The Crooked Street

37

Frost sat at the counter of a twenty-four-hour pizza café a block from the street food park. He ordered a beer and a slice of pizza for himself and Shack, who was in a carrier on the bar stool next to him. The kid behind the counter noticed the blood on Frost’s knuckles and the purplish bruise on one side of his face. When he brought a tap glass of Fat Tire and a slice of sausage pizza on a paper plate, he also brought along a plastic zipper bag filled with crushed ice.

“For your chin,” he said.

“Good man,” Frost replied.

He took a ball of sausage from the pizza slice and pushed it through the door of the carrier. Shack began to play hockey with it. Frost took a bite of the pizza itself and realized that he wasn’t hungry. Instead, he drank his beer and held the bag of ice against his face, where it numbed his jaw.

There were a couple of teenagers at a corner table in the café, but Frost was the only person sitting at the counter. Everyone else was in the nightclub next door. Live rock music blasted through the wall, and the thump of the bass made Frost’s beer glass vibrate. He grimaced at the noise. His head spun.

Silently, he swore at himself for fighting back. Duane had touched a raw nerve, mostly because all his accusations were true. Frost had tried to walk the safe side of the line with Tabby for months, but he’d been kidding himself. All along, he’d been playing with fire.

Now the fire had burned them down.

He wondered what his sister, Katie, would have said. He could almost hear her voice in his ear as if this were the most delicious gossip in the world.

You and Duane? In love with the same girl? Oh, Frost, that is too funny.

It wasn’t funny at all, but Katie would have laughed.

Frost shook his head. He knew his parents wouldn’t laugh. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, his mother would be on the phone to ask him what on earth he was thinking by getting in the middle of his brother’s relationship. And by breaking his brother’s nose. It didn’t matter that Duane had thrown the first punch and kept going when Frost tried to stop the fight. Frost was the younger brother, but he was supposed to be the adult between the two of them.

“You want another?”

Frost looked at his beer glass. It was empty. “Sure, why not?”

“So who got in the way of your fist?” the kid asked as he brought Frost his beer. The name tag on his apron read “Lido.”

“My brother, actually.”

“Ouch. That’s biblical. So what happened between you guys? A girl, right? It’s always a girl.”

“It’s a girl,” Frost said.

“Who won?”

“I’m pretty sure we both lost.”

“I hear you,” Lido replied. “Sorry, man.”

He left Frost to return to the pizza oven as two gay men came into the café hand in hand and began perusing the menu that was posted behind the counter. While they mulled their order, Frost drank his beer and listened to the rock music roaring through the wall. The volume made it hard to think about anything else, which was fine.

He studied the indie rock band posters crowded on the café wall and recognized almost none of them. Pinned among the band posters, oddly, were half a dozen postcards featuring the ruins of Machu Picchu among the green Peruvian mountains. For some reason, he found himself unable to take his eyes off the postcards. They made him think about going somewhere far away.

His phone rang. There was no one he wanted to talk to right now, but he checked the caller ID anyway. It was Trent Gorham. Frost frowned, and then he answered the call.

“Trent,” he said.

“Just checking in. Any word on Mr. Jin?”

“Not a thing.”

“You find his kid? You talk to him?”

Frost decided it was safer to lie. “No.”

“Too bad. Anything else I should know about?”

“I can’t think of a thing,” Frost replied.

“Well, let me know if you catch a break. I’ve been all over Chinatown. If anyone spots Mr. Jin, I’m their first call.”

“Keep me posted,” Frost said.

He hung up and finished his beer. It was time to go. He took a last look around the restaurant, then flagged down Lido and pushed a couple of bills across the counter. “Will that cover it?”

“Definitely. You want change?”

“No, keep it.”

Frost grabbed Shack’s carrier and headed for the door. He was halfway outside when he stopped. He wasn’t even sure why he stopped or why the question popped into his head, but he turned around and went back to the bar stool where Lido was wiping down the counter. The kid looked up.

“I’m curious,” Frost said, pointing at the postcards on the bulletin board. “What’s up with Machu Picchu?”

Lido shrugged. “It’s the coolest place in the world. You been there?”

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Lido said.

“Then how do you know it’s the coolest place in the world?”

“Well, just look at it. The stone walls. The mountains up in the clouds. Imagine the Incas building something like that hundreds of years ago. It’s my spirit place.”

“Your what?”

