Authors: Warren Hammond
“Morning.”
I scratched my ear, the back of my neck.
“You okay?”
“Got eaten up last night.”
“Yepala?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“More.” I rolled over to face her. “Found too much. Listen to me, do not bring your sister to the offworld doctor.”
Her hand pulled away. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
“He’s a monster.”
“I’m not going to work for Chicho the rest of my life. And neither will my sister. We’re going to start our own house, and the doctor is our ticket to better days.”
I couldn’t let her do it. I made the decision right then. Had to blurt it out quickly before I went back on it. “Take my business.”
“What?”
“The protection racket. Take it.”
She sat up. “Is this a joke?”
“Tell your sister to quit, and the two of you run the business.”
She flicked on the light. I squinted at the brightness, her image a blur of hair and rouge and lipstick. “I can’t run a protection racket.”
“Why not?”
“Women don’t run protection rackets.”
“They’re not bouncers either.”
“You think I can face down Captain Mota?”
“I’ll take care of him.”
“What about the next Captain Mota? If KOP or a street gang wants to move in, how am I going to stop them? Sic my fifteen-year-old sister on them?”
“Throw my name at them. You need me to show up, I’ll show up, flex my muscles, but the business is yours. You run it. You keep the money.”
The corners of her heavily painted lips lifted, the beginnings of a smile. “You serious?”
* * *
I went to the gate and rang the bell.
“Yes?” came a voice from a speaker.
“I’m here to talk to Hudson Samusaka.”
“That won’t be possible, sir. Your face is on file, and it’s on our no-entry list.”
I sneered into the lens. “He’ll see me. You tell him I had a nice talk with his son Ang. Couldn’t shut the kid up.”
No response. Good. Meant he was checking with his boss. I leaned against the gate and waited.
Worked better than a fucking key. The gate buzzed, the voice telling me Miss Paulina would meet me at the door. Samusaka had to find out what I knew.
I pushed through. My eyes took in the well-lit grounds. The walkways branched and merged into a meandering network of stone paths. Manicured hedges and fountains; stone walls and wrought iron railings; the air scented by flowers. I headed for the main house, my shoes clacking on stone.
The door was open, Miss Paulina standing guard, arms crossed over a blue dress, eyes staring down the length of her nose. “You again?”
I came up the steps. “Where is he?”
“In the study.” She held out a hand like an usher.
“I know the way.” I breezed past her into the foyer, got a few steps down the hall before turning back to face her. “I’ll take a brandy. Make it a twenty-year.” I was off before she could respond. Might as well act the part from the get-go.
I moved down the hall, then through the study’s entrance. He sat at the desk, white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled up, eyes sharp like monitor claws. I strode to the desk and took the seat across from him. Opened with a bluff. “You’ve been a naughty boy.”
He bared teeth. “What did my son tell you?”
“Everything.” My face was straight like a piece of rebar. Time to beat him with it. “Kid found your dirty little secret right here in this study. He ransacked this room until he found it, then made it look like somebody broke in. Kid’s been naming his own allowance ever since.”
Color leaked from his cheeks and pooled into a flushing triangle between his collar points and under his Adam’s apple. “What do you want?”
Gotcha, asshole.
“Truth.”
“Or else?”
“Or your dirty secret doesn’t stay secret.”
His shoulders rode high, like every muscle in his body was tensed. “You want money?”
I shook my head. “I want answers.”
He threw up his hands. “Ask your damn questions.” Bluffed into folding. Game over.
I kept signs of victory off my rebar face. “You know your eldest son was murdered, don’t you?”
He stayed silent, giving me a big spoonful of that hostile glare. I knew his type. Controlling. Domineering. I knew how he’d treated his wife the last time I was here, making her stand a step behind him. Prick was used to treating people like property.
A knock came on the door. Miss Paulina entered, brandy snifter in hand. She carried the glass to me and silently hurried out.
I sucked in a sip, swished it around in my mouth, tongue wrapped in flavor and the tingle of alcohol. I swallowed it down and set the glass on his desk. One sip was enough. Gave me a perverse satisfaction to know the busybody housekeeper would have to pour the rest down the drain.
“Murder. Killer cut your son’s dick off.”
He didn’t flinch. “I know what happened to my son.”
“Why did the police report it as an OD?”
“They wanted to save our family from the embarrassment.”
“Telling the public your son doped himself to death isn’t embarrassing?”
His granite face didn’t budge.
“Detectives Wu and Froelich handled your son’s case, correct?”
He nodded that rock on top of his neck.
“How much did you pay them?”
“Enough.”
“You know they’re both dead. They suffered the same fate as your son.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Did you know them before your son’s murder?”
“No.”
“But they knew your son.”
“They did.”
“How?”
“They were business partners.”
“What kind of business?”
“I stayed out of my son’s affairs.”
These bare-minimum answers were pissing me off. Didn’t he realize he’d lost? I’d bluffed him into folding, and now it was time he paid up. I wanted to crank up the pressure, use my leverage, but I still had no idea what his youngest son had found in this room, what he was dangling over his father’s head, what had turned this take-charge alpha dad into a whipped cash register. I didn’t know.
He moved up in his chair. “Are we done?”
I screwed up my face. “No, we’re not fucking done. Your son was murdered, and I’m trying to catch his killer. Now why won’t you help me?”
“I’ve told you everything I know.” He pushed a button on his desk. “Paulina will see you out.”
I stayed where I was, my brain struggling to comprehend why this blackmail angle wasn’t scoring shit. If it worked for his son, why didn’t it work for me?
Her voice came from the door. “Right this way, sir.” She’d shown up fast. Too fast. Damn woman must’ve been eavesdropping again.
I couldn’t make sense of why he was shutting me out. I looked into his eyes, closed windows staring back. I gave it one more incredulous shot. “What the hell is your problem? You telling me you’d rather I go public with what I know than help me catch your son’s killer?”
The lights went out behind his closed-window eyes. “Good-bye, sir.”
twenty-four
D
ELUSKI
came strutting up, a small grin on his face. Kid was feeling pretty good about himself, finally pinning down that lizard. He could be a detective one day. A good one.
“Any luck with Samusaka?”
I fell into step alongside him. “No. He didn’t say anything useful.”
“Did you threaten to expose his kid’s blackmail scheme?”
“He still didn’t talk.”
We turned left, into the university campus: boxy concrete structures, moss-covered walls, and rusted window frames.
Deluski pointed straight ahead. “Biology department should be up there. He’s hiding something, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, and whatever it is, it must be bigger than what his kid has on him. He tried to buy me off, but when I wouldn’t bite, he just shut down.”
We crossed a footbridge—foul-smelling canal water running underneath—and veered right,
BIOLOGY
painted over a door. Inside, we took the stairs up two flights, then down a short hall and in through a glass door to a lab with cages and terrariums, and white-coated techs with goggles.
A young man stepped forward. “Can I help you?”
Deluski flashed his shield. “We want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“That would be Dr. Stark. Wait here. I’ll see if I can locate her.”
We stayed put, eyes scanning across the glass enclosures, where iguanas—and tuataras and geckos, skinks and chameleons—perched on dead branches, and salamanders parked on leaves. It was feeding time, a lab tech moving down the line, pouring beetles from a coffee can.
“I’m Dr. Stark,” said a tall, ponytailed woman with a horsey smile. “How can I help you?”
“We’re interested in your stripe-faced man-eaters.”
“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?”