The Crooked Street

34

Darkness caught up with Frost as he headed across the city toward Chinatown. Traffic crawled from red light to red light. Up and down the hills, the neighborhoods changed. First there were painted ladies among the houses, and then there were painted ladies on the streets. Neon lit up the storefronts, glowing on leather and fishnets on the sidewalks. He passed Fillmore, which was young and hip and rocking with music. He rolled on through Nob Hill, where the rose window of Grace Cathedral glowed like a blue star and the smell of money oozed from the Mark Hopkins, the Stanford Court, and the Fairmont hotels.

At Stockton, he turned north and crossed into Mr. Jin’s world.

His favorite Chinatown restaurant was on Washington Street only two blocks from Mr. Jin’s apartment. He pulled his Suburban into the tow-away zone outside the brightly lit door. The owner was a tiny Chinese woman who knew him well. She could have been anywhere from fifty to four hundred years old. She saw him and waved, and five minutes later, one of her daughters brought a brown paper bag out to his truck. He paid and gave the girl a large tip, and then he divvied up the order between himself and Shack. Frost ate stir-fried beef and baby bok choy with an order of barbecued pork. Shack ate shrimp fried rice and a fortune cookie.

The paper fortune that Frost took out of the cookie felt ominous. Someone close to you is not your friend.

He tried calling the number that Fox had given him, but the boy’s cell phone was turned off, so the call went straight to voice mail. He left a message. When he was done with dinner, he hiked uphill. The street was lined with gift shops, dragon murals, pagoda facades, and second-floor acupuncture clinics. Paper lanterns glowed like cherries under the awnings, and car headlights swept the walls. Every other doorway was a bakery or restaurant, and he found Mr. Jin’s hole-in-the-wall dim-sum house on the ground floor of the building adjacent to the chef’s apartment.

The restaurant itself was simply called Jin. It was nothing to look at outside, but inside, the handful of tables were covered with white tablecloths and surrounded by black lacquered chairs carved with Chinese characters. The clientele was all Asian, and there wasn’t an empty seat anywhere. Waiters in starched white uniforms pushed dim-sum carts from table to table Hong Kong style, and he saw steaming bamboo pots of har gow and shu mei. He noticed that the framed posters decorating the wall were not Chinese cityscapes from Kowloon or Shanghai but were all pictures of Niagara Falls, just like in Mr. Jin’s apartment.

He asked to see the manager, who was younger than Frost expected. He didn’t look old enough to drink. He was dressed in a tuxedo, and his black hair was oiled and lay flat on his head. He bowed when Frost showed him his badge.

“How may I help you?” he asked politely.

“I need to find Mr. Jin,” Frost replied. “Has he been in here lately?”

“Mr. Jin? Oh no, he rarely comes here. He hires me to run his restaurant. Best dim sum in Chinatown. You want a table? I always find a table for a police officer. You keep us safe.”

“Thank you, but no. It’s very important that I find Mr. Jin quickly. He isn’t in his apartment, and he’s not in his restaurant. Where should I look for him?”

The young man’s face wrinkled unhappily. “I’m very sorry. If Mr. Jin is not at home, then he must be cooking somewhere. I have never known him to do anything else.”

“How does he get around? Does he have a car?”

“No, mostly he walks,” the manager told him.

“He walks?”

“Oh yes. Mr. Jin does not believe in modern things. Sometimes he will take the bus, but more often than not, he walks.”

“What about friends or family? Is there anyone local he might stay with?”

“His only family is his son. The rest of his family is in China. As for friends, I don’t know of any. Mr. Jin is a very private person. When he is not working, I believe he is usually by himself.”

Frost couldn’t help but think that he and Mr. Jin had been cut from the same cloth. If the chef had a cat, it would have been uncanny. The good and the bad of Mr. Jin being an elusive loner was that he was hard to find. If Frost didn’t know how to track him down, neither did Lombard.

“Has his son been in here recently?” Frost asked. “Do you know where he is?”

“No, I haven’t seen Fox in nearly a week.”

Frost handed the man his card. “If you see or hear from Mr. Jin, tell him to call me immediately. It’s extremely important. Understand? No delay.”

“Immediately,” the man repeated.

Frost headed out of the dining room. He stopped in the foyer to examine several framed magazine reviews that were hung on the wall. Most of the articles included photographs of Mr. Jin, and Frost realized he’d never seen a picture of the man before. The photos had all been taken at different times, but Mr. Jin’s expression was identical in each one. He wore no smile or frown, just seriousness on his face. He wasn’t old, probably no more than forty, and he was lean, which made sense for someone who spent his days hiking the San Francisco hills. His eyes were dark, and his black hair was shaved to stubble on his skull. Despite reviews calling him one of the city’s top chefs, he looked unimpressed by all the fuss.

