The Crooked Street

by Brian Freeman

  He went around to the back and then stopped short.

  Duane sat on the rear steps outside the truck door. His white chef’s coat was unbuttoned, revealing a black T-shirt underneath, and he wore only cargo shorts. His feet were bare. His long black hair was loose. He clutched the neck of an expensive bottle of tequila and swigged it, letting some of the alcohol spill onto his coat.

  His brother, who almost never drank, was drunk.

  “Duane?” Frost asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Hello, bro!” Duane told him in a loud voice. “Sorry, you just missed Tabby. She left half an hour ago.”

  There was something in the way Duane said Tabby’s name that made Frost stiffen with concern. “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on?” Duane took another extended swallow of Patrón. “Tabby ended it with me, that’s what’s going on. She and I are over. Done.”

  “What?” Frost felt as if a snake had wrapped itself around his chest and begun to squeeze. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that the one woman I have ever loved in my entire life just told me she was really sorry, but she doesn’t love me anymore, and she doesn’t want to lead me on or prolong the pain or pretend to feel something that she doesn’t. So that’s it. Engagement off. Thanks for the memories.”

  “Oh my God,” Frost said. “Duane, I am so sorry. I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, you’ll be pleased to know it’s not me. It’s her. It’s all her. I’m a great guy, and she hates the idea of hurting me. I shouldn’t blame myself. That made me feel so much better.”

  Frost struggled with what to say. He’d expected bad things after the previous night, but he hadn’t expected this. “Give her some time, Duane. I’m sure she’ll come around. She’s just confused. This isn’t about you and her, it’s about everything else that’s going on in her life. I’m telling you, this is not the end for you two.”

  Duane blinked at him through drunken eyes. His jaw hardened with anger. “Well, at least she has a shoulder to cry on.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what it means. If Duane’s too busy and doesn’t have time, she can always run to Frost. My brother is always right there for her.”

  He felt heat on his face. “Duane, come on.”

  “Come on nothing. Do you think I’m blind? Do you think I haven’t noticed how the two of you are together?”

  “There is nothing between us,” Frost insisted, but his denial felt limp and false even as he said it.

  “Oh, who are you trying to kid? I saw it all over your face last night. And hers, too.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. Last night was awkward, I know that. She and I both drank way too much. That’s all it was. Nothing happened, and nothing was going to happen.”

  “You were about to kiss her! You call that nothing? Are you saying the two of you wouldn’t have ended up on the floor after that?”

  “No way,” Frost told him. “No way in hell. I would never do that to you.”

  “So it’s just a coincidence that I catch the two of you together last night, and today Tabby breaks up with me?”

  Frost shook his head. His mouth felt dry, and his stomach was sick. He couldn’t deny the truth of what Duane said. This was no coincidence. This was his own fault. “I swear I did not see this coming, Duane. I knew Tabby was unhappy, that’s all she told me.”

  “And you didn’t play a role in any of this? Is that your story? Come on, Frost, you can do better than that. I know you have feelings for Tabby. Was this your plan all along? Break us up so you can have her for yourself?”

  “If you think I would ever deliberately come between you and your fiancée, then you don’t know me at all.”

  “Oh, I know you too damn well, Frost. Nobody knows you better than me.”

  Duane leaped off the steps of the food truck and shoved both hands hard against Frost’s chest, forcing him backward. Frost regained his footing and had to stop himself from responding in kind.

  “Knock it off, Duane. You’re upset, I get it. You’re hurting. I’m hurting for you, too. I can’t believe this is happening to the two of you, and I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” his brother yelled. “That’s all you have to say? This is your fault! Everything was great between me and Tabby, and then suddenly, she was moody and distant and upset, and I didn’t understand what she was going through and I was pushing her too hard. You know when that happened, Frost? You know when Tabby started pulling away from me? When I introduced her to you.”

  “Duane, listen to me,” Frost began, but his brother interrupted him.

