I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the hotel’s phone number and punched in 2-3-1-8 when prompted by the electronic voice that answered the phone.
I heard the phone ring down the hall in Henry’s room.
“Hello?” the voice said over my cell phone.
“Hi, this is the front desk. We have a package for a Mr. Henry Zhang in Room 2318.”
“Hold on for a moment,” the voice said. Then as if a hand had been placed over the receiver, I heard a muffled exchange. “Are we expecting a package?”
“Here?”
“They say there’s a package for Mr. Zhang at the front desk.”
“Who even knows we’re here?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. Should I have them send it up?”
“No. Take Wen and go down and check it out.”
The voice came back to me. “We’ll be right down to pick it up.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said and hung up. I scooted my linen cart quickly out into the hallway and then returned to a more plodding pace with my head down. Two of Henry’s men came out of the door and headed for the elevators. Damn. That meant there were still two more inside.
At least I’d improved my odds. I pushed my cart to room 2318 and knocked on the door. “Housekeeping.”
One of Henry’s men opened the door. It was the bald guy with the thick neck. I kept my head tilted down, but it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t even look at my face. He took in the uniform and the cart and that was all. And to think, I’d planted my heel in this guy’s solar plexus only two days before. You think you’ve made a connection with someone, then bam, you realize you were nothing but a nasty side kick to them. “You already made the beds.”
“We wanted to bring more towels.” I picked up a stack from the cart and marched past him. I mean, who doesn’t need more towels when they’re staying at a hotel? There’s never enough for your hair. Of course, I generally prefer my towels without a dagger tucked inside the stack, but today was different.
Today I was a killer and I liked my dagger just fine.
Sure enough, he stood aside.
As I suspected, Henry and his men had two adjoined rooms. Henry was in the next one. I went into the bathroom and began straightening the toiletries next to the sink. I heard Henry answer his cell phone. “Tell them that they’re the ones who called us about the package.” He lowered the phone. “Jimmy, what was the name of the person who called from the front desk about the package?”
Jimmy, or at least the guy I presumed to be Jimmy, said, “They didn’t say a name. They just said the front desk.”
Henry lifted the cell phone back to his ear. “Give them five more minutes and then come back up.”
I didn’t have much time. I slid the dagger up the sleeve of my maid’s uniform and left the stack of towels in the bathroom.
I moved into the main area of the hotel room. Baldy and Jimmy were both in this room with Henry propped on pillows in the next. I picked up the phone and pretended to wipe down the desk beneath it. Instead, I unplugged it. I turned around still holding the phone. Neither man was watching me.
I wrapped the cord around the neck of one and smashed the phone into the head of the other. They went down in a heap. “I think it’s for you,” I said brightly.
I leaped the bodies, barrel-rolled through the open adjoining door and was in Henry’s room with the connecting door slammed behind me before Henry even registered that anything had happened. He was just looking up from his newspaper when I leapt onto the bed, pinned him by his throat to the bed with my left forearm and pressed the dagger against his throat with my right.
I watched a series of emotions pass across Henry’s face. I saw surprise, confusion and then recognition. I didn’t see fear. Why the hell not? He should have been afraid. Hell, I was afraid and I was the one with the knife.
“Hello, Ms. Markowitz.” Henry smiled at me. “Are you surprised that I know your name?”
“No, Henry, I’m not surprised. Are you surprised that I know yours?” He flinched a bit when I said his name. Score one for Melina.
“You are a very clever young lady. Nothing you do would surprise me anymore.” He settled his head back against the pillow.
I made sure my knife followed his movements. “Maybe this will. I’m going to stop your Triad from moving into my town. I’m going to cut off the head of the snake, Henry, and that would be you.”
He laughed, which actually impressed me. Not many people would be able to muster up a chuckle with a sharp knife at their throat. I knew what it meant to be able to do that. It meant that death meant nothing to you. Henry was as cold-blooded as they come.
