shapeless gray dress, and she was as still as stone.
I got up, checked my gun, and stepped over the bodies to get to the couch. Feeling altogether too large to miss at that range, I edged along its length and then lunged around its far corner. The unexpected guard was a huddled mass of cloth and blood, tucked into a ball that hadn't been small enough.
“He's finished,” I said to Horton, who was standing in the doorway and leaning forward to examine his right thigh. A deep red stain was spreading over the front of his robe. 'This ain't gone clean,' he said.
“Out of here,” Dexter said. People were beginning to stir.
“Just a minute.” I went to the woman and knelt by her. When I touched her, her head came up and dark eyes bored into mine. “Doreen?” I asked.
She paled. “No,” she said in English.
I put my mouth to her ear. “Mrs. Summerson,” I whispered.
“No,” she said again, not buying it.
“You were in her school,” I said. “1941. Third row, eighth from the left. Come on, she needs your help.”
She looked around the room, thinking it over, and then extended a hand in a ladylike fashion so I could help her up. “Ask if anyone's hurt,” I said when she was standing.
She said something musical and interrogative and got no answer. Most people lay absolutely still.
“Ask them all to get up,” I said. Tell them no one will harm them.'
What she said this time had a current of command in it, and people began to disentangle themselves and get to their feet. Dexter used the time to dust himself off and go into the back of the house. Men backed away from him, but no one made a play of any kind. No one was bleeding, although some of them were feeling themselves for wounds, unable to believe their luck had held.
“Roundin third,” Dexter announced, coming back into the room with a briefcase and tossing me a reproachful look. “How you doin?” he asked Horton.
“Muscle,” Horton grunted. “I seen worse in high school.”
“Doreen,” I said, “there will be men here in two minutes to take all of you to Mrs. Summerson. One of them will speak Chinese. Mrs. Summerson is his family's friend. Tell these people to go with him. Got it?”
She nodded, looking dazed, and I glanced at Dexter. We'd had shots, and there was no time to solicit recruits. As we rounded the corner, I saw Peter Lau cowering in a corner, and stopped cold.
Tran was standing there, drawn inside by the gunfire, and he was folding a knife. Ying lay facedown in the center of a dark lake of his own making.
“Two,” Tran said to me in the softest voice I'd ever heard.
“I told them they were all Vietnamese,” Peter Lau said as we drove toward the third safe house, trailing Dexter's car. The surviving guard had been thrown into its trunk, and the two dead ones were wrapped in blankets and plastic bags in my backseat. By now the Doody Bus Co., abetted by Horace and Doreen Wing, was picking up the second houseful of slaves. “They saw your little stiletto freak, but they didn't see you.” He swallowed several pints of saliva. “I figured nothing would happen. I figured no one was crazy enough to try to bust Charlie.” He rested his head against the window. “I figured they'd let me go home.”
“How'd they get you?”
“Someone in the restaurant, I guess.”
“And you don't think they mentioned me?” I wasn't really thinking about me; I was thinking about the Chans.
“I don't know.” He was sitting with his hands clasped protectively between his thighs. “Maybe, maybe not. The slaves hate Charlie. They might answer only the questions they were asked. If they're worried about Vietnamese, maybe they didn't ask the right questions. You know, 'Who else was in the restaurant before our man got taken?' 'Peter Lau.' 'Was he with anyone from the Vietnamese gang?' 'Yes.' They only asked me about Vietnamese.”
“Right,” I said.
“But now,” he said, “they'll come after me.”
I rounded the corner leading to the third safe house and watched Dexter and Horton's car pull to the curb. “We've got people behind us,” I said, “picking up the slaves. They'll be delivered to a church. Listen, Peter, are you one hundred percent sure I can trust you?”
“Do you think,” he asked wistfully, “I need one more person who wants to kill me?”
“Okay. We'll deliver you to the same church, like you got picked up in the sweep, and you can get home from there. They come back to you, you were delivered blindfolded. It was a black church, somewhere in South Central maybe, but you don't know where. The gang that took you were all black.”
“You think that'll wash?”
Dexter and Horton were getting out of their car.
“If it doesn't,” I said, “I've got things more important than you to worry about.”
The third and fourth safe houses went like Japanese clockwork, with the substitution of one of the henchmen from the first house knocking on the door instead of Ying. We hit the standard two watchers and two briefcases full of cash, flung the standard dresses around the bedrooms, and painted the standard slogans on the wall. At the fourth house, I said nothing, as we'd arranged, and Dexter and Horton, talking blacker than I'd imagined they could, managed to let one of the guards get free, so there'd be someone to report back to Charlie. He'd scaled the fence of a neighboring house as effortlessly as someone who'd just discovered the antigravity principle, and we let him go.
By then the pigeons were mounting up, and Tran had to grab the second van at the last house and join the Doody Brothers Transport Co. By the time we were through, we had six of Charlie's guys, taped wrists to ankles and blindfolded, divided between the trunks and Dexter's backseat.
We took surface streets to L.A., heading north on Western for most of the trip and driving like a caravan of school safety patrols on the way home from work. It took more than an hour, which was what I wanted. By the time we hit Wilshire, around eight-thirty, I guessed Charlie Wah would be getting anxious about his missing collectors and their little briefcases. He was going to be a lot more anxious in the morning.
At Wilshire and Crenshaw we pulled off onto a side street. I consolidated the money into two very full briefcases, and Dexter swung east, heading for his apartment and an appointment with a junkie doctor whose shaking hands were about to be cured by a glare from Horton. The bullet was still in Horton's thigh, which spared him an exit wound but meant that there was some potentially messy medical work ahead.
“Shit,” Horton had said, “for this much money, he could of shot me in the head.”
By the time we had the cases snapped shut, five vans were stacked up behind us, filled to overflowing with rescuees, and I found Horace trying out his Mandarin on them. It sounded rusty even to me, but the guys seemed calm, or maybe just glazed. As Peter Lau had said, they had nothing to lose.
The church, a big one in a Hispanic neighborhood that was starting to go Korean, was lighted up like Christmas, and the moment Mrs. Summerson opened the door, Doreen Wing began to cry. I didn't know what it was-relief that she wasn't going to be killed, delight at seeing Mrs. Summerson, shock at her teacher's age, or sheer exhaustion-but Mrs. Summerson wrapped her big arms around Doreen and patted her with her big blunt hands and talked to her in a Chinese dialect that Horace didn't understand until Doreen's sobs subsided into hiccups.
“And is this all?” Mrs. Summerson asked, looking at the other one hundred and seventy-one pilgrims being herded forward by large Doodys. We were still on the front porch, being dive-bombed by moths.
I rejected several intemperate replies. “It's all there were.”
“Haven't you done well,” Mrs. Summerson said brightly. “Please, come in, come in.” And she extended her arms to all of them, running through dialect after dialect until they were all smiling and nodding at her. We congregated in the chapel, the Chinese taking seats in the pews while Mrs. Summerson and Doreen talked a mile a minute to them, and I waited for a break in the flow and took her arm.
“We need someplace to talk,” I said.
“The pastor's office is open.” She linked her arm through mine, and we set off toward a door at the rear of the chapel. I had one of the briefcases in my free hand.
“Here are their names,” I said, handing her the manifests. We'd found one in each of the briefcases. “That should make the papers easier.”
She leaned against the pastor's gray steel desk, a big strong woman in a shapeless brown dress. She didn't
