seen. “Drink up, little Tran,” he said, “and then let's figure out what Grace here wants.”
“Wait,” I said. “We've brought a friend.”
“How many?” Dexter asked two glasses later. Tran was sitting, happy and red-faced from the alcohol, on the couch. The translator was lying on his side on the floor, trussed in jumper cables and belts. He'd still been unconscious when Dexter and I toted him in, and we'd improvised a hood, an old interrogation technique, from a pair of Dexter's boxer shorts. The legs waved over his head like cotton antennae.
I prodded him with a toe.
“Sixteen,” he said. Tran had poked him with a two-pronged barbecue fork a minute ago.
“Sixteen Chinese guys,” Dexter said, clarifying things.
“Sixteen Chinese guys with guns,” I corrected him, “and God knows how many innocent Chinese along for the ride.”
“But they Chinese, too,” Dexter said. This was what had worried me.
“Chinese shit,” Tran said, returning to his main theme.
“You know,” Dexter said, rubbing his face with long fingers, “some black folks aren't crazy about Orientals.”
I looked at my two allies and went for the hole card. “There's a lot of money here.”
“I made out okay last time,” Dexter said, although money had had nothing to do with why he'd come in with me. Dexter had a low boredom threshold. He'd been an unwilling soldier in two small but stupid American wars, and while he wouldn't have claimed to be richer for having spent time in Grenada and Panama, he'd retained the skills he picked up in the University of Legal Murder. He demonstrated one of them by popping seven hundred knuckles. “How'm I sposed to tell them apart? I can't tell a boy from a girl as it is.”
Tran opened, and then closed, his mouth.
“We'll point,” I said. 'We'll say, 'Good, Dexter,' and 'Bad, Dexter.' '
“I think I can keep that straight,” he said. “Less you talk fast.”
“It's going to be easy,” I said, “as soon as I work out the plan.”
Dexter gave me the big eyes. “No plan?”
“I had one,” I said, “until this guy got himself all tangled up in battery cables. Tran here knows where the good Chinese get delivered. Three or four houses in San Pedro.” I nudged the fallen warrior with a toe. “Right?” I said. “San Pedro?”
“Umm,” the fallen warrior said thoughtfully through Dexter's shorts.
“We got somebody here who'd love to kill you,” I said. Tran poked him with the fork again.
“Yeep,” he said. “Yes, San Pedro, yes.”
“And I thought we'd drop by and really mangle the gears in Charlie Wah's little machine. I'll tell you about Charlie Wah in a minute.” The hooded warrior rubbed his legs together, cricketlike, at the mention of Charlie's name. “And I figured that would get Charlie confused, make him lose his way, so that he'd-” I ran out of inspiration and looked at my allies. They looked biracially skeptical.
“Yeah?” Dexter said. “You know, I got a life here-”
“So Charlie would run the wrong way,” I said very quickly, “and maybe he'd run into us.” Dexter looked at the ceiling. “Charlie's the big bad guy,” I added, just to fill the silence.
“Why should I care?” Dexter asked the ceiling. “Bunch of Chinese.”
“There's the money. About a million.”
“You already said about the money.” Dexter sounded hurt. “Money's okay, you know? I mean, I
“I don't want a lot of guys. I want you.”
“Why's that?” He was still addressing the ceiling.
“I need someone at my back,” I said. “Someone I can trust.”
“You got Junior here,” Dexter said, pointing a lengthy finger at Tran.
“Junior,” Tran said angrily.
I got angry, too. I'd been sitting on anger for a long time, and when it bloomed, it blossomed all at once, like a time-lapse hibiscus, big and red and blotting out the landscape. “So fuck you,” I said, getting up. “Come on, Tran.” Tran got up, looking bewildered.
“Hold it,” Dexter said. “Did I make a error in tact?”
“You don't even get to keep the money,” I said, too mad to care. “Most of it is salt for the mine.”
He sat back and waved me back toward my seat. “I never did understand that,” he said. “What good is salt in a mine?”
“Dexter,” I said, still standing. “I'm in this because of Eleanor.”
“Yeah?” Dexter looked at the man on the floor. “What's this got to do with Eleanor?” He'd met Eleanor twice.
“Her brother Horace is looking for someone connected to these guys, but what he's going to find, if he finds anything, is Charlie Wah. I figure, even if I can't find Horace, I can short circuit Charlie, I can maybe bring Charlie to me, before Horace gets killed. Maybe that's all I can do, but it's still something. Maybe it can save Horace.”
Tran raised a hand. “These Chinese,” he said, looking straight at Dexter, “these good Chinese. They going to be slaves.”
“Slaves?” Dexter asked. He regarded Tran and then turned to me. “What you mean, slaves?”
“They're slaves,” I said, “in the classical definition. They owe Charlie anywhere from twenty to thirty thousand bucks apiece. With interest. They're going to be worked until they pay it off, ten thousand a year. Three, maybe five, years of slavery.”
Dexter got up and poured another Johnnie Walker. Then he tilted the glass in the translator's direction. “Stick another fork in bag-head, here.”
“About the ship,” I said twenty minutes later to the little translator. We'd established, with a few physical assists from Dexter and Tran, that the current load was coming in by ship. “When will it unload?”
“It's already unloaded,” the translator said. He was sitting on Dexter's couch by now, battery cables pinning his arms behind him and my belt around his feet. He still had Dexter's shorts over his head.
“You're lying,” I said, watching my plans fall apart.
“You're going to kill me,” the translator said.
“No,” I said. “But screw me up, and I can probably fix it so Charlie will.”
“I went to college here,” the translator said piteously. His breath made little puffs inside Dexter's shorts. 'Cal State University Northridge. You think I want to work with Charlie? Hey, I'm Chinese, too.'
“In the bad old days,” Dexter said, “Africans sold Africans to the slavers.” He and Tran had new drinks in their hands. “Those Africans the fuckers I hate most.”
The translator said, “Oh.”
“You ever pretend to be an INS inspector?” I asked him. His English was good enough.
The question took him by surprise. “Who've you been talking to?”
“You don't ask,” Tran said. “You answer.” He touched one point of the barbecue fork to the man's thigh and pushed it down. The man made a fluttering sound like wind through Venetian blinds, and I looked away and saw Dexter staring at Tran with a new expression on his face. It might have been admiration.
“So the boat is empty?” That was Dexter.
“No.” The translator shook his head, twisting Dexter's shorts from right to left. “Charlie's aboard. He likes to stay offshore in case anything goes wrong. But the little boats already picked up.”
“Tell me about the little boats,” I said. “What are they?”
“My leg,” the translator moaned.
“That's enough,” I said to Tran. He looked up at me as though he were surprised I was still in the room and withdrew the fork. A dark red circle surrounded the hole he'd made in the translator's trousers. “What boats?” I demanded.
“Fishing boats, pleasure boats. They pick up the payload and bring it ashore.”
“And they've already done that.”
“Like I said, last night.”
Okay, forget the houses. “So there's nobody on board now except Charlie.”
