The Man With No Time

11

Thank God I'd just bought Saran Wrap.

It was past five by the time I'd hauled him up the steep, rutted driveway and into the house, Bravo growling at him with each step, and he was still dead weight. Charlie Wah's martial-arts expert had underestimated the effect of his rabbit punch. As I propped Dumbo-Ears upright on the couch, I was hoping it was only an underestimate. He'd be a bigger problem dead than alive.

Ransacking my haphazard kitchen for the Saran Wrap, I did an emotional inventory for pity and found none. Except for the arrival of Mrs. Chan and her two umbrellas, he might now be a multiple murderer and Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, and I might be murderees.

On the other hand, I'd recently found someone I hated more, and that meant the kid got a shiny new uniform and number-a spot on the home team.

In my line of work you tend to get hurt a lot. I had two bottles of Bactine and an old scrip for antibiotics in the medicine cabinet, and after I'd dropped the Saran Wrap on the couch, I went to the bathroom and fished out the pills. I dabbed Bactine onto the long, shallow scratch on his chest and the nicks on his chin and nose, postponing the hard part. When I'd assured myself that the minor cuts wouldn't give him any trouble, I held my breath and poured quite a lot of the Bactine into the flap of skin and muscle below his left shoulder. Then, silently reciting the alphabet to distract myself from the task at hand, I moved the flap around to distribute the Bactine and wrapped the upper arm with Saran Wrap. I tried to leave some room for air at the apex of the wound.

Hauling him more or less upright, I pulled his arms behind him and wound a spiral of Saran Wrap first around his right wrist and then around his left. Finally I sheathed both wrists tightly together, mummy-fashion, with about twelve feet of crisscrossed Saran Wrap. Pulling off his boots, I took the handcuffs Charlie Wah had thoughtfully left me and snapped them tight around his delicate ankles and laid him sideways and folded his knees so I could pass a short, twisted Saran Wrap rope between the chain connecting the cuffs and the Saran Wrap that linked his wrists. Every time I moved him, Bravo growled a warning low in his throat.

After I got a couple of Ampicillin and a few aspirin down his throat, I laid him down on the couch on his side, injured shoulder up, covered him with a spare blanket, and then, in the tradition of good homemakers everywhere, I tidied up before going to bed. I made a mental note to buy more Saran Wrap in the morning. It's so useful.

I hadn't slept in what seemed like months, and this night proved to be no exception. I'd given the kid my last two aspirins, I hurt in places I hadn't known possessed nerve endings, and Bravo kept trying to set up camp on my extra pillow. Until this evening I'd been operating on fear that something might happen to Horace, but now I found that the fear had been shouldered aside by rage. The rage centered itself busily in my chest like the old fifties version of the atom, lots of little hornets zipping circles around a walnut. Each of the hornets was a separate rage: rage at the memory of the girl's slashed and terrified face, rage at the fact that Charlie Wah was still alive somewhere in the world, rage that I hadn't snapped the pillar like Samson and eviscerated Charlie and his fractured idioms with a transitive verb or a piece of broken concrete. The girl closed her eyes as the blood flowed from her cheek. The little translator stuck out his foot, and the boy fell again, over and over, like a loop of film.

I'd been a detective for almost five years now, and I'd learned that my parents' clean and comfortable world, so absolute when I was a child, was actually something that existed inside a bubble only while the real world was too busy to burst it and let the horror in. Still, I'd never built up resistance to horror as naked as this. Every time I saw the girl's eyes close, I thought, she could have been Eleanor.

The last time I looked at the clock, it said six-forty-five. At seven-twenty, the kid revealed yet another character flaw by snapping awake, with a yell, no less.

Just what I needed: an early riser.

I wrapped a towel around my middle and went into the living room. My neck ached, my sliced ear burned, and each of my joints was competing to register a complaint of its own. He was sitting up, wearing his black trousers and his Saran Wrap, and looking a little woozy. It had gotten cold during the night, so I let him stew while I threw some kindling into the wood-burner that serves as the house's only heat source and got a fire going. Duty fulfilled, I turned my attention to my patient.

