Chapter Twenty-six
San Francisco, present day
Cape pulled alongside the curb directly across from the park, only a block from the house where Sloth lived. Linda was waiting at the door when he arrived, her hair moving despite the lack of wind.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” said Cape.
Linda gave him a noncommittal smile. “Learn anything new?”
“I think someone wants me dead.”
“That’s new?” asked Linda. “I’ll bet plenty of people want you dead-ex-girlfriends, their ex-husbands or fiances from before you came along, their therapists, who are probably sick of hearing about you-”
Cape cut her off. “I think someone is
“Oh,” said Linda, her hair shifting in apology. “That’s different. I guess that means you’re making progress, huh?” She smiled encouragingly and turned to enter the house.
“You find anything?”
Linda’s hair nodded but she didn’t turn around. “I think so.”
Cape followed her through the short foyer, wondering if any of her other friends thought of her hair as a separate person, a fuzzy third wheel that wouldn’t leave you alone.
Sloth had designed his home around his affliction. Born with a rare neurological disorder, the Sloth didn’t get his nickname from how he looked, but for how he moved. Far slower than the world’s slowest mammal, it could take him an hour to cross the room, minutes to finish a single sentence. Until he came into contact with his first computer, the Sloth was trapped inside a frozen body that could only move at a glacial pace.
A large living room dominated the first floor, an open kitchen off to the side separated from the living area by a short counter. In the living room sat small islands of furniture, each arranged by function, none more than three feet apart. A television, DVD player, and amplifier sat off to the left, surrounded by a set of chairs and a small couch. Filing cabinets and a desk sat a few feet away, clustered together in a pattern that seemed quite deliberate but entirely unconventional, as if someone wanted to decorate their house with the furniture equivalent of crop circles.
In the center of the room were the computers. Box-shaped servers lined the carpeted floor beneath a wide desk shaped like a crescent moon, above which were mounted four plasma screens. Sloth sat behind the desk, his face bathed in iridescent light.
Computers had revealed Sloth’s curse to be a mixed blessing. While his body steadfastly refused to speed up, his brain was faster than a laptop on steroids. He saw patterns in data invisible to cryptographers, heard music in equations that spoke only to mathematicians. The screens in front of him flowed like rivers-numbers and bit streams scrolling downward at a dizzying rate, Sloth’s hands shifting spasmodically across the top of the desk. A liquid crystal square was directly below his fingers, a touch-sensitive screen he designed himself. A butterfly landing on the desk could activate it, and the Sloth could play it like a piano. As Cape watched, words and symbols appeared and disappeared from the surface of the desk like stray thoughts, a holographic code only understood by the pale, stoic man behind the desk.
“Hello, old friend,” said Cape warmly.
Sloth’s watery eyes blinked slowly behind his glasses and his mouth twitched, an expression that would have looked pained on anyone else but was somehow full of affection. A lurch of his right hand and the second screen from the left went blank. As Cape watched, words appeared in large black type on the glowing surface.
WANT TO KNOW WHAT WAS ON THE SHIP?
Cape nodded and sat down next to the Sloth, while Linda, always cautious about anything emitting too much electricity, paced back and forth behind them. The room was lit by halogen lights set directly above each cluster of furniture, except the computers. The screens cast a bluish pall over Cape’s face, the words appearing as if conjured from the depths of a crystal ball.
BLUE JEANS.
Cape glanced at the inscrutable Sloth, then gave a quizzical look over his shoulder at Linda.
“That’s it?” he said. “Blue jeans?”
Linda nodded. Her hair shrugged.
“No drugs?” asked Cape. “No heroin?”
“Nope,” said Linda.
“No guns?”
Linda shook her head.
“Uranium?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Plutonium?”
“None of that,” replied Linda. “But there were several dozen refugees onboard-in case you forgot.”
Cape frowned. “No, I didn’t forget. But Mitch Yeung told me it was fairly common for refugee ships to be smuggling operations of another kind. Since they’ve already taken the risk of getting searched, why not double the profits?”
“Does that matter?” asked Linda.
Cape shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
Linda nudged him. “But…?”
“But if there was heroin onboard,” said Cape, “then it would be easier to tie the ship to Freddie Wang, since he controls the smack trade in the Bay Area.”
“Why so anxious to tie the ship to Freddie?” asked Linda.
Cape told them about his visit to Freddie Wang’s restaurant and the bomb he’d found beneath his car. When he told about his stop at the grocery store, Linda’s eyes went wide and her hair became agitated and seemed ready to leave without her. The corner of Sloth’s mouth twitched repeatedly as if he were laughing.
“There’s a corpse in your car?” asked Linda, as if she hadn’t heard correctly.
“It’s OK,” said Cape. “I told you-I bought ice.”
“Isn’t that against the law?”
“No,” replied Cape. “Ice is perfectly legal in the state of California. It’s one of the few things that is anymore, unless you want to count medicinal marijuana.”
“That’s not what I meant,” snapped Linda. “And you know it.”
Cape held up his hands and shrugged.
Linda crossed her arms. “I have no interest in getting arrested as an accessory to…to…to whatever it’s called when you drive around with a corpse in your car.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Cape said simply.
“What are you going to do with him?” demanded Linda. “I mean, with it?”
“I haven’t decided,” said Cape matter-of-factly.
Linda made a noise that sounded like
Cape smiled hopefully. “Can we talk about the ship?”
Linda didn’t answer right away, but she turned her frown toward the plasma screen, which Cape took as a conditional “yes.”
“Where was it registered?”
The words materialized on the screen, each new phrase causing the previous one to disappear.
REGISTERED IN HONG KONG…PICKED UP CARGO IN FUZHOU.
“Who is it registered to?” asked Cape.
