The man dropped to his knees, and Tran twirled and lifted a boot and punted his victim's head into some imaginary end zone, probably in Hawaii. As the man flopped to the pavement with a wet sigh I could hear ten feet away, the one with my belt around his neck gurgled and went limp, and I aided his forward movement with a shove that bounced his forehead on the blacktop. I kicked him in the ear for good measure, and he lay still.
“Go start the car,” I said, retrieving my belt. “Wait for me.”
Tran jumped nimbly into the air and landed with both knees on the kidneys of the one he'd kicked, tearing the man's sport coat up the back seam, and then sprinted for the car. I went to his victim and took a look: Ying. Tran's cousin's face swam into the air in front of me, and I grabbed a handful of Ying's hair and lifted his head and then scrubbed his face back and forth against the asphalt, pushing down with all my strength. He bled rewardingly from forehead, chin, and nose, and the seam down his left cheek opened up very nicely. I realized I was growling as I took a little leap of my own, nothing as graceful as Tran's, and landed on his kidneys with the heels of my Reeboks, hoping he'd be pissing blood for weeks.
The whole thing hadn't taken fifteen seconds. With my heart beating three-quarter time in my ears, I went to the one I'd choked and rolled him over to make sure he was alive. His face was swollen and almost purple, but he was breathing, and I recognized the mild-looking little translator. I took a moment to check his pockets out of habit, found nothing, and, just for the hell of it, I lifted my right foot and dropped on my left knee into his gut. As his breath escaped him with a whoof, Alice came around the corner with Tran at the wheel.
He was laughing and pounding the dash, but when he saw the man at my feet, his face darkened.
“Take him,” he said through the driver's window.
“Ying's over there,” I said. “We can't handle both of them.”
“Him,” Tran said. “Or drive off, me, and leave you here.”
“Him it is,” I said, grabbing the translator by the back of his pants and hauling him toward the car. Tran leaned over and opened the passenger door, and I tossed the translator into the backseat.
“Around the building,” I gasped, as Tran navigated around Ying. “Get Peter.”
But Peter wasn't there. While I fought to regain my breath and kept an eye on the little translator, motionless on the backseat, Tran drove sedately across the lot and into the street. Half a block later, he turned to me, grinning fiercely, and raised a fist.
“Turn left,” I said. My mind was whirling with possibilities. “Get to the freeway heading south.”
“Where we going?”
“We're going to deal ourselves a wild card.”
14 - Ralph and Grace
“Wo,” Dexter Smif said, efficiently blocking the doorway. “You in the wrong 'hood.” Then he glanced past me at Tran, and said, “United Nations still in New York.” He pushed the door wider, craned his neck forward to give Tran a good look, and nodded. “I be drivin a cab now. Driver got to know where the U.N. is.”
“I don't mean to seem unfashionably nervous in a largely minority neighborhood,” I said, “but do you think we could come in?”
“Be nervous,” he said. “This a good place to get your ass chewed.” Dexter was impossibly tall and thinner than soap film. He favored uniforms with his name embroidered on the pocket. The one he was wearing was bright orange and said RALPH.
“Ralph,” I said forcefully, “we'd like to come inside. Now.” The translator had been wrapped in battery cables and stored in the trunk.
He looked down at the name on his pocket. “Fifty cents a letter,” he said. “Saves me half a buck. Always thought I looked like a Ralph.”
“This is Tran,” I said, switching tactics. “He'd like to come in, too.”
“T-R-A-N?”
Tran nodded, craning up at Dexter.
“Lucky dude. You a two-buck-shirt man.”
“Tell it to Consumer Reports" I said, "and get out of the way, would you?”
“No manners at all,” Dexter said, stepping aside. Tran and I filed past him into a room that looked like a bordello for dentists.
“Why a cab?” I asked, looking around. The living room was furnished entirely in cut-rate Ikea stuff, leather, black steel, and glass. Literally everything emitted clinical glints of light. “Jesus, I'd hate to think what you do in here.”