“Oh, you poor mistaken little girl, a Triad is not like a snake. You can’t cut off the head and kill it. We would have been hunted out of existence long ago if that were the case. A Triad is like a hydra. Cut off the head, and two will grow back in its place.”
I pulled back for a second, reassessing. Was it possible? Would I end up killing Henry and not have anything to show for it but a stain on my soul that would never wash off?
“Sacramento is ripe for picking. I can’t believe it’s taken us so long. I suppose no one wants to leave San Francisco for a backwater like this. Still, better to be king in a backwater than someone else’s knight in a paradise. I may be the first one to try it, but I won’t be the last.” Henry tilted his head, again moving his neck a little bit away from my knife.
Again I followed his movement. That argument wasn’t going to hold water at the moment. At least, not for me. “The Triads can do whatever they want. It’s when you started bringing the
kiang shi
into it that I had to get involved.”
Henry shook his head ever so slightly. Anymore of a shake and he would have sliced his own throat.
“That was not it, Melina. You were ready to leave that alone. It was the baby, wasn’t it?”
He knew about Maricela? My shock must have shown on my face.
“You and my brother are too softhearted. You put too much value on other people’s lives, especially the lives of those you deem to be innocent. Innocence is overrated if it exists at all.”
“What sin can Maricela have possibly committed? She’s six months old.”
“And she is a greedy, self-centered being. All children are until we teach them to pretend to be otherwise. What is she going to become anyway? Look at her mother. A stupid whore. What precisely do you think she’ll teach her? How to give a twenty-five-dollar blow job?”
I leaned forward and the knife cut a little bit into Henry’s skin. His eyes went wide for a fraction of a second, not long, but long enough for me to see it. He wasn’t as cool as he made out to be. “Let’s leave the baby out of this. I’m past caring about much because of you. All I really care about is making sure you can’t hurt any more of the people I love, and I figure there’s only one way to do that. That’s to kill the one person you love, Henry. I figure that would be you.”
“A very pretty speech, Ms. Markowitz. I know I should feel terrible about my selfishness, but that selfishness is what has made me into the successful businessman I am today. So successful that there are men who are willing to die for me.”
That’s when I heard the door to the adjoining room click open. I had made the classic mistake. I had not acted decisively. I’d let Mae down once again. I hadn’t been able to chart my course and stick with it. I had wavered. I had let Henry talk me into waiting, into hesitating, and now, truly, all might be lost.
Once you’ve died once, you become a little more used to the idea. Death always wins in the end. There’s a certain amount of relief in knowing that. If you lose, it’s because the inevitable has finally happened. It’s not your fault. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. I leapt off the bed, spun and slammed the heel of my foot into one of Henry’s men’s larynx, and figured that if my day was today, so be it.
While I was still in the air, the one next to him lowered his shoulder and took me out with a tackle that crashed me into the table and chairs. I rolled and bunched up my legs, ready to send him reeling back with a kick to the chest. I never got the chance. The third man dropped an ax kick on my solar plexus and then hit two pressure points at the base of my skull.
Everything went black.
22
WHEN I CAME TO, I WAS TIED TO A CHAIR. THE CHAIR WAS SET in the middle of the floor.
Henry sat behind his table and gestured with his hand. One of the men brought him a cup of tea. “Forgive my lack of hospitality. I’d offer you tea, but I know you can’t drink it with your hands bound behind your back that way.”
Plus, if they gave me a cup of anything, I’d throw it in their faces. I was in that kind of mood. Being smacked on the back of the head and tied up does that to me. I was, however, working at the knots I could reach as fast as I could without letting them know what I was doing. Somebody here was either a Boy Scout or a sailor. Either way, they knew their knots. “I’ll take a rain check,” I said.
He smiled again and shook his head. “So clever. Always so clever. How is it, Ms. Markowitz, that you came to be so clever?”
I shrugged as well as I could. “A happy nexus of genetics and opportunity, I guess.”