“How you feeling?” I asked, trying for bright.

He glared at me, swore in Vietnamese, and slammed his back against the couch. I didn't have to understand Vietnamese to know he wasn't wishing me many grandchildren. The winter sun was just starting to beat against the east-facing windows, and as the kid thrashed, the couch threw motes of dust that danced mockingly in the air. Presumably there were always motes of dust doing the latest steps at that hour, but I was rarely privileged to see them. It was going to be a long day.

“Let's look at that arm,” I said, adopting the first-person plural of nurses everywhere. He jerked away at my touch, and Florence Nightingale did a fast fade. “Hold still or I'll pull your tongue out,” I snarled. “I'm going to look at your arm.” I looked at his arm.

His arm looked terrible.

It looked ragged and red and rotten and infected. It looked like something I couldn't look at very long. I did what men have done for centuries when faced with something too revolting to stomach. I called a woman.

“Holy smoke, Simeon,” Eleanor said from the couch less than an hour later, “this looks terrible.”

“I know,” I said, staring out the window. “Do something about it.”

Even with a stop at an all-night market to pick up more Bactine and Saran Wrap, she had arrived from her place in Venice only fifty minutes after I'd awakened her with my call. She'd always been a woman who could get dressed fast.

“He needs a doctor,” she observed.

“He's not going to get one. I told you on the phone how it happened. I was there. If we call a doctor, the doctor will call the police, and I'll probably be in jail as an accessory to several murders.”

She ignored the reproach. “That's an ugly cut. I think he's got a fever. How do you know he won't die?”

“Come here,” I said. “Into the kitchen.” She continued to peer at the wound, and I said, “Now.”

She followed me around the single corner that shielded my kitchen from the sight of those in the living room. It was a pitiful privacy, but it was all we were going to get.

“Listen,” I hissed, “It's Horace who's out there chasing these guys, Sir Galahad in his tinfoil armor, and he has no idea-”

“What if the boy dies?”

“He's not going to die. It's his arm, for Christ's sake. People get it in the arm all the time and live. Don't you watch TV?”

“Infection,” she said loudly. From the living room the boy shouted something.

“Shut up,” I yelled. “Listen,” I said to Eleanor, “if I really think he's in trouble I'll push him out of the car in front of Santa Monica Emergency. In the meantime, he's my way in.”

She closed her eyes. “Into what?” she asked at last.

“Into whatever Horace is stalking. Remember Horace?”

“Horace.” Her eyes were still tightly closed. “Poor dumb Horace. This is how he's going to make everything up to Pansy, you know.”

“Pansy's not going to be happy if he's dead,” I said, “and these people have a flair for killing. That's a direct quote.”

She turned to look out the kitchen window at a mountainside waking up to the sun. “I'll need soap,” she said. I turned to the sink to get it. “And water,” she added.

“Thank you,” I said nastily, unloading my anger on her as I had so many times. “I never would have thought of that.”

Dumbo-Ears was sitting upright on the couch, the Saran Wrap rope connecting his ankles and his wrists cut, courtesy of Eleanor the Merciful. After cleaning and disinfecting the shoulder and swabbing the other cuts and scratches, muttering generalities about man's inhumanity to man, she'd gone down to the Fernwood Market to buy a jug of Excedrin and three bottles of red wine. Only after she'd returned, loaded down with wine and unsolicited opinions about someone who'd drink it under such circumstances, did I get to take the shower I wanted so desperately and check out my ear. It looked like something belatedly snatched from a document shredder, but it would stay on. She'd dabbed it dispassionately with Bactine and left again, but not without a concerned backward glance at her homicidal little patient. Talk about wasted motion.

