Tell No Lies (41 page)

He hammered the glass with a fist, and the woman rose with irritation and came around the counter, leading with her quadripod cane. She unlocked the door and threw it open, startling him with her perfect English. “You’re gonna break my glass!”

“This man. Have you seen this man?”

“You’re banging on my window like a crazy person!”

The wall clock over her shoulder showed 11:38.

“Look at this photo. Please. It’s an emergency. Have you seen this man?”

She scowled down. “Yes. I see him every day.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Why would I know where he lives?”

He looked past the owner at the three other old women who regarded him, fingers resting on their game tiles. A social meeting of the town elders.

“Can I ask them? Please, can I…?” He gestured, stepped inside. “Have any of you seen this man? Here, in the photograph?”

Blank stares.

He heard the thump of the cane behind him, and the woman trudged up next to him, her head not much higher than his elbow. She spoke to the others in Cantonese, and the photo was passed around the circle. Each woman examined it with excruciating care. They spoke back and forth. The tortoise pace of the proceedings was torture; it was all Daniel could do to keep himself from shouting at them to hurry up.

Finally a matriarch with pearl-drop earrings, liberally rouged cheeks, and a dignified bearing gave a terse nod and spoke to the woman at Daniel’s side.

“What? What’s she saying?”

“He rents a room from her cousin’s aunt’s friend. The woman’s named Mrs. Lai-Wing.”

Relief was so intense it took the air from his lungs.
“Where?”

Another exchange. Then the woman at Daniel’s side lifted her cane and aimed the four rubber points through the back of the restaurant. “Waverly Place at Clay, red house with the shingles falling off. She rents out the basement in-law suite.”

“Lai-Wing have no in-laws,” the matriarch added. She smoothed a few stray hairs back toward the loose bun at her nape. “Lai-Wing lucky girl.”

“Thank you.” He grabbed the owner’s shoulders, kissed her on the forehead, then charged past her even as she shouted after him. He ran through the brief kitchen and out into an alley, skidding on a mound of rotting vegetables. Waverly Place was a historic two-block stretch of Chinatown, once nicknamed 15 Cent Street for the price of the haircuts given there. Daniel shot out the end of the alley, knocking over crates of cabbage and pinballing off a Dumpster onto the main drag. He rushed past the three- and four-story Edwardians with their intricate balconies, flags, and signs in traditional Chinese, a fluttering banner announcing it as the “Street of Painted Balconies.” Between an employment agency and a temple, he spotted the dilapidated red house.

No cop cars. No unmarked sedans. Just the house and him, facing off in the cool Chinatown air.

He paused in front, hands on his knees, panting.

Up the slender alley to the east, almost lost to shadow, was a battered worker’s van. Just beside it, concrete steps down to a subterranean door.

Fear scratched at his chest from the inside.

He pulled out his iPhone, checked the time: 11:47.

Moving silently up the alley, he brought up Dooley’s number. Pressed
CALL
.

“Where the hell are you?” he whispered.

“We got the place. We’re outside now. SWAT’s ready to steamroll.”

“I don’t see you.” He approached the van in a crouch. Coming into view behind, parked haphazardly beside a low wrought-iron fence, was a rusting motorcycle. The final confirmation. He stared at the bike, reminding himself to breathe. “Where
are
you guys?”

“A shithole north of Sunnydale. Are you here?”

He tried to swallow but his throat was too dry. “
Sunnydale?
You— No. I’m in Chinatown at Waverly. Red house by the intersection of Clay.”

He crept closer to the van. Dangling from the rearview mirror, a Metro South parking pass.

He rested his palm on the hood.

Still warm.

Dooley said, “All his last-knowns show him at—”

“He’s
here,
Dooley.”

He hung up. Turned off the phone. Removed the box cutter from his pocket and slid the blade out as far as it would go.

Then he crept around the side of the van and descended the worn steps to the peeling door below.

Chapter 70

The door to the basement apartment was slightly ajar, the latch resting against the jamb, as if someone had made a hurried entrance. With full hands. Inset glass squares in place of a peephole afforded Daniel a partial glimpse of the living suite. Unfolded futon with no frame, electric hot plate in the corner, clothes strewn on a water-stained carpet.

