“Ooof,” he said, lifting his knees to shrink his diaphragm, trying to catch his breath. With another shot at a set of genetic jewels presenting itself, I drove my foot into his crotch.
It worked again. He squealed in soprano, curling himself away from me. He was painfully thin, and I did my best to shatter his ribs, bringing a Reebok-soled foot down on his solar plexus.
I was winning. And if I wasn't, who was around to contradict me? I fumbled my way to my feet, fighting for breath, and sighted an angel.
“That's my baby,” the angel said. As I'd thought at first, she couldn't have been more than fifteen. Her left hand came up and leveled a gun, a new gun, in the very specific direction of my brain. “You can't hurt my baby.”
“Honey,” I said, “I was only trying—”
“You hurt him,” she said. She cocked it. She was too far away to reach. I heard the first click and then the second, and I kissed it all good-bye. Eleanor would know that I'd tried. The eyes in the absurdly young face narrowed, and I watched the knuckles circling the trigger go white. Someone else's life flashed before my eyes, the life of some poor, dumb fool who had missed all his chances, who had turned his back on the love that might have saved him, redeemed him. Chances rejected, love denied, lifelines refused. What the hell; it was my life after all.
“Drop it,” said a new voice, a voice I'd never heard before. “Drop it, fish sauce.”
She turned away from me, toward the entrance of the alley, her mouth an open, vulnerable O. A large number of Chinese men, seven or eight of them, stood there. Most of them had guns. All the guns were pointed at the angel.
“Gone,” she said, dropping it.
“Jesus,” I said fervently to them as they advanced. “Thanks.”
“Forget it,” the nearest of them said. He had a semi in his hand, and he leaned down to pick up my keys. Then he smiled at me and took a step in my direction.
The last thing I remember from the alley was the barrel of the semi hitting me on the temple. Whatever I landed on seemed very soft.
Across the room, the girl was chained to a concrete pillar.
So was I.
To be exact, we were both handcuffed, and the chain connecting the cuffs had been passed behind metallic electrical conduits that terminated at the tops of boxy outlets about six feet from the ground. That put my hands directly behind my head, but the girl's arms were stretched straight up and her feet pointed downward balletically. She was even shorter than I'd thought. Her eyes were closed, but her lips were moving silently, and she was conscious. Other outlets sprouted from similar pillars studded throughout the room. The room, which was quite large, was windowless and rich in pillars. A basement, maybe, supporting the weight of the building above it. The dirty cement floor was cluttered with desks and pallid beneath a thin wash of fluorescent light. On each desk was a sewing machine, and each of them was plugged into one of the boxes on a pillar. Cartons of unfinished garments, sleeves and collars and whatever comes between them, squatted next to the desks. A sweatshop. Chinese men were yanking the plugs from the outlets and shoving the desks and cartons aside to clear a space in the center of the floor, an action that struck me as sinister for some reason that might have been related to the fact that I was, after all, chained to a goddamn pillar.
My head felt like leftover gristle, and my neck felt like it had been flayed. It was difficult to focus my eyes; things kept getting watery. Dried blood pasted my shirt to my neck and shoulder. Whoever my rescuers were, they'd been forceful about things. No one had been worried about diplomacy. On the other hand, I was alive.
I wasn't sure why, but then I wasn't sure about much of anything.
“He's awake.” One of the men said, giving me what he probably thought was a hard stare from the middle of the room. He was thin and round-shouldered, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt tucked into pleated, shiny-kneed slacks that he belted about six inches below his armpits. He came toward me, loafers flopping lazily on his feet, and one of the other men, the one who had clouted me with the gun, said something short and sharp in Cantonese. The natty dresser laughed, showing me a partial set of third-world teeth, and stopped about eight feet from me. Too far away to kick.
“Head hurt?” he asked, cocking his head to one side and giving me a diagnostic survey.
“No,” I lied.
“It will,” he said.
This got a big laugh from two of the men on the floor. There were six of them, counting the guy with his belt loops in his armpits and his pockets at his nipples. So a couple were missing, probably in the back room torturing puppies.
“Do a lot of sewing?” I asked him.
He looked absently around the room. “That's funny,” he said soberly. Then he stepped forward, lifted a leg, turned quickly, bent at the waist and swung a shoe into my ribs.
It took my feet right out from under me, and the cuffs took a bite out of my wrists as I dangled there, fighting back a sudden upsurge of vomit. As I tried to get my feet working again, he knotted his fingers together and swiped both hands, arms fully extended, across my face. The blow drove my head back and into a corner of the electrical box, and I saw a brief explosion of light and my legs went slack again.
“Now does it hurt?” he asked.
“Bruce Lee,” I said. I'd bitten my tongue hard, and my mouth tasted hot and salty. “Everybody thinks he's Bruce Lee these days.”
“Bruce Lee is dead,” he said informatively.
“That's the trouble with impressionists,” I said, finding my feet at last. “They never take it far enough.”
One of the other men, a mild, even scholarly-looking specimen several inches shorter than the one who'd hit me, laughed and loosed a volley of Chinese. I recognized “Bruce Lee,” and then the translator laughed again and the other men joined in.
