by Neil Mcmahon
“Dumb bastard,” Larrabee growled. He braked and veered into the right-hand lane to turn back the way they had come.
“I tried to talk him out of it,” Steffie said. “But—it’s like he thinks this is a party. He’s got some great stories.”
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” Monks ordered. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
They headed west on Geary, making most of the lights. Monks saw with relief, when they pulled into the turnout, that the RV was the only vehicle there. Stephanie was standing at the edge of the cliff, watching something below. She turned at the sound of the van’s approach and waved at them anxiously.
Monks and Larrabee got out and hurried to her.
“He’s getting into a fight,” she told them breathlessly. “This guy was beating up his girlfriend, and Lex went down to help her.”
Halfway down the cliff, at the edge of the park that extended to the north, Lex Rittenour faced a young man wearing huge baggy pants, a black T-shirt, and several chains hanging from his belt. Lex had his fists clenched in a clumsy boxer’s stance, while the kid was crouched, talking and gesturing in threat or obscenity or both, hands and feet weaving in unimpressive karate-type chops.
Monks just caught a glimpse of another figure, small, slight—and wearing Lex’s distressed leather jacket—disappearing into the thickly wooded park.
“Hey, dipshit!” Larrabee yelled at the young man. He looked up and saw them. Quick as a ferret, he was gone into the bushes too.
Lex lowered his fists and turned around. Even from that distance, he looked bewildered.
“Looks like Lex just bought somebody a jacket,” Larrabee said quietly.
Lex’s faux snakeskin hat had fallen off his head. He put it on and trudged up the slope, slipping in his clumsy new slick-soled cowboy boots. It was a painful sight. Monks braced himself at the cliff’s crest and reached down to grip Lex’s hand, helping him up the last few feet.
“That guy was slapping a girl around,” Lex panted. “I went down there and told him to quit. He starts yelling he’s going to kick my ass. She ran over to me and said, ‘Please mister, he tore my blouse, can I put on your coat a minute?’ “
“Your heart’s in the right place, Lex,” Monks said soothingly.
But his jacket was not. That seemed to be coming home to Lex; he was patting pockets that were no longer on him.
“We’ve got to catch them,” he said urgently.
“Forget it, Lex,” Larrabee said. “They’ve got bicycles. They’re a mile away by now.”
Lex’s eyes widened and his tone escalated to panic. “My stash was in it.”
Monks closed his eyes, took the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and squeezed for long seconds. It provided an odd relief.
Lex pawed in supplication at his shoulder. “You’ve got to help me,” he said woefully.
Monks opened his eyes. Larrabee was gazing out to sea. Stephanie had her hands clasped in front of her, looking apprehensive.
“I can’t walk into a pharmacy and buy narcotics any more than you can, Lex,” Monks said.
“Then take me some place I can score on the street.”
“That’s a great idea,” Monks agreed. “If you don’t get busted, you can try for another O.D.”
“What am I going to do? I’m going to need a shot in a couple hours.”
Larrabee turned back to them. “Let me talk to somebody,” he said.
“How long’s this going to take?” Lex demanded.
“As long as it takes,” Larrabee said harshly. “We’ve got other priorities. Now for Christ’s sake, this time, stay inside like we told you.”
“You try to do the right thing and you get screwed,” Lex said bitterly.
“It goes with the turf of being out there, Lex,” Monks said, putting an arm around his shoulders and steering him toward the RV.
In the van again, Monks and Larrabee drove back into the city.
“I know a million people who deal dope, everything illegal you ever heard of,” Larrabee said. “But the legal stuff—that’s hard to get.”
“You have somebody in mind?”
“A respectable gentleman who got into an ugly situation with a young stud hustler, a couple years ago. I helped make it go away.”
The respectable gentleman happened to be a dentist with a very tasteful, upscale office in the Noe Valley. Larrabee went inside and Monks waited in the van, while the first drug deal he had ever been party to went down.
