The Crooked Street

1

Denny Clark emerged through a cloud of steam into the cold darkness of Chinatown.

The fragrance of ginger and jasmine, and the spitting sizzle of hot oil, chased him into the alley. His shoes tracked footprints outlined in pig’s blood onto the stone. He slammed the metal door behind him, silencing the chorus of voices bellowing in Mandarin from the restaurant kitchen. With sweat on his forehead, Denny breathed hard and nervously eyed the shadows. On either side of the walkway, brick buildings rose six stories over his head, and fire escapes clung to the walls. The alley-front shops were barred and padlocked. It was ten o’clock on Friday night.

He’d come here to deliver a warning, but he was too late. Mr. Jin was already gone. So was his son. No one had seen or heard from them for three long days.

Denny squinted at the faces in the alley. Two Chinese teenage girls chirped to each other as they zigzagged toward him in short skirts and high heels. A hooker serviced a bald client in the doorway of a massage parlor. Barely ten feet away, a homeless man bared his yellowed teeth and banged a copper mug against the pavement. Denny threw him some change from his pocket.

He clutched a phone in his damp palm. He’d written the number for Zingari on the back of his hand because he knew he might need it later. He struggled to read the numbers; the moisture on his skin had made the ink run. He dialed and waited as the phone in the busy Tenderloin restaurant rang and rang.

Finally, an impatient voice answered. Denny could hear a clarinet warbling jazz in the background.

“Is Chester there?” Denny asked.

“What?”

“Chester,” Denny repeated loudly and urgently, trying to cut through the noise. “I need to talk to Chester.”

“Hang on.”

The noise of the restaurant disappeared. He was put on hold, and he gripped the phone tightly as he waited. Maroon 5 kept him company, and he listened to “Payphone” all the way to the rap by Wiz Khalifa before a new voice came on the line.

“This is Virgil. Talk to me.”

“Virgil, it’s Denny Clark. I was looking for Chester.”

“Well, well, Denny. It’s been a long time, stranger. How come you haven’t had me out on the boat lately? I’m hurt. Devastated. In need of tequila.”

“I’m sorry, but this is important. I need to talk to Chester right away.”

I need to warn him, Denny thought.

“Well, you’re too late, amigo,” Virgil replied.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Chester decamped. Disembarked. Departed. Hit the highway. He decided San Francisco wasn’t cosmopolitan enough for him. He moved to — are you ready for this? — Pocatello, Idaho. As if that’s even a real place. He texted the manager yesterday and said he wants to be closer to his parents. Appalling. Not even a farewell drink.”

Denny squeezed his eyes shut. “Are you sure?”

“I’m staring at the bar now. The new bartender is some scary brunette with a lot of ink.”

“Okay. Thanks, Virgil.”

Denny hung up the phone. He squeezed his hand into a fist and pushed it against his forehead. Everything was crashing down around him. He knew Chester hadn’t moved to Idaho. He’d hung out with Chester since high school and knew that his parents were both dead. The text was a lie.

Chester was gone.

Mr. Jin and his son, Fox, were gone.

So was Carla.

Carla, his ex-wife, who’d been in and out of Denny’s life for a decade, who’d loved and hated him in equal measure. They’d gotten her, too.

Denny had taken BART under the bay three hours earlier to visit Carla’s apartment in Berkeley. The police were already there with squad cars and an ambulance outside the building. Suicide, they told him. Her roommate had found her in the rose-colored water of the bathtub. Carla had cut her wrists in two deep vertical slashes and bled out.

Another lie.

Carla hadn’t killed herself, not like that. As long as he’d known her, she’d been scared sick of the sight of blood. Even if she’d intended to kill herself, she would have chosen another way. And she would have left a note to make sure he felt guilty about what she’d done.

No, she’d been murdered. Just like the others. Carla, Chester, Mr. Jin, and Fox. To Denny, that meant only one thing.

He was next.

Denny hurried north through the Chinatown alley. Red-and-black graffiti painted the brick walls, and empty paper bags made cartwheels along the pavement. Banners with Chinese characters snapped like flags in the stiff breeze. He passed a Christian mission. A tea shop selling herbs and ginseng. A fortune cookie factory. Ahead of him, protesters pounded a war beat on their drums.

When he was almost to Jackson Street, a sixth sense made him spin around. He backed into a doorway out of the neon glow and watched the kitchen door of Mr. Jin’s restaurant. Something was wrong. Something had changed in the seconds since he’d walked away. Then he realized: The homeless man with the copper mug had vanished. He’d disappeared after Denny left.

There were no coincidences now. Denny was being watched. His enemy had eyes everywhere.

He waited for a gap among the pedestrians, then burst from the alley and ran. He weaved uphill, dodging past fruit markets and dim-sum restaurants. He veered across Jackson, drawing horns from the cars jammed up at the intersection. At the corner, he stopped and looked over his shoulder. The faces of the people on the sidewalk glowed red under paper lanterns hung over the street. He watched for someone breaking from the crowd in pursuit, but he saw no one. He turned and quickly walked away, head down. Two blocks later, he turned again. And then again. He kept going until he found another alley where the neighborhood was quiet and deserted.

He made a second phone call.

“It’s Denny,” he said.

“Denny? What’s up? Are you okay?”

“They’re all dead, you bastard. He killed them. Even Carla. And now he’s coming after me.”

There was a long pause on the line. “Slow down. What are you talking about? Who’s dead?”

