Neither, however, was an innocent. They knew they could not eliminate evil, only mitigate it. In the Strip, sometimes that was enough.

"Got a traba-job for you, Angel." Pangborn was studying a heads-up suspended to his right. From where he was sitting, Cardenas could not make out the details. "Over in Sanjuana. Branch of Macrovendi EU, Milan-you know that outfit?-is screaming because somebody's spazzing half their new mollyspheres before they can be inserted in their new senseware. Since their organic burrowers have come up with nothing, they've come hat in hand begging the help of the lowly federales." He waved a hand through the heads-up, temporarily distorting the carefully collated aura. "I thought maybe you'd like a few days at the beach. Do a little burrowing for Macrovendi, locus their compromise, issue a couple of warrants. The Department can always use some good PR."

Cardenas smiled diffidently. "If it's all the same to you, Shaun, I'd just as soon stay here and follow through on what I'm working on right now."

Frowning, Pangborn ablaed the heads-up away. In response to his verbal command, the informational wraith vanished from above the desk. "Chinga, Angel. Half the people in the Department know about the Macrovendi assignment, and for the last couple of days it seems like every one of them has been kissing my nacha trying to get it." He gestured expansively. "I offer it to you on a plate, and you come back at me with a no-thanks."

Cardenas shrugged. He could be as parsimonious with words as with his salary.

"That's neither answer nor explanation." Irritated, Pangborn summoned forth the heads-up on the other side of the desk. Commanding it, he examined the results intently, squinting at the display. After a couple of minutes, with the call-up still occupying virtual space on the side of his desk, he turned back to his visitor.

"Tell me, Angel: what's so special about this affair? I grant you there are some interesting characters involved, but the details suggest that the explanations are rote. Wife runs off with a big chunk of the husband's money, one of his partners, and their kid." He glanced briefly back at the heads-up. "Sure, given his record, it'd be a nice little coup to pin some pintatime on this Mockerkin culo. But this is scut work and track, follow-up and simple addition. Any junior officer can handle it."

"There's a homicide involved," Cardenas pointed out.

Pangborn rolled his eyes. "Ordinary revenge killing. Nothing out of the ordinary. From the particulars on the deceased Anderson-Brummel, I doubt that soche-at-grande has suffered any great loss. Let somebody else handle it. Go to Sanjuana, take a week burrowing for Macrovendi, spend some time on the beach miraing the chicas." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "There's room in Accounting for a little drift. I think we can get you into the Coronado. As for this standard-issue sorryness"-he indicated the read-only that gleamed within the heads-up-"I'll put Gonzalez or Rutland on it."

Cardenas did not like to argue with Pangborn. The Captain was one of the very few in the Department who could almost understand what it was like to be an intuit. Almost.

"I really want to see this case through to conclusion, Shaun. As Senior Inspector, I can cogit some fluence."

Pangborn looked sad. "I guess it's true what happens when people start to get old. They suffer these attacks of dementia; mild at first, slowly evolving into episodes of insanity that eventually start to opaque their thinking." He sat back in his chair, which sighed appreciatively. "Either that, or you're being more than typically pig-headed. But then, you know that I'm just slagging you, and that I'm going to let you swim in your chosen slime. Don't you?"

Cardenas grinned. "Of course I do." And he was not lying.

When Pangborn rose, the Inspector stood with him. The two senior officers walked to the door of the Captain's office. "After thirty years on the force there are two things I've learned." Pangborn fingered his artificial ear, the one whose prosthetic did not properly match the original cartilage. "Don't try to talk sense to someone who's spizzing on sparkle, and never play poker with an intuit." He rested a hand on the Inspector's shoulder. "Do me a favor, will you? Wind this up as fast as you can and try not to get vaped in the process."

Cardenas advanced far enough for the door to respond to his presence, identify him, and open. "I'll try. Dying always complicates an investigation."

"Not to mention the added paperwork." Pangborn dismissed him with a wave of mock annoyance. "I'll send Gonzalez to Sanjuana. He can sneak his new bride along. Put them up at the Coronado for a few days, and he'll raise an icon to me." His tone grew more somber. "Watch yourself, Angel. I'm not concerned about the usual rent-a-cutioner. But my read on this Mockerkin is-cautionary."

"Same here. Thanks, Shaun."

Cardenas felt no sense of triumph as he departed the division Captain's office. Only quiet satisfaction that he was going to be allowed to continue with the assignment he had set for himself. He felt he owed it to Hyaki. He felt he needed it for himself. And for some reason as yet undetermined, he felt he owed it to someone he had yet to meet.

A twelve-year-old girl named Katla Mockerkin.

The more he learned about The Mock, the less he liked the man. What available information there was had to be scrounged from the depths of the central Namerican macrolice box. There was next to nothing in the popular media. Clearly, Cleator Mockerkin was one of those insidiously intelligent antisocs who neither needed nor wanted his picture flashed on the evening cast, prizing anonymity alongside power.

And power he had. Over the course of the next couple of days, Cardenas tied fiscal links to The Mock that crossed half a hundred boxlines girdling the globe. In addition to dealing in illegal weaponry on an impressive scale, Mockerkin drew revenue from trade in banned designer pharmaceuticals, siphoned crunch, endangered species (foodstuffs as well as the illegal pet business), and prohibited wafers and mollys. This income was supplemented with money from more mundane activities like extortion and kidnapping. None of it was kosh, all of it was stylishly laundered, and there was enough of it floating around to tempt even a knowledgeable subordinate who should have known better like the late Wayne Brummel.

A meticulously diversified feleon was The Mock. A real verdad nasty-ass chingaroon. If his disciples caught up with the fleeing Surtsey and Katla before the authorities did, Cardenas knew the upshot would not be acrimonious debate followed by a succession of mutually agreed-upon visits to a marriage counselor. About the daughter he could not surmise, but he seriously doubted that Surtsey Mockerkin was getting much sleep these days.

Following long hours spent staring at info, he relaxed by striding the streets of the Strip at night, his dark eyes flicking from side to side and taking everything in as he walked off the energy that built up during the day. He paid little attention to the gaudy displays, the glittering municipal art works, or the persistent adverts. People were what interested him; the bustling inhabitants of the Strip in all their manifold musky ethnicity, a potpourri of colors, sizes, and shapes. In this, the commercial center of the western hemisphere, a casual listener could snak yakk of several dozen languages and dialects, from Azeri to Zulu, in addition to the predominating Spanish and English. Underlying it all, like a set of conversational box springs, was the provincial patois of the Strip-the jumpy, jerky hybrid argot known as Spang, for English-Spanish slang.

Cardenas could volubate with the best of them. His fluency was a frequent surprise to the ninlocos and algaeaters he often had to deal with. What he could not inflect, he inferred-one of the benefits of being an intuit.