Stealing the Dragon

Chapter Twenty-six

San Francisco, present day

Cape pulled alongside the curb directly across from the park, only a block from the house where Sloth lived. Linda was waiting at the door when he arrived, her hair moving despite the lack of wind.

“Thanks for meeting me here,” said Cape.

Linda gave him a noncommittal smile. “Learn anything new?”

“I think someone wants me dead.”

“That’s new?” asked Linda. “I’ll bet plenty of people want you dead-ex-girlfriends, their ex-husbands or fiances from before you came along, their therapists, who are probably sick of hearing about you-”

Cape cut her off. “I think someone is trying to kill me-note the use of the present tense.”

“Oh,” said Linda, her hair shifting in apology. “That’s different. I guess that means you’re making progress, huh?” She smiled encouragingly and turned to enter the house.

“You find anything?”

Linda’s hair nodded but she didn’t turn around. “I think so.”

Cape followed her through the short foyer, wondering if any of her other friends thought of her hair as a separate person, a fuzzy third wheel that wouldn’t leave you alone.

Sloth had designed his home around his affliction. Born with a rare neurological disorder, the Sloth didn’t get his nickname from how he looked, but for how he moved. Far slower than the world’s slowest mammal, it could take him an hour to cross the room, minutes to finish a single sentence. Until he came into contact with his first computer, the Sloth was trapped inside a frozen body that could only move at a glacial pace.

A large living room dominated the first floor, an open kitchen off to the side separated from the living area by a short counter. In the living room sat small islands of furniture, each arranged by function, none more than three feet apart. A television, DVD player, and amplifier sat off to the left, surrounded by a set of chairs and a small couch. Filing cabinets and a desk sat a few feet away, clustered together in a pattern that seemed quite deliberate but entirely unconventional, as if someone wanted to decorate their house with the furniture equivalent of crop circles.

In the center of the room were the computers. Box-shaped servers lined the carpeted floor beneath a wide desk shaped like a crescent moon, above which were mounted four plasma screens. Sloth sat behind the desk, his face bathed in iridescent light.

Computers had revealed Sloth’s curse to be a mixed blessing. While his body steadfastly refused to speed up, his brain was faster than a laptop on steroids. He saw patterns in data invisible to cryptographers, heard music in equations that spoke only to mathematicians. The screens in front of him flowed like rivers-numbers and bit streams scrolling downward at a dizzying rate, Sloth’s hands shifting spasmodically across the top of the desk. A liquid crystal square was directly below his fingers, a touch-sensitive screen he designed himself. A butterfly landing on the desk could activate it, and the Sloth could play it like a piano. As Cape watched, words and symbols appeared and disappeared from the surface of the desk like stray thoughts, a holographic code only understood by the pale, stoic man behind the desk.

“Hello, old friend,” said Cape warmly.

Sloth’s watery eyes blinked slowly behind his glasses and his mouth twitched, an expression that would have looked pained on anyone else but was somehow full of affection. A lurch of his right hand and the second screen from the left went blank. As Cape watched, words appeared in large black type on the glowing surface.

WANT TO KNOW WHAT WAS ON THE SHIP?

Cape nodded and sat down next to the Sloth, while Linda, always cautious about anything emitting too much electricity, paced back and forth behind them. The room was lit by halogen lights set directly above each cluster of furniture, except the computers. The screens cast a bluish pall over Cape’s face, the words appearing as if conjured from the depths of a crystal ball.

BLUE JEANS.

Cape glanced at the inscrutable Sloth, then gave a quizzical look over his shoulder at Linda.

“That’s it?” he said. “Blue jeans?”

Linda nodded. Her hair shrugged.

“No drugs?” asked Cape. “No heroin?”

“Nope,” said Linda.

“No guns?”

Linda shook her head.

“Uranium?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Plutonium?”

“None of that,” replied Linda. “But there were several dozen refugees onboard-in case you forgot.”

Cape frowned. “No, I didn’t forget. But Mitch Yeung told me it was fairly common for refugee ships to be smuggling operations of another kind. Since they’ve already taken the risk of getting searched, why not double the profits?”

“Does that matter?” asked Linda.

Cape shrugged. “Not necessarily.”

Linda nudged him. “But…?”

“But if there was heroin onboard,” said Cape, “then it would be easier to tie the ship to Freddie Wang, since he controls the smack trade in the Bay Area.”

“Why so anxious to tie the ship to Freddie?” asked Linda.

Cape told them about his visit to Freddie Wang’s restaurant and the bomb he’d found beneath his car. When he told about his stop at the grocery store, Linda’s eyes went wide and her hair became agitated and seemed ready to leave without her. The corner of Sloth’s mouth twitched repeatedly as if he were laughing.

“There’s a corpse in your car?” asked Linda, as if she hadn’t heard correctly.

“It’s OK,” said Cape. “I told you-I bought ice.”

“Isn’t that against the law?”

“No,” replied Cape. “Ice is perfectly legal in the state of California. It’s one of the few things that is anymore, unless you want to count medicinal marijuana.”

“That’s not what I meant,” snapped Linda. “And you know it.”

Cape held up his hands and shrugged.

Linda crossed her arms. “I have no interest in getting arrested as an accessory to…to…to whatever it’s called when you drive around with a corpse in your car.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Cape said simply.

“What are you going to do with him?” demanded Linda. “I mean, with it?”

“I haven’t decided,” said Cape matter-of-factly.

