“Five hundred. He used to write about them but they make big noise at the newspaper and talk about burn it down, and he got fired. We find him and he give us six hundred to say we didn't.”
Five hundred bucks, and he wrote about them, and Lo was worth a thousand. I lose certain abilities when I drink, but subtraction isn't one of them. “Where did you find Peter Lau?” I asked.
“Never same place, but always some coffee shop. Monterey Park. Moves around. Scared all the time.”
“And he paid you.”
“Scared to death,” Tran said, forcing a smile. “Six hundred just to go away.”
“Anyone else?” He looked at the glass and opened his mouth, a fish seeking the bait, and I gave it to him.
“Also old lady,” he said when he'd drained it.
“Old lady,” I said neutrally.
“Old Jesus lady, Jesusloveyou, Jesusloveyou, cometojesus.”
“Summerson,” I said, feeling like someone had just punched me in the face.
“Excuse me,” Tran said politely, turning his face back to mine. “Okay I throw up?”
I guided him to the toilet and, when he'd finished voiding his insides, back to the couch. He was singing along with Ray Davies, syllables only, not a recognizable word per line. “Listen,” I said after he'd settled himself, “you're not going to go anywhere, are you?”
“Where?” he asked dreamily.
“Right,” I said. “Nowhere. Because even if you walk out of here you'll be lost in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains. It's miles to L.A. And you've got a hole in your shoulder and Saran Wrap around your arms—well, do you understand?”
He nodded and wiped his chin across his shoulder.
“Go to sleep, Tran,” I said, tucking the spare blanket around him. I picked up my gun and the cuffs, and he mumbled something and closed his eyes, and I went into the bedroom and folded down the remaining blanket and closed my own. It was pretty late, and I was pretty drunk.
Bravo came in and made the usual nuisance of himself, and I shoved him aside and tried to force my eyelids down again, and then I heard the sobbing. I decided to ignore it. Ten or fifteen minutes later I decided not to ignore it.
Mumbling to myself about nothing in particular, I grabbed my blanket and went into the living room and propped Tran up again so I could sit next to him. Then I threw the blanket over both of us and sagged to the left, with Tran leaning on me. Bravo joined us, on top of Tran, and Tran cried all of us to sleep.
12 - Crash Landing
I woke up with a spacious red headache, and I woke up alone.
My initial reaction—pure reflex, embarked on even before I'd begun to explore the margins of my headache—was to feel blindly around for Bravo. For some time now I'd been entering each day nasally, via Bravo's bravura pong, and my nose knew immediately that something was missing. It took me a few excruciatingly queasy moments and a couple of blind gropes with my right hand to discover that more than Bravo was missing.
“Holy shit,” I groaned. A memory bloomed, horribly bright through the red murk: I had unwrapped Tran. Since there appeared, under the circumstances, to be no reason ever to open my eyes again, I rolled over onto my side and resolved to sleep forever. Death sounded appealing. Better, at any rate, than facing Eleanor, or even myself, and admitting that I'd let the kid get away. With Horace still out there, no less.
Something said, “Ping.”
It did not engage my attention. A ping could have been anything, any kind of mocking reminder from the land of the living: a moth against a windowscreen, for example, or the tags on Bravo's collar, wherever the hell Bravo might be. I consigned all pings to hell and concentrated on the details of a comfortable death. I waited patiently for it to come, to spread its anesthetic wings around my head. It kept its distance. A comfortable death, it seemed, would require effort. I'd have to cure my headache first.
Something said, “Burra-burra-burra.”
I cranked one eyelid open and looked at the cracked leather covering my couch. If I'd achieved paradise, I'd apparently taken my couch with me. I'd imagined paradise before, full of willing, lissome houris, but I hadn't imagined them on my couch. Paradise seemed a lot cheaper with my couch in it.
Someone said, “Wheeee.” Not something, but someone.
“Left wing up,” the voice said, and I recognized words I had spoken myself while I was still alive.
