“Anyone follow her?”
The driver shook his head.
“Wasn’t anything,” he said. “Just nerves. Feminine vapors.”
“You were watching?”
“She asked me to,” the driver said. “You think I wouldn’t?”
“All right,” Carver said. He turned around again so he could see out the back. “Just drive. I’ll watch.”
The motorcycle came around the corner from Sutter just as the light changed.
It followed the taxi from three cars back, going under the Dragon Gate and up the hill that rose into Chinatown. It was an older bike, an Italian import that Carver hadn’t seen since his first year of patrol. Instead of batteries or fuel cells, it still ran on gasoline. A full tank might have cost more than the bike itself. The rider was wearing a black leather jacket and a matte black helmet with the face shield down.
The cabbie went through the intersection of Grant and Pine without turning. But the motorcycle took a left on Pine, and after it was out of sight, Carver could hear the rider accelerating toward the Ritz.
“Take a right on California, then a left on Kearny,” Carver said. He had enough experience following people to know the psychology. The longer it went on, the more paranoid the guy would get. But at the very beginning, he’d feel invisible. He might be feeling bold enough to follow the taxi through a few quick turns.
“Come into Chinatown on Washington?”
“That’s fine.”
Carver watched behind but didn’t see anything until they were passing Portsmouth Square Plaza. There was a motorcycle between two parked cars, its rider astride it. They passed it too quickly for him to decide what he’d seen. It might have been a different bike, a different rider.
But when they turned off Washington onto Waverly Place, there was a motorcycle coming fast down Clay Street. He saw its dual, vertically stacked headlights, saw the reflection of the streetlights in the rider’s face shield.
He took out his burner and texted Jenner.
At least one tail, maybe two. Motorcycles.
Jenner responded immediately.
Can you shake?
Carver looked out the back window. The motorcycle hadn’t turned down Waverly. If the riders were following him, they either had an unnatural ability to guess where the cab would show up or they were getting help from above. It was illegal to fly an unlicensed and unlit drone over the city’s airspace, but there was no way to police them. At night, the skies hummed with them. Sometimes, at his bedroom window, he could catch their flitting silhouettes against the glowing clouds.
All they needed was an eye above him and they could follow him on the streets all night. It wouldn’t matter how many sudden turns his driver made.
“Let’s go down to Powell Station,” Carver said. “I guess no one’s back there.”
“You got it.”
Carver turned back to his phone and typed out another text.
If I don’t show, she knows what to do. But she’ll have to do it to you.
If motorcycles were following him, they could be on Mia, too. Now he understood how reckless he’d been to go out with her, to the Fairmont and the Irish Bank. Anyone watching the building would have seen her with him, would have concluded that Mia was a part of whatever he was doing. Maybe tonight they should have just stuck together. As far as he knew, she didn’t carry a gun, nor did she have a knife slipped into her boot. For Mia, it was running or nothing.
“Powell Station,” the driver said.
Carver looked up. They were at the curb on Cyril Magnin Street, facing Market. He settled the fare with cash he’d borrowed from Mia, then exited the cab and went quickly across the brick-paved plaza to the escalator that fed into the underground station. As it carried him down, he heard a motorcycle racing up Market Street. He began to run down the moving steps.
He fed his pass card to the machine, then pushed through the turnstile and went to the next escalator, which led another level deeper. There were at least a thousand people on the platform, most of them watching the Fremont train as it spilled from the tunnel. The metal-on-metal cry of its brakes filled the underground room. He stepped off the escalator and turned around to watch above. A man in a black leather jacket stood at the top, looking down. He took off a pair of black gloves, then unzipped his jacket and reached inside it. Carver pushed into the crowd, moving away from the escalator and toward the Fremont train, which had come to a stop.
There wouldn’t be much time. Surely the man had seen him.
When the train’s doors slid open, the crowd on the platform began to push toward it. Carver boarded with a group of office workers, then went up the aisle between the rows of seats and stood where he could see through the passageway leading to the next car. He looked behind him and saw the man through the window, crossing the platform, shoving people aside. He boarded the train one car ahead of Carver. Carver hit the button to open the sliding door in front of him, then stepped through the narrow vestibule, and into the next car, elbowing through the crowd to propel himself up the aisle. The man in the leather jacket was just turning around when Carver reached him. He was fit, white, and in his late thirties. He had close-cropped brown hair, and eyes like brushed steel. His face had just tightened with recognition when Carver threw a right hook. He felt the man’s jaw break in the follow-through. Before the man could fall, Carver flattened his nose with a shove of his left palm. The man crumpled like an empty can.
A woman screamed, then another.
Carver looked around. Up and down the car, passengers were scrambling to give him space. The man on the floor wasn’t moving at all. Carver took out his phone, stepping sideways to block the doors from closing. One of the doors pressed between his shoulder blades, then slid back. The intercom gave a ding, before the train’s computer spoke.
“Please step away from the door. The train is leaving the station.”
