“Not yet, let’s give it a little more time.”
What the hell was his problem? We’d been having this argument for months. The lieutenant had reached the end of his rope with us. He was threatening to split us up as partners, but Paul still wouldn’t let it go. The guy was obsessed.
I wasn’t going to let Paul talk me out of it, not this time. “We have all we need. All we have to do is call Judge Saydak, and get our warrant. I want this to be over, Paul. We’ve had those cameras up for months. I’m sick of us sitting on our asses when we could have dropped the bastard a long time ago.”
Our case against Natasha’s father was airtight. We had more vids than a jury could watch-Yashin making flashlit pickups on the river; Yashin cutting piles of brown sugar on his kitchen table; bowtied waiters coming to the door and exchanging cash for butcher-paper wrapped packages.
The only thing we needed was witness statements. My plan was to run a sweep-Paul and I would pick up Yashin. We’d get vice officers to pick up all his dealers. The whole thing would be coordinated, so it all happened at the same time. We’d make their heads spin. We had vids of all his dealers making midnight buys from Yashin. We’d use the vids to turn two dealers on Yashin-first come, first served on two reduced sentences; fuck the rest of them. The first two to take our deal would authenticate our surveillance.
But Paul was still hooked on the bigger fish-Ram Bandur. Pavel Yashin and Bandur were still negotiating the sale of Yashin’s overstock from the busted Nguyen deal. Paul swore that the deal would eventually go through, and when it did, we could get Bandur.
Paul tried to disarm me with one of his smiles. “I’m telling you, we can get Bandur. Just give it a little longer.”
“We don’t have anything to pin on Bandur. You’ve been waiting for months for this deal to go down, and you don’t have shit. Even if he and Yashin come to terms, and we get the whole deal on vid, it still won’t matter. Bandur is out of our reach. He’s not a small-time drug peddler like Yashin. The guy’s a fucking kingpin. I wish we could bag the guy, but we can’t. He can buy his way out of anything we get on him. The vids we take will go missing, and we’ll go missing with them.”
Paul took a hit of his drink. He talked without looking at me. “We don’t have to arrest Bandur.”
“What are you talking about, Paul?”
“We can use the vid as an in. I’ll take it to him and offer to hand it over to him.”
“I don’t get it.”
He looked at me. “We’ve got Yashin whether we move now or later, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So we wait and maybe score some evidence on Bandur. Nothing he can’t beat on his own, but if we turned it over to him, he’d be appreciative; wouldn’t he?”
“Maybe so,” I admitted. “Where the fuck are you going with this?”
“We should make a deal with him. Bandur can rat out his competition to us, and we’ll arrest them. Think about it, we’ll make so many busts that we’ll be stars in KOP.”
Was he serious with this? “You’re talking about teaming up with a murderer, Paul. He had his initials burned into those dealers’ balls. How can you think of making a deal with a guy like that?”
“Don’t give me the goody-good bullshit, Juno. Crime isn’t the real enemy. It’s poverty. Why pretend that we can beat crime when we’d be better off partnering with it, controlling it? I’m sick of these college-educated pinhead politicians riding their fucking white horses, telling us cops to clean up the city. Who are they to deny people the right to gamble or take a few hits of O? It’s the only thing that’s keeping them all sane. It takes their minds off how hopeless their lives are. The only thing we achieve by arresting them is filling up the Zoo with prisoners-just more people living off the government peso. In the meantime, the people keep gambling, whoring, and drugging as much as ever.”
I couldn’t believe he was seriously thinking about this. “And you think that you can change things by giving our evidence away?”
“Why not? I’ll go to Bandur and tell him that I can make him the most successful crime boss Lagarto’s ever seen. We’ll arrest all his competition. The whole city will be his. Who would turn down a deal like that?”
“And what do you get in exchange?”
“Some rules, that’s all. Just some rules. We’ll carve the city up into zones-areas where illegal activity is accepted and areas where it’s not. Maybe we can get some more tourists to come down here if they know there are areas where it’s safe to go. We’ll be able to regulate the illegal areas. Whores won’t have to hide out in alleys anymore. We’ll have whorehouses as classy as anywhere. We can even run honest games. That way offworlders won’t be afraid to play, because they’d know they wouldn’t be cheated. You know the mines are doing well. There’s going to be more and more people up there. They all need to take a vacation somewhere. What do you think?”
I was shaking my head. Was he insane?
Paul grinned at me. “It comes down to this. We need offworld money; that’s the best thing we can do for Lagarto.”
“This is too far out for me, Paul.”
“Hey, man, I wouldn’t ask you to do this with me. I’m okay doing it alone. Just let me do it if you don’t want to be part of it.”
I was tempted. Despite it all, I was tempted. Crime-free zones could actually work. Paul’s ideas, no matter how fucked up, could be infectious. Then Natasha’s picture came front and center. “I can’t let you do it, Paul. If you don’t want to arrest Yashin, I’ll do it myself.”
Paul clenched his drink. “You would do that to me? We’re supposed to be partners. You can’t just go and take a collar for yourself. We’ve been working Yashin together.”
“I’m going to do it tomorrow. I’m going to walk in there and arrest the fucker. Are you coming with me or not?”
“Why are you so hot to do this? We’ve got Yashin sewn up. Why the rush?”
“I’m sick of waiting. I don’t want to watch that family anymore.”
“What are you talking about? You love to watch them. What are you going to do if we arrest Yashin, and you can’t watch Natasha anymore? I’ve seen the way you look at her.”
“It’s weird to watch them like that-in their own home.”
“You didn’t think it was weird when we started. You told me yourself that you liked it. You said that watching them made you feel invisible. You could move from room to room, and they couldn’t see you.”
“That was at the beginning. I don’t feel that way now.” Let it go, Paul.
Paul downed his drink and held up two fingers for the bartender. An overweight Tarzan filled our glasses halfway and hurried back down the bar to keep up with the late-night rush. Paul looked like he was going to say something. He took a couple long pulls on his brandy before he spoke up. “There’s something you’re not telling me. What made you have a change of heart?”
He was going to find out anyway. “I’ve been seeing Natasha.”
Paul just about busted a vein. “What? How long?”
“Since April.”
“Is that who you’ve been seeing all this time? Shit, what are you thinking? Does she know you’re a cop?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know we’re after her father?”
“Yeah. She knows, but she won’t tell him.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“She hates him.”
“Does she know about the cameras?”
“No.”
Paul rubbed his face with his hands. “How could you do this? We put too much effort into this case for you to risk it all for some tail.”
“It’s not like that.”
“What is it like?”
“We’re serious about each other.”
Paul finished off his drink with a gulp and put two fingers back up. The bartender came and filled Paul’s glass
