Kop by Warren Hammond Page A

may be too late. It’s only a matter of time before Gilkyson ties me to the Bandurs. Shit, we’ve been allied with the Bandur cartel for twenty-five years. We worked hard at covering our tracks, Juno, but we’ve been sanctioning criminal activity for over
twenty-five years
. You can’t tell me they won’t find something.”
    “I can’t believe what you’re saying. Why haven’t you told me about this?”
    “I couldn’t do that to you. You’ve been working so hard on getting your life under control. I wanted to keep you out of it.”
    “But now you want me back in?”
    “I don’t want to drag you into this, but listen to me, Juno. You’re the only one I can trust. Since Mayor Samir started in heavy on this corruption bullshit, I’ve been trying to take him down, but nothing’s worked. Even my extortion scheme fell through.”
    I waved for another brandy. “What kind of extortion scheme?”
    “I put some of my most loyal cops on it. They started checking into Mayor Samir’s personal life. Turns out the mayor’s daughter is a real slut. ‘Sounds promising,’ I thought. We catch some vids of her poking every guy she meets and threaten to go public with them, and the mayor will lay off. We’ve been tailing her for a month, and we’ve got squat. All the sudden, her legs lock together at the knees. It’s like she’s a fucking nun. Somebody in the inner circle’s a rat.”
    I squeezed my glass. I was growing double angry—angry at a cop who was a rat and angry at myself for letting Paul down. Ferreting out rats used to be one of my specialties.
    Paul said, “So then I figured that if I can’t trust my own men, I’ll give Sasaki a crack at it, but somebody keeps ratting his plans, too. You know Sasaki; he does his best to run a tight ship, but that fucking Bandur kid is fucking worthless. Ram was always too soft on him. He’s too worried about his looks to do anything productive. When I told him that he’s got a rat in his organization, he listened, then asked me how he’d look with a more pronounced chin. I wish his father was still alive. Shit, they’re so worried about the Simba cartel moving in that they don’t care about the mayor anyway.”
    I tried to soak it all in. Mayor Samir was trying to take KOP away from Paul, and Paul thought the Vlotsky case was related. My stomach started to flop. I downed the brandy in my glass. The mayor was up on the bandstand now, dancing with his wife. They were hamming it up, twirling and dipping, taking full advantage of the photo op.
    Paul asked, “What have you got so far on the case?”
    Paul’s question took a minute to register. “We were going to look at an Army guy who has a record and a good motive. ButI don’t see how that could be related to the mayor. Do you want me to drop it and focus on the mayor?”
    “No. Work it like any other case. I need you to find out what happened in that alley. You work the case from the bottom up. I’ll work it from the mayor down. Hopefully we’ll meet in the middle.”
    “Can you get me in to see this Army guy? His name’s Jhuko Kapasi. The military has him under wraps.”
    “I’ll do what I can.”
    The place went quiet. The band had stopped playing, and the mayor had moved to the podium, throwing grins and waves at the audience. A hundred holographic replicas of the mayor floated over the tables of the people too far away to see his charming mug. Paul and I waited quietly as he spoke a few brief words of thanks then ticked through his political agenda. Straight through the mayor’s anticorruption stumping, Paul kept his true feelings hidden behind his public face.
    The crowd was still applauding when Paul said, “Are we square on this?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “But you have to get rid of Maggie. I work alone.”
    “No. I handpicked Maggie for this. Everybody knows how far back the two of us go. If we manage to nail Mayor Samir, we’ll need somebody with a good rep, somebody they can’t slander as a