Linda made a noise that sounded like harumph.

Cape smiled hopefully. “Can we talk about the ship?”

Linda didn’t answer right away, but she turned her frown toward the plasma screen, which Cape took as a conditional “yes.”

“Where was it registered?”

The words materialized on the screen, each new phrase causing the previous one to disappear.

REGISTERED IN HONG KONG…PICKED UP CARGO IN FUZHOU.

“Who is it registered to?” asked Cape.

KOWLOON IMPORTS.

Linda cut in. “But Sloth thinks that’s a dummy corporation.”

Cape looked at the Sloth while asking Linda the question. “How come?”

“He hacked their network and checked their balance sheet, then compared it with other Hong Kong shipping companies, including two that work the same trans-Pacific routes.”

“And?”

The screen on the right resolved into four quadrants, each filled with a series of columns and numbers. At the top of each square was a company name. Kowloon Imports was written in the lower right quadrant. The amount of detail on the screen made it difficult to read, and Cape didn’t know where to look. As he watched, a blue rectangle flashed across the screen, stopping at certain figures in each quadrant before jumping back to the top and beginning a new course through the data.

“The cash flow doesn’t line up with actual dates in port,” explained Linda. “We checked the records from the harbor masters in Fuzhou, Hong Kong, and San Francisco.”

Cape knew the answer to his next question but asked it anyway. “You have access to that kind of data? I thought only the feds could plug into those records.”

Linda smiled sheepishly as the Sloth’s mouth twitched.

Cape shook his head. “And you’re giving me shit for driving around with a dead guy in my trunk,” he said. “Talk about a double standard.”

“That’s not the point,” said Linda defensively.

“What is the point?” asked Cape.

THE COMPANY GETS PAID FOR

SHIPMENTS THAT AREN’T MADE.

“By whom?” asked Cape.

Linda answered before any words appeared. “We don’t know yet,” she said simply. “The money trail is complicated, but you’d think the companies expecting shipments would notice.”

“Unless they were part of the scam themselves,” mused Cape.

Linda nodded, her hair bobbing excitedly. “That’s what we thought.”

“So who owns the blue jeans?” asked Cape.

Linda nodded toward the screen.

GASP

“Gasp?” said Cape.

“That’s what everyone calls them,” said Linda, “but you’re supposed to say the letters: G-A-S-P. It’s an acronym.”

“For what?”

GREAT ASS, SEXY PACKAGE…G-A-S-P.

Cape looked from Sloth to Linda. “Unbelievable.”

“So are midriff shirts that look like they got shrunk in the dryer,” replied Linda, “but all the young girls are wearing them.”

“They’re the new designer jeans, right? Supposed to go up against Levi’s and the Gap?”

“Except they cost over a hundred dollars a pair,” replied Linda.

“Are they selling?”

“They did at first,” said Linda, “but sales have slowed considerably. They’re not the kind of jeans you’d wear every day of the week.”

“Is the company publicly traded?”

Linda nodded vigorously, her hair threatening to take flight. “GASP went public right before the crash a couple of years ago-their stock is in the toilet.”

“And they’re made overseas?”

Linda nodded. “Just like everything else.”

“In China?”

“In Fuzhou, to be specific,” said Linda. “Same place the ship came from.”

“Well, well.” Cape looked back at the screen. “Where are their headquarters?”

“Right here in San Francisco,” replied Linda. “Actually, they’re on the Embarcadero, right next door to the new headquarters for the Gap.”

“Butting up against their competitors,” said Cape.

Linda groaned. “Was that an attempted pun?”

“Couldn’t resist,” said Cape. “I don’t suppose GASP Jeans has any warehouses in town?”

An address flashed onto the screen. Cape recognized it as south of Market Street.

“Interesting.”

“What?” asked Linda.

Cape didn’t respond. Freddie Wang had basically told him to check some warehouses south of Market Street. That was fine. But he also told Cape to go fuck himself, if not in so many words. Freddie spoke in half-truths, and Cape had no way of knowing which half was bullshit. But the address on the screen was too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Cape put his hand on the Sloth’s shoulder and squeezed. “I’d be lost without you,” he said gently.

YOU STILL MIGHT BE LOST.

Cape nodded. “You’re probably right, but at least I’ve got somewhere to go.” He turned to Linda. “You mind doing one more thing?”

“What?”

“Who owns GASP?”

“Michael Long,” replied Linda. “Chairman and CEO. Used to work for Disney and, before that, the Gap. Rumor has it, he used to manage strip clubs in Vegas before coming to California.”

“That would explain his fashion sense,” said Cape. “Can you get me on his calendar tomorrow?”

Linda shrugged, her eyes narrowing. “What do you want as cover?”

“Tell him I work for your paper,” replied Cape. “And we’re doing a story on local fashion icons-Levi’s, the Gap, and him-he should love that. Tell him I’m the fashion editor.”

Linda gave him a deliberate once-over, stopping at the running shoes.

Cape shrugged. “I’ll be presentable,” he said. “I promise.”

Linda looked skeptical but nodded. “Just don’t wear jeans,” she said, “unless they’re his.”

“Got it,” replied Cape. “And thanks.”

Linda smiled, her eyes just visible beneath her shifting hair. “Anything else?”

Cape glanced at his watch. “Yeah,” he said, looking past her toward the kitchen, then over his shoulder at Sloth. “Can you spare some ice?”