Ying's hard little eyes rolled toward him. “Thirty-eight.”
Dexter had been appointed Grand Inquisitor. “How many of your assholes?”
“Two.” It figured: the vans' drivers.
“What kind of metal?”
Ying looked bewildered. “What?”
“Guns, stupid. What kind of guns?”
“Little poppers,” Ying said. His eyes found me, registered the mask, and went back to the immediate threat.
Dexter unfolded the paper, held it in front of Ying's face, and lit a Bic. “Read this.”
“Names,” Ying explained.
“I know they names, you little dink. Read them.”
Ying went for an edge. “Who are you looking for?”
Dexter touched the Bic to Ying's unoccupied nostril, and Ying said, “Yiiii,” in a shrill voice.
“Hush, now,” Dexter said, removing the lighter to a reassuring distance. “Let's see how quiet you can read this.”
Ying read it in a shaky whisper. There were Christian names scattered here and there, but nothing that sounded remotely like the one I wanted. When he'd finished, Dexter looked at me and I shook my head.
“Part two,” Dexter said. “You gone go back up there and knock on that door again. You do it right, and you might get up tomorrow.”
“Any questions?” Horton asked in a voice that made the ground vibrate beneath my feet.
“No questions.” The scabbing on his face was rusty and stiff-looking.
“So what you waitin for?”
With Horton and Dexter flanking him, Ying trudged toward the house. When he got to the front door they moved to either side of it, guns upright and backs to the house. Dexter stretched out a leg and gave Ying a little kick by way of a prompt, and Ying knocked. After a moment, someone called out a question from inside. Ying replied in Chinese, and the door opened.
Even after having seen him go through the car window, I wasn't prepared for how fast Horton Doody could move. He shouldered Ying back into Dexter and slipped through the door, hitting the man who had answered it with his chest and sending him sprawling. Dexter curved an arm around Ying's throat and stepped in behind him. I followed, staring at the dark makeup on my hands.
We were in a short unfurnished hallway. Horton hoisted the fallen man by his belt and carried him into the living room, from which we'd heard a babble of voices when we came through the door. The silence that greeted his entrance was profound.
The room was packed with fatigued-looking Chinese men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, mostly sitting on the floor. They stared at Horton as though Night had just gotten dressed and strolled in.
“Call your buddy,” Dexter said to Ying, and Ying emitted a short bark. A man in a white shirt came into the room with a coffee cup in his hand. When he saw Horton, the hand loosened and the cup sagged and then dangled by its handle, pouring coffee over the front of his trousers.
“Come here,” Horton said to him, pointing the big gun at the bridge of the man's nose. The man had been one of the laughing pack in the sweatshop. Looking a lot less cheerful now, he threw an uncertain glance around the room as though he hoped his pigeons had turned into a trained army in his absence. Men stared back at him, wide-eyed and empty-handed.
“Now,” Horton said, and the man picked his way across the room to Horton's side. “Turn around.” Horton made a little circle with the gun, and the man complied. I slipped past Horton and taped the man's hands behind him, looping the tape through his belt for good measure. Then, following the drill, I passed the tape around his head to seal his mouth and eyes. When I'd finished, Horton passed a possessive hand between the man's body and his taped arms. The pigeons watched, silent and openmouthed as I repeated the treatment on the one who'd opened the door, and Dexter wrapped him in a long dark arm, the one that wasn't cutting off Ying's breath.
“Who speaks English?” I asked the room at large, trying to imitate Dexter's island lilt. Nobody answered. In fact, nobody looked at me, all of them finding the walls and the carpet more interesting than my question. “Okay,” I said a bit wildly. “Nobody speaks English, we kill you all.”
A face bobbed up. It belonged to a skinny guy with a wispy mustache and a black Marlboro T-shirt, and it looked terrified. “Come here,” I snapped. He looked at me, turned to his friends, and then shook his head in tiny, quick swings. Horton snapped his fingers with a sound like a firecracker and pointed imperiously at the floor in front of him. Drawn by a supernatural force, the young man got up and came to us, walking against the wind. I put my hand on his arm, and he started violently, eyes still fixed on Horton's face.
