The Man With No Time

20

Pressure points.

There were too many of them, I thought, driving south at nine a.m. while Tran caught up on his sleep in the passenger seat. It was almost enough to make me suspicious.

But why shouldn't there be holes in the operation? Charlie had his racket to himself, sewn up with the Snake Triad Black Hats back in Taiwan, and there wasn't much pressure from the White Hat side here in America. Who cared about a bunch of impoverished Chinese? They were an insignificant trickle in the overall illegal immigration picture, nothing like the nonstop cascade over the borders to the South. They provided cheap labor to people who probably contributed to political campaigns. They didn't vote. They may not have had much else, but at least they were safe from the promises of American politicians.

And, as Charlie had said, kill a gwailo, and you bring the police. Keep the violence and the exploitation confined to people with yellow skin-or black, I added to myself, or brown-and they'd stay out of your way. It would take something very conspicuous to draw their attention.

The idea I'd been forming for the last three days would provide something very conspicuous. Unless it got us all killed.

Tran dozed most of the way to San Pedro, leaving me lots of time to move mental furniture around as we inched our way southwest on the permanently clogged Harbor Freeway. They're fixing it now, but they're always fixing it. They've been fixing it since it was built, and it still looks like a used-car lot most of the time. I let Tran snooze. I had a couple of big questions to ask him, but they would keep.

San Pedro looks slightly better at dusk than it does in daylight, and slightly worse than it does at night. Unfortunately, I was seeing it in the morning.

I didn't know the street names in San Pedro, and I didn't learn them on that trip. Once we were off the freeway I just prodded Tran awake and let the poured concrete and flat-roofed stucco buildings slide past in the tea-colored air, noting landmarks here and there and listening to Tran tell me where to turn. Finding my way back would be no problem. With luck I'd only have to do it once.

There were four safe houses off the main drags, all within a square mile or two. All were equally anonymous: cheap, run-down one-story houses in what seemed like an endless farm in which cheap one-story houses were the cash crop. They were concealed by their very uniformity, which I supposed was, as Peter Lau might have said, the point, and I was looking at the third before I realized what they all had in common: a driveway that curved around the house and disappeared behind it. Ideal.

“Which door did you go to?”

“Front,” Tran said, still making Roy Rogers eyes against the light.

“All four houses?”

He was peering through the window now, remembering something. “Yes.”

Good, better, best. “Makes sense,” I said. “They bring the pilgrims in through the back and keep them in the back. Anyone comes to the front, the CIAs are out of sight. You're not supposed to know about them, so you come to the front.”

“Charlie Wah no dope,” Tran said grudgingly.

“He's going to feel like one. You always hit the houses in the same order?”

“Always. Quicker that way.”

“Same time?”

“Charlie Wah,” Tran said, “crazy about time. Number one, seven-oh-four, number two, seven-seventeen, like that.”

“But the same times always?”

Tran hesitated, reluctant to deliver bad news. “Sometimes not.”

“How much difference?”

“Half hour sometimes, sometimes hour. Always after dark.”

“We'll live with it,” I said, wishing I had the confidence I was pretending.

“Sure,” Tran said, “no big deal.”

I looked at him and he was smiling at me.

“Good team,” he said.

“Dynamite,” I agreed.

“We going to kill them?” he asked.

“No,” I said, accelerating toward the last of the houses. Charlie Wah's voice echoed in my ear. “We're going to mess with their heads.”

“Listen up,” I said to my mismatched gang. We were gathered in the motel room, which I'd booked for another full day. Even the desk clerk couldn't believe it; he'd called in my credit card twice.

Horace, Dexter, and Horton had been crashed on the two narrow beds when Tran and I came in. Now they all sat, tangled in sheets, backs against the wall, waiting for their coffee to cool.

“They're delivering the slaves tonight.”

“What time?” It was almost below the range of human hearing, so it had to be Horton.

“Don't know,” I said, “but we'll be there first. Let me get through this before you ask questions, or we'll still be sitting here after they've come and gone, okay?”

Skeptical nods all around.

“There are four safe houses, all within a couple of miles in San Pedro. They're in neighborhoods, so shooting should not be anyone's first option. Anyway, from what we've learned so far, there aren't going to be a lot of guards. These people have nowhere to go if we escape, and no one else is competing for their hands.”

