Georgette Devereux, Ilsa’s niece, resided in San Francisco General Hospital’s “mental health center”—the psych ward—and had been in and out of there for years. She was used to it by now. It was always for the same reason. She’d run out of medication and then she’d try to kill somebody. Homicide Division, in particular, had dealt with her many times. No wonder Kinsey knew her.
Georgette had an unusual neurological disorder. The Fregoli Delusion, they called it. It could manifest in various ways, but for Georgette, it meant that in her head—despite what she actually saw—everyone she met looked like the exact same person.
And the person they looked like was the man she believed killed her mother.
It had been a fairly famous case, at least in the neurological trade magazines, and though Georgette had been told numerous times by numerous doctors that the man she thought she saw wasn’t there, and though she believed what they said, that didn’t make it any easier. All it took was an empty vial of medicine and the wrong look from the wrong person for Georgette to go over the edge again.
In her mind, each time, she was just defending herself … and exacting revenge.
She still hadn’t found the real killer. No one had. She swore she’d get revenge eventually. And now, as soon as word got out to her, she’d be looking to exact revenge for another family member.
Ilsa.
“She’s a piece of work, Moses,” said Eastwood, dragging Ilsa’s lifeless body across the parking lot to his black Corvette, seemingly not concerned that a prowling squad car—or any car might spot him. “Georgette. Ilsa. The whole Devereux line. Crazy.” He popped open the trunk remotely with his key.
“How do you know all this?” asked Moses, still pacing the parking lot.
“I’ve been following Ilsa for years, man. Her secrets are kind of my business. Her and the others. Peng’s not a big fan of them.” Peng was the leader of the Mighty Kings. Eastwood worked for Peng, which was proven to Moses by way of his tattooed insignia, revealed while he had hoisted Ilsa up and into the Corvette’s trunk. Shut it. Locked it.
“You know. Bounty hunters. They’re all messy. Now High Corner’s getting into the bounty hunter business. Limit Break Boys will probably follow their lead. They all think it’s lucrative or romantic somehow. Nah. It’s garbage, Moses. Eventually, they make too much noise. And that’s when I get to work.”
“But … But how do you know all this? Me? Here? Now?!”
“… Let’s step back inside. Shall we?”
***
“Ten. Thirty-one. Zero. Eight,” said Eastwood, just outside Moses’s firearm unit on the first floor. Moses rolled around the lock.
“You would not believe who listens in to who these days. Your phone calls,” said Eastwood. “I was wondering why this combination though. Moses. That’s your cue.”
He undid the lock. Plucked it out. Rolled open the door.
Inside, the cabinets of guns were just as he left them. Eastwood whistled loudly. Helped himself to whatever he wanted, asking intermittently, “This one hot?”
No, Moses answered. None of them were. He didn’t keep hot guns. As Eastwood shopping-spreed, the unspoken agreement being this would be on the house, Moses all but fizzled away.
You just kind of disappear …
“Uhh … Why don’t you get a box. Help me out,” said Eastwood.
Moses did as asked, but muttered: “I’ve never helped anyone out. I just hurt people. I don’t want to hurt people.”
Eastwood gave Moses an eyebrow and tsked. “Good one.”
***
“Why the combo?” Eastwood asked, a little while later, inside his Corvette, cruising north.
“Hey. You hear me?”
“The combo,” Moses said, repeating.
Moses thought on that. XI XXI. XCII. He understood now. Why Ilsa had those numbers. Why, despite their being a giveaway, she needed them there.
“The combo,” Moses repeated. “Why?”
“… It’s a date. October 31st, 2008.”
“Had a nice Halloween?”
“… The day my wife found out about her … condition. M.S. The day everything, ah … changed.”
“… But what were you for Halloween?” Eastwood searched Moses’s eyes for a laugh, forgetting the traffic, but Moses couldn’t stop looking behind the seatback at Ilsa’s corpse. “She’s already dead, man. Nobody comes back to life.”
Moses made a point of saying something in agreement, but the words vanished from his memory as soon as they came to his lips. Vanished, or locked away, or buried underground already. He tried to unearth them again, caught in his throat; leap before you look, he thought, and yet, these words, these terrible words of acquiescence, of affiliation, of association drifted away like a helium balloon. He tried burning holes into Eastwood’s gaze, but that made the words of normal clay business no easier. Those were gone. Gone! Dead! Done!
“I’m guilty!” he cried, his shaking hands grabbing Eastwood’s, who calmly kept control of the car. “I am fucking guilty. I know who killed Charles Hattaran.”
Eastwood raised an eyebrow.
“I need to speak with the inspector.”
“What inspector?”
“Inspector Cole Hoffer. NOW.”
Eastwood chewed the inside of his cheek and made a popping noise in consideration.
“Don’t flip,” said Eastwood, taking a smooth left. “The place we’re going to, we’ll take care of this body—and your guilt.”
They were well up into the city now. They came to Powell Street, where a left turn would lead them back to San Francisco Central.
But Eastwood took a right instead.
Moses didn’t object. Didn’t have the energy for it. He was being driven to a point once again, for the final time, out of his control.
