Gentleman Takes a Chance (42 page)

There was a long silence, followed by the sound of cutlery and a rattle of plates and a voice saying something in an Asian language. Kyrie took a deep breath. Her thumb moved towards the disconnect button on the phone.

"Hello," a male voice said. It was a resonant voice, with almost no trace of an accent.

Caught off guard, Kyrie cleared her throat, nervously and said "Am I speaking to the owner of Three Luck Dragon?"

"Speaking," the voice said.

"Oh. Oh. Good. I wanted to talk about . . . about the owner of the diner . . . The George."

For a terribly long moment, while the speaker on the other side was silent, she thought he was going to ask "Who?"

But instead, when he spoke, he said, "The young dragon? The one whom Himself . . ."

"Yes." Kyrie hastened, not wanting to know if the man was about to say "the one whom Himself almost killed" or "the one whom Himself is protecting." That she didn't know which one the man was about to say betrayed her ambivalence about this being and about the step she was taking.

Was she doing the right thing? Or was she about to betray Tom's trust in her for nothing?

"I assume," the man said from the other side, his voice even more impersonal, colder, as though he were a receptionist talking to a stranger about some abstract transaction. "I assume that you do not wish to speak of this over the phone?"

Kyrie did not wish. No matter that Anthony was busy at the grill. No matter that she could go outside and attempt to talk from there. What she had to say was bound to make more than a few clients or passersby get curious. And then there was the fact that Summer might have friends or relatives coming around to see her place of death. There was already a clutter of flowers around the base of the pole, and one pink teddy bear clutching a heart. Summer's friends were bound to be journalists. Considering the paper was obsessed with cryptozoology, how would they react to hearing Kyrie talk of dragons. "It would be better if I may speak in person," she said. She remembered the parking lot, and the Great Sky Dragon in it. And all the other dragons around. Had this man—dragon—been there too? There was a great deal she'd rather do than see one of these dragons again. All else aside, they were a criminal organization and one populated by shifters, who could destroy her and Tom several times over. But she didn't have any choice. She'd run out of all choices.

"Come to the restaurant," the man said. "I'll be here. Ask for Mr. Lung."

Mr. Lung? Was he related to Conan?

Rafiel opened the door to the aquarium. It had been unlocked. The smell of fish and bleach—combined—hit his nostrils as well as damp air that seemed hot compared to the frosty air outside. He stepped into the shadows, lengthened since all the lights in the aquarium were off. He almost called out to Lei, except he remembered the offices were far enough around the corner that he was sure she couldn't hear him. He walked past the sealed door to the shark room, up a short flight of service stairs, now the only way to get past the shark room, to where the light of the floor-to-ceiling windows made the room with the anemones and crabs much brighter than the one belowstairs. He walked past the aquariums, looking curiously at the spider crab one. He wished he could tell that one of the giant, long-legged crabs—some of them looking as weathered and beaten as though they'd escaped from the mother of all clarified butter dishes—was a shifter. They all had moss growing on them. He squinted, reasoning that a shifter crab would have less moss, wouldn't it? Surely the moss sloughed off when the crabs shifted to human then back? Surely . . . But all of them seemed to have an even covering of the green stuff, and Rafiel started wondering if John Wagner had hallucinated it all. Perhaps for his own amusement. The man seemed to have a very odd sense of humor.

Normally he could have cut through the shark room to the office area, but now he had to make it across the silent restaurant, and then down another set of stairs, to the back.

As he got to the bottom floor, he saw light shining out of the office and called out, "Ms. Lani?"

She stuck her head out of the office, for just a moment. "I'll be ready in just a moment, Officer Trall."

"Oh. All right," he said.
Now what are you up to?

"You may come in." Her voice sounded vaguely amused.

He ambled out of the hallway and into the cramped offices he had visited and searched before. On the wall, on a pegboard were the keys he had stolen and gotten copied, as well as several other sets of keys, which he assumed were to either other areas of the aquarium—areas he'd found no need to explore—or to the utility parts of the aquarium. At least he assumed that electrical circuits and such would be locked behind panels and couldn't be accessed by just anyone.