It didn't sit well with Highpockets. His eyes narrowed, and his long upper lip raised to reveal those teeth. His hand went to an elevated pocket and came out with a knife. He flicked it downward and a very bright blade appeared, and he angled away to my right, out of reach of my feet.
The other men watched fascinated. Highpockets was behind me now, breathing shallowly and fast, and I could smell garlic and beer and the odor of my own fear. Something brushed past my hair, and the edge of the knife came to rest at the top of my injured right ear, at the spot where it joins my head. He began to press down.
“No,” the translator said. Then he said something in Chinese.
The knife was lifted, and Highpockets came around me, staying clear of my feet, and grinned at me. “Hero,” he said. “Mr. Hero.”
He turned his back on me and crossed the room to the girl. Her eyes were wide open now, watching him come. He stopped beside her, turned to give me a mocking look, and grasped her chin with his left hand. With his right he drew the knife down her smooth cheek.
She made a muffled, whimpering sound, and a line of red appeared. It began below her left eye and ended below the corner of her mouth. The blood coursed down her throat and dripped onto her jacket.
“What about it, Mr. Hero?” Highpockets asked. He released her chin and crossed behind the pillar to reappear on her right side. He grabbed her chin again, and now she began to cry. “Got anything funny to say?”
“Please,” I said.
“Pretty little fish sauce, isn't she?” he said, raising the knife again.
“Please,” I said again. “Please don't.” The girl sobbed hopelessly without moving, frozen into immobility by the point of the knife.
'Please,' he mimicked, forcing his voice into a soprano squeal. “Oh, please don't.”
“That's right,” someone said. “Don't.”
Highpockets jumped back as though the girl had given him a shock. The knife dangled impotently at his side.
The man who had come into the room was short, maybe five-six, but wide as a door frame. He wore a meticulously cut suit in an improbable shade of powder blue that didn't mask the huge muscles at the tops of his sho
ulders, muscles that seemed to crowd his ears. He was clean-shaven and blandly pleasant-looking, with thinning black hair combed straight back, a little too long at the back of his neck. Something gleamed at one corner of his wide, straight mouth. Two semifinalists from the Mr. Chinese Universe contest stood possessively behind him. They would have been identical except that one of them had two eyebrows and the other had one, a straight line of hair that joined over his nose like a furrow of corn.
“We will speak English,” the man in blue said in a mild voice. “To be polite.” Then he pointed at Highpockets and said, “Ying. Cut yourself.”
Highpockets looked at his friends on the floor, but no one moved. Most of them seemed to be fascinated by the unfinished garments in the cartons at their feet. One of them actually picked up a sleeve and gave it an experimental stretch.
Highpockets swallowed and then looked an appeal at the man in blue. The man in blue took whatever it was out of his mouth and lifted his eyebrows expectantly. Highpockets immediately put the blade against his own face and sliced downward. Blood flowed.
“Face the girl,” the man in the blue said. Highpockets did as told, bleeding face to bleeding face.
“You may spit on him,” the man in the blue suit said.
The girl spat on him.
“Ying,” the man in the blue suit said. “Take one of those pieces of cloth and clean her face.”
Highpockets—or Ying, I guessed—took a sleeve or something from a carton and mopped her face with it.
“Press it against the cut to stop the bleeding,” the man in the blue suit said.His eyes were calm, almost uninterested.
Ying did as told, very gently. Blood from his own cut stained his white shirt. The man in blue turned to face me.
“It's always wise,” he said, “to demonstrate control at the outset. People think it's easy to be the bad guy. They don't take into account the kind of help you have to hire. Does your head hurt?”
“Yes,” I said this time.
“Good,” he said, nodding. “There's no reason you should escape Scotch-free.”
“Scot-free,” I said without thinking.
His eyebrows went up and he smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “Idioms give me some trouble. So many of them make no sense. The first time someone said 'How do you do' to me, I asked him how I did what.” He paused.
“How about that?” I said, since he obviously expected me to say something.
“You are in the way,” he said, apparently fascinated by the sound of the words. “Is that what you say, 'in the way'?”
Was he kidding? “That's what we say.”
“I thought so. It's not your fault, exactly. Or, rather, it is, because you are a persistent soul. But it's not your fault that the Confucian ethic is breaking down.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said, not having the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“Everywhere you look,” he said, “old values are failing. Your country is certainly not immune.”
“I guess not.”
“Look at the work ethic,” he said, settling in for a chat. “Americans used to like to work. Now they're as lazy as fleas on a dog.” He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“That's a new one to me,” I said.
“ 'As lazy as fleas on a dog'?” he asked. “This is not something you say?”
“Well, it's not something I say.”
“The flea,” he said quite seriously, thinking things through, “is not an industrious animal.”
“Hungry, though,” I said, equally seriously.
“Hungry?” He put the thing back in his mouth, and I saw it was a gold toothpick. “ 'As hungry as fleas on a dog,' perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“That may be the trouble with Americans. They're not hungry anymore.” He seemed to be waiting for applause.
“I think that's something we're proud of.”
