Koko the Mighty (2 page)

Koko needs to keep Flynn’s mind occupied, so she takes one of his trembling hands and places it on the bloody towels.

“Here, firm and steady pressure. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

Koko quickly kisses the top of his sweaty head and then snaps her blood-slickened fingers. She points at the release specialist, the one in the gold lamé hot pants who cold-cocked the intruder just after she opened fire.

“Get that ugly bitch’s weapon and give it to me. Frisk her, check her pockets and inside her boots. Be thorough. I want everything she’s got. Identification, currency, that holster and belt she’s wearing, the works.”

The young man in the gold hot pants quickly kneels and does as Koko says. It takes some work to reach underneath the intruder, but he rummages through all of the woman’s pockets and finds only a single additional power clip for the weapon the intruder dropped when she fell to the floor. He pulls off both the woman’s boots. The boots are empty.

Koko wipes her fingers on her pink T-shirt. It’s a small challenge for her to get to her feet without using her cane, but when the young man hands over the intruder’s belt she lashes it around her hips. After pocketing the power clip in her camouflage shorts, Koko checks and sights the weapon. It’s an HK U-50. Naturally she’s handled one before, but at a formidable twelve hundred plus grams the weapon is definitely not a personal favorite. Setting the safety and seating the weapon in the belt’s holster, Koko then orders two other release specialists to retrieve a set of bug-out backpacks she’s stashed in the saloon’s kitchen.

“Look in the crawlspace next to the walk-in fridge,” she says. “You’ll see a huge green plastic bin labeled ‘Used Commode Parts.’ The backpacks are in there.”

The two release specialists move out on the double, and, not missing a beat, Koko instructs three more to bring the electric cargo ute around to the front of the building, as well as her terra-sled from the rear storage sheds. Koko looks down at Flynn.

“I hate to say this, baby, but you and me? It’s time to vamoose.”

“Vamoose?”

“Yeah, like, scram on the pronto.”

“What,
now
? Are you crazy? I’ve just been shot.”

“Doesn’t matter. An incident like this sort of voids our amnesty deal with the Custom Pleasure Bureau and The Sixty. Not only that, but we’re kind of being recorded right now too.”

Flynn’s head flops to the side. “What do you mean, we’re being recorded?”

“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before, but a few weeks ago I got a weird feeling so I executed a top to bottom sweep of our new building and the surrounding perimeter. I found at least a half-dozen camerascopes imbedded in our rooms and three more secreted away in the brush outside. Someone must’ve come in and set them up when we were off the islands looking for staff. I guess you were right not to trust The Sixty’s management team and CPB board of directors. Insisting we have biometric identifiers inserted in our skin and recording everything we do—after all that went down, I suppose they still want to keep an eye on us.”

“Sheesh, I’m your damn partner here, Koko. You could’ve said something.”

“Well, it’s not like I could disable the camerascopes or anything. Biometric identifiers and a few visual recorders—I figured, meh, maybe it was just better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Where?”

Koko looks up and gestures. “Right now there’s one fixed directly above us at twelve o’clock. Ceiling fan, dead center. You see the raised bolt? On it there’s a lens about the size of a pharaoh ant. I’m just guessing, but it probably takes in the whole bar area.”

A bead of sweat drips into Flynn’s eye. “Oh, man. I guess that means—”

“Someone else saw you bawling like a baby? Yeah.” Koko motions with her chin to the burly-looking intruder knocked out on the floor. “So tell me, do you recognize her?”

Flynn shifts a bit. “I can’t see her face.”

“Lift that gorilla’s head so Master Flynn here can give her a look.”

Another two release specialists scurry over and shovel palms under the unconscious woman’s forehead. When the intruder’s crew-cut head tilts back, Flynn scrutinizes her features and a pair of zonked-out eyes.

“Oh, no. It can’t be,” he says.

“What?” Koko asks.

Flynn swings back. “She’s one of the two bounty agents I saw back on
Alaungpaya.
She was in the terminal area right before we escaped the Second Free Zone.”

Koko bites her lower lip. “Hmm, I thought so.”

“She was with that redhead, the one with the neck extension bands. What the hell is she doing here?”

“Ruining our lives, apparently.”

Wiping her brow with her forearm, Koko turns to yet another one of her employees—a female release specialist—and whips off the silk belt cinching the girl’s kimono together. Koko lowers herself down and gets busy securing the wad of towels to Flynn’s thigh.

“But Portia Delacompte is dead,” Flynn says. “I was there, Koko, remember? We both were. How can a dead woman still have bounty hunters after us? It doesn’t make sense.”