“Throttle back,” croaked a rusty hinge that I recognized as me. “Not so fast.”
“Quiet,” the other voice commanded. “Working it out.”
“Fine,” I said to the back of the couch. “I'm dead anyway.”
“Landing, me,” the other voice said unsympathetically. “Die later.”
“Then get the goddamn left wing up and throttle back.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the other voice said. I closed my eyes. Then it said, “Shit.”
“You crashed,” I said, disappointed that the exit from life wasn't more clearly marked. What if there was a fire?
“I totally eat it.” The tone was apologetic.
“Do you think,” I asked, trying not to plead, “that you can find the Excedrin?”
“Already took three,” Tran said. “Water?”
“Good idea,” I said, reconciling myself to the thin and tepid gruel of life. “You can walk okay?”
“You took them off, remember?” Tran said over the splash of running water. “I got no place to walk, that's the problem.”
“That's your problem,” I said primly.
“You should learn to throw up,” he said, sounding closer. "Me, I throw up." A tentacle touched my arm, and I rolled blindly toward it and opened my eyes to see a hand that looked larger than Australia, with a couple of pills in it.
“Five,” I suggested.
“Salowly,” he said. “Two first.” He extended a glass of water in the other hand.
I gulped them down, closed my eyes again, and slid down a long greased chute into queasiness. I had no indication that we were no longer alone until I heard Eleanor's voice saying, “What's wrong with this picture?”
“We're alternating,” I said. “Tomorrow I take care of him.”
“Well, who should I look at first?”
“Him,” I said, without turning over to face her. “There's nothing that can be done for me.”
Something clinked. “All three bottles,” she said accusingly. “Did you get this boy drunk?”
Tran laughed, a light, merry, truly merciless little laugh.
The bottles hit the paper bag in the kitchen that serves as a garbage can. “Sit down,” Eleanor said. She sounded sympathetic.
“I haven't got that much energy,” I said.
“Not you, you sot. You.” The chair in front of my computer—the computer on which Tran had just totaled an electronic airplane—creaked. Saran Wrap rustled. “Well, well,” Eleanor said approvingly, “this is much better.”
“He's seventeen,” I said bitterly.
Tran said, “Ouch.” It momentarily cheered me.
“Shhh. Have you had coffee?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tran said.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“You know where it is,” Eleanor said.
“I know exactly where it is,” I told the back of the couch, “and I know I can't possibly get there.”
“Sit tight, sweetie,” Eleanor said to the little murderer. “Let me get the old sot some coffee.”
“I finish it,” Tran said, without a tinge of guilt.
“That's all right. He needs some special coffee. We make it with uranium.” Extremely familiar puttering sounds came from the kitchen. If I'd died, I found myself thinking, I would never have heard those sounds again. A little butterfly, or, more likely, a cabbage moth, spread its wings in my soul.
Two and a half hours later, I was sitting in a blindingly bright coffee shop in Monterey Park, watching the most nervous man I'd ever seen in my life. Peter Lau was definitely not enjoying his m
iddle forties. He was tall, almost six feet, and unhealthily thin, with the jaundice-yellow face of a drinker whose liver is moments away from retirement. Wary eyes swept the restaurant from above dark circles that looked like they'd been planted with a punch press. He'd checked me out twice, but he hadn't seen Tran, who'd retreated strategically into the men's room.
Across an expanse of scalp that began three inches above his eyes, Lau had meticulously pasted twenty six foot-long hairs, left to right, to form a clever little hair hat. The vanity behind this hopeless pretense was echoed in his clothing, which was stylish in a way that had nothing to do with style, like someone who'd once heard a description of the well-dressed man on the radio but had never actually seen one: color-coordinated tie and handkerchief, both in a large check; striped shirt; blazer nipped too sharply at the waist; wide gray slacks; white shoes. The gold rings on his index fingers, like the rings under his eyes, were a matching set.