“It's okay,” I said, realizing belatedly that most of them had never seen a black man before. “You're going to be fine.” I wrapped my fingers gently around his arm. “Here's what I want you to say. Tell them we're here to set them free from the Snakes. Tell them to hold tight for one minute, and they'll be all right.”
“No,” he said, a totem of disbelief.
“What the fuck?” Dexter asked the ceiling, hugging Ying and the guy who'd answered the door, and looking like the middle man in a trio about to start dancing the hora.
“Yes.” I told the Marlboro man. “If they stay here they'll belong to the Snakes. If they wait a minute, we'll get them out of here and keep them safe from the Snakes and the Immigration Service. We'll take care of them.”
Dexter muttered monosyllables, and Horton emitted subsonic chuckles. The Chinese man stared at the floor.
Horton stopped chuckling. “You want to get dead?” he asked.
The Marlboro man took one terrified look at Horton and let loose a brief burst of Mandarin. Any uncertainty he might have felt about delivering the message had vanished at the sound of Horton's voice: he sounded positively Messianic.
When he'd finished, people looked at each other. No one moved.
“Good enough,” I said. “Hang on.”
“We gotta go,” Dexter hissed. “Drive time.” He still had his arms around two Chinese throats.
I grabbed the Marlboro man's arm and tried for a reassuring smile. “Sit still, hear?”
We closed the front door behind us, and I took Dexter's henchman, as Mrs. Summerson would have called him, in my grasp, and used my free hand to spray-paint rasta power across the door. I saw Horace sprinting around the corner toward the car with the Doodys in it, and we turned Ying and the two henchmen in the direction of the car Ying had arrived in. As we neared it, Tran got out and popped the trunk, and one of the guards joined the driver in the trunk, with an assist from Horton. I hauled the other one to my car, and Horace opened the trunk. After it had been slammed down, I made a run to Dexter's car, grabbed fifteen or twenty dresses, and went back in to distribute them among the bedrooms with all the other stuff the pilgrims had hauled along to the New World. By the time I'd climbed into my rented whatever, Horton and Dexter had taken off with Ying between them, and Tran had followed in Ying's car.
“Okay,” I said over the walkie-talkies as I started the car. “That was the hard one.”
And I thought I was right until the door at the second safe house opened, and I found myself staring over Dexter's shoulder at the terrified face of Peter Lau.
22 - Taking Wing
Lau gaped at Dexter, who had Ying in front of him, with the air of someone whose final earthly expectation has been proved wrong. As Dexter raised his gun over Ying's shoulder, someone put one eye around the door, and Horton Doody lifted a leg, hiked up his skirts, and tried to put a foot through the door.
It was a heavy, old-fashioned oak door. It attained maximum velocity instantly and slammed against the skull behind it with Louisville Slugger results. The head disappeared, and the door bounced back, cracked Peter Lau on the shoulder and knocked him toward us, and then bounced back and hit the falling warrior on his way down. Dexter passed Ying to me like a discarded partner in a reel and shoved his gun at Peter's open mouth.
“No,” I whispered. “Take Ying, an
d leave him to me.” By then, Horton was through the door and reaching around it to do further damage to the guy who'd hidden behind Peter and whatever surprise Peter had been intended to provoke, and Dexter grabbed Ying again and carried him forward. I took Peter's arm and said, “Shut up and do what I say.”
“Bu-bu-bu-but,” Lau said.
“You're okay,” I said. “This is Simeon.” His arm was so boneless that I grabbed a handful of jacket and yanked him along behind me, toward the living room.
The next thing I knew, someone was shooting.
The shots made muffled little snapping sounds, and I heard a smack and Horton went, “Whuff,” and this time he wasn't laughing. He took a step back into the hallway, releasing the man he'd carried in with him and kicking him behind the knee. The man fell, and Ying turned quickly and lashed out with a foot at Dexter. Dexter blocked it with an upraised knee and shoved Ying into the living room, and Horton's semi went off like the world's biggest deck of cards being shuffled. He leaned forward and grabbed his thigh.
A woman screamed.