Other than that, the office consisted of a very long, narrow room, which might have, in some previous incarnation, been a hallway. It had no windows, and only two rows of desks, six on each side against the walls. While Lei Lani rummaged through the desk nearest the door, Rafiel walked up and down the rows of desks, to the small fridge set against the narrow far wall, and the coffee maker on top of the fridge. The coffee maker had coffee in it, and, inside, some blue mold over a residue sludge that might very well be sentient in itself, or perhaps even a shifter.

Rafiel eyed it dubiously. He was well aware, no matter how much he pretended not to be, that Tom and Kyrie thought there was something wrong with him, since he still lived with his parents, and he was the first to admit that perhaps he had leaned on parental protection too long. Until he'd met Kyrie and Tom, he had never seen other shifters manage for themselves, without normal people to cover up for them. But whatever his staying with his parents might betray about his character, it did not betray a lingering, overlong adolescence. To the contrary. Rafiel kept his area of the house neat, and had even acquired the reputation of a neat freak at the police station. If this coffee machine, or anything like it, were in the station, he'd be taking it out, rinsing it, washing it, then giving all his subordinates a lecture on keeping foodstuffs around as they molded. With a rueful smile, he thought that McKnight and the others must think he was a pure bundle of joy.

To distract himself from the machine, he turned his attention to the desks, once more. Above them were corkboards, with the usual family pictures and the like, showing that most people who worked here were pretty ordinary. One of the corkboards was ornamented with groups of young men standing around drinking beer and an inordinate number of pictures of a simpering blond in different bikinis. Rafiel presumed it was a young man's desk and, in fact, looking at the various groups in the pictures on the wall, quickly narrowed down the user of the desk to a tall, disheveled blond who looked like a football player. He was the youth who appeared in every picture and Rafiel had a vague memory of seeing him among the other employees the police had cursorily interviewed. Judging from the attention given to beer and girls amid the man's favorite memories, it wasn't hard to imagine him bringing girlfriends to the shark area to impress them. But then, the pictures were all of the same girl, and she didn't look like she'd be that much into sharp-toothed creatures.

Next to that desk was another one, whose remarkably neat and empty corkboard showed only two pictures. One had a soulful-eyed, sad-looking basset. The other, which was clearly a bought postcard, showed a donkey about to cross a busy highway and said, in yellow letters across the top "dumb ass." Rafiel thought the desk might as well be labeled as John Wagner's, and resisted a momentary impulse to look through the drawers. He truly had no reason to suspect John Wagner of anything, no matter how much he had—and he undoubtedly had—upset Lei. At least, judging from her comments on him. But then, Rafiel thought, those two would rub the other one the wrong way, wouldn't they? Lei Lani with her careful image, her nice clothes and manners, and John Wagner who seemed to believe his job was to repeatedly poke the universe in the eye.

He moved on to the next desk, and perked up because it was so obviously a woman's. Or perhaps he was letting his assumptions show, but he truly could not imagine any man, no matter his sexual orientation, adorning a desk with a collection of pretty kitten mugs, and owning a notepad in pink ornamented with butterflies. Besides, the collection of smiling kids in various stages of tooth loss and toothiness on the corkboard seemed to clinch the matter. They were all the same kids, he guessed, at different stages of growth. Or at least, the entire horde were redheaded and blue-eyed and had disturbingly vacuous expressions. "I guess she has what? Eight children?" he asked, more to distract himself from the contemplation of such a thing than to talk.

"What?" Lei said, the rustling of papers momentarily stopped.

"I said your . . . colleague seems to have eight children?"

She looked across and smiled. "Suzanne isn't married," she said, and, as though realizing that really didn't mean much in context, added, "She doesn't have any children. Those are her nephews and nieces."

"Oh," Rafiel said, embarrassed. He stepped across the other way, to look at the desk next to Lei's, which had pictures of what appeared to be bodybuilders on the corkboard, a note saying "Call me" and the number, and a collection of pink notebooks on the desk. He had just resolutely decided he wasn't going to say anything, much less ask it, when he noticed that Lei was staring intently at him, and blushing slightly.

