The Man With No Time

by Timothy Hallinan

  He nodded, still staring into what he probably thought was the face of death. Bravo chose that moment to let his tongue loll out in a grin, so I stepped on a paw, and he looked up at me. “Bravo,” I said sternly, “if he moves, kill him.” I growled at Bravo, and Bravo growled back. It was his one trick.

  “Not me, you idiot,” I said, “him.” I snapped my fingers in front of the kid's bare chest, and Bravo swung his head around, back into the kid's face. He was still growling.

  “Drink?” I asked the kid again. I held up a glass and poured some wine into it and held it out to him. Bravo, momentarily diverted from guard duty by the possibility of refreshment, followed the glass with his eyes.

  The kid nodded, never taking his eyes off the dog.

  “We'll take a little medicine at the same time,” I said, lapsing once again into Nursese. I sat on the table in front of the couch and measured out two more Ampicillin and a couple of Excedrin. “Open,” I said.

  “Nuh-uh,” the kid said, staring at the pills as though they were hemlock. He was more afraid of them than he was of Bravo.

  “Look,” I said, putting one of each into my mouth and washing it down with what turned out to be a very nice red wine. This was getting to be a lot of Excedrin. “Medicine. For your arm.” I gestured toward his arm and he shrank from me, making me feel like Klaus Barbie. “Make you strong,” I said hurriedly. “Fix your arm.” I rubbed my own shoulder with the hand holding the pills and then flexed it. The kid's eyes went to my mouth.

  “Swallow,” he said, with a hollow note of command.

  I poured some more wine into my mouth, swallowed extravagantly, and opened wide to show him that the pills were gone. The second gulp of wine hit my stomach like a hot, wet towel and spread out, radiating upward toward my chest. “Now you,” I said. I dropped the two pills into his mouth; he gave me a dark, sour look as he tasted the aspirin.

  “Drink this,” I said, holding out the glass, which was empty. “Whoops,” I said, “sit tight.”

  “What?” he asked, a little furrily, as I poured.

  “Just stay there,” I said, resolving on the abolition of idioms forevermore. “Here.” I held the wineglass to his lips and he took a suspicious sip and stopped. He washed it around inside his mouth and then drank the rest.

  “Good boy,” I said. “Listen, I can't keep saying 'good boy' to you. It confuses the dog. What's your name?”

  He looked down at my chest and pursed his lips, and I growled at Bravo, who responded with something that sounded like the overture to the Lisbon Earthquake. It even cut through Parsifal

  “Tran,” the boy said quickly.

  “Okay, Tran.” I pulled the glass back and refilled it. “I've got the dog and I've got the gun and you've got a bad cut on your shoulder. And you tried to kill some people I love not so long ago—”

  “Not kill,” he said. “Only frighten.”

  “Spare me the embarrassment. And then you tried to kill me. Twice.” I drank half the wine.

  “Only beat up,” he said. He squirmed to find a more comfortable position and failed. “You tickled me.”

  “And you set a house on fire,” I said, letting him finish the glass.

  “Not yours,” he said, the soul of reason. “We came to beat you up but the house was burned down. I got mad, burned it the rest of the way.”

  “If you had come to this one, you'd have tried to kill me.”

  “No. Beat up only.”

  “I'll take that on faith,” I said, “but only because nothing depends on it.” I poured again and decided to skip a turn. “Drink up.” He took the wine easily this time, and why not? It was better than he deserved.

  Bravo sat happily on my foot, watching the wineglass again, and I prodded him up onto all threatening fours. “This is the deal—sorry, forget that. Here's what's going to happen. Do you understand me?”

  “Understand,” he said, sounding insulted.

  “I need to know that you do. Understand, I mean.” I watched him closely as I poured another glass, remembering, a little late, that I'd brought two into the room. I drank and said, “I'm going to take care of your cut, okay? I'm going to keep you here for a few days and the nice lady you wanted to kill, frighten, whatever, is going to come around once in a while and give you medicine until you're better, and you and I are going to talk.” I poured again.

