Montezuma Strip (16 page)

Despite his presence and good looks it was his companion who immediately drew Cardenas’s attention, and not just because a
woman’s signature had been appended to his summons. She was slightly taller than he but in no way statuesque, voluptuous without
being overpowering. Her visage was dominated by a sharp-bridged, angular nose that might have been lifted from a classic Greek
amphora. Dark hair tumbled around her in tight ringlets, framing her beautiful face. Cosmetic artisans had been at work there,
but only to enhance what nature had given, not to replace or rebuild. She held a tall frosted glass in both hands and wore
a rather severe V-necked dress of floating niobium lamé. She was perhaps twenty years older than her male companion and didn’t
look half it.

“I appreciate your coming to see me, Sergeant.” Her voice was like the river beyond the glass, he thought. Steady, eternal,
commanding, deceptively gentle at the edges. “Would you like something to drink?”

“No thanks,” he told her. “You said you might have some information for me, Ms. Okolona?”

She seemed to hesitate, a gesture as much studied as genuine, as she glanced briefly over at her companion, who had taken
a seat on a sand-colored couch large enough to hold seven people.

“Ramón convinced me I should talk to somebody.”

Cardenas regarded the man, then the woman, and wondered why she should find the subterfuge necessary. From everything he had
been told and had observed thus far, Sisu Sana Okolona was one of those entirely confident individuals who did not require
approval of their actions from other human beings. He said nothing.

She began to pace. More for effect, he suspected, than from nervous need. “First it was that pet store owner. Of course, what
he was doing was illegal, but he didn’t deserve to be
murdered for it. Now that other man, Banquero, that was different.” Her expression twisted. “By all accounts he was a subhuman
parasite, living off people as much as animals. But two other people got killed besides him, and a lot of others hurt.” She
halted, regarding him with violet eyes the color of fine amethyst. “I don’t want anyone else hurt and blaming me for it.”

Cardenas’s brows rose. “You?”

“Didn’t they tell you about me at your station?”

“I know that you’re the president of Neurologic. I recognized the name Okolona.”

She smiled thinly. “My late husband and I. We founded the company when no one believed in it. Throwing our lives and abilities
away on obsolete technology, everyone told us. We built Neurologic up from nothing, Sergeant, with our hands and brains and
little else. No technology is obsolete. Only applications. Well, we discovered and developed some new applications. One of
which was the magifying controller and concomitant software.”

“Ah,” said Cardenas, understanding now.

“Of course when Norris and I were working on the process the magimal concept wasn’t even a glimmer in our imagination. The
neuromuscular stimulation technology that we were interested in was originally developed to enable paralyzed individuals to
move their limbs by sending stimulating electrical impulses directly to the requisite muscles by means of ultrathin wires.
Originally these were taped to the epidermis. Later they were inserted beneath the skin, for cosmetic purposes.

“But when we started working with the technology the biosurges were just learning how to regenerate damaged nerve tissue.
That rendered electrical stimulation technology unnecessary and extraneous. Nevertheless my husband and I continued to work
with it. We found other uses for the technology, not only in medical rehabilitation but in research. The magimal concept came
about, as so many great commercial developments often do, by accident.

“We oppose the magifying of any exotic animals or dan-specs. The idea originally was and still is to provide children with
better pets. Puppies that can talk. Birds that can help out around the house. Pit bulls into which fail-safes can be installed.
Steeplechasing horses that no longer have to be destroyed because their riders can better help them avoid obstacles. Guard
dogs that cannot only run down criminals but read them their rights and frisk them at no risk to the arresting officer. The
magimal concept has been a great success.”

“So in addition to regretting the fact that magified animals were involved in the deaths of these people you’re also concerned
about the possibility of adverse publicity,” Cardenas observed succinctly.

She responded with a radiant smile, but it was a cold, controlled radiance of the sort to be found in fireflies and certain
effulgent denizens of the deep ocean. “I know that you would not have been sent all the way from Nogales if you were not an
unusually perceptive and sensitive practitioner of your profession, Sergeant. I see that additional explication would in your
case be superficial.”

