Black Dove (35 page)

“I don’t know. Cuz it’s disgustin’?”

“So, Charlie,” Old Red said, “you got any idea what boiled scorpions would be a remedy for?”

“I didn’t know they were a remedy for
anything
till just now.”

Diana knelt down next to our prisoner. “What about you, Mr. Woon? Do you know?”

The detective finally lifted his flabby face up off the floor. It was covered with dust.

“I am not a doctor.”

“That ain’t what the lady asked you!” Gustav snarled. “Now I’m givin’ you one last chance to get yourself back on your feet.” He snatched up one of the scorpions and shook it so hard a pincer flew off. “What would Doc Chan or Yee Lock use these little black bastards for?”

“Ask him,” Woon said, nodding at the body curled up half a dozen feet from where he lay. Then he put down his head and went back to playing possum—or, in his case, dozing walrus.

“Yeah, well, maybe him I can’t ask, but that don’t mean there ain’t others,” Old Red said. “Charlie—there gonna be any more of these herbal-type pharmacies open this hour?”

“None of the respectable ones. But there are a couple that stay open all night.” Charlie glanced over at Diana. “For the right kind of customer.”

The lady opened her handbag and fished out her bankroll—only it wasn’t much of a
roll
anymore. It was more like a cracker.

“I hope nine dollars can make me the right kind of customer,” Diana said after a quick count.

“It’ll have to,” Gustav said. “Now come on, all of you—help me find something to tether Woon proper. I ain’t gonna leave the job to no necktie.”

After a couple minutes searching, Charlie came up with some twine that would do the trick. We used it to bind Woon’s wrists and ankles, while my tie we wound round his face for a gag.

Woon didn’t fight us, but he didn’t help us either. Tying him was like trying to put a bathing suit on a bag of wet cement. Old Red wanted to leave him behind the counter, but after one back-breaking attempt to lift him, we gave up and left him where he was.

He didn’t say a word through the whole sweaty ordeal.

Not five minutes after we left Yee Lock’s, we were in an identical shop a few blocks away. The only things missing were the bodies on the floor.
Everything else—the narrow center aisle, the crowded bins of dried “medicine,” the flickering light of a single candle—was exactly the same.

The proprietor was a short, surprisingly cheerful Chinaman Charlie referred to as “Lee Kan.” At first, he’d peeked out through a barely cracked door, looking drowsy and distrustful. But the second his sleepy eyes opened wide enough to take in who we were, he smiled and ushered us inside. He and Charlie chatted casually in Chinese as we filed in, but the bantering turned to bartering quick enough.

Considering the late hour, Charlie told us, a consultation would cost ten dollars.

“Highway robbery!” Old Red huffed, and he started to stamp out—exactly as we’d planned if a little extra leverage was needed. (It was agreed by all that my brother was the natural choice for a show of pique.)

As Diana and I turned to follow, Lee Kan blurted something out in Chinese

“
Wait
,” Charlie said to us.

The two Chinamen wrangled for a minute, at the end of which Charlie nodded brusquely and handed over five dollars.

Lee Kan grinned and waved us further into his shop.

“Alright—the folderol’s out of the way,” Gustav said to Charlie. “Get to askin’.”

Charlie spoke to the healer for a moment, then turned back to my brother.

“Alright. Show him.”

Old Red pulled out one of the scorpions from Yee Lock’s store.

Lee Kan’s grin turned into a grimace.

It took the man a moment to find his tongue again, and when he did his voice was a strangled whisper. It was as if he feared not just the thing the words represented but the very words themselves. They were hoodoo words—cursed.

He pointed at the scorpion as he talked, then held the finger aloft, plainly saying “one” or “only.” When he was done, Charlie repeated back the last two words to leave the healer’s lips: “
Mah fung
.”

Lee Kan nodded. “
Mah fung
.”

“
Mah fung?
” Gustav said.

“Yeah,
mah fung
?” I threw in. I glanced over at Diana, but she didn’t seem tempted to join our quartet.

“Old Joe,” Charlie told us. “The pox.”

“A-ha,” said Old Red.

“Oh-ho,” said I.

I started to translate Charlie’s translation for the lady, but it wasn’t necessary.

“Scorpion tea is a treatment for
syphilis?
” she said.

Charlie nodded.

Lee Kan gaped at our guide, then unleashed a gush of gibbering Chinese. Charlie tried to turn back the flood with a shake of the head and a curt, one-word answer.

