Chasing the Dragon (17 page)

The instant Ying walked into his grandmother’s place, he knew something was wrong. The old woman sat motionless on the rattan couch. She was not meditating, though; her position was too rigid—and she did not offer him her cheek in greeting, but instead held her head in such a way as to suggest she was listening to something from up above. Then Ying heard the noise, too.

An intruder, he thought, and headed up the stairs. Goddamn kids—though another part of him feared it was not kids at all. He was remembering how the room had been trashed.

Then he heard the noise on the street, the sound of the fire escape being pulled down.

He pushed through the door, gun drawn.

Dante had scampered up the ladder and onto the balcony. Inside, the room was dark. Ying would be coming up the other way, he guessed, drawn by the noise, and he realized the situation here could get out of control, and he himself was illuminated, out on the balcony, unarmed, a complete and utter target. Just as he realized this, the woman said “Dante,” and he saw her form emerge from the darkness inside, stepping toward him—then the door on the other side pushed open, and there was a flash of gunfire.

An instant later the lights were on. Ying was standing with his gun drawn, and on the ground lay the prone figure of Anita Blonde.

PART THREE

Anita Blonde was bleeding badly. The blood was seeping through her shirt, and Dante started to unbutton her front, thinking to somehow staunch the flow. She gasped. His fingers fumbled. Then she gasped again, and the sound of the gasp made him stop.

Ying hovered a few feet back, his gun slack in his hand.

Blonde sputtered, lifting her head. Her eyes were swimming but she recognized him, and for a moment Dante thought she might try to say something. Her lips moved and there was a bubble of pink froth. Her eyes closed. She looked like a kid, with her short hair and a face that was boyish, full of freckles, and Dante thought again of hayfields and pitchforks and her voice that was flat as Kansas someplace. She looked a little like Dorothy laying there, the Oz girl with her innocent pigtails sheered away.

“It’s all right,” he told her.

But it wasn’t all right. Her eyes opened and she gasped again, clenching herself. And then she was dead. The room smelled of blood but also of urine and shit because she had voided herself at the end.

Dante got to his feet.

“I saw someone on the balcony,” he told Ying. “And I charged up the fire escape.”

Her gun lay on the floor nearby. It had all happened so quickly. Ying had pushed open the inside door, and Blonde had turned, swooping low, pulling the gun from the ankle holster. But she was too slow. Ying had fired not once but twice, and her own shot had gone wide, blistering the doorjamb. Standing on the balcony, under the arc lamp, Dante had feared Ying might shoot him as well.

Now Ying pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Dante grabbed his arm.

“What are you doing?”

“Exactly what you think I’m doing. Calling for a car.”

“No.”

Ying was a by-the-book type, but Dante could not afford for him to go by the book. There was an unwritten rule: When an agent falls, you distance yourself. Another Homicide investigation now would put Dante in a quagmire. It would blow his assignment—or worse—because in the end he did not know what Blonde had been up to. More importantly, he didn’t know where the company’s involvement ended and where other interests took over, or how those worlds might be intertwined.

He had already taken a chance with Ying, risking his cover to help find his uncle’s murderer. A mistake, maybe—but there was no going back now.

“She was my contact.”

“What do you mean?”

“My job here was to set up a sting. On the Wus. And she’s an agent, working with me.”

“What was she doing here at my grandmother’s?”

“I don’t know. Looking for something. The photos, maybe. Or something else. I ran across her in my place the other day—rummaging.” Dante shrugged. “It’s not always clear, my business. There are things I am not told. Things I don’t know.”

Ying gestured at Blonde’s gun.

“It’s a nine millimeter.”

“I see that.” It was a Glock, similar to the model Dante carried, only a little smaller and more lightweight, with a shorter handle.

“Same millimeter killed your uncle.”

“Either way,” said Dante, “we have to get rid of the body.”

“I can’t do that.”

“We report what happened here, no good will come out of it.”

“I am not culpable.” Ying’s voice was weak; he did not sound convinced. “She was in my house. She pulled a gun.”

“That’s not going to matter,” said Dante. “She’s an agent. She could’ve come here to ransack your room, or to kill you, but it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s true, they’re not going to let that story come out—this thing will get twisted some other way.”

“I’ll just tell the truth.”

“Our chance to get the Wus will disappear, and you will be destroyed.”

Ying said nothing.

“Your career,” said Dante. “Your reputation.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ying.

“And whoever was after your family before—”

Ying hesitated. He hesitated long enough to make Dante think he was considering it, and he could guess what was in his head. The bullet had gone through Blonde’s body, probably, and there would be a slug somewhere in the wall. There was also the blood. If for some reason there were a search of Ying’s room, the cops would drop Luminol on the floor and find the blood traces.

“Won’t someone come looking for her?”

“They’ll figure she dropped out,” said Dante. “Flew the coop for another life. Or else someone caught up with her somewhere, a past assignment. A violent end. But they won’t come looking. They won’t want the trouble.”

