“So I have a couple of days,” Kate said, not looking for permission.
Al turned his palms upward in a weak sign of giving up. “You are all overlooking one fact. Even if we get a hair from the senator and perform the DNA test, we will still have to prove that the hair we tested was the senator’s. Not to mention that it was illegally obtained. Once again, that will bring us back to a legal battle.”
“So what do you have in mind, Al?”
Al ran his fingers through his newly cut hair. “Let me make a few calls.” ***
Jake followed Kate up the carpeted stairs, turning left at the landing where pictures of Al’s son and wife hung in matching wood picture frames. Kate passed the bathroom and stopped outside the partially closed bedroom door. She peeked in at Wei Ling and felt Jake’s face on her neck, his lips moving slowly up her skin to her ear. Kate nuzzled back against him and Jake’s heart skipped a beat.
For Jake’s whole life, Uncle Steve had told him that every woman, no matter how perfect they may seem, has a major flaw. Unless Kate was hiding a deep, dark, yet-to-be-revealed deal-breaker, Jake surmised that Kate’s major flaw was her father. Maybe it was a flaw they shared. He pushed aside the image of Jimmy Sorrentino and squeezed Kate a little tighter until she purred quietly. With the exception of the little stripper faux pas, time with her had been the best six weeks of his life. The fact that they came after the worst eighteen months of his life only made it that much sweeter. Who knew, maybe when the smoke cleared and Mr. Sorrentino learned what Jake had done, he would reconsider the deal. Jake didn’t know if it was an even trade, but he looked at the girl on the bed and wondered what he had done. Simply fading out of Kate’s life was going to be easier said than done. He dug his nose deeper into her hair and inhaled. Maybe he could keep dating her on the sly. Mr. Sorrentino would never have to know. ***
Al walked in the door just before six a.m. Sweat stains darkened the neck and the back of his gray t-shirt. It had been a night without sleep, walking the streets, seeing people. He took off his dirty shoes at the door and treaded quietly through the main hall of his house. He entered the kitchen, turned on the light over the stove, and trained himself on a new coffee maker. It had been four years since he had made his own coffee, and he added one scoop of grounds to the filter for every two cups of coffee. The math hadn’t changed during his time on the street, and five minutes later he poured in a splash of milk to a perfectly brewed cup.
Jake and Kate were asleep on the pull-out sofa bed in the living room. Al walked in with two cups of coffee and put them on the glass tabletop next to a thick picture book on the American West. He gently shook Jake, who rolled over and continued sleeping. Al shook him harder.
With his feet on the floor and his hand on a coffee mug, Jake yawned. “What time is it?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“Early.”
“You can sleep when it’s over.”
“When what’s over?”
“The job we started.” Al flung his chin in the direction of Kate who was still under the covers. “Wake her up and then have her wake up Wei Ling.”
“At this hour?”
“We have to be prepped and ready by eight.”
“Ready for what?”
Al didn’t answer the question. “And you’re going to need a suit. See if my brother can dig up one you can borrow,” he added on his way out of the room.
Chapter 44
The black sedan-for-hire with D.C. tags pulled in front of the Peking Palace and maneuvered itself into a parallel spot with an eight-point turn, leaving half-a-foot off both bumpers. The Asian driver in a black suit that matched the car and his jet black hair, set the vehicle in park, pulled the keys from the ignition, and put them under the seat. He reached into the glove compartment and checked the documents one last time before slipping them under the seat next to the keys. He got out of the car, looked around cautiously, and shut the door without locking it. He broke into a slow walk down the sidewalk, taking in the early morning neighborhood activities on his way to the active side of Chinatown. Five minutes later, he disappeared into the mix of similar faces and was gone.
The ringing silver cell phone on the side table woke Chow Ying from a peaceful sleep. He reached over and opened the flip phone. A voice on the other end of the line told him that the car he claimed he so desperately needed was parked out front. He was out of excuses.
Wearing only tan boxers, Chow Ying rolled out of bed and peeked out the window at the roof of the black sedan from his third floor room. “Shit,” he said in English. He paced, made one lap around the room, and stopped again on the far side of the table near the window. He checked the note with the precise instructions C.F. Chang had given him over the phone five days before and shook his head.
Today was the day.
The water pressure from the shower head wasn’t strong enough to knock pollen off a dandelion, and Chow Ying let the water run through his newly cut hair in the standing-room-only shower stall. The ponytail he had worn with pride for ten years was now in the small plastic bathroom wastebasket. A few runaway strands of hair draped from the lip of the sink, next to an old pair of scissors that had been just sharp enough to do the job.
Back in the room, still dripping, Chow Ying pulled the suit from its plastic wrapping and held it up to the light that pushed its way through the window and its nicotine-stained curtains. For seventy-five dollars, the custom- made, single-breasted suit tailored in a shop in Chinatown was a thing of beauty. With the skill of a man who knew fabrics and sewing, he examined every stitch, felt the linen-wool mixture between his rough hands, appreciated the perfect crease in the slacks.
He dried himself and got dressed in a suit for the first time since a Chinese New Year celebration the year before. On his first try, he tied a beautiful double-Windsor knot on a red power tie he had bought for eight bucks. He posed in the hotel room for a few seconds and deemed himself to be one dashing gentleman. When he finished the one-man fashion show, he sat down at the small round table near the window and wrote a letter to the old man who ran the hotel. He counted out a thousand dollars, put it into the folded letter, and wedged the paper under the dirty ashtray. The money was more than enough to cover his bills.
Chow Ying felt a moment of loneliness in leaving his one room mansion. The old man had been the first person he could remember who liked him without wanting anything. The Mountain of Shanghai smoked a cigarette, wrote another letter, and slipped the remaining wad of cash into his inside breast pocket with his passport. He put the cell phone on top of the revolver at the bottom of the small bag he had gotten from Mr. Wu in New York at the beginning of his stateside journey. He took the key to the back door of the hotel and slapped it on the table next to the ashtray with his room key. Whatever the day held in store, he was permanently checking out from the comforts of his room at Peking Palace.
The back door to the hotel led to an alley behind Eighth Street, too narrow for the oversized city garbage trucks to reach the trashcans, much to the chagrin of D.C.’s finest sanitation engineers. Chow Ying walked down the alley for fifty yards, cut across a small residential street, and followed another alley into the back end of Chinatown proper. He hadn’t seen the two policemen in their car for two days but he knew they were out there, moving their location, never parking in the same spot twice. He had seen the car giving Peking Palace the occasional drive-by from his dark hotel room window. Yes, they were out there somewhere. He felt it.
After wandering the neighborhood’s less aesthetic side and checking for Johnny Law, Chow Ying approached the black sedan from the opposite direction, slipped behind the wheel as elegantly as someone the size of an NFL linebacker can do, and reached under the seat. ***
“Pull around the block,” Wallace said to Nguyen. “We’ll wait on the other end of the one-way street for him to come out.”
“And then what?”
“And then we follow him.”
“We have been waiting to get our hands on this guy for over a week, and now you want to follow him?”
“Something’s fishy…and I’m not talking about the kind with scales in the market down the street. This guy has been lying low and now he has a car delivered to his doorstep? Something is wrong with this picture.”
