by C. J. Shane
Suddenly, Jade saw movement in two places simultaneously: below her and toward the back wall of her garden. Directly below her a man was exiting her back door, coming from the kitchen. She could see the top of his head though the wooden slats of the ramada that extended over the back door and patio. He was slender, had very dark hair cut long, just long enough to touch his shoulders. He was dressed in a white suit. He moved quickly into the yard and began moving toward the garage and Jade’s art studio.
At the same time the intruder left the house, Jade saw another man emerging from behind a large bougainvillea covered in magenta blossoms at the back of her yard. The second man also had dark hair but cut shorter. He was dressed casually in khaki pants with a long-sleeved cotton shirt. The second man moved forward steadily but very quietly, his body erect and alert. Unlike the intruder who seemed hurried, the second man’s graceful movements made Jade think of a cat stalking prey.
For just a brief second, Jade imagined that she saw the second man glance up at her, but she wasn’t sure. Then suddenly the first man who had been in the house saw the second intruder. They were now face to face only a few feet apart. They spoke no words to each other, but came together in a violent martial arts battle. The intruder attacked first by attempting a punch that the second man easily deflected. Kicks and more punches followed.
“BB movie,” the words popped into Jade’s head. Carlos loved those Chinese kung fu movies. Jet Li was his favorite star, but Li was just one of many. Carlos loved the old Jackie Chan films, and Chan’s pals like Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, any film by the Yuen Woo-ping, and, of course, Bruce Lee. When they were in high school and Carlos’s friends were all agog at the martial arts in The Matrix, Carlos just laughed and said, “Hey, cabrones! It’s all been done before. Yuen Woo-ping!”
Later, after Carlos and Jade married and had a home of their own, Jade would sit with him on the couch with a bucket of popcorn between them. They watched those Hong Kong kung fu films, fascinated by the “brutal ballet (BB)” in these films that Carlos so loved. The martial artists in the films were graceful, like in classical ballet, but violent to the point of brutality. Carlos was the sweetest, kindest person she had ever known, and yet he was addicted to these films. When she asked him why, he shrugged his shoulders, laughed, and filled his mouth with popcorn. She wondered how long these memories of him, unbidden and painful, would suddenly appear in her mind.
Jade’s attention went back to the men below her. This wasn't an exhibition, and it wasn’t a movie. The fight was real, very real and very serious. The only sounds were of fists and feet hitting flesh, accented by grunting and heavy breathing. They moved warily around each other in the small space of her garden. Punching and blocking punches, kicking and dodging, the two men were giving her a superb exhibition of classic martial arts. She could see now that both were Asian, and this just reinforced the feeling that she had woken up in the middle of a movie. She had never seen either of the men before, and she could not imagine why these strangers were silently battling each other in her backyard. The Hong Kong movie notion resurfaced. Were they Chinese? Japanese? Korean? Jade had no idea.
After about three minutes but what seemed much longer to Jade, the second man seemed to be getting the upper hand in the battle. His fist found its target more often and his kicks seemed stronger and swifter. Suddenly, the intruder who had been in her house a few minutes earlier began to back away from the fight. He muttered something angrily in an unfamiliar language, then turned and fled through the gate. The second man stared after him, then turned abruptly and entered Jade’s back door.
What the hell? thought Jade. Who are these guys, and why do they both think they can just waltz into my house? She rose abruptly with the intention of descending the ladder and confronting the second man. But prudence stopped her. If this second intruder can beat up the first, he can certainly stop me, Jade thought. She lowered herself against the roof and waited.
A few minutes passed, and the second man left her kitchen door to stand briefly under the ramada. He paused, then walked around the right side of the house and exited through the iron gate. He did not look back.
Jade had been holding her breath and now released it slowly. Time to call her friend Letty. Letty would know what to do.
Jade swung her leg over the roof's edge and onto the ladder. She was about half way down when she heard a small noise. She swung quickly to the left and saw the second man, the victor in the kung fu contest and the last to leave Jade’s backyard. He had returned silently and without warning.
