by Rhys Ford
“Ah.” He hissed through his teeth, a mournful low whistle sharp with sympathetic regret. “And you’re carrying her?”
I nodded, then shrugged when he shook his head at me. “What other choice do I have? Who else is going to? It’s just that some days, when I take flowers to a dead girl’s funeral, I’ve got to ask if I’m doing any good.”
“If you ask, then you should know you are.” Goma shook a handful of noodles into a sieve, then hooked it into a pan of boiling water to warm. His hands were slower than I liked, gnarled knuckles wrapped around a knife handle so he could make short work of a piece of roasted pork belly. Green onions and a bit of egg omelet joined the pork on the chopping board, sliced thin with a few passes of the blade. “Let’s get some food into you.”
Goma needed something. I could tell by the set of his shoulders and how his back tightened when he turned. After a few minutes, he placed a large bowl of ramen swimming in a miso broth in front of me, the tangle of noodles he’d pulled from the hot water now buried beneath a mountain of trimmings. He put one last dash of minced green onions across the top and handed me a spoon and a pair of chopsticks.
The spoon was a bit ambitious. It was going to be at least twenty minutes before I’d even see the soup.
I got in about seven mouthfuls before one of Goma’s workers joined him in the cooking area, freeing him up to talk. Sidling up to the end of the cook station to get out of the fae kid’s way, Goma cleared his throat and spat out what was sitting on his tongue.
“Your grandfather’s looking for you,” he finally said.
Not what I wanted to hear after the truly shitty day I’d had. I looked up from my ramen only to have Goma’s eyes slide away from my face.
That troubled me more than my grandfather asking after me.
I couldn’t think of a reason my father’s father would be trying to get ahold of me. I hadn’t spoken to him since my mother’s funeral, when he’d had the bad taste to approach me about throwing away my badge and stepping into the place he’d made for me… the one right by his side.
Never going to happen. No matter how hard the old bastard pushed. It just wasn’t going to happen.
“Can’t imagine Takahashi coming to the alleyway and knocking on your door, Goma.” I kept my tone light as I ate, but my appetite wasn’t as good as it had been a few seconds ago. Still, braised pork belly, so I was going to at least make an effort. “Who’d he send?”
“A couple of his boys. No one important.” Another shrug, and this one was lighter. Goma hated secrets. They dug at him, poisonous sea urchins with sharp barbs looking for a way out of the cove they’d washed into. “They were sent around to ask if I’d seen you, not if I’d tell them when I saw you. So not too bad, yes?”
“I don’t know.” I put my chopsticks down, resting them on the lip of the spoon. “Did they threaten you? Or anyone else?”
“No, just asking after you,” he replied slowly. “Polite. Not pushy. Not violent. Just… big.”
“Big I can handle. Violent I won’t stand.” I wished they’d been pushier, because it would have given me some idea about what Takahashi was up to. “Don’t know why he just doesn’t knock on my front door. He knows where I live.”
“He’d never have done that. Especially not when you’re on probation.” Goma picked a bean sprout out of my ramen and bit into its still crunchy length. “It’d be too much of a risk to you. He wouldn’t do that. It’d turn you against him.”
“Yeah, he’s not stupid,” I conceded, going back to my noodles. A tiny flit flew by, barely a spark in the darkness, but the sprite was bright enough to throw shadows in its wake. It was how I felt around my grandfather, like a speck of light and dust small enough to inhale and then expelled in a rush of snot. “He’ll find me if he needs me. I can’t worry about it right now. I’m going to spend the next few months breaking someone new in.”
“That’s right. You’re back now, yeah? On the job?” He squinted around behind me, but his face was relaxed, probably recognizing someone walking by. Goma more than likely knew I was back on the job the moment Gaines handed me my gun, but I hated having people in my business, so the passing nod to my dignity was nice. “Because I’ve got a favor to ask of you, if you can. Nothing to do with your grandfather. Just someone Penji knows has some trouble.”
