by Rhys Ford
I’d gone back to the station to finish up the last of the forms I needed to fill out for Gaines and passed Trent on the way out. His eyes slid away from my face as he walked out the door. And that was the last time I saw Inspector Trent Leonard that afternoon.
We were supposed to have the Sunday off, but I’d gone in anyway, digging through stacks of useless interviews and staring at pictures of dead people and broken statues. The casters down in the morgue hadn’t come back with any findings despite me calling them at least six times that day alone, and after the polite but firm Fuck off, Inspector, I’d hung up feeling more frustrated and broken than before.
By four in the afternoon, all I’d achieved was a low-grade migraine and a sour stomach from eating vending machine burritos with shady no-expiration-date sour cream, so I headed home, intent on drowning my brain in a few glasses of whiskey.
It was funny how I still ended up looking for my family when I needed grounding, so it wasn’t a surprise when I somehow ended up standing in front of a trio of gravestones I’d just visited the day before.
The grass was wet, a sloshy mess of thick fragrant green blades and loamy mud. I’d chosen a place in the shade for them and in retrospect probably should have found the sunniest spot, considering San Francisco’s weather, but John’s nose always burned with the slightest hint of a clear day, and the girls really liked trees. From where I stood, I could see my mother’s memorial, a set of black Odonata wings rising from the ground, twisting up toward the sky to frame an eternally burning ball of blue mage fire. Flowers lay around the wings, remembrances left by the city and some families she’d saved during her career.
After she’d been assassinated, they’d named a day after her and a foundation to assist faerie officers with their education. She’d have hated the attention, and the memorial would have sparked a yearlong rant about wasting money and aggrandizing the job.
Most of all, she’d have hated knowing her granddaughters followed her in death not even a month after she’d been gunned down.
“She loved you guys,” I reassured the deaf and mute stones. “Even if she didn’t show it like most other grandmas, she loved the Hell out of you. She was just… prickly.”
The tangerines I’d left were still there, but the onigiri were gone, probably as soon as I’d gotten to the car. Apex predators could learn a few things from the cemetery’s squirrels. There wasn’t a lot of space between the cramped plots, and I’d lucked out finding a spot for my family in the older section. The narrow rows had barely enough room to squat down in front of the gravestones bristling up over the slight hillocks, jagged uneven teeth rife with cavities made from gouged-out names of the lost.
It didn’t do any good to leave mementos. The groundskeepers plucked them out within a day of anything being laid down. Well, anything but traditional tributes, but I’d left two tiny koinobori in the gravel-filled metal bowl fixed into the cement in front of their graves. Surprisingly, they were still there, damp but no worse for wear. I wedged a few incense sticks into the heavy grit, then lit them, taking a small whiff of the lemon-myrrh smoke, then stood up, shoving my hands into my jacket pockets.
And stared down at my dead.
The slush-slush of someone making their way through the rows was hard to miss. I should have been more worried, considering I’d rattled a few cages at Kingfisher’s the other day, but if there was one sacred place, it was a graveyard. No one would come looking for me among the markers, but they’d certainly be waiting for me out on the streets. Even by the yakuza standards, killing someone on top of their dead family was taking things a bit too far.
I knew who was there. Or at least I thought I did. No one but Gaines would follow me out to the rain-drenched plots. He hadn’t finished tearing me a new asshole back at the station, and considering I’d not shown up for the family dinner I’d not-quite promised to make an appearance at, hunting me down would be something on his to-do list. So instead of looking up, I simply said, “Hello, my favorite pain in the ass.”
If I’d thought Trent’s fae-iced fingers down my throat were cold, they had nothing on the frigid brittleness in the words flung at my back in response.
“Is that any way to greet your grandfather?” he rasped, wrapping so much disapproval into his voice it could have curdled cabbage into kimchee. “Is it, Takahashi Rokugi?”
