OF MORE SIGNIFICANCE EVEN THAN THE information he had gleaned from the street nin was that Fredoso Hyaki was awake, alert, and had been shunted out of IC. Cardenas found him floating in a gel bath, looking for all the world like a paralyzed gerbil trapped in the middle of a giant pudding. While the medicated gel would slowly permeate his flesh and help his entire body to heal, its real job was to accelerate the regrowth of his normal epidermis beneath the filmy protective coating of artificial skin. It was cool, and soothing to the point where the injured sergeant looked almost comfortable.
Almost.
An attached web of tubes still cycled food and its afterproducts, though one positioned near his head provided ice water and fruit juice he could actually take by mouth. As Cardenas entered, Hyaki murmured a command and one of the feeders entered his mouth. The Inspector waited until his friend and partner had finished sipping before moving into the sergeant s field of vision.
"Always room for Jell-O, I see."
Prevented by subtle, flexible supports from slowly sinking to the bottom of the burn tank, Hyaki was still able to turn his head far enough to focus on the speaker. "I like it better with some fruit, though I guess if you're swimming in it instead of eating it, you're better off with the pure stuff." He smiled, though not as readily as usual. "I'll never look at the La Brea Tar Pits again with quite the same detachment." The smile faded. "What happened?"
"The Anderson residence was jig-timed. You ended up wearing a lot of it."
"Let me guess." The wide body stirred ever so slightly within the gelatin bath. "You intuited what was going to happen, and that's why you're still walking around flashing that hangdog grin of yours while I'm stuck in this bowl of antiseptic-flavored flan with the mother of all sunburns."
"Yeah, that's it," Cardenas shot back. "I like getting blown up so much I thought I'd wait until the last minute so I could get a good whiff of cordite." His expression turned serious. "You doing all right?"
Hyaki's expression reflected his distaste. "Two thousand three hundred and sixty-two channels, and not a damn thing worth watching. You find mother and daughter Anderson yet?"
"No, but I found out some other things." He proceeded to enlighten the sergeant on the results of his investigating. When he had finished, the big man started to nod, winced, and lay still.
"Sounds like the motivation was something more than your standard-issue case of domestic abuse."
"No mierde," the Inspector agreed. "If this mama Surtsey is as experienced at hiding from her husband as it would appear, she's not going to be easy to find. It's not hard to lose oneself in the Strip. Especially if you've got enough cred-and are frightened enough."
"She won't put the girl back in a soche. Not for a while, anyway. After the business with the house, they'll go even further underground than they were before." Hyaki went quiet for a moment. "I hope you find 'em before her ex-husband does."
Cardenas nodded gravely. He felt very strongly that if they did not, the discovery-recovery might prove even more disconcerting than it had been for a certain George Anderson-Brummel.
"I wish they'd let me out of here. I'd really like to help on this one." Hyaki flashed the wonderful faux Buddha smile that enchanted children and reassured women. "I don't hold anything against the mother and daughter. It was the house that did this to me-not them."
The Inspector leaned over the tank. "You're not going anywhere until you get your back back. I'll keep you posted." He turned to go.
"Hoy, Angel!" Cardenas looked back. "You know the worst thing about being stuck here like this?" The Inspector shook his head, and his partner explained mournfully, "I hate Jell-O."
It did not take a lot of crunch nor require the services of a box tunneler to access information on Cleator Mockerkin. There was more in the restricted macrolice file than Cardenas cared to know.
The man's present whereabouts were uncertain, although he was known to frequent residences in Greater Miami, Lala, Nawlins, and Harlingen. That was hardly surprising. A man like Mockerkin would have many enemies and no friends beyond those bought and paid for. By all accounts he was a thoroughly unpleasant character: his rap sheet comprised a copious and detailed catalog of antisoc activities ranging from petty theft as a subgrub to embezzlement, arson-for-hire, assault with and without a deadly weapon, extortion, sexual abuse, up to and including no less than three arrests for murder-one direct and two for hire. Although he had done three separate stints in stir, none had been for any of the significant felonies with which he had been charged.
