“Garage across from the Marriott. Third floor.”
Carver leaned over the balustrade and looked down his street. Near the intersection of Grant and Sutter was an old-style gas motorcycle, its rear wheel facing the curb. He could tell the bike was running from the warm haze of exhaust gathered around it. But its rider was nowhere in sight.
“Be there in twenty. You know how to pull the fuse on your GPS?”
“Already did,” Jenner said.
“I’ll call you.”
He hung up, then put his hands on the stone rail. When he looked up, the helicopter was circling back, its searchlight roving left and right as it swept toward the Vendôme. He waited to hear gunfire, or the sirens of radio cars converging on the square. But neither came. Maybe they’d lost their man.
He closed his eyes and pictured Mia, replaying the time he’d spent with her through the lens of the story she’d told him. He knew it didn’t answer everything. Even if what she’d said was true, all it explained was her desperation. He still didn’t know what had happened on Thursday night. He didn’t know who had killed Hadley Hardgrave or Patrick Wong. Mia had only deepened the mystery. And there was still no one he could trust, except Jenner.
Before going back to the ladder, he checked the street again. The motorcycle hadn’t moved.
He walked to Powell, then up toward Nob Hill. He heard a motorcycle’s racing engine one block over. He wanted to turn around and check the sidewalk behind him, but he didn’t let himself. He trudged up the steep hill, listening to the rattle of the cable in the track to his left. At the mouth of Fella Alley, the same girl he’d seen on Sunday night was leaning against a brick wall. Her robe was open, and in the cone of light from the streetlamp, he could see the rhinestones in the waistband of her black underwear. She’d dusted silver and blue glitter across the pale undersides of her breasts.
“You wanna date?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, but stepped past her into the alley.
“You don’t see anything you like down there, come see me,” she said to his back. “You could get me in, if you wanted. They’ll let me in if I’ve got a date. And I can’t go home, unless I get in there.”
He went halfway to the club’s door to get away from the girl, and then he stepped close to the brick wall and called Jenner. It had been twenty minutes and he knew Jenner was either in his car or standing somewhere close enough to watch it.
“Tell it to me,” Jenner said, when he picked up.
“Last year we caught that triple. Two girls and a pimp. You remember?”
“Go on.”
“I’m at the scene, but I’ll be coming out the other side. Going the way he went. Take about ten minutes.”
“Someone following you?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Just watch for tails. Motorcycles, maybe.”
“I see one, I’ll shake it.”
Carver hung up. When Mia didn’t want to be followed, she’d taken a fire escape and a taxi before dodging through the Vendôme. That had been very good. But she didn’t know the city the way he did, hadn’t devoted her life to finding its darkest places. He went the rest of the way to the door. It was flanked on each side by gas lamps, but they were broken. The letters spelling out the club’s name had been pried off the door years ago by metal thieves. No one had bothered to replace them; a name was the last thing this club needed.
He could hear the music from down below, could see the purple light leaking from the gap at the door’s threshold. He knocked three times, his knuckles hitting bare wood. Other men had worn away the paint. The door swung open and the bouncer stepped out. He looked at Carver and took a long drag on his cigarette, then flicked it over Carver’s left shoulder.
“One fifty.”
Carver gave it to him and the man stepped aside and opened the door. The staircase behind it led down. Under the building and under Nob Hill.
Once, this club had been something special. He believed the old men’s stories because he’d seen their photographs. They’d called it a jewel box. A treasure—if you were lucky enough to know it was there. But it had been abandoned. Thieves had stripped its ebony floors, had carted away the piano and the chandeliers. In peeling that veneer away, they’d unearthed an old tunnel, a leftover from the even deeper past.
He crossed the small dance floor, brushing past a half-dozen unclothed women. Their pupils were as wide as the bullets in his gun. Canvas tarpaulins hung from the ceiling to make private spaces along the walls. From inside them, he could hear the rest of the girls. They were working, and their cries carried over the music. He went to the bar and leaned against it until a man came over. He wore a black T-shirt and had clay plugs in his earlobes, and when he saw Carver he nodded slightly. They’d spent a day together in an interrogation room, and he hadn’t forgotten it.