Outside, the sidewalk was busy, and the night air was fragrant with flowers. Cars jammed the street like a backed-up pipe, and pedestrians jaywalked between the bumpers. He headed downhill toward his Suburban but stopped when he felt the buzz of a text arriving on his phone. He checked it and saw a single-line message from a blocked number:

Frost turned around. He studied the Chinese faces coming and going on the street. No one in the crowd seemed interested in him. He turned the corner into the alley and waited for his eyes to adjust. The lone streetlight was broken, making the walkway darker than the bright neon of Washington Street. It smelled of burnt oil from the restaurant kitchens. The same homeless man who’d haunted the alley three nights earlier was still there, eyeing him from under his wool blanket. People came and went like ghosts in the wisps of fog. Overhead, clotheslines stretched between the windows and the fire escapes.

Not far away, a silhouette in black stood with one foot propped against the redbrick wall. It was Fox, grinning at him.

“Hey, Copper. You find Lombard yet?”

Frost didn’t like hearing Lombard’s name shouted out loud. He checked the alley in both directions and then walked up to Fox. The boy was a foot shorter than he was, and half his weight, but Frost had learned the hard way not to treat him as harmless. “Hello, Fox.”

“I got your message. Here I am.”

“I’m glad you came, but you should stay away from this area,” Frost warned him. “Don’t go back to your father’s apartment. If people aren’t looking for you right now, they will be soon.”

Fox shrugged. “If they see me, they have to catch me. Nobody catches Fox.”

“Don’t underestimate these people,” Frost said. “Have you heard anything from Mr. Jin?”

“Not a word. You know where he is yet?”

“No, but the good news is, he’s alive.”

“Yeah? How can you be sure?”

“Because Lombard’s still looking for him,” Frost said. “That’s also the bad news. Your father’s not safe.”

“Is this about Denny and the boat?”

“Yes.”

Fox frowned. “Word on the street is that the guy who killed Denny ate a train. So why is Lombard still after Mr. Jin?”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about that cruise last Tuesday,” Frost said. “Mr. Jin may be the only one who has the answers. That’s why Lombard wants to keep him quiet. If you see your father or he contacts you, make sure he does not go home. Got it? Call me, and I’ll meet the two of you wherever you are.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I wish you’d let me find you a safe place to stay until we locate him,” Frost said. “I can protect you.”

Fox laughed at the suggestion. “Protect me? You seen a mirror lately? You don’t look so good. Maybe I should be protecting you.”

Frost laughed, too. “Well, I could do a lot worse than you for a bodyguard, that’s for sure. But you said yourself that everybody sees everything around here. If you hang out in Chinatown, Lombard will know it, and sooner or later your luck is going to run out.”

The boy winked. “It’s not luck, man.”

“Don’t get cocky, Fox. You’re good, but Lombard has a lot of people working for him.”

“So do I. Around here, people have my back.”

“Oh?”

“See for yourself,” Fox said.

The boy snapped his fingers.

A moment later, a sharp crack like the explosion of a bullet erupted behind Frost. He ducked and spun around and yanked his gun into his hand. The acrid smell of black powder filled his nose. He looked for a shooter but saw no one, and then he focused on the homeless man crouched against the opposite wall. The old man’s eyes glittered with amusement in the reflections from the street. He flicked something from his fingers, sending a ribbon of sparks through the air. A firecracker hit the ground, sizzled, and then exploded with a bang.

The homeless man laughed so hard he began to hack into his blanket.

Frost turned around again. Fox was already gone. No more than a few seconds had passed; there simply hadn’t been time for him to disappear entirely. He squinted down the alley, but the boy wasn’t there. Then he heard more laughter, directly over his head this time. Frost looked up.

Fox stood six feet over the alley, balanced on a metal strip of pipe bracketed to the brick wall. He had barely an inch on which to stand. As Frost watched, the boy sidestepped along the pipe like a ballet dancer and launched himself across the open space to the nearest fire escape, which seemed like an impossibly long jump. He grabbed it, dangled, and then swung his leg over his head in a way that made it look as if he had no bones in his body.

In the next second, he was standing on the platform of the fire escape.

“Don’t you worry about Fox,” he called as he began to climb the building with the grace of Spider-Man. “You just find Mr. Jin for me.”