help. “It's okay,” I told them. “I'm done.”

Not taking my word for it, she asked Niki if everything was all right.

She said, “Yes.” Then, after they reluctantly left, she said to
me, “You know … I was going … to ask you the … same question.”

“What's that?”

“How can you d—do this to me?”

I left the hospital when Vlad showed. I posted the former cop outside Niki's door, fronting him enough money to negate a fourth of my recent profits.

I walked out saying, “See what you've done, Niki. You've really fucked things up.” The door closed behind me, shutting me off from her plug-pulling pleadings. Things would be different when she got her spine. She'd see I was right.

The rains were back. The city lights illuminated the long raindrops as they emerged from the darkened sky. I ducked into an all-night café and ordered up some eggs.

There was a vid screen hanging over the counter. The news was running a pic of the deceased Officer Ramos. He was a regular-looking guy. A real Everyman. Brown hair, brown eyes, and bronze skin. I recognized him now. He wasn't anybody I knew, but his face was probably one that I'd walked past a hundred times in the halls of KOP station. The gene eaters had really done a job on him. The gray pumpkin head I'd seen on the barge bore absolutely no resemblance to the smiling face on the screen. I read the scrolling headline, “Cop Crushed by Corroded Crane.” Not a bad lie. It sounded plausible. Shit was always falling off those barges, and this way they wouldn't have to show anybody his gene-eaten corpse. They could just say he got pancaked beyond recognition. The press would drop it in a day or two, and the KOP brass wouldn't have to admit their ineptitude in failing to catch an offworld serial killer with a baker's dozen to his name.

I spiked the coffee with a splash from my flask, trying to soothe away that sick feeling I'd had in my gut ever since Niki's “accident.”
I thought of her watching Ian pinch off her air. My first instinct told me I should kill Ian. Eliminate the threat. What held me back was the knowledge that Ian was part of something bigger. I'd seen all those cops at Roby's last night. Some of them were the same ones that had joined in with Ian on that beatdown he laid on that sap cameraman. Ian was part of a cop clique, likely the leader. You couldn't take on one without taking on them all. I knew that better than anyone. I ran the biggest, baddest cop clique in KOP history for chrissakes.

I thought about the deal I'd made with Ian. The good news was Ian thought I actually wanted to be rid of Niki. If she only knew how that one backfired on her. She'd only made herself safer. If I'd known that he'd threatened her, I never would've asked for payment. As it was, Ian thought he had nothing to gain by killing her, and I'd be doing my best to keep him thinking exactly that. Things were going to get ugly. I had no illusions about getting involved with Ian. I knew Ian's type. Shit, I'd
been
his type. Once you got in with him, there was no getting out.

The eggs arrived, and I forced myself to choke them down despite the rebellion put up by my stomach.

I looked out the window. The sky was starting to brighten with the dawn. I could see the hospital from here. How could she do that to me? Maybe I shouldn't have saved her when she took her swan dive. Maybe I should've just let her die. That was what she wanted. That was what she told anybody who would listen. She had the shrinks convinced. Three separate ones came to me, each of them telling me she had the right to refuse medical treatment. It took all my powers of persuasion to bring them around to my way of thinking, a little cash flashing here, a little knuckle cracking there. It was hard enough getting her medical needs met; I didn't need a legal battle, too.

But why did she have to fight me like that? If that was the
way she was going to be, maybe I should just give Niki her wish, let them yank the plug and wash my hands of it altogether.

My eggs wanted to come back up. I sucked some coffee down hoping it might settle my stomach. Stop thinking like that, I told myself. I couldn't let them pull the plug. I couldn't lose her. This was Niki we were talking about. There was still hope for us. I was certain of it. Broken and battered as the two of us were, I knew we still had a future. We were meant to be together.

And there was no fucking way in hell I was going to let some punk wannabe enforcer take her from me.

I called Maggie, told her we needed to meet.

T
HE
smell of acid burned my nose. I moved around to the upwind side of the fountain and watched the small team of city workers scrub the upper reaches of the statue from precarious scaffolds surrounding the four intertwined iguanas. The iguanas were sculpted to look like they'd climbed each other's bodies until the whole lot of them had lifted themselves off the ground. They were held up by their tails, which braided down and disappeared under a pool of black water at the fountain's base. The top halves of their bodies were stripped down to bare stone as the city workers had already scoured away the layers of molds and mosses. Their lower halves were still coated with furry growth that looked like wooly pants.

I saw Maggie approach from the far side of the fountain sporting designer duds and rain-speckled hair. The knot in my stomach started twisting at the thought of having to fess up.

“My god, what happened?” were the first words that came out of her mouth when she spotted my mummified hand.

“Did you get yourself scanned?”

“I'm clean.”

“Good.”

I had to be sure I wasn't bugged, so I'd gone down to an offworld tech shop to get myself checked out, and came up bug free. It made me sick how much money the scan cost. If I had to keep spending like this, I'd have no chance of making my next payment. After breakfast, I'd called up to the Orbital and
asked what would happen if I missed a payment. They said that they'd keep the spine tanked for as long as it took for me to pay in full; only then would the bastards ship it down to the surface. I argued for half an hour, trying to convince them that they should ship the spine as soon as implantation was medically possible, but they held firm, telling me that their policy was to keep possession of all parts until receiving payment in full. The best they could do was to waive the additional daily tank storage fees until I paid up. The possibility of Niki lying there while there was a perfectly good spine ready for implantation made me sick. She deserved better than that. I
had
to make those payments.