  “Screw that! I don’t want any more excuses from you. You never answered my question. Tell me the truth. Are you in love with Tabby?”

  Frost lowered his voice. “Whatever’s going on here is between you and her. This has nothing to do with how I feel.”

  “In other words, yes.”

  “In other words, I’m done. I’m leaving. You need to cool down.”

  He began to turn away, and he took his eyes off Duane for a second. He heard the swish of his brother’s sleeve and a rush of air as Duane’s arm swung toward his face. Frost dodged but not fast enough, and Duane’s fist collided with his chin. The impact snapped Frost’s head back, and he staggered as pain shot through his jaw. Duane swore as his hand stung with the blow.

  Frost felt his own fists open and close. He took a slow, deep breath and tried not to listen to the roaring in his head. He had to go now, or he’d regret what happened next.

  “I’m not fighting with you, Duane,” he warned him, but his own anger rose out of his chest. As he spoke, he tasted the copper of blood in his mouth.

  He headed for the gate, but Duane bellowed after him and charged. His brother threw himself into Frost’s back, and Frost stumbled forward and nearly fell. When he got his balance back, he tried to walk away again, but Duane jumped across the distance between them and grabbed Frost’s shoulder. This time, Frost lost it. As Duane spun him back, Frost unleashed his left fist on his brother’s face. The impact hammered Duane’s nose, which broke with a spray of blood. Duane crashed down. He looked up from the ground, blood smeared across his face and pouring from his nostrils, his eyes wide with shock.

  Frost stood over him. They were both breathing hard.

  “Okay, Duane. You want me to say it? I’ll say it. You’re right. I do have feelings for Tabby. I didn’t want it to happen. I wish it weren’t true. But I have never told her that I felt that way, and I would never let anything happen between us. The only thing I ever wanted was to see the two of you happily married. That’s the truth.”

  His brother swore at him from the ground, long and loud. Over and over.

  “See you, Duane,” Frost muttered, rubbing his swollen jaw.

  He walked away, but Duane’s curses chased him out of the food park and onto the street, getting softer and more distant, like an echo slowly sinking into a deep canyon.

  37

  Frost sat at the counter of a twenty-four-hour pizza café a block from the street food park. He ordered a beer and a slice of pizza for himself and Shack, who was in a carrier on the bar stool next to him. The kid behind the counter noticed the blood on Frost’s knuckles and the purplish bruise on one side of his face. When he brought a tap glass of Fat Tire and a slice of sausage pizza on a paper plate, he also brought along a plastic zipper bag filled with crushed ice.

  “For your chin,” he said.

  “Good man,” Frost replied.

  He took a ball of sausage from the pizza slice and pushed it through the door of the carrier. Shack began to play hockey with it. Frost took a bite of the pizza itself and realized that he wasn’t hungry. Instead, he drank his beer and held the bag of ice against his face, where it numbed his jaw.

  There were a couple of teenagers at a corner table in the café, but Frost was the only person sitting at the counter. Everyone else was in the nightclub next door. Live
rock music blasted through the wall, and the thump of the bass made Frost’s beer glass vibrate. He grimaced at the noise. His head spun.

  Silently, he swore at himself for fighting back. Duane had touched a raw nerve, mostly because all his accusations were true. Frost had tried to walk the safe side of the line with Tabby for months, but he’d been kidding himself. All along, he’d been playing with fire.

  Now the fire had burned them down.

  He wondered what his sister, Katie, would have said. He could almost hear her voice in his ear as if this were the most delicious gossip in the world.

  You and Duane? In love with the same girl? Oh, Frost, that is too funny.

  It wasn’t funny at all, but Katie would have laughed.

  Frost shook his head. He knew his parents wouldn’t laugh. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, his mother would be on the phone to ask him what on earth he was thinking by getting in the middle of his brother’s relationship. And by breaking his brother’s nose. It didn’t matter that Duane had thrown the first punch and kept going when Frost tried to stop the fight. Frost was the younger brother, but he was supposed to be the adult between the two of them.