Interestingly, he was also charged with illegal weapons procurement. This indictment stemmed from his involvement in the Paraguayan Rebellions of '69 and '71. Principally through numerous contacts in Central and South America, he had grown wealthy enough to buy off or dispose of his most serious rivals. Worse still, he was able to afford that bane of all hard-working, honest cops: lawyers whose courtroom skills were inversely proportional to their moral sense. If his sheet was to be believed, he should be in jail right now.
In addition to the long stat list, there were some vit clips. In the privacy of his office cubicle, Cardenas played them back over and over. In surveillance and courtroom recordings, they showed a tall, well-tanned individual slightly younger than the Inspector, with very blond hair cut short, a muscular upper torso, and a small, tight mouth that opened only to talk, never to smile or to frown or show expression of any kind. The courtroom vits were especially interesting. Mockerkin had one of those voices that was traditionally referred to as an "acid tongue." Even his casual asides to his lawyers or supporters were tinged with venom. Surprisingly literate, his performance on the stand was characterized by a highly developed sense of sarcasm that would have done justice to a right-wing political pundit. The source of his sobriquet, among law enforcement and underworld representatives alike, was instantly apparent.
In the course of his career Cardenas had personally made the acquaintance of more than one skew-level antisoc. There was Little Napoleon, and Tipo Repo. There was Fregado Freddy and Azina the Legs, Marianne Molto and Johnni Half-Face, The Zipper and Gordo Carlos. To this long litany of antisocs could now be added Cleator Mockerkin-alias The Mocker. The Mock, for convenience. It suited the man, the Inspector decided as he reran the vit file. An antisoc as personally unpleasant as he was successful, and dangerously smart. Not the sort of individual you would want to cross. In running off with his woman, his daughter, and his money, his former associate Wayne Brummel had shown considerable huevos.
Or exceptional stupidity.
How much of it had been Brummel-Anderson's idea, Cardenas wondered, and how much Surtsey Anderson-Mockerkin's? Successfully eluding the attention of someone like Mockerkin would take time and planning. By all accounts, Mockerkin's ex-wife was sufficiently attractive, and clever, to have carried off the flight without help. Had she wanted a little extra protection around, for herself and her daughter, or had she really been in love with the unfortunate Brummel? There were only two people who could answer that question. One of them was dead, vacced and drac'd, and the other was on a serioso waft.
Avoiding The Mock's skills and reach would likely entail a good deal of moving around. Cardenas suspected that if he checked the Assessor's records, he would find that the Anderson family had not occupied their recently annihilated habitation for very long. How long, exactly, the three of them had been on the run he did not yet know. But he would find out. Doubtless their change of residence coincided with a corresponding alteration of identity.
One thing he was able to infer, if not technically intuit, from the available information was the nature of the deceased Anderson-Brummel's occupation. He was a promoter, all right. He had promoted himself into Surtsey Mockerkin's confidence, promoted himself into The Mock's missing money, and promoted himself into at least half a dozen illicit meat banks in this segment of the Strip, where his assorted hastily appropriated body parts would fetch a good price. His death would not be enough to satisfy someone like Mockerkin, Cardenas knew. The Mock would not be content until the absent components of his runaway family were returned to him. In that event, Katla Mockerkin would probably survive unharmed. Physically, anyway.
The Inspector did not dwell on what such a resolution might mean for Surtsey Mockerkin. He had dealt with too many men like Cleator Mockerkin to hold any illusions about how they treated women who betrayed them. The Namerican Federal Police needed to find her, and her daughter, fast, before they were run down by The Mock's minions. It was too bad, he reflected, that those as yet unknown and unidentified individuals had not entered the abandoned Anderson house ahead of himself and Hyaki.
Now mother and daughter were on the run again. Presumably by themselves this time. He doubted someone as adroit as Surtsey Mockerkin would let more than one outsider into her confidence. With their male buffer gone, she would have to do everything by herself. As for Katla, in addition to those talents Cardenas had already learned she possessed, he now added the quality of resilience.