From Powell, it was down Clay Street, and then Eastwood hooked a right along Grant Avenue, where the road went one-way the other way, just like Moses’s mind. The Chinatown culture was thick here. The traffic was thin, on account of the late night. They crawled under red hanging lamps and passed by cream, green, and blue pagodas before finally coming to a stop in the middle of the one-way outside a convenience store with Chinese letters just above the door. The big white columns loomed to either side of the store, attached to the third story of the building above, giving the impression that this might’ve been a place of government business once. Maybe it still was, in a manner of speaking.
They stepped out of the Corvette. Eastwood didn’t appear to care a lick about his parking job, nor that the body remained in the trunk, (Mighty Kings territory, after all) and Moses didn’t have the energy to make up for the difference. Instead, he followed him through the front glass door, which chimed upon their arrival. Eastwood said something in Mandarin to the Chinese girl at the register that Moses didn’t understand, adding to the creeping feeling of being in a dream: surrounded by Chinese postcards and knick-knacks, Chinese language, even that smell of someone’s culturally appropriate cooking. He shuffled through the store’s aisles, quietly noting how all convenience stores have effectively the same layout, just like the one he had been in yesterday, where he had picked up this stupid Alcatraz T-shirt.
“Come on,” ordered Eastwood. Moses followed, passing through an “Employees Only” door behind the register. The woman working refused to make eye contact with him. Dead man walking, Moses thought.
They continued down a long, tall, dark hall, like something out of an old bank. It was quiet. Empty. A good place to hold off an enemy and defend the infrastructure behind the scenes.
“Come on, man, hurry up,” said Eastwood. He was getting impatient. Eastwood knocked on the door at the end of the hall six times with a rhythm Moses couldn’t quite make out. But whoever was on the other side understood it. The big door opened, revealing two other Asian men. One about Eastwood’s age. He had opened the door and still held the handle. The other sat on a wooden chair in the center of the adjoining room. He was very old, his skin almost translucent, his hair almost gone, like a man who might just vanish from existence at any moment.
The one Eastwood’s age extended a hand. “Ben,” he said. “Ben Lee.” He came into the light, his eyes thin and mouth thinner.
Moses gave him a head-to-toe look, grunted a reply, “Of course,” and did not shake his hand.
Eastwood shut the door behind them. As his eyes adjusted to the dark room, he noted it was something like a circle with various doors around the perimeter. Each one had Chinese characters above it that Moses couldn’t possibly translate. Within the room, he noticed the old man’s chair was quite decorative, unabashedly European, and totally out of place with the red and black Chinese aesthetic.
“You’re the gun man,” said the old man. And now, with the benefit of his growing pupils, Moses realized who it was.
“Peng.” The leader of the Mighty Kings. Its elder, president, auditor, secretary, treasurer, and local tattoo artist, currently made clear by the supplies in Peng’s tree-twig hands. Tattoo needles, long and sharp. He washed them in a small, mobile bath placed next to his chair. The man was well-known among clay business people. Particularly if you wanted to do any business in Chinatown. American-born, but fiercely loyal to his motherland. In charge of the biggest Chinese tong in the Bay by force. Renowned for his art, despite tattoos being discouraged by his ancestors.
Eastwood and Ben Lee (Moses understood) were protectors of the Wu Xing. Something like boo how doy, contracted hatchet men. Not hitmen though. Or at least, don’t call them that. He knew that now.
“What does he know?” Ben Lee asked Eastwood. Eastwood couldn’t say.
“Do you know who they are?” Peng asked Moses, gesturing to Ben and Eastwood both. Being full-blooded American, he had no accent.
“Your … boys, I guess?”
Peng smiled. “No. My boy is in Berkeley. Wasting my money with education. These are my men. The Water,” he pointed to Ben Lee, “and the Metal.” He pointed to Eastwood. “They keep my world stable. Say hello.”
He didn’t.
Peng shook his head. “Now, you. You’re just about the opposite of stable. That’s how we got into this whole mess. You running around. Shǎng jīn lièrén. That’s bad business.”
Moses quivered, his body not ready to die, despite his mind. “What are you going to do to me? Why did you bring me here?” Almost by instinct, he hurried to the door to the hall to the convenience store. Eastwood let him. It was locked. “Why can’t I leave?” He paced around the circular room. “What do you WANT?”
At that last question, Moses snapped his attention at Ben Lee, who immediately felt for his firearm, only to seemingly remember he didn’t wear one here. Ben’s face went white. Eyes black.
“What are you looking at?” said Ben.
This wasn’t the time to enrage his audience. He needed the inspector. The inspector was the key. The thing!
“What’s the thing?” asked Eastwood.
“What thing?”
“The thing in the storage unit. Two-nineteen. The thing the cop took off with. What was it?”
Moses soured, realizing he was now only as valuable as the thing he didn’t even have. “You heard my whole phone conversation … Is that it?”
“We got our ways,” said Eastwood.
“All right … It’s important. The thing. It’s worth a lot of money. It’s the jaws of a beast,” his voice wilting. “A very valuable beast. One the De Luca family—those De Lucas—would pay top dollar for. And I had it. I just never … got to use it. If I had, I could’ve put this all behind me. This … job. Crime.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I … like it. Too much.”
