Ex-Kop (26 page)

“Michelle Davies.”

“Davies?”

“That's right. She's Ian's sister.”

If I wasn't sitting, I would've fallen over. As it was, I found my good hand grabbing hold of my seat like I was about to fall into the drink.

The rain was drumming as Maggie and I stepped off the boat and down to the dock, now almost underwater. Another week of rain and it would have to be abandoned for a higher one. With the help of a rope handrail, we climbed the muddy riverbank steps up to the Orzo estate. I'd woken Maggie up and shared the news as soon as I'd hung up with Abdul. We talked about the incestuous Davies family the rest of the way. Ian and Liz, brother and sister. We remembered how he bought her shoes, how he caressed her feet, her calves, his
sister's
calves …

Or how about when they kissed in the window, Ian popping a brotherly boner? The whole discussion was beyond disturbing, but to me, it was a relief, a relief from thinking about what I was about to do.

We jogged over to the closest hut, and once under the cover of the thatch overhang, we stripped off our shoes and racked
them upside down to keep them spider free. We followed the wood platforms from hut to hut, covering a kilometer or more, finally arriving at Niki's room. Vlad heard us coming and sat up straight in his chair. Maggie waited outside while I went in and woke up the nurse.

“What are … you doing here?” asked Niki.

I waited for the nurse to leave before saying, “I talked to Abdul.”

“Dammit. I t—told him not to. …”

I interrupted her. “Stop. It's okay, Niki. We talked and …”

Her eyes took on a look of hope.

“He told me that … that …” I found myself unable to voice my feelings, which were shifting far too fast for me to even identify. “I know that you …” I pinched my lips shut, frustrated by my inability to express myself. Rather than launching into another false start, I decided to just cut to the chase. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

Her eyes melted with relief and gratitude. “Yes.”

I pulled up the mosquito netting and kissed her cheek. She looked so different. Her body had withered down to her bones. Her skin had yellowed from the cinnamon color I remembered so well. Strands of what had always been raven-colored hair were growing in gray at the roots.

She smiled at me. Her smile still looked the same. She asked, “What do you s—say we take that tour … first?”

I pulled Niki out of her chair and set her into a hammock, and then I scrunched in next to her, cradling her head. The respirator was pumping its regular beat, but it was only a matter of time before it petered out. I'd already turned off the generator, leaving us about two hours of battery life.

We'd seen the entire place. Maggie pulled a pair of laborers off the bottling assembly line and told them to help me with
Niki's wheelchair and not-so-portable respirator. We started with the distillery and moved on to the cask cellar and then the tasting room. When the rain slowed to a drizzle, we carried more than wheeled Niki through the brandy tree orchards, where wet leaves sparkled whenever the morning sun peeked out from the clouds.

Lastly, we carried Niki up a series of scaffoldlike staircases that led up into the jungle canopy where there were a set of platforms interconnected by suspension bridges. We navigated from platform to platform until we settled on the largest. The platform looked like it was used for hosting parties. There was a bar, tables, a stage with a dance floor. When I'd asked her if she was ready to go back to her room, she said we should do it here.

We didn't talk. There was nothing to say. Now that the generator had been turned off, the sounds of the jungle were allowed to come through in peeping, buzzing, croaking, and warbling harmony.

What the hell was I doing? Just yesterday, I was dead set against this. Yet, here I was. I had no idea if this was the right thing, but it felt right, and that would have to be good enough. I held onto my wife. I held on tight, knowing our time was short, knowing how much of it I'd wasted with my working and my boozing. We were supposed to grow old together. There was always going to be plenty of time to make it up to her.

I lost all sense of time, lying there with Niki. Only the metronomic pumping of the respirator marked the passage of time, until even it finally stopped. Niki didn't stir when it happened. I couldn't say exactly when she passed, but I held on to her the whole time, wanting to stay with her forever. I took solace in the jungle, feeling a part of it and a little less alone. I still didn't want to leave, even as her skin began to cool.

“J
UNO.
We're almost there.”

I opened my eyes. Maggie and I were still on the boat. I sat up and could see that we were back in Koba, riding alongside Floodbank. It was almost dark already. I'd slept the whole way. The first really good sleep I'd had in a long, long time. Then just when I was beginning to feel pretty good, the memories came crashing in. Was that even real? The jungle? The orchards? The sprawling tree house? It was real, I told myself.
She's gone.
But it all happened so fast. It couldn't be …

The young girl was already standing on the bow as we nudged closer and closer to Floodbank, the floating city within a city. The boat captain throttled the engine down to the point of almost idling, and then he swung the rudder ninety degrees, aiming the boat straight into Floodbank. We entered between a pair of floating restaurants and suddenly found ourselves in a knotted tangle of fishing boats and skiffs. The young girl used a splinter-ended pole to push off the other hulls while the motor plowed forward with a steady crawl until we eventually broke through the jam.

We angled into a narrow channel, barely wide enough for our boat, which was of the bulky fishing variety. We followed the meandering waterway around so many bends that I lost all sense of direction. We passed under arched bridges and weaved around dozens of fruit stands. The channel gradually tapered the deeper we penetrated into Floodbank. The young girl was
now using her pole to keep us from bumping the channel walls, which were actually homes that we could see into. Hawkers came out from inside and leaned out over the water, tipping wood poles in close enough for us to reach, one with bags of nuts tied to the end, another with fruit, and yet another with cigarettes. Another hawker jumped onboard carrying a tray loaded down with “soda in a bag.” The baggies were filled with cherry soda and then sealed up with rubber bands anchored around straws that poked out the tops. The boat captain bought one for himself and another for his daughter before the hawker jumped back off.