“My spirit place,” Lido repeated. “Hey, we all have one of those. Some place that really speaks to you, you know, that follows you wherever you go. Like maybe you lived there in a past life, know what I mean? Don’t you have a place like that?”

Frost smiled. “San Francisco.”

“Then you’re lucky, man. Not many of us get to live where we’re supposed to live. For me, it’s Machu Picchu. I don’t even know if I’ll ever get there, but I just know it’s out there, and that makes me happy. I’ll tell you, though, if somebody ever drops a few thousand bucks in my lap, I’m out the door the next day and on my way to Peru.”

“Your spirit place,” Frost said.

Lido nodded. “Damn straight.”

Frost took another twenty dollars out of his wallet. “Put this toward Peru,” he said.

Then he practically ran for the door. He knew where Mr. Jin was.

No one at the dozens of Niagara Falls motels appreciated the call from the San Francisco policeman in the middle of the night. It was almost midnight as Frost dialed, which meant it was three in the morning in upstate New York. Some of the larger chain hotels had overnight staff, but many were mom-and-pop proprietors who bit his head off when he woke them up to ask about Mr. Jin. For the ones that didn’t answer, he left messages asking them to call back.

Over the course of two hours, he made more than sixty calls, but he still had nearly two hundred hotels left to reach on his TripAdvisor list. No one recognized or remembered Mr. Jin, and Frost began to wonder if he’d been wrong about where the chef had gone with his sudden influx of cash. Maybe Niagara Falls wasn’t his spirit place after all.

He decided to take a shower to wake himself up before going on with the calls. He spent a long time letting the hot water pour over his head and attack his sore muscles, and then he went back downstairs to the sofa where Shack was already asleep. He picked up the phone and grabbed the list, but his eyes blinked shut before he made another call, and he was gone.

He slept heavily. It was still dark outside when something started him awake. He had to shake off his bad dreams before he realized that his phone was ringing. He grabbed it from the coffee table and saw that it was six thirty in the morning. He’d slept for nearly five hours.

“Frost Easton,” he said groggily.

“Inspector Easton, good morning! This is Weazie Palmer at the Summer Mist Motel in beautiful Niagara Falls, New York. You left a message on my machine overnight. My goodness, you were up late!”

His first conscious thought was that Weazie should drink decaf.

“Thanks for calling me back, Ms. Palmer. I was wondering if you had a guest staying with you from San Francisco named Mr. Jin. J-I-N.”

“Call me Weazie! I don’t picture Californians as the formal type, for heaven’s sake. Do you have a first name for this Mr. Jin?”

Frost thought about it. “Honestly, no, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, well, no matter. I’m sure we’re talking about the same man. I spent a whole lot of time chatting with him about the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz and those seals at Pier 39. I love San Francisco. My guests come here to honeymoon, but I went out there to honeymoon, isn’t that ironic? Very nice man, Mr. Jin. A chef, he said. When I found that out, I tried to pepper him for recipes, but he wouldn’t give up any secrets.”

“Is Mr. Jin still there? Can you connect me with his room?”

“Well, I would, Inspector, but he checked out three days ago.”

“Three days?” Frost asked.

“Yes, he didn’t stay with us long. Paid cash, too, which is unusual.”

Frost closed his eyes. He didn’t understand. If Mr. Jin had left Niagara Falls three days ago, he should have been back in the city by now. “Did Mr. Jin tell you anything about his itinerary?” he asked. “Did he say where he was heading next?”

“Home is what he told me.”

Frost shook his head. “Do you happen to know what airline he took?”

“Airline?” Weazie said. “No, no planes for Mr. Jin. He said he’d never flown in his life and wasn’t about to start. He took the bus here, and he took the bus back. I can understand being afraid of flying, but he must have spent practically his whole vacation sitting in a Greyhound seat.”

A bus.

Greyhound.

Frost thanked Weazie Palmer and quickly hung up the phone. The next thing he did was pull up the Greyhound website and check the routes between Niagara Falls and San Francisco for departures three days earlier. The time and distance explained Mr. Jin’s long absence. It was a sixty-nine-hour cross-country journey with four transfers along the way in Buffalo, Columbus, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

When Frost checked his watch, he saw that the last leg of the journey would be bringing Mr. Jin into the Greyhound bus station on Folsom Street at 7:05 a.m.

That was in twenty minutes.