“Hard earned,” said Ian in a quiet voice as he looked away, his focus shifting back to Amarela as she approached the front door.
Rossella squeezed his arm and let the conversation drop. Now wasn’t the time to explore what he meant.
*
Jersey, Ian, Rossella and Wasp Face listened in on Amarela’s conversation with Mr. Anderson via a wireless microphone clipped under her jacket. Before long, she was sitting on the front porch, chatting through a crack in the door. She laughed and smiled, cooed, sympathized and empathized.
When Mr. Anderson finally laid down his weapon and opened the door further to share his near-empty bottle of tequila, she stroked his forearm and smiled like they were at the end of a promising first date. He didn’t even seem to mind when she placed him in handcuffs and escorted him off the porch to a waiting patrol car.
“He’s going to need a good lawyer,” said Rossella.
Ian nodded, reading her thoughts. “Be gentle.”
“You don’t mind?”
“This is what you do,” said Ian. “And Cody needs both his parents to get through this. His mother’s transformation will be tough enough without losing his father, too. But get the man some good counseling. He needs it.”
After the patrol car drove off, with Rossella catching a ride with her new client, Amarela returned to the awning and unwrapped a fresh piece of gum. Slipping it into her mouth, she grinned at her partner and rolled her eyes.
“Men,” she said with great exasperation. “I don’t know why we still let you idiots run the world.”
32
After making sure Cody and his mom were in safe hands, Ian escaped the melee and drove back to his grandfather’s apartment above the Dynasty restaurant. The leftover pizza was cold, the opened wine warm, and the apartment quiet.
Settling into the armchair by the window, Ian cracked open the code book and went to work.
It took time to understand exactly what he was looking at. His only experience with secret codes had been in his childhood when he found a plastic decoder ring in a second-hand bookshop. It was laying at the bottom of a bag of old DC comics he bought for five dollars, and it used a simple substitution cipher. Unfortunately, since none of his friends owned a similar ring, it quickly lost its attraction.
After an hour of intense study, Ian began to see the logic and patterns behind the CIA code. Despite its complexity, it really wasn’t that much different from his boyhood toy. He spent a second hour frustrated by his lack of progress, until he realized the codebook didn’t contain one key, but hundreds. Each ledger entry began with a four-letter code. Contained within that code was a page and paragraph number that told him which key needed to be used to unlock the rest of the cipher.
When the first jumble of letters became a word he recognized — Alice — he practically wept for joy. In celebration, he took a slug of wine from the bottle and devoured a slice of room temperature pizza. Re-energized, he deciphered the entire first entry, breaking down its structure piece by piece. He did the same to the second entry — Leticia — and then compared the two.
They both followed the same basic outline.
To make sure it wasn’t an anomaly, Ian began decoding the third entry — Paola. It fit the same pattern, which meant he could take a chance and only decipher the necessary entry on each page, the line that contained each woman’s original name.
He found Constance Zelig in the middle of the fourth ledger as the morning sun brought a blood red glow to the damp and glistening streets below.
His exhausted reverie was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” Ian called out, his voice dry and rough.
“Mei Song, Mr. Quinn. My grandparents are asking if you would like to join us for breakfast.”
“Will there be coffee?”
Mei giggled like only a young woman could. “Yes. My grandfather loves his coffee strong and black.”
“I’ll be right down.”
*
Over breakfast in the Songs’ apartment, Ian allowed himself a moment of reprieve where he listened to the family chatter of Mei Song and her grandparents, sipped coffee so strong that Mr. Song joked it could “put hair on the chest of a Chinaman,” much to the chagrin of Mei, and devoured a cooked breakfast of bacon, eggs and thin Vietnamese pancakes, each one the size of a silver dollar.
The pancakes were served with butter and coconut jam rather than syrup.
“Mrs. Song,” Ian said as he wiped up the last of his egg yolk with a morsel of pancake. “Can I ask how long you knew my grandfather for?”
“Very long time,” said Mrs. Song.
“Did you meet in Vietnam?”
“What make you ask?”
“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I don’t mean to open old wounds, but I heard a story recently about my grandfather and how he brought a young girl home with him during the war. I wondered if that girl might have been you.”
“Your grandfather unusual man,” said Mrs. Song as she cleared plates off the table. “He save my life, but I never know why.”
“Why he saved you?”
Mrs. Song nodded. “All men want something, but your grandfather…” She paused for a moment in search of the right phrasing, failed, and went with, “He good man. Man of honor.” She smiled and reached out to squeeze her husband’s shoulder. “I never tell if he even like me and yet he risk life to bring me here. What is that saying about no good deed? And yet, with your grandfather, he ask for nothing. I never know another like him.”
“Is that why you’ve kept his office for all these years?”
Mrs. Song shrugged. “The office belong to him. We do nothing but do nothing.”
Ian smiled at the simple philosophy. “Do you still have family in Vietnam?”
Mrs. Song shook her head. “That story end on day Augustus find me. I have no desire to look back.”
“What about you, Mei?” Ian asked the granddaughter. “Any interest in visiting Vietnam?”
