Warren Hammond - Kop

We turned into a narrowing alley. On the left, we passed a window filled with fried fish wrapped in newspaper; on the right, skinned iguanas hanging on hooks. We took a left, to the river. At this point, the walkways were made of sandbags, three layers deep. Rank water lapped the sides of the sandbag bridge. Fish innards bobbed on the surface among iridescent swirls of oil. Planks ran from the sandbag bridge to a row of shops on stilts.

We emerged from the market. The river rolled in front of us. We hopped a skiff downriver. Maggie ate quietly. I ate with my left and made a damn mess.

Private Jimmy Bushong from Tenttown wasn’t first on the list of ten enlistees in Vlotsky’s unit, but he lived the closest to KOP station. I checked my watch. Jessie would be running the story on the news any minute. The military was about to be cover-their-ass alerted to Lieutenant Vlotsky’s death. They’d be snapped to attention and engaged in Operation Roundup That Unit. They didn’t like civvy cops and civvy reporters nosing around in their business. I hoped we’d be able to get to Bushong first.

We rode the skiff down one of the canals that ran into the Tenttown neighborhood. The water took on the familiar sewage smell that I remembered so vividly from my childhood. Women stood knee-deep washing clothes. Young children swam naked as youths hauled buckets of water for boiling.

My great-grandparents settled here in Tenttown along with countless other families that made the fourteen-year journey from Earth. They came lured by the promise of work. The brandy market was surging. The plantation owners needed labor, so they advertised all over Earth’s third world, and my great-grandparents answered the call, selling everything they had to buy their way here on a cargo freighter. They came for the high wages, the free housing, and the bright future.

But by the time they arrived, the brandy market had collapsed. Somebody had smuggled a pair of brandy tree saplings offplanet, and soon after, all the settled planets began raising their own fruit. Why pay extra to import Lagartan brandy when the local variety was just as good? Especially when it took anywhere from five to thirty years to ship it in from Lagarto?

In fact, the brandy market had already been dead for twenty years by the time my great-grandparents landed. The plantation owners had sent message to Earth that they didn’t need any more labor, but even at light speed, it still took ten years for the message to reach Earth, and by the time it was received, my great-grandparents were already four years into their journey. When they finally made landfall, they found that all but a few of the sprawling plantations had already reverted to jungle, and all the great riverboats had been sealed up and left to rust.

My great-grandparents were taken to Tenttown, nothing more than a succession of slashed and burned fields upon which do-gooders raised tents for the twenty-four-year stream of immigrants that landed after the economic crash. No jobs, no homes, no medicine, no food-welcome to Lagarto.

Jimmy Bushong’s address was listed simply as “Tenttown.” A half hour’s worth of asking around my old stomping grounds and we located him at a canal party. It didn’t matter that it was still early afternoon. As soon as the sun went down in Tenttown, the youth came out for good times. I checked out the four-piece band cranking out the tunes. I scoped the sweated-up dancers, barefoot in the mud, their whites rolled up to the knee. I took it all in: buckets of shine with enough tin cups to go around, eye-straining strobe lights, mud-coated topless chicks speaking in tongues. My heart swelled with teenaged memories.

We led Jimmy away from the party, to the canal’s edge, which was coated with slippery-wet moss. Reptilian eyes reflected from the water below. Maggie was silent. I took the lead. “You serve under Lieutenant Dmitri Vlotsky?”

“That’s right.” Jimmy was dressed in his whites. His pants were rolled up, exposing mud-caked bare feet. His sleeves were rolled to the shoulder, showing off his Army tats. He had a boy’s face with Army-cut hair. His eyes had been replaced with metallic night-vision implants. He was sipping from a tin cup, drinking shine. My mouth watered.

“Where were you last night?” I asked.

Jimmy said, “Right here. Why?”

“Lieutenant Vlotsky was murdered last night.”

“Murdered? Shit, you serious? Can’t say I’m surprised, but shit, that’s fucked up.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You gonna tell anybody I talked to you?”

“No.”

“Know what? I don’t care if you do tell anybody. My two years is up next month, that’s right, next month. It ain’t worth it to ’em to send me back out on patrol, so I’ll be workin’ a desk while the rest of the Two-Nine is goin’ back to the jungle. Not me, man. I tell you, I’m through with that jungle shit. I can’t wait ’til they pop out these night vision eyes and give me back my biologicals. As long as they didn’t lose ’em like they lost my cousin’s. He had to wait almost a year for them to get a new set grown ‘n’ flown from the Orbital. Say, man, you guys’re cops, you think I got a chance of landin’ a job like that? I’m not talkin’ no detective shit. I know you gotta be smart for that. I’m talkin’ phones, filin’, you know, ’ministrative shit. I did some of that in basic before they sent me out on patrol with the Two-Nine. I was the best they seen in a long time. Sorry to see me go. That’s what they told me.”

I threw the kid a bone. “I can put in a good word. You look me up when they let you out. KOP can use a smart and honest guy like you.”

“You serious? Yeah, you’re serious. Ha, ha, what’s your name again?”

“Just ask for Juno.”

“Juno. Okay. Thanks, man.”

“Why weren’t you surprised about Vlotsky?”

“Yeah right, the lieutenant. We all wanted to kill that asshole. I didn’t sign up for the shit he put us through.”

“What did he do?”

“You see, we was workin’ out of a base upriver, you know, jungle duty. We’d spend two weeks doin’ maneuvers, then one week on the base. Now these maneuvers was fucked up. They’d give us a truck. Four walk in front, four in back. Two guys take turns drivin’.”

We didn’t have time for this. The mils would be here soon. “What about Lieutenant Vlotsky? We just need to know about Vlotsky.”

Jimmy sounded insulted. “Shit. I know, man. You want to know about the lieutenant, but you got to have some background in order to understand; you see what I’m sayin’? I ain’t goin’ to waste your time. You’re goin’ to want to hear this.”

“Sorry. You’re right, Jimmy. Go ahead.”

“Now, when the rest of us are doin’ maneuvers, Vlotsky takes a bedroll, ties it to the top of the truck, and sleeps. You believe that shit? I’m talkin’ all day. I don’t know how he does it-these roads are rough. I couldn’t sleep like that. The truck’d get stuck in the mud all the time. We’d be shovelin’ out, and Lieutenant Vlotsky’d be up their snoozin’ away. Only time you see him’s when it rains, then he sits in the cab.”

Maggie Orzo asked, “What’s the purpose of these maneuvers?”

His metal eyes swiveled inhumanly. “That’s the kicker, man; there is no purpose. We ride around all day lookin’ for this hill, that creek-shit like that. Shit, this ain’t no real war. If it was, we’d be invadin’ and shit, but they never give us those kinds of orders. We could wipe them out inside a year, I guarantee it. Shit, they ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of farmers.”

“They’re drug lords, Jimmy,” Maggie emphasized the words drug lords like it proved something.

“Shit, I know that, but they ain’t so dangerous. There ain’t no money in brandy no more, so they growin’ poppies. So what? Who’s it hurtin’? They sell most of that O to offworlders anyway. It’s the politicians that make them out to be some kinda threat. You know they do that ’cause they just want to keep those offworlders sendin’ in that aid. Shit, man, they gettin’ rich off that money.”