As he was pondering the shimmering depths of the box tunnel hovering over the far side of his desk, a note popped up in the lower right-hand corner. The Captain wanted to see him. Cardenas smiled inwardly. Very little got past Pangborn. The higher-profile the case, the more the Inspector's superior's ass itched. If he was following this one, Cardenas knew he must be scratching like mad.
He saved the augmented macrolice, shut down the vit, and headed upstairs.
Shaun Pangborn had an office. Not a cubicle, not a subdiv sec of multiuse floor: a real office. From its location on the next-to-the-top floor of the Federal Police Headquarters, Nogales Division (the top floor being armored and reserved for ballistics and rapid-reaction deployment via chopter and vertiprop), a visitor could see halfway across the Strip, past office towers and green-garbed codos, past humming maquiladoras and malls, and dream of the distant cool waters of the Golfo California.
The Inspector settled into a chair opposite. He liked Pangborn, and the Captain liked him. They had a lot in common besides age and experience. For one thing, neither was wholly original. Both men sported replacement parts: Cardenas his eyes, Pangborn part of an ear-and other more sensitive areas everyone knew about but were careful not to allude to in his presence. They were senior federales, with a shared sense of right, wrong, and what maybe perhaps possibly sometimes could be done about it.
Neither, however, was an innocent. They knew they could not eliminate evil, only mitigate it. In the Strip, sometimes that was enough.
"Got a traba-job for you, Angel." Pangborn was studying a heads-up suspended to his right. From where he was sitting, Cardenas could not make out the details. "Over in Sanjuana. Branch of Macrovendi EU, Milan-you know that outfit?-is screaming because somebody's spazzing half their new mollyspheres before they can be inserted in their new senseware. Since their organic burrowers have come up with nothing, they've come hat in hand begging the help of the lowly federales." He waved a hand through the heads-up, temporarily distorting the carefully collated aura. "I thought maybe you'd like a few days at the beach. Do a little burrowing for Macrovendi, locus their compromise, issue a couple of warrants. The Department can always use some good PR."
Cardenas smiled diffidently. "If it's all the same to you, Shaun, I'd just as soon stay here and follow through on what I'm working on right now."
Frowning, Pangborn ablaed the heads-up away. In response to his verbal command, the informational wraith vanished from above the desk. "Chinga, Angel. Half the people in the Department know about the Macrovendi assignment, and for the last couple of days it seems like every one of them has been kissing my nacha trying to get it." He gestured expansively. "I offer it to you on a plate, and you come back at me with a no-thanks."
Cardenas shrugged. He could be as parsimonious with words as with his salary.
"That's neither answer nor explanation." Irritated, Pangborn summoned forth the heads-up on the other side of the desk. Commanding it, he examined the results intently, squinting at the display. After a couple of minutes, with the call-up still occupying virtual space on the side of his desk, he turned back to his visitor.
"Tell me, Angel: what's so special about this affair? I grant you there are some interesting characters involved, but the details suggest that the explanations are rote. Wife runs off with a big chunk of the husband's money, one of his partners, and their kid." He glanced briefly back at the heads-up. "Sure, given his record, it'd be a nice little coup to pin some pintatime on this Mockerkin culo. But this is scut work and track, follow-up and simple addition. Any junior officer can handle it."
"There's a homicide involved," Cardenas pointed out.
Pangborn rolled his eyes. "Ordinary revenge killing. Nothing out of the ordinary. From the particulars on the deceased Anderson-Brummel, I doubt that soche-at-grande has suffered any great loss. Let somebody else handle it. Go to Sanjuana, take a week burrowing for Macrovendi, spend some time on the beach miraing the chicas." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "There's room in Accounting for a little drift. I think we can get you into the Coronado. As for this standard-issue sorryness"-he indicated the read-only that gleamed within the heads-up-"I'll put Gonzalez or Rutland on it."