Larrabee returned with an envelope containing four small white tablets. Monks recognized them as oxycodone, a synthetic opiate. They were time-release painkillers, and would not provide the quick sweet high of Demerol.
“He swore that’s all he could spare,” Larrabee said. “I didn’t have time to push it.”
“I’ll make him pace it,” Monks said. “Maybe it will get him through this.”
“Maybe,” Larrabee said.
Gloria Sharpe’s shop presented a different picture than it had yesterday. There were no tradesmen’s vehicles parked out front, no signs of activity, no light showing through the papered window or closed door.
Monks waited in the van, concealed by the door panel, while Larrabee knocked. No one answered. Larrabee walked to the art gallery next door and disappeared briefly inside. A minute later, a middle-aged woman returned with him to the sidewalk, talking and gesturing at Gloria’s shop in a way that did not look happy.
“Gloria’s got some people pissed off,” Larrabee said, getting back into the van. “The neighbors think she’s been living here illegally. Sometimes she leaves the dogs, they bark and drive everybody crazy. But this morning, she didn’t show. The workmen couldn’t get in.”
“Are the dogs in there now?”
Larrabee shook his head. “All quiet.”
It came as no surprise. Gloria Sharpe had plenty of reason to take a sudden vacation.
It was 1:38 P.M.—getting to be time for the meeting with Mrs. Hak. Larrabee started the van toward the Ferry Building. Both of them were aware that their list of options was getting slimmer.
Monks walked the pavement in front of the Ferry Building, moving unobtrusively with the crowd of commuters and sightseers, his cap pulled low and sunglasses on in spite of the foggy afternoon. On the Bay, the gray sky hazed into the choppy water with no visible horizon, bringing a premature sense of twilight. Pigeons trotted around with the nervous, fussy manner of elderly ladies. Gulls kited past, squawking and fighting over bits of refuse. A few prosperous-looking pelicans squatted on nearby piers. The bird community, Monks thought, were survivors.
After a couple of minutes, he became aware of two women walking toward him. Both were wearing scarves and large sunglasses that almost hid their faces. One was Mrs. Hak.
Then, with fierce elation, he realized that the other was the girl who had come into the ER. She was pretty, full-faced, not heavy but strong. Built like Stephanie, Monks found himself thinking, and about the same age. She stood with eyes downcast, hands clasped tensely.
“This Miss Lee,” Mrs. Hak said. “Not real name.”
Miss Lee bowed shyly, eyes still down. Monks bowed back.
“We walk?” Mrs. Hak asked.
“Yes,” Monks said.
They paced along the Embarcadero, Monks keeping a covert eye on surrounding pedestrians, accusing himself of paranoia but doing it anyway. Larrabee was following behind, watching too.
“She talk to me in hospital and beg to hide,” Mrs. Hak said. “Forgive please not tell you right away.”
“She’s staying with you?” Monks said, astonished.
“I send her to friend in Oakland. Try to decide where she go next.”
“Is she illegal?”
Mrs. Hak nodded and pointed toward a huge tanker moored at a pier to the south. “Come on ship like that. Fifteen people, bucket for toilet. Twelve day. Hidden in room.” She held her hands up, palms close together. “Between—like walls. How you say?”
“The hulls,” Monks said, fighting off the claustrophobic vision of human beings crammed into a narrow steel chamber for days or even weeks, to escape into a new life—of menial labor or prostitution, never able to pay their ever-increasing debts.
“Men find her, send her back Korea,” Mrs. Hak said. “Slave in hawhouse.” She watched calmly while Monks absorbed this comment on several thousand years of civilization. “You see, Docta, why I help her? How I grow up in Seoul. Husband buy me, bring me here.”
Mrs. Hak patted his arm, as if she were the one consoling him, perhaps because of the look on his face.
“You bring money?” she asked briskly, all business now.
“Yes.”
She opened her purse casually, as if looking for something inside. Monks glanced around again, making sure no one was watching, then placed the packets in. Miss Lee stared at the money, then, fearfully, at him.