“My concern is for the dead and injured,” he told her, pointedly omitting any reference to a desire to spare the Neurologic
corporation bad publicity, “and in keeping this from happening again. That’s why I’m here. You said you might have some information
that would be of use to me. I won’t deny that I could use some help.

“We think that some ninlocos may be involved, though for the life of me I don’t know why. There’s no motive for them. But
an eyewitness put three at the scene of the first incident, and several survivors of the abortive
pelea de gallos
gave descriptions of a girl similar to the one seen at the first murder site.”

Sisu Okolona paused again, and this time her hesitation struck Cardenas as genuine. She glanced at her companion, who smiled
and shrugged. Then she turned back to her patient visitor.

“Neurologic tries to track sales of our equipment, to prevent just the sort of illegal activities that the unfortunate pet
shop owner was engaged in. We’re not in the investigative business and we’re not perfect. We’re just concerned about quality
and, I admit it, publicity. Components are marked, but as I’m sure you know better than I there’s a vast underground market
for all sorts of componentry.” She walked to a table and opened a drawer, extracting a piece of paper.

“A young woman of interest to us is suspected of frequenting this address. Not being the police, we’ve had no reason to interfere
with her movements or activities. But she is one of a number of suspicious people we do try to monitor. You see, Sergeant,
we try to stay one step ahead of the kind of people who have recently been killed. Obviously we are not always successful.
You might pay this young person a visit and ask some of your questions. You might get an answer or two.”

Cardenas took the paper, glanced at the address. “This would be here in Yumarado.”

Okolona nodded once. “In the deep industrial district, I believe. Where once at high summer midday the temperature was reported
to have hit fifty-six Celsius. Not a pleasant place. I would not like to go there.”

“I don’t mind the heat,” Cardenas told her. “Although as I get older I seem to have less tolerance. For it, and for other
things.”

A real smile this time. “You’re not at all that old, Sergeant.” It vanished quickly. “Be careful if you follow up on this.
My people tell me that even though these individuals are little more than children, they can still be dangerous.”

Cardenas put the paper in his shirt pocket. “I’ve taken down important criminals and real locos, Ms. Okolona, but the boy
who blew my face away years ago was just nineteen. It doesn’t take experience or strength to pull the trigger of a spitter.”

“Are you sure you won’t have that drink?”

“Gracias,
but no. I guess I’m a glutton for work.”

“Now that,” she volunteered in kindly fashion, “will kill you far quicker than the heat.”

The address consisted more of directions than numbers, and he had to abandon the police cruiser outside the first alley. The
narrow gap that separated two
maquiladora
plants was frantic with people, lower-grade assemblers and toters rushing to beat deadlines and the heat. He’d waited until
evening, not only because it was cooler but because he sensed he’d have a better chance of making the acquaintance of the
contact at night. Ninlocos tended to sleep as much as possible during the hot day and emerge in the comparative cool of darkness,
like any other sensible troglodytes.

Many of the
maquiladora
factories operated twin ten-hour shifts with four off in-between for maintenance and cleaning. With a surplus of labor drawn
from CenAm, S.A., and the Mexican states they could set their own hours and standards and many did. Labor inspectors sometimes
got paid to wink at substandard practices, but most of the big companies had to toe the line lest they risk a shutdown because
of violations. They maintained government standards, not out of altruism but because it was cheaper than having their lines
halted even temporarily. But the smaller plants, the independent operations… Cardenas had over the years observed conditions
in some of them that bordered on the inhuman. They were able to stay in business because there was always a surplus of labor,
millions begging for the low-paying, dangerous work. Anything was better than trying to eke out a living tilling a few acres
of corn with a mule, or potatoes in the Andes.