“Pay attention,” I said as he scowled up at me. All the lines on his face went down, and I thought briefly of those frowning faces kids draw that turn into smiling faces when you turn them upside down. “You there?” His eyes narrowed, which I took to mean that he was listening. “Okay, here it is. I really don't care if you die. But the way I figure it, we've got the same enemy.”

“Go hell,” he said.

“Up to you.” I fought down the urge to throw him through the window. “The two who were killed. What were they to you?”

His mouth tightened and relaxed and then tightened again. I figured he was going to spit, and I stepped back. But he surprised me.

“What?” he said.

I replayed what I'd said and found what I thought was the problem. What were they to you? So, unlike Charlie Wah, he wasn't a student of idiom. “Your friend?” I probed. “Your girlfriend?” He said nothing, just looked at me as though he was trying to figure out where we'd met before.

"Relatives? I asked.

The mouth worked again, and I kept my distance, but all he did was repeat, "Go hell"

“Fine,” I said, advancing on him. “Be a hardass.” Idioms be damned. I leaned over and punched him lightly on the arm that Eleanor had so meticulously unwrapped and washed and Bactined and rewrapped.

The scream would probably have pleased Torquemada, but it made me feel like shit. He fell sideways onto the couch, blubbering in the language of his mother and father and his vanquished country, and I stood over him trying to see a murderer and seeing instead a frightened seventeen-year-old.

“That's just the beginning,” I said, but my voice lacked conviction even in my ears. I heard Hammond's voice, saying something about the Vietnamese kids having lost everything. If they had anything left it was dignity, and I knew I couldn't take his.

“Don't you want to get Charlie Wah?” I asked, still leaning over him.

At the sound of Charlie Wah's name the blubbering turned into real weeping: choking, shuddering, gut-deep sobs that overpowered his will, that came from a place inside him where the will was a distant rumor. I silently went into the bedroom and closed the door to leave him alone with his grief.

When I woke up, aching like a hit-and-run victim, and remembered that I'd forgotten to take any aspirin, it was getting dark. I'd slept nine hours, and there was no sound from the living room.

He was out cold on the couch, his mouth partly open, snoring as delicately as a girl. A little more hair, I thought, and a little less ears, and he'd make quite a passable girl. I poked the fire and added some paper and wood, and waited until the coals did their incendiary work. Older than the Parthenon, I limped into the kitchen, turned on the light over the sink, ran some water, and took four Excedrins, gagging as they went down. Then I poured a glass of milk to protect my stomach from the acid and trudged heavily back into the living room to entertain my guest. Once I'd flipped on my one and only floor lamp, the wound looked a little better, despite my shameful and inept attempt at torture: The edges weren't quite so red, and nothing unwholesome seemed to be seeping from them. I tugged the Saran Wrap down to let the wound breathe, and he made a little sound of protest and then sank back into sleep. He looked even younger asleep. It was very hard to hate him, but I was determined to try.

The music for hatred is Wagner. I put Parsifal on the CD player, cranked it up, and went to open all three bottles of wine.

The opening chords had already whacked the kid awake by the time I returned, bearing a tray containing a bottle and two crystal glasses Eleanor had given me for use on special occasions. Well, this was special, if not in the precise sense she'd intended.

“Drink?” I asked.

“No,” he said sullenly, refusing to look at me.

“It wasn't really a question,” I said, pouring. It had a promising color.

“I need toilet,” he said.

“God,” I said, putting down the bottle and glass, “I thought you'd never ask.”

I lifted him to his feet and helped him hop into the bathroom. “You'll have to sit,” I said, undoing his pants and yanking them down, “and I’ll have to leave the door open. Problem?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then hold onto it,” I said. He lapsed back into angry Vietnamese, but he sat. Listening to the splash of water on porcelain, I went into the bedroom and got the gun I usually keep in Alice's dash compartment.

When I came back with the gun shoved into a pocket, he was trying to stand. I pulled him to his feet and reversed the process with his pants. The fly took some attention, which is why I was off guard when he tried to kick me.