I let go of Peter and stiff-armed the fallen man, slamming his head sideways, and then grabbed his left arm, lifting and twisting it until the joint went pop and it was dislocated. He moaned and rolled over onto it, trying to stifle the pain, and I was up and running toward the doorway that led to the living room, my gun out with a bullet in the chamber. Peter stayed in the hallway, saying something that sounded like a Chinese prayer.
Ying and the man Horton had been holding were hanging on to Dexter like dogs trying to bring down a bear, Ying's hand pulling back and then driving four straight fingers up and under Dexter's ribcage. Dexter gargled. Pilgrims hugged the floor, two deep in some places. Something flashed across the room and a man ducked behind a couch, but not so quickly that I didn't see the automatic in his hand. I fired twice at the ceiling and then dodged left, hoping he'd come up and take a shot in the direction of the sound, but I tripped over a body and went down on my hip and elbow, and my gun went off again, involuntarily this time, and the woman screamed once more.
A crack and a whimper drew my attention, and I saw the guard who'd been flailing at Dexter go down, his face broken and bleeding from the barrel of Dexter's gun. Ying pulled himself free from Dexter's grasp and fled into the hallway, stumbling over the man Horton had dropped before he disappeared from sight.
But now fingers were scrabbling at my gun and I turned back to stare into a pair of terrified eyes belonging to a kid of eighteen or nineteen. The moment I looked at him, he froze solid. Something made a huffing noise from the doorway, and there was Horton, gun in his left, making a motion with his right that needed no translation anywhere in the world; Get down. The pilgrims dug holes in each other to get closer to the carpet, and Horton emptied the gun into the couch, blowing big gaps into the fabric and scattering white stuffing into the air like popcorn. He stitched the couch methodically, left to right and back again, and then repeated the entire pattern for good measure. When he stopped, the air rang with reverberation and reeked of cordite, and no one was moving.
The woman was halfway across the room, lying on top of a man. She had short graying hair and wore a shapeless gray dress, and she was as still as stone.
I got up, checked my gun, and stepped over the bodies to get to the couch. Feeling altogether too large to miss at that range, I edged along its length and then lunged around its far corner. The unexpected guard was a huddled mass of cloth and blood, tucked into a ball that hadn't been small enough.
“He's finished,” I said to Horton, who was standing in the doorway and leaning forward to examine his right thigh. A deep red stain was spreading over the front of his robe. 'This ain't gone clean," he said.
“Out of here,” Dexter said. People were beginning to stir.
“Just a minute.” I went to the woman and knelt by her. When I touched her, her head came up and dark eyes bored into mine. “Doreen?” I asked.
She paled. “No,” she said in English.
I put my mouth to her ear. “Mrs. Summerson,” I whispered.
“No,” she said again, not buying it.
“You were in her school,” I said. “1941. Third row, eighth from the left. Come on, she needs your help.”
She looked around the room, thinking it over, and then extended a hand in a ladylike fashion so I could help her up. “Ask if anyone's hurt,” I said when she was standing.
She said something musical and interrogative and got no answer. Most people lay absolutely still.
“Ask them all to get up,” I said. Tell them no one will harm them."
What she said this time had a current of command in it, and people began to disentangle themselves and get to their feet. Dexter used the time to dust himself off and go into the back of the house. Men backed away from him, but no one made a play of any kind. No one was bleeding, although some of them were feeling themselves for wounds, unable to believe their luck had held.
“Roundin third,” Dexter announced, coming back into the room with a briefcase and tossing me a reproachful look. “How you doin?” he asked Horton.
“Muscle,” Horton grunted. “I seen worse in high school.”
“Doreen,” I said, “there will be men here in two minutes to take all of you to Mrs. Summerson. One of them will speak Chinese. Mrs. Summerson is his family's friend. Tell these people to go with him. Got it?”
She nodded, looking dazed, and I glanced at Dexter. We'd had shots, and there was no time to solicit recruits. As we rounded the corner, I saw Peter Lau cowering in a corner, and stopped cold.
Tran was standing there, drawn inside by the gunfire, and he was folding a knife. Ying lay facedown in the center of a dark lake of his own making.
“Two,” Tran said to me in the softest voice I'd ever heard.