None of it felt real. It all felt dead to me, like the whole planet was dead, and I was the only person left. Or maybe it was me who was dead, and I was some kind of ghost that could move around and see the world but couldn't interact with it. Try to pick something up and my hand would just pass through. Try to talk and nobody would hear me. My theory proved false when I succeeded in buying up a bottle of supercheap hooch from a kid with a lazy eye.

When the channel became too narrow to proceed any farther, the pilot slapped the motor into reverse. Maggie and I would have to walk from here. I slipped a few bills to the captain, and remembering I didn't have a partially developed spine hanging over my head anymore, I passed another bill to the daughter.

Maggie stopped me once we'd stepped up onto the walkway. “Are you sure you're ready for this, Juno?”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded muffled, like my head was stuffed with cotton balls and my ears were filled with water.

Maggie and I hoofed along the floating walkway, which creaked with the river's gentle rocking. Floating buildings rubbed against one another with the sound of scraping wood. Ropes—all kinds of them—were all that held this place together.
Thin and thick, twines and tug ropes, they were all that kept Floodbank from pulling apart and floating downriver. There were ropes all around us, running every which way like the threads of a drunken spider's web.

We crossed a plank bridge that bowed under our weight and stepped in through the beaded curtain that substituted for a door. The one-room home was triangle shaped, custom-built for this particular gap in Floodbank. The man we'd come to see was eating a sandwich, looking at me with a surprised expression. “Juno?” he said.

“That's right, Ian. Long time no see.”

Ian Davies, Sr., put his sandwich down. “What brings you here?”

Maggie and I took seats at his table. “This is Maggie,” I said. “She's your kid's partner.”

“So?”

“Have you talked to him recently?”

“No. I ain't seen him in a long time. He's an ungrateful punk.” He pulled the top slice of bread off his half-eaten sandwich and tossed it through the back door where it skidded off the plank deck and down into the water. “I heard you retired, Juno.”

“Something like that.”

He picked the meat off what was left of his sandwich and tossed the other slice of bread. “You gonna tell me why you're here?”

“What? Can't a couple ol' retirees get together and have a chat about the old days?” I held up the bottle I'd bought.

He rolled up the lunch meat and took a bite. “Not today. I'm kind of busy.”

I didn't let his sourpuss act dissuade me. I knew this guy—you get a couple drinks in him, and you can't shut him up. “Now you're being rude, Ian. You got any glasses?”

He took another bite of his lunch-meat cigar. “No.”

Maggie reached behind her and pulled the cupboard open. She pulled out three dusty glasses and set them on the table. He had his arms crossed.

“Now don't be like that, Ian. We're just going to have some drinks, okay?” I took my time cleaning the glasses with my shirttail. Maggie poured the glasses half full, and I raised mine with my left. “To old times.” I stayed in that pose, with my glass held high, for what must've been thirty seconds, waiting for a reluctant Ian to clink glasses.

Maggie stopped after one, but Ian and I were into our fourth when he started to loosen up. I smiled and laughed at all the right times while he yapped about the time he busted that pimp, how he had the pimp down, and he was about to cuff him when one of the guy's bitches came screaming in, buck naked, and started trying to pull Ian off her guy. He managed to snap the cuffs on the pimp, and then he wrestled her down, and since he didn't have another pair of cuffs, he had to restrain her until backup arrived. They came storming in, and there he was, lying on top of this bitch, and she's bucking like a fucking horse. …

He kept prattling on with that big mouth of his. Telling us about the time he stopped an armed robbery when he was off duty. He was just going to the store to pick up some booze, and there was this punk, you know the type, with the fresh tats and the hotshot attitude. And he could tell right away that the punk was up to no good. The punk was all jumpy and shit. Ian, Sr., played it cool; he acted all nonchalant and waited for the punk to make his move, and then he jumped the little bastard and took his lase-pistol. That was when the kid went after the owner with a blade, and Ian had to shoot him.

I remembered that incident. It was a long time ago, but the way I heard it, the kid was hopped up on stims when he tried
to knock over the liquor store. Ian jumped out from one of the aisles and screamed at the kid to freeze, knocking over a whole rack of bottles in the process. The kid reflexively jumped away from the spray of shattering bottles, and Ian fried him in the back.

“You sure taught that punk a lesson,” I said.

“Damn straight I did.”

I kept tipping my glass to my mouth every so often, but I'd already stopped drinking. He kept rattling on, his tales getting taller and taller. He was talking mostly to Maggie now. Her face was a hell of a lot prettier than mine. I kept up the illusion that I was keeping up with him in the drinking department by emptying my glass through a hole in the floor, the cheap booze running down the side of an oil drum that served as a pontoon.

I kept the hooch flowing and soon enough Ian, Sr., was
180
proof. His exaggerated yarns were turning into paranoid rants. He was going off on some doctor now. “This bitch must think I'm stupid, trying to rip me off. She thinks I don't know how much a fucking pill costs? I ain't no damn pushover. She thinks those degrees on the wall give her a license to bend me over.”

Blah, blah, blah
… This was the way he'd always get at the bars. Always the victim of some imagined wrong, talking nonstop trash. I remembered how one night, he started off on some bullshit about a mechanic who jacked up the price on him and how he was going to go down there and teach him a lesson. “Let's go,” I'd told him. I wanted to see him teach this mechanic a lesson. That's when he told me to butt the fuck out or he'd have to take me to school. Had we been alone, I might've blown the comment off, but I couldn't let him get away with it when there were other cops around, watching. What kind of enforcer would let something like that pass? I gave him a good ass-kicking that night, and if need be, I was ready to do it again. “Hey, whatever happened to your wife?”