The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see Fremont—you got any money?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Can you get more? Do you have an ATM card?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll stop for cash in the Richmond District. We’ll each get as much as the machine will let us take.”

  “You’re worried they’ll freeze our accounts,” she said. “Track us if we keep using them.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What about this van? How long till the church reports it stolen?”

  She was right to worry about that. The police wouldn’t have a hard time spotting it once they knew to look for it. Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral—Holy Family Chinese Mission was written in foot-high letters down both sides.

  “We’ll ditch it in a couple hours,” he said. “Find something else.”

  “Do you have an idea about that?”

  “Maybe.”

  Carver parked the church van in front of the karaoke place on Noriega. The club’s neon sign was gone, and its windows were broken. There had been a fire, and its roof had collapsed onto the restaurant floor. Charred timbers pointed into the rain, like the bones of a whale. The pizza joint on the other side of the street was now the only point of light in the neighborhood. It was still in business, and meant to stay that way. A man sat on a folding chair out front, a shotgun across his knees.

  “If they burned this place down too, it could be too late. The strain got out, and it’s spreading. They’ll try to contain it, but ​—”

  “It’s not what you think,” Carver said. “It’s just copper thieves. When they screw up and don’t shut off the mains, this is what happens.”

  “That’s what the people on Filbert Street are telling themselves.”

  He got out of the van and met Mia on the sidewalk. It was raining, but he could still smell the smoke. Black water flowed out of the ruins and across the sidewalk. Mia took his hand and they walked together to Fremont’s garage apartment.

  There were no lights in the windows, but when Carver knocked with his fist, the bulb next to the door came on.

  “That you, Carver?” Fremont asked.

  “That’s right. And my friend.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Another job. It’s quick.”

  The door opened and Fremont stepped out. He was wearing sweatpants and a white T-shirt, and had on fingerless weight-lifting gloves. His face was covered in sweat.

  “What job?”

  Carver took out the memory card he’d retrieved from the motorcycle rider’s phone. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and brought it up so Fremont could see it.

  “I got this off a suspect ​—”

  “I thought you were suspended.”

  “If I could take it to the lab, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Except I asked about it,” Fremont said. “This suspension. Called some guys. Nobody knows anything. There’s a lockout notice, but there’s no entry of suspension, no hearing.”

  “It’s informal,” Carver said. “You got equipment to read the data on this?”

  “If it’s encrypted, forget it.”

  “Two hundred—if you can get whatever’s on there, put it on my laptop.”

  “Three.”

  “Three, then. And for that, you don’t call your friends about me anymore. You don’t know me.”

  Fremont opened the door and let them in.

  “What happened to you guys?” he said as Mia passed him. “You look like shit.”

  “Nothing you need to know about.”

  Fremont turned two deadbolts and put the chain on the door. Then he gestured at the couch.

  “I’ll do this in my bedroom,” he said. “You want coffee, there’s a shop on Fortieth.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Unless it’s been firebombed,” Fremont said. “You look at this city, and it’s like SFPD surrendered everything west of Twenty-Second.”

  He went into his bedroom and shut the door.

  From outside, there were three pops of gunfire. Five, maybe six blocks away. Carver went to the couch and pushed aside a pile of unfolded laundry. He sat, and Mia took the space next to him. They waited for Fremont for half an hour, and in that time they heard a dozen more shots but not a single siren. Probably no one bothered to call anymore.

  He couldn’t blame people for losing faith. His own partner had just been kidnapped. He’d witnessed, on screen, the murder of a police officer. Yet he hadn’t called anything in. There’d be no point to it. He had nothing solid to give and the police would do nothing in return. He had no confidence that the man in the spacesuit wasn’t acting on Lyndon Ivies’s orders.

  He turned to Mia.

  “I didn’t understand, until just now, how they knew your name. How they knew you were with me.”

  She nodded, her eyes welling up again. She understood; she’d already figured it out. They might not have known her name an hour ago. But once they had Jenner, everything changed.

  “Ross—there’s nothing you could’ve done.”

  “They’ll have to pay it back,” he said. “Whatever they did to him.”

  “Stay with me, Ross,” Mia whispered. She put her arms around him and pressed her face against his neck. “I know what he means to you. But don’t let yourself go there. Not right now. It won’t help.”

  Mia let go of him when Fremont came out of his bedroom office. He crossed the small room and sat on the end of his weight bench. Then he handed Carver the memory chip and a portable hard drive.

  “Most of what you want—call logs, text messages, email—is encrypted. The FBI, maybe they could do something. But not me.”

  “Was there anything you could get?”

  “His camera roll—two hundred pictures. Some video clips.”

  “Pictures of what?” Mia asked. “Did you open them?”

  Fremont nodded at the briefcase. In the time he’d been gone, he seemed to have shed most of his arrogance. He looked like an old man, a lonely soul trying to keep a light burning as the world around him slipped into darkness.

  “You got a laptop in there? Take a look.”

  Fremont went to his kitchen and found three unmatching glasses. He reached up toward his collection of Kinclaith and took the opened bottle. He poured a finger’s worth of the scotch into each glass and brought them back. He set two of them on the coffee table and then went back to the weight bench, the only other place in the room to sit.