Mrs. Hak spoke crisply in Korean. The girl threw her arms around Monks, burying her face in his chest. He tried to disentangle himself but she clung, sobbing.
“She run away now,” Mrs. Hak said.
“Tell her it’s from the man she brought to the hospital.”
Mrs. Hak looked puzzled, but spoke again. Miss Lee let go of Monks and backed away, bowing and gasping out words.
“She sorry she kick him. Very scared.”
“He forgives her. If she knows where the driver is, who was with her that night—there’s money for him too.”
“He leave her at hospital. Not see again. They find him, he dead.” It was not clear whether this was what would happen, or it already had. Monks decided to let it stay that way.
Mrs. Hak was waiting, watching him with polite inquiry.
“Ask her who gave her the bottle with the drug in it,” he said.
Miss Lee lowered her eyes again. When she spoke, he could hardly hear her voice.
“Name Kwon,” Mrs. Hak said. “Very tough solja. Girls belong him.”
“Were there Americans involved? People he associates with? Does she know who hired her and the car?”
Mrs. Hak translated again. Miss Lee shook her head timidly.
Monks grimaced in disappointment; he had been hoping against all reason that this would identify one of the Aesir crew or someone with an obvious link, that it would be the key they needed.
Miss Lee spoke anxiously.
“Afraid she not tell you what you want,” Mrs. Hak said.
He did not have the heart to confirm that she was right. “Can she take me to Kwon?”
“Scared he see,” Mrs. Hak translated.
“He won’t. We’ll keep her hidden. All she has to do is point him out.”
The two women talked quickly, with Mrs. Hak taking a firm tone. She shook her purse emphatically, perhaps to remind Miss Lee of the money.
“Okay,” Mrs. Hak said to Monks. “Place on Inez Street, she show you where. Kwon come and go. Okay?”
“Yes,” Monks said. “Thanks, Mrs. Hak. We’ll keep her safe.”
Monks escorted the fearful Miss Lee to the van. He and Larrabee settled her in the back as comfortably as they could.
They drove south, into a part of the city Monks was not very familiar with. Mostly, he came down here only on the rare occasions when he had reason to go to San Francisco General Hospital. The neighborhood shops displayed an ethnic spectrum of signs—Hispanic, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and some that Monks recognized as Korean. In spite of the cool weather, plenty of people were hanging out on the streets and in the couple of parks they passed: young men with the trappings of gangs and drugs, older men drinking in front of corner stores, the homeless sleeping and the aimless wandering and a few short-skirted women on the corners, calling saucy invitations to passing cars.
Inez was a side street off Army near Twenty-fifth, lined with boxy, nondescript three- and four-story commerical buildings, neither new nor old, that could have housed anything. The one Miss Lee pointed out—with words Monks could not understand but a whispered tension that was all too clear—sported a partly lit neon sign of a tipped martini glass with the word COCKTAILS underneath. An old painted sign below that read HOTEL INEZ. There were more signs in Korean. The windows of the glassed-in lobby were painted different bright opaque colors, shielding clients from being seen.
This was where Kwon’s stable of prostitutes worked, and where, according to Miss Lee, he would show up soon. They parked down the street, with a view of the hotel’s entrance.
“Some of those girls probably aren’t much older than ten,” Larrabee said. “Wonder if Lex Rittenour would have been so hot to trot with Miss Lee if he’d known she was working out of a place like this.”
Then he glanced back quickly at her. “I hope she didn’t understand that,” he muttered. To her, he said, “Can you see okay, honey?” He made circles with his thumbs and forefingers and held them to his eyes like goggles. “Okay?” he said again.
She smiled timidly, nodded, and returned to watching out of the van’s rear window.
The minutes passed, with a trickle of clients—all male and mostly Asian—going into the Hotel Inez. Monks watched tensely, with a little flare of hope rising and dying out with each arrival. Miss Lee remained silent and still.
Then, at last, she clapped her hands and jabbed her finger ferociously at a stocky man getting out of a car.
“Kwon,” she said.