The three Asian men observed Moses quietly. Peng looked as though he’d gone dizzy, his hands and needles bathing in bubbling basin, but he recovered. Eastwood whistled.
“How,” Peng considered, “did you receive this?”
“There was a good cop once. Gus Shulman. He was investigating something big. And he found it. And he told me to hold onto it. And then he just disappeared.”
“And where did he disappear to?”
“… If you’ll let me go, let me turn myself in, I’ll tell you how to get the thing.”
He assessed his audience. Ready.
“I put a GPS device in the box. With the thing. You go to Ilsa’s, or take her phone, or however the heck she did it … you can track it. Wherever it was taken. For now, at least, until it’s out of that box.”
Eastwood and Ben Lee gave each other side-eye.
“Can I go now?”
“You said you wanted Cole Hoffer,” Ben chided him.
“Yes!”
Eastwood grunted. “Cole’s here, my man.”
“… Where?”
Peng nodded at Eastwood. “Take him down.”
***
Eastwood opened the iron door at the very back of the circular room, almost hidden behind the furniture. Beyond that open door, a set of smooth, velvet-carpeted stairs led down. The carpet absorbed the light above, reflecting only small, razor-thin glints until an overwhelming darkness bubbled up to meet them.
“What is this place?” Moses asked. He received no answer. He favored his sore knee as he took each step.
A warm glow rose as they approached the bottom and entered a long, smooth granite hallway, lined with doors made out of dark, heavy rosewood. Between the doors hung red lanterns, illuminating the hall with glowing circles of light that created the illusion of space. The feather-light scent of hibiscus and sandalwood drifted out of vents that circulated cool air.
“Wu Xing,” muttered Eastwood. “The brothel.”
Every detail of this hallway appeared to be lovingly crafted to promote and sustain the all-encompassing feel of relaxing pleasure. A delicate feast for the senses. But despite its appearance and smell, as the two stepped past door after door, he couldn’t help but notice the rubber foam seals that encapsulated the doors. He couldn’t help but find the consistent silence guilty, knowing that meant the walls were soundproof, and god only knew what happened on the other side.
Around the curve of the hallway, a woman with deep wrinkles entered the lantern light and padded towards them, the only sound she made coming from the soft whisper of her silken gown over stockinged feet. As she drew near, her wrinkles didn’t clear but blurred, until it was revealed that they weren’t wrinkles at all, but numberless little dots, tattooed along the fine lines of her face. The dots lifted themselves and separated into a smile, exposing little round teeth stained with tar.
“Luo,” she purred to Eastwood with smooth familiarity, “is there need for alarm?”
Eastwood shook his head. “Looking for the white boy.”
The woman smiled, gesturing at Moses. “You and him both?”
“No, the other white boy. The one that comes in.” Eastwood’s face was red.
Small dots gathered and tugged in the corner of the woman’s lips. She curled a thin finger and glided back down towards distant doors. Eastwood stayed at the front of the hallway, keeping a hard eye on Moses as he followed behind her.
Moses had never been so impatient. He wanted to run past the old woman but he didn’t know which door he was being led to. He wanted to shout the inspector’s name, profess his guilt, tell him the truth about the killer.
But he didn’t have to. He could walk away now. He’d given away his business. His hunter was deceased. Christine, Violet—alive. He could just walk away! Maybe he hadn’t “seen” the killer after all.
But to turn around, he’d have to face Eastwood again, and Ben Lee above that, and Peng as well. He felt petrified, yet continued to follow behind the woman in cruise control, a hot sweat approaching the surface of his skin, his hands clammy, preeminently experiencing the sense of warm relief he knew was just a door away.
Near the end of the winding hall, the woman turned theatrically, knocked twice on a door, and turned the handle. Hydraulic hinges took over. One more door opened for him without question. One more step paved in his way, despite the powers that be having no logical reason to do so.
He could see two bodies writhing inside the red room. A man and a woman. The man, Cole. He could tell him. He could shout. Absolve himself. Free his heart. Let this inspector know that he had seen the man who had killed Charles Hattaran. He had seen him clear as a bell. And, as a matter of fact, he had seen the killer’s face—again!—looked at it!—in just these past seventy-two hours.
He remembered his friend, Shulman, who disappeared the day he decided to take on the system. He remembered again the advice Shooter had given him: Leap before you look.
Well, Shooter, hell, it’s time someone followed in your footsteps. It’s time some other policeman figured out how high the brick and clay went. It’s time someone solved a crime that mattered in this damn city.
“Cole Hoffer,” he’d say, “I know what happened!”
“Cole Hoffer,” he’d proclaim, “we can take this to the top!”
“Cole Hoffer,” Moses would go, “are you prepared to face the truth?”
He was ready. He stepped into the room. Leap before you look.
“Cole Hoffer!” he shouted, too loudly, tumbling into the room, aggravating his sore knee, losing balance, and falling onto the bed.
Cole, half-covered in woman and blue pillow, jolted at the intrusion, grabbed his side-arm on the floor near the bed, and shot Moses clean through the brain.