me.
I was pretty slow this morning: It didn’t occur to me until I was getting into the car that she probably did speak English and had been putting me on the whole time.
I stopped at a Chevron station out near Park Presidio Drive, and while an attendent fed the car I went to the phone booth nearby and rang up the DMV again. There were two sixtyish Kazuo Hamas living in California, Fletcher told me, only one up here in the northern part of the state; that one’s residence was Hama Egg Ranch, Rainsville Road, Petaluma. Petaluma was close to San Francisco-about forty miles away to the north. The other Kazuo Hama lived in Orange County, in some town I had never heard of. I took down his address too.
The DMV records showed a single Sanjiro Masaoka: 72 West Point Avenue, Princeton. Which was even closer to the city, Princeton being a small fishing village snuggled up to the larger community of Half Moon Bay, some twenty-five miles south on Highway One.
I thanked Fletcher, promised him a couple of bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label-he wouldn’t take money from me because he said it made him feel dishonest-and went back and ransomed the car. When I left the station I swung over to Geary and drove out to the Great Highway and then pointed the car south toward Highway One. I didn’t have anything better to do, the rain was still holding off, and Princeton was a good place to get a seafood lunch, if nothing else. Or it would have been if I hadn’t had my unwanted company.
The white Ford stayed behind me all the way down.
Chapter Eleven
The road that led into Princeton angled off Highway One and skirted the edge of the small Half Moon Bay airfield. There wasn’t much to the central part of the village-an old inn, a grocery store, a couple of restaurants, and some craft stores that catered to tourists. Straight ahead was a communal pier and the white-flecked water of Pillar Point Harbor, where a bunch of fishing boats rocked at anchor and geometrically laid out rock jetties marked the channels.
Off to the west were a fish-processing plant and a boatyard and three or four square blocks of private houses. I turned that way in front of the inn. All the rough-paved streets were named after colleges; West Point Avenue was one of the longest and easy enough to find. I crawled along it in deference to its potholes, past a variety of houses ranging from comfortable old frame to tumbledown shacks; past bright green, fieldlike lots and boggy yards full of boats large and small, some up on drydock davits and some that were little more than rotting hulks.
Number 72 was near the inner sweep of the harbor-a smallish two-story shingled house painted box-car red, shaded in front by a line of cypress trees and enclosed by a mossy woodstake fence. In the yard behind the fence I could see stacks of cordwood and old tree stumps, and the rusted skeleton of a bus that appeared to serve now as a shed or workshop. The bus had once belonged to a tribe of hippies, judging from the remnants of flower decals that decorated its sides; it sat there like a relic from some ancient and curious civilization. And in a way, maybe it was.
I parked in front, between a pair of rain puddles that resembled miniature ponds. The air had a sharp salt tang mingled with the smell of ozone; it was going to rain again pretty soon. As I approached the gate I could see that all of the house’s facing windows, downstairs and upstairs both, had shades drawn over them. It gave the place a closed-up, abandoned look.
The gate was latched; I reached over and opened it and went inside along a short muddy path. The porch stairs made little popping, creaking noises as I climbed them. Except for the distant racket of gulls, those pops and creaks were the only sounds in the heavy quiet.
On the front door was one of those old-fashioned doorbells that you have to twist to ring, like winding up an alarm clock. Nobody answered the ratchety summons. I tried it again, with the same nonresults, and decided Sanjiro Masaoka was somewhere else this morning and that maybe one of his neighbors could tell me where that might be. I turned from the door, took one step, and immediately quit moving again.
There was a dog down at the bottom of the porch stairs, sitting on its haunches and staring at me with bright yellow eyes.
It was a Doberman and it was big and it looked menacing as hell, even though it wasn’t doing anything except sitting there. The hackles went up on my neck. Usually I get along all right with dogs, as long as they’re kept on leashes and not allowed to crap all over sidewalks and people’s lawns. But a Doberman is something else again. Dobermans stir up some sort of primitive fear in me; I don’t like them one bit and I steer clear of them whenever our paths happen to cross.
Neither of us moved. We just kept looking at each other for what seemed like a long time. Where the hell had he come from? I’d closed the gate behind me, so he hadn’t wandered in off the street. Which meant he’d been on the property the whole time, somewhere out back. Which in turn probably meant that he belonged here-Sanjiro Masaoka’s dog-and if he belonged here, he knew I didn’t.
I worked up some saliva, swallowed it to lubricate my throat, and said, “Easy, boy. Easy. Nice dog,” to see what would happen.
The Doberman pricked up his ears. Then he began to growl low in his throat. Otherwise he didn’t move; his little stub of a tail was as stiff as if it was welded onto his rump.
Oh, fine, I thought. Dogs that growled instead of barked and didn’t wag their tails were dangerous dogs. So why hadn’t Masaoka put out a BEWARE OF DOG sign so people like me wouldn’t wander in and maybe get themselves chewed on?
I looked away from the Doberman, out toward the street. The white Ford had pulled up about fifty yards behind my car, in front of a weathered neighboring house with a screened-in front porch, and the two Japanese guys were staring in my direction. I had a momentary impulse to call out to them. But even if they had been inclined to help me, which they no doubt weren’t, any loud noise like a shout might set the Doberman off. You never knew with high-strung dogs like that, even if they were trained, what was liable to trigger them.
He quit growling after another few seconds, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. I kept looking around for some avenue of escape or somebody to come along, but the former didn’t exist and the latter didn’t seem to either. The muscles in my neck and back and bad arm began to cramp up with tension. I met the dog’s gaze again and tried some man-staring-down-dumb-beast stuff. It didn’t work; he had a more forceful will than I did when it came to confrontations like this.
A good five minutes went by. The Doberman kept staring, the Japanese guys kept staring, the cramps got worse, and I began to grow more irritated than anxious. The hell with it, I thought finally, and I took a slow, careful step toward the stairs.
The Doberman got up, spread his forepaws, and commenced snarling.
I froze in place. Those yellow eyes were all hot now and full of what I took to be bloodlight. I forgot about being brave and annoyed and got anxious again. Christ, how long was I going to have to stand here before somebody rescued me or the goddamn dog decided to attack?
As it turned out, I had to stand there worrying about three more minutes. Then the screen door at the weathered house next door opened and a woman came out and down her porch steps. She stopped at the foot of them, put her hands on her hips, and peered at the white Ford. Pretty soon she moved in a purposeful way to her front gate and said something that I didn’t catch to the two kobun. But it must have been a threat-to call the county cops on them for loitering in front of her house, maybe-because it wasn’t long before the Ford’s engine revved up and the car pulled out and went past me and the Masaoka house. Not far, though; it turned the corner at the nearest intersection and angled off onto the verge again.
The woman had also followed the Ford’s progress and that allowed her to notice me. She peered in my direction the way she had peered at the Ford, then walked out through her gate and came down the street and stopped before Masaoka’s gate. She was around sixty, sun-cured and bony and gray-haired, wearing a tattered sweater with suede elbow patches. A tough old bird. Which suited me just fine.
“Hey, you,” she said. To me, not to the Doberman. “What’re you doing in there?”
What does it look like I’m doing? I thought. I’m standing here waiting for the Hound of the Baskervilles to tear out my throat. But I said quietly, so as not to stir up the dog, “I came to see Mr. Masaoka on a business matter.