  “Talk what?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Talk everything.” It was catching. “You're going to tell me why you wanted Uncle Lo, and who those Chinese are, and what they're doing, and all sorts of stuff.”

  “Stuff,” he said shortly, and I wasn't sure whether it was a request for clarification or a command, but I passed on aggressiveness and put the glass to his lips and let him drink again.

  “Stuff,” I said equably, “like, first, who's Lo and why were you sent to get him?”

  “Don't know,” he said. Then he looked at the wineglass and said, "Good."

  “Glad you like it. More?” He nodded, more enthusiastically than before, but this time I drank a full one myself before I gave him another couple of ounces. The Grand Inquisitor at work, pitiless and perhaps slightly drunk.

  “Where were we?” I said. “Uncle Lo, and don't tell me you don't know.”

  His mouth went wide and negative. “Don't. They said get him. They said if he came out from apartment, get him.”

  “Why did they send you to get him? Why not send Chinese?”

  The mouth curled scornfully. “Two Chinese they sent. Only one got out.”

  “Lo killed the other one?”

  He shrugged. “Must be. Only one got out.”

  “So you were supposed to be backup?”

  He nodded.

  “And they didn't tell you who he was or why they wanted him?” Some epicurean judge inside was telling me that this was a very nice wine.

  “Why?” he asked, eyeing the glass in a fair imitation of Bravo, who had managed to sit on my foot again. His weight felt good, so I let the bum sprawl.

  “Why what?” I asked, getting confused.

  “Why tell us? If they don't tell us, we don't know.”

  There was a certain unassailable logic in that. It was what he'd said before, under the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “You didn't know who he was, but you were going to kill him.”

  He shrugged, as well as someone can who's sheathed in Saran Wrap. “Only get him. If he come out. Kill him if we have to, sure. If he try to kill us.”

  “Or if he was getting away,” I suggested. He hesitated and licked his lips, and I poured a little wine down his throat.

  “Sure,” he said, after he'd swallowed, “kill him. No problem.”

  There was something elaborately casual about the words. They sounded like make-believe.

  “Have you killed a lot of people?” I asked. I was thinking about how he'd laughed when I tickled him.

  “Very many,” he said gruffly.

  I let it pass. “You were supposed to get him if he came out. Why'd you go in?”

  He blinked. “Uh,” he said.

  “Could you be more specific?”

  He tried a smile. “Mistake.”

  “It sure was.”

  “We run out of gas,” the hitman said, dropping the smile and looking embarrassed. “Gas thing on my car broken. So, late, almost half hour. We don't know who's in, who's out. Think maybe Lo's there.”

  It was too stupid to be a lie. At seventeen, I'd always run out of gas.

  “One more time,” I said, “who was Lo?”

  He looked into the middle distance, and oak popped in the fireplace. The boy started at the sound and then tried to hide the movement by turning it into a shiver. Something furtive and intelligent came into his eyes, and I involuntarily caught my breath as words formed themselves on his tongue. Here it came, the big news flash. He looked at the wine again, and then at me. He licked his lips.

  “Water chaser?” he asked.

  I heard myself laugh, and I heard Bravo's
tail thump against the floor, and I said again to Bravo, “Kill him if he moves,” and then I laughed again and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  Two hours later I was sitting next to him on the couch, and he was leaning against me in a friendly fashion. I'd undone the cuffs around his feet and slightly loosened the Saran Wrap connecting his wrists, and we were well into the third bottle. I'd learned that he was, in fact, seventeen, that the name of his gang was the Flying Fists, and that his parents were long divorced, his father gone God knew where. I'd learned that he lived—whenever he was home—with his mother, who worked as a cashier in a Vietnamese restaurant in Westminster, about forty miles south of L.A. He'd learned all about the relationship between Eleanor and me, and he'd agreed that nothing was harder than being a bad man who has somehow come into possession of a good woman. A grand and malicious joke. He'd also taken another Ampicillin, to make up for the one I'd eaten, and another Excedrin, and he was, both literally and figuratively, feeling no pain.