“Who called you?”
“No one,” Carver said. “I came on my own. My own dime.”
“You want a drink, order one,” the man said. “You want a girl, they’re right behind you.”
“I want to go through,” Carver said. “Is that still fifty, to go through and out the other side?”
“A hundred,” the man said. “The girls don’t like it.”
“What’s it to them?”
“They’re living down there.”
Carver brought out his wallet again. He had exactly one hundred dollars left. He wasn’t sure if his informal suspension included getting paid or not. That could turn into an issue if he had to keep spending money like this. But he lifted the bills from his wallet and handed them over. The man pocketed them.
“You know the way.”
The door to the underworld gave no hint at what lay beyond it. It was as squat and unassuming as a pantry door. It might have passed for one: it was built into the back wall of the club’s unused kitchen. The door was ten or twenty years old, but the passageway beyond it ran back to the first Tong War. The bartender unlocked the door for him. Carver took out his flashlight and stepped through.
The narrow passage led down the side of Nob Hill, burrowing beneath basements and through the foundations of the buildings above it. There were side tunnels, and low stone chambers. The floor was strewn with trash, and the walls were marked with graffiti. Some of the scrawls were so old they were ghosting back into the bricks. He saw a living space that hadn’t been there when he’d last been through. Mattresses on the floor, plastic bins filled with shimmery-thin dresses. High-heeled shoes were piled against the stone wall. He saw a child’s denim jacket, saw a little girl’s plastic doll on one of the shared beds, its blond hair carefully combed. All around the floor there were candles and oil lamps, but none of them was lit.
In the ten minutes he spent underground, he heard no voices. But once, from far back in a side tunnel, he heard the slap of bare feet on wet stone. Several pairs of them. Women and girls, he thought. They were running through the dark, to hide from him.
The door on the other side opened into the back of a storeroom. He came out from behind a metal shelf and stepped over a mop bucket. He opened the door and went up a set of wooden steps. He parted a red curtain and slipped quietly onto the main floor of the club. No one noticed him come out. Everyone in the place was watching the television, including the three desultory girls who were supposed to be dancing on the bartop.
He followed their gaze to the screen.
A vial of Black Aria was descending through an eternal night sky. If he could believe Mia, Black Aria was only the latest thing. It didn’t matter what it was as long as people saw the hidden triggers and robbed their own savings to buy it. As he had done, too many times to count. The vial pierced layers of clouds, everything lit silver by the moon. Then a city spread out beneath it. A city with no ragged edges, no darkened districts. It was a glittering promised land. No child inside its borders had ever been shot over a bucket of bricks. Its men didn’t gut their own homes for copper. Women didn’t hide in the catacombs.
He wasn�
��t sure how long his phone had been vibrating before he answered it.
“I’ll be out front in one minute,” Jenner said.
“Any trouble?”
“No.”
He looked once more at the advertisement, and then around the room at the men watching it. Some of them sat with open mouths. One of the girls on the bar had stopped dancing altogether. Absently, she pinched her nipple. She had it between her thumb and forefinger, and as she stared at the television, she was pulling it out. Twisting it. If it hurt at all, her face didn’t show it.
The strip club was on Waverly Place, in the heart of Chinatown. As the crow flies, it was fourteen hundred feet from the top of Nob Hill. Carver had probably covered twice that distance underground. Jenner’s headlights lit the rain around Carver’s legs when he crossed in front of the car and got into the passenger seat.
“You okay?”
He nodded.
“What is this?”
“I couldn’t let you pick me up at my place. In case it’s being watched.”
“What’s going on?”
“Drive,” Carver said. “We can’t just sit here.”
“Where?”
“South,” he said. “Hunter’s Point. But don’t hurry.”
“What’s in Hunter’s Point?”
“Calvin Tran.”
“I thought he was in Folsom.”