THE OLD bastard looked exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him, a lean, hollow-cheeked Japanese man with thick black hair slicked back from his hard, handsome face and cold dirt-brown eyes. He’d dressed for the weather, a long navy blue cashmere coat over a tailored pinstriped gray suit that probably cost more than my car. Since he normally came with at least two shadows, I peered into the rising fog and found them, hulking men with stony expressions and dead gazes. They were giving us space. Too much space, if anyone’d asked me. The old man was worth just under a billion in legal tallies. I didn’t even dare to imagine how much he had on his set of uncooked books. Still, it was odd to find him standing behind me in a graveyard, especially out in the open where anyone could take a shot at his head and set a good part of the criminal underworld on fire.
“Nice of you to visit your granddaughters.” I glanced at the koi rattling in the breeze. “I didn’t think you knew where they were buried.”
“Those were not my granddaughters.” His words pressed tightly together, strung beads of coiled dislike. “We shared no blood. We—”
“They were mine,” I reminded him. “You want to hang your family name on me? You hang it on them as well.”
He said nothing at first, his mouth flattening to a straight line. Then he glanced over his shoulder at his bodyguards and pushed them back a few steps with a nod. Clearing his throat, he waited until they were dark shimmers behind the thickening mist, then remarked quietly, “I killed your cousin for what he did. I did what you could not do. For them. So no, they are not my family… not my granddaughters, but that does not mean I do not think of them as yours.”
“I didn’t—” Reminding the old man I hadn’t asked him to kill Donnie wasn’t going to get us anywhere. It wouldn’t have made a damned bit of difference one way or the other. In his mind, Donnie’s fate was sealed the second he decided to send his men to board up the doors and windows of my house, then set it on fire with my family inside.
I couldn’t even think of what to say that I hadn’t said before. The old man was both my damnation and my salvation. His overt favoritism marked me as a threat in the family despite my refusal to have anything to do with the Takahashi dynasty, but no one would move against me as long as the old man lived.
What’d happened to Donnie was usually enough of a promise of what waited for anyone who’d cross that particular line. It was a pity no one’d learned that lesson earlier so I wouldn’t be standing on my daughters’ graves wishing I’d had just one more burned pancake Sunday breakfast with them.
“Fucking Hell, you’re here about the netsuke,” I muttered under my breath. Gods, I was slow at times. I hadn’t slept much since the damned scorpion tried to crawl past my teeth, and parts of my body were the color of crushed seedless black grapes, strings of bruises puddling across wide swaths of my skin. “Do you know who sent it after me?”
“If I did, we would not be standing here in the cold having this conversation.” He shifted his feet, moving to my right, nearly close enough to touch me, and the shadows in the fog shimmered closer. “Instead, your morgue would be opening gift-wrapped tiny scraps of someone’s body I’d left on your desk. But now that you bring it up, I have… people looking into it. Are you now going to tell me to not interfere?”
“Would it do any good?”
“No.” The lizard I called my grandfather smiled, a draconian sneer broad enough to flare his nostrils. “This isn’t about you, Rokugi—”
“Really? Because it sure as Hell felt all about me when the damned thing was slicing up my throat.” My raised voice troubled the old man’s security, because another shape emer
ged from the gray veil, only to drop back into hiding a moment later. “Might also be about the other dead people those things left behind.”
“If I do not make an example of whomever attacked you, then the others will think I’ve weakened. I can’t have that—”
“This isn’t some chess game, Grandfather, and you can’t keep rushing in to protect me. I’m not even on the board—”
“You are on the board because I’ve put you there,” he reminded me. “And you will stay there until you see reason. The others are too hotheaded, too volatile. I will not turn over generations of wealth and power to mewling, reactive imbeciles. If I had another choice, I would have turned my back on you a long time ago and let fate decide your life for you, but I can’t… I won’t… allow our family’s legacy to fall after I die. I will not be the last Takahashi to stand at the head of our clan.”
