The Butcher's Granddaughter (18 page)

She was calm. Not ice-cold by any stretch, but not freaking out either. I wiped a hand across my forehead and stared at it and then my shirt. Both were bathed in blood. I said, “Give me that,” and took my piece from her. “Where’s the other one?”

She nodded back over her shoulder at the door. “He’s in the men’s room, wondering if I’m really gonna blow his cock off if he opens the door.” She looked at me and I noticed pain in her eyes. It was probably the first time I’d ever seen it there. “You’re in deep shit, Bird. Li’s dead.”

My stomach started crawling around inside me, and I felt the sudden dampness of tears around my eyes. “Wait a minute,” I started, “what do you mean,
I’m
in trouble?”

“They found her under your bed. She’d been there for two days.” We were both struggling with ourselves, battling not to show each other the emotion that was so obvious. She finally looked at her feet and said, “I think I have what they want.”

I nodded stupidly like I knew what that meant. Still hazy from the beating, I stepped back to the nearly headless body lying in the trash. I had a hunch.

From behind me Tanya said, “What the hell are you doing?”

I took a deep breath and bent over him. I reached in his shirt and tore it open to the waist, the buttons clattering around me on the pavement. My knees started to go and I could suddenly feel my heart in my head. I stepped back to Tanya and took hold of her arm. I could hear voices just beyond the door behind her. It started to open as I said, “C’mon. Let’s go.”

And we ran.

It was one-thirty in the morning, and a light mist was slowly turning into rain. Tanya and I were huddled beneath the steps of a backalley fire escape off of Pico and Robertson, my bike leaning against the handrail, steam wafting off the heads as moisture spit and fizzled on them. We hadn’t said a word to each other in over an hour.

She was dressed like she had just come from a club: heavy makeup that she looked better without, a black bustier studded with little silver pyramids, and retro1970’s blue jeans that started well below her navel, snugged her hips, and outlined her legs before ending in two flares over a pair of black suede platforms with gothic Venetian heels. Over all that she wore a black vinyl raincoat which she pulled over her knees as she crouched under the fire escape.

We were both staring straight ahead. I began to take the nine-millimeter apart and clean it. It gave me something to do, something to focus my mind from its wild careen through the last four days. I kept glancing sidelong at Tanya, trying to come to terms with what she had done. I wondered if she was doing the same. She had stepped into that alley and simply reacted—the guy’s gun in my throat, my face swollen and bleeding, and she protected me, without forethought, without emotion. Completely pragmatic. That’s the hallmark of a person who bears watching. Careful watching.

I pursed my lips and stared at the barrel as if it had some imperfection I’d just discovered. “When did you come in?” I said, still staring at the gun.

“I was sitting at the bar when you got there,” she said loosely. Her demeanor was hard and nonchalant at the same time. We were both scared to death and trying to hide it. “Some loser was trying to pick up on me and I let him. You walked right past me. When the money went across the table to that freak you were talking to, I figured you hadn’t started a new life. Which reminds me.” She reached underneath the vinyl coat and produced the negative of the spread Rat had sold me. “This was on the floor by your gun. Important?”

I snatched it from her hand and, for the first time, we looked at each other. Neither of us was going to swoon. I said, “Probably,” and started laying gun parts in front of me.

We were silent for a bit. I finished cleaning the pieces, stared at them for a minute, then got up suddenly and dropped the barrel and the clip into a dumpster next to us. The slide and the stock I strolled out to the street and dropped into a sewer grate. When I sat back down she said, “What’d you do that for?”

“Never carry a weapon after you’ve used it. You killed a guy back there. And people he’s connected with are going to find us. Which, by the way, is not our biggest problem right now.”

“What is?”

“You.”

“Be real,” she came back, “I saved your life.”

“Right. And don’t think for a minute that only bothers me a little bit.” I put my head back against the wall and took out a cigarette.

“Got one of those for me?” she asked.

I jerked one out and handed it to her. I popped my lighter, lit my own, and handed the lighter to her. We sat smoking and not looking at each other. I took my jacket off and then my blood-smeared t-shirt. I threw the t-shirt under the dumpster and put my jacket back on.

