Chapter 89
THE WALLET WAS SLIM, a good-quality goatskin with the initials RB stamped in gold on the corner. I took out Booker’s driver’s license and found a sheet of yellow paper in the bill compartment.
I unfolded it, my eyes taking in the data, my brain, a few beats behind, trying to make sense of it.
I said, “This is a bill of sale. Rodney Booker bought a bus from a used-car lot in Tijuana on May second, just days before he died.
“It was an old school bus, says here, nineteen eighty- three.”
I stared at the yellow paper, but my inner eye was on Market and Fourth right after an old school bus had blown up, filling the air with bloody mist, littering the street with body parts.
Ten innocent people had died.
Others had been injured, scarred for life.
I remembered hunkering down on shattered glass, talking with the arson investigator Chuck Hanni as he pointed out the broken parts and melted pieces in what was left of the rear of the bus, showing me that the vehicle had been a mobile meth lab.
The owner of the bus had never been identified.
“What did Sammy say?” I asked my partner. “Bagman used to cook meth in the house – but it was too dangerous?”
“Right.”
I took a second piece of paper from the wallet. It was plain white, six by four inches with a glue-strip edge, obviously torn from a notepad, folded in half. Handwritten on the paper was a tally converting pesos to dollars. A scribbled word jumped out at me: “ephedrine,” the main ingredient in methamphetamine.
Conklin was breathing over my shoulder. “That’s a signature, isn’t it? J something Gomez.”
“Juan.”
The name Juan Gomez was as common as John Smith. That might not mean much, but it was the name on the ID of the meth cook who’d been blown across the intersection at Fourth and Market, dead from the blast before his head had been bashed in against a lamppost.
I could hardly believe the treasure I held in my hands.
Rodney Booker had been branching out from small-time crack sales to big-time meth. He’d bought the ingredients, hired a cook, bought a bus, and turned it into a meth lab.
And on its first drug run, Booker’s lab had sent ten people to God. Bagman’s motto had never seemed as ironic to me as it did right now: Jesus Saves.
Chapter 90
YUKI WAS WORKING OUT with her video trainer when the intercom buzzed and her doorman’s voice crackled over the box on the wall, saying, “Dr. Chesney is here to see you.”
Elation shot through her.
Doc was early! The doorbell rang, and Yuki opened the door wide – and Doc kissed her. And Yuki made the most of it, putting her hands all through Doc’s blond Ricky Schroder hair, wriggling and moaning in the doorway.
He grinned at her, said, “Glad to see me?”
She nodded, smiled, said, “Uh- huh,” and they kissed again, Doc kicking the door shut behind him.
This was the thing that was priceless: how these kisses were even theirs.
Only she and Doc kissed this way.
“Hi, honey. How was your day?” Yuki said, coming up for air, laughing at the idea of making a “couple” joke.
When was the last time she’d done that?
Ever?
“Not too bad, sweetie,” Doc said, scooping her up and walking her backward to the couch, where he dropped her gently into the overstuffed cushions, but she said “oof” anyway, and he settled down beside her.
“Bee sting, broken collarbone, and a baby halfway delivered in the waiting area,” Doc said, touching her hair, stroking the half-inch- high stand-up buzz cut that he’d started with his clippers weeks ago and liked so much.
She was starting to like it, too.
“Any day I don’t get stabbed by a syringe from an HIV-positive patient is a good day for me,” he said.
“I second that,” said Yuki. “So are you gassed up, packed up, ready to go?”
Because she was. As soon as she zipped up her bag, they’d be off for their Memorial Day weekend in Napa, the long, romantic drive, the beautiful hotel, the huge bed with a view.
“I am. But there’s something I have to tell you first.”
Yuki searched his eyes. Thinking back a couple of minutes, she remembered that Doc had looked a little jittery when she’d first opened the door, and since she’d been feeling a little nervy herself, she’d chalked it up to their upcoming big weekend. That soon they’d be making love for the first time.
Now his smile was tentative, and that alarmed her.
Was their weekend going to be cut short?
Or was it worse than that?
“John, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“Depends on how you look at it,” he said. “This is going to be rough, Yuki.” He was holding her hand, but he kept lowering his eyes.
“The problem is, you tell someone too soon, and it’s presumptuous. You tell them too late, and you’ve messed with their minds. In our case it’s both: too early and too late -”
“You’re scaring me, John. Spit it out.”
“A few days ago when you said that you hadn’t had sex in a couple of years -”
“That was stupid of me. It’s true, but I was nervous. My brain… just overflowed.”
Doc fixed his slate-blue eyes on her. “I haven’t had sex in a couple of years either.”
“You? Come on. I don’t believe you.”
Yuki’s brain was on rewind, thinking how she’d gone to the hospital to see Doc after the car accident. She’d agreed to show him the city. After their first soft kiss, she’d dived in for a longer, sexier one – like she’d done just now.
She’d been driving the whole fantasy.
He’d been following her lead.
Yuki was mortified. Why hadn’t she listened to her mother?
“Be like swan, Yuki- eh. Hold head high. Swim strong and silent.” She had no patience. Instead she’d taken after her father. The tank driver.
“Please, just say it,” Yuki said.
And then he did tell her, his voice halting, the story coming out in bits and pieces on a jagged time line. And although Yuki could hardly grasp what he was saying, her vision narrowed. There was a loud humming in her head.
And then everything went black.
Chapter 91
I SAT IN a wobbly chair across from Yuki and Cindy at Casa Loco, a Mexican joint near Cindy’s apartment