“All the leather,” he said, “make it easy to mop up after. Yeah, new career path. Man can only chore for the city, pick up dead animals for so long. Hey, your cat still dead?”
The first time I'd met Dexter, the city had sent him to pick up an extravagantly deceased cat at the foot of my driveway. “She's been reincarnated,” I said, “as a dog.”
“All the same to me, by the time I got them, 'cept dog a little heavier to lift. Talk about hard to lift, got a couple of cows, about a week apart, just before I hung up the ole shovel. Cow a week, it was lookin' like.”
“Tran's Vietnamese,” I said, including him in the chat. “He doesn't know from cows.”
Dexter gave Tran the eye again. “I know he some kind of sushi. You shave yet?”
“I'll never shave,” Tran said, sounding defensive.
“Wo. Two bucks a shirt, no razors. Man can live cheap. You sit on the floor?”
“No,” Tran said shortly.
“Shame. Do without furniture, too, you on the way to rich.”
“Same you?” Tran asked, taking in Dexter's furniture.
Dexter stopped in mid-flow and made his eyes glimmer at Tran, who took a step back, up against a low table that might have been the educated child of two pieces of scrap iron. Then Dexter laughed. “You should drive a cab,” he said fondly to Tran, ignoring me. “Got the right attitude. Fare tries to shovel it at you, you shovel it right back. Hey, a free lesson. Fare say, 'You takin me out of the way,' when you just drivin from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica by way of San Diego. You say, 'Hey, garbageface, get out the fuckin cab.' Less you want to say something bad. You drinking?”
“No,” I said, shuddering.
“Does the Pope—” Tran began cheerfully.
“He's drinking,” I said.
“Does the Pope what?” Dexter asked, fascinated.
“You don't want to know,” I said.
“Pope sounds like a good career path,” Dexter said, turning to a perfectly ordinary black cabinet and leaning over to unfold a bewildering number of surfaces, like someone taking apart origami furniture. “Not too many dead cows on the Pope's beat. Somebody hand the Pope a dead cow, he just probably make the sign over it, say somethin in Polish.” Open at last, the cabinet gleamed with bottles and glasses.
“The cow,” I pointed out, “would still be dead.”
“But on the way,” Dexter said, gesturing skyward with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. “On the way to Elsie Heaven with clover everywhere, milkin done on cue by angels in silk gloves. One bull for every cow, just standin around stupid, waitin for the word.”
“What word?” I asked.
“Moo,” Dexter said pityingly. “What word you think?” He poured two glasses of Johnnie Walker and handed one to Tran. “Want one?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Tea? I could make it real weak.”
“It'll make my heart race,” I said. “You know how I get when my heart races.”
“Grace here,” Dexter said, nodding toward me, “only get wrecked on beer. And, hey, thanks for all the cards and letters.”
“I didn't have your address.”
Dexter started to say something and then laughed again, showing Tran the biggest teeth he'd probably ever seen. “Drink up, little Tran,” he said, “and then let's figure out what Grace here wants.”
“Wait,” I said. “We've brought a friend.”
“How many?” Dexter asked two glasses later. Tran was sitting, happy and red-faced from the alcohol, on the couch. The translator was lying on his side on the floor, trussed in jumper cable
s and belts. He'd still been unconscious when Dexter and I toted him in, and we'd improvised a hood, an old interrogation technique, from a pair of Dexter's boxer shorts. The legs waved over his head like cotton antennae.
I prodded him with a toe.
“Sixteen,” he said. Tran had poked him with a two-pronged barbecue fork a minute ago.
“Sixteen Chinese guys,” Dexter said, clarifying things.
“Sixteen Chinese guys with guns,” I corrected him, “and God knows how many innocent Chinese along for the ride.”
“But they Chinese, too,” Dexter said. This was what had worried me.
“Chinese shit,” Tran said, returning to his main theme.
“You know,” Dexter said, rubbing his face with long fingers, “some black folks aren't crazy about Orientals.”