Koko finishes tying off the dressing. There’s no time to explain, but the logic is starting to add up to her. When they were fleeing the lower atmospheric sky-barge
Alaungpaya
, it’s true: she did take out two of the bounty agents who were pursuing them via her ex-friend Portia Delacompte’s brutal elimination order. The first was a suspected former professional athlete she plugged in Flynn’s quarters, and the second was that dolled-up redhead with the neck rings she decapitated on
Alaungpaya
’s flight deck right before they hijacked the septic freighter. At the time of the second agent’s demise, Flynn advised Koko there were two operatives on their immediate six, so now Koko forces herself to replay the whole deadly sequence of events in her head; how after the redhead’s head slammed down the portal shaft, Koko heard the bellow of someone crying out below. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room for due diligence at the time, but her hunch is the unconscious woman who just shot Flynn is, in fact, the third bounty agent who was in the portal shaft. She must have survived the flight deck’s high altitude depressurization somehow.

“Listen,” Koko says, “all things being even it might be a matter of ego with this one, you know? If I were in her shoes I know unfinished business would have stuck in my craw. Back on
Alaungpaya
you told me there were two bounty agents on our immediate tail. For this one to survive an emergency depressurization at that altitude, I mean, I thought we were in the clear. What matters now is the payout on my elimination looks permanent.”

Flynn droops. Koko pats his arm.

“I’m sorry, sweetie.”

“Oh, sure. You’re sorry. Is that somehow supposed to make me feel better? Goddamn it, I really hate all this.”

“I know, getting shot really hurts.”

“No, not getting shot. I mean, that hurts, yeah, but I really hate all
this.
You and me, how when things start going good, everything just turns to shit.”

“Can you stand?”

“Did you miss my whole getting shot thing?”

“I’m serious, Flynn. You need to get up. We’ve a chance of getting out of here, but it’s a slim one at best.”

Flynn dabs at the blood-soaked towels secured with the kimono belt. Without being asked, several employees in the saloon rush over and, with some orchestration, get Flynn up on his feet. Somebody picks up Koko’s white walking cane and holds it out to her, but Koko waves it off. Even if she’s still recovering from the damages inflicted on her by Portia Delacompte, Koko is definitely of the mind that now is not the time to be relying on props.

Flynn hops and Koko drapes one of his clammy arms across her shoulders. The two release specialists Koko sent to retrieve the backpacks from the pantry return while, outside the saloon, the electric motoring sounds of the cargo ute and terra-sled draw near.

Flynn notices the backpacks. “What are those?”

Koko shifts Flynn’s weight against her body and discomfort twangs down her leg. “Bug-out packs,” she explains. “A few thousand credits, minimal rations, a couple of side arms, NBC-protective suits, potable water, stuff like that.” Together they limp around the fallen bounty agent. “Here, watch your step.”

Flynn looks over his shoulder. “Wait, we’re just going to leave her like that? But she could come after us. Shouldn’t we, like, do something?”

Koko stops. “Oh, so you want me to kill her, is that it?”

“Well, I know it sounds cold-blooded, but it seems sensible.”

“Sensible? Oh, really? Hmm, maybe you want me to bite out one of her eyes for good measure while I’m at it.”

“I didn’t say you had to go to extremes.”

Koko resumes dragging Flynn forward, adding sarcastically, “You know, I seem to recall a short time ago a certain somebody complaining about how I should turn over a new leaf. Gee, how did he put it? Broaden my emotional capacities? Embrace my softer, gentler side?”

“I was talking about with us. I mean—”

“You know what, Flynn? I don’t want to hear it. Not now. If SI Security is on their way here that bounty agent is their problem, not ours. They’ll deal with her. Priority one for us is to get good and gone.”

Flynn looks over his shoulder once more at the saloon’s main bar area and hesitates. Fleetingly Koko wonders if he’s stalling because he wants to take his chances with SI Security. Koko supposes she really can’t blame him for being freaked. Yeah, sure, he used to be a cop, but being hunted down on a dead woman’s orders, this sort of psycho scenario is in Koko’s wheelhouse, not his. As the traumatized saloon staff watch them leave, a few of the release specialists start to cry.

“What about them?” Flynn asks.

Koko knows who he means, but she keeps her mouth shut and her eyes fixed straight ahead. Before she met up with him in the Second Free Zone on
Alaungpaya
, Koko had fought her way out of a whole smorgasbord of hellacious situations and not once in all those times has looking back ever helped.