“Stop.” I held up my hand to stop him from going into the same tired lecture I heard every time we were in the same space for more than a few minutes. “I’ve got, what… fifteen first cousins? I know what some of them have been up to. They’re not stupid. Jujeng alone has three territories he controls for the family, and there are others just as strong. They have no loyalty to me, and me stepping in behind you is the last thing they want.”
“I am removing the family from its… less than legal means of doing business.” His bombshell had its desired effect, and I was left speechless. “I would rather cripple the family than watch it die.”
It took me a good half a minute before I could scramble my brain out of the unfolding maze he’d laid into my thoughts. No matter how I looked at it, the city’s underground would still be embroiled in a bloodbath, and I couldn’t see my way out of it.
Finally I exhaled the breath I’d been holding in. “You like murdering people too much.”
“I like knowing people will die because I say they should die,” he corrected, patting my shoulder. “There is a difference. That will not change, but I propose you consider what I have to offer you. Of all my prospects, you are the one closest to thinking like me. You weigh the possibilities, and people like you. People work harder for a man they like. Me, they fear, but you… you drive people to a loyalty I will never achieve. Now, as to the small matter of the netsuke that attacked you. It was the first of a set. A set of three.”
“How do you know that? We only saw the one.”
“I know because it came after me not more than an hour ago.” He motioned toward the dark shapes lurking around us. “Riyuchi has its remains in a bag. I brought it because I knew it would help you in your investigation, but make no mistake, my grandson, someone has marked us both for death.”
“Kind of egotistical, even for you. There were other murders, Grandfather,” I pointed out. “Lots of people kill for more reasons than taking you down.”
“That would be true if those other people weren’t just collateral damage.” His smile was back, as slippery and malevolent as before. “Every one of those killed were mine, Tombo, and I have my suspicions on where the one you fought with on the gōngyù was headed. Either join me and fight this, or you will end up as dead as your whore mistress at Kingfisher’s.”
“You’re lying, old man.” My blood ran cold, spreading an icy lace through my veins. “Jung Jie—”
“They just found her an hour ago with a stone scorpion in her throat. Ask your uncle Goma if you do not believe me, but someone out there is trying to kill us.” He leaned in, close enough for me to smell the butterscotch from the candies he liked on his breath. “This is about me—about the family—and whether you like it or not, Rokugi, this will eventually be about you as well.”
“SHE’S ALREADY gone, MacCormick,” Yamada dolefully informed me through my car’s open window. “Morgue guys took her in about five minutes ago. The casters got the netsuke, and Forensics still has the scene tied up while they go over it. You should just head home and let me handle the witnesses. You’re too close to this one. I can see it all over your face.”
Kingfisher’s was in an uproar when I went by, and no amount of pleading could get me past Yamada, who’d seen me coming and leaned on my car door to stop me from getting out.
“I’ve got to see….” I slammed my fist against the steering wheel, leaving a small dent in one of its curves. The hollowed-out cavity in my stomach ached, filling with a pain I’d grown too accustomed to over the past few years. I was sick of people dying around me and being helpless to stop it. “Yamada, she was my friend.”
“I know, man, but Gaines’d have my ass if I even let you get near the door. That’s the first thing he told me.” His hangdog face melted into a deep sorrowful frown. “I’m sorry, MacCormick, but he was firm about this. You go inside and he’ll peel what little hair I have on my nut sack off with a jar of hot wax. You’ve got to walk away, man. Go find someone—anyone—and hang with them until you’ve got your head on straight. Do you need me to call someone to come get you?”
Jie was more than a friend. More a sort-of cousin I’d snuck into Chinese school with me so we could both sit at the back of the class and make fun of the teacher, who looked more frog than human. I’d shared lunches with her when she’d been hungry and got angry when she’d refused to show me where she lived. I’d known nothing about her family, and she’d refused to come into my house, pointing out my mother was a cop and she pretty much spent most of her time breaking one law or another.