  “You said you got it off a suspect,” Fremont said. “The memory card. You didn’t say he was the guy who did Hadley Hardgrave.”

  “That’s what’s on here?”

  Fremont brought the glass to his nose and breathed in. Then he took a sip and let the whiskey sit on his tongue for a moment.

  “I never saw a snuff film before,” he said. He looked at Mia. “You might not want to watch this.”

  The gunfire outside was farther away now. Ten blocks, Carver guessed. He watched Mia take a glass of whiskey from the table, watched her drink it. She turned to him.

  “I don’t want to watch it,” she said. “But I guess I have to, don’t I?”

  Carver inserted the portable drive and opened the folder of video files. The file names were just meaningless numbers assigned by the man’s cell phone. But there were file creation dates, and those meant something. The first video was shot the day Hadley Hardgrave had gone missing. She’d sung four nights in a row at the San Lung Lounge and was supposed to come for one last performance. But she never showed up.

  Carver double-clicked the file. A media window opened. There was a still image of Hadley Hardgrave’s face. Her eyes were closed and she was screaming. Her lips were fully intact, hadn’t yet been carved into that Cheshire grin. If that didn’t happen in this video, it would be on the one after. Carver hit play, and felt Mia’s grip on his arm. She was bracing herself against him, getting ready for it.

  They bot
h knew what was coming.

  26

  THEY LEFT FREMONT’S apartment and went up the street in the blowing rain. Carver had the briefcase in his left hand, and his right arm was wrapped around Mia’s waist. He was ready to push her aside if he had to draw his gun, but the streets were empty. It was dark in every direction until they reached Noriega and turned the corner. The pizza place was still lit, but the man with the shotgun was gone.

  That should have told him something, but it didn’t occur to him until later. He was thinking about the man on the train. The right hook that had smashed his jaw like a piece of damp plaster.

  “I had him,” Carver said. “Had him on his back. I could’ve put a bullet through his head. Could’ve stepped on his windpipe and been done with it.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “I might not get another chance.”

  “It’s not just him,” Mia said. “He’s part of it, but he’s just the tip.”

  “He’s a psychopath.”

  “And a useful one,” Mia whispered. “He might’ve enjoyed what he did to Hadley. But they let him do it—they let him keep doing it—because it suits them. It keeps my people underground. It keeps us running.”

  They finished the walk to the van in silence.

  Thirty minutes ago, he would not have thought it possible to believe Houston was lucky. But she had been. Her pain ended in seconds. He didn’t think that was true for Jenner. He thought of the high-pitched, scratching voice on the phone. If it had been the man from the train, the man from the videos—

  “Ross?”

  “In the bell tower, when Houston and Roper were in the foyer, you said they should look in the basement. You told me to send them to the basement ​—”

  “Ross, I ​—”

  “What did you know?”

  Mia took a step away from him so that she was backed up against the van. She spoke carefully, her eyes on the gun in his shoulder holster.

  “Only what you’d told me—that someone pulled an electrical permit. That someone put four-hundred-forty-volt mains into the basement. And if you wanted to run a lab, run something with the kind of machinery that could print nanomachines, you’d need a steady foundation. You couldn’t put it on an upper floor.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I promise you, Ross.”

  She was holding her hand out to him. Jenner was gone and there was nothing he could do about it. He had one lead but no way of following it, and he still didn’t know whose side Mia belonged to. So nothing had really changed. He had to keep her close until he figured it out. He used the remote to unlock the van, then opened the door for her. That was his second mistake—to help her inside, to hold her elbow as she stepped off the debris-slick sidewalk and up to the passenger seat. He didn’t see the men come out of the ruined restaurant, didn’t notice anything amiss until the five of them were already behind him. He started to turn, but stiffened when he felt the gun’s muzzle pressed against his spine. Someone pulled the briefcase away from him. He didn’t turn around to see who’d done it.

  “Put up your hands.”

  He raised his arms, laced his fingers over the top of his head.

  “Tell the lady to get out.”

  Mia climbed back to the sidewalk, her hands up.

  “Turn around, Inspector Carver.”

  He turned and faced the five young men. They wore black slacks and black woolen coats. Their faces weren’t covered, and he recognized some of them from their mug shots, the Gang Intelligence photos. When they were tracking Patrick Wong, Jenner had kept a folder of them on his desk.

  One man stepped forward, shoving a gun in Carver’s face. A second man patted him down, taking his weapon and then his keys. The man moved to Mia, and Carver had time to think of his first two mistakes. Then he thought of a third.

  He should never have let Fremont go into his office and close the door.

  “Sonofabitch,” Carver said.

  The second man had just finished checking Mia and they both looked up at him.

  “That sonofabitch just sold us to Johnny Wong,” Carver said.

  “And he’d like a word with you,” said the man with the gun in Carver’s face.

  A dark limousine rolled out of the fog and came to a stop in front of them. Its windows and bodywork were the same smooth black; the whole thing might have been cut from a single piece of polished volcanic glass. The chauffeur stepped out and came around to the rear. He opened the door and extended a white-gloved hand to Carver and Mia, as if they were guests on their way to a costume ball.

