Nikki takes a static over to Scobee, which is deep in the heart of Julio’s turf. It’s as she walks past one of the bars he runs that she realises there was an upside to having Jessica hanging around her like a fart in zero-g, which is that the girl was effectively a human shield. Long as Nikki showed up somewhere with a conspicuous FNG dork by her side, it immediately let people know she was here on some kind of official business, and not anything they needed to draw their weapons for.
Julio Martinez and his crew started off running protection in Scobee’s entertainment district, which was a burgeoning competitor to Mullane at the time. They had a limited line on a supply of rum and tequila which they marketed via a strategy patented in Chicago circa 1929, in that Julio’s thugs broke your place up if you didn’t stock his booze.
Julio tried expanding into Mullane a few years back, sending his boys in to start fights. Sometimes they escalated into wreckage, but even when they didn’t, they succeeded in his intention of damaging a place’s reputation. People wanted to unwind and have a good time, and if they couldn’t do that safely without worrying that they might end up collateral damage in a brawl, or busted up by some psycho for looking at him wrong, they would stay away.
That was when Nikki stepped in. Essentially she undercut Julio’s protection rates, and thus nurtured a mutually beneficial partnership with Yoram Ben Haim. Nikki, with a badge and Seguridad backup on her side, ran Julio’s assholes out of town, leaving Yoram with a near monopoly of supplying contraband drink and other illicit commodities.
Mullane thrived due to the security and stability it enjoyed, rapidly outgrowing Scobee, which became synonymous with lone-drinker dive bars and home-stilled gut-rot. The price of this success was that Yoram couldn’t keep up with demand, leaving the door open for other suppliers to make inroads into the market. Guys like Lo-Jack can’t afford to run low, so they buy from whoever is selling, and it’s something of a sacred code among Seedee’s bar owners that they don’t tell suppliers who else they’re buying from. If you want them to take your goods, you have to give them something worth buying and you need to give them it on better terms than your competitors.
These days, one of those competitors is Julio. He retreated to lick his wounds but he never went away. Julio got himself into the import business somehow, with a line on primo tequila. At first people were suspicious, reckoning he was distilling his own stuff and decanting it into old bottles. With the ability to easily fabricate the kit, and a million hidden nooks to set up in, lots of people up here have a crack at brewing their own liquor, but it generally tastes like shit. Even the more accomplished and official attempts at vodkas, gins and tequila taste rough or artificial, which adds to the desirability—and consequent dollar value—attached to genuine imports.
But though Julio’s people are known to recycle the bottles—indeed are protective and fastidious about it—what is inside them has been repeatedly proven to be exactly what it says on the label: the real McCoy, one might even describe it. Not just Jose Cuervo either: AsomBroso, Milagro Unico, Casa Dragones and of course, Don Julio Real. Julio is supplying them all, and for the life of them neither Nikki, Yoram, nor anybody else has been able to work out how he is bringing it in.
Julio was never going to settle for just one slice of the market though, which is why Yoram was already getting edgy even before that major shipment went missing. Tension has been rising steeply between the two factions, so the business that went down at Dock Nine is likely to have both sides on a war footing.
Nikki checks her arsenal as she comes up the stairs on to Seddon Street. She’s got her standard-issue Seguridad “stopper and sticker” load-out: an electro-pulse blackjack and a resin gun. She’s also packing a flechette pistol, which is definitely not standard issue, but nor is it going to do her any good down here, where trouble is most likely to be at close quarters. Those things can cut you up, but they’re never going to stop anybody. Well, apart from Kobra, but that was out of the ordinary. Dart had to have been tipped with a rapid-action sedative, like in the micro-capsules fired by “goodnight guns,” the suppression rifles the Seguridad keep in case of riot.
Nikki heads for Ludus, a boxing gym that she’s heard Omega liked to frequent. She wants to get the view from Julio’s camp while she doesn’t have Jessica present to hear the wider context. Nikki doesn’t know whether any of Omega’s circle will be here, but she’s confident she’ll be able to threaten or bribe someone who can tell her where to find them.
The place is ringing with thumps and clangs and echoes, a low-ceilinged chamber that looks larger because of the mirrors along two walls. There are two guys sparring in the ring, stop-start stuff, a trainer coaching specific moves. Close by she sees a woman hitting combinations, one-two, one-one-two, sweat flying off taut muscles as she pounds the pads being held up by a dude twice her weight. People are working speedballs and heavy bags, so intent upon what they’re doing that Nikki’s entrance barely merits the briefest glance.
She feels a pang of guilt, thinking of how long it’s been since she worked up a sweat with her clothes on. Then she realises it’s only a dormant reflex. She used to feel bad any time she saw someone working on their fitness, but eventually it wore off. She’s past the stage of worrying she ought to be in better shape. Now it’s more like she’s feeling bad about how long it’s been since she even felt bad about it. Meta-guilt.
She’s got the build of a skinny drinker these days: someone who doesn’t mind missing a meal if there’s good liquor to be had instead. Or even not-so-good liquor. Fuck it, Qola too if it’s all that’s on offer. When it comes to getting down and dirty, she’s still got the moves when she needs them, but she’s not as strong or as fast as she used to be.
She flashes on a time when she was strong and fast, the tired-limb feeling she used to luxuriate in when she had pushed herself to the limit. The memory instantly makes her feel blue. Where did that come from?
