City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2)

by Mark Wheaton

  “Got hot zikh bashafen a velt mit klaineh veltelech,” she said in what Luis recognized as Yiddish.

  God created a world full of many little worlds.

  “He did indeed,” Luis replied, patting her hands. “He did indeed.”

  Oscar had been scouting a new house with Helen when Tony called. It was a magnificent four-story affair in the Palisades with a trail leading to a beach and a breathtaking view of the ocean from the fourth floor. What more could anyone want?

  “If you’re eight months pregnant, you don’t want to do the stairs,” Helen had said, leading Oscar away from the eager realtor, who’d seen the gleam in Oscar’s eyes. “So the view’s irrelevant. The view out the back windows on the first two floors is of the base of the embankment a dozen yards away, like looking at the wall of a prison. I vote no.”

  Oscar had fumed. This was the first house he had found rather than having to rely on Helen. That he’d missed all of this made him feel embarrassed in front of the one person whose opinion he cared about. But sensing this, she’d moved into his eye line and touched his hand.

  “That’s why I’m here, Oscar,” she’d said lightly. “That’s why we’re a team. But so you know, I’m not interested in being with someone who makes me feel like I have to worry about hurt feelings every time I say something that might stroke his ego in the wrong way. If you want somebody to just shut up and do whatever you say, tell me. I can probably point you to the right person. But it won’t be me.”

  Oscar had stared at her, wanting to take her up into his arms and kiss her, but had refrained, as he’d heard the realtor’s soft footsteps in the hall.

  “You’re right,” he’d finally said.

  “I know,” Helen had replied, leaning in to kiss him on the lips even though the realtor had walked into view.

  As they’d pulled away, Oscar’s cell phone had rung. It was Tony Qi asking if Oscar could meet him in about an hour. He was to come alone. When Oscar agreed, Tony had texted him a map point of an area called Shadow Hills, a remote location deep in Auyong Valley. Oscar had immediately feared some sort of trap but had no idea what Tony would have against him.

  Contrary to his better judgment, Oscar drove out on his own.

  When he got to the spot on the map, he thought what it chose to designate a “road” was overly generous. It was more of a sandy trail marked by ATV tracks and the hoofprints of horses.

  Now I know it’s a trap, Oscar thought.

  He checked the pistol in his glove box, the one in the magnetized holster under the driver’s seat, and a tiny and an ineffectual-at-best .22 two-shot Derringer he kept in the sunshade, and pressed on. But then he saw Tony Qi’s car parked up ahead and its owner sitting alongside an old and twisted tree. It was just about the only thing that broke up the vast empty vistas. There was clearly nowhere to hide an ambush, unless they’d tunneled underground or would drop from the sky.

  Oscar parked and climbed out of his car, his feet sinking into the soft sand. Tony rose and came to meet him, extending his hand. Oscar shook it.

  “Tony Qi,” Oscar said by way of greeting.

  “Thank you for coming all this way to meet me,” Tony said. “I thought you’d enjoy seeing this tree.”

  Oscar thought Tony must be joking. When he realized that he wasn’t, he shrugged.

  “Okay.”

  Tony led him over to it and patted the trunk. “This tree is five thousand years old. It is literally one of the oldest living things on the entire planet. It predates not only most of what exists in this region but civilization as we know it.”

  Oscar was already bored. The sum total of his knowledge of China was formed by watching Jet Li and Jackie Chan movies. He figured this must be some kind of Chinese honor thing tied to tradition. He also expected a long speech of some kind. He’d given up a quickie with Helen on some side street in the Palisades for this? Maybe he was the one who was there to shoot Tony.

  “I asked you here to negotiate an alliance,” Tony said.

  “Don’t we have one?” Oscar asked.

  “One that extends far beyond our agreements relating to the houses we’re buying,” Tony explained. “It is one between my society and your organization.”

  Organization?