A knee struck my thigh, but he'd forgotten that his ankles were cuffed together, and the force of his kick pulled his other ankle up and he tilted backward and fell. Adrenaline, prompted by the vision of his head striking the toilet, kicked in, and I managed to straighten up and grab him before the collision took place. He was already pitching away from me, and I felt my back emit a murmur of protest, followed by a shout of pain. I strained against it and kept him upright somehow, but by the time we had both stabilized I was mad again.

“Try it again,” I said, my face inches from his. “Try it again, and I swear I'll take your fucking arm off. This arm,” I said, tugging at the wrist below the sliced shoulder.

He sighed, in a fashion that might have been described in the nineteenth century as “melting,” and folded like a marionette whose strings had been sliced. He'd fainted.

Disgusted with myself, I towed him back into the living room and lowered him gently to the couch. Air, pushing itself out of his mid-section, made a popping little motorboat sound between his lips.

“Party time,” I said. I put the gun on the table in plain sight, poured an ounce of wine into a glass, and tossed it into his face.

Accompanied by a crash of Wagnerian Sturm und Drang, his eyes snapped open. They were glazed and vague, and I knew, as he tried to get to his feet, that he had no idea where he was. I stepped back to let the handcuffs around his ankles remind him, but Bravo pushed past me, making a sound like an idling tractor, and the sheer malignancy of the dog's gaze got the kid's attention. His eyes widened and focused on Bravo's face, about eight inches from his own, and he froze.

“He remembers you,” I said.

The kid said nothing, but he kept his eyes on Bravo. “If I tell him to kill, he'll take your throat out,” I lied. Bravo didn't know the command for “sit.” "Understand?"

He nodded, still staring into what he probably thought was the face of death. Bravo chose that moment to let his tongue loll out in a grin, so I stepped on a paw, and he looked up at me. “Bravo,” I said sternly, “if he moves, kill him.” I growled at Bravo, and Bravo growled back. It was his one trick.

“Not me, you idiot,” I said, “him.” I snapped my fingers in front of the kid's bare chest, and Bravo swung his head around, back into the kid's face. He was still growling.

“Drink?” I asked the kid again. I held up a glass and poured some wine into it and held it out to him. Bravo, momentarily diverted from guard duty by the possibility of refreshment, followed the glass with his eyes.

The kid nodded, never taking his eyes off the dog.

“We'll take a little medicine at the same time,” I said, lapsing once again into Nursese. I sat on the table in front of the couch and measured out two more Ampicillin and a couple of Excedrin. “Open,” I said.

“Nuh-uh,” the kid said, staring at the pills as though they were hemlock. He was more afraid of them than he was of Bravo.

“Look,” I said, putting one of each into my mouth and washing it down with what turned out to be a very nice red wine. This was getting to be a lot of Excedrin. “Medicine. For your arm.” I gestured toward his arm and he shrank from me, making me feel like Klaus Barbie. “Make you strong,” I said hurriedly. “Fix your arm.” I rubbed my own shoulder with the hand holding the pills and then flexed it. The kid's eyes went to my mouth.

“Swallow,” he said, with a hollow note of command.

I poured some more wine into my mouth, swallowed extravagantly, and opened wide to show him that the pills were gone. The second gulp of wine hit my stomach like a hot, wet towel and spread out, radiating upward toward my chest. “Now you,” I said. I dropped the two pills into his mouth; he gave me a dark, sour look as he tasted the aspirin.

“Drink this,” I said, holding out the glass, which was empty. “Whoops,” I said, “sit tight.”

“What?” he asked, a little furrily, as I poured.

“Just stay there,” I said, resolving on the abolition of idioms forevermore. “Here.” I held the wineglass to his lips and he took a suspicious sip and stopped. He washed it around inside his mouth and then drank the rest.

“Good boy,” I said. “Listen, I can't keep saying 'good boy' to you. It confuses the dog. What's your name?”

