by Rob Hart
“Let me guess,” Frederick said. “This story doesn’t have a happy ending.”
“No, it does not. Thing tasted like Styrofoam.”
“They can’t all be winners,” Frederick said. “Sometimes for fun I’ll get something I know isn’t a regional specialty, just to see how they fucked it up. This one time…remember London?”
Mateo’s face reverted back to concrete. “I remember London.”
Frederick cursed himself for erasing his progress. “Sorry. Okay. But…I was at this pub one night, and they had nachos on the menu, and I thought, in the land of boiled food, I wonder what nachos looked like. So I ordered them, and you know what came out?”
Silence.
“Doritos.”
That earned a laugh. “No shit?”
“No shit,” Frederick said. “There was some salsa and some melted cheese blend thing and then god damn Doritos.”
“Did you eat it?”
Frederick laughed, shrugged. “I was raised that it wasn’t polite to leave an empty plate. Probably why my cholesterol is so high.”
“Yeah, well, join the club.”
Mateo looked around one more time, less like he was looking for someone, and more like he was afraid someone might see him. Then he reached toward the green tray and picked up a fork, stabbed a slice of the chicken and popped it in his mouth, avoiding eye contact, chewing quickly, but halfway through paused and looked up at Frederick. He swallowed what was in his mouth and said, “That’s pretty good.”
“Try it with the rice,” Frederick said. “And a little bit of that red sauce. It’s spicy.”
Mateo went in for a more complete bite and Frederick speared some chunks of carrot cake and enjoyed the moment, fleeting as it was. This wasn’t his last meal, not if he didn’t want it to be, but almost certainly it was his last meal out in the world, his last one breathing fresh air, his last one where any kind of thought or passion went into the dish, so he made sure to savor each individual chew.
“So how’d you find me?” Frederick asked.
Mateo finished the helping of chicken rice and went for the kway teow, spearing a few rice noodles and a chunk of sausage. “A hunch, mostly.”
“C’mon,” Frederick said. “Give me a little more than that.”
“San Francisco, last year,” Mateo said. “We found the apartment you used. We went through the building’s trash, found the bag for that unit, and then the wrapper for Huitlacoche.”
“That was a damn good burrito,” Frederick said. “And I now regret not taking my trash with me when I left town. But that couldn’t be it. That’s not enough to go on. I paid in cash. They didn’t have a camera.”
“Dublin, two years ago, you used a burner phone, which we found, and we were able to pull some location data,” Mateo said. “Two hits at a pub popular for its full Irish breakfast.”
Frederick was fascinated, almost enough to forget his food for a moment. Then he looked down at the plates, at the rapidly dwindling portions, and realized he didn’t have much longer. He took some more kway teow.
“Three years ago, Japan,” Mateo said, going for a bite of the carrot cake. “Sukiyabashi Jiro. Tough to score reservations.”
“I worked three jobs in Tokyo before I was able to get a seat,” Frederick said.
“We had a much looser description of you back then,” Mateo said. “But we had a witness put someone we thought might be you eating there, the night of.”
“And that’s how you found me?” Frederick asked. “I mean, in this line of work you, expect to be caught, or worse eventually, but a reservation? A breakfast? A wrapper?”
“Food Ventures.”
The bulb went off. Frederick exhaled, bowed his head. A laugh built in the center of his chest and there was no use trying to keep it contained. He let it spill out. “Food Ventures.”
Mateo nodded. “I can’t even take the credit. We had a few other little pieces, too, other places you ate, so we knew you were a foodie. Got a kid in our office, he’s a foodie too. So I asked him to take a look at all the evidence. Like I said, a hunch. I didn’t think anything would come of it. But he put it together. All the places we had you visiting were places recommended by this one website.”
Frederick wanted to clap his hands. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to dance. Undone by a food blog. The blog he visited whenever he was in a new city, because Food Ventures was dogged and reliable in its recommendations.
It was so pedestrian.
“We knew you were doing a job in Singapore,” Mateo said. “So we looked up Singapore, found they did a list on the food centers. We’ve got men covering a half-dozen more of these. But Hong Lim had the most recommended food stalls, so, again.” He shrugged. “A hunch.”
“Well,” Frederick said. “I’m impressed.”
“Are you?”
“Of course I am.” He piled together a big spoonful of chicken and rice, saving the best bites for last, so he could end the plate on the highest note possible. “Kind of proud, actually. How long we been at this now?”
“Going on fourteen years. I figure I had another six months before they pulled me off you entirely.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad it was you who caught me.”
“That seems like a silly thing to say.”
Frederick swallowed. “I’m serious. You think I didn’t notice you, a few steps behind me the past couple of years? Look, I get it. We’re playing for opposite sides, and if the universe is a just place, which I like to believe it is, you’re the one who’s going to come out on top. That’s how these stories are supposed to end. So…I know this sounds ridiculous. Maybe it is. I never knew how I’d react if I got caught and I guess this is it. I’m just…glad it was you, and glad we got to share a meal before it went down.”