I looked at my two allies and went for the hole card. “There's a lot of money here.”
“I made out okay last time,” Dexter said, although money had had nothing to do with why he'd come in with me. Dexter had a low boredom threshold. He'd been an unwilling soldier in two small but stupid American wars, and while he wouldn't have claimed to be richer for having spent time in Grenada and Panama, he'd retained the skills he picked up in the University of Legal Murder. He demonstrated one of them by popping seven hundred knuckles. “How'm I sposed to tell them apart? I can't tell a boy from a girl as it is.”
Tran opened, and then closed, his mouth.
“We'll point,” I said. "We'll say, 'Good, Dexter,' and 'Bad, Dexter.' "
“I think I can keep that straight,” he said. “Less you talk fast.”
“It's going to be easy,” I said, “as soon as I work out the plan.”
Dexter gave me the big eyes. “No plan?”
“I had one,” I said, “until this guy got himself all tangled up in battery cables. Tran here knows where the good Chinese get delivered. Three or four houses in San Pedro.” I nudged the fallen warrior with a toe. “Right?” I said. “San Pedro?”
“Umm,” the fallen warrior said thoughtfully through Dexter's shorts.
“We got somebody here who'd love to kill you,” I said. Tran poked him with the fork again.
“Yeep,” he said. “Yes, San Pedro, yes.”
“And I thought we'd drop by and really mangle the gears in Charlie Wah's little machine. I'll tell you about Charlie Wah in a minute.” The hooded warrior rubbed his legs together, cricketlike, at the mention of Charlie's name. “And I figured that would get Charlie confused, make him lose his way, so that he'd—” I ran out of inspiration and looked at my allies. They looked biracially skeptical.
“Yeah?” Dexter said. “You know, I got a life here—”
“So Charlie would run the wrong way,” I said very quickly, “and maybe he'd run into us.” Dexter looked at the ceiling. “Charlie's the big bad guy,” I added, just to fill the silence.
“Why should I care?” Dexter asked the ceiling. “Bunch of Chinese.”
“There's the money. About a million.”
“You already said about the money.” Dexter sounded hurt. “Money's okay, you know? I mean, I like money. So maybe I come in with you for the money, hey, you can get a lot of guys for that kind of money.”
“I don't want a lot of guys. I want you.”
“Why's that?” He was still addressing the ceiling.
“I need someone at my back,” I said. “Someone I can trust.”
“You got Junior here,” Dexter said, pointing a lengthy finger at Tran.
“Junior,” Tran said angrily.
I got angry, too. I'd been sitting on anger for a long time, and when it bloomed, it blossomed all at once, like a time-lapse hibiscus, big and red and blotting out the landscape. “So fuck you,” I said, getting up. “Come on, Tran.” Tran got up, looking bewildered.
“Hold it,” Dexter said. “Did I make a error in tact?”
“You don't even get to keep the money,” I said, too mad to care. “Most of it is salt for the mine.”
He sat back and waved me back toward my seat. “I never did understand that,” he said. “What good is salt in a mine?”
“Dexter,” I said, still standing. “I'm in this because of Eleanor.”
“Yeah?” Dexter looked at the man on the floor. “What's this got to do with Eleanor?” He'd met Eleanor twice.
“Her brother Horace is looking for someone connected to these guys, but what he's going to find, if he finds anything, is Charlie Wah. I figure, even if I can't find Horace, I can short circuit Charlie, I can maybe bring Charlie to me, before Horace gets killed. Maybe that's all I can do, but it's still something. Maybe it can save Horace.”
Tran raised a hand. “These Chinese,” he said, looking straight at Dexter, “these good Chinese. They going to be slaves.”
“Slaves?” Dexter asked. He regarded Tran and then turned to me. “What you mean, slaves?”
“They're slaves,” I said, “in the classical definition. They owe Charlie anywhere from twenty to thirty thousand bucks apiece. With interest. They're going to be worked until they pay it off, ten thousand a year. Three, maybe five, years of slavery.”