He snapped a picture of the man’s face, then knelt and reached into his motorcycle jacket, stretching backwards with one foot to keep the doors from shutting. The gun was in a slim shoulder holster, the phone in a zippered pocket. Carver slipped back onto the platform and heard the doors close behind him. The train was gathering speed before he got to the escalator.
Powell Station had nine exits to the surface, scattered across two and a half blocks. He’d gone underground at Hallidie Plaza, and he returned to the surface using the eastern stairs at Fourth and Market. He didn’t run, didn’t look back. Someone would have called the BART Police by now. He checked his watch and saw there was no time left. He hurried to Fourth and walked along the curb until the taxi pulled up beside him. Mia opened the back door and then slid across the seat to make room for him.
“Battery and Sacramento,” Mia said, when she caught the driver looking at them in the mirror.
“But first let’s go down Fourth,” Carver said. “Past Caltrain, and then the ballpark—I want to see what’s going on down there.”
Mia understood and nodded to the driver, who took his foot from the brake.
“It’s your meter.”
Carver was watching out the passenger window, looking back toward the underground entrance, expecting patrol officers, or a second man in a motorcycle jacket. The cab moved forward until the intersection was out of sight, and then he leaned back. He felt Mia’s fingers on his right hand. He looked down and saw the broken skin along the tops of his knuckles. Fresh wounds cutting through the layered scars.
“You’re all right?” she asked.
He nodded. His hand didn’t matter.
“If I show you a picture on my phone—it’s just a picture—will you look at it?”
“Okay.”
He brought out his phone and handed it to her so that they could look at it together.
“This happened just now? You did this?”
“On one of the trains.”
The man’s face was out of proportion. His jaw reached too far to the right, and his nose lay on its side. C
arver had taken the picture quickly, before the real bleeding started. Mia studied the screen closely, then used her thumb and forefinger to zoom in. Finally, she handed the phone back to him.
“He’s one of them?” he asked.
She nodded.
“He was there. In your living room.”
Carver put his phone away, then got the one he’d found in the man’s jacket pocket. It was risky to keep it. Even turned off, there were ways to track it.
“You got a paperclip in your purse?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s all right.”
With a paperclip he could have opened the memory card slot on the phone’s side. Instead, he held the phone in both hands, down low where the driver wouldn’t see it. He broke it in half down the middle, then picked the pieces apart and found the card. He slid it into his wallet, and dropped the rest of the phone into the foot well behind the driver. When he looked up, they were passing the shuttered ballpark. A lone prostitute leaned against the blackened ticket window, her cigarette tip and jewelry flashing in the dark.
The driver let them out on Sacramento Street next to a scrolling-poster kiosk. Carver watched the cab roll away. The poster changed from a backlit photograph of a nude woman draped in a sapphire necklace to a bottle of cognac and a pair of low snifters. One of the glasses bore a lipstick mark, the red so deep it was almost black.
Jenner crossed the empty street and joined them. He was carrying his briefcase in his left hand, and walked with his right hand inside his coat.
“Y’all okay?”
Carver nodded. He’d texted from the cab, so Jenner already knew what had happened in Powell Station. They shook hands, and then the three of them turned to look at the building. Bank offices took up most of the lower floors, and those had closed hours ago. Everything to the tenth floor was dark. Above the twentieth floor, where they were going, the building simply disappeared into the fog.
“You texted him already?” Jenner asked.
“Five minutes ago.”
They went up the sidewalk and crossed through the bronze bollards that stood as protection against ram-raiders. Next to the glass door was a card reader and a thumbprint scanner. Beyond the glass, on the far side of a polished marble lobby, was the empty security desk. When Mia saw the CCTV cameras, she put her head down.
“What do we do?” she asked. “Knock?”
“He’s expecting us.”
They waited another minute and then the guard came into view from the elevator banks. He crossed toward them and used his card to unlock the door. He opened it six inches and stood looking at them. He wore a black windbreaker with yellow stenciling, and his bleached hair curled from beneath his black cap.
“Who sent you?” he asked.
“Glenn.”
“All right.”
He opened the door and they came into the lobby. He led them to the elevators, walking ahead so that his back was to them.
“Clinic’s on twenty-six. Whole floor. No one’s up there.”
“You’re sure?” Jenner asked.
The guard pointed toward the security desk without turning or breaking his stride.
“I’ve got motion sensors,” he said. “Got thermal. It’s clear.”
“We need a master key?”
“I was just up there. It’s unlocked.”
The guard stepped into an elevator, which was waiting with its doors open. After he swept his card through the reader, its lights came on. Machinery above the steel ceiling hummed to action. He pressed the button for twenty-six and stepped back out. The doors began to close and he caught them with his foot.
“You don’t need it to get down,” he said. “Just hit the call button.”
“Okay,” Carver said.
The three of them stepped into the elevator, but the guard didn’t take his foot away.
“Let me have it before you go up.”
“I’ve got it,” Mia said. “It covers both of you.”
She brought an unsealed envelope from her purse and gave it to him. The guard opened it and thumbed through the bills. He pocketed it and handed back a yellow square of paper.
