Bones of the Barbary Coast (11 page)

A long silence. She couldn't speak.

"Given that I understood," Skobold said quietly

Cree was thinking about Bert's divorce and the difference between the laughing, flirting guy she remembered and the tired large rumpled man he was now, and about Skobold's handsome young lover and funeral home persona, and she couldn't say a word.

They worked for another two hours, talking only when Skobold gave suggestions or showed her aspects of the bones he considered important. He washed the cranium and mandible himself, using extreme care, frowning to look closely at interesting features, retrieving small chips and loose teeth that accrued in the drain screen. When they were done, the stains were mostly gone and the skeleton looked brighter, more cheerfully savage.

It was almost eleven o'clock when they peeled off their gloves. They removed their smocks and put them into a steel hamper, then covered the bones and wheeled the pallet into the back room.

The next step, Horace told her, was to take cores from the femurs for the osteon count, another way to assess age and health. They'd measure the bones, label them, and varnish them; Skobold would degrease the skull in preparation for taking casts of it. He'd look closely at the X-rays, compare the wolfman's metrics to standard statistical tables, then would put together his best guesses as to facial musculature and appearance with any information she might find, such as period photos or medical records. Only then could they begin reconstruction.

It would have to be done in his spare time, he reminded her, which meant they'd have to meet mainly after hours. Cree had other nighttime activities on her agenda, but figured it was manageable; she agreed readily.

"Same time tomorrow night, then. Now, I have a little paperwork to do before I close up. Please take care walking to your car. There have been some incidents on campus lately."

He opened the hall door for her, smiling wearily. But when she turned to say a last good-night, she found his face had changed again.

"I adored my son. Adored him. I had to look at his broken body with an anatomist's knowledge of what it must be like inside him. Later, I wouldn't let them close the casket, they had to pull me away. At the burial, I thought I'd die. My marriage didn't last a year. I still visit his grave on the anniversary."

Skobold's jaw was quivering slightly, and Cree felt it in him, the huge unfillable hollow, the enormity of that pain. She touched his cheek, afraid to offer more lest they both break down, and started to walk away.

"But at least I
knew,
you see," he called after her. "Where he was. What had happened. When I thought of Bert's situation, I always knew I was the lucky one."

13

B
ERT WAITED UNTIL Cree had driven out of sight, then walked past the city-issue Crown Vic and got into his own vehicle. It was a Chevy Suburban, biggest thing on the road short of a Hummer, pretty intimidating with its dull gray paint and deeply tinted windows. He slammed the door, started it up, then bent to unlock the metal case bolted to the floor under the driver's seat. He brought out his little Tomcat .32 and tucked the clip holster into his waistband, then put the truck in gear.

His first errand was a quick-stop place, where he gassed up the Suburban and went inside for a jumbo coffee and three egg-and-sausage sandwich things that had been in the steamer since breakfast time. Back in the driver's seat, he tore into the sandwiches and stoked himself with coffee. The coffee was good, and he felt like the truck, full tank and ready to go.

Not yet eight, he was right on time. He drove back down to Sixteenth Street and into the Mission district. He had always felt at home here, one of the few parts of San Francisco that wasn't just pastel stucco houses but also big industrial buildings more like the type he'd grown up around back east. He pulled over in the orange glow beneath the 101 overpass and let Chevy idle as he sipped coffee, smoked, and waited.

A few minutes later, Nearing's car slid past and pulled over. Rich got out and came to the Suburban, bringing a small gym bag and his own cup of coffee.

Rich Nearing was a tall, stringy black guy in his late thirties, a beanpole with sandpaper-short hair over a hatchet face and a long neck with a prominent Adam's apple. Tonight he wore black jeans, black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket that he left open so you could see the straps of his shoulder rig. He worked in the Narcotics Section, Bert's unit before moving over to Homicide.

"Hey, Machete," Rich said. He slammed the door, made himself comfortable, popped the hole in his coffee lid. First Tuesday of the month, this was the ritual. They'd drink coffee and discuss the route before they got going. In the dark cab, with the tinted windows and his black skin and clothes, Nearing was the Invisible Man, just teeth, eyes, a single gold stud earring.

"How's it going, Rich?"

"Goin' good. My boat's almost done, that feels all right." Nearing had used some of his off-the-record income to buy a third-hand cabin cruiser and was fixing it up himself. "My son's birthday is coming up this weekend, we're trying to get ready. That stuff. You?"

Bert started to shrug,
same old same old,
but then surprised himself by finding there was something to report. "My . . . niece is visiting from out of town. A good kid, haven't seen her in a while."

Nearing nodded, put his coffee to his face.

"How's it look for tonight?" Bert asked.