“He’s asking a lot of questions,” Charlie said.

“Well, bully for him. But he’s gonna have to wait till
we’re
done.” Old Red gave his scorpion a little waggle. “Ask if he stocks these things hisself.”

Charlie dutifully converted the question into Chinese.

“No,” he reported after hearing through Lee Kan’s answer. “The black scorpions are special. They have to be shipped over from China. He doesn’t have any.”

Lee Kan spoke again, unprompted. He pointed at Old Red, Diana, and me as he jabbered, his strangely sunny smile returning.

“In case he’s wonderin’,” I said, “
no
, the scorpion tea ain’t for me.”

“He’s saying he’s heard about you,” Charlie said, beginning his translation before Lee Kan was even through talking. “That’s the only reason he let us in so cheap. He’s got information he thinks you’ll pay big money for. He knows—”

Charlie broke back into Chinese, his voice rising, excited.

As Lee Kan answered, his grin stretched so wide I could see every tooth in his head.

“What?
What?
” my brother said.

“He knows where Fat Choy is.”

So at last, at least one mystery was solved: I now knew what Lee Kan had to be so chipper about.

“I don’t think four bucks quite qualifies as ‘big money,’ ” I said. “And
that’s all we got left, remember? How we gonna get Lee here to spill the beans?”

“I’ll get him to talk,” Charlie said, his tone turning tough. He brought himself up to his full height and clenched his long, bony fingers into fists.

It was funny seeing scrawny Chinatown Charlie trying to act hard. To me, he looked about as menacing as an understuffed scarecrow.

Yet little Lee Kan picked up on the change in Charlie, and his big grin changed, too. The lips lost some of their rubbery stretch, and the eyes widened, turning wary.

“Actually, we’ve still got plenty of cash,” Diana said. “Charlie—what about the fifty dollars I gave you this morning?”

“What about it?” Charlie growled back, clearly not caring for the direction the conversation was taking.

“Why not loan it back to us?” she suggested. “At, say . . . one-hundred percent interest? Compounded daily?”

Charlie snorted. “I’m not a bank.”

“Oh, come on, Charlie,” my brother snapped. “We ain’t got time for this. Offer the man twenty bucks outta your stash. You know the lady’s good for it.”

Charlie glared at him a moment, then slowly unclenched his fists and pulled out his folding money. Lie peeled off a ten note, held it up in front of Lee Kan and spoke in Chinese.

The healer nodded and snatched the bill away, looking relieved. Then he started talking.

Fat Choy had been standing right there in his store not half an hour before, he told us (via Charlie). The hatchet man had been dressed in an American-style suit that seemed a touch tight on him, and his queue was tucked under the collar of his jacket. He bought opium—a lot of it—and asked about herbal remedies for seasickness. While Lee Kan mixed up a batch of his own secret recipe, he’d slyly (or so he said) inquired as to Fat Choy’s need for the stuff. Fat Choy had laughed.

“You know why I can’t stay here,” he’d (supposedly) replied. “I have an uncle in Honolulu. I’ll go live with him until everyone’s forgotten about Gee Woo Chan.”

“He really came right out and mentioned Doc Chan by name?” I asked when Lee Kan was through.

Charlie passed the question along, and Lee Kan nodded.

“Well, I reckon there ain’t no question about it now,” I said to Old Red. “Fat Choy done in the doc for sure.”

My brother didn’t even look at me.

“Fat Choy said ‘
I
can’t stay here’? ‘
I’ll
go live in Honolulu’?” he was saying to Charlie. “No ‘we’? No mention of the gal at all?”

Once again, Charlie Chineseified the question. This time, Lee Kan answered with a burst of words and a shake of the head.

“No,” Charlie told Gustav a moment later. “Fat Choy didn’t say anything about Hok Gup, and Lee Kan sure wasn’t going to bring the subject up.” He rolled his hands in the air like the paddlewheel of a steamboat pulling away from the dock. “So are we through here? Because it seems to me we’ve heard everything we need to know.”

“I gotta agree with Charlie,” I said. “We finally got a real bead on where Fat Choy’s gonna be. All we gotta do now is grab us a paper and check the shippin’ listings. Can’t be more than one boat bound for Hawaii tonight. We hightail it over to the right pier, maybe we can catch Fat Choy ’fore his ship sets sail.”

