fishermen in docked boats gutted their morning catch and tossed entrails into the water, setting off the splashing frenzies of monitors fighting for the free meal. The gator-sized reptiles thrashed in the black water, creating a roiling mass of whipping tails and snapping jaws.
The Lotus Club was on the other side of the river. We hit a jam-up just before the bridge intersection. It looked like a car accident. Two drivers were out of their cars, screaming at each other, their faces red with the strain. The fading aircon threatened to suffocate us until the driver dropped the windows. Children immediately reached into the cab with their palms up. I looked straight ahead.
I called Niki. Her happy-to-see-me hologram sat next to me as I told her I wouldn’t make lunch. I hung up without telling her why. I’d try to finesse that one later. She didn’t want me taking any risks. She was always telling me I was getting too old for it.
The car accident cleared, and the driver gunned it over one of the half dozen riblike bridges that arced up over the city’s backbone, the Koba River. Rejuvenated aircon pumped out the chill as I took in the city, a haphazard sprawl that sat buried under a wavy brown cloud of polluted jungle haze. Koba was Lagarto’s capital city, its one and only political, cultural, and economic center. My eyes scanned from neighborhood to neighborhood, each one bordered by canals that spiderwebbed through the city, evidence of our once proud agricultural history.
An offworld vehicle suddenly screamed by, putting a lump in my throat. Sons of bitches thought they owned the road with their accident-proof cars. Only the most filthy rich could afford an offworld vehicle. Lagarto was the victim of a galactic-sized trade imbalance that made the purchase of offworld products next to impossible. Almost everybody on this backwater planet was forced to live a life absent of offworld tech.
Shit, when I was a kid, the only ways to get around were boats, bikes, and feet. It wasn’t until some enterprising businessmen began manufacturing these antique cars that we finally had an almost affordable mode of transportation. These things were practically medieval, fossil-fuel powered and human navigated. And they came in only three accident-prone models: car, truck, and bus. If you smashed one up, they’d just hammer out the dents and hose off your blood to get it ready for the next owner. Not many people owned one, but cabs and buses were now accessible to all but the severely poor, of whom we had plenty.
Arriving at the Lotus, I used my left to drop a five-hundred on the driver, keep the change. The morgue boys had already arrived and were waiting in the shade. A couple beat cops blocked the public from the alley. They stepped aside when I flashed my badge.
The Lotus Club kept a low profile. You entered from the alley, not the street. There was no sign over the door and no ground-level windows. They catered to a higher-class crowd than most whorehouses. Their customers liked discretion. I went past the entrance then back behind the cooling unit. Homicide dicks Josephs and Kim were chatting in the shade.
Detective Mark Josephs was a thirty-year man. He had worked with me in vice for many years before moving to homicide. Back then, he wouldn’t take his payoffs in cash. Instead, he’d take his cut in the form of drugs and hookers.
Josephs got in serious trouble back in ’83. It started when he hit a dealer up for some pills. The dumb-shit dealer got confused and gave Josephs a flat from the wrong stash. Dealers would keep two stashes. The good stuff was for the regulars, and they’d unload the cheap shit on offworlders. What were the chances of meeting an offworlder twice? They were all just passing through.
A few days later, some street cops got called in on reports of a drug-crazed freak at the Royal Hotel. They found a naked Detective Mark Josephs face down on the lobby sofa, humping away at the cushions. The cops tried but couldn’t talk him down from his bad-trip high. Finally, they dragged his naked ass out across the lobby floor. They brought him down to the station, sedated him, then slapped a prison jumpsuit on him and tossed him into the padded room.
Come morning, he woke up puzzled to find himself locked up with cuff-bruised wrists and rug burn raspberries dotting his face. Cops crammed around his cell. “Nice jumper.” “Hey, Josephs. When did you start headlining at the Royal!” “You go queer yet?”
When they cut him loose, he came up to vice on the third, grabbed a cup of coffee, and sat down at his desk like always. His partner asked, “You okay, Mark?”