Eight eyes, different shapes but all dark brown, gazed at me.

“They hit the houses in the same order every time, just to save time and gas. It's a big loop, and when they're finished they can hit the freeway and head back. What they do there, they pick up money. We're going to pick it up instead.”

“Money,” Horton said, and then sang, “M is for the Many ways we spend it. .”

“O,” Dexter chimed in, “means Only that there's not enough.”

Horace caught the spirit. “N,” he sang, “is for the No one who will lend it.”

I held up a hand, and Tran, who'd been ransacking his brain to translate the next lines from Vietnamese, gave me a grateful smile. “And after we take the money, we're going to take the watchers and move on to the next house. The minute we leave, the Doody Brothers are going to pick up the slaves and take them to a church, where people will be waiting for them.”

“Pick them up in what?” Horton again.

“In the vans they got delivered in. They'll still be there, right, Tran?”

“Always there before,” Tran said.

“Why not do it all at once?” Dexter asked.

“Charlie's not afraid of the cops,” I said, “because the cops aren't interested. What is Charlie afraid of, Tran?”

“Another gang,” Tran said, on cue.

“So we're going to give them another gang. It's going to be a black gang.”

Horace looked at me appreciatively.

“They have no sources of information in the black community,” I said. “No way to figure out who it might be.”

“And this gone to leave Horace's family clear,” Dexter said. “But, still, why not do it all at once?”

“Because of Horace. The slaves have crossed an ocean, they've paid money, to get here. Charlie's gang is all they know. They're not going to leave with the Doodys unless the Doodys have a Chinese translator who can tell them what's happening. That's Horace, and we can't let the keepers see him.”

“I speak Chinese,” Horace volunteered. “Three dialects.” He looked positively happy.

“So we pick up all the crooks and all the slaves, and the slaves get delivered to the church,” Dexter said. “Then what?”

“Then we salt the mine,” I said, knowing it would tick him off. “And I'll tell you about that later.”

By eleven-thirty, all but Horace had been assigned chores. Dexter took charge of weapons and technical paraphernalia, and Horton and Tran assumed responsibility for costumes, such as they were. Tran expressed some confusion over my request for fifty used thrift-store dresses with the labels cut out, and he went out shaking his head and muttering in Vietnamese. That left me alone in the motel room with Horace.

My almost-brother-in-law's spurt of enthusiasm was waning, leaving him free to indulge in his penchant for lists.

“One,” he said, nursing his Styrofoam cup of coffee, “they're going to be on guard. They know Tran's out there. You belted one of their guys and stole another one.”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn't think they were that frightened of one little Vietnamese kid; Charlie Wah was too scornful for that. “The one guy who saw anything,” I said, “only saw Tran, and I'm sure they've assumed their missing guy is dead-a victim of a little one-on-one revenge.” I blew onto the surface of my own cup; coffee in Styrofoam cools more slowly than the Universe. “What's two?”

“That girl, that Florence. You don't know she didn't tell Tiffle everything.”

“She doesn't know much except that the sky is going to fall on good old Claude tomorrow morning.”

“Tran, then,” he said, finally getting down to it.

“Tran's fine.” I was becoming very bored with this particular argument. Horace held a grudge by wrapping both arms and legs around it and clinging for dear life.

“He could sell us-”

“Blood is thicker than money.” I stuck the tip of my tongue into the coffee and pulled it out fast. “Anyway, they'd kill him on sight, and he knows it.”

Horace ran the nails of his free hand over his jeans with a sound that made the hair on my arms stand on end. “I don't know.”

I found I was furious. “And I don't know about you.”

He looked astonished. “Me?”

“What the hell did you think you were doing?”

His face slammed shut, and for the first time since I'd met him Horace turned into the inscrutable Oriental. He squeezed his cup, making it bulge perilously. “I don't want to talk about it.”

“Too bad. I do. You know, I do this shit, or something like it, for a living, remember? I'm sure some mathematician could express my death as a probability factor. Well, okay, so I can die. I'm nobody's father, and as much as I love Eleanor, I'm nobody's husband. You're both.”

“Barely,” Horace said between his teeth.

“Tell it to the kids,” I said, not caring whether it sounded brutal.