“If it hasn’t already,” Diana said.

Charlie wasn’t waiting for more debate. He spun away from Lee Kan and pushed past us toward the door.

“Not yet, Charlie!” Old Red barked.

Charlie stopped and whirled around. “More questions?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Just two.” Gustav looked up at Lee Kan. “Does that seasickness cure of yours cost a lot? And how much of it did Fat Choy buy?”

Charlie did his translating from behind us, near the door. Though he surely knew Old Red couldn’t understand a word, Lee Kan gave his answer directly to my brother, looking him in the eye the whole time.

“Yeah, the seasickness powder’s expensive,” Charlie said. “Twenty bucks a bag. Hard-to-find ingredients, Lee Kan says—which just means he had a customer who didn’t have time to haggle. Fat Choy only bought enough for a couple nights.”

“Well, then . . . .” Gustav turned to face the rest of us. “He ain’t goin’ to Hawaii.”

I held up a finger. “Uhhh, if I may interject.” I cleared my throat. “
Huh?
”

“
Fat
. . .
Choy
. . .
is
. . .
not
. . .
going
. . .
to
—”

“Oh, would you stop it? I ain’t goin’ deaf. I just don’t get it. You’re sayin’ Fat Choy blew forty bucks on a remedy for seasickness so he could turn around and go to
Idaho?
”

“Could be.”

“You think it’s too simple,” Diana said to Old Red. “Too obvious.”

“But simple is good!” I protested. “
Obvious
is good! We ain’t had enough of neither today.”

Old Red chided me with a quote from Holmes: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

“You know, that one makes about as much sense as that claptrap about the truth bein’ whatever ain’t impossible.”

Gustav rolled his
eyes
. “Just think about it, would you? Fat Choy’s spooked enough to spend the whole day down in that hidey-hole, but when he finally climbs out he comes here, to
him
—”

He waggled his thumb back at Lee Kan, who stood stiffly behind his counter watching us with an even stiffer smile.

“—a man Charlie tells us is three miles to the left of respectable. And he up and lays out exactly where he’s goin’ next?”

Old Red shook his head.

“That don’t sit right. Not unless he
wanted
to spread around that fairy tale about an uncle in Hawaii. And use your noodle on
this
: Fat Choy buys him a big mess of opium but goes stingy on the stomach soother? When it takes a ship . . . what? Two, three weeks to get out to them islands? Naw.”

“If he was lying, why buy the seasickness remedy at all?” Charlie asked from his spot by the door. He looked so anxious to get going he may as well have been tapping his foot. “Fat Choy’s a hoppie. He’s not going to throw away forty dollars he could spend chasing the dragon.”

“Welllllllll . . . ,” Gustav said, stretching the word out like taffy while he did some quick figuring. “Maybe he really did need some of that potion. Only not for a long trip. For a short one.”

“Los Angeles and Portland ain’t but a few days away by boat,” I suggested.

“Or,” Diana said.

Just that. “Or.” And she cocked an eyebrow at my brother.

“Oh, yes . . . oh, yes, yes,
yes
,” Old Red said, giving her a nod that started small but kept growing until his head was doing such a bobble he could’ve been bobbing for apples.

I nodded, too. “Of course! Why, it ain’t just elementary, it’s kindergarten!”

“What is?” Charlie demanded.

I shrugged. “You got me.”

Diana took mercy on the two of us and provided an actual answer.

“If you want to get as far away from San Francisco as quickly as possible, a train’s the best choice. But you can’t catch any of the major lines from the city itself. For that, you have to go to Oakland.”

“Of course,” I said. And I meant it this time. “On the ferry.”

“Last one leaves at nine o’clock—right, Brother?” Old Red said. “So that means we probably got no more than . . . hey, hold on, Charlie!”

I turned toward our guide only to find him blowing out the door. He threw a glance back at us as he stepped outside, the expression on his face a strange gumbo of opposing emotion. I saw contempt there, and fear, and regret.

Then he bolted.

I ran after him, but by the time I reached the sidewalk, his long, lean legs had already carried him across the street to yet another alleyway. He disappeared into the shadows without another look back.

“He’s gone.” I stumbled back inside, stunned. “He just . . . run off.”

“Of course, he has,” Diana said, less like it was something she’d been expecting than something she’d been dreading. “He’s gone to tell his boss what we know. We’re in a race for sure now, gentlemen.”