If Takahashi had been the diversion, either Goma’s favor had to be huge or my grandfather’s men were more serious than he was sharing. It didn’t matter. I owed the man a lot. He’d been there when my mother died, offering me support. When John and the girls died, he’d sent food deliveries to Gaines’s house, where I’d holed up to grieve. He’d given me a seat on the sixth stool for no other reason than I’d probably needed it, a fae-human kid with no social skills and struggling to find my place in the world. Goma gave me street cred when I’d needed it and had my back when I’d pinned on my badge.
There was nothing he couldn’t ask of me except murder, and even that I’d have to seriously look at who he wanted hit. He wouldn’t ask; that was the thing. Goma believed in the law, believed in the badge I wore, nearly as much as I did, so whatever he needed, I could trust him not to put me on the line.
“What do you need?” I’d found the soup but left the spoon where it was.
“Just for you to keep your ears open, maybe?” Goma leaned in, whispering beneath the noise of the market around us. “Penji… the wife… she’s been worried about a friend, another woman. They play hanafuda with a bunch of others every Saturday after temple, but this time, her friend didn’t join them. She was at temple but didn’t go to the tearoom afterward. Penji called her house, but there’s no answer. No one’s seen the friend, so she’s worried.”
“What’s the friend’s name?” I grabbed a napkin, and Goma handed me a pen from the cup near his register.
“Shelly Chan.” Goma screwed his face up. “I don’t remember where she lives. I’ll have to ask Penji and get back to you. She has a daughter, but she lives in San Jose.”
“Any chance she’s gone to the daughter’s?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed softly, barely audible as a group of butterfly-winged young women sauntered by, their giggling as bright as their patterning. “I’ll get the address, but honestly, she’s sharp, but… Shelly is… older than Penji, but she’s in good health. And she was at the temple. It should be safe there, but no one saw her after she bought the token. It’s like she just—”
“Disappeared in thin air?” I offered up. “What temple? The one on Stockton?”
I took down as much information as Goma had to give, promising to look into it or to at least ask someone to chase it down. Missing persons was outside my range. If she’d been setting fire to little children using an ignite spell, I’d have been able to do something, but digging through the streets for a missing Chinese woman was best left to the experts.
“Appreciate this, Roku. I know you’ve got other things on your mind, but you know, Penji worries. It’d be nice to find something out. Even if it’s that she’s worrying too much.” Goma worked at the knuckles on his left hand, kneading them with his fingers. “I told her we should to go to the police, but she’s… scared. Old-school, you know?”
I nodded, more out of sympathy than anything else. It’d been hard to be faerie in a human city when Penji and Goma were younger. It was different now, but sometimes people’s ugliness resurrected old troubles. I didn’t want to dig into ancient wounds.
“I know someone in Crimes Against Persons. They’ll run her down for me.” I’d forgotten to ask if Shelly Chan was human or faerie, but I’d leave those questions to CAP to answer. They’d come easier from someone Goma didn’t know. I tucked the napkin into my jacket, sorry I couldn’t get the soup down, but I was done. I needed a good night’s sleep, especially if Gaines was going to toss a newbie at me tomorrow. “I’ll drop a call to her when I get home. Can she call you?”
“Yes, give her my number. I’ll have Penji talk to her. Probably better
that way. Only thing I know is she stopped to get a good luck token from one of the stalls outside of the temple, and from there she was supposed to go to the teahouse. That’s half a block down, maybe?” He shifted sideways, and his shirt strained with the press of his wing stumps. “Temple tokens are expensive, but they work, yes? Worth the price.”
“Was she unhappy? Having a bad time?” I frowned, wondering if Shelly hadn’t just walked off, too overwhelmed to deal with whatever it was that drove her to the temple to seek relief.
“I don’t know,” Goma confessed, looking slightly bashful. “But then, does anyone really know when someone’s having a bad time of things? Do we actually really know anyone?”
C-TOWN’S INSPECTOR area sat on an open loft above the uniforms’ bull pen. I climbed a sweeping staircase and reclaimed my desk amid the quiet rumble of the afternoon shift. It looked like I was alone except for the sparse light of computers flipping wallpapers of exotic beaches none of us would probably ever see in our lifetimes. Someone had cleaned the top of my desk while I’d been gone, wiping it down and neatly stacking my cold cases. A bottle of tequila, complete with a worm in the bottom and wrapped in a blue bow, sat in the middle of my now organized mess.