Carver shook his head.
“Parole. A couple days ago. I had an alert pop up, in case I wanted to go to the hearing.”
“All right,” Jenner said.
He turned left onto Clay Street. The Ønske Pyramid was two blocks in front of them, rising above everything else in the Financial District. Tonight it was lit blue-green, the color of sea ice. The crown jewel, the beacon at the spire’s tip, was shining through the wind-blown mist. That was the one light that never went dark.
“You gonna tell me about Mia, or what?” Jenner asked.
“It’s why I told you to take it slow,” Carver said. “Stick to surface streets. Keep an eye in the mirror.”
“Who are you worried about?”
“Johnny Wong,” Carver said. “Hernandez. What Mia talked about.”
He told Jenner then. Before he finished, they were in the pitted, dark streets of Bay View. Jenner didn’t say much while Carver talked. He took a winding route, pulling to the curb and waiting sometimes, his eyes on the rearview mirror. Then he’d take a U-turn and speed off. If they had a tail, it was a very good one. They saw nothing.
Jenner parked across the intersection from Tran & Tran Auto Body, and they sat in the car and watched the dark shop and the little apartment above it. There had been a car accident in the intersection. A minivan had T-boned a pickup. Both vehicles had been abandoned there, then stripped. At some point, they’d been set on fire. Now they were just black hulks. The asphalt around them had burned, leaving nothing but a circle of loose gravel. In a year, all this would be gone. In its place there’d be clean white concrete and glass-fronted warehouses. Lines of delivery trucks departing every fifteen minutes for points in the city, heavy with liquor and silk, with dry-ice-cooled cuts of meat. Carver finished his story and they watched the building in silence for five minutes while Jenner thought about it.
“Is she crazy?” Jenner asked, finally. “Paranoid schizophrenic, something like that?”
“If she is, she’s got a category all her own.”
“I just met her the one time,” Jenner said. “I wouldn’t have pegged her that way either.”
“If she’s not crazy, there’s someone else in her network. She didn’t think George was here in the city. But somebody would leave a sign for her when there was a message from him. And she could leave a sign if she needed to contact George.”
“You’re thinking we could find this guy. See if he and Mia tell the same story.”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Maybe I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Are you even entertaining this, that it’s real?”
“I don’t know.”
“If she’s not crazy,” Jenner said, “then she knows something. But maybe it’s not the same thing she’s telling you.”
A light appeared in one of the apartment windows. It stayed there a minute, then went away.
“Where’s he fit in?” Jenner asked. “Calvin Tran.”
“We got a tip,” Carver said. “A note. It said we should look at Johnny Wong for Hadley Hardgrave.”
“That was anonymous,” Jenner said. “And two months ago, Tran was still in Folsom. How’s he gonna slide a note under your windshield wiper?”
“The handwriting,” Carver said. “I just put it together.”
“What?”
“When we worked out the plea on Tran, we were in the DA’s office. Tran’s lawyer wrote the deal points on a notepad, handed the page to me.”
“Eight years ago.”
“After I talked to Mia, I was thinking about Johnny Wong and Hadley. Trying to remember everything about when we first made a connection. So I was thinking about the note, and when I pictured it, I remembered the other. The writing on the plea deal.”
Jenner looked at Carver. The only light came from the red glow of the dashboard clock.
“The shit you hang on to, Ross,” he said. “I mean—Jesus. You think he got a message to his lawyer, asked him to send us the note?”
Caver nodded.
“And that note, a lot of it checked out,” Carver said.
“Sure.”
“We were sure enough about Johnny Wong to swear out a warrant. But if Mia’s telling the truth, then Hadley wasn’t some two-bit torch singer. Johnny wasn’t in her league, and neither was anyone else we know.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her,” Jenner said.
“But it puts a different spin on it.”
Jenner thought about that for a while. Then he checked inside his jacket, making sure his gun wouldn’t catch on anything if he had to draw it. Carver did the same.
“All right,” Jenner said. “Then we’ll go ask him.”