Cardenas did not like to argue with Pangborn. The Captain was one of the very few in the Department who could almost understand what it was like to be an intuit. Almost.
"I really want to see this case through to conclusion, Shaun. As Senior Inspector, I can cogit some fluence."
Pangborn looked sad. "I guess it's true what happens when people start to get old. They suffer these attacks of dementia; mild at first, slowly evolving into episodes of insanity that eventually start to opaque their thinking." He sat back in his chair, which sighed appreciatively. "Either that, or you're being more than typically pig-headed. But then, you know that I'm just slagging you, and that I'm going to let you swim in your chosen slime. Don't you?"
Cardenas grinned. "Of course I do." And he was not lying.
When Pangborn rose, the Inspector stood with him. The two senior officers walked to the door of the Captain's office. "After thirty years on the force there are two things I've learned." Pangborn fingered his artificial ear, the one whose prosthetic did not properly match the original cartilage. "Don't try to talk sense to someone who's spizzing on sparkle, and never play poker with an intuit." He rested a hand on the Inspector's shoulder. "Do me a favor, will you? Wind this up as fast as you can and try not to get vaped in the process."
Cardenas advanced far enough for the door to respond to his presence, identify him, and open. "I'll try. Dying always complicates an investigation."
"Not to mention the added paperwork." Pangborn dismissed him with a wave of mock annoyance. "I'll send Gonzalez to Sanjuana. He can sneak his new bride along. Put them up at the Coronado for a few days, and he'll raise an icon to me." His tone grew more somber. "Watch yourself, Angel. I'm not concerned about the usual rent-a-cutioner. But my read on this Mockerkin is-cautionary."
"Same here. Thanks, Shaun."
Cardenas felt no sense of triumph as he departed the division Captain's office. Only quiet satisfaction that he was going to be allowed to continue with the assignment he had set for himself. He felt he owed it to Hyaki. He felt he needed it for himself. And for some reason as yet undetermined, he felt he owed it to someone he had yet to meet.
A twelve-year-old girl named Katla Mockerkin.
The more he learned about The Mock, the less he liked the man. What available information there was had to be scrounged from the depths of the central Namerican macrolice box. There was next to nothing in the popular media. Clearly, Cleator Mockerkin was one of those insidiously intelligent antisocs who neither needed nor wanted his picture flashed on the evening cast, prizing anonymity alongside power.
And power he had. Over the course of the next couple of days, Cardenas tied fiscal links to The Mock that crossed half a hundred boxlines girdling the globe. In addition to dealing in illegal weaponry on an impressive scale, Mockerkin drew revenue from trade in banned designer pharmaceuticals, siphoned crunch, endangered species (foodstuffs as well as the illegal pet business), and prohibited wafers and mollys. This income was supplemented with money from more mundane activities like extortion and kidnapping. None of it was kosh, all of it was stylishly laundered, and there was enough of it floating around to tempt even a knowledgeable subordinate who should have known better like the late Wayne Brummel.
A meticulously diversified feleon was The Mock. A real verdad nasty-ass chingaroon. If his disciples caught up with the fleeing Surtsey and Katla before the authorities did, Cardenas knew the upshot would not be acrimonious debate followed by a succession of mutually agreed-upon visits to a marriage counselor. About the daughter he could not surmise, but he seriously doubted that Surtsey Mockerkin was getting much sleep these days.
Following long hours spent staring at info, he relaxed by striding the streets of the Strip at night, his dark eyes flicking from side to side and taking everything in as he walked off the energy that built up during the day. He paid little attention to the gaudy displays, the glittering municipal art works, or the persistent adverts. People were what interested him; the bustling inhabitants of the Strip in all their manifold musky ethnicity, a potpourri of colors, sizes, and shapes. In this, the commercial center of the western hemisphere, a casual listener could snak yakk of several dozen languages and dialects, from Azeri to Zulu, in addition to the predominating Spanish and English. Underlying it all, like a set of conversational box springs, was the provincial patois of the Strip-the jumpy, jerky hybrid argot known as Spang, for English-Spanish slang.
