“He must know I’m right behind him.”
“If he does,” Wish said, “he doesn’t care.”
This seemed accurate. Cody stopped the chopper dead on a side street near the shelter, setting off on foot.
Paul and Wish did likewise, ditching the Mustang at the corner of Berkeley and Alameda. Paul, who hated mobile phones for completely unoriginal reasons, had bowed to necessity and bought one. He flipped it open and turned it on. The phone began its start-up routines.
Hurrying up the street, he heard himself huffing. Every time he came up here, he had to make the adjustment to the impossibly high altitude. He was tired of feeling red-faced, dried out, and oxygen-deprived. He wanted Nina to land in Carmel with him, in the richly oxygenated air at sea level. He wanted her to evacuate from her mountains, her frenzy of trouble, her daily trials, and move into a place where there was the placid calm of ocean and good healthy light.
The women’s shelter came into sight, Cody Stinson making headway up the steps.
“What’s he going to do?” Wish asked, astonished. “Just knock?”
He did knock. Nobody answered. He wasn’t brandishing a handgun, at least.
Paul punched 911 with great deliberation. “If some lamebrain woman has it in mind to answer the door,” Paul said, “we take him out.”
“Did you bring a gun?”
“No, I did not bring a gun,” Paul said. He had, in fact, left his gun behind in the glove compartment. It was the mistake of an amateur, and it made him worry about his edge and lack of sharpness, but by now four in the morning was creeping up, and Paul did not feel at his best. He knew he could take this guy if necessary. He had thirty pounds on him, height, superior physical training, and a will to succeed, he reminded himself.
“How do we take him out, then?” Wish whispered.
“Any way we can,” Paul answered.
Cody, at the door to the shelter, had started yelling. “Please, somebody let me in,” he called pathetically, pounding loudly. “It’s so cold out here.”
“Where are these people?” Paul said, giving attention to his inattentive phone. “Why don’t they answer?”
“ 911,” a bright voice piped.
He gave brief details, starting right in with the fact that Cody Stinson was a wanted man.
“We’ll be there asap,” the lady said,
“They’ll be here asap,” he told Wish.
But by now, Cody Stinson, impatient with the lack of response, had decided to take matters into his own hands. He wandered back out into the yard in front of the shelter, picked up a loose limb, held it high in one hand, and broke the front window. “What does it take to get you women’s attention, anyway?” he yelled.
A woman holding a rifle appeared in the window. Andrea Reilly.
“The police have been called,” she yelled. “If you don’t leave, you’ll be arrested and charged. Leave now.”
“I’m not here to cause anybody any trouble,” Cody Stinson whined. “I just want to talk. Are Brandy and Angel here by any chance? I heard they might be.”
Paul made his move. He ran up swiftly and quietly behind Stinson and pulled him down. Stinson didn’t resist or say a word as Paul straddled him and searched his pockets. Wish came over and said, “We got him, buddy!” and Paul heard the welcome siren of the South Lake Tahoe police at his back.
“Drop the gun!” the police ordered Andrea. “You there, freeze,” they advised Paul. He froze, the full weight of his body pressing down on Cody Stinson.
15
A FTER SOME PALAVER, the police arrested Cody and escorted him away, deaf to his protests. “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’! Hey, I got a right to come here, same as anyone else! Big deal about the freaking window! I said I’d pay for it!”
Back in his hotel room at Caesars, Paul left a message for Nina at the office, deciding not to wake her. He and Wish caught six hours of precious sleep, Paul on the bed, and Wish all over the easy chair. Then they got back into the car. After all the time they had spent driving recently, the Mustang felt about as comfortable as a camel. They wended their way six thousand feet lower in altitude to the city of Fresno, where the Vangs had recently moved, arriving just after the morning rush-hour traffic.
After the Gold Rush, not much had happened in Fresno for about a hundred and fifty years, except that tracts of ranch houses sprouted in place of orchards these days and strip malls lined the once-lazy country roads. Over the years immigrants from many lands had adopted Fresno. They found the pickings good in the agricultural central valley of California and didn’t mind the long series of hundred-degree days from August to October. They came mostly from Mexico and Central and South America, as always; they came from Bosnia and the Ukraine; and they came from the villages of Asia, the brave and the desperate, to stoke California’s goliath agricultural engine.
The Hmong had arrived during the mid-1970s and after, jettisoned by the war in Vietnam, which had spilled over into wars in Laos and Cambodia. When Laos went Communist, the Hmong went resistance. Preferring their traditional village systems, they distrusted the increasing centralization of power in the lowlands and generally became thorns in the side of the Pathet Lao government. After the U.S. lost the war, many Hmong fled to refugee camps on the Thai border and from there dispersed to new lives in California. Their people mostly practiced Buddhism, Paul knew. Hard- working and intelligent, they had been brutally rushed into the twenty-first century.