  Oscar scoffed. “I’m not sure who you think I am, but you should know that it may not be who you think I am. There is no organization. There’s me and my shops, my guys, a few affiliated crews, but that’s it. Maybe a hundred men.”

  “No, I have a clear picture,” Tony said. “A hundred men is precisely what I need. About a hundred of yours that can replace a hundred of mine. And quickly. Very quickly.”

  “Wait, what’s this about?” Oscar asked, alarmed. “I don’t want to get in the middle of some kind of power struggle.”

  “It’s not that at all. Necessity makes strange bedfellows, as they say. But perhaps we can build to something mutually beneficial. You see, it’s about to be open season on Asian businesses in Los Angeles. Boycotts, picketing, possibly even violence, though I doubt it’ll get that far. And the businesses I’m related to can’t afford that.”

  “Whoa,” Oscar said. “That’s crazy. Are you guys paranoid or something?”

  “Have you heard of SARS?” Tony asked.

  “Yeah, it’s like bird flu. You guys invented it, right?”

  “Therein lies the problem. An hour ago the CDC confirmed a SARS outbreak here in Los Angeles. Two Hispanics, a Lebanese man, and a young Caucasian girl have already been positively identified as carriers. All four have died.”

  “So you think they’re going to look at you and not a bunch of Hispanics or Lebanese people? I mean, they’re not going to look at white people, of course. But you’re crazy if you think they’re going to go after Asians.”

  “All right, then let me be crazy,” Tony said. “My motivations aside, would you consider deepening our relationship?”

  “Are these illegal businesses?” Oscar ventured.

  “Not at all,” Tony said. “Food deliveries, restaurant supplies, linens, liquor distribution, and so on. I need a few people in warehouses, but more importantly, I need different trucks, different drivers, and different men carrying the boxes into these businesses.”

  “Different as in non-Asians?”

  “Yes.”

  Oscar thought about it. His commission for rounding up a bunch of guys to drive around the city to make a bunch of paranoid triad guys happy would probably be significant. Also, the fact that Tony had brought him out to some five-thousand-year-old tree as if to imply the strength and longevity of this new agreement meant that, aside from being a drama queen, he was also desperate. This meant Oscar was in the catbird seat.

  “One big caveat,” Oscar said. “I can’t have my guys involved with narcotics. That’s a deal breaker. If I’m not willing to do the sentence for a crime, I’m not going to send my guys out to do it. And heroin’s a bad, bad rap. Also, we’d start running into territorial issues with some of our own.”

  “No drugs, I assure you,” Tony said, shaking his head. “It is only a question of perception. When news of the outbreak reaches far and wide, no restaurant can allow its customers to see our deliverymen. It’s that simple. Perception, Oscar. That’s all. And if it wasn’t for decades of ‘yellow peril’ racism associated with incidents like this, I might agree with you about being paranoid. But if there’s any constant in this world, it’s that people are always looking for ways to be exclusionary and xenophobic, as pack animals do, and this is a golden opportunity.”

  As much as he didn’t want to admit it, some element of what Tony was saying rang true. He nodded.

  “I’ll do it for the money, but I don’t want this to be a temporary stopgap,” Oscar said. “We keep your trains running on time, we get to keep a couple of routes after this SARS deal blows over. We have the pack mentality, too, and if it’s our people in our neighborhoods making the delivery money, I’m sure I can get a few restaurants added to your list. Maybe even in a
reas of the city you haven’t been able to crack. What do you think?”

  When his counterpart didn’t reply, Oscar wondered if he’d overstepped. Then Tony rose and offered a solemn handshake.

  “If my associates agree,” Tony declared, “maybe this will turn out to be a blessing in disguise.”

  Oscar nodded amicably. He’d worked with a lot of people in his day. But this Tony Qi guy took the cake.