“Everyone, all of them,” Denny replied. “Except me. I’m the last one. You think he’s going to let me walk away?”

“Where are you right now?”

“Chinatown.”

“I’ll come get you.”

“You?” Denny said. “No, I don’t think so. You got me into this.”

“Look, find a place to hide, and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Denny didn’t reply. The only noise on the street was the raspy whistle of his own breathing. He stood next to a secondhand clothing shop and peered around the corner at the empty block. A streetlight illuminated the sidewalk close to him, but the opposite side was dark. Then a tiny flame came and went in the shadows, and the wind carried the smell of a cigarette across the asphalt.

He wasn’t alone. They’d already found him again.

Denny stared at the phone in his hand. “Are you tracking me?”

“What?”

“You gave me this phone. Did you tell him where to find me?”

“Denny, don’t be crazy. I can protect you.”

“This was a trap all along, wasn’t it?” Denny insisted. “You’re working for him. You planned this whole thing from the beginning.”

“No, stop, listen to me—”

Denny threw the phone sharply to the ground, where it smashed into pieces. He sprinted toward the far end of the alley. When he got to the next street, he shot a glance over his shoulder. In the same place where he’d made his phone call, a lone silhouette watched him from between the buildings. The man made no move to lay chase, as if he knew Denny had no way to escape. Denny ran anyway, as fast as his pounding heart allowed. He crossed Powell Street and climbed the next block to Mason, where cable car tracks stretched along the pavement. He’d left Chinatown behind him. He was in the Russian Hill neighborhood now. From here, the streets climbed into the sky, as steep as mountains.

Muscle cramps tightened around his stomach and legs. His thighs quivered. He couldn’t run anymore. As he doubled over with exhaustion and grabbed his knees, a puff of air whipped by him, so close to his head that it ruffled his hair. A tiny ping of shrapnel struck the concrete wall behind him. There was no fire, no smoke, no gunshot, but someone had just shot at him and missed.

He looked back. Halfway down the block, a small man hiked calmly toward him through the darkness. The man carried a pistol with a strangely elongated barrel. An air gun. Silent. Lethal.

It was just the two of them on the street. Denny and the man who was going to kill him.

He staggered toward a dead end above him, where steps led through parkland to the heights of the Russian Hill neighborhood. Behind him, careful, measured, unhurried footsteps closed the gap between them. Another low pop and a strange puff of air filled his ears, and this time, he felt a pinch on his neck no more painful than a bee sting. He slapped his skin the way he would to kill an insect. When he looked at his fingers, he saw a smear of blood. Just a little bit, not the gushing flow of a bullet wound. He stared down the hill and saw the man not even twenty yards away, watching him calmly.

Waiting.

Denny rubbed the blood between his fingers until it dried. He took a breath in and out. He told himself that he was fine, but somewhere in his mind, he knew that he was not fine at all. He was going to die like the others. It was tempting just to sit down on the steps and accept the inevitable. The peaks of Russian Hill loomed like Everest above him, and he had almost no strength to go on.

Even so, he knew one person who lived up there, practically in the clouds. Once upon a time, the two of them had been like brothers, but they hadn’t spoken in years. He couldn’t call him a friend anymore, but he didn’t need a friend right now.

He needed a cop.

Denny climbed. Each step was a stab of torture. He wheezed in and out and realized he was struggling now to find the air his lungs needed. But he climbed. He made his way up the slope to Taylor Street, where there was another hill, steeper and more intimidating than the one before. And still he climbed. The higher he rose, the more the nighttime city opened up in a panorama of lights. He saw Coit Tower. He saw the pyramid of the Transamerica building. A ribbon of white lights marked the Bay Bridge.

He didn’t know how much time had passed since the sting. It might have been only a few minutes; it might have been half the night. The man who’d shot him hadn’t even bothered following him. Why follow a dead man?

Denny began to notice strange things happening to his body. His lips felt numb. His tongue grew thick and swollen. Drool ran down his chin. His head throbbed, and he swayed with each step, feeling the world spin. When he reached the last cruel set of stairs up into the trees, he found his limbs growing stiff, as if he were Pinocchio morphing back into wood. His body became a sea of tremors.

Every time he sat down to rest, he was sure that he wouldn’t get up. But he did. He climbed and climbed, and finally, he broke from the trees onto the summit, where the house was. He’d been here before. Half a dozen times in the past two years, Denny had come here to make peace, and each time, he’d driven away without even having the courage to go to the door.

There were no lights inside. For all he knew, the house was empty, and all of his labor was for nothing.

Denny collapsed on the sidewalk. His forehead hit the pavement, his glasses broke, and blood trickled down his face. He couldn’t walk anymore, so he crawled. He put a hand forward, then a knee, over and over, until he reached the front steps of the house. He slithered toward the door like a snake, and when he was there, he somehow willed his paralyzed body to stand.

He rang the bell again and again and again. And he waited.

A few seconds later, the outside light went on, and the door opened. There was his old friend, staring at him with horrified surprise.

“Denny?” Frost Easton said. “My God, what happened to you?”

Denny had so much to say and no breath with which to say it. His frozen knees caved beneath him, and Frost caught him. Denny was dead weight, but Frost held him under his shoulder blades, and they stood there locked in each other’s arms, face-to-face.

Two old friends who weren’t friends anymore.

Denny found one last word at the bottom of his throat. Someone needed to know the truth. Someone needed to know who’d done this. He gasped it to Frost before the fog closed over him.

“Lombard.”