WELCOME CENTER read the wooden plaque on the wall of a small bungalow in the old part of town. Letters in a strange and beautiful alphabet just underneath must have said the same thing to those in the know. Paul pulled into the parking lot behind the building.
Inside a fan circulated air. Greenery filled the windows. Hardwood floors and a few straight-backed chairs left the front room austere. In the larger room beyond, Paul saw a large group of preschoolers sitting on the rug, singing a ditty to their teacher, a young lady playing the piano.
“Well, that’s sure not Dr. Mai,” Wish said, disappointed.
Paul noticed a door marked Kitchen and poked his head inside. A scanty-haired elderly man who met Nina’s description of Dr. Mai worked at the sink, washing a huge aluminum kettle, rubber gloves on his hands and a dishtowel around his waist. When he saw Paul and Wish, he dropped the kettle, which bounced onto the linoleum, and looked around wildly for an escape as if confronted by thugs armed with AK-47s. Clearly, he had been through a war. Paul held up his hands, showing his palms in the universal sign that he came in peace. Then he reached into his pocket and presented the old fellow his P.I. card, telling him that Nina Reilly had sent him.
Dr. Mai sagged in relief, catching hold of the sink edge. “Just a moment,” he said, and straightened up. He took off the apron and gloves, hanging them neatly over the sink. “She has regretted her decision? You have the check?”
“She has a few questions first.”
“No check?” he mumbled to himself, shaking his head as if in disbelief. “After all this, no check. Why come here, then?”
“To find out about the family.”
“She doesn’t need Kao. She has the power of-”
“She’s stubborn that way.”
Mai shook his head. “Kao is safe,” he said. “They are all safe.”
Wish picked up the pan and carefully placed it in the dish drainer. Paul leaned against the wall, put his hands in his pockets, and said, “You know, sometimes when people come to this country it doesn’t go smoothly. Sometimes they open up businesses that bad people want a piece of. Sometimes they still owe money to the agents who brought them here. Is something like that going on here?”
“No, no,” Dr. Mai said. “It’s nothing like that.”
Hmm. The old guy dismissed the idea so easily, it had the ring of truth. Paul had developed his own private working theory, sure the urgent need for the settlement money came from a shakedown gone bad. It had crossed Paul’s mind that Kao had shot one of the enforcement boys and had his store burned down in retaliation.
Then again, maybe not.
“What are you cooking?” Wish asked Mai.
“Vegetable stew,” Mai answered shortly, while Paul wondered how to get the information he needed.
Wish nodded. “Want some help with the chopping?” When the old man didn’t say no, Wish washed his hands and picked up the knife and skinned an eggplant with expertise Paul had never suspected he had. Also watching, Mai appeared to relax. “Your mother must be a good cook,” he said to Wish.
“My dad taught me. You should taste my dad’s chili. My dad, he used to run a store on the Indian reservation where he grew up. Sold everything you can think of, fishing gear-he lived by Pyramid Lake, you ever hear of it?-canned food, toilet paper.” Wish finished the eggplant and took a big yellow onion and had the skin off it in half a second. Chopping rapidly, he added, “He never could make a living off it, though. He went into truck driving after that. Gets me thinking about Mr. Vang. I know he doesn’t want to see us, but maybe Mr. Vang doesn’t know Nina’s awfully worried. If only we could tell her he’s all right.”
Dr. Mai seemed to be mulling this over. Paul decided to lie low and see if Wish could take this situation somewhere.
“You want me to put some water in the kettle?” Wish asked. Mai went over and started doing that. He was thinking, and Paul let him think. Mai let Wish put the heavy kettle on the stove, turn on the heat, and dump in salt. He picked up a potato peeler and handed it to Wish.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Sure.” Wish started peeling potatoes into the garbage can.
Mai pulled out a step stool and sat down slowly. “Kao deserves peace. He has suffered gravely. I have stayed with him all this time, through the surgeries and the fear.”
“We want to help him,” Paul said.
“Kao Vang knew the men who robbed his store.”
Paul grabbed the word
“What really happened, Dr. Mai?” Paul said. Mai shook his head with a look that said, next you’ll be asking me to describe the hereafter.
“Will she be satisfied if I take you to talk to Kao right now?” Mai asked. “Will she stop this stubbornness, this misguided attempt to help?”
“If he personally directs us to give him the check.”
“All right. If we must do it this way. I have to finish the lunch. Come back in an hour.” He didn’t invite them to lunch, but that was fine, Paul wasn’t into vegetable stew, he was into easing Nina’s mind about this family so he could run down other leads on the lost files.
“It’s a deal,” Paul said.
He and Wish went outside to sit in the car, which by now had surpassed the temperature of Mercury’s sunny side. The hood had been pocked by hail the night before. That would cost a pretty penny to fix. He turned the engine on and got the AC blowing.