Ying twisted the ring on his finger. His wedding ring. For his part, he’d seen a hundred murders bungled: cases where people killed someone by accident or in rage and thought they could get away with it, but in the end they were caught. At the same time there were plenty of other cases where someone went missing and you never found the body. There were times when you had motive and maybe some circumstantial evidence and a gut feeling—but nothing else. He twisted the ring and looked at it and thought about his wife and his little kids and how if he did the thing he’d been trained to do—if he was the honest cop—he would disgrace himself and endanger his family. But if he did the other thing . . .

Which path weakness, which path strength
.

“I have a boat,” Dante said. “It belonged to my grandfather. We can take her out on the bay.”

Together they wrapped Anita Blonde in a plastic tarp and carried her downstairs. The old woman, Ying’s grandmother, sat in the tiny parlor below. She sat with her legs crossed, eyes open, dead eyes, seeing nothing, and at the same time she moaned a low moan—some Buddhist chant, Dante guessed, but it was not particularly sonorous, and he could not escape the sense that the woman, though she saw nothing, heard nothing, knew what was in their bundle. Dante glanced at Ying. The detective lowered his head as he walked past the old woman, not looking in her direction. His lips trembled.

Outside there was no one in the alley, and they struggled to get the corpse into the trunk of Ying’s government-issue Ford.

“Where’s the boat?”

“On the old pier. Behind Alioto’s Restaurant.”

“We can’t carry her through that way.”

Ying was right. The old Wharf was a tourist haunt. Even after hours, when the hotels and the restaurants were closed, people lingered along the gangways.

“You drop me off,” said Dante. “Then meet me on the other side of the harbor building, at the public pier.”

Dante hit the dock. Out where the old fishing fleet had been—the trawlers and the deep water boats and the crabbers—it was all pleasure craft now. Around the corner, though, along a plank walk that ran between the Alioto’s pier and Scoma’s Grill, there were still a couple of dozen professional rigs. His grandfather’s boat was a refashioned felucca with some deep casting lines and a net for trawling—though the net was of the sort that had gone out of style decades ago, too small for commercial purposes, these days. The boat was really nothing more than a dinghy with a motor in the back and a compartment below that you stuffed with ice and maybe fish if you caught them. The old boat still had its sailing mast—Dante had rigged the mast seven years ago, when he went out with Marilyn Visconti—but it was dark now and he relied on the motor, working his way along the shore, past Fort Mason toward the harbor building and the public landing on the other side.

Ying was waiting there when Dante arrived.

There was not much going on at the public pier this time of night. No doubt there was a person or two sleeping in their boats, and there were drifters under the cypress trees in the park. The patrol cars that worked this beat swung by every few hours, sweeping the park with a flood. When the next sweep might be, Dante had no way of knowing.

“Let’s grab her,” said Dante.

Though it was only a couple of dozen steps from the car to the boat, it seemed much longer. There were cars on Marina Drive nearby, any one of which might suddenly pull into the lot. There were cars in the lot even now, and inside the parked cars there were people necking, or smoking dope, or maybe just looking out at the view, at the two shadows with the sagging burden between them. As they carried her down the gangway, Dante caught the glow of a cigarette near the sea wall, then a pair of cigarettes, and the sound of laughter echoed over the water. Finally they were on the boat, and they rolled Anita Blonde below deck, into the compartment which his grandfather had once filled with ice and fish.

Anita Blonde with her blue eyes, and her pearlescent skin. Who had sat outdoors at the Café Du Monde in the sweltering heat, and who had followed him here to San Francisco. Anita Blonde. Who’d had another life once upon a time. Another name.

Dante worked the skiff out into the bay. The water was calm, the night clear and dark. Ying’s eyes glistened in the blackness. Dante could sense the change in him. He was complicit now, too. It happened to everyone sooner or later, that was the truth of it. In fighting evil, you succumbed to evil—and you tried to hide what you had done. It was an awful thing, maybe. But there were things that were worse.

“Your people were fishermen?”

Dante nodded.

“Mine, too. Generations ago.”

It was likely. The red-hulled junks had been here first. When the Luccans came, they forced the Chinese out. North to San Rafael, to China Camp, and Point Richmond. South to Monterey. Then the Sicilians came and forced out the northern Italians, too.

“Where we taking her?”

“Out past Treasure Island.”

Ying nodded.

Treasure Island was the name for the naval facility built on slag out in the middle of the bay. Ying knew, like Dante knew, the places where professionals dumped a corpse if they wanted it to stay under. In the deeper water, away from the shipping channels. It was one of those things you learned if you work Homicide in SF. The amateurs, the sociopaths, the wife murderers, and rage freaks, the first thing they did was head for the bay with the body, as if the idea were somehow original and simply dumping the corpse would destroy the crime. But corpses floated; they washed ashore. If you wanted to get rid of the body, you had to place it right. It wasn’t an exact science, no, but the currents were seasonal and predictable. You wanted to weigh the body down, submerge it in deep water, but away from the shipping channels, where it might get stirred to the surface by the heavy freighters passing through.