He looked down at my chest and pursed his lips, and I growled at Bravo, who responded with something that sounded like the overture to the Lisbon Earthquake. It even cut through Parsifal

“Tran,” the boy said quickly.

“Okay, Tran.” I pulled the glass back and refilled it. “I've got the dog and I've got the gun and you've got a bad cut on your shoulder. And you tried to kill some people I love not so long ago-”

“Not kill,” he said. “Only frighten.”

“Spare me the embarrassment. And then you tried to kill me. Twice.” I drank half the wine.

“Only beat up,” he said. He squirmed to find a more comfortable position and failed. “You tickled me.”

“And you set a house on fire,” I said, letting him finish the glass.

“Not yours,” he said, the soul of reason. “We came to beat you up but the house was burned down. I got mad, burned it the rest of the way.”

“If you had come to this one, you'd have tried to kill me.”

“No. Beat up only.”

“I'll take that on faith,” I said, “but only because nothing depends on it.” I poured again and decided to skip a turn. “Drink up.” He took the wine easily this time, and why not? It was better than he deserved.

Bravo sat happily on my foot, watching the wineglass again, and I prodded him up onto all threatening fours. “This is the deal-sorry, forget that. Here's what's going to happen. Do you understand me?”

“Understand,” he said, sounding insulted.

“I need to know that you do. Understand, I mean.” I watched him closely as I poured another glass, remembering, a little late, that I'd brought two into the room. I drank and said, “I'm going to take care of your cut, okay? I'm going to keep you here for a few days and the nice lady you wanted to kill, frighten, whatever, is going to come around once in a while and give you medicine until you're better, and you and I are going to talk.” I poured again.

“Talk what?” he asked suspiciously.

“Talk everything.” It was catching. “You're going to tell me why you wanted Uncle Lo, and who those Chinese are, and what they're doing, and all sorts of stuff.”

“Stuff,” he said shortly, and I wasn't sure whether it was a request for clarification or a command, but I passed on aggressiveness and put the glass to his lips and let him drink again.

“Stuff,” I said equably, “like, first, who's Lo and why were you sent to get him?”

“Don't know,” he said. Then he looked at the wineglass and said, "Good."

“Glad you like it. More?” He nodded, more enthusiastically than before, but this time I drank a full one myself before I gave him another couple of ounces. The Grand Inquisitor at work, pitiless and perhaps slightly drunk.

“Where were we?” I said. “Uncle Lo, and don't tell me you don't know.”

His mouth went wide and negative. “Don't. They said get him. They said if he came out from apartment, get him.”

“Why did they send you to get him? Why not send Chinese?”

The mouth curled scornfully. “Two Chinese they sent. Only one got out.”

“Lo killed the other one?”

He shrugged. “Must be. Only one got out.”

“So you were supposed to be backup?”

He nodded.

“And they didn't tell you who he was or why they wanted him?” Some epicurean judge inside was telling me that this was a very nice wine.

“Why?” he asked, eyeing the glass in a fair imitation of Bravo, who had managed to sit on my foot again. His weight felt good, so I let the bum sprawl.

“Why what?” I asked, getting confused.

“Why tell us? If they don't tell us, we don't know.”

There was a certain unassailable logic in that. It was what he'd said before, under the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “You didn't know who he was, but you were going to kill him.”

He shrugged, as well as someone can who's sheathed in Saran Wrap. “Only get him. If he come out. Kill him if we have to, sure. If he try to kill us.”

“Or if he was getting away,” I suggested. He hesitated and licked his lips, and I poured a little wine down his throat.

“Sure,” he said, after he'd swallowed, “kill him. No problem.”

There was something elaborately casual about the words. They sounded like make-believe.

“Have you killed a lot of people?” I asked. I was thinking about how he'd laughed when I tickled him.

“Very many,” he said gruffly.

I let it pass. “You were supposed to get him if he came out. Why'd you go in?”

He blinked. “Uh,” he said.