"Everything's routine except the new client, the dry cleaner. Mr. Zheng's son called to ask if we could wait 'til next month. I said, Sure, no problem, we're nice guys, we understand."

Bert laughed. Being understanding was not a posture that you used. He hadn't met the Zhengs. Koslowski, their partner in Vice, had gone with Nearing for the first meeting, but he knew the call meant there'd probably be some ugly stuff later tonight. Mood he was in, he almost didn't mind.

The first stop was a video store, specializing in but not exclusively devoted to sex tapes. It was run by a pair of old hippies who had opened up their shop on the periphery of the North Beach sin zone. Bert pulled up across the street and Nearing hopped out with his duffle, waited for traffic, then crossed to the brightly lit facade. Bert watched as he went inside, and through the door he could see the change in posture of the guy behind the counter. Nearing's favorite greeting for these visits was "Trick or treat!"

Bert lit a cigarette, knowing there'd be a wait. Nearing liked to chat up their clients, playing buddy and coconspirator while in fact he was just drawing it out, savoring his power. Nearing always got off on the risk, the rush of being outside society, off the record, off the charts. Playing it both ways, law and outlaw.

Working in Narcotics and Vice put you in touch with certain kinds of people and therefore certain kinds of opportunities. The guys who ran Very Very Video were typical. Storefront rentals were pricey anywhere near North Beach. You had an inventory to keep up, overhead was high, and you had competition, so of course you wanted to make extra money on the side. In the case of these guys, they had friends up in Mendocino who grew amounts of marijuana even the pot-tolerant SFPD would ordinarily be reluctant to ignore. But the tip had come first to Nearing, so word of their activities never made it into the books. All these guys did was hold the quantity shipments, stinky green bales of leaf and big zip-top bags of resinous buds until local distributors picked up their allotments. For taking the risk, they got a percentage from the suppliers.

For overlooking Very Very Video's sideline, Bert, Nearing, and Koslowski took a percentage of the percentage.

At last Nearing kicked his duffle under the counter. The guy back there disappeared from view, then stood again. The bag reappeared on the floor on Nearing's side, but still Rich had to shmooze some more. He called it "establishing congenial client relations."

Bert had been inducted into the business by the old-timers back in Narcotics, had left it behind for some years after he moved to Homicide, then got recruited again by the younger generation. When his senior at Narco had first invited him in, Bert had declined. But after a year or so he'd begun to feel that he was owed something by the scumbags who he worked so hard to police and who—one of them anyway, somebody somewhere—had destroyed his life. If you wanted to get moralistic about it, you could call it a sin tax. And if it occasionally required administering pain, you could call that punishment. There was a certain quid pro quo that Bert was uneasy about, in that their clients also expected Nearing and Koslowski to stifle cop interest or at least provide advance notice of pending action. But in the end, Bert felt these guys mostly got what they deserved.

At last Nearing wrapped up his visit, skipped across the street, jumped in.

"How'd it go?" Bert asked.

"Great. I had him throw in a couple copies of
Bad Boys 2."

"Give mine to Koslowski."

"Hal was telling me how hard moving to DVD is on these smaller outfits. I never thought of that. You can't get rid of your tapes because for half your customers, that's still the viewing technology they've got, and now you also gotta please the people who've gone over to disc. Except where are you going to display it all when you've only got six hundred square feet? Plus you're carrying every title in both formats, twice the inventory for the same rental volume. It's tough." Nearing stared sympathetically at the storefront. "Funny, you never really realize what the other guy's up against. You know what I mean?"

Bert pulled out and gunned the engine. "My heart bleeds," he said.

The last stop was the dry cleaner's. It was after eleven, and the north end of Columbus had quieted down, storefronts dark, traffic sparse. Bert could feel pressure building as they got closer, the accumulated tension of waiting and knowing what would probably go down. Nearing was feeling it too, getting quiet, checking his gun, generally girding himself.

All-Nite Laundry was a new business and a recent addition to their list—a full-service laundry and dry cleaner that was open twenty-four hours, three-hour guaranteed turnaround. From the street, the plate glass windows showed a spotless front waiting area, a long counter with two cash registers, and an endless garment conveyor full of clothes in plastic bags, stretching back into darkness. The actual cleaning facility was a bigger room in back with a loading entry on the alley.

Between front and back operations were five windowless little rooms, occupied by five young Chinese women. Being open twenty-four hours a day, the business made the perfect front, allowing men to come in at any time without drawing attention to themselves. The tip had come through Koslowski.

They pulled up directly in front and sat there for a while, looking at the bright counter and the two increasingly nervous guys behind it. They would be wondering why this big gray Suburban was there, but with its tinted windows they wouldn't be able to see who was inside. The moment Bert and Nearing got out, one of the men inside turned and scuttled back among the garments.

