chance of making my next payment. After breakfast, I'd called up to the Orbital and asked what would happen if I missed a payment. They said that they'd keep the spine tanked for as long as it took for me to pay in full; only then would the bastards ship it down to the surface. I argued for half an hour, trying to convince them that they should ship the spine as soon as implantation was medically possible, but they held firm, telling me that their policy was to keep possession of all parts until receiving payment in full. The best they could do was to waive the additional daily tank storage fees until I paid up. The possibility of Niki lying there while there was a perfectly good spine ready for implantation made me sick. She deserved better than that. I had to make those payments.
“Did you break something?” she asked.
“Actually, it was Ian that did the breaking. He found out about me meeting the girl. He and Hoshi met me outside the Zoo.”
Maggie's face turned angry. “How did he know?”
“One of the guards at the Zoo called him, one of his old buddies.” It had been a long time since Ian had worked at the Zoo, but he obviously still had at least one supersized contact there. I could just picture Ian talking to the guard: “Anybody comes to see the girl, you call me right away. Got it, boy-o?”
“Oh damn,” she said. “I'm sorry, Juno. I should've warned you that he used to work there.”
“Don't worry about it. I knew he used to be a guard, too. His father used to brag about it all the time. But that was years ago. Neither of us had any reason to believe that he'd be tracking visitors.”
Maggie nodded, her face tight.
This would be the tough part. I just had to spit it out. “I lied to you, Maggie, about Adela.”
“What about her?”
“I didn't get a confession out of her. In fact, she was quite insistent that she didn't do it.”
Maggie brushed it off. “That's okay, Juno. I understand.” And then she looked at my hand.
I wasn't going to let myself get off that easy. “It's not that. I didn't lie because Ian broke a couple fingers. I…” I struggled to find the right way to say it. “I needed the money. I thought if I just told you that the girl confessed, I could get you to pay up fast.”
Maggie dismissed the whole thing, “Money doesn't mean anything.”
Only a rich person would say something like that. I was getting frustrated at how painless she was making this. I'd been ready to spill to her about Niki, about how I couldn't afford the payments, about how desperate I was to get her out of the hospital. I needed to make Maggie understand why I'd lied to her. I needed to tell her. Yet I stood there, in the drizzle, unable to find words, her quick forgiveness catching me totally off guard.
Maggie took my good hand in hers. “I understand, Juno. It's okay.”
“But-”
“I understand,” she repeated.
I blinked rainwater out of my eyes and began to see that she understood far more than I'd thought. She'd probably already guessed that I'd lied about the girl, maybe picking up something in my voice when I'd tried to bullshit her. She was making it clear that she didn't care. She knew about Niki's accident and knew the kind of financial pinch I was in. She wasn't going to make me debase myself by saying it.
I squeezed her hands back. “Thanks, Maggie.”
“Now, is there anything else?”
I filled her in on my late-night rendezvous with Ian, telling her first about Liz and the offworlder, and then about how Ian threatened Niki's life, and finally the deal he offered. I left out the part about Niki not telling me.
Maggie listened to the whole story without saying a word until I was done. “So where do we go from here?”
“I don't think it's wise to kill him until we know more about the rest of his cop clique and what it is they're into.”
“Christ, Juno.” She was shaking her head. “We're not going to kill him. Killing him won't give us the evidence we need to exonerate Adela Juarez. She's going to die if we don't get evidence that'll free her. Besides, killing isn't what you're about anymore.”
I didn't think I was “about” anything. But whatever it was that I was “about” I was pretty sure it didn't live up to Maggie's image of me. Ever since we'd worked the Vlotsky murder together, she'd gotten the notion that I'd turned a new leaf. I liked to think she was right. That I was still capable of good deeds and selfless acts. And when it came to that one case, maybe I had done some good.
“We have a chance to do something important here,” said Maggie. “If we do this right, we can save an innocent girl and get some dirty cops out of KOP.”
I nodded my head even though I wasn't so sure about Adela being innocent. I couldn't shake the first impression I'd had of her as I'd watched the interrogation vid. There was no way I could've misread her eyes. I'd spent most of my adult life looking into those same eyes. In my mind, Adela was still the one with the lase-whip in her hand.
“We together on this?” Maggie asked, her jaw set, her eyes fixed.
She had such purpose for someone so young, such drive. It was hard to understand where it came from, this unyielding determination to clean up KOP. I suspected it had something to do with her father's murder. I'd have to ask her one day, but not today. Today, I let her strength soak into me, my spine firming, the knot in my stomach uncoiling.
“We're together one hundred percent,” I said. “It's you and me against the world.”
Maggie walked in after a short stint at the office.
“Did you place it?”
“Yeah,” Maggie said. “I pretended to shoo a fly off his head and dropped it in his hair.”
“Good. Let's see what we're getting.”
I made short one-handed work of setting up the recording equipment on the hotel bed. I'd spent the afternoon avoiding the hospital by getting the stakeout ready, picking a room in a high-rise but low-profile hotel, sneaking up to the roof and finding a primo spot for the receiver, placing it behind the aircon vents. You couldn't see it from the stairs, but it still had good line of sight to a relay tower. The reception would be good even in the rain. I checked to make sure that the unit was receiving a signal, then aimed the projection unit at the wall and flicked it on. The wall lit up with a view of the street that bobbed with Ian's footfalls. I found the volume control and turned it up just as Ian entered a shoe store.
“Well done, Maggie.”
Maggie smiled. “That shoe store is just down the street from KOP station.”
“He must've just left the office.”
“You were right about the cam. The image quality's not bad.”
After our meeting, Maggie and I had bought the cam from an offworld tech shop whose outrageous prices were indicative of the fact that the shop catered almost exclusively to offworld tourists. The offworld owner tried to talk us into a higher end unit, but I convinced Maggie that we didn't need to spend the extra coin, even though she was the one paying. Since the medical bills started rolling in, I'd become as frugal as my mother.
Besides, this unit had everything we needed. Even though it was the cheaper model, the unit still cost Maggie close to six month's worth of KOP paychecks. The flea-sized cam was designed to crawl through the hair and make its way to the hairline where it would attach itself to the scalp, a lot like the biomon I'd dropped into Niki's hair, except this one was even smart enough to match its shell to Ian's hair color.
Ian was going through the women's shoes, picking them off the wall and turning them over, looking at prices, stopping when he found the most expensive. He held the shoe up for the owner, who hustled into the back room.
Maggie tilted her chair back, putting her feet up on the bed. “What did you think of Adela when you met her?”
“She acted like a scared little girl.”
“Acted? You don't still think she killed her parents, do you?”
“I do.”
Maggie was incredulous. “How can you possibly think she did it?”
“I watched her confession. It looked genuine to me.”
“If she really did it, then why would Ian be so sensitive about you interviewing her?”