  “You want another?”

  Frost looked at his beer glass. It was empty. “Sure, why not?”

  “So who got in the way of your fist?” the kid asked as he brought Frost his beer. The name tag on his apron read “Lido.”

  “My brother, actually.”

  “Ouch. That’s biblical. So what happened between you guys? A girl, right? It’s always a girl.”

  “It’s a girl,” Frost said.

  “Who won?”

  “I’m pretty sure we both lost.”

  “I hear you,” Lido replied. “Sorry, man.”

  He left Frost to return to the pizza oven as two gay men came into the café hand in hand and began perusing the menu that was posted behind the counter. While they mulled their order, Frost drank his beer and listened to the rock music roaring through the wall. The volume made it hard to think about anything else, which was fine.

  He studied the indie rock band posters crowded on the café wall and recognized almost none of them. Pinned among the band posters, oddly, were half a dozen postcards featuring the ruins of Machu Picchu among the green Peruvian mountains. For some reason, he found himself unable to take his eyes off the postcards. They made him think about going somewhere far away.

  His phone rang. There was no one he wanted to talk to right now, but he checked the caller ID anyway. It was Trent Gorham. Frost frowned, and then he answered the call.

  “Trent,” he said.

  “Just checking in. Any word on Mr. Jin?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “You find his kid? You talk to him?”

  Frost decided it was safer to lie. “No.”

  “Too bad. Anything else I should know about?”

  “I can’t think of a thing,” Frost replied.

  “Well, let me know if you catch a break. I’ve been all over Chinatown. If anyone spots Mr. Jin, I’m their first call.”

  “Keep me posted,” Frost said.

  He hung up and finished his beer. It was time to go. He took a last look around the restaurant, then flagged down Lido and pushed a couple of bills across the counter. “Will that cover it?”

  “Definitely. You want change?”

  “No, keep it.”

  Frost grabbed Shack’s carrier and headed for the door. He was halfway outside when he stopped. He wasn’t even sure why he stopped or why the question popped into his head, but he turned around and went back to the bar stool where Lido was wiping down the counter. The kid looked up.

  “I’m curious,” Frost said, pointing at the postcards on the bulletin board. “What’s up with Machu Picchu?”

  Lido shrugged. “It’s the coolest place in the world. You been there?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” Lido said.

  “Then how do you know it’s the coolest place in the world?”

  “Well, just look at it. The stone walls. The mountains up in the clouds. Imagine the Incas building something like that hundreds of years ago. It’s my spirit place.”

  “Your what?”

  “My spirit place,” Lido repeated. “Hey, we all have one of those. Some place that really speaks to you, you know, that follows you wherever you go. Like maybe you lived there in a past life, know what I mean? Don’t you have a place like that?”

  Frost smiled. “San Francisco.”

  “Then you’re lucky, man. Not many of us get to live where we’re supposed to live. For me, it’s Machu Picchu. I don’t even know if I’ll ever get there, but I just know it’s out there, and that makes me happy. I’ll tell you, though, if somebody ever drops a few thousand bucks in my lap, I’m out the door the next day and on my way to Peru.”

  “Your spirit place,” Frost said.

  Lido nodded. “Damn straight.”

  Frost took another twenty dollars out of his wallet. “Put this toward Peru,” he said.

  Then he practically ran for the door. He knew where Mr. Jin was.

  No one at the dozens of Niagara Falls motels appreciated the call from the San Francisco policeman in the middle of the night. It was almost midnight as Frost dialed, which meant it was three in the morning in upstate New York. Some of the larger chain hotels had overnight staff, but many were mom-and-pop proprietors who bit his head off when he woke them up to ask about Mr. Jin. For the ones that didn’t answer, he left messages asking them to call back.

  Over the course of two hours, he made more than sixty calls, but he still had nearly two hundred hotels left to reach on his TripAdvisor list. No one recognized or remembered Mr. Jin, and Frost began to wonder if he’d been wrong about where the chef had gone with his sudden influx of cash. Maybe Niagara Falls wasn’t his spirit place after all.