As night rode roughshod over fading evening the day shift made way for their replacements, workers moving both ways jamming
the warren of access alleys around the plants until the last of the daytime personnel had escaped to the worker’s
warrens south of the Strip and their nocturnal counterparts were online. There were still people in the alleys and streets,
but not nearly so many now, nor all so gainfully occupied. In addition to the massive factories there were cafes and tiny
service markets, outlet stores and discount marts that identified themselves by means of drifting holagel adverts and ambient
neonics. They clung to the flanks of the plants like whale lice to favored cetaceans.

Cardenas’s clothes worked overtime to cool him down, but along the Colorado with its combination of desert inferno and river
humidity there was no choice but to sweat.

The combination of directions and numbers led him to a workers’ hostel. Only the poorest of the poor, the true bottom-end
laborers lived here, in the bowels of the city, because they couldn’t afford to get out, couldn’t afford the price even of
a shuttle commute. There was no live desk clerk; only an automonitor that demanded his room card and had to be satisfied instead
with his police identification.

Following directions he rode the elevator to the top floor and exited into a hall that reeked of neglect and stale urine.
Someone had managed to etch obscenities into one supposedly graffiti-resistant wall with a cutting laser or similar tool.
There was barely enough light to illuminate the hall and its featureless flush-set doors, the chemoluminescent strip tacked
to the ceiling weak and long overdue for replacement.

The old aural stripping around the doors leaked and he could hear sounds from within each apartment as he passed it: children
crying, men and women arguing vociferously, TVs blaring. He went to the end of the hall. There was a window, a single fixed
pane of transparent plastic. The building’s air-conditioning huffed reluctantly. On this top floor it was stifling hot. The
lower levels, he knew, wouldn’t be much better.

He drew his gun, made sure the tracer sewn into his suit was activated, and thumbed the callthrough. A tinny male voice barked
back at him.

“Yeah?”

“Police, open up. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

There was a pause. Cardenas’s fingers tightened on his weapon. He didn’t like this place, didn’t like the delay. Much as he
preferred to work alone, maybe he ought to have requisitioned backup for this one. But his tracer was on, and the room’s occupants
had no way of knowing he was by himself.

“Sure, homber. Come on in.” Cardenas heard the door seal unsnick.

He found himself in a single room, somewhat larger than what he’d expected. There were two beds, rumpled and used, the cooling
thermosheets stained beyond hope of color recovery. An ancient chair squatted beneath a window that was a match to the one
in the hall. It offered the same dismal view of alley and buildings. Cotton stuffing bulged from various holes in the upholstery
like bloodless entrails.

The walls of the room were an incongruous, immutable pale pink splattered with faded images of butterflies. The choice of
scheme was ironic. The dirty, polluted chunk of industrial Namerica that smothered the lowermost Colorado hadn’t played host
to a real butterfly in a hundred years.

Both boys looked to be in their late teens. One was tall, healthy-looking, dark-skinned. The other had ear-length stringy
blond hair and a stunned expression, as though he wandered through life under perpetual sedation. From the look of his bones
and eyes his condition wasn’t entirely due to drugs though. Cardenas saw that he suffered from congenital mental numbness.

The tall black kid nodded toward the pistol. “You just want to
habla,
frion, why the punch?”

“Regulations.” Neither boy was armed nor was there anything lethal visible in the room. Cardenas dropped his arm, letting
the gun hang at his side, where they could see that it was still activated. He took in his surroundings. Maybe drugs for sale
if not for use, but that wasn’t what he was here for.

“You guys know anything about some illegal magimals been involved in a couple of incidents recently?”

The tall boy laughed, his companion chiming in with a
rasping giggle.
“Seguro,
frion. Sure. We monitor the news every day.”

“We don’t know
nada,
man,” added his equally hostile companion. “Anything else you wanna know?”

The combination of ignorance and pugnacious disdain might’ve been enough to put off a regular federale, but not Cardenas.
There were too many pregnant syllables in the boys’ phrasing, too many subtle, disquieting, revelatory shifts in their posture.
He intuited that they were hiding something, that they knew more than the nothing they were saying. Staying alert, he strolled
over to the far bed, eyed the door beyond.