“Look,” I said finally, “we don’t like each other, and that’s fine. I think you’re a bitch, and you think I’m a coward, and that’s fine, too. But I was involved in something that I thought I’d dropped in the hands of the cops and left behind, and now it’s come back and almost killed me. The more I think about it, the more confusing it gets. And, as much as I maybe hate your guts, I’m sorry you’re involved now. But know this, Tanya, I swear to God I haven’t done anything to provoke what happened in that alley.”

She sat there and let it wash over her. I couldn’t tell if any of it affected her. She was a stone.

For the millionth time I mentally backtracked over the last few days, and for the millionth time came up empty. I had brokered some information and that had been
it
. Why were people after me? And Tanya? Of all people, why did she drop in? She was just a club girl with a figure and an attitude, avoiding trouble like water around rocks, and here she was, crouched next to somebody she hated, like a cold and hungry rat forced to share space with an old alley cat. None of it made any sense.

“What were you involved in?” she asked, breaking the silence and beating me to the interrogation all at once.

I snapped my head up and ignored her question. “You said you had what they’re looking for. What is it?”

She looked at me coldly for a second, deciding if surrendering this little bit of control represented a weakness on her part. My face told her it didn’t. She rummaged around in her raincoat some more and produced a now-soggy envelope. From it she pulled a gold necklace with a charm. She slowly handed it to me. I held it up in a shaft of streetlamp light and let it spin around.

I had seen one just like it four days earlier, hanging from the neck of a stupid, pissed off little Vietnamese girl.

The chain pattern was a basic cut, but the charm was exceptionally unique: three Chinese characters running vertically, not simply stamped out of gold but etched in relief from a single small block of metal. I recognized it immediately, and fear tightened my guts once again. In the spaces between the strokes of the symbols was an intricate pattern of lace, also etched in relief, and filled in with black lacquer. The back of the charm was polished to a high glow. I popped the miniscule latch on the piece’s right side and opened it. Inside was a tiny black-and-white photo. It was meaningless. All it showed was a headstone in some Asian cemetery. The characters on the stone were Chinese, and none matched that of the pendant. It was undoubtedly some relative of Song and Li’s. Ancestor worship.

I cupped my hands over my ears and tried to keep old images from getting in my head. Inside I laughed a deep, sorry laugh. It kept me from screaming out loud. The rain dripped off the fire escape and into my collar. I scooted over a couple of inches and let myself be cold and wet. It was several minutes before I realized Tanya was saying something.

“... underneath your bed. I couldn’t fucking believe it. You got another cigarette?” she asked. There had been a trace of timidity in her at first. It was rapidly diminishing.

Stumbling out of my own head, I dug out the smokes and gave them to her. She lit two and handed me one. “I don’t think she suffered,” she said, more to herself than to me, almost like a Catechism.

I wondered if Tanya had been thinking about the same things I was—where she’d met Li, what they had talked about. Memories are like that. Yesterday, I would have struggled to remember what Li had said that first rainy night in Gorky’s Cafe, that simple hello. Now she was so close I could even remember her inflection, her trouble pronouncing long vowels.

I sighed. Tanya stared. I hadn’t heard most of what she’d been saying the past few minutes. “Under my fucking bed. Christ,” I muttered.

“She was staring at me,” Tanya continued in her prayer-level voice. “You know...when I looked underneath. One hole, right in the middle of her forehead.” I noticed that part of the moisture on her face was tears. Tanya’s emotion made my mind fuzz up even worse, and I forced myself to clarity. “I suppose this is an obvious question,” I said, “but what were you doing in my apartment?” It didn’t come out as gently as I’d wanted.

“Trying to figure out what this meant.” She said it like she wanted to put ‘asshole’ at the end. She again produced the envelope that held the pendant and handed me a small slip of paper. It looked like it had come off a pad of yellow sticky notes. It said:

Tanya,

Find Bird. He’ll know about my parents. Show him the pendant.

Li

It was written hurriedly, scrawled across the paper. “So she knew,” I said, whispering.

“Knew what?”

I held the piece of yellow paper between three fingers and flicked at it nervously. “Knew she was being followed, knew they were coming.”

“Knew who was coming?”

“This piece of paper is from next to my bed. I keep a little pad there for messages. She wrote this while she was still at my place.” Tanya gave me a disapproving look. “It wasn’t what you think,” I said disgustedly.