  He decided to take a shower to wake himself up before going on with the calls. He spent a long time letting the hot water pour over his head and attack his sore muscles, and then he went back downstairs to the sofa where Shack was already asleep. He picked up the phone and grabbed the list, but his eyes blinked shut before he made another call, and he was gone.

  He slept heavily. It was still dark outside when something started him awake. He had to shake off his bad dreams before he realized that his phone was ringing. He grabbed it from the coffee table and saw that it was six thirty in the morning. He’d slept for nearly five hours.

  “Frost Easton,” he said groggily.

  “Inspector Easton, good morning! This is Weazie Palmer at the Summer Mist Motel in beautiful Niagara Falls, New York. You left a message on my machine overnight. My goodness, you were up late!”

  His first conscious thought was that Weazie should drink decaf.

  “Thanks for calling me back, Ms. Palmer. I was wondering if you had a guest staying with you from San Francisco named Mr. Jin. J-I-N.”

  “Call me Weazie! I don’t picture Californians as the formal type, for heaven’s sake. Do you have a first name for this Mr. Jin?”

  Frost thought about it. “Honestly, no, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, well, no matter. I’m sure we’re talking about the same man. I spent a whole lot of time chatting with him about the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz and those seals at Pier 39. I love San Francisco. My guests come here to honeymoon, but I went out there to honeymoon, isn’t that ironic? Very nice man, Mr. Jin. A chef, he said. When I found that out, I tried to pepper him for recipes, but he wouldn’t give up any secrets.”

  “Is Mr. Jin still there? Can you connect me with his room?”

  “Well, I would, Inspector, but he checked out three days ago.”

  “Three days?” Frost asked.

  “Yes, he didn’t stay with us long. Paid cash, too, which is unusual.”

  Frost closed his eyes. He didn’t understand. If Mr. Jin had left Niagara Falls three days ago, he should have been back in the city by now. “Did Mr. Jin tell you anything
about his itinerary?” he asked. “Did he say where he was heading next?”

  “Home is what he told me.”

  Frost shook his head. “Do you happen to know what airline he took?”

  “Airline?” Weazie said. “No, no planes for Mr. Jin. He said he’d never flown in his life and wasn’t about to start. He took the bus here, and he took the bus back. I can understand being afraid of flying, but he must have spent practically his whole vacation sitting in a Greyhound seat.”

  A bus.

  Greyhound.

  Frost thanked Weazie Palmer and quickly hung up the phone. The next thing he did was pull up the Greyhound website and check the routes between Niagara Falls and San Francisco for departures three days earlier. The time and distance explained Mr. Jin’s long absence. It was a sixty-nine-hour cross-country journey with four transfers along the way in Buffalo, Columbus, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

  When Frost checked his watch, he saw that the last leg of the journey would be bringing Mr. Jin into the Greyhound bus station on Folsom Street at 7:05 a.m.

  That was in twenty minutes.

  38

  Frost made good time through the dark, early morning city, but so did the Greyhound on its way into San Francisco from its last stop in Oakland. By the time he reached the block-long stretch of parking stalls where the buses dropped off passengers, the incoming Greyhound was empty. A handful of riders lingered in the terminal with maps and luggage, but most had already vanished into the city. He checked with a customer service agent who pointed him to a bus driver sitting on a nearby bench with a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

  When Frost showed him a photograph, the driver recognized Mr. Jin.

  “Oh, sure, he was on the bus when I took over in LA,” the man told him. “Quiet guy, sat in the very back row.”

  “Did you talk to him at all?” Frost asked.

  The man took a bite of doughnut, wiped sprinkles from his beard, and shook his head. “No, nobody likes to chat on the red-eyes. We keep the lights off, and most people try to sleep.”

  “When did you get in?”

  The driver checked his watch. “About fifteen minutes ago. I’m still on my first cuppa joe.”