I took my bowl to a window table and sat down. I nibbled Gunk and sipped water, never taking my eyes off the bench where I’d stowed the Gizmo. It got boring after a while, but I stuck with it. This was a stakeout.
Could Lefty track my Gizmo? If he could, it’d give me an idea of how powerful he was. It would mean he had connections all the way to the top.
“Mind if I join you?” said a familiar voice behind me.
I jerked my head around to look.
Rudy. Shit. “Uh…” I said eloquently.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He seated himself and rested a Gunk bowl on the table. “As you can imagine, I have a few questions.”
“How did you find me?!”
“I tracked your Gizmo.”
“Yeah, but it’s way down there!” I pointed to the windows.
He looked out over the Arcade. “Yes, imagine my surprise when your Gizmo turned on in the middle of Arcade Square. That’s pretty careless. Doesn’t seem like you at all.”
He took a bite of Gunk. “So I figured you’d be watching from a safe distance. This is a nice, cheap buffet and a perfect vantage point. Wasn’t hard to work out.”
“Well, aren’t you Mr. Clever.” I stood. “I’ll just be on my way—”
“Sit down.”
“No, I don’t think I will.”
“Sit down, Jazz.” He shot me a look. “If you think I won’t tackle you here and now, think again. Eat your Gunk and let’s talk.”
I settled back into my seat. There was no way I could take Rudy in a fight. I tried once, back when I was seventeen and stupid as shit. It didn’t go well. The guy had muscles of iron. Magnificent, stallion-like muscles of iron. Did he work out? He had to, right? I wondered what he looked like working out. Would he be sweaty? Of course he’d be sweaty. It’d be all dripping down those muscles in rivulets of—
“I know you didn’t commit the murders,” he said.
I snapped back to reality. “Aww, I bet you say that to all the girls.”
He pointed to me with his spoon. “I know you blew up the Sanchez harvesters, though.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Do you expect me to believe the sabotage, the murders, and you hiding out are all unrelated?” He scooped a bite of Gunk from his bowl and ate it with perfect table manners. “You’re in the middle of all this, and I want to know what you know.”
“You know everything I know. You should work on the murders instead of the petty vendetta you’ve got against me.”
“I’m trying to save your life, Jazz.” He put his napkin on the table. “Do you have any idea who you antagonized with that sabotage?”
“Alleged sabotage,” I said.
“Do you know who owns Sanchez Aluminum?”
I shrugged. “Some Brazilian company.”
“They’re owned by O Palácio, Brazil’s largest and most powerful organized crime syndicate.”
I froze.
Shit, shit, shittity shit!
“I see,” I said. “Spiteful bunch, are they?”
“Yes. They’re the old-fashioned, ‘kill you to make a point’ kind of mafia.”
“Wait…no…that can’t be right. I’ve never even heard of these guys.”
“It’s possible—just possible—that I know more about organized crime in my city than you do.”
I put my forehead in my hands. “You’ve got to be shitting me. Why the hell does the Brazilian mob own a lunar aluminum company?! The aluminum industry’s in the toilet!”
“They’re not in it for the profits,” Rudy said. “They use Sanchez Aluminum to launder money. Artemisian slugs are an unregulated, largely untracked quasi-currency and the city has iffy identity verification at best. We’re a perfect haven for money laundering.”
“Oh God…”
“You have one thing going for you: They don’t have a strong presence here. This isn’t an ‘operation’ to O Palácio. It’s just an avenue for creative accounting. But it would seem they do have at least one enforcer on-site.”
“But…” I started. “Wait…let me think this through…”
He rested his hands on the table and waited politely.
“Okay,” I said. “Something doesn’t add up here. Did Trond know about O Palácio?”
Rudy sipped his water. “I’m sure he did. He was the kind of man who researched everything before making a move.”
“Then why did he knowingly fuck with a major crime syndicate to take over a failing industry?”
For the first time in my life, I saw confusion on Rudy’s face.
“Stumped, eh?” I said.
I glanced out at the Arcade and froze.
There was Lefty. Right next to the bench where I’d hidden my Gizmo.
I guess Rudy saw the color disappear from my face. “What?” he asked. He followed my gaze out the windows.
I shot him a glare. “That guy with his arm in a sling is the killer! How’d he know where my Gizmo is?”
“I don’t know—” Rudy began.
“You know what else organized crime does?” I said. “They bribe cops! How the fuck did that guy track my Gizmo, Rudy?!”
He held both hands out. “Don’t do anything rash—”
I did something rash. I flipped the table and hauled ass. Rudy would have to fight off a slowly tipping table before he could give chase.
I’d worked out my escape route in advance, of course. I ran straight across the casino floor and through an “Employees Only” door in the back. They were supposed to keep it locked but they never did. It led to the main delivery corridors that connected all the Aldrin casinos. I knew those tunnels well—I’d made hundreds of deliveries there. Rudy would never catch me.
One thing, though…he wasn’t chasing me.
I slid to a stop in the corridor and watched the door. I don’t know why—I guess I wasn’t thinking well. If Rudy had barged through I would have lost valuable running-like-hell time. But he didn’t.
“Huh,” I said.
I channeled my inner “dumbass in a horror movie” and walked back to the door. I opened it a crack and peeked through. No sign of Rudy, but a crowd had gathered near the buffet.
I slinked back through the casino and joined the crowd. They had good reason to gawk.
The window near our table was shattered. A few jagged spikes of glass stuck out from the frame. We don’t have safety glass here. Importing polyvinyl butyral is too expensive. So our windows are good old-fashioned neck-slicing deathtraps. Hey, if you want to play life safe, don’t live on the moon.
An American tourist in front of me nibbled on a Gunk bar and craned his neck to see over the crowd. (Only Americans wear Hawaiian shirts on the moon.)
“What happened?” I asked.
“Not sure,” he said. “Some guy kicked the window out and jumped through. It’s three stories to the ground. Think he’s dead?”
“Lunar gravity,” I reminded him.
“But it’s like thirty feet!”
“Lunar grav—never mind. Was the guy dressed in a Mountie uniform?”
“You mean bright-red clothes and a weird hat?”
“That’s the ceremonial uniform,” I said. “I mean a duty uniform. Light shirt, dark pants with a yellow stripe?”
“Oh, Han Solo pants. Yeah, he had those on.”
“Okay, thanks.” Pfft. Han Solo’s pants have a red stripe. And it’s not even a stripe—it’s a bunch of dashes. Some people have no education.
Rudy hadn’t chased me. He’d gone after Lefty. The Arcade-level entrance was three floors down and across a huge lobby. It would have taken at least two minutes for Rudy to get there by conventional means. I guess he’d picked a faster route.
I peered into the Arcade along with the other onlookers. Both Rudy and Lefty seemed to be long gone. Too bad—I would have loved to see Rudy beating the shit out of that bastard and cuffing him.
But I guessed this meant Rudy wasn’t part of a plot to kill me. And hey, now Lefty had Rudy to deal with. All in all, not a bad outcome.
Not that I was happy. I still didn’t know how Lefty found my Gizmo.
—
My hidey-hole on Bean Down 27 was barely okay for sleeping and too damned small for anything else.
So I sat on the floor in the corridor. On the rare occasions when I heard someone coming, I skittered into my hutch like the cockroach I am. But mostly, I had the hall to myself.