  “Why join the gang?” I asked again. I was propping him up and pouring the seven hundredth glass of wine, and Bravo was snoring under the table and chasing phantoms from the ankles down. He'd had a little dog-dose himself, out of the extra glass.

  “If you don't join one gang, two gangs try to take money. If you join a gang, only one.” He grinned at me, looking suddenly shy. “Better odds,” he said.

  “Fine. Why work for the Chinese?”

  The grin vanished. “More money,” he said as though it were painfully obvious. “Chinese have all the money, same in Vietnam. Chinese always have all the money.”

  “Where does the money come from?” The words were no more precise than my mental processes, but he understood them.

  “Chinese,” he said with an odd mixture of admiration and scorn, “sweat money.”

  Eleanor, as far as I could remember, didn't seem to sweat at all. There was no question, though, that she was tight with a buck. I wasn't. It was one of the things we'd fought about.

  “But where does it come from?” I put the glass to his lips and wondered briefly why I seemed to be doing all the talking. “The money, the Chinese money, I mean. Those men, for example.”

  His eyes went opaque. “Don't know.” He looked around the room, seeming to notice it for the first time. His eyes fell on the loudspeakers, almost as tall as he was, bounty from a case on which I'd actually had a client. “Music, please. Rock and roll?”

  “Music,” I said, sighing. It was getting late. I tilted him upright and got up—not quite as stiffly as before, lubricated by the wine—and put on a CD by the Kinks, not his vintage, but fuck him. If he wanted Ice-T, he could escape.

  “Old fart stuff,” he said after the opening guitar riff, wrinkling his nose.

  “That's because I'm an old fart,” I said, draining the glass. “And you're a young one.”

  “Young fart,” he said, grinning again as I settled back onto the couch and rested a foot on Bravo's shoulder. “Funny man.”

  “Back to business,” I said, drinking again. “How did they find you when they needed you?”

  He shook his head dismissively. “Guy came around.”

  “Around where?”

  “School,” he said. “More, please.”

  “School,” I said, pouring. I was dealing with a drunk baby. “Names.”

  “Wine first,” he said, looking cunning. I put the glass to his lips, and he gulped it down.

  “Charlie Wah,” he said immediately after swallowing. “Charlie Fucking Wah.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Taiwan king shit. Big man. Back and forth, yo-yo, yo-yo, Taiwan to America.”

  I leaned forward. I was getting some content at last. “They're from Taiwan, then.”

  “Shit floats,” he said. “They float here from Taiwan.”

  “Why? What are they doing?”

  The smooth features froze tight. “Don't know.” He looked into my eyes. “True. Don't know.”

  “Well, what do they ask you to do?”

  “Dangerous stuff. Stuff they afraid to do. Frighten people, beat them up. Pick up stuff and deliver it.”

  “Drugs.” It was a guess.

  “No. Charlie Wah doesn't like dope.”

  “What, then?”

  “Don't know.” He inhaled and then blew out through his lips. “Lying to you. Money. Always wrapped up, all taped up in a bag or in a briefcase, but money.”

  I was feeling dubious. “They trust you to pick up money?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “With about twenty Chinese watching. Cars in front, cars in back. Everybody with guns, everybody except us. Sure, they trust us.”

  “Where did you pick up the money?” Ray and Dave Davies were singing in trademark octaves, Dave taking the top.

  “San Pedro.” Charlie had said "San Pedro" into the phone.

  “And took it where?”

  “Chinatown.”

  “Always the same place in San Pedro?” I drank, feeling flushed and excited, and heard myself humming to the Kinks.

  “Three or four places.”

  I put the glass to his lips again and tilted it. “And in Chinatown.”

  “Sometimes one place, sometimes not.”

  “Where's the one place?”

  “Granger Street. A white man.”

  I stopped humming. “Name?”

  “Don't know.”

  “What kind of white man?”

  “Sloppy man, big stomach, wet lips. He pays us sometimes. Lawyer,” he added.

  I drank, unaware at first that I was doing it. If my hand hadn't been shaking with excitement I might not have noticed it at all.

  “Chinatown,” he continued. “American lawyer in Chinatown. Rice freak.”