“Did you break something?” she asked.

“Actually, it was Ian that did the breaking. He found out about me meeting the girl. He and Hoshi met me outside the Zoo.”

Maggie's face turned angry. “How did he know?”

“One of the guards at the Zoo called him, one of his old buddies.” It had been a long time since Ian had worked at the Zoo, but he obviously still had at least one supersized contact there. I could just picture Ian talking to the guard: “Anybody comes to see the girl, you call me right away. Got it,
boy-o
?”

“Oh damn,” she said. “I'm sorry, Juno. I should've warned you that he used to work there.”

“Don't worry about it. I knew he used to be a guard, too. His father used to brag about it all the time. But that was years ago. Neither of us had any reason to believe that he'd be tracking visitors.”

Maggie nodded, her face tight.

This would be the tough part. I just had to spit it out. “I lied to you, Maggie, about Adela.”

“What about her?”

“I didn't get a confession out of her. In fact, she was quite insistent that she didn't do it.”

Maggie brushed it off. “That's okay, Juno. I understand.” And then she looked at my hand.

I wasn't going to let myself get off that easy. “It's not that. I didn't lie because Ian broke a couple fingers. I …” I struggled to find the right way to say it. “I needed the money. I thought if I just told you that the girl confessed, I could get you to pay up fast.”

Maggie dismissed the whole thing, “Money doesn't mean anything.”

Only a rich person would say something like that. I was getting frustrated at how painless she was making this. I'd been ready to spill to her about Niki, about how I couldn't afford the payments, about how desperate I was to get her out of the hospital. I needed to make Maggie understand why I'd lied to her. I
needed
to tell her. Yet I stood there, in the drizzle, unable to find words, her quick forgiveness catching me totally off guard.

Maggie took my good hand in hers. “I understand, Juno. It's okay.”

“But—”

“I understand,” she repeated.

I blinked rainwater out of my eyes and began to see that she understood far more than I'd thought. She'd probably already guessed that I'd lied about the girl, maybe picking up something in my voice when I'd tried to bullshit her. She was making it clear that she didn't care. She knew about Niki's accident and knew the kind of financial pinch I was in. She wasn't going to make me debase myself by saying it.

I squeezed her hands back. “Thanks, Maggie.”

“Now, is there anything else?”

I filled her in on my late-night rendezvous with Ian, telling her first about Liz and the offworlder, and then about how Ian threatened Niki's life, and finally the deal he offered. I left out the part about Niki not telling me.

Maggie listened to the whole story without saying a word until I was done. “So where do we go from here?”

“I don't think it's wise to kill him until we know more about the rest of his cop clique and what it is they're into.”

“Christ, Juno.” She was shaking her head. “We're not going to kill him. Killing him won't give us the evidence we need to exonerate Adela Juarez. She's going to die if we don't get evidence that'll free her. Besides, killing isn't what you're about anymore.”

I didn't think I was “about” anything. But whatever it was that I was “about” I was pretty sure it didn't live up to Maggie's image of me. Ever since we'd worked the Vlotsky murder together, she'd gotten the notion that I'd turned a new leaf. I liked to think she was right. That I was still capable of good deeds and selfless acts. And when it came to that one case, maybe I
had
done some good.

“We have a chance to do something important here,” said Maggie. “If we do this right, we can save an innocent girl and get some dirty cops out of KOP.”

I nodded my head even though I wasn't so sure about Adela being innocent. I couldn't shake the first impression I'd had of her as I'd watched the interrogation vid. There was no way I could've misread her eyes. I'd spent most of my adult life looking into those same eyes. In my mind, Adela was still the one with the lase-whip in her hand.

“We together on this?” Maggie asked, her jaw set, her eyes fixed.

She had such purpose for someone so young, such drive. It was hard to understand where it came from, this unyielding determination to clean up KOP. I suspected it had something to do with her father's murder. I'd have to ask her one day, but not today. Today, I let her strength soak into me, my spine firming, the knot in my stomach uncoiling.

“We're together one hundred percent,” I said. “It's you and me against the world.”

Maggie walked in after a short stint at the office.

“Did you place it?”

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “I pretended to shoo a fly off his head and dropped it in his hair.”

“Good. Let's see what we're getting.”

I made short one-handed work of setting up the recording equipment on the hotel bed. I'd spent the afternoon avoiding the hospital by getting the stakeout ready, picking a room in a high-rise but low-profile hotel, sneaking up to the roof and finding a primo spot for the receiver, placing it behind the aircon vents. You couldn't see it from the stairs, but it still had good line of sight to a relay tower. The reception would be good even in the rain. I checked to make sure that the unit was receiving a signal, then aimed the projection unit at the wall and flicked it on. The wall lit up with a view of the street that bobbed with Ian's footfalls. I found the volume control and turned it up just as Ian entered a shoe store.