Dragonfire

Eleven

The telephone woke me.

It was dark in the room, but I had not been asleep very long; I came up out of it groggy and disoriented, with a kind of bloated feeling, the way you do after you’ve been wrenched out of a deep sleep after only a few hours. When I struggled over toward the phone I came down hard on my left shoulder; pain rocketed the length of the arm, brought a strangled yell out of me. But it also cleared away some of the sticky web in my mind. I twisted back the other way, gritting my teeth, and kicked the wadded sheets out of the way and heaved into a sitting position.

The phone kept on ringing as I squinted at the night-stand clock. Ten-fifteen; I had been out close to four hours. I hauled up the receiver in the middle of another jangle and muttered a hello.

A male voice — a Chinese voice — said, “This is Jimmy Quon.”

That woke me up all the way. I took a tighter grip on the receiver and started to say something, but the words got caught in the dryness caking my throat. I worked up saliva, swallowed it, and this time I got the words out.

“What do you want, Quon?”

“I hear you looking for me. I think we better talk.”

“So talk. I’m listening.”

“Not on the phone. You want to meet me?”

“Why should I meet you?”

“That’s what you want, right? Face to face?”

“When?”

“Right now. You say where.”

“Sure. And you show up with that three fifty-seven Magnum of yours.”

“I got no big puppy like that, man,” he said. “You wrong about me; I didn’t have nothing to do with the dogs barking at you and the cop.”

“No, huh?”

“No. But maybe I know who did. You want to meet or not?”

“Yeah. I’d like a good look at you, sonny.”

“Pick a place. Public as you want.”

“St. Francis Hotel, lobby bar. Forty-five minutes.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“Alone, Quon. And unarmed. Don’t try anything with me.”

“In a place like the St. Francis? Hey, I told you, man, you wrong about me. I don’t throw dog feed at the fan quai.”

“Forty-five minutes,” I said, and hung up on him.

I switched on the bedside lamp, used part of one sheet to wipe mucus out of my eyes. So what the hell is this? I thought. Some kind of trap, maybe, but I couldn’t see how it would work. He’d let me pick the place, and he’d have to be crazy to try taking me out in the lobby of the St. Francis; it was a highly respectable hotel on Union Square, always crowded, with a good security force. He could try it on the street outside, either before or after the meeting, but the streets in that area were well populated and well patrolled. Besides which, the St. Francis had three entrances on three different streets; he had no way of knowing which one I would use.

There were a hundred better, safer ways to make his move against me, and none of them required a telephone call to set up a meeting. It was possible that he’d been telling the truth, that he wasn’t the body-washer who’d gunned down Eberhardt and me — but if that was the case, then why had Kam Fong lied to me? Why had Lee Chuck put on his Charlie Chan act and made his veiled threats? No, I didn’t buy it. Quon was the boy, all right. And he was up to something. But what, damn it? What was the purpose in announcing himself to me beforehand?

In the bathroom, I ran cold water into the sink and washed my face. Then I got myself dressed and presentable enough so I could walk into the St. Francis without causing a stir. When I had the .38 clipped on under my jacket I shrugged one-armed into my overcoat, put on a hat to keep my head warm, and went out and double-locked the door behind me.

There was fog mixed with the overcast now, but it was a high fog, capering over the tops of the buildings. The street and the sidewalks were empty at the moment; they glistened faintly in the shine of the streetlamps and building lights. I turned left off the stairs, toward where I had parked my car. The wind blew chill against my face; crosscurrents of it came down the narrow, cement-floored alley that separated my building from the one adjacent, tugging at my hat, and I reached up to jam the thing down a little tighter on my head.

And that was when I saw the dark-colored sedan illegally parked in one of the driveways next door.

The sedan was the first warning. The second was the shadowy presence on the passenger side, and the third and fourth were the facts that the window was rolled down and the door was not quite shut. All the muscles in my body seemed to knot up at once. I did not have time to think; the rest of it was instinct. I was already moving, sweeping the flaps of my overcoat and jacket back so I could get at the .38, when he came up out of the car. And I was two steps into the blackness of the alley before he cut loose with his first shot.

The gun made a muffled farting sound — not the .357 Magnum, a smaller piece outfitted with a silencer; the slug missed somewhere behind me and there was a thwacking undersound as it buried itself in the side wall of my building. I couldn’t see where I was going; my right knee hit something — one of the garbage cans tucked back in there — just as I yanked the .38 free of its holster. It broke my stride, made me stumble. Then I banged into another of the cans, got my feet tangled up, and went down in a sideways sprawl that clacked my teeth together and caused an eruption of pain in my shoulder.

The fall probably saved my life. A second bullet slashed at the air above me; I heard the whine of a ricochet off one of the metal storage bins at the rear of the alley. I still had a grip on the .38. I scrambled around with it on the rough floor, amid a thin litter of wind-blown leaves and papers, until I was lying extended on my right side, facing toward the street. Pain and sweat had blurred my vision, but I could see him out there on the sidewalk, outlined by the streetlamp across the way — feet spread, body dipped into the same kind of shooter’s crouch he’d used at Eberhardt’s house.

