“Yeah. And nobody knew—?”
“Nobody knew anything. This was the first I’d heard of it. I tried to put some pressure on him. Told him, if he didn’t turn over the information, not only was that one little girl going to continue to be gang-raped over the Internet, there had to be others too. He said that should make it worth more. I tried to spook him about ‘withholding information’ and he just laughed. I never saw him again.”
“So it just went on?”
“Actually, it didn’t. A week later there was a big bust. Federal. The FBI vamped on the whole operation, took it down in one fell swoop. A beautiful case: even the first one to roll got major time.”
“You think Pryce sold it to the Gee?”
“There’s no way to know. I asked a friend over there how they got the case, and he just said it started with a CI, that was all he knew.”
“But he didn’t mean Pryce was the Confidential Informant?”
“No. But he could have been running the CI, whoever he was. Or it all could have been bogus, a setup to justify the search warrant.”
“You got anything else?” I asked her.
“No, that’s it. But if I hear anything, I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
“Your turn,” she said, giving me another deadly smile.
I was telling Wolfe the story, spooling it out in bits and pieces, not going anywhere near Hercules. We both played outside the lines now, but we didn’t play the same. I trusted her, but Wolfe was a cop in her heart. A rule-busting cop, sure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a hell of a difference between concocting probable cause to take bad guys down and taking money from them. The only difference between Wolfe’s operation and a vigilante team was that Wolfe’s crew got paid. She still made her living busting crime—I still made mine committing it.
We were standing against my car, talking quietly, all by ourselves on that isolated patch of ground. Years ago, I used to think things could be . . . different between us. Not thinking, really—wanting. She drew the line. Once in a while we got to hold hands over it, but I couldn’t pull her to me, and she’d never tried to pull me to her.
Wolfe took a photograph out of her pocket. Not a mug shot, some kind of surveillance photo. “Is this him?” she asked me.
It was murky, indistinct. “I got a flashlight in the trunk,” I told her.
She was standing by herself between the Plymouth’s dead headlights when the egg-yolk-yellow Pathfinder rolled into the parking lot. No music coming from it. Bad sign. I looked up as it slid within ten feet of Wolfe. A young guy bounced out: shirt to his knees, sleeves past his knuckles, worn over baggy pants ending at half-laced ultra sneakers endorsed by some role-model basketball star and made in some sweatshop in Southeast Asia, black knit watch cap with White Sox logo turned sideways, representing. Hip-hopper or wigger—I couldn’t tell his color in the early light.
“Yo
I came around the back of the Plymouth with the tire iron in my hand. The guy said “Oh shit!” and piled back into the Pathfinder. It took off, grinding its chunky tires against the crusty blacktop.
“Bruiser,
“Who knows what that was really about,” Wolfe said to me, leaning on the Plymouth’s hood, smoking one of my cigarettes, the rottweiler sitting next to her, calm now. “They could have been after anything from a hassle to a rape. There’s something about being in a car that gives punks courage.”
“It isn’t the car,” I told her. “It’s the gang. And a woman alone.”
“I guess.”
“And don’t call it courage,” I said. “Your dog, he’s the one with the balls.”
“Don’t remind me,” Wolfe chuckled, reaching in her pocket and pulling out a disgusting-looking length of what looked like dark-red sinew. The rottie watched it, eyes narrowed in. But he didn’t move a muscle. “Bruiser, okay!” Wolfe said, handing it over. The beast immediately snatched it, lay down, grasped the prize in his front paws and started tearing into it. The sounds he made would have scared a forest ranger.
“What is that you gave him?” I asked her.
“It’s a dried beef tendon,” she said. “One of his favorites. Next to fresh pineapple. But I can’t carry that around with me.”
“Well, he earned it,” I said. “I never saw a dog that big move so fast. He ever bite anybody?”
“Sure,” Wolfe said, grinning at the stupid question.
I hefted the tire iron, feeling foolish. I don’t carry a gun anymore. Don’t keep one in the car either. It’s got nothing to do with search warrants or being an ex-con. I’m just . . . careful. Ever since I tried to kill my childhood and killed a child instead.
“I don’t know what’s going down with this Pryce guy,” I lied, playing the flashlight over the photograph Wolfe had. It was him all right. “Maybe nothing. I’ll let you know.”
“Either way,” she said, pulling a promise with the words.
“Either way,” I agreed.
I rolled the Plymouth onto the highway, merging with the traffic, blending back in. A lot of stops to make that day, but I couldn’t really get started until the comic shops opened. The rest of what I needed for Herk was already stashed in the trunk.
Which is where Pryce could end up if he played me wrong.
It was after dark by the time I got back from meeting with Hercules. When I cruised by Mama’s, the white-dragon tapestry was in the front window. All clear.
But as soon as I came out of the kitchen into the main room I knew something was up. Mama wasn’t at her register—she was on her feet, hands on hips, waiting for something. Max was sitting at one of the tables, eyes closed the way he gets just before he has to work, a violence machine with its battery on trickle-charge.
At another table, three young Orientals, all dressed in identical black leather dusters and red silk shirts buttoned to the neck. They were all razor-built, with long glossy black hair and delicate features. They didn’t look like brothers, but the tribal relationship was stamped deep . . . the kind of deep only the crucible creates.
And in a booth, an elderly Chinese woman, bird-faced and stick-thin, wrapped in a heavy dark-green shawl, eyes aimed at the floor.
Mama gestured for me to come over to my booth. She sat down across from me. No soup this time.
“Tigers have her nephew,” she said, voice low-pitched, head cocked slightly to indicate the old woman. “He owe big money. Thirty thousand.”
I didn’t need a translator. The nephew was an illegal, smuggled in by one of the gang operations that supply so much of the cheap labor in Chinatown. The family back home picks the youngest, strongest one to go first. When that one works off the debt in the sweatshops, they can send another.
That’s one of the reasons you see guys making a couple of bucks an hour off the books get so deep into gambling. Their families back home encourage it, especially those relatives far down in the next-to-go chain. It’s the only way to pay off the transporters quick. In the sweatshops, thirty grand would take a decade, minimum.
“Kuan Li old friend. From home. Everything set, okay?” Then she told me the plan.
The squat Chinese who opened the door had a cop’s nightstick in his right hand, the leather thong wrapped around his wrist. The brutish expression on his face didn’t change until he saw that the three
