“You think the mayor had Lieutenant Vlotsky popped?”
“That, or he has a good reason for covering it up. Either way, I need you to connect him to it. I have to kill this corruption investigation. I’m getting desperate. You get me the goods on this one, and I’ll extort the mayor into laying off of KOP.”
“Why don’t you just kick that asshole Gilkyson out of your office?”
“Don’t you get it, Juno? I work for the mayor. He wants Gilkyson to follow me around. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Just give them what they want. Hand over a couple crooked cops, and they’ll leave you alone. You have a whole police force to choose from. Use it as a goddamned opportunity to clean house.”
Paul became visibly angry, very un-Paul. “You don’t think I tried that? Do you think I’m a fucking idiot? The mayor won’t take the deal; he wants me, Juno.”
I snagged a brandy from a passing waiter and tossed it down my throat. The alcohol quashed my rapid-fire nerves. “Why?”
“He wants control of KOP, and he knows he won’t get it as long as I’m here. He wants a fucking yes- man.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad. My informants in the mayor’s office say he’s getting ready to make a move on me.”
I rejected the notion. “He can’t touch you.”
“The mayor is flexing some serious muscle. He’s got cops on his payroll, and he’s got Chief of Detectives Diego fucking Banks working against me. He’s the mayor’s little lapdog, and he’s drooling all over himself, thinking about my job. He’s been sucking up to Mayor Samir so he’ll get appointed chief when I fall. I never should have let Samir get elected. I thought I could buy him off like the other mayors. I should have sabotaged his campaign the minute he started in on KOP. Now it may be too late. It’s only a matter of time before Gilkyson ties me to the Bandurs. Shit, we’ve been allied with the Bandur cartel for twenty-five years. We worked hard at covering our tracks, Juno, but we’ve been sanctioning criminal activity for over twenty-five years. You can’t tell me they won’t find something.”
“I can’t believe what you’re saying. Why haven’t you told me about this?”
“I couldn’t do that to you. You’ve been working so hard on getting your life under control. I wanted to keep you out of it.”
“But now you want me back in?”
“I don’t want to drag you into this, but listen to me, Juno. You’re the only one I can trust. Since Mayor Samir started in heavy on this corruption bullshit, I’ve been trying to take him down, but nothing’s worked. Even my extortion scheme fell through.”
I waved for another brandy. “What kind of extortion scheme?”
“I put some of my most loyal cops on it. They started checking into Mayor Samir’s personal life. Turns out the mayor’s daughter is a real slut. ‘Sounds promising,’ I thought. We catch some vids of her poking every guy she meets and threaten to go public with them, and the mayor will lay off. We’ve been tailing her for a month, and we’ve got squat. All the sudden, her legs lock together at the knees. It’s like she’s a fucking nun. Somebody in the inner circle’s a rat.”
I squeezed my glass. I was growing double angry-angry at a cop who was a rat and angry at myself for letting Paul down. Ferreting out rats used to be one of my specialties.
Paul said, “So then I figured that if I can’t trust my own men, I’ll give Sasaki a crack at it, but somebody keeps ratting his plans, too. You know Sasaki; he does his best to run a tight ship, but that fucking Bandur kid is fucking worthless. Ram was always too soft on him. He’s too worried about his looks to do anything productive. When I told him that he’s got a rat in his organization, he listened, then asked me how he’d look with a more pronounced chin. I wish his father was still alive. Shit, they’re so worried about the Simba cartel moving in that they don’t care about the mayor anyway.”
I tried to soak it all in. Mayor Samir was trying to take KOP away from Paul, and Paul thought the Vlotsky case was related. My stomach started to flop. I downed the brandy in my glass. The mayor was up on the bandstand now, dancing with his wife. They were hamming it up, twirling and dipping, taking full advantage of the photo op.
Paul asked, “What have you got so far on the case?”
Paul’s question took a minute to register. “We were going to look at an Army guy who has a record and a good motive. But I don’t see how that could be related to the mayor. Do you want me to drop it and focus on the mayor?”
“No. Work it like any other case. I need you to find out what happened in that alley. You work the case from the bottom up. I’ll work it from the mayor down. Hopefully we’ll meet in the middle.”
“Can you get me in to see this Army guy? His name’s Jhuko Kapasi. The military has him under wraps.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
The place went quiet. The band had stopped playing, and the mayor had moved to the podium, throwing grins and waves at the audience. A hundred holographic replicas of the mayor floated over the tables of the people too far away to see his charming mug. Paul and I waited quietly as he spoke a few brief words of thanks then ticked through his political agenda. Straight through the mayor’s anticorruption stumping, Paul kept his true feelings hidden behind his public face.
The crowd was still applauding when Paul said, “Are we square on this?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you have to get rid of Maggie. I work alone.”
“No. I handpicked Maggie for this. Everybody knows how far back the two of us go. If we manage to nail Mayor Samir, we’ll need somebody with a good rep, somebody they can’t slander as a dirty cop. Somebody that they can’t dig up any dirt on. Maggie is crystal. She hasn’t been corrupted like the rest of us. She was first in her class, and she comes from a prominent family that can’t be pushed around. Plus she’s got that honest face-the public will believe anything she says. I’m hoping that we can force the mayor into a deal, but if we have to go to the public with it, she’ll make the perfect face for it. You don’t have that kind of credibility. If I put you in front of the cameras, they’ll spin it as a ploy to save ourselves. I made up all that stuff about her mother calling me so Gilkyson wouldn’t suspect anything. He thinks I’m doing her mother a favor.”
“Does she know about this?”
“No. She just thinks she’s my favorite. Keep her out of the loop. You do the dirty work, let Maggie take the credit.”
Niki appeared at my elbow. “Who’s Maggie?”
Paul smiled at Niki, happy to see her. His smile faded when he caught her evil eye. Before he moved off, he said, “It’s nice to see you, Niki.”
Niki evil-eyed Paul until he disappeared into the crowd. Niki used to like Paul. It was hard not to like him, the way he could charm you. With that broad smile and that easy attitude, you’d think he was the nicest guy you ever met. Niki blamed Paul for my drinking problem and my nightmares, and everything else that was wrong with me. To her, it was all Paul’s fault for making me do all the things I’d done as his enforcer. While it was true that I was following his orders, I had free will. I knew there was nobody to blame but myself.
Even when I’d gotten to the point where I’d have to down half a bottle to work up the nerve to go into a beatdown session, and then drink the other half to try and forget what I’d done, I’d still kept going. It made me sick to think about all the times I’d slammed my fists into some defenseless sap’s face.
“Who’s Maggie?” Niki repeated.
“My new partner.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you need a partner?”
“Paul has his reasons.”
Niki and I got home late after having a surprisingly good time. It had started off rocky, but once I’d explained away my new partner to a jealousy-prone Niki, things got loose. I pounded down enough brandy to grease the friction between us, and I slipped into my old hard-partying habits. We danced ourselves sweaty and ran the waiters ragged on brandy refills.
On the way home, I drove with one hand on the wheel and one on Niki’s thigh. A full day of looking at Maggie
