their car for a chance at an offworld fare. A flash of my badge talked him out of it.
Even though the Koba Spaceport was kilometers away, I could feel the rumble of a launching ship over the car’s normal vibration. I looked up but couldn’t see the vessel. It always sounded like it was right on top of you.
We crossed a narrow canal and entered Cap Square, the government district. There was a crowd gathering by City Hall, peaceniks waving homemade placards denouncing violence. They were worked up over the most recent victim in Lagarto’s latest organized-crime war, a young girl who caught lase-fire from a street skirmish. Every time an innocent died, the peaceniks would take to the streets in an ineffectual attempt to get city leaders to crack down. The dumb-shits didn’t get it-where there was poverty, there was crime, and where there was organized crime, there was always going to be a battle for supremacy. You couldn’t stop the violence.
Koba was run by the Bandur cartel. It was started by Ram Bandur, aka the Kingpin of Koba, aka the Nepali Svengali. Ram Bandur was a crime lord the likes of which Lagarto had never seen. He seized control of Koba’s illegal activity more than twenty years ago. He was the first to consolidate every one of Koba’s neighborhoods under one criminal house. Bandur would take a piece of all the city’s action-prostitution, bookmaking, loan-sharking, extortion, pornography, cloning, protection rackets, gunrunning, con games, fraud, drugs, bootlegging, DNA smuggling…He stood unopposed for two decades.
Ram passed away three years ago and willed his criminal empire to his son Benazir-a weaker version of his father. The criminal kingdom had since been under attack from Carlos Simba, Loja’s crime lord. Loja was the planet’s second largest city, two hours upriver. Simba declared all-out war against Ben Bandur’s organization and launched the two cartels into an ever-escalating bloodbath. I hoped the Bandur cartel would quell the Simba uprising soon. Paul and I had a vested interest in seeing the Bandur cartel victorious. KOP had a secret and unholy alliance with the Bandur outfit. Hell, it was Paul and me that put them in power.
The driver dropped us curbside. KOP station loomed over us, its stone steps and columns streaked with lizard excrement. I marched straight to Paul’s office, Maggie trailing a half step behind. Out came Diego Banks, KOP’s chief of detectives and Paul’s number two. His jet black hair was slicked back into a duck’s ass hairstyle. The tension crackled between us. I didn’t take kindly to traitors. The latest lowdown was that he’d become chummy with Mayor Omar Samir. It sounded like the number two had his eyes on the number one job, angling for a post- Paul appointment as chief.
Banks wrung the tension out of his voice and spoke in an easygoing tone. “Thanks for coming by, Juno. The chief says go on in. Maggie, why don’t you come with me?”
I went in, leaving her behind…hopefully for good.
Chief Paul Chang sat at his desk. His hair was streaked gray, and his familiar Asian eyes had started wrinkling in the corners. His trademark smile took ten years off his age. He sprang from his seat when I entered. He was wearing a spare-no-expense hand-tailored suit with diamond-studded cuff links and tie tack. His badge sparkled, shined to diamond intensity. “It’s good to see you, Juno.”
My eyes went straight to Karl Gilkyson who was sitting to the right. I immediately wondered what that asshole from the mayor’s office was doing here. “Isn’t this a police matter?” I asked.
“Don’t mind Karl. He’s just doing his job, Juno. I told the mayor we had nothing to hide, so he suggested Karl tag along and see how we conduct business. You know how tense things have been between the police and the mayor’s office. I thought this might promote cooperation between us. He’s been a fly on the wall for a couple weeks now.”
Shit. Things were worse than I thought. Clearly I had lost track of what’d been going down since I’d stopped enforcing for Paul. Mayor Samir took office almost three years ago promising to clean up the city’s government with KOP as his first target. He launched an investigation into police corruption that had been slowly gaining momentum. Paul must’ve been feeling the heat to be letting that bastard Karl Gilkyson in here. I thought that investigation was pure get-the-vote-out posturing. I had no idea it had legs.
Gilkyson was a typical lawyer: tight suit, tight lips. He leaned forward in his chair. “That’s right, ‘fly on the wall.’ Don’t mind me. Just pretend I’m not here.”
I was happy to oblige by pretending he wasn’t there. I said to Paul. “Why do you want me on this case? Josephs and Kim can handle it.”
“Because you’re a better detective than both of them put together. The victim’s father is a bureaucrat who works for the city. I told the mayor we’d put our best man on the case. That’s you, Juno. Besides, Josephs and Kim are swamped with missing-persons cases.”
Gilkyson broke from his supposed fly-on-the-wall persona. “Don’t feel pressured to take the case. The mayor made his wishes very clear to me and Chief Chang. He doesn’t want any special treatment just because the victim is the son of a city employee.”
“Nonsense,” Paul dismissed him. “We’re all city employees here. When one of our sons is brutally murdered, we all take it personally. I know the mayor understands that. So what do you think of Officer Orzo, Juno?”
“I haven’t had a partner since you, Paul. I don’t see the point of having one now.”
“I know this is hard for you, but I’m in a bind here. She’s descended from plantation owners. You know what that means.”
Yeah. It meant she was rich. Very rich.
Paul said, “Her mother keeps calling me, wondering when she’s going to get a big case. I really want to call her now and let her know her daughter is working a homicide before she calls me again. As long as I have to give her a case, she may as well learn from the best.”
“I don’t care how rich she is. She’s not ready for this.”
“She doesn’t have to be ready. You don’t have to give her any responsibility. Just let her look over your shoulder.”
I turned to Gilkyson, hoping the bastard could bail me out. “Isn’t this unethical?”
He turned his palms up. “We don’t have a problem with it. The mayor often has to grant favors. It’s the way the system works.” His left palm caught my attention. It was glassed over-no, not glass; it was flexible but clear like glass. I could see the circuitry behind it. It was a scanner. He could swipe his hand over documents, uploading them through the phone system to the computers on Lagarto’s orbital station. They must’ve sent him up to the Orbital to get that thing installed. I couldn’t imagine how big a dent it must’ve put in the mayoral budget.
Paul put his unaugmented hands flat on his desk. “What do you say, Juno?”
He always could talk me into anything. I said, “I think Officer Orzo is going to need some convincing. I don’t think she’s very enthusiastic about working with me.”
“I’ve got Banks talking to her right now. He’ll smooth things with her. You’ll report direct to me on this one.” He laid one of his toothy smiles on me. “Thanks for coming by. I’ll see you and Niki at the banquet tonight, won’t I?”
“Yep, we’ll be there,” I said reflexively as I walked out, though we both knew I hadn’t had any plans to attend the mayor’s banquet. I hated that hobnobbing bullshit. I didn’t fit in. So why did he say he’d see me there? He wanted me to come so he could talk to me without that prick Gilkyson listening in. I knew right then that this case was bigger than he’d been letting on.
FIVE
I left Paul’s office, right hand in my pocket, my shoes crunching weeds that sprouted from floor cracks. The ceiling lights were penny-saving bulbless. The dim passages were lit by misty sunlight beaming through sparsely placed windows. The building was half abandoned. Lagarto was perpetually entrenched in rough times.
I headed up to the third, taking the stairs slow. Their sharp edges were now rounded from a hundred years of wear. I’d lost my footing more than once, so I held the rail tight in my left, my fingers running over the crusted mold of the underside.
I called home. “We’re going to the banquet tonight.”
Niki’s hologram was all smiles, matching her mood. “That’s great! What made you change your mind?”
I smiled back at Holo-Niki. “Paul. He’s got me on a case, and he wants to talk to me tonight.”
“What kind of case?”