Cardenas could volubate with the best of them. His fluency was a frequent surprise to the ninlocos and algaeaters he often had to deal with. What he could not inflect, he inferred-one of the benefits of being an intuit.
Why hadn't he taken Pangborn up on his offer? He was as fond of Sanjuana's beaches as the next indigene. The Captain had been perfectly correct that the business of the puzzling Anderson-Brummel-Mockerkin axis could be dealt with by junior inspectors. Was Cardenas, after all, the secret masochist that some of his younger colleagues suspected? It wasn't as if he was angling for a promotion. In the last five years he'd turned down half a dozen higher-paying (and far less risky) admin posts.
Seguro sure, he loved the Strip, with its noise and flair and surprises and the constant, never-ending action that was missing from his own life. But that was not explanation enough. Nor was his lack of a stable home life, although his recent relationship with the Gen-Dyne designer Hypatia Spango had lasted longer than most. Maybe it was because he lavished the love he carried around like carefully guarded baggage on kids like Wormy G and Bac-a-ran and, most recently, Wild Whoh. They were his family. Where most federales gave out only citations, Angel Cardenas also dispensed hope. There were subgrubs and nins and orphanos out there he hadn't even met yet, and all of them doubtless deserving of salvation.
It was not only possible, but highly probable, that Katla Mockerkin was one of them, and he knew full well that any junior inspectors assigned to the case were unlikely to dispense their actions in light of that distinct possibility. Cardenas did not have to intuit the girl to know that she was worth protecting. He needed only to know that she was a seemingly normal twelve-year-old who had the misfortune to find herself caught between a duplicitous if protective mother and a corrupt, intimidating father.
Beyond The Mock's inner circle and the Namerican Federal Police, he did not expect anyone to be much interested in, far less know of, the circumstances surrounding Surtsey and Katla Mockerkin's frantic flight from the peaceful surrounds of Olmec inurb. So he was more than a little surprised when, finishing his dinner on the patio of the Tchere-cheri Restaurant down the street from his codo, he was approached by a tottering masque in human form from which issued the whispery phrase, "Follow me, si see, fedoco, if you'd still like to dock The Mock." The gaunt figure did not stop, but continued to lurch down the pedestrian street like some psychotic scarecrow fled in secret from its farm of birth.
The fluid outlines of the morphmasque rippled with every step the camouflaged figure took. Hastily settling his bill, Cardenas followed in its wake. Without a clear view of the masque's owner, he could not even be certain if it was a man or woman who shambled along beneath the ever-shifting veil. When it turned down an alley lit only by the diffuse glow from the remaining phototropic paint that covered the surrounding walls, the Inspector hesitated. It was difficult enough to try and intuit the intentions of someone cloaked by a masque without the added burden of trying to do so in the dark.
But whoever was stumbling along beneath the fabric facade knew of his interest in Cleator Mockerkin. As that interest was something less than common knowledge, Cardenas was quietly burning to learn how his unseen guide had become aware of it. Also, it had, or claimed to have, information. Trailing the figure deeper into the alley, the Inspector let one hand cradle the frac he always carried in his righthand pants pocket. It was capable of stunning a small mob; he did not doubt its ability to incapacitate one wandering masque, no matter how spizzed its owner might happen to be.
Near the end of the passage, the figure turned. Its appearance was now that of a tall, handsome young man. The scene was so quiet you could hear the condensation drip from the arterial network of conduits that served the buildings' air-conditioning systems. No water actually reached the ground, of course. Within the Strip, casual evaporation of recyclable water resources was a crime punishable, if not by law, then by the severe opprobrium of one's neighbors.
The morphmasque suddenly flared, and the image of a young man turned into that of a slender middle-aged woman. The Inspector's fingers tightened around the frac. But the display was a prelude to dialogue, not a threat. For a moment, Cardenas was afraid he had been lured sideways simply to view some adverts. If so, he had to admire the masquer's gall.
