The Future Is Japanese (24 page)

Goku gave him the gist.

“Oh, that one.” The lieutenant shook his head. “Jurisdictional nightmare. We voted it off the island. Something my father used to say,” he added in response to Goku’s puzzled look. “Case too small for you guys? Well, don’t worry—the minute Pretty Howitzer finds out I3’s interested, she’ll probably lie down and plead like she should’ve done in the first place.”

Goku decided against mentioning the contradictory information as to how it had come to him, at least for the moment. “Right now, I don’t give a shit one way or the other. I came to see how Konstantin’s doing.”

“No change from yesterday or the day before or any other day in the month since it happened,” Ogada said wearily. “I stop in two, three times a week, sit next to her, tell her I’m eating lunch, and suggest she lose some weight.”

“Why would you do that?” Goku asked, drawing back slightly.

“I figure that’ll get a rise out of her if nothing else will. So far—” He got up and put on his jacket. “No joy. We’ll get your name on the list, maybe you’ll have better luck. But not right now. You might as well come back to the precinct and question What’s-Her-Name Howitzer, she’s still in Holding. You guys got this case a lot faster than usual.”

“So I’ve heard,” Goku said.

Pretty Howitzer was a type that Goku privately classified as cute. He couldn’t decide how much Japanese there was in her lineage—more than a fourth, possibly more than a third, but certainly not more than half. The jailhouse lenses dulled her eyes a bit, but he could still see they were closer to gold than brown, and there was a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her turned-up nose. She was also very petite, more so than he had realized from her mug shots.

But the most striking thing about her at the moment was her relentless nail biting, which did nothing to undercut her blasé attitude. Someone had once told him that for some people, nail biting had nothing to do with anxiety—it was merely a neurological glitch, possibly a half-baked form of OCD or even Tourette’s. Pretty Howitzer made it look like self-indulgence; the longer she chewed on herself, the more relaxed she seemed, awkward as it was with the handcuffs.

Goku found it hard to watch, and there was nothing else in the small interrogation room to draw the eye. The observation window was camouflaged as bare wall, so there wasn’t even a mirror. Anyone with the slightest tendency to claustrophobia would have a rough time in this room. He remembered Konstantin’s partner, Taliaferro, who worked out of an office on the roof. Too long in here, Goku thought, and he might have to join him. Assuming Taliaferro was still getting away with it now that Konstantin was benched.

“So you’re the big bad I3 agent,” Pretty Howitzer said, removing her left index finger from her mouth briefly. “Thought you’d be taller. Or maybe it’s this room.” She dipped her head like she was afraid something would fall on it and looked from side to side. “Is it me or is this a goddamn shoebox?”

“It’s you,” Goku lied, mildly surprised at how confident he sounded. “Shit doesn’t get a whole lot deeper than this—well, not while you’re alive anyway. So if you feel like the walls are closing in, it’s because they are.”

Pretty Howitzer rolled her eyes. “If that’s a mixed metaphor, you’re not even trying.”

Several sharp retorts jockeyed for position in Goku’s mind, but what he heard himself say was, “Get your fingers out of your mouth.”

To his surprise, she obeyed. “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” The handcuffs rattled as she wiped her fingers on the front of her pink coverall. According to some expert, the color supposedly made prisoners feel physically and mentally less powerful. Pretty Howitzer looked like she was wearing a playsuit. “Most of the time, I don’t even know I’m doing it.”

“How do you cope in AR?” Goku asked. “Going without for hours must be real hard on you.”

“I don’t have to go without anything.” She looked down and to her left for a moment at something only she could see. Goku did likewise, but if her lenses were tapped, he wasn’t getting a copy. Civil service: he’d probably have to fill out eighty thousand forms in triplicate for a transcript. Which he could expect to receive in four to six weeks. “When they deregulated AR+, I sent a basket of flowers and a box of chocolates to my congresspeople,” Pretty Howitzer was saying. “And I can’t even vote.” Her upper body rose and fell with a deep sigh that was somehow both wistful and satisfied. “I don’t remember the last time I was stuck playing indoors.”

“Well, it’s the end of an era for you, Ms. Howitzer.” Goku leaned on the bare metal table between them and then was annoyed to find he had to pull his chair in farther. The legs shrieked on the floor, and he had to suppress the urge to pick the thing up and throw it across the room. “You don’t get AR or AR+ in prison. It’s just ground floor all day, every day, day in, day out. But the good news is, you can bite your nails whenever you feel like it. All the way down to your elbows, if you want.”

Pretty Howitzer wrinkled her cute little nose. “You talk like my grandfather. And that’s not a compliment. I hated that old f—”

“Get your fingers out of your mouth.”

She made a small, jerky movement, obeying reflexively before realizing she didn’t have her fingers in her mouth. “Hey!”

He grinned broadly without showing his teeth. “That why you’ve been picking on the old folks, because you hate your grandfather?”