  My turn not to catch the idiom. “Rice freak?”

  “Chinese girls,” Tran said. “Likes Chinese girls. Office full of Chinese girls. Bigtime kung-fu asshole. White clothes, big feet, big nose. Nose bigger than his feet.” He chuckled briefly and then hiccupped twice. He was very drunk. “Bigtime bignose kung-fu asshole. White-eyes, eyes very like water. Wine, please.”

  “Can you take me there?” I asked, pouring.

  “Does the Pope,” he asked rhetorically, “cross the road to shit in the woods?” Good question. I gave him the glass. He slurped ambitiously. “Pluto and Bluto,” he said. “They the guys with the muscle bumps hanging onto Charlie Wah. Eat steroids all the time. Go really batshit once in a while.”

  “Anybody else?” I had to close one eye to keep him in focus, and I had a feeling I should have been taking notes.

  Tran looked at me blearily. “Little one, wears his pants high? Ying. Think he's king shit, big Snake Triad guy. He the one Lo didn't kill. Zowie, you know zowie?”

  “Which one is Zowie?” It sounded like an improbable name for a Chinese.

  “No, zowie,” he protested. “Like, zowie, good wine.”

  “Sure is.” I held the bottle up to the floor lamp. “About half dead.”

  “Me, too,” Tran said, laughing. It was the first time I'd heard him laugh, except under torture. It was a very young and very innocent laugh.

  “You'll be okay,” I said, “youth being wasted on the young, and all.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. What does the Snake Triad do for its money?”

  “Don't know,” he said for what felt like the hundredth time. “Why tell me? But big money. Even for us. To bring Lo, one thousand. Five hundred for me and five hundred for . . .” He faltered.

  “For your friend,” I said.

  He started to nod and then put his head on my shoulder instead. He was trembling violently. I heard him fight for a breath. It fought him all the way in.

  I patted his shoulder, feeling big and useless. “We'll get them.”

  “They killed her,” he said. “And I stabbed him,” he cried, suddenly pulling himself away from me. It was quite a feat, considering that his hands were bound behind him and he was drunk.

&nbs
p; “No one knows what he will do until the time comes.” I sounded like Charlie Wah.

  “She my cousin,” he said, and I shut up, completely and profoundly. For a moment I thought he was going to start weeping again, but instead he shook his head and said, “Wine.”

  “No problem,” I said, but pouring it without spilling took all the concentration I had. “You made a choice,” I said, “between your cousin and your friend.”

  He swallowed air twice. “Brother,” he said.

  “Shit,” I said, gaping down into a yawning gulf of tragedy. I hadn't meant to say it. I drank the glass he'd asked for.

  “Yes,” he said fiercely, displacing his grief, “shit. Shit triad.”

  “I need names,” I urged. “You want them dead.”

  He turned an unlined face to me. Up close, he looked younger than seventeen. “I can kill them.” It sounded like a new clause in the Boy Scout pledge.

  “You can kill one or two, maybe. I can get them all.” I almost believed it. “The ones I can't kill, I can put in jail.”

  “Taiwan,” he said bitterly, “you can put them in jail in Taiwan?”

  “Give me names,” I said. If I couldn't get them all, I could die trying.

  “Names,” Tran said mechanically. “Chinese guy. Peter Lau.”

  “Who's he?”

  “Newspaper writer. Drink, please.”

  I looked at his wine-red face. “I really think it would be better—”

  “You want to know about Peter Lau?” He opened his mouth, and I poured and extended the glass.

  “Chinatown newspaper,” he said, when he'd finished. “Not with them, against them. They told us to frighten him, not one time. Two times. But we couldn't find him. He writes about them. He used to write about them,” he corrected himself, “but we couldn't find him.” He giggled.

  “What's funny?” I asked.

  “We found him, both times. But he paid us more than they paid us.”

  “How much?” It wasn't what I needed to know, but I wanted to keep him talking.

  “Five hundred. He used to write about them but they make big noise at the newspaper and talk about burn it down, and he got fired. We find him and he give us six hundred to say we didn't.”