“She said tear it up when you’re done,” he said.
“I will.”
He let the elevator doors close, and then the car began to rise.
22
THE IMAGING CLINIC was dark when they stepped off the elevator and into the reception area. An exit sign glowed near the stairwell, and the floor-to-ceiling windows next to the leather couches let in the dull-orange blur of radiant fog. Mia took a moment to look around, and then she pointed at the door behind the receptionist’s counter.
“It’ll be back there.”
They followed her down a hallway. Carver had never seen the inside of a clinic like this. He was used to linoleum floors and battleship-gray walls. Raised voices and wet coughing in the waiting room. But this place had hardwood paneling on the walls, and deep-pile carpet underfoot. When Jenner found a switch and hit it, accent spots glowed alight from the ceiling to illuminate framed paintings of brocaded koi, each fish floating in the negative space of an otherwise blank canvas.
“You worked in a place like this?” Carver asked Mia.
“Pretty much.”
“You’ll find what you need?”
“It won’t be a problem,” she said. She held up the square of paper the guard had given her. “I’ve got the console password, and that’s the main thing.”
She opened the door to a patient changing room. There was a cabinet in the back, and she pointed to it.
“Find a gown that fits. Take off everything else. Don’t forget your watch. You can’t have anything made of metal.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll set up the machine,” she said. “But first, let me give you this.”
She went into her purse again and brought out a small glass vial and a new syringe still in its plastic packaging.
“What is it?”
“A paramagnetic tracer,” she said. “It’ll help us see what we need to see.”
“Let me take a look at that,” Jenner said.
He came into the dressing room and took the vial from Mia. He wasn’t rough, but it was clear to Carver that he might have been if Mia had refused. If it bothered her, she didn’t let on. She turned her back to him and opened the syringe, then set it on a tray. She knelt and found alcohol swabs in the cabinet beneath the counter. Jenner was turning the vial in his fingers, studying the label.
Mia looked around at him, watched him read the tiny print on the label.
“Don’t open it,” Mia said. “You don’t have gloves and your fingers aren’t sterile.”
“This could be anything,” Jenner said. “I’m supposed to let you stick it in him?”
“It’s gadodiamide—the contrast agent. They’ve been using it forever. This clinic probably runs through it by the liter.”
“It’s fine,” Carver said. “Let’s do it. Give it back to her.”
Jenner closed the vial inside his fist and stepped back toward the hallway.
“Ross, you don’t know what this is.”
“Make a list of everything we don’t know,” Carver answered. “How long would that be? What else can we do?”
Jenner took another step back.
“We could go take our evals next week,” he said. “Pass them and get back to work. How much easier would this be with the cover of a badge? You’re not thinking with your head.”
“I trust her,” Carver answered. It sounded true when he said it. “But it doesn’t matter. I’ve got you. She’s not injecting it in you. And you’ll be with her, watching. She knows that. So it’s okay.”
“Ross —”
“Give it back to her,” Carver said. “Then go help her set up the MRI.”
“I don’t know about this,” Jenner said. “After last night—after Calvin Tran—I really don’t know. Maybe we ought to step back.”
“You mean quit.”
“I mean step back. Think things through.”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
“Except that it has to work out. We just pulled a B and E, on camera. You beat down a man at Powell Station —”
“He was following me.”
“—in front of a crowd,” Jenner finished. “And your excuse is worth shit. All our excuses are shit. So if this is how we think things through, then what Mia told you better be true. And it has to lead somewhere. Or we’re in trouble.”
Jenner hadn’t raised his voice, but that might not last. He was sweating at his temples, gripping the vial of gadodiamide as if he wanted to break it in his fist. Carver wanted to explain. They were in trouble, maybe had been for a long time. Now they might be at the threshold of finding out where everything had gone wrong. He didn’t know if they could trust Mia, but there was nothing to stop them from using her to get a step closer. He needed to know what had happened to them. It wasn’t just that the world had fallen so low: he’d been walking point, had led the charge into the darkness. The only thing that separated him from the copper thieves and the prostitutes was his job. He’d held on to it, and so he had a paycheck to spend. Which meant that every night for him had been the same: a maze of mirrors and flashing glowcards. If he managed to thrash awake and shake off the nightmare, the room just tilted and spun, and then he slid back into the dream. He was trapped. There’d been some clarity with Jenner, whole nights where their partnership had let him focus. But in the end, the only long-term relationship he had was with his phone. If there was even a chance Mia knew a way out, he was ready to risk anything to get there.
But if Jenner didn’t already understand all of that, then explaining it wouldn’t help. Maybe he was afraid that, like the addicts who slept in the abandoned blocks past the ballpark, they wouldn’t be able to change anything. Maybe it was better not to know, to ignore the sting of the needle and lose themselves in the glowing lights.
“Go if you want,” Carver said.
“I won’t just walk out when you need me.”
“I know it.”
“Then you ought to know this isn’t fair,” Jenner said. “But you don’t get it.”
The Night Market Page 20