20
CARVER STOOD OFF to the side, in front of a cinderblock wall, where a shotgun blast couldn’t hit him. He reached around, through the iron bars of the outer security door, and hammered on the inner door’s wooden lock rail. He pulled back, then brought the phone to his ear.
“Anything?”
Jenner was in the scrap-strewn backyard, watching the other door.
“Nothing. I could hear you knocking.”
“I’ll do it again.”
He put the phone in his pocket and was leaning to knock again when he heard a footstep on the other side of the door.
“Who’s there?”
It was just a whisper from the dark.
“SFPD,” Carver said. “We’re here to talk with Calvin Tran.”
“You can’t,” the voice said. “It’s—I mean—you just can’t.”
When Calvin had gone up to Folsom eight years ago, he’d left behind a wife and a twelve-year-old boy. Carver guessed he was talking to the boy. He closed his eyes and reached down into his memory until he caught hold of the name.
“Garrett,” he said. “That you?”
There was silence. But he knew Jenner wasn’t going to wait. Until he came through, Carver had to keep the kid busy.
“Listen up,” he said. “We’ve got business with your dad. You can let us in now and we’ll talk in the dark, so it’s private. Or you can stand your ground and we’ll come back tomorrow with a bunch of guys in blue. In the daylight, when everyone can see.”
Garrett Tran thought about it for half a minute. Then the locks started to turn. He’d opened the inner door but not the security gate. A flashlight lit up the weed-choked path leading up to him. Carver didn’t step into view.
“I want to see your badge,” the kid said.
Carver was considering how to respond when Jenner beat him to it. His voice came from inside.
“Give it to me, Garrett,” Je
nner growled. “Nice and easy.”
Carver listened, waiting to hear a struggle. But then Jenner was talking again, low and calm.
“Like that . . . just like that,” Jenner said. “That was good. Now open the gate.”
Carver took out his phone. It was still on speaker, still connected to Jenner. He hung it up, then put his gun back into its holster. Garrett Tran opened the gate and Carver stepped inside.
Jenner had Garrett’s sawed-off twelve-gauge in one hand. The flashlight was taped to the barrel. Its beam lit the waterlogged ceiling. Carver caught the set of lock-picking tools when Jenner tossed it. He put it in his jacket pocket.
“Trouble with it?” he asked.
“It was a little rough,” Jenner said. “I never had your touch. These guys might have to buy a new one.”
“Small price,” Carver said.
He looked at Garrett Tran. He took after his mother, had her finer features. He might have been a handsome young man in other circumstances. Right now he looked as if he’d been shot in the gut. His face was bloodless and he was breathing in short, shallow gasps.
“How about we go see your dad?”
They had to cross the garage floor to reach the apartment stairs. A black Maserati GranTurismo was in the main workspace. Jenner and Carver each let their lights touch its sleek body. Its sapphire windshield sparkled in the dark. There was a terrycloth towel on the hood, and a laptop computer on top of the towel. Wires ran from it and disappeared through the car’s open window.
“Don’t touch that thing,” Jenner said. “So hot, it’d blister your skin.”
The kid didn’t answer. He was wearing sweatpants and a thin T-shirt, had plastic slippers on his feet. He was shaking. From the cold, from exhaustion. And he was terrified of something. That was plain. The fear was spilling out of him, so thick Carver could almost taste it.
Jenner pointed to the stairs with the shotgun and the kid shook his head. But he led the way.
At the top of the stairs was a thin wooden door, and Garrett Tran opened it. Carver saw a wall switch and flicked it, but no light came on. The power lines serving this neighborhood had probably been stolen years ago when the eminent domain condemnations turned the neighborhood into a wasteland. They’d have gasoline generators in the garage, because they wouldn’t be able to run their shop without electricity. But gas wasn’t cheap, and was getting harder to find. So up here, in the apartment, they were using flashlights and candles. The air smelled of smoke and sickness. The unwashed stink of the dying.
The Night Market Page 18