“This is my partner,” I said.
“No kiddin’.” Mike jerked his chin in greeting. “Ajax, right? I recognize you from the papers. What happened to your head?”
“Well, um . . .” Jax touched the bandage on his head, and sounded embarrassed. “A pair of dancers.”
“Ah, yeah.” Mike nodded sympathetically, hands resting on his belly. “Hit your head on the pole?”
Jax blinked, and I stepped in to salvage the conversation.
“Need a word,” I said. “A private word.”
“Fine. Reg! Watch the front.” He lifted the gate in the counter and let us into the back.
We filed after him into the back, where shelves brimmed with pawned items that hadn’t yet been forfeited or claimed. Each once was something that people had desired, maybe loved, now converted into collateral for short-term loans. The city’s faded dreams transformed to tomorrow’s treasures.
Big Mike guided us through a dented steel door into a cluttered office space. Mike claimed the room’s sole chair, while Jax and I hovered, trying not to topple the stacks of merchandise and paperwork.
He looked at me and rubbed his palms together. “Well?”
“Need a dupe made,” I said. “Rush job.”
Mike waggled webbed fingers. “I’m a little behind.”
“So charge a little more.” I figured Ajax would see it as an investment. Mike named a figure and Jax agreed without haggling. One more sign the kid hadn’t fully caught on to how things work in Titanshade.
“Badge number?”
Ajax hesitated. “It’s okay,” I said.
My partner shook his head. “Maybe I can get something off the shelf instead?”
“It won’t match your badge number.”
“I’m not going to keep it,” he said. “I won’t need it for more than a day.”
Mike shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He made the words seem more affable than indifferent.
“You got a TPD detective badge sitting around?” I asked.
He huffed, thinking, and I blinked against the sudden swampy odor. “Pretty sure I do.” He focused on Jax. “You want me to put out feelers, see if anyone’s trying to pawn a legit shield?”
Jax hummed a note of gratitude. “That’d be great.”
“Wait here.” Mike lifted himself out of the chair with a grunt. “I’ll go see what I can turn up.”
As he departed, I claimed Mike’s vacant seat for my own.
“Once we’re done here, we can tie up some loose ends on the Bobby Kearn case.”
“What loose ends?”
I pulled out the message from Murphy CaDell that had been waiting in my inbox. “Saul Petrevisch.”
Jax rubbed his bandage, probably trying to place the name. “The guy who supplied Sheena and Michael with snake oil?”
“You got it.”
“That’s not relevant to the murder. The fact that there was a drug buy is important. But where it came from?” He spread his hands. “Why stop there? Are you going to track it back to the driver who smuggled it into town?”
“Trust me, we need to do this.” I tapped Saul’s name on the message. “How many open cases do we have right now?”
He paused, doing a brief tally. “A half dozen, if you count the CaMachio double homicide as two cases.”
“A little on the light side, then. And we’re waiting for info or stalled on all of them.”
“So?”
“So we’ve got time.” I dropped my voice. “And you wanted me to tell you about any manna-related stuff, right? Well, this is a manna thing.”
He looked at me, silent and skeptical.
“We’ll just run out, see what Saul has to say for himself, and then we’ll look up this property management company and find your real badge. Deal?”
His eyes narrowed. “Fine. But I’m driving, and you’re talking.”
I spun Mike’s desk chair, swiveling around and watching the pawned dreams spin by. “Whatever you say.”
After Mike came back with a temporary detective’s badge for Jax, we piled back into the Hasam and made our way to the outer rings of Titanshade. Saul Petrevisch lived in Beggar’s Delight, a neighborhood near the Borderlands that skirted the edges of town. Here the thermal vents were sparser, resulting in colder temperatures. Less chance of nicking a thermal vent meant taller buildings, since crews could sink footers deeper in the ground, something they’d never be allowed to risk in more well-heated neighborhoods. Disrupting the flow of warmth that kept the city alive would be considered a personal affront to the entire population of Titanshade. In a city known for corruption, there were precious few things that could get a wealthy person thrown in jail; damaging the network of thermal vents that snaked beneath the city streets topped the list.
Traffic was slow, with several roads rerouted to account for the arrival of the Barekusu. Because the geo-vents appeared organically, buildings and blocks were constructed to take advantage of their presence. As a result, streets rarely followed anything resembling a consistent pattern. It was worse in the city center, but even in more leeward areas like Beggar’s Delight, streets wound unpredictably, narrowed and widened at random, and terminated in abrupt dead ends. Any amount of road work or detours resulted in traffic jams that took a degree in advanced mathematics and abstract geography to untangle.
We advanced a few car lengths, then came to another stop, this time in front of a television store. The front window displayed a wall of screens, all tuned to the same station. A dozen various-sized images of the same reporter bundled up against the cold, standing in the Borderlands, on the wide streets of Secor Boulevard, where the Barekusu caravan was expected to roll in.
Jax inched the car forward. Another bit of progress, as I stared out the window.
“Not getting that duplicate made,” he said. “Does that make me . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know, naive?”
“No, kid. It makes you principled.” I rubbed the underside of my chin, looking at my pale reflection in the window, and wondered at the flesh that had grown loose since the days I was young and idealistic like Ajax. “You do what you gotta do. There’s worse things in this world than sticking to your beliefs.” Beyond my faded reflection people shuffled past the wall of