“No need,” said Mrs. Song before her granddaughter could answer. “Mei is American. This her home, not Vietnam.”
Sensing he was tiptoeing in a minefield, Ian dropped the subject and finished his coffee.
“Thank you for the lovely breakfast, but if you’ll excuse me—”
“What do you find up there?” interrupted Mr. Song. “If it is not rude to ask.”
Ian thought over the question for a moment, realizing that his own intrusion into Mrs. Song’s past had opened this door. “It seems your wife is not the only woman rescued by my grandfather.”
“It is true,” said Mr. Song. “He helped many women. They would come to him with horrible stories of woe, frightened and with nothing to their name. At first, it was women who knew my wife’s story, a story she shared with Vietnamese women who had also been brought to this country but by less scrupulous men. These women thought they were escaping hell, but they were sold into another. Your grandfather became a whispered legend, a knight in the darkness.”
“You helped him?”
“Where we could. When we could.”
“But one of the women he helped was the daughter of Walter Zelig. You know him?”
Mr. Song’s eyes narrowed as he nodded.
“Her disappearance is the reason my grandfather was tortured to death, the reason my sister vanished from my life, and the cause of my father’s murder. I need to find her and put an end to this vendetta.”
“What would your grandfather do?” asked Mrs. Song.
“We already know,” said Ian. “But I’m not him. I won’t sacrifice any more lives for the sake of one woman. I need this to be over.”
*
Crossing the street, Ian entered the butcher’s shop. The front door was unlocked as the cleaners were already busy on the back room, their portable boombox blaring one of the local radio stations. The front room had grown in size with the large refrigerated cases removed and its natural plank floor polished to a shine.
It wasn’t perfect, t
he scars too deep to be covered by simple floor wax, but it was a start.
The dark sheets of moldy chipboard had been removed from the picture window, flooding the open space with natural light and revealing the painted shop sign to the absent public for the first time in decades.
“What do you think?” asked Clark as he pushed through the steel mesh curtain from the back room.
“You’ve done an incredible job,” said Ian.
“It’s a beautiful space, really,” said Clark. “Pity it’s in such a lousy area.”
“But it’s growing on me,” said Ian.
“I spent a little extra on security,” said Clark. “Hope that’s okay?” He pointed at the large shop window. “I didn’t want to block the light with steel bars, but I found this new product that’s just about as strong.”
He crossed to the window and wrapped his hand around one of a dozen clear plastic rods that ran the entire height of the window. The rods ran from floor to ceiling and were spaced approximately eight inches apart.
“It won’t stand up to a tank, but nobody is getting through these without a ton of effort.” Clark grinned. “And there’s another cool feature that steel won’t give you.”
He crossed to the wall beside the front door and flicked a switch. Suddenly, the bars lit up in a soft blue hue.
“LEDs,” said Clark. “With the rest of the lights off, it makes for a cool feature, plus it lets the outside world know your store is protected.”
“And the front door?” Ian asked.
“All new locks, reinforced steel jamb, plus a four-prong deadbolt that will snap the ankle of anybody who tries to kick it in.”
“Sweet.”
Clark grinned. “It’s been a fun project, and given me ideas about how to expand my business. A lot of the cleanup jobs we do are after thieves and vandals have broken into a place.” He pointed to the wall behind Ian. “Did you notice your sign?”
Ian turned to see the rusted iron pig attached to the brick wall. Clark had hidden white LED lighting behind it to cast a soothing glow and make it appear almost three-dimensional.
“I thought about cleaning it up,” said Clark. “But the oxidation and weathering just gives it so much character that I left it as is.”
Ian had to agree, it looked cool. And he liked to think that his grandfather would approve.
*
Upstairs, in his freshly cleaned though still uncomfortably cluttered apartment, Ian called Jersey.
“Thanks again for helping last night,” said Jersey when he answered. “Although making Amarela the hero of the hour is not a pleasant experience for any of us.”
“Hey, I heard that!” Amarela called out in the background.
“You were meant to,” said Jersey. “She’s also unbuttoned her shirt one extra level just to make it more difficult for the officers to look her in the eye when they stop by to offer congratulations, which I might add is something they never do for me.”
“I’m right here,” protested Amarela. “And that button was a mistake. I was tired this morning, I already told you that.”
“Uh-huh. What do you think, Ian?”
“Send me a photo, I’ll let you know.”
Jersey laughed and told Amarela what he said.
“She called you a pig.”
“Well, I do live above a butcher’s shop.”
Jersey laughed again. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m trying to track somebody down. I have a name and address in San Diego, but there’s a good chance she might not still be there.”
“One of your missing women?”
“The missing woman,” said Ian.
“Oh?”
“Walter Zelig’s daughter, Constance.”
“Okay. And what are you going to do when you track her down?”
“Bring her home,” said Ian coldly. “It’s time for her to settle up with her father and get my family off the hook. There’s been too much blood spilled for this to have a happy ending. He’s an old man now, she can take him.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
33
Ian sat at the small kitchen table, sipping a coffee and talking to Birdie, the rack-thin brunette who had patched him up last time he brought Molly to visit her uncle. Birdie simply listened and nodded.