  Susan had been Federico Carreño’s doctor for more than half his life. She’d seen him through ear infections, a broken finger attributed to school sports (which the doctor would later learn was a result of a wrestling match with his drunken father), and a handful of other childhood illnesses. But she’d only really ever thought of him as a name on a chart. He’d come in, she’d look down to remind herself of who he was, then ask him about school, summer vacation, or plans for Christmas break, depending on the season. If forced, she doubted she could pick him out of a lineup.

  But now she was faced with determining whether he carried a disease that had already decimated his family.

  “And did you come over to the house after your grandfather fell ill?”

  “I did. With Mamá.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “She made me stay downstairs,” he recalled. “She didn’t want me to miss any school.”

  Thank heaven for small miracles.

  “And your mother? Did she make you stay away from her, too, after she got sick?”

  The boy’s father shifted in the examination room doorway. Federico sniffled. Tears formed in his eyes. Susan kicked herself for not finding a better way to frame the question.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I know this is hard, Federico, and you are being very brave.”

  What she didn’t want to say, what she couldn’t say, was that she needed to know all this to determine if he might be infected, too. But that was too much to put on this boy’s mind. If he was sick, there wasn’t much she could do. There were no antibiotics, no vaccines, no cures. The only thing to be done was to try and keep the infected patient’s organs functioning long enough for the virus to pass through the body.

  “When she came back from the hospital after abuelo died, she was really sad,” Federico said. “She climbed into bed with me. She wasn’t coughing, though, not like abuelo.”

  Susan froze her features so the boy wouldn’t see how far they’d fallen. Esmeralda had thought to keep her son safe from her father but not from herself. She’d had no idea she was sick. It was potentially devastating news.

  “Thank you, Federico,” Susan said, moving away from the exam table. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to go talk to your dad now. We’ll be right back in.”

  Susan led the boy’s father, Pablo Ochoa, into her office.

  “Is he sick?” Pablo asked.

  “He’s definitely been exposed,” Susan said. “You need to leave here and go immediately to Good Samaritan.”

  “I can’t do that,” Pablo protested. “The whole reason we come to you is because we can’t go to a regular doctor.”

  “Sir, you’ve probably been exposed, too. If you can’t think of your son, maybe think of yourself.”

  Pablo blanched. Susan hoped this would be enough, and to her relief Pablo softened and nodded. She gave him a detailed list of further instructions, then sent him to retrieve his son. When she went back in to see Federico, she almost thought she’d gone to the wrong room. He seemed to have aged several years in the few minutes she was away.

  He knows, she realized.

  Luis watched Pablo and Federico exit an unmarked door at the rear of the shopping plaza. The boy was the spitting image of his mother. He eyed the pair closely, looking for any sign that they might be infected with the virus that had killed Esmeralda. To his relief, he saw none, but he knew that meant little.

  Climbing out of his car, he hurried over to the door but found no handle.

  Huh.

  Moving around the side of the building, he found a handful of other businesses, including a florist, a doughnut shop/deli, and a pet store that primarily focused on exotic fish. There was no sign of how to enter the doctor’s office. That is, until he went down a side hallway and found another unmarked door by restrooms. He took the handle, found it locked, but then looked up and saw a security camera lens staring back down at him.

  A small voice box came to life beside the door. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Dr. Auyong.”

  The door buzzed and Luis entered. The waiting room on the other side was about the same as any other doctor’s office he’d been to. Four people were waiting, including a mother and her young daughter. There were two televisions on, a number of magazines laid out, and a large kid-friendly fish tank in one corner with an advertisement at the bottom revealing that it and its contents were purchased from the store around the corner.

  “Sir? Are you a new patient?” the receptionist asked.

  “I am. But I just need to see her. I’m a friend.”

  The receptionist eyed Luis’s collar and she nodded. Luis wondered if Father Chang had ever been here. When Susan appeared a moment later, several boxes in both hands, she looked at him with surprise. Then it seemed to dawn on her.