The peeling paint poked into his fingertips. The hinges were mercifully quiet. And then he was standing inside.

Empty.

He retracted the blade, his mind whirling. Ten minutes left, maybe less.

He pictured Marisol Vargas pinned to her kitchen floor, leaking tears of blood, and then her face was replaced by Cris’s and his brain mostly shut down, stopping him there two steps onto the rotting carpet.

You’ll see.

He waded through the stark terror that had descended over him, telling himself to look for any hint of a clue. The folding closet doors were open, nothing inside but scattered take-out cartons and pizza boxes. A few unwashed bowls were stacked unevenly by the hot plate, and the place stank of fish. Hardened spaghetti lay in a clump near an overturned dish in the corner, red sauce splattered up the wall. Through the bathroom door, he saw the cracked bowl of the toilet, the tank lid missing, a wire hanger jerry-rigged to serve as a trip lever rising into reach. Here beneath the city, the primitive surroundings seemed not just of another world but another
time.

A moist, earthy reek emanated from the bathroom. And the faintest stirring of air. He drifted into the cramped space and stood on the curling linoleum. The mold-speckled shower curtain breathed out at him. Then sucked away. He stared, bewildered, as it bulged and withdrew like the wall of a lung.

His thumb rode the box cutter’s slide forward again, the razor ticking out millimeter by millimeter. The curtain breathed at him some more. Bracing himself, he raked it aside.

A jagged, man-size hole penetrated the tile wall. Wall studs remained like exposed ribs, a narrow space dropping away.

His breathing came fast, ragged. He tried to calm down but found his body unwilling to obey. Taking in a gulp of air, he stepped into the tub and leaned through the mouth, the protruding tiles biting into his shoulders.

A narrow shaft dropped ten feet into what appeared to be a tunnel.

Only one way left.

Down.

Pocketing the box cutter, he climbed through and lowered himself as quietly as he could manage, splinters pricking his hands. He dropped the last few feet and hit dirt, nearly toppling over.

He shot quick looks in either direction. The tunnel was impressive, tall enough that he could stand without crouching. He remembered the myths of the passages running beneath Chinatown, the shaft Dooley had discovered leading into the restaurant cellar. Those apocryphal tong opium dens and torture chambers, the Prohibition escape routes. With their ancient beams and rusted bolts, the crumbling walls looked old enough, but a few joists were held in place by newer metal brackets. The perennial handyman, Angelberto had reinforced them himself.

The intestinal walls radiated a wet chemical stench, like an infested pond. Daniel spun in a slow circle, his breath clouding about his head in the chill. Mine-shaft lights dangled from snarls of extension cords, hung at intervals, barely cutting the gloom. One fork was visible, several paces ahead. A trickle of air brushed his cheeks, carrying with it the faintest noise. A woman’s whimpering.

Cristina.

The sound of her burned his nerve endings straight through to numbness. Leading with the box cutter, he started toward the split in the tunnel. His fear had turned to something physical, needles pricking at his arms, his face, the back of his neck.

He reached the fork, stepping around the first bend to stare down a brief length intersecting another passageway. To his right an adjoining room came visible, sunken several feet off the main tunnel system. The old ceiling had crumbled, beams smashed down at angles, but around the wreckage was new buttressing. In fact, the room had been partially excavated and rebuilt, concrete poured to firm the dirt, a few lengths of rebar stubbed up.

Movement at the tunnel intersection ten or so yards ahead drew Daniel’s attention. Paralyzed with disbelief, he watched as Angelberto moved backward through the visible stretch, dragging an empty plastic tarp behind him. He wore the familiar black sweat suit and work boots, and the motorcycle mask was shoved up, crowding his forehead. Whistling, he passed from sight.

Daniel stood breathless, a statue.

The whistling, a skin-tingling merriment, found resonance off the tunnel walls.

Then it stopped.

Firming his grip on the box cutter, Daniel watched the brief stretch of intersecting tunnel.

A puff of air blew into sight.

Breath.

And then Angelberto stepped back into view. He regarded Daniel, head cocked, puzzled. Mist huffed again from his mouth.