“Ah, yes, but it takes the edge off.” He smiled in triumph at the idiom, the gold toothpick protruding from one corner of his smile. Something gurgled.
“Excuse me,” he said, the model of politeness. He pulled one lapel of his suit aside to display a holster, and my stomach did a sudden flipflop. The holster gurgled again, and he pulled a cellular telephone from it, turning away from me as he did so. Highpockets—Ying—watched him, his shirt soaked with blood, not daring to remove the cloth from the girl's face. The girl seemed to be concentrating on something taking place in the Andromeda Galaxy.
“Yes?” Mr. Blue demanded. He listened for a moment, and then snapped his fingers, twice. One of the Mr. Universe contestants, the one with the single eyebrow, leaped forward, pad and pen in hand. He handed them to the boss and turned submissively away, offering a back as broad as the Mississippi Delta as a writing surface.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Blue said into the phone. Then he said, “San Pedro,” and followed it with a couple of very fast paragraphs in Chinese, but it didn't sound like Cantonese. He took the phone from his ear and punched a button, turning back to me and holding out the pad and pen in one smooth gesture. Mr. Universe took them, and Mr. Blue holstered the phone.
“You understand Mandarin?” he demanded.
“No.”
He snapped something at me, watching me closely, and then flung a few syllables at his bodyguards. They started to move toward me, and Mr. Blue gave me the big calm eye for a moment and then snapped his fingers. The muscle twins froze.
“I told them to remove and eat your liver.”
“I'd rather they didn't,” I said, hoping my knees didn't decide to fold again.
“So I see. And I see you didn't understand when I said it.” He gave me a forgiving smile. “I am Charlie Wah,” he announced. “You see, I tell you my name. Do you know anything about Charlie Wah?”
“I'm learning.”
He laughed softly, a precisely measured and tightly controlled little ha-ha-ha, and then stopped, cutting the laugh off in mid-ha. “Well,” he said, “that's probably good. I would like you to tell me everything you know.”
I tried to think of something I could tell him, and failed. “I don't know much of anything.”
Charlie Wah smiled at me, one reasonable man to another. “And yet you are here.”
I said, “I was looking for Little Tokyo.”
“Please,” he said, “don't mess with my head.”
“That's a little dated,” I said.
He nodded. “And what would you say?”
“I don't—” I began.
“Would you say 'Help'?” Charlie Wah snapped, stepping closer. The two bodybuilders came with him in perfect lockstep. “Would you say 'Oh, don't' if Ying here was told to cut your nose off? You can live without your nose, but many veins supply it and a lot of blood would be involved. And then, of course, you wouldn't be exactly a fashion model when it was over,”
“I don't know anything,” I said, on the edge of pleading. “It's true.”
“Let me be the judge of that. Just tell me why you're here. Start at the beginning, please. Everything you know.”
“I know that my girlfriend's uncle showed up unexpectedly—”
Charlie Wah held up a finger. “Lo.”
“Lo. And he kidnapped my girlfriend's niece and nephew and then returned them without taking anything.”
He pulled the gold toothpick from his mouth. “Without taking anything from where?”
“From my girlfriend's brother's house.”
“In Los Angeles.” He was watching me very closely.
“And Las Vegas,” I added quickly. “Her mother lives in Las Vegas.”
Charlie Wah nodded, one short jerk of the smooth chin. “What was he looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“And this is why you're here? To ask him what he was looking for?”
“Sort of.”
He smiled. It didn't raise the temperature any. “Pardon?”
“I'm curious,” I said. “That's my job, to be curious.”
“Yes. You're a detective. It says so in your wallet. But not a policeman.”
“Not,” I said. “Not a policeman.”
“Lo must have taken something,” Charlie Wah said persuasively.
“That's what I thought, too. But they say not.”
“Where is your girlfriend's father?”
“Dead.”
“Chinese?”
“Yes.”
Charlie Wah thought for a moment. “Of Lo's age?”
“Yes. I think they were friends.”
“In China.”
“I guess so.”
“But he came here before he died. The father.”
“No, He died in China.”
Charlie Wah looked at me for a very long time. “Think about your nose,” he said at last.
“He died in China. The Cultural Revolution got him.”
“You have no doubt about that.”
“It's one of the first things my girlfriend ever told me.”
“And when was this?”
“Years ago.” My nose was beginning to itch.
“Years ago,” Charlie Wah repeated. “How old was your girlfriend then?”
“You mean when she told me?”
“No,” he said impatiently. “When her father died.”
“Two,” I said.
“Nothing was taken,” Charlie Wah said. He sounded puzzled.
“Not that I know. Not from either house.”
“How odd,” Charlie Wah said distantly. Then he called something out without turning around. I heard "Lo" twice, and one of the men left the room. Charlie Wah drew in the corners of his mouth and stared at the floor for a moment, and then looked up at me.
“You are remarkably lucky,” he said.
I immediately felt better. “Well, whoopee.”
“Yes, whoopee. If you were Chinese, you'd be dead. Instead, you're going to live to be an old man and have many grandchildren.”
“I can't wait.”
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 11