Dexter got up and poured another Johnnie Walker. Then he tilted the glass in the translator's direction. “Stick another fork in bag-head, here.”
“About the ship,” I said twenty minutes later to the little translator. We'd established, with a few physical assists from Dexter and Tran, that the current load was coming in by ship. “When will it unload?”
“It's already unloaded,” the translator said. He was sitting on Dexter's couch by now, battery cables pinning his arms behind him and my belt around his feet. He still had Dexter's shorts over his head.
“You're lying,” I said, watching my plans fall apart.
“You're going to kill me,” the translator said.
“No,” I said. “But screw me up, and I can probably fix it so Charlie will.”
“I went to college here,” the translator said piteously. His breath made little puffs inside Dexter's shorts. "Cal State University Northridge. You think I want to work with Charlie? Hey, I'm Chinese, too."
“In the bad old days,” Dexter said, “Africans sold Africans to the slavers.” He and Tran had new drinks in their hands. “Those Africans the fuckers I hate most.”
The translator said, “Oh.”
“You ever pretend to be an INS inspector?” I asked him. His English was good enough.
The question took him by surprise. “Who've you been talking to?”
“You don't ask,” Tran said. “You answer.” He touched one point of the barbecue fork to the man's thigh and pushed it down. The man made a fluttering sound like wind through Venetian blinds, and I looked away and saw Dexter staring at Tran with a new expression on his face. It might have been admiration.
“So the boat is empty?” That was Dexter.
“No.” The translator shook his head, twisting Dexter's shorts from right to left. “Charlie's aboard. He likes to stay offshore in case anything goes wrong. But the little boats already picked up.”
“Tell me about the little boats,” I said. “What are they?”
“My leg,” the translator moaned.
“That's enough,” I said to Tran. He looked up at me as though he were surprised I was still in the room and withdrew the fork. A dark red circle surrounded the hole he'd made in the translator's trousers. “What boats?” I demanded.
“Fishing boats, pleasure boats. They pick up the payload and bring it ashore.”
“And they've already done that.”
“Like I said, last night.”
Okay, forget the houses. “So there's nobody on board now except Charlie.”
“One or two guys from Taiwan. Charlie's always got backup, but not much.” The translator shook his head, making semaphores with the legs of Dexter's shorts. “Can you undo my hands?”
“No.” I looked at Tran and Dexter. “Only one or two?”
“That's it,” the translator said.
“Tell me how you get the pigeons off the ship, when the money changes hands, the whole thing.”
He sighed. “We bring them into the harbor. The immigrants get off-loaded into the little boats. While the ship gets checked for its registered cargo, the immigrants get driven to the safe houses in San Pedro. They pay the rest of their down payment, and then the businesses come by and pick them up.”
“The businesses,” Dexter said thickly.
“The people they're going to work for.” He sounded resigned.
“Slavemasters,” Dexter said.
“They want to get out of China,” the translator said. “Who wouldn't?”
“Back to the down payments,” I said.
“The down payment is ten K. Let's say they pay five K when they get on the ship. Let's say they pay nothing, or maybe one K for earnest money. Chinese don't like to pay in advance. Then they owe anywhere up to ten thousand when they're safe in America. They pay that in the vans on the way to San Pedro. When they're on American soil, but while they're moving at 35 miles per hour.”
“And they arrive with it intact,” I said. “You never grab it while they're still on the ship.”
“We'd have a mutiny. A hundred and seventy-five, two hundred men going crazy on a small ship. No, we wait until they're here, and they're happy to pay.”
“If they haven't got it?” Dexter asked.
“They've got it.”
“But if they don't?” I could barely hear him.
“They've got it.”
“Fork the asshole,” Dexter said.
“They get taken back.” The words came out very fast.
“Yeah,” Dexter said, “and you get them back into China with no papers.”
“Thrown overboard,” Tran suggested. “On the way back.”
“Somewhere in the middle,” Dexter said.
There was a long silence. “Not very often,” the translator finally said.
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 17