“He’s going to throw a goddamned fit.”
A sly grin formed. “Looking forward to it.”
Deluski came through the double doors, back from the bathroom, and dropped into a wooden chair scarred with carved graffiti. Tall shelves stood behind him, rows and rows of mildew-stained books, the aging paper making the room smell old.
I stole another glance at Maggie’s smile, soaking in as much of it as I could before I voice-ordered the yearbook forward, one holo shifting into the next, kid after kid, the same damn repetitive poses: the smile-into-the- camera look, the thoughtful chin-resting-on-fist look, the looking-off-into-the-future look. I stopped on a name. The kid I didn’t recognize, but I did the name: Ang Samusaka.
“A brother?” asked Deluski.
“Looks like it. Why don’t you go ask the librarian?”
He stood and went to her desk. Maggie leaned my way. “How long you going to keep him under your thumb?”
I rubbed my smarting arm. “I set him free already.”
“Really?”
“He destroyed the video himself.”
“But he’s still working for you?”
“He wanted to see this case through. Kripsen, Lumbela, and the others were his friends. After this is over, I don’t know. If he’s smart, he’ll go back to being a regular cop.”
“Think he’s smart?”
I shrugged my shoulders. We’ll see.
“You know, it’s nice to see your eyes again.”
It took me a second to realize I wasn’t wearing my shades. Paul’s shades. I’d worn them long enough that I could still feel the plastic resting on the bridge of my nose, stems hooked over my ears. Ghost shades to go with the ghost pain in my hand.
“You done hiding?” she asked.
I tuned into my own breathing, air moving in and out, lungs inflating and deflating. I tuned into the other signs of life. My heartbeat. The ache in my missing hand. The pleasant memory of recent sex.
She waited for my answer. I put my good hand on her knee, felt the warmth through her pants. “I’m done hiding.”
“That’s good.” She patted my hand. “That’s real good.”
I took my hand back and reluctantly, remorsefully forced my brain out of the moment, back into the past, focused it on my first sight of the lizard-man, standing in the doorway, Wu’s lower jaw in his hand. I conjured up the killer’s face as I navigated from pic to pic. Searching for that wild mop of hair. Those disturbed eyes. That cold gaze.
Seven years of class photos. Samusaka’s class and the three years before and after. Close to the end now, the last year of San Juan Diego Academy’s privileged but troubled youth cycling by.
“That’s it.” I rubbed tired eyes. Lizard-man wasn’t a student here. He knew Samusaka some other way. Knew about the party pad where he killed Samusaka and later posed Froelich and Wu’s bodies some other way.
Deluski came back. “Ang was Franz’s brother. Graduated last year. Last the librarian heard, he was living in a hotel off the Square. She hears the kids talking about it. Sounds like he hosts a lot of parties there.”
“Anything else?”
“I made a quick call to a cop friend I used to work with-”
“Did you use your new phone?”
“Yeah.”
I felt an uptick in my pulse. “Why the hell did you do that? You should’ve borrowed the school’s.”
“I wanted to see if-”
“Ditch the phone.”
He rolled his eyes. “The phone’s anonymous.”
“Not anymore. Dump it.”
“This was a friend I called. He’s not going to tell anybody.”
I pointed my short arm at the trash can.
He rolled his eyes and tossed in the phone. The loud, metallic clunk drew a scolding stare from the librarian. Librarians must practice that shit.
“You know Maggie still has her phone. Mota could track us through her.”
She shook her head no. “Mine’s anonymous. I hid my police issue under the seat of a taxi.”
I smiled at the thought of Mota following a taxi all around town. “What did your friend tell you?”
“I had him look up Ang to see if he has a record. He wasn’t in the system except for a call he put in to report a B-and-E at his parents’ house. I checked the date. It was only a month before his brother was killed. Think we oughta check it out?”
Hotel Koba. Ten minutes of asking around the school had scored us the name of the place. We followed the arrow down a set of stairs to a basement door and pushed our way through. Stone floors and sculpted light fixtures. Thick rugs under monitor-hide chairs. A front desk made of polished wood with a backdrop of gold-tinted mirrors.
“Ang Samusaka,” I said to the desk clerk, a teenage girl in a purple hand-me-down uniform with overly long sleeves folded up at the wrists and a worn-through collar.
“Let me see if he’s in.” She touched a number on an airborne holo-grid to her right. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“No.”
Lines in her forehead arched at my curt response. “Um.” She gestured at her earpiece. “It’s ringing right now.”
We waited.
“He’s not answering.” Not He’s not in, but He’s not answering.
“No problem. What’s his room number?”
She hesitated until Deluski waved his badge. “Three-o-three.”
Maggie pushed the elevator’s up button, and steel doors slowly cranked open with a metal-on-metal scrape. Inside, a chambermaid struggled with a tippy towel hamper that was missing a wheel from one of the front corners.
I reached with my half-arm but came up short. Dammit. Deluski beat me to it, used his big hands to lift the cart’s front end over the gap between the elevator and the floor.
We stepped into the now vacated elevator. The humid stench of soggy towels clung to the walls. The elevator banged and groaned up to the third before the doors took their time scraping open. We walked down the hall, shoes sinking deep into plush carpet.
Deluski rapped on the door. A punk kid answered, dark skin and fried eyes. No shirt, no shoes, wrinkled pants. Not him.
“We want to talk to Ang Samusaka.”
“Ang!” he called over his shoulder before wobbling back inside.
We strode into the young Samusaka’s suite and closed the door behind us. The room stank of burned herbs. Damn early for that shit. Another kid slept on the sofa, and to his left, a rolled herbstick burned on a saucer, and next to it a plate with a half-eaten frybread. The punk who let us in sat and called for Ang again before snatching up the bread.
A bedroom door opened. Ang came through fastening his pants and nabbed a shirt off the floor. He gave it a shake before pulling it over his shoulders. “Who are you?”
Maggie moved toward him, her shoe avoiding a food scrap on the floor. “We want to talk to you about your brother.”
He pulled his shirt over visible ribs and started buttoning. “He’s dead.”
“We know.”
“Who are you?”