We’d grown apart only when we drifted onto our separate paths, but she’d been there, or at least around, for me during some of the shittiest times in my life. Around was enough for me, and now, when I walked into Kingfisher’s, I wouldn’t see the girl I’d spent afternoons with stealing fresh oranges from graves or eating ourselves sick on the Dungeness we’d fished out of the murky Bay waters. Now she was dead, and I’d probably brought her killer right to her front door.
“No, I’m… where’d they find her?” I pressed Yamada. “Tell me that at least. And where’s Yokugawa?”
“He’d stepped away. A couple of guys were shooting at each other near the end of the street. That drew him and the dogs off the door, and one of the other guys stepped in to cover.” Yamada glanced over his shoulder when a uniformed cop called out his name. “We found him dead against the wall. Same kind of thing, ceramic statue, but this time, one of those long-legged crabs they use in front of restaurants. We found the damned thing hugging his face. Killed him by driving its limbs into his head, then just stayed there.”
“I need to—”
“You need to get out of here, MacCormick.” He patted my arm. “Go get drunk. Go get laid. Just… don’t be here.”
AT SOME point I ended up holding a whiskey glass with a hole in it, because no matter how much booze the bartender poured into it, it always seemed to be empty when I picked it up.
The dive was a place I’d come to on and off over the years, a tiny street stall set up for business a little ways away from Woo Fat’s Hong Kong Style Noodles. Woo Fat’s didn’t sell noodles, and he’d never been outside of the city, much less to Hong Kong. Instead, Woo Fat was actually a man named William Fong who bought and sold stolen electronics out of a fried bread restaurant no one ate at. Business for Fong was brisk, and he could dance around a police investigation like he’d been born to waltz.
As a result, undercover cops began spending a lot of time behind Woo Fat’s, hoping to shake him loose for an arrest. Food and coffee options were slim in the lower reaches of the street since most of the businesses in the area were warehouse storage and sweatshops, so there’d been a lot of hungry, grumpy cops needing something to sustain them on their long, futile stakeouts.
Which led to Sailor Jim’s opening up and becoming possibly the only street stall bar catering practically only to cops and the occasional fireman.
They also always served a mean shot of whiskey.
Chinatown stayed in the shadows, a rollick of murmured voices and blazing lights muted by the overhangs crowding the rooftops ab
ove the stall. I wasn’t the only one drinking away the stars. There was a ruddy-faced fae on the other side of the rectangular booth, his brown tweed jacket badly cut around his short, dark wings. From his grizzled face and deadpan expression, I made him for another cop, a supposition confirmed when he reached for his wallet to pay for a beer and I caught a wink of a badge hanging from his jacket’s inside pocket.
I knew the proto-goblin slinging drinks on sight, mostly because it was hard to forget a six-foot-plus muscled gray mass with sawed-off gold-tipped tusks jutting up over his fleshy upper lip. The covered stall was a cramped, narrow space built up against Woo Fat’s back wall with only a tiny swing door on the side for access to the inner well, and I watched with a hushed awe as he nimbly moved about the glass bottles without knocking anything over. He’d lost a fight or two in his lifetime, his bulbous nose and drooping jowls thick with old scars, and I never could tell if he just had heavy eyebrow ridges or if his frown was simply a permanent expression he’d adopted over the years.
A snorfling sound by my foot was a bit alarming, but not as startling as the squat magenta reptilian licking my shoe. More of a dappled snakeskin ottoman with short fat legs and a slash of a mouth filled with broad triangular teeth, snorklewhackers were mostly doglike irascible pets, and this one apparently had a fondness for leather boots.
“Your… ugly dog’s sliming my shoe, man.” Leaning over the counter, I tapped the bartender’s shoulder to get his attention. Sailor Jim’s wooden barstools were cobbled-together pieces of wood and steel, sturdy enough to carry the weight of a cop in full riot gear, though the one I sat on creaked alarmingly when I moved. I looked down at the snorklewhacker as it left a wad of viscous glob on my heel, then carpet-bombed the stall with a loud, smelly fart. “Jeez, what do you feed this thing? Cabbage and okra?”