I don’t own any guns. I do, however, have a fair number of knives. The thick-handled hunting knife wasn’t what I needed. It was too big and only sharp on one side. Instead, I selected a thin-bladed dagger that I strapped to my ankle. I braided my hair low on my head and walked out the door.
My first stop was to the Bok Kai Temple. Dawn had broken. It was light enough that the
kiang shi
had to be back in their graves. At least I didn’t have to worry about them. I took the back alleyway into the temple, though. I didn’t want to chance Henry having posted guards to watch his brother.
George wasn’t in the temple. He was nearby. I was sure of that. I could smell his fear and anxiety throughout the sanctuary, but he wasn’t in the temple proper. I slipped down the stairway, the sanctuary looking strangely innocent in the dawn light. I couldn’t help myself, I walked over to the
kiang shi
’s graves.
The smell of rotting flesh was strong, even stronger than the scent of the river. Had they decomposed more? I peeked over the edge of one of the graves at one of the
kiang shi
. He didn’t appear to be any more rotten than before, but I’d never really had a good close-up look at any of them. I’d been either wanting not to look or fighting them off.
Whoever he had been in his former life, he was disgusting now. Death did not become him. I suppose it doesn’t really become anyone, but some certainly handle it more graciously than others. He lay there, like his five brethren, arms crossed over his chest. No talismans hung from any of their foreheads.
I remembered now. They rose without the talismans and the priests had to put them on. They had to do it damn fast, too. They must need to be faster and faster as time went on, too.
I shook my head and went in search of George Zhang.
I found him asleep on a cot in the small apartment attached to the temple. It wasn’t much. In fact, it made Norah’s and my place look down right opulent. The floor was bare. Nothing hung on the walls. The only furniture besides George’s cot was a scarred wooden table with two straight-backed wooden chairs.
I shook him awake. Shockingly, he was no happier to see me this morning than he’d been on any other of my visits.
“No,” he said, rubbing his face as he struggled to a sitting position. “No. Not you. Not again.”
“I’m putting a stop to this, George, and I’m doing it today. I need your help.”
He shook his head. “No. I won’t do it. I won’t put any more of the people I love at risk. The only way to do that is to cooperate with my brother. I’ll do what he says. Eventually, he’ll have what he wants and he will leave us alone.”
“Well, that’s the problem, George. I won’t let any more of the people I love be at risk either. That means not cooperating with your brother. In fact, it means taking your brother down.”
“It’s not possible.”
I shrugged. “Then I’ll die trying.” It wasn’t my preferred solution for the situation, but it would resolve it. I was pretty sure that with me out of the way, Henry Zhang would leave my family and friends alone. “Where is he?”
“Leave it alone. Maybe if you stop interfering, he’ll leave you alone.”
“Not a chance I’m willing to take, George. Cough it up. Where’s big brother bunking?”
He pressed his lips together in a tight line and said nothing.
I sat back on my haunches, unsure of what to do next. I could pull my knife and threaten to torture him, but I’d seen what motivated George Zhang. If his brother had threatened to harm him, he would never have put the
kiang shi
in motion to attack the gangbangers. It was watching his brother’s henchmen beat up one of his brother priests that had broken him.
“Come on, George. I want you to meet somebody.”
HOSPITALS ARE NEVER ACTUALLY QUIET. THEIR PACE MAY SLOW at certain times, but it never stops. There is, however, a little something called shift change. If you want to slip into a hospital room unnoticed, try to do it at seven in the morning, three in the afternoon or eleven at night. That’s when the nurses and doctors from the shift before are giving the nurses and doctors from the next shift the straight lowdown.
I ushered George down the hall of the pediatrics ward, past the empty nurses’ station and into Maricela’s room.
In addition to the IV tube, she had a feeding tube running into her stomach. She was sprawled on her back. Little mittens were on both her hands, and her wrists were secured to the sides of the crib.
“Why is she tied down like that? She’s just a baby,” George whispered.