It took two tries for Daniel to get the words out. “It’s over,” he said. “Martin’s in jail. You know this.”

“The wife.” Angelberto spit brown, wiped his chin. “She will pay me. The money from the robberies. She has money still.”

“She’s dead.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Suicide. She stepped in front of a bus when they came to get her.”

Angelberto considered this, his face tensing, those thin lines of facial hair bristling. “Either way,” he said. “You have seen me.” He removed the lock-blade military knife from his pocket, unfolded it, and started calmly for Daniel.

Daniel half turned, putting his heels to the sunken room so he’d have space to leap backward and parry. The lip of the packed dirt pressed through the soles of his shoes. The moist subterranean walls muffled all sound from the world above. “The cops are on their way,” he said. “Right now.”

“That,” Angelberto said, “I do not believe. If that was the case, you would not be foolish enough to come down here alone.”

A shift of the air brought Cris’s muffled cries, sending Daniel up on the balls of his feet as if he’d taken a cattle prod to the ribs. Angelberto observed his reaction with neither pleasure nor sympathy. He drew nearer and paused.

Daniel kept the box cutter ready but low at his side. He dug the Polaroid from his back pocket, flipped it onto the dirt between them. “You want money to bring your family here, right?”

Angelberto looked down at the photo. Back up at Daniel.

“Think of them,” Daniel said. “Your wife. Your son. Would they want this?”

Angelberto’s shoulders lowered, the blade dipping. Somehow Daniel could hear the rumbling of the Bay, water against the bed of the city.

“Oh,” Angelberto said. “You don’t understand. You think I care.”

The reaction, reflective and almost mournful, caught Daniel off guard. He kept his gaze fixed on the knife. “About what?”

Angelberto said, “About anything like that.” The blade stayed low, but he lunged, one of those big black boots striking Daniel in the chest, propelling him backward off the lip.

He felt the impact, not yet pain, but a battering-ram thud. There was a tearing sound, a rending of flesh, and then his concrete-filled head rolled drowsily to the side and he saw the slick, gleaming spike of rebar rising up from his left shoulder, impaling him.

He moved, and his nerves finally awakened, pain screaming through him.

White static clouded his vision, then cleared by degrees.

He sensed Angelberto’s shape up past the ledge, the dust filling his lungs, a fallen ceiling joint just out of reach above. His feet squirmed and kicked against the pain, but from the waist up he could hardly move.

Pinned to the floor.

The blood-wet metal bar warm against his cheek.

Another muffled scream traveled down the shaft to match his. His wife, trapped in her own agony.

Angelberto’s voice carried down. “I’ll be right back.” His shadow lifted.

The boots tapped the earth, treading away toward Cristina.

Daniel realized he was bellowing unintelligibly. The white static returned, fuzzing the edges of his thoughts. Somewhere in there was the warning Dooley had issued in another context, another universe:
Usually piece-of-shit criminals are just flat-out
broken.
You can’t get through to them. You can’t fix them.

He tried to breathe, found it nearly impossible, his chest cramping around the wound. A memory of his own words to Cristina returned to mock him:
I would do
anything
to keep you safe.

Well,
he thought.
Then fucking do it.

The slightest movement set off such intense pain that he risked passing out. He cast about for any mental tool but could focus on little aside from the quick jerks of his lungs. He ran the equation: Increased adrenaline led to hyperventilation led to shortness of breath led to overbreathing led to diminished CO
2
led to dizziness led to fainting.

So.

He slowed the rise and fall of his chest.

Deep, even breaths.

Grunting with pain, he reached across his chest and felt for the point of penetration. The rebar rose through the meat of his trapezius just above his collarbone.

Flesh and muscle, then. No bone.

Which meant he had a shot at worming off the hook.

Gritting his teeth and yelling, he strained to lean forward off the rebar but the razor-blade flurry set off inside the wound sliced his will to pieces. Once he’d regained the ability to think, he realized that he couldn’t yank himself free; the angle was wrong. He’d have to lift himself vertically up off the metal post.

Impossible.

Through the haze of pain, he heard Cris’s cries intensify. Angelberto had reached her.