“If you are Mae Jones.” Already I was guiding her down the steps.
“I am. Who are-”
“We’re going to get you out of here, take you to Tommy.”
“Tommy! Is he-”
“He’s all right, yes.”
Her face brightened, but then was taken over by fear. “We must hurry. Lan faked a faint, but they will notice I’m gone very soon.”
We rushed down the stairs, along the hall toward the storage room. We were at its door when a man called out behind us. He was coming from the sewing room at the far end.
Mae froze. I shoved her, and then we were weaving through the stacked cartons. Shar got down on her knees, helped Mae into the duct, and dove in behind her. The door banged open.
The man was yelling in a strange language. I slid into the duct, pulling myself along on its riveted sides. Hands grabbed for my ankles and got the left one. I kicked out with my right foot. He grabbed for it and missed. I kicked upward, hard and heard a satisfying yelp of pain. His hand let go of my ankle and I wriggled forward and fell to the ground outside. Shar and Mae were already running for the fence.
But where the hell was Willie?
Then I saw him: a shadowy figure, motioning with both arms as if he were guiding an airplane up to the jetway. There was an enormous hole in the chain-link fence. Shar and Mae ducked through it.
I started running. Lights went on at the corners of the building. Men came outside, shouting. I heard a whine, then a crack.
Rifle, firing at us!
Willie and I hurled ourselves to the ground. We moved on elbows and knees through the hole in the fence and across the sidewalk to the shelter of a van parked there. Shar and Mae huddled behind it. Willie and I collapsed beside them just as sirens began to go off.
“Like ‘Nam all over again,” he said.
I stared at him in astonishment. Willie had spent most of the war hanging out in a bar in Cam Ranh Bay.
Shar said, “Thank God you cut the hole in the fence!”
Modestly he replied, “Yeah, well, you gotta do something when you’re bored out of your skull.”
Because a shot had been fired, the SFPD had probable cause to search the building. Inside they found some sixty Asian women-most of them illegals-who had been imprisoned there, some as long as five years, as well as evidence of other sweatshops the owners were running, both here and in Southern California. The INS was called in, statements were taken, and finally at around five that morning Mae Jones was permitted to go with us to be reunited with her son.
Darrin Boydston greeted us at the Cash Cow, wearing electric-blue pants and a western-style shirt with the bucking-bull emblem embroidered over its pockets. A polyester cowboy. He stood watching as Tommy and Mae hugged and kissed, wiped a sentimental tear from his eye, and offered Mae a job. She accepted, and then he drove them to the house of a friend who would put them up until they found a place of their own. I waited around the pawnshop till he returned.
When Boydston came through the door he looked down in the mouth. He pulled up a stool next to the one I sat on and said, “Sure am gonna miss that boy.”
“Well, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of him, with Mae working here.”
“Yeah.” He brightened some. “And I’m gonna help her get him into classes. Stuff like that. After she lost her Navy benefits when the skunk of a husband walked out on her, she didn’t know about all the other stuff that’s available.” He paused, then added, “So what’s the damage?”
“You mean, what do you owe us? We’ll bill you.”
“Better be an honest accounting, little lady,” he said. ‘Ma’am, I mean,” he added in his twangiest Texas accent. And smiled.
I smiled, too.
ONE FINAL ARRANGEMENT
Devil’s Slide, south of San Francisco, is a stretch of highway where you don’t want to push your luck, but I was pushing mine on the Yamaha, even though I had Lottie-my lady, Charlotte Keim-snuggled up behind me. It was a killer day, clear and crisp, and there wasn’t a shred of cloud in the sky. We hugged the curves above the sea, really leaned into them, and left the city and work far behind us.
At least Lottie-who’s one of my fellow operative at McCone Investigations-had left work behind. I was still steamed after having spent last night hunkered down in the rhododendrons at some guy’s Hillsborough estate, watching him go through the same damn motions that he had been going through for over a week. Watching him on a damp October night whose every chill breeze whispered the word
Just thinking about it made me come up too fast at the start of a hairpin curve. I corrected in time, but Lottie’s arms tightened around me, and she said, “For God’s sake, Mick!” after that I took it slower until we got the state beach at San Gregorio. While I was securing the bike in the parking area, Lottie ran off toward the sand.
By the time I followed her, Lottie was dancing along the water’s edge, her long dark-brown curls flaring and bouncing. She saw me and called, “Last one in’s a lovesick armadillo!” Lottie’s got seven years on me, but sometimes she’s as much a kid as my little sister, and when she gets excited, the Texas accent she tried to leave behind in Archer City comes out-along with what Shar calls Lottie’s “Texasisms.” Today Lottie was as Texas as Lone Star beer.
We didn’t really plan to go in the water; it’s cold along the northern California coast, even in the summer. So I caught up with her and grabbed her hand, and we strolled south to where the beach backed up against the cliffs. There were only three people around-a daddy and two kids, maybe around seven and eight. The kids were building sand castles, and the daddy was lying on his back, his head propped on a driftwood log. Lottie and I parked it on another log and watched the construction project.
“You want to tell me about it?” she asked.
“About what?”
“Whatever’s got you tryin’ to see if that bike can fly.”
“Just a problem at work, is all. No big deal. Shar’s got me on this case that’s going no place, no way, no how. You’d think she’d give up. The woman’s fixated.”
Lottie waited.
“Okay,” I said after a minute, “this is the situation. There’s this dude, seriously weird. Name of Harry Homestead. Lives all alone in this mansion down the Peninsula that makes my dad’s place look like a homeless shelter.”
“Hard to believe that.” Lottie’s a little in awe of my father, who makes an obscene heap of money as a country singer.
“Well, believe it. Seven and a half years ago this dud married big bucks. Older lady, Susan Cross, of the oil and banking family. Way back when, her forebears robbed practically everybody dumber than them who ever trekked through Emigrant Gap. Harry, though, he was kind of questionable, being from someplace nobody ever heard of in Nebraska and having-among other things-run a carnival concession and done a stint as a dealer in Vegas. That’s where Susan met him, Vegas. And she married him a few weeks later, without a prenup. Maybe she thought he was exotic, after years of boring high-society life with her late husband. Who knows what makes people get together?”
Lottie grinned and squeezed my hand. A lot of people thought we were an unlikely couple.