We'd visited five coffee shops before we found one with a window table that had a reserved sign on it. Tran had led me to a table and we'd had more coffee, not as bracing as Eleanor's, but strong enough to keep the floor level. After a few minutes, one of the Chinese waitresses had started to set the reserved table: a carafe of coffee, a couple of pieces of toast.
“Here goes,” Tran said, and did his fade. Thirty seconds later, Peter Lau jittered in with three briefcases, looking like something that had been run over by the Doodah Parade. He'd sat down as though he were afraid his knees would snap, and gone immediately to work on the latches of the first briefcase. After nine or ten false starts he worried the snaps into submission and pulled out a laptop computer, which he opened and put dead center in front of him. The next case yielded, after a prolonged struggle, a cellular telephone and a miniaturized fax machine. Case number three, which probably contained his secretary, he placed on the seat next to him.
Only then, floating office in place, did he take any sustenance: He lit a cigarette, cupping his shaking hands around a cheap plastic lighter as though he were in a full-force gale. Smoke streaming from his nostrils, he carefully poured coffee onto the table near his cup and then gave up and handed the trembling carafe to the waitress, who doled out something less than half a cup. When he lifted it, I could see why; his hand was so unsteady that I would have taken equal odds on his dropping it, spilling the coffee on his shirt, or knocking out a tooth with the rim of the cup.
It was the tooth. I was standing over him by the time the cup reached his mouth, and when he saw me the crack of porcelain on enamel was enough to bring my own coffee halfway back up into the light.
“Whawhawha?” Peter Lau said, looking around wildly. He seemed to have forgotten already where the exit was.
“Relax,” I said, sitting opposite him and trying to look reassuring and urbane, rather than green and sticky and reeking of Bordeaux. “I just want to talk to you.”
“This table . . .” he said, “this table, ah . . .” Words failed him, and he snatched up the reserved sign and brandished it in my face.
“I only need a few minutes,” I said, looking at him more closely. He was wringing wet.
“No talking,” he said jerkily. He started to put the reserved sign into his shirt pocket, found it wouldn't fit, and tucked it under the lapel of his jacket. “I don't talk. I never talk. Ask anybody.”
I leaned in and took an inconspicuous sniff. Alcohol fumes roiled off him. If I had the mother of all hangovers. Peter Lau had all four of its grandparents.
“I need some help,” I said, reaching over to extricate the sign and put it back on the table.
“I don't help.” He started the catechism. “I never help. Ask—”
He broke off and stared past me, looking like one of those little rubber dolls whose eyes pop out of their head when you squeeze them.
“He's with me,” I said, feeling very sorry for Peter Lau.
“Hey, Peter,” Tran said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder.
“Mr. Lau,” I corrected him.
“How you doing, Mr. Lau?” Tran amended.
Lau wrenched his gaze from Tran to me, and his brain might as well have been a blackboard: The kid is back, but this time they've sent someone with him and he can't be bought off. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the points on his collar had begun to curl up. “You're from Tiffle,” he finally said. It was more a gasp than a question.
“That's the name,” Tran said happily, slipping into the booth beside me. “White guy. Tiffle.” He was swimming in one of my shirts, looking very small and brown.
I knocked my leg into Tran's. “Why would Tiffle send me?” I asked.
“I don't know,” Lau said jerkily. “I'm not writing—”
“They threatened you,” I said.
“This little monster,” Peter Lau said, peering around for help. Literally everyone in the place looked away, finding the answers to long-held questions on the walls or in the middle of their plates. “This little beast and his—his—”
“Mr. Lau.” He jumped slightly. “Mr. Lau, I'm on your side.”
“I don't have a side,” he said quickly, “and if you're on it, why's he here?”
“Tiffle and the Snakes,” I said, and this time Lau positively leaped. His fingers, frantic for something to do, scrabbled lightly over the keys of his laptop. “They killed his brother and cousin. They kidnapped,” I added, stretching the truth some, “the children of some friends of mine.”
“My stars,” he said, and I realized he had a faint British accent. Hong Kong.