  “You were the priest at Good Samaritan, weren’t you?” she asked over the receptionist’s desk. “With Esmeralda Carreño?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose I should thank you,” she said.

  “I think we can skip that,” Luis replied. “I’m afraid I need to talk to you for a moment.”

  “I’m just on my way out,” she said, opening the door from the waiting room. “So you’ll have to make it quick.”

  They filed back to Susan’s office. She loaded bags with boxes of drug samples and vitamins.

  “I found out a few things about Father Chang’s death,” Luis said. “I thought you’d want to hear them.”

  “I don’t know if I do,” she admitted, piling the bags on a chair. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty to say at the trial, but I have time to get ready for that.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Yamazoe’s dead. He died sometime last night. They think it was poison.”

  Susan went very still. Then she smacked her desk and looked back up at Luis. “Good. Who did it?”

  “Depends on who you ask. A lot of the foreign papers that ran it already say it was suicide. Guilt over Father Chang’s death.”

  “And now the truth?” she asked.

  “I think he was killed by the LA triad.”

  Luis explained about everything he’d learned in the past forty-eight hours. Susan’s jaw dropped lower and lower. When he got to the part about Michael Story, Susan stopped him.

  “You’re friends with some kind of prosecutor?” she asked.

  “‘Friends’ isn’t the right word. Collaborators, I suppose.”

  “I hope you didn’t say anything about me.”

  “Not a word,” he assured her, glancing around. “Did Father Chang know about this place?”

  “He did.”

  “Was he your patient?”

  “No, we actually met off-site. One of the ways we get the state medical board to look the other way is through charitable work. We hit the streets, look for people in need of care, and take care of them. I ran into Father Chang when he was doing the same thing.”

  “Where exactly?”

  Susan considered her response for a moment, then nodded to the door. “I’m heading there right now. You want to ride along?”

  “César Carreño was a drug dealer?” Michael asked the assistant, one of the newer young women whose name he’d actually made the effort to remember—Naomi Okpewho—who’d come in with the news. “I thought he was some kind of construction worker.”

  “Yeah, they think even the daughter didn’t know,” Naomi replied. “LAPD has him selling drugs on work sites all around East LA and the San Gabriel V
alley for the past three or four years. Sold to a lot of people on the street.”

  Michael nodded. Since the SARS announcement that morning, the day had become a flurry of paperwork. There were extrajudicial health screenings of prisoners to be done, warrants for welfare checks to be brought to the right judges to sign, and now this—raids on places César Carreño’s customers might frequent. As a possible patient zero, every detail of Carreño’s life had been scrutinized. He hadn’t traveled recently anywhere there had been an outbreak, he hadn’t visited any farms or slaughterhouses, so the belief had quickly crystalized that he must’ve been infected by someone else.

  Finding that someone else and quarantining them, if they were still alive, and anyone else they’d come in contact with was the city’s top priority. Keeping the suddenly terrified populace from boiling over into outright paranoia and flight was a close second.

  “So, are we talking raids? Or just hitting the shelters and asking if anyone’s had a bad cough?”

  “Raids. I think the city knows it doesn’t have the time to be polite,” Naomi replied. “No one wants to be the bureaucrat who put up red tape as more people got infected.”

  Michael felt the memory of Jeff Lambert’s grip on his bicep and the crush of his handshake. He put his laptop bag back down on his desk and took off his suit jacket.

  “Good point,” he said. “Put the word out. Anybody who needs anything smoothed through the DA’s office can find me—me, personally—right here on this desk. Let’s get out in front of this. You game?”

  “Are you asking me as someone you hope organizes your campaign staff, or somebody in an actual position of power once you win the election?”

  Michael looked at Naomi with new eyes. “Both.”

  Naomi nodded. “Let me get back to my desk.”

  As she left, Michael considered that his steadfast refusal to leave his post might be seen as a cynical play for attention and possible advancement. But if there was even the slightest chance that it could work in his favor, he knew it’d be worth it.