No, that couldn't be right, he told himself. The unseen wanderer knew of his interest in The Mock.
"You going to talk, compadre, or just flash me?"
The owner of the masque shuddered slightly, though whether from the effects of sparkle, degeneration, or laughter, Cardenas could not intuit. Young man became middle-aged woman became teenage ninloco became white-robed saint as multiple identities morphed rapidly before the Inspector's eyes. Having watched morphmasquing in action before, he had only a cursory interest in the process of shell-shifting. "You want to dock The Mock. The Turtle heard."
At least now it had a name, the Inspector reflected. "How do you know that?"
Continuously reinventing themselves, lights and landscapes undulated across the masque; the inverse of camouflage. The unseen owner became a street light, a postbox, a charging station and an altar, and, perhaps most tellingly, a garbage bin. "When you turn tortuga, you learn how to listen. I hear things on the backStrip, I do." The quavering voice grew louder. "Things they say, 'That intuit who's straight, he wants to know about The Mock's woman.'" Cardenas tensed slightly. "Your rep precedes you, fedoco."
The Inspector ignored the compliment. "What do you know about Surtsey and Katla Mockerkin? Are they all right? Are they still in the Strip?"
The masque became a flickering bipedal pillar of crackling lights and spinning optos. "It's caramba time, fedoco. Tiempo tempo. Time for all turtles to find a hole to crawl into and be very still." The trembling intensified. That reaction Cardenas could interpret: this would-be informer was scared. Scared bad, right down to the bottom of his masque's swaddling skirt.
"I won't involve you. What do you want?"
"For the sequence? Nada, homber. But The Turtle has suffered too much tampo tiempo. Too much time in jail." The figure morphed into a quite detailed image of a narrow, barred cell. "Next time I'm in dock, maybe I call on my good compadre Cardenas the intuit, and they cut me a crease, you know so?" Again the serious shudder. "In Rehab they take away your shell!"
Trying to envision what lay beneath the morphmasque, Cardenas realized he still could not tell if the speaker was male or female. "You can always find me through the NFP box. I never forget a friend." He moved a little closer until the masque, now presenting the likeness of a small horse standing on its hind legs, flailed warningly with its front feet and flared a nervous red. "What about The Mock's family?"
"There's yakk on the backStrip." Beneath the masque, something shrugged. It might have been a shoulder. "You need to visit a certain infomaniac." The voice fell slightly. "You sabe Mocceca's Mall?"
Cardenas nodded. "I know where it is."
"In the back back past the bake rack. Talk to the Indian2. He'll know." Turning, the ungainly figure abruptly bolted from the alley.
"Wait!" The Inspector hurried after him. "One more question!"
He slowed when he reached the street. A few curious pedestrians glanced in his direction. Their stares did not linger. Cardenas was not in uniform. In the absence of NFP turquoise blue, he was not readily identifiable as an officer of the law. That meant he could be an officer of something else, so citizens did not stare. At night, even in well-traveled parts of the Strip, a lingering gaze was not a prudent accoutrement.
Of The Turtle, there was no sign. It might already have crossed the street, or entered a nearby building. Or he/she could be standing a foot or two away from Cardenas. The morphmasque would allow its denizen to blend in indistinguishably with its surroundings. A morph was not as sophisticated as an al-Levi military chameleon suit, but in an urban environment, it was effective enough.
He checked his ident. It was still early, although the time mattered only to him. Playplaces like Mocceca's stayed open 24/7, and no time off for good behavior. As he headed north, in the direction of the nearest public induction tube, he found himself pondering the identity of the individual who had been identified to him by The Turtle. Cardenas knew plenty of Indians. But an Indian "squared"? That was an ethnic description that was new to him. Did the designation refer to the indicated individual's shape, or his mind-set?
Damn morphmasque, he muttered to himself as he lengthened his stride. You couldn't intuit through the damn thing, any more than you could see through a turtle's shell. Which, of course, was the intent of both kinds of animals.