"Can I he'p you?" the one guy left up front said. Big toothy grin, pretending he thought they were customers. He was about seventeen and looked ready to piss himself.

"We need to talk to the boss," Bert said.

"My uncle not here. Sorry." Still the tight scared grin.

Nearing was already going around the end of the counter. Bert ordered the boy to stay up front, absolutely not to move from where he stood. He slapped the red button that turned on the conveyor, and the whole room began to move, a rumble and swish that would provide a good noise screen. Then he followed Nearing, brushing past the sliding plastic-bagged garments toward a lighted doorway in the gloom at the back.

They went into a square room at the center of the building, where several big canvas gurneys full of clothes waited for processing and a wide doorway opened into the laundry facility. Ranged along the walls were rows of machines topped by venting ducts, the round windows in their doors showing the tumbling cloth inside. In the middle were several long tables where a half dozen men and women were sorting, folding, spot treating. They all stopped when they saw Bert and Nearing at the door. The air was full of the stink of cleaning agents and the rumble and drone of machinery.

To Bert's left, another doorway opened into a narrow hall lined by a series of doors, all but one of them closed. He leaned so he could look into the open door and saw just a bed, a lamp, and a chair.

He turned when three men appeared in the doorway to the laundry area. The oldest was the father, a gray-haired, irritable-looking man of fifty, one of those tight-faced guys who looked like a skull. Behind him was the young man who had been at the counter and a burly Chinese guy with pecs and biceps bulging out of a wife-beater T-shirt.

"You don't come in here!" the older man said. He waved his hands at them as if that would make them go away.

"Mr. Zheng," Nearing said reasonably. "We do come in here. We come in here and you give us some money. That's how it works. That's what we arranged, remember?"

"No money now." The father stood resolutely in the doorway. "You said okay you wait."

The skinny young man moved forward. He was a good-looking kid, early twenties, dressed in a blue button-down shirt, tie, trim khakis. "Please. We'll be sure to have the money for you next time." His English was unaccented.

"Oh, come on, people!" Nearing said. "This is exactly what I warned you not to do. Mr. Zheng, I told you, this is how you get in trouble."

The patriarch said something rapidly in Mandarin, his eyes moving from Bert to Nearing, full of hate, and the clean-cut young man translated: "My father wants you to know that he doesn't believe you will have us prosecuted. Because if you close us down, you will get nothing from us."

"Hey, we're gettin' nothin' already," Bert reminded him.

"Prosecuting isn't the only kind of trouble I meant," Nearing added grimly.

"We'll have it next time," the young man repeated urgently. "It's not going to be a problem. Please."

Bert heard a noise from his left and he looked over to see a young woman stepping out of one of the doors along the side hall. She was wearing a short, lacy robe, and as she turned a length of smooth thigh emerged from the blue cloth. She made an involuntary shriek when she saw Bert and Nearing confronting her red-faced boss.

At the sound, two of the other doors opened and women's faces looked out warily. They were all smooth skinned, moon faced, ebony haired, terrified. Not one of them was older than fourteen, fifteen.

"You go back inside!" the father ordered them in Mandarin.

Two of them disappeared immediately, but the first one hesitated, clenching the robe at her throat.

Bert grunted, taken aback by what he was feeling. The father was haranguing the girl, his eyes screwed up, gesturing threateningly, but still she stood uncertainly, paralyzed.

"Take it easy, Bud," Bert said to the father.

"You don't tell me! You don't tell me in here!" He went on in Mandarin, incomprehensible except for his rage, as he stepped toward the girl.

Bert grabbed his arm and flung him across the room. Guy didn't weigh anything, he flew against one of the gurneys and half fell into it. Nearing drew his gun and went into a shooting stance, freezing the two at the door. The father stood up but Bert gave him a backhanded slap that spun his head around and dropped him in a heap. Bert bent, half lifted him by his shirt, and slapped him again. The guy looked ready to spit venom, his cheeks red-bruised, choking and sputtering, and the sight of his self-righteousness filled Bert with rage. He hauled off and slugged him, put his weight into it.

"The fuck you
doing?"
Bert yelled. "They're
kidsl
Don't you have any self-respect? They your daughters? Nieces? Or just kids you bought? What?"

Nearing stayed spreadlegged, gun on the guys at the door. On the floor the father moaned, his face still that weasel mask of hate, and Bert felt a tight string break inside. A terrific energy seized him. He lifted Zheng up and dragged him to the hallway where the girl had been. He held him up with one hand and threw open her door and saw her huddled on the bed, cringing and crying.