“Oh, are you actually a head doctor? You gonna psychoanalyze me, figure out how I went bad? You want to put in some buttons, turn me good?” She wrinkled her nose again. “For. Get. It. Not giving up
my
free will, not for a hundred times what I took off that old bat. I’m pro choice all the way. I do whatever
I
choose to do, not because someone else controls me—”

“Get your fingers out of your mouth.”

Again, she started to obey before realizing she didn’t have to; he felt a surge of spiteful joy. “You fuckin’ cops,” she growled, infuriated. “Think you’re so genius—”

“I’m an Interpol 3 agent. I can show you my
credentials
,” he said, inflecting the last word carefully to trigger it.

She started to answer, then froze for half a second. Her eyes took on a brief faraway look before she closed them and moved her eyes from side to side a few times to dismiss the image he’d sent her. “If I want to see your fucking
credentials
, I’ll—oh, shit.” She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her thumbs against them.

Goku managed not to laugh. “That was your own fault. The way you said
credentials
.”

Again she stared distantly at nothing before she clapped her hands over her eyes. “Cut it out, asshole!” She knuckled her eye sockets.

“I’m sorry, that really
was
an accident,” he said, meaning it. “It’s a tone-of-voice trigger. If you can keep yourself from mocking me for at least two clock-minutes, it shouldn’t happen again. I don’t think. I don’t know what the system is here for jailhouse lenses.”

“Just proves my point.” Pretty Howitzer’s glare was slightly bloodshot. “Agent’s just a fancy name for cop and I3 agents are just
free-range
cops. You’re only interested in crimes in places you want to go so you can get a free paid vacation. Don’t give me that look. It’s true, everybody knows that about you
agents
.” Abruptly, she heard the way she’d said the last word and froze, looking dismayed. But
agents
wasn’t a trigger word. Today.

“I have to say, I’m gobsmacked.” He couldn’t help chuckling now. “That you would think
I
actually
want
to come
here
.”

“Gobsmacked?!” Pretty Howitzer threw back her head and hooted at the ceiling; the acoustic tiles swallowed her voice so quickly, she sounded almost staccato. The effect reminded Goku of a story he’d read long ago, about a man whose job involved cleaning leftover sounds out of empty rooms. Years later, he had started out in I3 doing something that he sometimes thought of as (vaguely, faintly) similar, just as a way to relieve (albeit very slightly) the stultifying tedium of surveillance.

“Do you ever hear yourself! ‘Oh, I
say
, old chap, I’m utterly
gob
smacked by the
whole bloody business
.’ What’s that accent about anyway?”

“What accent?”

“Oh,
veddy
funny, old chap,
veddy
, pip pip cheerio and all that rot! Come on, what’s with you?”

Goku couldn’t help laughing. “Nothing. What’s with you, besides too much vintage TV?”

“Hey,
I’m
not puttin’ on an accent.”

“Neither am I. I was born and raised in England.”

“Yeah? You do all that English stuff ? Boarding school? Uniforms? Cricket, rum, sodomy, and the lash?”

Is this the vanguard of a new, more educated offender?
he wondered, amused. “You’ll have lots of time to read about the lives of English schoolboys in the Mid-Atlantic Prison library.”

“
What?!
” Pretty Howitzer’s cute jaw dropped as she lost whatever cool she’d still had. “
No!
You
can’t
! I didn’t
kill
anybody, I didn’t use a
weapon
, I didn’t even make
threats
! I’m a
US citizen
, you
can’t
sink me, you
can’t
!”

“I can. And the US apparently thinks it would be a good idea since they signed off on it.”

Her eyes moved rapidly as she searched for a pop-up that Goku knew wouldn’t be on her lenses. “Show me!”

“Paperwork’s still on the way,” Goku said smoothly, unsure if that were true. “
Real
paper. Sinking anyone, even a totally unapologetic and unrepentant career criminal like yourself, is serious business. Has to be done with hardcopy.”

“Who says I’m not apologetic?” Pretty Howitzer sat up straight and folded her cuffed hands on the table. “I
said
I was sorry! I
always
say I’m sorry! Look it up, it’s on the record!”

Goku leaned one elbow on the table and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he were thinking hard and not hiding a grin.

“Besides,
I’m
as much a victim here as Auntie Emmy,” she added, looking down her nose at him, or trying to. She came off more like an insolent child than a high-mileage felon, which Goku suspected was how she had managed to go as long as she had without doing any serious time.

He filed that for later consideration, along with
Auntie Emmy
. “What do you mean,
you’re
a victim? You knowingly sold a trusting old woman an invisible bag of vapor—”

“
I
didn’t
knowingly
do anything! It was
supposed
to be the
real deal
!”

Now he did laugh, a loud, hard, sarcastic sound that had little humor in it and was gone quickly, without even a hint of echo. The effect bothered the fuck out of him, Goku thought irritably. “There’s nobody—that’s capital No, capital Body—who would believe for one second—that’s capital One, capital Second—that you really, sincerely believed—”

“Okay, so
you
don’t believe me, but I swear, so help me freakin’ gods of techno—”

“—one hundred percent genuine—”

“—only because I
knew
it was the real thing—”

“—out door, egress, exit, whatever con artists are calling it these days—”