“It never is.”

I sat and glared. She ignored it. “C’mon, Bird. That paper could’ve come from her own kitchen. There are millions of those things in every room in every house in the world.”

I held it up to the streetlight. “Not with the phone number of a certain private dick I know on it.”

She scooted closer and I showed her Rick Cane’s office number, clearly embossed from the page that had been above it. It was the last number I’d written on the pad. She shrugged. “So now what?”

“So I don’t know. I know we’re in trouble.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘we’?” she said fiercely.

I was wondering when the denial would set in. I had been fighting it off myself for a while. As calmly as I could, I said, “Wednesday night, last Wednesday night, that is, Li scrounged me up down at the Reading Room. She was scared and trying not to look it. She asked me to help her fix a little problem that her sister was having. I did.”

“What a saint.”

I ignored that. The more I talked it out, the more serious our situation got. “I thought she was scared for her sister, but now it’s pretty obvious she was scared about a whole lot more. Her sister had been living under an assumed name for quite a while, and it was apparently news to the world that she even had a sister.”

Tanya nodded as if she agreed. I assumed that meant she was in the dark on that subject as well.

“I don’t know anything about Li’s parents. And I don’t know what the locket means. All I know is that some very rough, very well connected people want it, and we have it, and I don’t know who to give it to.”

“Give it to?! Li is
dead
because of that thing! And you just want to find these fuckers and hand it over? The hell with—”

I broke one of my few cardinal rules, and I slapped her. She wound up and slapped me right back, a solid, stinging blow. It had the effect I wanted. She was now too angry at me to be hysterical. Before she could decide between getting up and leaving or hitting me again, I said, “You aren’t getting this and I don’t know why. You and me are in this
together
, so get used to it. You could’ve stayed out of it but you didn’t, and I’m alive because you didn’t, and for that I thank you.” I got in her face. “But if you split now, we’ll never get to the bottom of this, and by tomorrow afternoon they’ll be weighing your liver down at L.A. Memorial.” I shoved the locket in her face. “Do you recognize this?”

She looked at me with derision. “Of course not. I don’t speak Chinese.”

“Neither do I, but I know these symbols. It’s the number forty-nine.”

“So what?”

“So it’s a symbol of the Triad, a sacred number.”

She gave me a stare that said she severely doubted I knew what I was talking about. I started explaining anyway. “Four times nine is thirty-six, the number of oaths taken at a Triad initiation ceremony. Put this symbol inside a solid black triangle and it’s the sign of the Hak Sh’e Wui—The Black Society. That guy you killed back there had it tattooed a foot high on his chest. He was a soldier in the Chinese Mafia.”

She went a little pale, but stayed tough. “Yeah. Like these guys give a shit about me.”

“They do now,” I said heavily.

“Bird, there was nobody there! How would they know?”

“The guy you left in the can, first of all. Second, I’ve heard estimates of Chinese membership in the Triads as high as
one-in-six
.” I set my head back against the damp brick wall and let out a tired, frightened sigh. “There’s nowhere to go,” I said quietly. “There’s nothing we can do. We’re completely fucked. They’ll have members notified everywhere, especially in the L.A.P.D. It’ll be like having terminators on us.”

Understanding spread across her face, aging her.

I turned toward her and gave her a sincere look. “Li was my friend, too. We can fight, or we can sit around and wait to die. I’m willing to compromise to stay alive at least long enough to get some retribution, and maybe even a little good old-fashioned revenge. What about you?”

She said nothing for a long time and then answered clearly and carefully. “Only because it’s Li, you fucking understand? Not for me, and definitely not for you. This is for Li.”

“Then let’s go.”

Nodiev
Vlostovnik is a Russian transplant, fifteen years now from Moscow, who came to America because it was so wonderful and free. He soon found some men who wrote everything on flashpaper and seemed more than willing to help him make a lot of money fast on something called “horse racing.” It looked like the wave of the future to Noddy, who dropped a few rubles here and there and then was happy he’d made my acquaintance, because he was into those gentlemen for his life savings. It wasn’t much by street standards, so I gave it to him and told him not to worry about it, but next time I’d throw him to the sharks. I don’t think his gratitude will ever end.