“They’ll be fine,” Koko says. “Somebody will take over this joint. I mean, all the work we’ve done getting the saloon ready and all the promotions? The whole operation is practically turn-key.”

She resumes getting Flynn out of the building with as little pain as possible. Passing through the batwings and making their way across the broad boards of the front porch, Koko fully expects to hear the hooting blares of SI Security sirens at any moment. Lightning flashes and after a deafening thunder crack, the savage downpour that had been threatening all afternoon cuts loose, and the straight-nailed monsoon rain sounds just like a round of applause.

Horace Britch is about to sink his teeth into a kebab of suckling boar meat when his shoulder’s epaulette mic warbles.

“Britch-3493? SI Security priority message. Please respond, over.”

Britch neglected to pick up napkins at the end of the buffet line, and grease drips down his arm in a warm rivulet.

“Britch-3493? Repeat, SI Security priority message. Please respond, over.”

Britch aims the kebab away from his body like a fencer’s foil. Sweating, he flattens his chin on his epaulette and keys the mic.

“This better be good,” Britch answers crustily. “I’ll have you know, I’m on dinner break.”

Dispatch is unsympathetic to his concerns.

“BOP event, Island Thirteen. Confirmed report involving unidentified female and a male resort manager, over.”

Britch flattens his chin on his epaulette again. “Oh, for the love of—a breach of peace call? What, somebody got punched in the snot-locker again?”

A long fizz of static and then, “Uh, that’s a negative.”

Britch kicks an empty bamboo
masu
box at his feet. With both hands he then lifts the kebab and quickly chomps down the meat lanced in between. Hand-seasoned with turmeric and basted with coconut water, the fatty pigskin snaps in his mouth with each bite and is so delicious Britch’s head actually starts to swoon.

As luck would have it, Britch is supervising officer for SI Security response that evening, and nearly everyone on The Sixty is throwing down big time on Island One. It’s The Sixty Islands’ weekly luau—an open-invitation, all-out bash publicized heavily by the CPB’s promotional and marketing departments. Counting the stuck-up vacationing patrons, the full-time SI employees, and the high-priced pyrotechnic entertainment (DJ Rajini Superwong and the Slavectors doing percussion duels, don’t you know), an eyeball estimate puts the luau crowd at nearly fourteen hundred and change. Most are scantily clad and nearly all are blitzed out of their minds on fortified rice liquor and God knows what-all. Between flame-spouting, caterpillar-tracked kulkul watchtowers, blade-juggling trapeze artists soar from catch bars as a tethered aerostat drifts overhead like a massive, gas-swollen dong. In the aerostat’s gondola, go-go dancers use hoses to disperse hallucinogenic rainbow-colored dyes over the crowds. The wilding masses below hail their approval and extend their tongues upward to catch a taste of the sweet narcotic mists.

All in all, The Sixty’s luau is an apotheosis of hedonism multiplied to the tenth power. If anything were to go wrong on the archipelago tonight, the sands of Island One are the odds-on favorite for ground zero. As Britch chews and swallows bite after bite, his beady eyes mirthlessly dart in their sockets. Eastward, past the flickering torches and garish massage tents, he can make out the smaller humps of The Sixty’s teen-numbered islands. More than a dozen kilometers away, the crepuscular contours look like the backs of dozing animals, and the storm front forecasted for that afternoon looks to have finally cut loose in their vicinity. It’s not raining just yet on Island One, but Britch can smell a charged fried-ion scent as a crimped vein of lightning marbles the darkening sky. The luau crowds cheer. Thunder rolls.

With almost two years’ tenure on the resort, Britch appreciates his position well enough and knows, given his morbidly obese liabilities, he’s damn fortunate to have it. Unlike most of his peers in SI Security, Britch didn’t come from a hardcore battle-tested soldiering or policing background. Initially, yes, he’d been bred in one of the collectives and applied for such training, desperately hoping for field work—all that squashing of the de-civ ilk and shoring up economic interests and such—but his practical test scores indicated he lacked a certain amoral fortitude to serve as an active duty solider or law enforcement officer. A squeamish washout the recruiters said. Though he marginally passed the physical examinations, the recruiters were adamant Britch needed to perform without mercy to be of value as a soldier or policeman. Three months of extensive virtual-reality training pretty much ferreted out his lack of brutal grit. Crushed, Britch protested and begged for another chance, but the recruiters told him no way. However, they did inform him he wasn’t completely worthless. While Britch didn’t have the coldblooded makeup to be a full-time policeman or soldier, his cognitive assessments demonstrated he’d prime attributes for administrative duties.