Chapter 3
Letty Valdez clicked the Send button on her computer screen. Then she pushed her rickety office chair back from her desk. She stretched her long legs out in front of her and sighed deeply. She was tired, but she felt really, really good. The departing email with attached file folder was the final report for her latest investigative case. Sending the report to the client was the last step in several weeks' worth of work. This case had been another skip job. Her task had been to find her client's former business partner who had disappeared one day about six months earlier, taking with him nearly a million dollars from the company's bank account. It took her a while, but Letty finally found the skip living the high life in Playa del Carmen on the Caribbean coast. The client would be pleased. Now it was time for his attorneys to take over.
The phone rang. Letty ignored it.
The phone rang again. This time she answered. It was a potential client, someone in the Foothills of the Catalina Mountains who identified herself as Mrs. Baird. She wanted to talk about a shooting that had occurred a few days earlier. Letty suggested calling the police. Mrs. Baird said the police had been there, and they hadn’t done their job. She said the wrong person had been arrested. Letty frowned. Okay. She agreed to meet the potential client and set an appointment for the next day. She doubted much would come of it. The police were not as incompetent as many people seemed to believe. She hung up the phone and looked out of the window again.
Late afternoon merged into evening. It was Letty's favorite time of day on the desert...that half hour just before the sun set. The city of Tucson glowed with a gold-tinged light. Palm tree fronds rippled dark against a dusky mango and watermelon sky. As far as Letty was concerned, winter evenings like this one were the best. She could see a lot of the sky now. Her office was a nondescript, strip mall address, but her window had a million-dollar view of the Santa Catalina Mountains on the north side of the city. She swiveled her chair to look out and see the mountains turn a coppery gold as the sun journeyed downward into the Sonoran Desert’s western horizon.
Once the light turned to a soft glow, Letty turned back toward her desk. The last light of the setting sun glinted on the glass of a framed certificate on the wall. It caught Letty's eye. The document proclaimed that she, Ms. Leticia Fernanda Antone Valdez, was a licensed private investigator in good standing and fully certified to work in the state of Arizona.
It had taken three years of hard work and a whole lot of help from Marv to make it, but now she could legitimately claim to be a self-employed, licensed private investigator. She started as Marv Iverson's assistant, and over time, she had become his business partner. Then when Marv retired, Letty took over the agency. As far as Letty was concerned, Marv had saved her. He gave her a job and a way to support herself and her family. The job turned into a career and a life, something she thought wasn’t possible after the devastation she’d lived through in Iraq. She could still remember the words in the brief ad on Craigslist. “Private investigator seeks assistant. Will train. Veteran preferred.” Letty could never repay Marv.
She sighed again, this time from satisfaction. She would go home now and make something for supper. Her baby brother Will had a job that kept him at the bike shop until seven p.m. Letty liked the idea of fixing her little brother some supper and eating with him. It seemed so normal – a family kind of thing after the lives that both of them had lived. She was trying hard to give him a stable home.
The cell phone on her desk buzzed for the second time. The first time that the phone had announced an incoming call, Letty ignored it in favor of finishing her report to the client. This time she decided to answer. She saw that the call was coming from Jade Lopez.
"Hey, Jade. What's up?" It was unusual for Jade to call Letty, and she wondered why.
"Oh, Letty. Thank God! I thought you'd never answer!"
Letty's eyebrows went up. That must have been Jade when the phone buzzed the first time.
"I'm here now."
"Letty, I don't know how to start. I came home from school. You know today's the last day of school, we had a Feliz Navidad fiesta, and I gave all my kids a send-off and wished them Merry Christmas, and I talked to several parents, too. You know how it is. I won't see them until after New Year's. Up till then, everything was normal."
Jade's voice was strained, and her words spilled out so fast that Letty had to listen carefully to catch everything.
"And then what happened?"
"I came home like usual. I rode my bike. You know I'm trying to get more exercise. Maggie told me if I get more exercise I'll feel better. Something about endorphins."
"And then what happened?"