“I don't talk to the kids,” Horace said tightly. “Pansy talks to the kids, Pansy's their window on the world. She explains to them about why Daddy's never home, because he's out selling real estate in the daytime and pumping gas at night, like they can understand. And then, when I get home and they're asleep, she talks to me about how they miss me and how she should get a job like she had before when she was taking pictures and how my mother tells them one thing when she's told them another, and they don't know what to do. Well, i don't know what to do, either. My home life feels like a … a maze that's all blind alleys.” He took a gulp of coffee and gasped steam. “Holy Jesus.”

I watched him unsympathetically as he fanned his mouth with his free hand. “So let Pansy get a job.”

“Right,” he said, sowing scorn right and left. “Eight hours a day out of the house. She leaves the room for thirty seconds, the kids cry. My mother moves to Vegas, the kids ask where's Grandma. I'm sure they think God is a Chinese woman of forty-seven, midway between Pansy and my mother. And I'm busting my butt to pay the electric bill.”

“God, that's terrible,” I said. “You're jealous of your own wife and mother. And you're a Chinese male chauvinist, to boot.”

“Jealous!” He did the thing with the fingernails on his jeans again and then put his hand on my wrist. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Well, I didn't. I'd never had kids. I blinked, lost for a moment, and he withdrew his hand.

“So maybe a little,” he said in a muffled voice.

“Not much,” I said soothingly.

“Aaahhh,” he said, shaking his head in small swings, like if he turned it too far it would yank his body after it.

“And your mother-”

“Pansy can deal with her, now,” he said. “She sent her home.” His eyes came up to me, and he looked like the old Horace again. “That was a big deal for Pansy,” he said proudly.

“That makes it your turn, doesn't it?”

“My turn.” His tone was noncommittal, but he'd shifted his eyes to his lap.

“Um, that Thai girl,” I said, not sure whether he'd hit me.

For a moment I thought he was going to laugh, but he forced the corners of his mouth down and then together, looking like a prince forced to kiss a frog with no princess potential. “I knew I shouldn't have taken you and Lo to that bar,” he said.

“Scene of the crime,” I ventured.

“Oh, some crime. I flirted with her, I tipped her. I figured it was all just business to her.”

I thought it probably had been-jealousy and all-but I didn't want to say so. She'd obviously stoked his ego, and men are such dopes.

“Still,” I said, shrugging.

He nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Okay, no more girls.”

Mentally I asked the next question and retracted it, then asked it out loud. “She the only one?”

“Are you kidding? How much energy do you think I've got with two jobs?”

“So ease off. You can pay the electric bill on one job.”

He thought about it. “Kids are expensive.”

“Pansy could save money if you brought home a dollar a day.”

He smiled, not at me but at Pansy. “She could, you know. Pansy's Chinese to her toes.”

“If you're home more, she could even get a job of her own.” I scalded my tongue and gave up on the coffee. Maybe I'd have it with lunch. Or dinner. “Male chauvinism notwithstanding.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and patted it awkwardly. “I don't want to turn into one of the guys on National Public Radio,” he said.

“You've got miles to go,” I said. “Light-years.”

He sat back. “Assuming I live through tonight.”

That brought me to the problem at hand. I got up and went to the window, looking out as though I expected to see a solution in the street. The window was open, and since the motel had economized on screens, I poured my coffee out through it. It splattered on the asphalt of the parking lot, steaming like the entry way to hell. “Tonight will be okay.”

“Listen to you,” Horace said. “Talk about male chauvinists. I just don't think it's nailed down. God is in the details, you know.”

I turned back to him, feeling my own tension build again. “So find me a nail, Horace. Hell, I'd settle for a thumbtack. The key to something like this is improvisation.”

The upside-down-V eyebrows went sardonic. We were buddies again. He sipped, blinked twice, spat it back into the cup. “A little sententious, don't you think?”

“Horace,” I said, “you're Eleanor's brother. Even if you think I'm willing to get myself killed, you have to know that your life is sacred to me.” I batted my eyelashes at him.

He inflated his cheeks and let the air out with a cynical little pop. “I just hope you know what you're doing. What we're doing.”

That was easy. “I thought we'd settled that, Horace,” I said. I went to him and took the coffee out of his hand and poured it out the window, on top of mine. “I haven't got the faintest idea.”