He raised his eyebrows at her. It wasn't as if he could ask her why she was staring at him, of course, but raising eyebrows was surely allowed. She sighed and colored deeper, and looked down at her hands, which were resting on a pile of papers, from which protruded a couple of plastic baggies.

"Look," she said, "I was . . . curious . . . you know . . . after what you told me about what you found on the outside of the . . . of the preservatives."

"Yes?"

"Well . . . I looked in Lillian's desk . . . and . . . well . . ." She reached over and slid open the drawer in the middle of the desk.

Rafiel looked down at a welter of pencils and pens, a forlorn nest of paper clips, a confusion of rubber bands. Lei seemed to lose patience with him. She reached down and picked up a tube of something and put it on top of the desk.

Rafiel looked closer. "Petroleum jelly?" he said.

"Well . . ." Lei said. "You know, it's used for . . . you know . . . sex . . ."

"Yes, I know," Rafiel said. And, he imagined, for a dozen other things. He had a vague idea that it was also used for some sorts of closures that must resist water, like, say, wetsuits, which he knew were used when divers went in to clean the tanks.

"But that's not what . . . what made me . . . I mean . . . why I think I should tell you," Lei said. "It's this." She showed him some grey adherences to the slightly greasy outside of the tube. "I thought . . . it might be sharkskin." And then, looking up at his face, she looked like she was trying very hard not to give a sigh of exasperation. "We use petroleum jelly around the . . . you know . . . around the aquariums, on seals and valves and such, and I thought, she might have got sharkskin on it. We collect the skin for samples and such, you know, and that she . . . you know . . . then used it for . . . for other things."

Rafiel shrugged. He took the tube and reached for the end of one of the baggies under Lei's pile of papers. It came out from under the papers, scattering grey flakes as it was pulled away. It was full of what looked like white and grey dandruff.

"Oh," Lei said. And then. "Not that." She pulled the baggie away and put it on her desk. "Those are some samples I meant to send to the lab, for sharkskin diseases. Of course, now I don't know if our sharks . . ." She shrugged and looked pained.

"I need a plastic baggie, if I'm going to send this to analysis," Rafiel said. "And I must put a label on it, then seal it. And you must be willing to say I didn't tamper with it." Though of course, that didn't mean Lei Lani hadn't tampered with it, Rafiel thought but didn't say. Her finding this in the desk seemed very odd, and oddly convenient.

She primly got him a plastic baggie from her own desk, where she had a pile of them folded together. "We use them for samples," she said, as she handed him one.

"Curiously," he said, "we do too." Sealing the bag, he wrote on it with a marker from the desk drawer, saying what he had found and where. This would never hold up in a court of law, of course. There were so many ways in which it might have been tampered with. But at this point Rafiel was not operating on the assumption the matter would ever come to a court of law. Instead, he thought, this would end up in the court of Rafiel and it was for himself that he must collect evidence. And he wondered how stupid Ms. Lani thought he was.

Kyrie parked in front of the restaurant and got out of her car, shivering at the sight of the facade, at its cheery sign saying three luck dragon above another sign that proclaimed for your health, we don't use msg in our cooking.

Kyrie pulled her coat tighter around herself. She had very bad memories of this parking lot. Without meaning to, she looked toward the sky, afraid of a flapping of large wings, the sudden appearance of the Great Sky Dragon in all his golden and green glory. But the skies were empty and a sound somewhere between throat-clearing and a cough made her turn to look.

In the slightly open door of the restaurant, stood a middle-aged Asian gentleman, with impeccably cut salt-and-pepper hair and a big white apron. She took a deep breath. Three steps brought her close to him, and she had a moment of surprise, at noticing that he was wearing a shirt and tie under his apron.

"Ms. Smith?" he said, extending his hand.

She hesitated only fractionally before she shook it. It felt slightly cool to the touch. Not abnormally so. It was the same way Tom's skin usually felt, as if he'd been holding a glass with a cold drink all the time. Maybe it was something about the metabolism of dragon shifters, though Kyrie would bet the dragons were not actually cold-blooded.