“Could you be more specific?”

He tried a smile. “Mistake.”

“It sure was.”

“We run out of gas,” the hitman said, dropping the smile and looking embarrassed. “Gas thing on my car broken. So, late, almost half hour. We don't know who's in, who's out. Think maybe Lo's there.”

It was too stupid to be a lie. At seventeen, I'd always run out of gas.

“One more time,” I said, “who was Lo?”

He looked into the middle distance, and oak popped in the fireplace. The boy started at the sound and then tried to hide the movement by turning it into a shiver. Something furtive and intelligent came into his eyes, and I involuntarily caught my breath as words formed themselves on his tongue. Here it came, the big news flash. He looked at the wine again, and then at me. He licked his lips.

“Water chaser?” he asked.

I heard myself laugh, and I heard Bravo's tail thump against the floor, and I said again to Bravo, “Kill him if he moves,” and then I laughed again and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Two hours later I was sitting next to him on the couch, and he was leaning against me in a friendly fashion. I'd undone the cuffs around his feet and slightly loosened the Saran Wrap connecting his wrists, and we were well into the third bottle. I'd learned that he was, in fact, seventeen, that the name of his gang was the Flying Fists, and that his parents were long divorced, his father gone God knew where. I'd learned that he lived-whenever he was home-with his mother, who worked as a cashier in a Vietnamese restaurant in Westminster, about forty miles south of L.A. He'd learned all about the relationship between Eleanor and me, and he'd agreed that nothing was harder than being a bad man who has somehow come into possession of a good woman. A grand and malicious joke. He'd also taken another Ampicillin, to make up for the one I'd eaten, and another Excedrin, and he was, both literally and figuratively, feeling no pain.

“Why join the gang?” I asked again. I was propping him up and pouring the seven hundredth glass of wine, and Bravo was snoring under the table and chasing phantoms from the ankles down. He'd had a little dog-dose himself, out of the extra glass.

“If you don't join one gang, two gangs try to take money. If you join a gang, only one.” He grinned at me, looking suddenly shy. “Better odds,” he said.

“Fine. Why work for the Chinese?”

The grin vanished. “More money,” he said as though it were painfully obvious. “Chinese have all the money, same in Vietnam. Chinese always have all the money.”

“Where does the money come from?” The words were no more precise than my mental processes, but he understood them.

“Chinese,” he said with an odd mixture of admiration and scorn, “sweat money.”

Eleanor, as far as I could remember, didn't seem to sweat at all. There was no question, though, that she was tight with a buck. I wasn't. It was one of the things we'd fought about.

“But where does it come from?” I put the glass to his lips and wondered briefly why I seemed to be doing all the talking. “The money, the Chinese money, I mean. Those men, for example.”

His eyes went opaque. “Don't know.” He looked around the room, seeming to notice it for the first time. His eyes fell on the loudspeakers, almost as tall as he was, bounty from a case on which I'd actually had a client. “Music, please. Rock and roll?”

“Music,” I said, sighing. It was getting late. I tilted him upright and got up-not quite as stiffly as before, lubricated by the wine-and put on a CD by the Kinks, not his vintage, but fuck him. If he wanted Ice-T, he could escape.

“Old fart stuff,” he said after the opening guitar riff, wrinkling his nose.

“That's because I'm an old fart,” I said, draining the glass. “And you're a young one.”

“Young fart,” he said, grinning again as I settled back onto the couch and rested a foot on Bravo's shoulder. “Funny man.”

“Back to business,” I said, drinking again. “How did they find you when they needed you?”

He shook his head dismissively. “Guy came around.”

“Around where?”

“School,” he said. “More, please.”

“School,” I said, pouring. I was dealing with a drunk baby. “Names.”

“Wine first,” he said, looking cunning. I put the glass to his lips, and he gulped it down.

“Charlie Wah,” he said immediately after swallowing. “Charlie Fucking Wah.”

“Who is he?”