“I'm going to reach into my pocket and bring out a card,” I said. “Don't be alarmed.” His eyes followed my hand as though it were the first one he'd ever seen, and stayed on it even after I'd dropped the card, right in the middle of the coffee he'd spilled.
“Sorry,” I said. “I'm in worse shape than you are.”
“I severely doubt that,” Lau said, picking up the card and wiping it with a napkin. He had to read it twice, closing his eyes between passes. “So what?” he said at last. “Anybody can print a card. You should see some of mine.”
“Tran,” I said, “would you please ask the waitress to bring us some coffee?”
“Oh, sure,” Tran said. “Make me very happy, be of service.” He was gone, and Lau never took his eyes off him.
“The other one is really dead?” he asked when Tran was out of earshot.
“I saw it,” I said.
“I won't ask how,” he said, sitting back slightly.
“But I need to ask you some things.”
“How do I know,” he asked, his voice notching up half an octave, “that Tipple didn't send you to see if I'd talk to you? Hmmm?”
“You don't. Look, Mr. Lau, I'm a private detective. I'm in the phone book. I have a terrible red-wine hangover.”
His eyes narrowed sympathetically. “Did you mix it?”
“No, but I drank enough so that it doesn't matter. Do you want,” I asked, “to go on living like this?”
“It's a perfectly good method,” he said. “I bought dozens of these things.” He pointed to the reserved card. “I just call the restaurant I want to be in, and they set up for me.”
“It's a little public,” I said.
He almost smiled. “That's the point.”
“And I have to say that it wasn't very hard to find you.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “there is that. But you didn't kill me.”
“I don't want to kill you.”
“So you say.” His eyes went back to Tran.
“If you like, I'll ask him to wait in the car.”
“That would be peachy,” he said. “In fact, why don't you ask him to drive the car to New York?”
“Coffee, boss,” Tran said, setting the cups down. Then he turned to Peter Lau and folded his hands together over his chest, looking penitent. “Mr. Lau,” he said. “Sorry. Please forgive me, you.” He bowed very low. Every eye in the restaurant followed him.
“Bloody little—” Lau be
gan. Then he pulled himself up short and blinked twice. “I have to absorb this,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”
“Not possible. I want to hot-wire the Snakes, and I haven't got the time.”
“Ho-ho,” Peter Lau said politely. “You're going to undo the Snake Triad?” He clinked together the rings on his index fingers, waiting for something persuasive.
“Mr. Lau,” I said. “This is the situation. I want to help someone I love. With your help, I might be able to be a genuine pain in the ass to the Snakes. Without your help, they'll probably catch me. And if they do, Mr. Lau, if they catch me because you didn't help me, I'm going to tell them you told me everything you know.”
“Oh,” Peter Lau said, blinking again. “You mean you'll lie about it.”
“That's what I mean.” Tran was looking at me admiringly.
“Love is a terrible motive for doing something vile,” Lau said after a moment's reflection.
“And I'm sorry about it. I'm sure you're a nice man and a good journalist and all that. But you're just not as important to me as they are.”
“That's bald,” he said. “And you're only one man.”
Tran waved at him, palm downward, fingers curling in. “Remember me?” he said. He sat beside me.
“You're murderous,” Lau said, “but I don't know that you're smart.” Tran took it in silence.
“What'll it be?” I asked.
Lau sighed. “What do you know?”
I told him about the kidnapping and about Charlie Wah. When I mentioned Wah's name, Lau looked very much like a man who desperately needs the bathroom. “So Wah's the Taiwanese boss, right?”
Lau nodded and wiped his upper lip with a finger.
“And Tiffle?”
“Tiffle's a lawyer.” He closed his eyes, like someone about to go over Niagara Falls in a teacup. “He's the Anglo front, when they need one. Legal chores. He launders a little money.” He fiddled with his cup, clinking it against the saucer, and the waitress Tran had been flirting with hurried over to half-fill it. He waited until she was out of earshot before he said, “Tiffle's very unpleasant.”
“Money from what?” I asked. “And why, specifically, a lawyer?”
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 15