“Ah, opportunity. I’m glad you brought that up. That is precisely what I wanted to talk to you about.” He set down his cup of tea and folded his hands in front of him.
His movements were so measured and controlled. It made what he said even more menacing, and I already felt pretty darn menaced what with the being bound to the chair and all the guys with guns under their jackets. It was the strange lack of emotion that made him so scary. Henry Zhang didn’t feel any of this. I twisted my hands harder and was rewarded only with a trickle of blood dripping down my hand. “What kind of opportunity?”
“A business opportunity. We don’t have to be adversaries, Ms. Markowitz. We’ve simply gotten off on the wrong foot. We could join forces.”
I shook my head. I took my cue from Nancy Reagan—which would have killed my lifelong Democratic mother—and just said no. “I don’t think that would be possible, Henry. Kind of you to offer, though.”
“Who says it wouldn’t be possible?” He leaned forward over the table. “Who controls you? Tell me. You would be surprised at the many ways I have of taking care of little problems like that.”
I shook my head again. “You misunderstand me. No one is controlling me.”
He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “It’s hard to try and make some kind of accommodation with each other if you won’t be honest with me. You can’t have done this on your own.”
“And why is that?” That plain annoyed me. So I hadn’t figured out everything on my own. I’d had Alex and Paul and Norah and Mae and Ted, not to mention Aunt Kitty, all contributing pieces of the puzzle, but I would have figured it out on my own eventually. Probably. At some point. Maybe.
Henry waved my question aside. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not you’re willing to come and work for me.”
“Not only no, but hell no,” I said.
“Don’t be so hasty. Think of the benefits. This is a very lucrative business. You wouldn’t have to share a rundown apartment. You could buy a house. Forget the filing job at the hospital. It wouldn’t be necessary. You could be free to pursue other interests.” He stood and walked around his desk, stopping directly in front of me to lean against it.
It did sound nice. “And what exactly would I have to do to get all this money and free time?”
He smiled his crocodile smile again. “Besides stay out of my way?”
I nodded.
“The occasional errand.” He shrugged. “Think about, Melina. Money. Comfort. Join us.”
I thought for about a nanosecond, and then I spit at him. It landed on his cheek. He stared at me and then very slowly and deliberately removed a handkerchief and wiped his face. Without ever taking his gaze from my face, he stood. “Take her out to the rail yard and kill her,” he said and walked out of the room.
IT HAD GOTTEN DARK OUTSIDE. I WAS SURPRISED. IT WAS EASILY close to ten o’clock. My how time flies when you’re tied up in a hotel closet.
There had been a fair amount of discussion on how to get me out of the hotel unseen. In the end, I had been hoisted by my own petard. Damn Shakespeare anyway. His phrasing is often too apt.
Henry’s men had jammed me into the linen cart that I’d used to worm my way into the room and had hauled me out via the service elevator at the end of the hall. It was a hop, skip and a jump to the loading dock and into one of their stupid Navigators from there.
The rail yards in Sacramento are infamous. It’s a pretty decent section of real estate in a prime location. It took an eon or two for the appropriate authorities to write environmental impact reports and then development stalled. Truly, they have no idea what’s in there. They think there might be a Chinese cemetery or two from the height of the railroad-building boom on the edge of the China Slough, a wetlands area that was filled in a long time ago. They also think there might be a buried locomotive or two. Apparently, back in the day, when the railroad officials didn’t know what to do with something that didn’t work anymore, they’d just drive it out into the slough and let it sink.
Don’t even get me started on the toxic chemicals.
There’s actually a bike path that runs around it and along the river on the way to Discovery Park. In the daytime, there are joggers and bikers and young mothers pushing strollers.
The sun wasn’t shining now, though. There was nothing but shadow as Baldy, Jimmy, Ponytail and the guy I took to be Wen shoved me along. I wondered how you picked where to execute a person. Is there some kind of etiquette? Worse yet, is there some sort of final humiliation? I’d never been to an execution before. Just my luck that my first one would be my own.