“Taiwan king shit. Big man. Back and forth, yo-yo, yo-yo, Taiwan to America.”

I leaned forward. I was getting some content at last. “They're from Taiwan, then.”

“Shit floats,” he said. “They float here from Taiwan.”

“Why? What are they doing?”

The smooth features froze tight. “Don't know.” He looked into my eyes. “True. Don't know.”

“Well, what do they ask you to do?”

“Dangerous stuff. Stuff they afraid to do. Frighten people, beat them up. Pick up stuff and deliver it.”

“Drugs.” It was a guess.

“No. Charlie Wah doesn't like dope.”

“What, then?”

“Don't know.” He inhaled and then blew out through his lips. “Lying to you. Money. Always wrapped up, all taped up in a bag or in a briefcase, but money.”

I was feeling dubious. “They trust you to pick up money?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “With about twenty Chinese watching. Cars in front, cars in back. Everybody with guns, everybody except us. Sure, they trust us.”

“Where did you pick up the money?” Ray and Dave Davies were singing in trademark octaves, Dave taking the top.

“San Pedro.” Charlie had said "San Pedro" into the phone.

“And took it where?”

“Chinatown.”

“Always the same place in San Pedro?” I drank, feeling flushed and excited, and heard myself humming to the Kinks.

“Three or four places.”

I put the glass to his lips again and tilted it. “And in Chinatown.”

“Sometimes one place, sometimes not.”

“Where's the one place?”

“Granger Street. A white man.”

I stopped humming. “Name?”

“Don't know.”

“What kind of white man?”

“Sloppy man, big stomach, wet lips. He pays us sometimes. Lawyer,” he added.

I drank, unaware at first that I was doing it. If my hand hadn't been shaking with excitement I might not have noticed it at all.

“Chinatown,” he continued. “American lawyer in Chinatown. Rice freak.”

My turn not to catch the idiom. “Rice freak?”

“Chinese girls,” Tran said. “Likes Chinese girls. Office full of Chinese girls. Bigtime kung-fu asshole. White clothes, big feet, big nose. Nose bigger than his feet.” He chuckled briefly and then hiccupped twice. He was very drunk. “Bigtime bignose kung-fu asshole. White-eyes, eyes very like water. Wine, please.”

“Can you take me there?” I asked, pouring.

“Does the Pope,” he asked rhetorically, “cross the road to shit in the woods?” Good question. I gave him the glass. He slurped ambitiously. “Pluto and Bluto,” he said. “They the guys with the muscle bumps hanging onto Charlie Wah. Eat steroids all the time. Go really batshit once in a while.”

“Anybody else?” I had to close one eye to keep him in focus, and I had a feeling I should have been taking notes.

Tran looked at me blearily. “Little one, wears his pants high? Ying. Think he's king shit, big Snake Triad guy. He the one Lo didn't kill. Zowie, you know zowie?”

“Which one is Zowie?” It sounded like an improbable name for a Chinese.

“No, zowie,” he protested. “Like, zowie, good wine.”

“Sure is.” I held the bottle up to the floor lamp. “About half dead.”

“Me, too,” Tran said, laughing. It was the first time I'd heard him laugh, except under torture. It was a very young and very innocent laugh.

“You'll be okay,” I said, “youth being wasted on the young, and all.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. What does the Snake Triad do for its money?”

“Don't know,” he said for what felt like the hundredth time. “Why tell me? But big money. Even for us. To bring Lo, one thousand. Five hundred for me and five hundred for. .” He faltered.

“For your friend,” I said.

He started to nod and then put his head on my shoulder instead. He was trembling violently. I heard him fight for a breath. It fought him all the way in.

I patted his shoulder, feeling big and useless. “We'll get them.”

“They killed her,” he said. “And I stabbed him,” he cried, suddenly pulling himself away from me. It was quite a feat, considering that his hands were bound behind him and he was drunk.

“No one knows what he will do until the time comes.” I sounded like Charlie Wah.