Molly held the large ginger tom in her lap, the cat’s delighted purr loud enough to be heard from the kitchen.
The armed biker on the porch outside kept glancing in the window as though to remind Ian that he wasn’t part of the brotherhood, and thus couldn’t be trusted.
“You expecting trouble?” Ian asked Gordo as his fellow gang member glared through the window again. “Your guard dog is acting nervous.”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” said Gordo. “New player in town is spreading his oats, testing the boundaries, you know how it is?”
“You have a name?”
Gordo shook his head. “No name. Not yet. He’s sticking to the shadows, making a few moves but still testing the waters.”
“But he’s about the size of a gorilla?”
Gordo grinned, surprised by Ian’s intel.
“That’s what I hear.”
“The Bowery brothers are working for him.”
Gordo nodded. “Heard that, too. What’s your interest?”
“He killed one of my clients.”
Ian winced as Molly looked up in horror. He tried to backpedal. “Sorry, Molls, I shouldn’t have said that. It was—”
“It’s okay,” said Gordo. “It’s good for her to know the dangers of this world.” He turned to his niece and stroked her hair. “But don’t you worry. Anybody tries to hurt you, they’ll have to go through me first, and that ain’t gonna fucking happen.”
Gordo turned back to Ian. “Who was your client?”
“Noah Bowery.”
“Rory’s boy?”
Ian nodded.
“And the stupid prick is working for his son’s killer now?”
“Both brothers are.”
“Fucking addicts, man. They’ll sell their own mothers for a hit.” He turned back to Molly. “If you learn anything from me, learn this. Drugs destroy from the inside out. They take your dignity, they rot your soul, and they turn you into a cancer that shits on everyone and everything you ever cared about. You want to get high? Smoke a little weed; take a shot of Jack, that’s fine. But I ever hear you’re into anything more than that and you’ll wish you were never born. You got that?”
Molly’s eyes were the size of dinner plates as she nodded.
“I’ve lost too many friends to that shit,” Gordo continued. “Plenty of coin to be made without it.” He turned back to Ian. “You know this gorilla?”
“Met him once.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. I was blindfolded. The Bowerys took me to him.”
“What’s his interest in you?”
“It’s complicated. He’s actually interested in Walter Zelig. Zelig is interested in me. He wanted to ask about it.”
“Zelig ain’t much no more.”
“Maybe not to you.”
“What’s that mean?”
Ian explained a slice of the story. When he was done, Gordo scratched his nose and said, “Old man still has teeth. Impressive.”
“Not if it’s your ass he’s got in his sights.”
“You’re a complicated dude, man.” Gordo rubbed Molly’s head. “No wonder Molls here likes you.”
“Mr. Q’s alright,” said Molls.
Gordo grinned. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”
“Hey!” complained Molly, putting up her fists. “Who you calling a horse?”
Gordo dropped to his knees on the floor, placed one hand behind his back and cocked his left fist in challenge. “You,” he said with a broad smile. “What you gonna do about it?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Molly feinted with her right to make her uncle block it with his left, and then planted a solid left
fist in her uncle’s eye.
*
“Sorry again, uncle,” shouted Molly sweetly as Ian led her to the van.
Standing on the porch, with Birdie by his side, Gordo held a bag of frozen peas against his eye.
“I hope he’s not mad,” Molly said to Ian as she climbed inside. “I told Birdie to kiss it better once the swelling goes down.”
“He seemed more amused than angry,” said Ian. “He underestimated you.”
“Yeah,” agreed Molly. “People do that all the time.”
“That they do, Molls.”
*
After dropping molly at her foster home, Ian pulled into a drive-thru to order a burger. He was just enjoying a second bite when his phone rang.
“I’ve got a number for you,” said Jersey. “She’s moved around a bit, but stayed mostly within the San Diego area. Four years ago, she changed her first name back to Constance, but kept her adopted surname of Silver. Her last move was only two months ago, so the number is fresh.”
“Did you call it?”
“Didn’t want to spook her. You sure you want to do this?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“We always have a choice.”
“Not this time. Not anymore.”
“Okay.”
Jersey gave him the number.
Ian took another bite of hamburger, but it sat heavily in his mouth until he spat it back into the wrapper. After throwing the meal away, he took a deep breath, composed what he was going to say, and dialed.
The phone rang four times before an answering machine kicked in. The recorded message wasn’t what he expected.
“Congratulations, Ian, you did what Zelig never could, you found his daughter.” The voice was deeply moist, male and familiar. A visage of the gorilla’s horseshoe-shaped scar filled Ian with icy dread. “The Bowery boys bet against you, which shouldn’t come as any surprise, but I knew you possessed an iron streak of resilience. I could see it lurking deep behind those stubborn blue eyes the first time we met. Most people shit themselves, as they should, but you…you barely flinched.” The gorilla chuckled. “Unfortunately, you’re too late. Constance is my pawn now.”
There was no beep to leave a message as the line went dead.
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