“Ah, the lagartus lacerta zebrata. You know how they mate?”
“We’ve read about it.”
“Those poor chaps get a raw deal.” She chuckled. “Why are you interested?”
“Part of a murder investigation. We can’t say more.”
“A murder?” She practically brayed she was so excited. “Nothing like that ever happens around here.”
She waved for us to follow and led us down the long room with a clumsily unbalanced stride. Probably spent too much of her childhood in libraries instead of playgrounds.
She stopped at a cage sitting on the floor. “We keep a pair of specimens in here.”
Deluski and I dropped to our knees. I put my nose up to the wire mesh and studied a lizard resting on a rock, sitting so perfectly still that it looked fake, like a kid’s toy. Its body was as long as my hand with a cigar-sized tail that tapered down to a cigarette as it snaked through some leaves. “Is that the female?”
“No, that’s a male. He’s a nubby hubby now.” She laughed at her own joke. “He mated two days ago. It’s too early to tell if it took. He only gets one shot at it, you know. That’s the female with her tail in the water.”
I looked at her glassy eyes, stripes like three sets of crimson eyebrows. Broad, red-speckled lips. Skin the color of polished granite.
“Ever seen one before?”
I absently rubbed my right arm. “I think so.”
“She lives up to her name, that one. She’s mated four times, makes sure her husbands never cheat on her. She eats some of her young too, but only the girls. The practice assures that there are always more male man- eaters than female. Otherwise the procreative math wouldn’t work.”
A crawling beetle held the man-eater’s attention; her head was swiveling like a turret.
Deluski stood. “Has anybody else come to talk to you about these lizards?”
“Not that I can think of. But we give tours from time to time, and we always point them out.”
The man-eater attacked, her movement so quick that my eyes couldn’t track, like she’d disappeared and reappeared in a new location, the beetle suddenly clamped between her red-speckled lips. She held it like a trophy for a few seconds, then started to chew it down, lips drawing in the beetle’s shell little by little, until nothing but the legs poked out before they too disappeared.
I got to my feet. “Have you ever heard of anybody being obsessed with these things?”
“Obsessed?”
“Ever seen anybody who wanted to turn into one?”
She stroked her ponytail. “I don’t understand.”
I couldn’t say it. Seemed too outlandish to put voice to it. Ever heard of anybody replacing their back-door plumbing with a cock-chopping steel trap? The thought sent a shiver down my back. Nerves jingling on heebie- jeebie overload.
I still couldn’t figure how he got his vics to have sex with him. Froelich and Franz Samusaka were gay; maybe they got seduced into a helluva surprise. But Wu? That scar-headed stiff was straight as they came.
It was unfathomable. Wu’s family was slaughtered, his little girls killed in their beds, and that was when the killer decided to hit on Wu. I just axed your whole family, so how about you come over to my place for a little man love?
Deluski broke the silence. “These tours you give, ever had anybody ask strange questions about the man- eaters?”
“Define ‘strange.’”
“Strange. Weird. Out of the norm.”
“Somebody tried to steal them once. Does that count?”
“Who?”
“I don’t think I ever asked his name. This was a while ago. Could’ve been a year, maybe more. He stuffed them inside his shirt. He must’ve been quick, because nobody saw him do it, but I later saw a tail poking out between the buttons.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Didn’t want the hassle. I didn’t think anybody else saw, so I just held him back when the tour ended and asked him to return them.”
“What did he look like?”
“Young. I figured him for a student, although I never saw him around here again. He had a thick mess of hair.”
Deluski gave me a questioning look. I grinned on a surge of hope. Yeah, that could be him. “We need a name.”
“I really have no idea. But we do sign-in sheets for our tours.”
My ass was planted on a bench in the Old Town Square. Street vendors with woks and grills filled the air with an oily reek. Pedestrians wandered about, children with balloons tied to their wrists, young couples holding hands.
Deluski sat next to me busily scanning the names on the sign-in sheets into his newest anonymous phone. I watched the fountain, a circular pool surrounding a statue of four intertwined iguanas climbing for the sky. Even the natives wanted to escape this world.
Mota hung heavy in my thoughts. I knew I was going to have to kill him. Panama too. I reasoned it every which way, but there was no getting around the fact that it was them or me. The moment I first stepped into Chicho’s office, I put us on a collision course. Them or me.
I had to do them right. Not like when I went out to his house. Couldn’t let my nerves get the best of me. I had to be a pro.
The tricky part was getting away with it. But there was always a way.
Deluski elbowed me. “Got a hit.”
“What?”
“One of the names showed up in Wu and Froelich’s case files.”
“Who?”
“His name is Bronson Carew, age nineteen. He went to the police with a rape complaint.”
Rape. Interesting.
“His complaint was taken by Inspector Jeljili, but the case got passed to Wu and Froelich.”
“How could that be? Wu and Froelich worked Homicide, not Sex Crimes.”
“It doesn’t say.”
“When did this happen?”
“The day after the break-in at the Samusakas’.”
The timing nailed it. Too big a coincidence for him not to be Lizard-man. Your day of reckoning is coming, Bronson Carew. “Call Jeljili.”
He gave me a dark stare. “I just bought this phone.”
“It was compromised as soon as you logged into KOP. Mota could be tracking us already. We call Jeljili then dump it and go.”
“You’re buying the next one. Do you know Jeljili?”
“Yeah. I’ll talk.”
I waited while Deluski rang him up, my thoughts centered on the man who stole my hand. A rape victim. I didn’t feel sorry for him. I didn’t care how hurt he’d been. He could’ve been raped a thousand times, and I wouldn’t care. He didn’t have to kill Wu’s girls. He had to be punished.
Mota. Panama. Dr. Tranny. They all had to be punished.
Inspector Blake Jeljili’s holo appeared before the fountain, tailored suit hanging on a trim frame, young eyes and a thick shrub of hair. I almost laughed at how comically ancient this holo was. Must’ve been scanned twenty years ago, long before that shrub of hair lost most of its leaves. Before Jeljili’s waist tripled and his chin had twins.
Deluski passed me the phone.
“Jelly, this is Juno.”
“Juno? It’s been a while. Hey, I heard about your wife. Tough break.”