“Yeah. It just stings when I pee. Rug burn.”
We all broke up. Then back to business as usual.
That night, Josephs caught up with the pusher that dealt him the bad pills. He beat him with a copper pipe and put him in a coma. It turned out the dealer was a minor. The public threw a fit. You know, police brutality. Had the dealer been an adult, nobody would have cared-one less drug-dealing lowlife on the streets.
As chief of the Koba Office of Police, Paul Chang had to move fast. He’d always said we couldn’t have the public losing faith in KOP. There was always an anticorruption faction in the city government, and if they got hold of this, it could threaten the police empire the two of us had built two decades earlier. He hurried to put a story together: Josephs saw the dealer making a score. He didn’t know he was a minor. It was too dark. The kid resisted arrest and fell during the struggle, hitting his head on the pavement. Josephs was only too happy to play along.
Paul sent me to the hospital to do some intimidation-medical style. After a five-minute scare session with a doctor and a defibrillator, the docs rewrote the charts to match Paul’s cover story. That was my last rough-up job before I went to Paul and told him I didn’t have the heart for it anymore. At first, he fought me on it, saying I was betraying him. I told him he owed me. For twenty years, I’d done the dirty work. The blood was always on my hands. He tried to tell me to get over myself. He said he was the one who made all the tough calls. All that blood was on his hands, not mine. Fuck that, I told him. I had to face them. He was just the general giving orders. I was the soldier, the executioner. There was no comparison. When I finally made him understand the toll it was taking on me, he relented and recruited some new heavies for himself, categorizing me as “ass-stomping inactive.” He still sent the occasional bagman job or frame job my way, but other than that I was strictly a collections man.
As for the Josephs situation, Paul sent the news station some KOP-approved vids of the kid. The vids showed concerned-looking doctors hovering over the hospital bed. Tubes ran from the kid’s mouth to a ventilator that pumped his chest up and down. White blankets covered him from the neck down. One bandage was strategically placed on his head to match the fake single-head-trauma story. The pictures didn’t show the broken ribs, legs, or arm. You couldn’t see the punctured lung, ruptured liver, or internal bleeding.
To make it look good, Josephs was suspended for thirty days and transferred from vice to homicide. Paul told the press how they put every officer through a two-hour refresher course on proper restraint techniques to “prevent further unfortunate accidents like this one.” Paul’s out-and-out mastery of public manipulation never ceased to amaze me.
Paul put Josephs in rehab, out of the public eye. He told him he had thirty days to clean up his act or else…
As for the kid, he died before the suspension was up.
These days Mark Josephs partnered with Detective Yuan Kim. I didn’t know Kim that well. What I did know was this: Kim was second-generation police. His father and uncle were both cops. His pop did twenty in homicide. He and I crossed paths a few times over the years. Good cop. His uncle was a beat cop for his whole career. When Kim joined the force, Daddy pulled strings to get him a stint as a beat cop in the Northwest Quarter. We’re talking seriously soft duty, rich neighborhoods with nothing but burglaries and domestic disputes. He made detective in record time and was assigned to homicide just like his father. Cops didn’t respect him. They said he never did shit to get that job. They thought he was living off his father’s name.
Josephs shook my hand. I pulled it out of my pocket fast, quick shake, back in. Josephs looked wired, eyes on fire. He was probably back on stims. “Juno, how ya doin’? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Okay.” Straight to business. “What do we have so far?”
Yuan Kim’s face was soaked in sweat. His glasses slipped down his nose. “What the hell’s goin’ on, Juno? Why are you taking over our case? You haven’t worked a hommy in ten years.”
“Take it up with the chief.”
Josephs said, “The chief put you on this? Does he know the vic or what?”
“Beats me. He just said he wanted me to work this stiff.”
“You still takin’ care of his dirty laundry, Juno? I know you two are still buds, but enough is enough. I’d tell him to fuck off and take care of his own shit.”
Kim wiped his forehead with his index finger and flicked the sweat to the ground. “This is bullshit. Chang