“When you get a free weekend, we’re so going to get hammered on this, V and B,” I read with a grin. “Aw shucks, now I know you love me. You know I puke after about three shots of this shit. Thanks, Vasquez.”
“Only the best for the guy who took Arnett down.” Vasquez crossed the room in a few long strides to embrace me in a short but bone-crushing hug.
“Shit, the lizards took him down. I just put the cuffs on him.” I turned the bottle around, making the worm dance in its liquid tomb. “Maybe I should go down to the nest and share it with them.”
“Yeah, like you’d waste shitty tequila on a bunch of lizards,” Vasquez shot back. “Good you’re here, MacCormick. Place was quiet without you.”
Inspector Mike Vasquez was one of the good ones in Chinatown, as much of a legacy cop as I was. He and his partner, Thea Browning, shared the other half of the quad with me and Arnett. Myron hated both of them. Judging by the sparkling clean empty area that used to house Arnett’s crap, Mike and Thea had no love for him either.
“Hey, my man! Rumor mill said you were back like five minutes ago.” Yamada grabbed me from behind, lifting me off the floor in a bear hug. Brian’d been a B-Class sumo wrestler before he became a cop, but no one had told him he didn’t have to keep up the beefy physique he’d earned in the sumo stable. My ribs cracked, and I yelped out a squealing hello as he put me back down. “Good to have you back.”
“Just in time for you to kill me. Jeez, what’s with the hugging? Didn’t any of you do any work while I was gone?” I gurgled, catching my breath as I slapped him on the shoulder. “Good to see you. What’s up?”
“The Captain finally got your ass up off the couch. Must be nice to sit around all day watching cartoons while we’ve been busting our butts.” Yamada wiped at his broad forehead, pretending to be overexerted. “Good to have you back. Even if you did let Arnett steal those eggs.”
“Thanks, asshole.” I made a face at him and sat on the edge of my desk. He lumbered off, his bristle head bobbing as he thundered through the maze of desks and chairs. After picking up the bottle again, I studied its label carefully, wincing at the worm bobbing about. “So when are we planning—”
The chatter around me came to a stall when Gaines’s slick leather loafers touched the loft’s floor. He stood at the top of the stairs, a harbinger of good and evil armed with the power to lengthen our shifts with a single grunted command. As a Captain, he was one of the best. A cop never had to worry if Gaines had his back. That went without saying. Most badges would give their left nut, tit, or wing to work under my godfather’s command, which made Arnett’s dirtiness an even greater betrayal. Smearing me and our partnership was one thing, but Arnett got his filth on the whole department and put a big black mark on Gaines’s record.
My old buddy Myron would be lucky if he made it out of the local jail with the same number of teeth he had going in.
Gaines wasn’t a surprise. The human behind him was, and from the look of my godfather’s squared-up shoulders and steely-eyed glare, I was going to guess he’d brought me a new partner. It was too soon for me, but not for Gaines. The man liked to have things in order, and one of the things he insisted on was a cop never went out alone.
From his square jaw and muscular build to his dirty blond fade haircut, everything about the guy screamed ex-hard-core military. He moved as if expecting a riot to break out in the upper loft, icy blue eyes scanning each of us, stopping only long enough to mark our presence before moving on to the next cop.
He found me first and then again, last. His gaze pierced me, assessing and judging in a way that did not say cop. I wasn’t sure what was found wanting, my shaggy mane or my odd ommatidia-faceted pupils, but something made his nostrils flare. I definitely spotted the moment he saw my pupils’ copper-green sheen. His head jerked back a few millimeters, and his chin jutted out.
If my new partner had a thing against fae or fae-bred, we were assuredly going to have a problem.
The guy wasn’t young, not a starry-eyed, fresh-out-of-patrol newbie with milk still on his teeth. If anything, he might have been a year or two older than my own three decades, but it was sometimes hard for me to tell with humans. There were too many variables to their aging, from racial proclivities to diet, and since most of the people I dealt with on a daily basis lived hard and died young, I was shit at guessing ages.