"I came home and parked my bike in the backyard, and I went in and changed my clothes, and I got a beer and went up on the roof, and I guess I fell asleep."
An image of Jade's house in the historic Sam Hughes District of midtown Tucson came into Letty's mind. She had only been there a couple of times on those rare occasions when Jade had hosted Sunday morning coffee on her back patio. Usually the Sunday morning coffee was at Maggie's house, and once in a while at Seri's condo. Jade's house was a small, well-kept adobe with a backyard surrounded by a six-foot adobe wall. The house had been a gift from Jade's affluent parents when Jade and Carlos married. The newlyweds could never have afforded the neighborhood otherwise. The house was enhanced with native landscaping that included some very mature palo verde and mesquite trees.
The back patio with its ramada had plenty of shade during the heat of summer days. The patio was a comfortable place to sit with her friends and drink coffee on quiet mornings. Letty knew that both Jade and Maggie came to coffee from early Mass on Sunday. She didn't know what Seri typically did on Sunday mornings, but Mass was unlikely. Probably she was reading an obscure text on Australian aboriginal art or quantum physics or something equally esoteric. Not Letty. She didn't go to Mass. After all the things she had seen, she wasn't at all sure that there was a god, and if there were, he just might be a real bastard with a sick sense of humor.
"Okay, so you're on the roof and then you woke up?"
"Yes...and I heard something down below in the backyard on the patio, and I looked and there was this man coming out of my house!" Her voice got all squeaky and breathless.
"Who was he?"
"I don't know!"
"Did he take anything?"
"No, I don't think so. I don't know. He didn't seem to be carrying anything."
"Okay. So then what happened?"
"I ducked down so he couldn't see me, but I was watching as best I could. He just came out of the back door, looked around, and then went out the side gate."
"So now he's gone?"
"No! I mean yes, but there's the other man. Let me explain. I decided to go down the ladder and go into the house to see if he'd stolen anything. And I sort of slipped and fell off the ladder."
In her mind, Letty saw the heavy mesquite branch ladder that usually rested up against the back of Jade's adobe house. Letty thought it was just for looks. Many affluent folks kept things like that around as decoration, especially the snowbirds who came only in winter to escape their northern winters. But apparently this wasn't just for decoration if Jade was using it to climb up on the roof. Letty wondered if anyone knew this about Jade, that she was spending time on her roof. They were all worried about Jade. She didn't seem as sad as she had been, but she still wasn't the same since Carlos disappeared.
Jade's breathing got really shaky now.
"I slipped, and I was going to fall but he caught me."
"Who caught you?" Letty was alarmed now.
"This Chinese dude. Well, really I don't know if he's Chinese. He just looks Chinese. Or something Asian anyway. Japanese. I don’t know."
"This was the man who was in your house?" Letty gritted her teeth. Get to the point, Jade.
"No! The second man! He held me for a just a second, and then he set me down on the patio."
"What's he doing now? And who is he?"
"He told me that he's a cop. His name is Joe."
“Joe? That doesn't sound very Chinese. Is he an American, a Chinese-American I mean? And where are you now?"
"I'm on the patio. He's standing here. I don't think he's American. He speaks with an accent. He said he's a good guy."
"A good guy?" Letty snorted. Jade was a real sweetheart but amazingly naive.
"I'm sorry, Letty. I didn't know who to call."
"It's fine for you to call me, Jade, but if your house was broken into, you should call Tucson police."
"Well....not exactly broken into."
Letty sighed again. How many times had she and Maggie and Seri warned Jade that she really should lock up her house and lock the side gate leading to the backyard when she left for school?
"Besides all that," Jade said in a low voice, "what good are the cops anyway. They don't do a damn thing."
Letty understood Jade's cynicism and felt a stab of guilt. Jade had no faith or trust in law enforcement. They hadn't been able to find Carlos, so they were useless in Jade's eyes. And Letty reminded herself that she hadn't found Carlos either, despite the fact that she was normally very good at finding people.