“That’s the problem. She’s only a baby. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. They have to restrain her so she doesn’t pull out her IV or her feeding tube,” I explained.
George took a tentative step into the room. “What happened to her?”
“Shrapnel,” I said. “When the Black Dragons started shooting at the Norteños, there was what they call collateral damage. Maricela is collateral damage.”
“Why is she all alone?”
“Well, George, her mom has to work. If she doesn’t show up for her shift at the Styrofoam factory, she’ll lose her job. If she loses her job, Maricela has no home to go home to and no food to eat when she doesn’t get there. My doctor friends tell me she’ll be fine, but she almost died. She’s still not entirely out of the woods.”
George turned away and leaned against the wall outside Maricela’s room. “This is wrong.”
“True that,” I said. “She won’t be the last either, George. You know your brother doesn’t care who gets hurt as he barrels along to whatever goal he’s set for himself. The Maricelas of the world mean nothing to him. He has to be stopped. Tell me where he is.”
George bowed his head. “He and his men are staying at the Omni on Capitol Plaza now that the grow houses are busted.”
I SHOULD HAVE LET GEORGE SLEEP. IF I’D DONE A GRID SEARCH of the area around the temple, I would have found the Navigators parked in a neat little row in the hotel parking lot. It was barely two blocks away. Conveniently located for creating mayhem. Continental breakfast included.
Daylight had started to burn. I wondered how long I had before Henry went after someone else I cared about. Was it enough that he’d killed Mae? Would he go after my family next?
This had to end now, and the way to end it was clear: either Henry Zhang had to die, or I did.
I am not a killer. Or, I suppose I should say, up until that point, I’d never been a killer. I’d never taken a life, human or otherwise. I have no doubt that I’d occasionally delivered something that might have contributed to someone’s end, but I’d never ended anyone’s life myself.
I fingered the knife at my ankle and shoved down the fear that rose up in my throat like bile. There was, after all, a first time for everything.
The Omni on Capitol Plaza is huge. It’s thirty-five stories and has close to five hundred rooms. Even with a nose like mine, it was going to be impossible to sniff out exactly where Henry Zhang and his friends were staying. I figured, however, that they would come out eventually. Unlike their friends the
kiang shi
, they weren’t nocturnal and would probably want to eat something besides hotel food at some point. Nor did they look like the kind of guys who were going to walk. What seemed to make the best sense was to watch the cars. I wouldn’t even have to follow the cars when they left, which was a good thing. If these men knew who I was, and obviously they did, they also knew what I drove. I love Grandma Rosie’s Buick to death, but inconspicuous it is not.
No. All I needed to do was watch for when they came back and then follow them into the hotel. I circled the block until a space opened up on the street. Finally, I had a stroke of luck. I’d be behind enough shrubs that they wouldn’t see me, but I had enough of a slice of view of the SUVs that I’d be able to see when they moved. I’d have to reposition at that point anyway.
For now, I hunkered down in the front seat of the Buick and settled in to wait.
HENRY ZHANG MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN NOCTURNAL, BUT HE wasn’t exactly diurnal either. It was getting close to noon when he and his band of merry men finally came out of the hotel, looking freshly showered and shined. They loaded into one of the Navigators and took off.
It was about time. I had a cramp in my leg, I had to pee wicked bad and my butt felt bruised from sitting too long. Now that I was sure they were gone, it was time to scope out the lobby for a place to position myself to watch for the return of my prey.
That was the way I had to think of them. They were prey. I was the hunter. It was as impersonal as that.
I brushed my hair back into its braid, put on my jacket and grabbed my duffel bag from the backseat of the Buick. I kept an eye out for anything unusual as I marched into the lobby of the hotel. I didn’t think Henry had left a guard, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
I’d seen nothing out of the ordinary by the time I made it to the registration desk. It only took a few minutes to rent a room. It wasn’t like I was actually going to stay in it, but once you’re a guest, you’re free to loiter in the lobby so long as you don’t make a scene.