He squeezed off a third time before I could get him lined up. It was a low shot, wide again; the slug burned off the pavement, skipped away into the blackness. One of my legs jerked in involuntary reflex and the shoe heel cracked into another garbage can. The lid came off, hit the pavement with an echoing clatter just as I pulled the trigger on the .38.

The shot was wild, like all of his had been, but the fact that I was armed and all the sudden noise made him unwilling to stick around for any more gunplay. He dodged away from the alley, back to where the sedan was. I levered up to my knees, grunting with the effort, and swiped the sweat out of my eyes with the coat sleeve. Above and behind me, somebody started yelling; it sounded like my neighbor, Litchak. Out on the street, the sedan’s engine roared. I made it to my feet as the car cut into view, tires howling, headlights dark. It seesawed out into the middle of the street, straightened out, and was gone before I could take more than three stumbling steps toward the alley mouth.

I stopped; I had nowhere to go now, no way to give chase. And a flashlight beam had come on and was poking down around me: Litchak. The gun, I thought, don’t let him see it. I jammed it into the holster, pulled the coat and jacket flaps over it an instant before the cone of light picked me up.

“What the hell is going on down there?”

I turned into the glare of the flash. Litchak was up on the staircase landing outside his back door, leaning over the railing with the flashlight at arm’s length. When he recognized me he called something I could not make out and came thumping down the stairs. In the adjacent building, a couple of people had their heads poked out of open windows, gawking. I glanced back at the street again, but there wasn’t anybody out there that I could see.

My shoulder felt as though somebody had set it afire; I could not move the arm at all without aggravating the pain. I was breathing in little ragged gasps when Litchak pounded up.

“I should’ve known it would be you,” he said. He was wearing bathrobe and slippers, and what hair he had stuck up at angles like a fright wig. “Christ Almighty, what’d you get yourself into this time?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Yeah? I thought I heard a shot.”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Well then? What was all the commotion about?”

“Kids,” I said. “They hassled me a little, that’s all. Tried to muscle me around back here as I was leaving the building.”

“You want me to call the cops?”

“No,” I said. “I told you, it’s nothing important.”

He didn’t believe me; that was plain enough even in the darkness. But he didn’t press it. He knew me pretty well — he’d been peripherally involved in a couple of my past skirmishes — and he was the kind, like Milo Petrie, who minded his own business.

He said, “You hurt? You don’t look so good.”

“Banged up my bad shoulder. I’ll be okay.”

“Sure?”

“Positive. Go on back to bed.”

The people in the adjacent building were still gawking out of their windows; I called up to them to go to bed too, there was nothing more to see and nothing to worry about. I did not want anybody over there calling the police, either.

“You better hit the sack yourself,” Litchak said, “the shape you’re in.”

“I will. I shouldn’t have come out in the first place.”

“I guess you shouldn’t. I never saw a man like you. You attract trouble like that garbage over there attracts flies. You don’t watch yourself, my friend, you’ll wind up in a coffin before your time.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He went back up the side stairs, shaking his head, and I went out to the street. My hat was lying on the sidewalk; I stooped to pick it up. Then I went in through the front entrance and upstairs to my flat. I was all right until I got inside; then delayed reaction set in, as it always does after a thing like this, and I had a few bad minutes — the shakes, hot and cold flashes, stomach cramps. I stayed in a chair, not thinking about anything, enduring it, until my brain and my body quieted down.

The fire still burned in my shoulder. I went into the bathroom, washed the grit from the alley off my hands and face. Then I stripped off my clothes and removed the bandage and looked at the wound. It had an inflamed look around the edges and one of the remaining stitches had pulled loose. Not too bad, though, considering; I could have ripped the whole thing wide open. I was due for a visit to Doctor Abrams tomorrow — he could take care of it then. I did not want to put anything on it myself because I didn’t know if that was the right thing to do.

I put the bandage back on and went and got into bed. The fingers on my left hand were cold as well as stiff; I lay there massaging warmth into them. Thinking about Jimmy Quon.

The way he had worked his trap was so damn simple I hadn’t even considered it. Set up a phony meeting just to get me out of the building at a certain time, so he could ambush me out front. He could not have known I would be in bed when the call came, that it would take me a few minutes to get dressed and moving; I could have left immediately after the call. Which meant the voice on the phone hadn’t belonged to him. He would not have had time to talk to me, even from down on Van Ness or somewhere else nearby, and then get up here and into position. No, it had to have been some friend of his, maybe another boo how doy for Hui Sip. I’d never heard Quon’s voice; if the caller said he was Jimmy Quon, I was supposed to believe it. And I had, pretty as you please.

Stupid. Stupid! Two major blunders today, and the second one in spite of my vows to use my head, be careful, not make any more mistakes. I had been lucky this time, but if I let it happen again, the odds were I’d be dead. And Kerry could keep her promise not to cry at my funeral.

Getting old, getting slow, getting stupid — yeah. But there wouldn’t be any third blunder. Quon wasn’t going to kill me; no way. He’d had his chance tonight and he’d blown it, and now it was my turn. Now I was the one who was going to eat some pie.

Mau Yee, I thought, you’re a dead cat. One way or another, sooner or later — a dead cat.