Mateo opened his mouth, to say something, to argue or refute, certainly not to agree, but then he closed his mouth, and picked up the fork, and took another bite of the carrot cake.
“This is really good,” he said.
“There’s this place in Little India, not too far from here, supposed to do an amazing fish head curry,” Frederick said. “I’d ask if we could swing by there before you put the cuffs on officially, but I suspect that’s not in the cards.”
“No, that’s not in the cards.”
Frederick scooped up the last of the kway teow, his heart going a little wobbly, time slowing down for that bite. Savoring the thick skin of the sausage, the slippery texture of the rice noodles. “So what happens now?”
“That’s up to you,” he said. “You want to make it easy, we both get to go to bed early tonight. You want to make it hard, you’ll be dead before you leave that seat. There are two dozen men surrounding this place and two snipers with their eyes on you. My guys, plus the locals. And you know Singapore. The government put more people to death last year than there were murders in the street. They don’t fuck around.”
“No, they do not,” Frederick said, taking another bite of carrot cake. Two bites left, maybe. Three if he stretched it out.
He considered it. Stretching it out. What that would look like.
A quick death, or a long life in a jail cell. Prison food was Z-grade meat and overcooked grains and no salt. Stale or moldy bread and coffee like it’d been filtered through a sock. Not that death sounded better, but he wasn’t excited for it.
If you’re creative, though, there was always another option.
And his appeared right on queue.
Swish swish swish.
What Mateo didn’t know is that before he took this seat, Frederick stood in an obscured alcove for a few minutes, balancing his trays, waiting for this particular table to free up. Because this particular table was next to a tall metal receptacle, where diners could return their trays when they were done. It was laden with a rainbow of plastic trays, covered in plates and bowls of finished or mostly-finished meals.
“I guess this is it,” Frederick said, holding Mateo’s at
tention. “Like I said, I’m glad you caught me and I’m glad we could share a meal together. I may be a bastard, but I do like to adhere to some aspects of social decency.”
Mateo’s hand snaked behind him. Frederick figured he was going for his cuffs, so slowly, as if it were an afterthought, he reached up and very deliberately scratched the bridge of his nose.
The old man in the stained white shirt skidded on the floor and slammed into the receptacle, sending it to the ground in a deafening crash, plates smashing across the concrete floor, and as soon as Mateo turned to find the source of the commotion, Frederick was off the seat, moving low and fast through the maze of tables.
Mateo and his team made several mistakes.
The first was not filling the seats around Frederick with undercover agents so that he’d be boxed in. But given the high volume of civilians, it was probably deemed too dangerous. Anyway, Mateo seemed like the type who wanted to play cowboy.
The other mistake was not noticing Frederick had stopped to speak to the man with the broom, or noticing the exchange of the money, and the signal, Frederick demonstrating how he’d scratch his nose so that the man would know exactly when to push over the cart. A hundred sing well spent.
Hong Lim was like most of Singapore’s Chinatown: a maze of concrete hallways and staircases linked to parking garages and shopping malls, the entire byzantine thing immensely complicated to navigate, which meant maybe, just maybe, he’d find a clear path, especially if he moved up, toward the roof, toward the top of the city, where escape seemed harder and therefore less important to cover.
Frederick didn’t want a quick death and he didn’t want a slow death in a cell, either. He would take his chances on a violent death, even if there was just a small chance he could avoid it all and make it out of here alive, because there was a great big world out there, and still a great many things he wanted to eat.
Thanks to the editors who published these stories: Todd Robinson, Otto Penzler, Ron Earl Phillips, David James Keaton, Joe Clifford, Eric Beetner, Steve Weddle, Ehsan Ehsani, Emily Schultz, and Brian Joseph Davis. Thanks to all the readers and fellow writers who encouraged my pursuit of this theme—far too many to name. As always, thanks to my wife for her eternal patience and support. Thanks to my grandmother and my dad (as well as his fellow members of the FDNY) for instilling in me the value of a good meal. And finally, to my publisher, Jason Pinter, for letting me collect these, and my agent, Josh Getzler, for putting a bow on it.
Rob Hart is the author of the Ash McKenna series: New Yorked, City of Rose, South Village, The Woman from Prague, and Potter’s Field. He also co-wrote Scott Free with James Patterson. His next novel, The Warehouse, will be released in 2019 and has been optioned for film by Ron Howard. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. Find more at www.robwhart.com and on Twitter at @robwhart.
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Rob Hart
Cover and jacket design by 2Faced Design
Interior design and formatting by:
www.emtippettsbookdesigns.com
ISBN: 978-1-947993-525
Library of Congress Control Number: tk
First trade paperback edition January 2019 by Polis Books, LLC
221 River St., 9th Fl. #9070
Hoboken, NJ 07030
www.PolisBooks.com