father, you’ll still have a chance to patch things up.”
“After what she did to me? She can go to hell.”
“You know what her father did to her. She’s been carrying all that guilt. She hooked to punish herself, Juno. We work vice. How many hookers do we know that have the same story? Besides, the way Josephs told it, she didn’t sound like a serious hooker. Maybe she was just experimenting. Maybe it was peer pressure. You don’t know. She did quit. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“She’s been lying to me, Paul.”
“And you’ve been honest with her? How do you think she’d feel if she found about you spying on her?”
“That isn’t the same.”
“It isn’t?”
“Dammit, Paul, you’re supposed to be on my side. Quit making me feel like a shit.”
He grinned. “But it’s so easy.”
“Fuck you.”
“Listen, Juno, I’ve never see you like this. You must love her, right?”
I begrudgingly nodded.
“Do you think she loves you?”
I nodded again.
“Then at least give it a couple days. You need to cool down first, so you can think straight. Will you at least do that?”
I gave him a reluctant yes.
“Good. Now let’s go get drunk.”
NINETEEN
SEPTEMBER 32, 2762
PM became AM and Paul slowed the drinks down. My buzz started to fade. Paul and I had been living large since we’d left my place-a two-person bar-hopping blowout. I’d been knocking back drinks with forget-Natasha abandon the whole night.
The crowd was thinning out. Where there’d only been standing room, there were now open tables. I hadn’t had a drink in at least an hour, and I was beginning to see straight. I wasn’t liking the idea of being sober one bit. The same strippers that I thought were hot an hour ago were now playing ordinary in my eyes-bad dancing, bad thighs, and bad sags were suddenly coming through strong. I wasn’t ready to shift from drunk-and-happy to depressed hangover. “You know where we should go, Paul?”
“C’mon, Juno, it’s late. The sun will be up in a few hours.”
“You haven’t even heard my suggestion yet.”
“All right, what is it?”
My phone rang. “Yeah.”
I couldn’t hear a damn thing over the late-night hubbub, but Natasha’s smiling hologram was blocking the stage. I read her holo-lips. “Juno,” she said.
Her sweet face soured in my mind, yet I couldn’t keep myself from cranking up the call’s volume. “Yeah?”
“I need you to come over. Something happened.” Her voice rang an alarming note over the go-go music.
“Be right there.” I clicked off. “We have to go to Natasha’s.”
Paul asked, “What do you think she wants?”
“I don’t know, but there’s something wrong.”
We went to the back door and knocked. Natasha opened up and let us into the kitchen. It was my first time inside the house that I had spent so much time spying on. I turned on the lights-knew right where they were. “Oh god, Natasha. Are you okay?”
Her shirt was covered in blood. There were spatters on her face, in her hair.
“Somebody broke in…my parents…”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay.”
Paul and I sprinted through the house. We bounded upstairs like we lived there. We found her parents in the bedroom. There was blood on the walls, the carpet, the lamp. Pavel Yashin was lying in bed, stab wounds all over his body. His blood had run through the mattress and puddled to the floor underneath. Blood spatters doused geckos drinking their fill. Flies were already bouncing around the room. We waved our hands in a futile attempt to keep them away. Pavel’s wife, Gloria, was huddled in a defenseless ball under her Virgin Mary shrine; white candles were spotted red. A lase-blade handle protruded from her back and smoke rose from her charring flesh as the blade burned an ever-widening hole. Half the hilt was already sunken into her back. I flicked it off before it burned through to the floor and set the house ablaze.
Paul said, “Go take care of Natasha. I’ll scope the place out.”
I returned to the kitchen. Natasha was sitting at the table, blood-smeared Formica under her hands.
“Tell me what happened.”
Her face was unreadable. “I’m sorry I called you. I know you don’t want to hear from me, but I didn’t know who else…”
“It’s okay, Natasha. I’m here now. Tell me.”
“I went out with my friends…and no, I wasn’t hooking. When I came back, I saw that my parents’ door was open. I peeked in to see if they were home, and I found…” She couldn’t finish. Tears began to stream.
“Then what?”
“I checked to see if they were still alive, but they weren’t breathing. That’s when I called you.”
“Do you know who did this?”
“No. Somebody must have broken in and sneaked back out. There was nobody here when I came home.”
Paul came around the corner. He checked the kitchen window then asked for a key to the basement. Natasha told him to look in the silverware drawer. He ran down to the basement for a minute, came back up, and waved for me to follow him to the living room.
“Excuse me, Natasha; I have to talk to Paul for a minute.”
Paul and I went into the living room. Paul spoke in whispers. “They’re both dead.”
“Do you think Bandur could have done this?”
“Is that what she said?”
“No. She said that somebody must have broken in.”
“I checked all the windows and doors, Juno. There are no signs of forced entry. The basement is fucking packed with O. He’s also got a couple cases of money down there. Nobody touched any of it.”
I couldn’t purge brandy-buzzed go-go tunes out of my mind. “What are you saying?”
Paul scratched his head. “You know what I’m saying.”
I dropped onto the couch. What had I done? She needed my help; she begged me for it. She asked me to deliver her from her home, and I shut the door in her face. “It’s my fault. I knew how desperate she was to get rid of her father. I made her do this. I left her no other choice.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “What do you want to do? Nobody knows about the cameras but us. We can play it however you want.”
“You want to take the opium and the money, don’t you?”
“It’s your call on this one, Juno. I’ll do whatever you say.”
I dropped my face into my hands and tried to concentrate. The upstairs massacre scene dominated my internal vision. A film of Natasha murdering her parents set to go-go music looped continuously before my eyes. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, creating kaleidoscopic color patterns that drowned out the