"Okay. Go in the house. Tell this Chinese good guy to stay outside in the back, and you lock the doors and wait for me,” Letty told Jade. “Don’t open the door again. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jade agreed. “Okay. I'm in the house now. He’s out there now on the patio. He just sat down on one of the patio chairs.”
Oh, great, Letty thought. Making himself comfortable.
"I'll be there in fifteen minutes," Letty said.
"Oh, thank you, thank you, Letty."
The drive across the city went fast despite the Friday five o'clock traffic. Everyone was in a rush to go home or, more likely, to go out to dinner at one Tucson's eateries. It was still warm enough to sit out on the patio and have a drink with friends while waiting for dinner to be served. Letty caught every green light, which she considered a minor miracle. Night had fallen when she pulled up in front of Jade's house. Letty could see that Jade had turned on every light in her house and outside, too, on the front porch and along the side of the house where the unlocked gate stood open.
The residential street Jade lived on was quiet most of the time, and like many streets in Tucson, there were no street lights. The city, including the surrounding region, was an important center for astronomy, and astronomers had convinced Tucsonans that too many city lights or lights of the wrong kind caused a kind of light pollution. So many streets stayed dark. The payoff for this was the ability for anyone to just look up and see millions of stars in the clear, dry desert night. The downside was that nighttime thieves were harder to see. Of course, there were plenty of daytime thieves, too.
Letty walked along the side walkway and came around the back of Jade’s house. She saw the Chinese man immediately. He had been sitting on a patio chair, but at the sound of Letty’s footsteps, he rose to his feet and faced her. He nodded politely. Letty said nothing. She knocked on the back door without turning her back to the man. She called out to Jade.
She could hear Jade moving around in the kitchen….cooking, no doubt. Their friends Seri and Maggie had teased Jade about what a little homemaker she was, always cooking and decorating for holidays and loving on those little third-graders that she taught every day. That is, they teased her until Carlos disappeared. Jade didn’t have anyone to
keep a home for anymore. Letty thought maybe Jade cooked now to deal with her anxiety. It's a wonder she wasn't hugely fat, but somehow Jade had stayed slender, even thin. It occurred to Letty for the first time that Jade might be cooking, but she might not be eating.
Letty looked directly at the man standing about ten feet away.
“My name is Letty Valdez, and I am a private investigator. And you are?”
“I am Zhou Liang Wei. I am a Detective Inspector from the Ministry of Public Security, People’s Republic of China.”
Letty noticed immediately that the man spoke English quite well. His accent was Chinese, but also faintly British.
By this time, Jade had opened the back door. More light spilled onto the patio. Letty took a closer look at the uninvited foreigner. She guessed Zhou was about five feet nine inches tall in his bare feet, maybe even five feet ten inches. He was a couple of inches taller than Jade – but not slender like Jade. He was all muscle. He looked very fit in an athletic way, like someone who worked out regularly. He wasn’t so much a pumped-up muscle builder but more someone who focused on the agility and strength needed to accomplish specific tasks, like taking out an opponent in hand-to-hand combat – the kind of skills a cop would need, Letty guessed. He probably outweighed Jade by thirty pounds but every pound was muscle. Although Zhou had to look up to Letty’s six feet, Letty intuited that she would have a hard time bringing this man down despite her size and her training in martial arts. She was sure that he was a martial arts practitioner, and a good one, too. The man looked relaxed, but she knew he was sizing her up as well.
Letty gestured for Zhou to enter the house before her. Once in the kitchen, Letty and Zhou pulled out identification at the same time and traded documents with each other. Letty looked closely at Zhou’s red leather passport with the seal of the People’s Republic of China on the front. It looked real enough. His police identification – or at least that’s what she guessed it was – also looked like a typical cop’s badge and ID, but all the words were in Chinese characters. Like most passports and other official documents, his photo was bad. It barely looked like the man in front of her. He seemed indistinguishable from any other Chinese man in his age group, which Letty guessed was early 30s. His clothing was average – khaki pants, a navy blue t-shirt under a long-sleeved light blue cotton shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His clothing was chosen to not attract attention.