“I told them they were all Vietnamese,” Peter Lau said as we drove toward the third safe house, trailing Dexter's car. The surviving guard had been thrown into its trunk, and the two dead ones were wrapped in blankets and plastic bags in my backseat. By now the Doody Bus Co., abetted by Horace and Doreen Wing, was picking up the second houseful of slaves. “They saw your little stiletto freak, but they didn't see you.” He swallowed several pints of saliva. “I figured nothing would happen. I figured no one was crazy enough to try to bust Charlie.” He rested his head against the window. “I figured they'd let me go home.”
“How'd they get you?”
“Someone in the restaurant, I guess.”
“And you don't think they mentioned me?” I wasn't really thinking about me; I was thinking about the Chans.
“I don't know.” He was sitting with his hands clasped protectively between his thighs. “Maybe, maybe not. The slaves hate Charlie. They might answer only the questions they were asked. If they're worried about Vietnamese, maybe they didn't ask the right questions. You know, 'Who else was in the restaurant before our man got taken?' 'Peter Lau.' 'Was he with anyone from the Vietnamese gang?' 'Yes.' They only asked me about Vietnamese.”
“Right,” I said.
“But now,” he said, “they'll come after me.”
I rounded the corner leading to the third safe house and watched Dexter and Horton's car pull to the curb. “We've got people behind us,” I said, “picking up the slaves. They'll be delivered to a church. Listen, Peter, are you one hundred percent sure I can trust you?”
“Do you think,” he asked wistfully, “I need one more person who wants to kill me?”
“Okay. We'll deliver you to the same church, like you got picked up in the sweep, and you can get home from there. They come back to you, you were delivered blindfolded. It was a black church, somewhere in South Central maybe, but you don't know where. The gang that took you were all black.”
“You think that'll wash?”
Dexter and Horton were getting out of their car.
“If it doesn't,” I said, “I've got things more important than you to worry about.”
The third and fourth safe houses w
ent like Japanese clockwork, with the substitution of one of the henchmen from the first house knocking on the door instead of Ying. We hit the standard two watchers and two briefcases full of cash, flung the standard dresses around the bedrooms, and painted the standard slogans on the wall. At the fourth house, I said nothing, as we'd arranged, and Dexter and Horton, talking blacker than I'd imagined they could, managed to let one of the guards get free, so there'd be someone to report back to Charlie. He'd scaled the fence of a neighboring house as effortlessly as someone who'd just discovered the antigravity principle, and we let him go.
By then the pigeons were mounting up, and Tran had to grab the second van at the last house and join the Doody Brothers Transport Co. By the time we were through, we had six of Charlie's guys, taped wrists to ankles and blindfolded, divided between the trunks and Dexter's backseat.
We took surface streets to L.A., heading north on Western for most of the trip and driving like a caravan of school safety patrols on the way home from work. It took more than an hour, which was what I wanted. By the time we hit Wilshire, around eight-thirty, I guessed Charlie Wah would be getting anxious about his missing collectors and their little briefcases. He was going to be a lot more anxious in the morning.
At Wilshire and Crenshaw we pulled off onto a side street. I consolidated the money into two very full briefcases, and Dexter swung east, heading for his apartment and an appointment with a junkie doctor whose shaking hands were about to be cured by a glare from Horton. The bullet was still in Horton's thigh, which spared him an exit wound but meant that there was some potentially messy medical work ahead.
“Shit,” Horton had said, “for this much money, he could of shot me in the head.”
By the time we had the cases snapped shut, five vans were stacked up behind us, filled to overflowing with rescuees, and I found Horace trying out his Mandarin on them. It sounded rusty even to me, but the guys seemed calm, or maybe just glazed. As Peter Lau had said, they had nothing to lose.
The church, a big one in a Hispanic neighborhood that was starting to go Korean, was lighted up like Christmas, and the moment Mrs. Summerson opened the door, Doreen Wing began to cry. I didn't know what it was—relief that she wasn't going to be killed, delight at seeing Mrs. Summerson, shock at her teacher's age, or sheer exhaustion—but Mrs. Summerson wrapped her big arms around Doreen and patted her with her big blunt hands and talked to her in a Chinese dialect that Horace didn't understand until Doreen's sobs subsided into hiccups.
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 26