her nose. I kept her like that as she sobbed and choked. It went on for a long time, long enough to use up half a box of tissues. When the sniveling finally subsided, I laid her flat on her back and caressed her cheek. “We're going to get through this,” I said. “It wasn't your fault.”
FOURTEEN
I crossed the Old Town Square, feeling great, better than I had in forever. The knot in my stomach was completely tame, and I hadn't had a drink for hours now. About time I got that off my chest. Year after year, I'd let Niki continue believing I didn't know about her father, thinking I was doing what was best for her. But now it was out, out in the open where she'd finally be able to face it and move on. I called the hospital and had them bring her some flowers, something nice I told them, not those wilted week-old flowers that die in a day.
I cut through one of the many narrow streets that ran off the square. I looked for numbers by the doors of the souvenir shops, but they were all hidden by cascading displays of monitor-hide handbags and oil paintings of regal-looking 'guanas perched on top of rocks or rooftops. I reached the end of the block and had to turn back before I spotted the Jungle Expeditions placard on the walk. I checked out the sign as I approached-sun-faded nature shots with words like adventure and excitement written in the gaps between pics.
I walked through a doorway into a courtyard covered by a series of tarps that were so pregnant with puddled water that they stretched in all the wrong directions, creating gaping holes in the coverage through which misting rain came glistening down. Souvenir stands ran around the circumference, their spaces overflowing with etched gourds and mini Lagartan-style skiffs made from seedpods. There was a staircase on the far end that led up to a second tier where I could see a window with painted-on jungle vines and tour prices. Standing alongside the door was a stuffed tiger, reared up on its haunches, one of its paws raised like it was about to claw somebody's heart out.
Tiger hunts? I took another look at the painted prices on the window and found a variety of tiger safaris dominating the list. I didn't think anybody did tiger hunts anymore. The tour operators quit running tiger shoots decades ago when the upriver tiger territory was overrun by warlords. Not that the tiger hunts were ever very successful in the first place. So few tourists ever managed to bag one that they usually chose to spend their offworld dollars elsewhere. From what I'd heard, even seeing a tiger in the jungle was next to impossible. The foliage was too thick to spot something that didn't want to be spotted. Tigers weren't like the monitors who still hadn't learned to fear us humans. To hunt monitor, you could just about sit in a chair and wait for one of the cocksure lizards to come right up to you. Being the top of the food chain for so many millennia had made them dimwittedly overconfident. Looking around, seeing all the monitor-hide jackets and gloves hanging on hooks, I found it hard to believe us Lagartans hadn't yet slaughtered enough of them to weed out their outdated king-of-the-jungle genes.
Tigers were another story. They weren't native. Their DNA was heavily seasoned with an instinctual fear of man. They were originally introduced over a century ago as a tourism promotion. They were supposed to give Lagarto a higher profile among the Unified Worlds. We would become the haven for all the extinct Earth species. All those offworld freighter crews passing through our system wouldn't be able to resist a trip down to the surface to see tiger, rhino, gorilla, and every other species that could be reconstituted from old DNA samples. The pols pushed the plan through, telling everybody that happy days would be just around the corner.
What a crock of shit. The Bio-Regeneration Program was a total failure. Start with the fact that the rot shot their supersafari plans to hell by sending the gorillas, the elephants, and all the other plus-sized exotics straight back into extinction. Tigers were the only large mammals that actually took, and any benefit the tigers offered was easily outweighed by the havoc they wreaked on the frontier farms, always eating people's cows and goats. It became just one more reason why so many upriver farmers switched to raising poppies instead of livestock. What was supposed to create a boom for the tour companies instead turned into a boon for the warlords who ran the opium trade. Their toehold on the fringe towns became a foothold, and then when the government tried to take the land back by force, the warlords started spewing all this power-to-the-people bullshit and converted their foothold into a stronghold.
And now even Lagarto's lifeless deserts were more tourist friendly than the warlord-controlled territory where lase-rifle-bearing children called themselves freedom fighters and where the warlords made a habit of giving their rival O runners Lagartan neckties-cut the throat and then reach in and pull the tongue down through the opening.
And I was supposed to believe Horst Jeffers had revived the tiger hunt business? No. I wasn't buying it. The tiger hunt business went under for a reason. Unless he had a damn tiger farm out there where his customers could pop them in their cages, tiger hunts were a cover. Only a damn fool would want to spend his vacation in the fringe towns where you were more likely to get a Lagartan necktie than a tiger pelt.
I kept one eye on the Jungle Expeditions door and used the other to paw through a set of monitor-hide belts. The hawkers eventually stopped pestering me after I gave them a long dose of total disregard. I made my way around from stand to stand, focusing on belts, thinking I could use a new belt, but not wanting to take the time to make a purchase. I had to stay ready to leave in a hurry should that powder-skinned Horst Jeffers show up.
It wasn't much longer before a trio of offworlders came out and walked down the stairs. A dozen-odd hawkers were ready to greet them by the time they reached the bottom. The hawkers descended on them, a mob of trinket-wielding parasites. The offworlders tried to ignore them but couldn't keep their resolve for more than a few seconds. One of them became so uncomfortable with the invasion of his personal space that he stepped away from the group, playing right into the hawkers' divide-and-conquer strategy.
A local emerged from the Jungle Expeditions door, and with a scowl, saved the offworlders from making some overpriced purchases. The parasites scuttled back under their rocks as he came down the stairs. “All ready?” He smiled.
The trio of tourists followed his lead. I dropped the belt I'd been mock studying and fell in behind them. The local led the way, with one of the offworlders hanging on his shoulder, talking his ear off, asking questions nonstop. The other two lagged behind. They were looking around, taking in the sights, both of them trying to enjoy the walk. I trailed behind, following at a comfortable pace.
We crossed the Old Town Square, stopping twice, first so the tour guide could point out the church that sat at the head of the square, and second so he could give a spiel on the square's history. They listened to his rehearsed shtick and laughed at his well-worn jokes while I stayed a short distance away and pretended to be interested in some jewelry. The offworlders stood side by side, wearing their I'm-a-tourist slickers, their faces hard to see, hidden by steam that came off their tech-heated quick-dry skin.
They were on the move again, walking in the same formation as before. Based on their multicolored threads, I figured these offworlders were from the Orbital instead of the mines. The offworlders on the Orbital were always coming in contact with the latest trends and these three were sporting some ultrabright reds, greens, and yellows under their slickers. As I kept looking at those flashy clothes, I started thinking that these three might actually be from one of the freighter crews instead of from the Orbital. Those over-the-top colors were plain gaudy, even by Orbital standards.
They were probably from Pivon, the planet closest to Lagarto, only five years by freighter. They could be on their way home, docking with Lagarto Orbital- 1 for a final restocking of raw materials that had been slingshotted in from the mining operations out in the belts. People said the Orbital was a major stop on the trade routes. I wouldn't know. All I knew was that looking around these streets and seeing the opium-ravaged derelicts holding out their hands, I found it mighty hard to fathom that there was a flourishing economy going on up there.
We took an arched bridge across the canal and headed toward the Phra Kaew market as the rain picked up its pace. The offworld trio didn't seem to mind, thick steam venting out the top of their slickers, making them look like walking cigarettes. We were about to reach the covered portion of the Phra Kaew market, and I was beginning to think this afternoon would be a total waste if it turned out I was following them on nothing more than a shopping spree. Just then, they took a right. I resisted the urge to speed up and took the corner at my regular pace. They were gone, all four of them. I strained my eyes, stretching my gaze in all directions. They were gone, but I had a good idea where.
I passed the door without a knob, remembering it well, the secret knock that changed every ten days. I'd
