Eye and Talon by K. W. Jeter Page A

seeing this guy before. He's some other cop, right?'
    Iris said nothing.
    The counter guy's gold-capped smile faded. He turned the photo toward his colleague. 'Remember him?'
    'Kinda.' Tilting his head to one side, to see the photo better, Francesco scratched at the hinge of his jaw. 'But he didn't come here. I mean, to our shop.' He straightened and pointed to another stall, visible several yards away through the milling crowd. 'He was over there. Asking something about a fish. I dunno what, though.'
    'That's right.' The lead counter guy nodded vigorously. He looked relieved. 'Go talk to the fish woman.'
    It turned out not to be a fish. At least, not that the cop named Deckard had been looking for. The tiny Asian woman at the artificial fish dealer's stall gave Iris a story about the man in the photo having come around with a scale in a tiny plastic evidence bag; she'd put the scale under her microscope, read off the serial numbers and species reference, and then had pointed him toward one of the storefronts where a fez-wearing, upmarket Arab type, who'd never come any closer to making his hegira than the average LA infidel, dealt in the larger herpetoids.
    'A snake?' Standing in the Arab's shop, Iris tucked the photo back into her jacket. 'He was asking about a snake ?'
    'Yes; he was.' The Arab dealer kept a handrolled cigarette, filled with ersatz and legal tobacco, cradled in the fingertips of his upsidedown hand. One corner of his lip curled with disdain. 'Very unpleasant enquiries they were, too. An ugly man; violent and cruel.'
    'That was his job,' said Iris. She didn't give a rat's ass about Deckard, but she didn't care for civilians slagging off on cops.
    'Nevertheless; if a police officer, he was a servant of the general population, not its master. An honest businessman such as myself naturally resents paying taxes and the expected schedule of bribery only to be abused by such a creature.' The Arab dealer took a deep drag off the faux cigarette, then contemplated the blue-gray cloud he expelled a moment later. 'I have heard tell,' he spoke meditatively, 'that the individual in question is dead. As the Prophet might have put it, payback is a bitch.'
    'The Prophet can stick it.' A bad mood rose inside Iris, like the polluted tide coming in over the oil-stained beaches to the west of the city. The Arab didn't irritate her so much as the sinking realization that she had come to a dead end, scrabbling around for leads here in the hotly fetid-scented marketplace.
    'You don't look well,' said the Arab, with no apparent concern.
    The man's cologne, star anise mixed with unnatural flowers, flared Iris's nostrils and left a sour taste on her tongue. As she watched him pick up a foot-long baby coral snake and adjust the action of its flickering tongue with a twelve-power jeweler's loupe and a hair-thin watchmaker's screwdriver, she felt the shop closing tighter against her shoulders, as though one of the artificial anacondas in back had managed to escape and wrap itself around the storefront, squeezing the air out of it.
    'No more questions?'
    Iris heard the amusement in the Arab's voice, so she didn't need to glance over her shoulder to see his oily smile. She pushed her way out of the shop and back onto the crowded, jostling sidewalk. The tinge of nausea she'd felt at the base of her stomach abated a little as she drew in a deep breath of the rain-scrubbed air.
    'You're wasting your time.' Another man's voice came from behind her.
    'Think I don't know that?' Iris hadn't recognized the voice; she turned to see whoever it was that had spoken.
    She didn't recognize his face, either. A nearly lipless smile slashed a horizontal line across the knife-sharp projection of his facial bones; the angular ridge of his nose and brow gave him as avid and predatory a look as the hawks inside the bird dealers' stall. He must have been waiting for her, out in the rain, for some time; his raven-black hair, cropped to a millimeter buzz, and the