A scene was the last thing I needed to create. Once I was checked in, I bought a newspaper and sat down in one of the chairs behind a potted fern. I wouldn’t be visible by anyone walking in the front entrance and going straight to the elevators. It was possible that Henry would go in a side entrance, but he seemed like a front-door man to me.
I settled in to wait some more.
HENRY APPARENTLY WASN’T ONE TO DAWDLE OVER HIS LUNCH. He and his men came walking in at around two o’clock. I stayed very still in my chair behind the fern as they marched through the lobby. His men definitely had his back. They were watching. If I’d moved, they probably would have spotted me right away. It wasn’t easy sitting there, watching my target wait for the elevator, head tilted back and throat vulnerable and exposed, but now was not the time.
Henry and I would need some privacy for what I had planned.
I moved quickly as soon as the elevator doors closed. I needed to see what floor they were on. With that narrowed down, I should be able to sniff out their rooms.
I watched as the numbers over the door lit up, one by one. They stopped at twenty-three. Bingo.
Now I had to figure out how to get to Henry when he was alone.
Hotels are not entirely unlike hospitals. They’re big. They’re impersonal. They both profess to care about your comfort when they’re really all about making money. For my purposes at that moment, the most important thing was that they both have shift changes.
Oh, sure, the office staff might work nine to five, but the cleaning and maintenance crews were on 24/7, 365 days a year, and that has to be done in shifts. At three o’clock, the daytime maid shift was leaving and the evening shift was reporting for duty. Just like in the hospital, it was the perfect time to slip in unnoticed. They didn’t exactly have a meeting where they sat down and exchanged information about different rooms and guests, the way they do at the hospital, but they did have a nice gossip in the changing room.
It hadn’t been too hard to figure out where the changing room was. I’d done a little reconnaissance of the basement after I’d figured out which floor Henry and his buddies were chilling on. It also wasn’t all that hard to find a uniform still in its dry cleaning bag, hung on a rack. This made me very happy because my plan hinged on me looking like a maid and I really didn’t want to club one of them on the head to steal her clothes. Their lives were hard enough without getting involved with my
meshugass
. I figured I’d leave the uniform in some easy-to-find location with a twenty tucked into the pocket to make up for whatever inconvenience I was causing by stealing it. Call me hypersensitive, but I hate to be inconvenienced, and my mother’s upbringing with her emphasis on the Golden Rule does come through at the oddest moments.
By three thirty, I was armed with a linen cart and a uniform. There’s a reason that people are always waltzing into places unnoticed in TV shows and movies by wearing a uniform and carrying a clipboard. It works. Still, for my purposes, it wasn’t going to be enough to sneak into Henry’s room. For what I needed to do, he was going to have to be alone.
I took my laundry cart up to twenty-three. Now that I knew what floor Henry was staying on, the job of determining which room he was in would be easier, though not necessarily a slam dunk. My nose is good, really good. But still, it wasn’t like I’d ever been really close to him, and most of the time that I’d been around Henry, the
kiang shi
had dominated my senses.
I pushed the cart slowly along, wondering whether I’d be able to sniff him out. About halfway down the hallway, I had my answer. I smelled it. That strange combination of river and rot that I smelled whenever the
kiang shi
were near. I slowed my steps. It was definitely strongest right outside room 2318, and there was a whiff of it outside 2320. I did another pass to make sure. Yep. The smell was definitely coming from 2318. It must be some kind of olfactory version of the theory of transference. If a person can’t come or go from a place without taking some of it with them and leaving something behind, apparently they can’t spend a lot of time with brutally murdered undead Chinese miners without picking up a bit of their perfume.
I made my way farther down the hall to the alcove with the ice and vending machines where I could duck out of view for a while. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have before someone came looking for the linen cart I’d made off with. Plus, I needed to get this over with before I lost what little courage I had.