  The man facing Carver was less discreet. He jerked his gun barrel at the open door.

  “Get in.”

  Mia went first, and Carver followed her. He expected the other men to climb in after him, but the chauffeur shut the door.

  Carver was on a wide leather-bound seat, looking down the length of a wet bar. The liquor bottles were illuminated from beneath by soft incandescent bulbs, their combined light filtering easily through the glass because every label had been removed. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and through the haze Carver could see the glowing tip smoldering across the car. Once his eyes had adjusted, he saw it was held by a man sitting in one of the rear-facing seats.

  He wore a well-cut suit and had a submachine gun across his knees. The cigarette was pinched between his left thumb and forefinger, so that his pinkie stuck out. He’d let that nail grow long. A sign of wisdom, Carver had heard.

  “I’ve seen a picture of Johnny Wong,” Carver said. “You’re not him.”

  “There’s a picture of Mr. Wong?” the man asked. He half smiled. “I thought we’d found them all. Removed them, one way or another. We should look harder?”

  Carver didn’t answer. The man took another drag on his cigarette, then twisted it into the ashtray next to him. The limousine started to roll. On the street, the five gunmen were piling into the church van. The man with the submachine gun must have seen the direction of Carver’s eyes.

  “A clean vehicle,” he said. “Mr. Wong, I’m sure, will thank you.”

  At the end of Noriega, the chauffeur took a right. They were going north along Ocean Beach. The water was invisible in the fog and the dark. Twenty blocks of wasteland lay between them and any street where they might reasonably hope to see a policeman.

  “You’ve heard a story about Mr. Wong,” the man said. “Maybe it went like this: A man is called to see Mr. Wong. Naturally, he’s terrified. They stuff him into the limousine—this limousine—and offer him a drink.”

  The man waved his hand above the glowing bottles.

  “Calvados? Or maybe a vodka. We have Russian, of course. But if he doesn’t want to support the Russians, he can support the Finnish. Or the Swedes.”

  Carver watched as the man dug a cigarette case from his left pocket. He put it on the seat next to him. He used his single, elongated fingernail to stroke the etched silver lid.

  “Of course, this man accepts a drink. He’s too frightened not to take what Johnny Wong offers. One must be courteous. But ultimately, the drink is not what soothes him. What sets him at ease—what sets them all at ease—is the blindfold. Because that is how he knows he isn’t going to die. That Johnny Wong intends for him to walk away from the meeting.”

  The man took another cigarette from the case and put it between his lips. Then he pulled a lighter from his lapel pocket and lit the cigarette. He did this all with his left hand. His right hand never left the stock of the gun on his lap.

  “You’ve heard this story?”

  Carver had heard a hundred versions of it. He’d heard it in interrogation rooms, and in the alleys behind bars. He’d spoken to men who’d actually taken the blindfold, who’d sat across from Johnny Wong and lived to tell about it because they’d never seen his face. His voice was supposed to be like a good single malt poured over frozen stones—smooth and golden, and cold. And there were women around him, all the time. The men Carver interrogated had never actuall
y seen one, had never heard so much as a feminine whisper in Johnny’s presence. But they’d revealed themselves in passing. Trails of perfume, whispers of satin.

  Carver nodded slightly at the man.

  “I know about that story.”

  “Then would you like a drink?” the man asked. “Pour your own. My hands, obviously, are full.”

  “No,” Mia said. “We don’t want a drink.”

  The man smiled again.

  “That’s all right, miss,” he said. “That’s very good. And Mr. Wong said you wouldn’t need blindfolds, either. In fact, he told me not to bring them. Maybe, since they were never a possibility, I shouldn’t have brought them up.”

  They followed the ocean to the northwest tip of the city. At the corner of Lands End Park, he saw the Legion of Honor in the fog. He looked at the man across from him.

  “Everyone said Johnny Wong was behind that job. Was he?”

  “What job?”

  “The Laurent show,” Carver said. “The beach and glass paintings. They said it was Johnny’s money, and his crew. But no one could make anything stick. He was untouchable, invisible.”

  “Who said that?” the man asked. “What are their names?”

  He took a long pull on his cigarette and blew the smoke across the illuminated bottles.

  “And where do they live? Maybe I should see them later.”

  The man put out his cigarette and used his left hand to pour himself a drink. With the label missing, it was impossible to tell what he’d chosen.

  They cut away from the shoreline, back onto city streets. They merged with Geary Avenue, and by the time they passed George Washington High School, the traffic signals were functioning again. Streetlamps glowed above the sidewalks, and lights shone from the windows of the houses they passed. If civilization had a bare requirement, Carver thought, it was a light to burn in the nighttime.

  Every day that circle grew smaller. Soon they’d all be in the dark.

  The limousine stopped in front of a club on Columbus Avenue. There was a green canvas awning, and above that a backlit marquee surrounded by chasing lights. Carver had driven past this club when the names of bands, sometimes half a dozen in a night, were spelled out in red block letters. Hadley Hardgrave’s name had been up there. But tonight, the sign was simpler.