“How about Officer Orzo here? You want to spy on her?”
“No.”
“Do you think she’s pretty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is your mother pretty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does she have boyfriends? Do you like to spy on her when she’s with them?”
“NO!”
“How long have you been coming here?”
“This was my first time.”
“You’re lying, Pervo. You make a habit of peeping.”
No answer.
“Were you here two nights ago?”
No answer.
“Did you see something go down in the alley?”
No answer.
“What did you see? Tell me now.”
“I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t here.”
“You were here. We found your stash of skin mags. We know the kind of sick shit you’re into. We got your DNA from the mags. You jizzed all over them, Pervo. Don’t tell me you weren’t here. You saw something that scared you, and you pissed your pants.”
“No, I didn’t see anything.” He was shaking now.
“If you want us to let you go, fatboy, you’ll tell us what you saw.”
“I–I didn’t see anything.”
We rode back to the station in my car. The triple palm print I’d put on Pedro’s cheek had faded. His lips were zipped up tight. He was too scared to talk. The things he saw were enough to haunt him for life. I couldn’t blame him for being afraid, but it didn’t change the fact that I had to break him.
We hauled him up to the second-floor lockup. Eddie was working the desk. “Hey, Juno. How’s it going?”
“You know how it is, Eddie. You look like you could use a cup of coffee. Why don’t you guys take a break? I can watch the desk for you.”
Eddie beamed. We hadn’t played this game in years. He called out the interior guards, and they made like they were leaving. They weren’t really going anywhere. In a couple minutes they’d be gathered around the monitors to watch the show.
“Did you turn off the cameras?” I asked.
“You bet.” Eddie flipped a couple switches to make it look good. You couldn’t really turn them off. What Eddie really did was flick the holding tank lights on and off. We had no more control over our cameras than we did our phone system. Like most of the tech on Lagarto, it was provided by the Orbital. Paul told me that the fat cats on the Orbital got a bigger cut of the KOP budget than police payroll did. Damn offworlders would never just sell us the tech. Instead, they’d rent it and then have the gall to tack on maintenance fees. They’d say we didn’t have the expertise to maintain it ourselves.
I seized Pedro by his shirt and led him in as the door opened upon detecting my DNA.
The holding tank consisted of three cages on the left. The night’s catch looked bored until they saw us. A chorus of teeth sucking started Pedro to shivering. I paraded him up and down the hall, close enough to the bars that the prisoners could just about touch him. I surveyed the detainees: drunks bloodied from bar fights, tweaked- out dealers, freaked-out johns caught wagging their wangs. Not the toughest group I’d ever seen, but there might’ve been one or two actual rapists or murderers in there. More than enough testosterone-laden malice to get the kid blabbing his life story.
They barraged the kid with catcalls. “Sooo weee! Piggy boy.” “Look at that big juicy butt.” “The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’.”
I egged them on, telling them his name was Pedro the Homo.
His lip quivered. “Why did you turn off the cameras?”
I got up in his face. “I’m not a fucking perv like you. I don’t want to watch.” The kid looked pale. “Time to pick a door, Pervo. One, two or three…”
Prisoners whooped.
Pedro avoided my eyes. He was on the edge… Push him.
I whispered in his ear. “You hear them? They can’t wait to pop your cherry. You talk now, or I leave you here.”
“I’ll talk.”
I popped a couple more pain pills while Maggie filled out a witness report with the kid.
Vice was now in full swing. The veterans were gathered around the coffee machine, passing a flask and putting on an early buzz. They were swapping stories and laughing up a storm like always. They quieted down when I passed. News of my ass-kicking by Josephs must have been the hot topic.
The younger cops sat at desks, talking to the air, their words caught by the dozen voice pickups around the office, sending their dictation up to the Orbital to be digitized and fed into the system as arrest reports, nightly activity logs, citation journals, and evidence entry forms. The vets made the younger cops do all the paperwork. It was called paying your dues. I had had to do the same tedious bullshit work until I latched onto Paul’s coattails.
I rang up the kid’s mother. I could barely hear her over the bar’s din. “What’s the little fucker done now?” Her hologram smiled sweetly.
“Nothing, ma’am. He’s a witness to a crime. We just need to question him.”
“You keep him for the night. Teach the brat a lesson.”
“He hasn’t done anything, ma’am. Would you like us to call you when we’re done questioning him so you can take him home?”
“No. I need my sleep. He knows the way.”
“I’m sure he does, ma’am, but he’s seen some things no boy his age should see.”
“Don’t think I won’t punish him for it, officer. He may be bigger than me, but I can still beat his ass.”
I got off the phone and entered interrogation room two. Maggie and I sat on one side of the mildewed table, the kid on the other.
Maggie said, “Tell us what you saw…from the beginning.”
Pedro wiped away a tear. “I was on the roof, you know…”
“Peeping.”
“Yeah…peeping. And I heard something in the alley. So I looked over the wall. I saw two guys, one holding the other from behind. The guy was struggling-kicking and grabbing at the other guy to get loose, but the first guy held him tight, and he couldn’t get away.”
“How did he hold him?”
“He had him in a headlock, from behind. Like this…” Pedro held his fleshy arm across his throat.
“Then what happened?”
“The guy stopped struggling, and the man dragged him farther into the alley.”
“Dragged how, by his feet? Hands?”
“No, he kept him in the headlock and just walked backward.”
“Then what?”
“The man let him go, and he fell down. It was sick the way he fell.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He landed wrong. He hit his head on the ground, and his arm was all bent up under his body. I thought he had to be dead, but I guess he wasn’t, ’cause then the man got on top of him. You know, he got on his knees over top of him.”
“He straddled him.”
“Yeah, he straddled him. Then I saw the knife in his hands, and he started stabbing him.”
“How?”
