Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

Crowe answered on the first ring.

“Crowe.”

“It’s Neal.”

“You are taking me to an expensive dinner, aren’t you?”

“Crowe, has anyone been around asking for me?”

“No.”

“Anything unusual? Repairmen you didn’t expect? Pollsters? Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“No! I’m in the mood for French cuisine, I think.”

“Just shut up and listen. I won’t be back. Thanks for all the help. If anyone comes around asking questions, you haven’t seen me or heard from me in years, okay?”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s too long a story.”

“Where are you now? Neal, are you in trouble?”

Well, sort of, Crowe. I have this creepy feeling that the CIA and my own employers want to kill me, but other than that…

“I just need to disappear for a while, Crowe.”

“Let me help, Neal.”

“You already have. Thanks, Crowe, and ’bye.”

Neal met Graham outside the Chinese Crafts Center on Grant Avenue. Groups of tourists from Grey Line bus tours were prowling Chinatown, gawking in store windows and choosing restaurants as night fell and the neon came up.

“Let’s take a walk,” Neal said. He told Graham about his research and his suspicions about AgriTech.

“And the Man is on their board?” Graham asked when Neal was finished.

“Yeah.”

“So what is AgriTech to the CIA or the CIA to AgriTech?”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

Graham grabbed him by the elbow. “Are you crazy? You’re not going to do shit. What you’re going to do is what I’m going to do.”

Neal wrenched his arm away. “Which is what?”

Graham started walking again and gestured for Neal to come with him. As they were walking, Graham started to lecture.

“Neal, listen. I don’t know if you’re right or not about this CIA thing. Sounds crazy to me. But whatever is going on here, it is very serious. With this kind of stuff, we don’t fuck around. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to catch the next plane to Providence, we’re going to walk into the Man’s office and say, ‘Mr. Kitteredge, please tell anyone you may or may not know that Joe Graham and Neal Carey don’t know anything and care less.’ Then we’re going to ask him what he wants us to do. He’s going to tell us in polite terms to keep our fucking mouths shut and forget about Dr. Robert Pendleton, and Neal-that’s what we’re going to do.”

“They’re going to kill her!”

“You mean him.”

“I mean both of them.”

Graham looked at him real funny. “You mean her.”

“All right. Her.”

Graham slammed his rubber hand into a lamppost. “Fuck! What is it with this babe, everyone falls in love with her?”

“I’m not in love with her.”

“Yes, you are.”

Yes, you are, Graham thought. I know you, kid, you’re in love with the heartache.

“Look, Neal… say you find them, say you warn them. What then? Are you going to save them? How? You won’t save them, dickhead, you’ll join them. You’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this time the bullet won’t miss. Son, you don’t know these people, what Pendleton did, what the China doll did. Maybe they deserve it.”

“Her name is Li Lan. She has a name.”

“A little while ago you thought she set you up for a bullet in the head, now you want to rescue her. What next, you want to fuck her? Listen, Neal, if you want a little Chinese pussy, I’ll buy you some, it’s all over the place.”

Neal’s fists clenched. For a moment he thought he might punch Graham.

Am I in love with her? he wondered. I must be, because the thought of her hurts, the thought of her dead… and I don’t give a rat’s ass about Pendleton and haven’t since I saw her. And the thought of never seeing her again…

“See you, Dad.”

Neal turned and started walking away. Graham is always telling me that he taught me everything I know, let’s see if he taught me everything he knows, he thought. Graham may be the best street man ever born, but I may be the best ever made.

He was right, but he was right on both counts. Graham hung on his tail like a burr on a dog. Neal couldn’t get the space he needed to break the connection. He took the older man along Grant, then up Clay to Stockton. He passed through crowds and crossed the street, doubled back, went into a store through one door and left through another, took it fast, took it slow, and still Graham stayed with him. It was all right, though. In this game, like baseball, the tie goes to the runner, and Neal knew that time was on his side. Graham couldn’t stop to call in for backup, so he wasn’t able to drive Neal into a tightening net. And once Neal shook him, that would be it.

Mark Chin had kept the net loose all day and was glad it was finally time to jerk it shut. He’d let the kweilo sit around the Hopkins hotel, had let the one-armed guy come in, had waited while the kweilo did his thing in the library, and finally saw his spot as the two kweilos had an argument. About fucking time. It had taken the efforts of seven of his best boys to keep this Neal Carey person in an invisible net. Now the mark was running hard, trying to shake his partner. The opportunity was at hand.

He fell in behind him and let himself be seen as the mark turned to check on his partner.

Neal saw Benchpress come out of a doorway behind him, and this time Benchpress looked like an opportunity. Graham was coming up about fifty feet behind them. Neal turned on his heel and bumped straight into Benchpress.

“A hundred bucks for taking that guy out without hurting him. Another bill for meeting me, giving me some help.”

Benchpress mumbled an address and turned back toward Graham.

Graham saw the guy coming, but it was too late. The fucker was huge, and Graham felt himself wrapped in a bear hug that choked his breath and obliterated his view. In two seconds there were three more Chinese guys around him.

“Don’t hurt him,” Chin told his assistants.

“I’ll beat whatever he paid you,” Graham said.

“This isn’t an auction.”

And Neal was going, going, gone.

Neal checked the address on the doorway under a yellow neon sign with XXX on it in black letters. A tired-looking black man behind the raised counter nodded to him. There were three or four customers in the shop, but none of them looked up from the porno magazines.

“You can shop, you can buy, you can get tokens from me. You can’t read. This isn’t a library,” the counterman said to Neal.

“I’m meeting a guy.”

“Gay stuff back and to the left.”

Benchpress came in just then and handed a five-dollar bill to the clerk, who handed back a plastic sleeve full of tokens. He jerked his head to Neal and pointed to a swinging door at the rear of the shop.

“Step into my office.”

Chin selected a booth, gestured Neal in, and shut the door behind him. There was a pull-down bench just large enough for one person to sit on. A box of Kleenex completed the furnishings. Chin dropped two tokens into a coin slot, then glanced at the channel selector.

“Any preferences?”

Neal shook his head.

Chin pushed a button and the porn video started.

“Sit down. Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.”

Neal handed him another fifty.

“I get the idea,” Chin said over the sound track of groans of phony passion, “that you got more than a fifty-dollar problem.”

Neal could hear similar groans from the next booth.

“Turn up the volume,” he said.

Mark Chin cranked it up to full. The tinny rock music vibrated on the cheap walls.

“So?” Chin asked.

“I need a place to hide.”

“No big deal.”