The dark blue suit he wore was tailored to his bulk, fitted along his broad shoulders and cutting in slightly at the waist. Pity he hadn’t worn his shoulder harness when he’d gotten the navy blazer altered, because his rig ruined the line of the coat, rucking up across his back where a strap hung up on the back seam. He wasn’t short but definitely was more evenly proportioned than me, but being human could do that to a guy.
Still, he was good-looking in a fit, thunder God kind of way, and my unruly dick was more than happy to make his acquaintance. If there was any part of me I regretted having human blood, it was my libido. Faes had it easy: a pheromone or two caught their attention and it narrowed the field down. Instead I’d gotten a wider stream of lust and want. It was annoying. Especially when I found myself attracted to a man who looked like he’d rather be armed to the teeth and prowling war zones than be stuck in a car with me.
“Inspectors,” Gaines rumbled loudly. “I want to introduce you to Inspector Trent Leonard. He’ll be joining our little family as of today. MacCormick, he’s with you. I want the rest of you to make yourselves available to Leonard while he learns the ropes. He’s just come out of Street, so it’ll be up to all of you to mentor him during his transition.
“Leonard, that’s MacCormick,” my godfather said, pointing at me. Inspector Trent Leonard practically snapped to attention and clipped his heels together when Gaines barked his name. “Keep tight on his ass, ask questions, and you’ll learn the job.”
“Just don’t be in front of him if he’s got his gun out,” someone teased from behind me. I’d have guessed Yamada, but I was too engrossed in the whiff of musk kicking up out of Inspector Leonard’s skin. Something was cuing up his fight or flight responses, and only a dead skink wouldn’t know it was me.
I ate up the distance between us and tried not to let my metaphorical wings get ruffled when Leonard started, almost as if he was about to take a step back. Edging past Gaines, I stuck my hand out to my new partner and said, “Welcome to Dim Sum Asylum.”
Four
IT DIDN’T seem like San Francisco was ever going to dry out.
The after-work rush hour rain was a pour of silky dark sheets over the district when I drove through the lower reaches near the Bay. Damp rainy evenings and late afternoons were my favorite time in the city. The water spun out gossamer threads, misty batting thin enough to weave through the complicated loom of buildings
set up on the city’s hills. Neon signs bled into the fog, daubing reds and yellows across the air, a whore’s lipstick smear after the end of a long night’s work.
Passing under the dragon squatting on the East Gate on Grant and Bush, I saw its eyes gleam gold as it caught a whiff of something in the air. Its finlike tail slapped at the green tiles on its long perch, rattling the chimes hanging from a broad support beam straddling the double-lane street. We had to stop for a minute as a car backed out of a spot, holding up traffic, and I made the mistake of looking around.
In the dark recesses below the prismatic reptile’s squat, an old balding nun in muddied orange robes shook fortune sticks out onto an old TV tray for a gaggle of Hawaiian shirt–wearing round men, either a tour group or rejects from a vintage Hilo Hattie advertisement.
A few feet away, her shaven fae apprentice fought to adjust her robes around her tiger-moth wings, the upper end of her right span dotted liberally with tiny glistening obsidian stars. I counted an easy seven, but it could have been more. After one or two, the count never really mattered, and her loss showed in the yellow weeping into her blue compound eyes. It was hard to catch a glimpse of her pain. I had my own, flickers of citrine at the edges of my irises when I thought of John and the girls, but the young fae’s tragedy went beyond my imagining, and I was grateful when traffic began to move again so I could pull away from her anguish.
Despite the rain, I’d left the driver’s-side window open a crack so I could feel the wind on my face and catch the scents of the streets we drove through. People were out in droves, both human and fae. Pedestrians strolled up Grant, stopping sidewalk traffic as they peered at the street’s storefronts. A red light brought me to a stop, and I watched a stream of tourists and locals hurry from one corner to the next. The meat and dumpling place across from the Old Grant hotel sizzled with aromas, and my stomach growled, reminding me the last time I’d seen fit to toss something down my gullet, it’d been a scoop of cafeteria congee leftovers from the depths of my fridge. That’d been hours ago, and the rows of suckling pig and tea-smoked duck hanging in the charcuterie’s window made my mouth water something fierce.