19
Kwon was wearing sunglasses, a short-sleeved polyester shirt loose at the waist over slacks, and a gold flex-band wristwatch. His black hair was carefully combed back and shiny with oil. He walked into the Hotel Inez with an unhesitating stride that suggested power.
“He got the pimp-car make right,” Larrabee said. It was a black Cadillac Eldorado, a shortened new model. “Just not quite the look.”
Miss Lee scuttled forward on her knees and crouched behind the front seats.
“I go now?” she whispered, the first knowledge of English she had betrayed. Her face was turned up, pleading like a child’s.
Larrabee nodded. “I’ll drive you where he can’t see you,” he said, and tried to convey the meaning with gestures. He pulled around the corner. Monks opened the van’s side door for her. Miss Lee hurried away at a near-trot, without a backward glance.
Larrabee drove on around the block quickly and parked several spaces behind Kwon’s car, facing the same way as it. They did not want Kwon to be seen talking to them if they could help it. Their best bet for getting the information was to bribe him, and he was more likely to cooperate if his own people did not know about it.
They had been watching for several more minutes when Monks’s cell phone rang. He answered warily, remembering that the last call had come from the phony fire inspector, setting up the assault.
“Is this an okay time to talk?” With a little shock, he recognized Martine Rostanov’s voice. She had been a steady presence in his mind, there every time he dropped his guard—a tormenting enigma he could neither trust nor discard.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve been hiding in corners at Aesir, being a mouse,” she said, with quiet excitement. “I may have something interesting. I overheard Ron Tygard talking to somebody, I don’t know who, but he was very secretive, very nervous. He said, ‘For Christ’s sake, that’s crazy.’ And then, All right, I’ll meet you there by six.’ Like he gave in. Can you follow him?”
Monks did not answer. Apparently, she did not even know about the shooting. It was impossible for him to believe that she was capable of pretending otherwise.
Almost impossible.
He finally said, “It depends.”
“I could try it,” she said uncertainly. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good at it.”
“Any idea when he’ll go home?”
“There’s an executive meeting at four in Aesir’s offices,” she said. “It should be over about five. Then there’s that gala ball tonight in Marin. The big shots are sailing over on the Viking boat.”
/> “Does that include you?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “I am going to be sick for that.”
The Hotel Inez’s door opened. Kwon came striding out, moving toward the Cadillac. He was alone. Larrabee turned the key in the van’s ignition.
“Call me when Tygard’s leaving the building,” Monks said into the phone. “I’ll try to be somewhere near.” He punched disconnect without saying good-bye.
“You’ve got a short memory, Carroll,” Larrabee said, cutting the steering wheel to pull out.
When Kwon reached his car, Larrabee drove up alongside him and stopped. Kwon turned with wary swiftness. One hand went inside his loose shirt, no doubt for a gun.
Monks, in the open passenger window, held up a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, fanned like cards.
“All we want is a name,” Monks said to Kwon. “Ten thousand dollars.”
Kwon glanced around. There was no one nearby.
“One name,” Monks said. “Then we’re gone, we never heard of you.”
Kwon looked around again—a quick but intense sweeping glance, like a soldier surveying terrain.
“You follow,” Kwon said, and got into his car.
Larrabee pulled over and let the Cadillac pass. They drove several more blocks to the parking lot of an industrial building, deserted on this damp and darkening afternoon. Kwon pulled over and Larrabee brought the van abreast again.
Kwon watched them stonily through the obsidian insect eyes of his sunglasses. His right hand was back inside his shirt. Now Monks could see the bulge of an unholstered pistol in his waistband.
“What name you want?” Kwon said. His accent was thicker than Mrs. Hak’s, his speech, like his body, blunt and forceful.
“The night before last, you sent a girl to a man, with drugs,” Monks said. “Who told you to do it?”
“You give money.” He thrust out his left hand. It was short-fingered, square, oddly plump. Monks gave him five thousand dollars.
“All money,” Kwon insisted.
“The name first.”
