Don Winslow: The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

“Excuse me, sir,” he said. There was no trace of a Chinese accent. “May I ask what you were doing in Room ten-sixteen?”

The younger maid hadn’t wasted any time calling down. So much for her five bucks, Neal thought.

“I left my-”

“Save it. That wasn’t your room.”

Neal nodded at the other guests in the lobby. “Can we do this outside?”

“Sure.”

He opened the door for Neal and let him get a good feel for his bulk. Neal knew that his next move would be to get in front of him and maneuver him to the wall. Which would be the end of the game, so it just wouldn’t do to let Benchpress here make that next move.

Neal looked off to his left as soon as he cleared the doorway, held up his hand, and yelled, “Taxi!”

The front cab in line started to edge forward on the curb as a bellhop hustled over to open the cab door.

“No, no, no,” Benchpress said, waving his arms as he quick-shuffled between Neal and the cab.

This was okay with Neal, who didn’t want to take a cab anyway. He wanted to take a nice long walk up a long, steep hill to see just how badly Benchpress wanted to carry all those big muscles and that belly up a pitch to talk. With Benchpress off to his left, Neal had his whole right side open to move, and he knew where a right turn would take him: through North Beach and then up Telegraph Hill, which was plenty long and steep enough for what he had in mind. He took a hard right and headed out.

Benchpress wasted two seconds standing by the cab wondering how embarrassed he should be, and then another second trying to decide if the chase was going to be worth it.

He decided it was.

Neal wasn’t happy to look over his shoulder and see Benchpress coming after him, but he wasn’t too worried either. The guy wasn’t going to cause a scene-not near his hotel, anyway-and he wasn’t going to call the city police over this kind of crap. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure this thing became real personal, so Neal wasted a second of his own to turn on his heels and grin at Benchpress. Then he inserted his middle finger in his mouth, twisted it around, popped it out, and displayed it to Benchpress.

Benchpress took it personally. He nodded, put his head down, and started forward.

Okay, Neal thought, come on. I’ve spent six months hiking up and down a steep Yorkshire moor carrying packs of supplies. No overweight, pumped-up rent-a-cop can catch me on a hill.

Neal led him up Kearny and took another right on Broadway, which was a little flatter then he remembered. He picked up the pace past the strip joints and sex shops that were just opening to catch the early trade. Benchpress wasn’t distracted by the tired barkers who were sipping on Styrofoam cups of coffee, or by the sleepy dancers who were just arriving with their dancing togs in gym bags slung over their shoulders. He didn’t trip over any of the empty beer or wine bottles, or slip on any of the wax-paper sandwich wrappers or any of the trash that littered the North Beach strip. A sharp, cool wind was blowing off the Bay and into their faces, but that didn’t slow Benchpress down much either.

Reduced to cheap tricks, Neal crossed Broadway in mid-traffic, inspiring some aggravated honking but no apparent concern in Benchpress, who swatted a Renault out of his way and kept coming.

Jesus, Neal thought, what a day. First I screw up and let Pendleton take off, next I find the only house detective in America with an overdeveloped sense of duty.

He swung a left onto Sansome Street, which gave him the incline he was looking for. Like a sparkling brook that flows into a polluted river, Sansome Street seemed a world apart from Broadway. Its street-level garages led up to white and pastel apartments and houses that featured large sun rooms overlooking the Bay. A lot of their windows had those security-service decals plastered on them, the kind that let prospective burglars know that they shouldn’t mess around here unless they wanted police academy dropouts with nightsticks, rottweilers, and inferiority complexes coming down on their sorry asses.

Sansome Street was pretty, trendy, and expensive looking, and Neal wondered where the money came from. Maybe it came from streets like Broadway, money that slipped through the fingers of the strippers and the whores, money that got away from the junkies and the porn addicts, from the sad drunks who paid six bucks a shot to peek over their grimy glasses of cheap bourbon at the bitter shake-and-jiggle of somebody’s baby girl. Maybe it was the angry neon glare of the strip that paid for the warm, bright sun rooms with the view of the Bay.

His class-war reverie took his mind off the pain that was starting to shoot through his legs, pain that reminded him to take Sansome Street for what it was, a steep route up Telegraph Hill. He sucked it up and shifted into high gear. There’s a trick to climbing a hill: you keep your knees slightly bent as you walk, like Groucho Marx going up a staircase. Every three or four steps you rock back on your heels. The technique saves wear and tear on the knees and ankles, and it moves you up a hill faster. Fast enough to leave a musclebound, beer-bellied badge from Woolworth’s stretched out on the pavement sucking air.

After punishing his pursuer for a couple of minutes, Neal looked back over his shoulder and saw that Benchpress was huffing, puffing, muttering, sweating… and gaining on him.

Neal didn’t know where Benchpress had learned Carey’s Own Special Hill-Climbing Technique, but figured his patent was in jeopardy. Also his ass, because his legs started to do one of those reverse Pinocchio numbers and turn to wood. The pot of coffee and the cheese omelet he had consumed started to make some serious complaints in the form of an excruciating cramp, and his lungs began to ask if all this was such a good idea.

He looked around for some boulders or something to roll down on Benchpress like they do in the movies, but didn’t see any. So he took a nice, deep gasp and plunged a little faster up the hill. Plan A, the Leave-the-Fat-Boy-on-the-Slope Maneuver, hadn’t worked, so he tried to come up with a better Plan B. The wit and wisdom of Joe Graham came to him.

“If you can’t beat ’em,” Graham had once intoned, “bribe ’em.”

He had about a ten-second lead on Benchpress and figured he’d need at least fifteen. His current tactic wasn’t getting it done-in fact, he’d be really lucky to reach the park at Coit Tower with a five-second cushion, and five seconds weren’t going to be enough for what he had in mind, so he broke into a run.

“Run” was a grandiose word for the shuffling jog he managed. His heart went into its Buddy-Rich-on-Speed imitation, the pleasant cramp in his stomach reached down into his groin, and his lungs issued a strong protest in the form of a wheezing gasp. But his legs kept moving. They ran up to the corner of Filbert Street and turned right, then hopped over to the north side of the street. While his legs were busy running, his right hand reached into his jacket, lifted out his wallet, and put it in his left hand. The two hands cooperated to take out one of the Bank’s crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and put the wallet back. Then they tore the bill in half, the left hand putting its half in the left pants pocket, and the right hand gripping its prize in its sweaty palm.

He looked back quickly and saw that Benchpress hadn’t hit the corner of Filbert yet, so it looked like he’d get his fifteen ticks. He hit the bottom of Coit Tower park, found a bowling-ball-sized rock at the base of a tree, and put the half-hundred under it. Then he sprinted as fast as he could up the walkway to the observation tower and marked the location of the tree. He leaned against the railing next to one of the coin-operated binoculars to catch what was left of his breath. As he sucked for air, he took off his left loafer and put the hotel notepad and the ticket stubs inside it before he put the shoe back on. People who search you, even after they’ve beaten you unconscious, often forget to look in your shoes.