Had to be the smells in here: a warm fug of sweat, leather and muscle rub, taking her back to a place where she used to lose herself in pumping the weights and pummelling the bags until the salt sweat was stinging her eyes. Back in Venice. Back in LA. Back when she was a real cop.
She hates the way that shit can simply pop into her head, unbidden. She wishes she could stop it, put a seal on it.
She knows there are options. She had the mesh implant way back, and though they don’t publicise it, the technology doesn’t only allow them to add memory data, but to take it away also. The latter is in the pilot stage, far less advanced and far less sought-after, but she knows people who have had it done, such as Liberty, one of the hookers she looks after.
Like many workers on Seedee, Liberty came up here to get away from something terrible, only to realise she had brought it with her in her head. In desperation, she signed up for the pioneering procedure of having a specific memory erased. It worked, but Nikki isn’t sold on it.
“I don’t get the nightmares any more,” Liberty told her. “I’m not scared all the time. But I have this emptiness, this hole in my mind that I can almost touch. I still feel the same sadness but I can’t remember why.”
Nikki’s not sure whether that might be worse. Her memories eat away at her, attacking without warning and laying a siege that only an oblivion of drink, sex and sometimes violence can lift. But she also knows there’s a part of her that needs her pain.
Nikki casts an eye around the machinery, the glistening limbs and straining faces. She’s got lucky. Sol Freitas is locked into a gyroscopic weight-resistance machine, knocking out reps with those powerful arms of his. He’s in the moment, totally focused, mind elsewhere.
She approaches from the side so that he doesn’t see her until it’s too late. He can’t even begin to disengage from the locking mechanism before she has placed one hand on the modulator, the other guarding the safety override.
His eyes bulge upon recognising her, a shake of the head from Nikki warning him not to move. He knows that if she ratchets up the frequency on this thing, it could rip even his arms out of their sockets.
She senses movement from behind and in a twinkling drops her hand from the safety and seizes the jizz cannon, pointing it into the face of the guy who was planning to intervene.
“Seguridad,” she warns, but it’s the resin gun that really makes him back off. Nobody wants to be dealing with the aftermath of a cum shot.
What the guy doesn’t realise is that the paperwork she’d have to fill in to officially report discharging her weapon is just as messy and takes even longer to be fully free of.
Freitas stares at her wordlessly. It’s more than the usual code of silence—more like he’s trying to contain his rage.
She stares back for a few seconds, seeing if frustration and curiosity cause him to break first.
“What?” he grunts aggressively.
“I’m looking for your buddy, Omega. Hear he didn’t show up for work and everybody’s just worried sick about him.”
She says this so she can monitor his reaction, see if he knows.
He rattles the gyro-grips like he might burst free, enough to rattle the whole frame of the machine. It’s not a show of defiance. He’s angry and he’s hurting. Probably down here working out because he doesn’t like where his head would be otherwise.
Oh, he knows.
“Yoram didn’t need to send his pet rentacop around. We already got his message.”
“I’m here on official Seguridad business. Yoram didn’t send me. What message are you talking about?”
“For all the practice they get, you’d think cops wouldn’t be such shitty liars. You know what I’m talking about. That fucking slaughterhouse. We saw pictures.”
“Yoram sent you pictures?”
“Well he didn’t put his signature on them but like I said, we got the message. I take it the Seguridad already ruled it an accident?”
“Well, we like to be thorough, so we’re not ruling anything out and we’re not ruling anything in. That’s why I’m here asking questions.”
“Yeah, so I heard. You and your sidekick. FNG got you on their leash pretty good,” he adds with bitter derision.
“Don’t kid yourself. She’s nobody.”
Something about this pleases Freitas. Something Nikki doesn’t like.
“Used to be Nikki Fixx was the one with eyes everywhere. These days looks like you’re gonna be the last to know.”
Nikki ignores this. These assholes love making out they’ve got the skinny on something to try and take your eye off the ball. She isn’t falling for it. Something is bothering her, though: a niggling thought in the back of her mind that she can’t quite pin down. It’s that feeling like she missed something that was right in front of her, but when she tries to concentrate on it, it only seems to get more clouded. It is something to do with Omega, Freitas and Dade, beyond their link to Julio and yet central to it too.
“What time did you last see Omega?”
“Fuck you, Freeman. I ain’t telling you shit.”
“I’m just trying to find out what happened here. Could be there’s someone very dangerous on the loose.”
“You know what happened. Omega jacked your shipment and this is Yoram getting payback.”
She scoffs.
“You seriously think Yoram would cross that line over missing whisky?”
“Six months ago, probably not. But now he’s overreacting because he’s seeing the straws in the wind.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Sol. I ran Julio and his chimps out of town once before. Yoram knows I could do it again if it came to it. He wouldn’t need to do this.”
She’s trying to provoke him, but instead he looks kind of smug behind the anger, like this is the one thought giving him comfort.
“You look kinda tired, Nikki. Old. Like you been up all night and you can’t take the pace no more, you scope me? Gotta be tough work, cutting a man up like butcher meat. Need a strong stomach for that shit. But we’ll see how strong your stomach really is when we come back at you, because you’re right: someone dangerous is on the loose, and his name’s Julio fucking Martinez. Julio got a play he ain’t made yet, and when that comes through, Yoram’s gonna need more than some ageing rentacop bitch to protect him.”