“She my cousin,” he said, and I shut up, completely and profoundly. For a moment I thought he was going to start weeping again, but instead he shook his head and said, “Wine.”

“No problem,” I said, but pouring it without spilling took all the concentration I had. “You made a choice,” I said, “between your cousin and your friend.”

He swallowed air twice. “Brother,” he said.

“Shit,” I said, gaping down into a yawning gulf of tragedy. I hadn't meant to say it. I drank the glass he'd asked for.

“Yes,” he said fiercely, displacing his grief, “shit. Shit triad.”

“I need names,” I urged. “You want them dead.”

He turned an unlined face to me. Up close, he looked younger than seventeen. “I can kill them.” It sounded like a new clause in the Boy Scout pledge.

“You can kill one or two, maybe. I can get them all.” I almost believed it. “The ones I can't kill, I can put in jail.”

“Taiwan,” he said bitterly, “you can put them in jail in Taiwan?”

“Give me names,” I said. If I couldn't get them all, I could die trying.

“Names,” Tran said mechanically. “Chinese guy. Peter Lau.”

“Who's he?”

“Newspaper writer. Drink, please.”

I looked at his wine-red face. “I really think it would be better-”

“You want to know about Peter Lau?” He opened his mouth, and I poured and extended the glass.

“Chinatown newspaper,” he said, when he'd finished. “Not with them, against them. They told us to frighten him, not one time. Two times. But we couldn't find him. He writes about them. He used to write about them,” he corrected himself, “but we couldn't find him.” He giggled.

“What's funny?” I asked.

“We found him, both times. But he paid us more than they paid us.”

“How much?” It wasn't what I needed to know, but I wanted to keep him talking.

“Five hundred. He used to write about them but they make big noise at the newspaper and talk about burn it down, and he got fired. We find him and he give us six hundred to say we didn't.”

Five hundred bucks, and he wrote about them, and Lo was worth a thousand. I lose certain abilities when I drink, but subtraction isn't one of them. “Where did you find Peter Lau?” I asked.

“Never same place, but always some coffee shop. Monterey Park. Moves around. Scared all the time.”

“And he paid you.”

“Scared to death,” Tran said, forcing a smile. “Six hundred just to go away.”

“Anyone else?” He looked at the glass and opened his mouth, a fish seeking the bait, and I gave it to him.

“Also old lady,” he said when he'd drained it.

“Old lady,” I said neutrally.

“Old Jesus lady, Jesusloveyou, Jesusloveyou, cometojesus.”

“Summerson,” I said, feeling like someone had just punched me in the face.

“Excuse me,” Tran said politely, turning his face back to mine. “Okay I throw up?”

I guided him to the toilet and, when he'd finished voiding his insides, back to the couch. He was singing along with Ray Davies, syllables only, not a recognizable word per line. “Listen,” I said after he'd settled himself, “you're not going to go anywhere, are you?”

“Where?” he asked dreamily.

“Right,” I said. “Nowhere. Because even if you walk out of here you'll be lost in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains. It's miles to L.A. And you've got a hole in your shoulder and Saran Wrap around your arms-well, do you understand?”

He nodded and wiped his chin across his shoulder.

“Go to sleep, Tran,” I said, tucking the spare blanket around him. I picked up my gun and the cuffs, and he mumbled something and closed his eyes, and I went into the bedroom and folded down the remaining blanket and closed my own. It was pretty late, and I was pretty drunk.

Bravo came in and made the usual nuisance of himself, and I shoved him aside and tried to force my eyelids down again, and then I heard the sobbing. I decided to ignore it. Ten or fifteen minutes later I decided not to ignore it.

Mumbling to myself about nothing in particular, I grabbed my blanket and went into the living room and propped Tran up again so I could sit next to him. Then I threw the blanket over both of us and sagged to the left, with Tran leaning on me. Bravo joined us, on top of Tran, and Tran cried all of us to sleep.