Dim Sum Asylum(35)
“What now?” Trent asked, backing away from the curb. “And before you ask, someone from the garage already dropped off another car. Ours is now evidence.”
“Crap, my tea packet was in there.” I peered at the slightly battered sedan we’d come in. “I’m going to have to make another stop on the way home.”
“Or you could take the painkillers. Those were released to me. I’ve got them in my pocket.” He stood under my withering snort easily enough, then capitulated. “I can go ask if they’ll let the tea go, but really, do you think it actually does anything?”
“She needs a license to issue any concoctions she makes,” I pointed out. “How is that any different from—wait a second, you said something earlier.”
Trent’s attention was on the crowd now, his focus pinned to the faces in the demi-shadows. “I’ve said a lot of things to you. I’m not sure any of it stuck.”
“You wondered how expensive would it be to pull this kind of thing off. The netsuke are small, easy to animate, but they were focused. The shrine god was bigger but seemed like it was all over the place.” The thread of thought eluded me, glistening in the orange glow of the building’s death. “We’ve got two—no—three object animation events—one with a purpose, killing two seemingly unrelated people, and one shrine god that didn’t seem to have an endgame other than to cause a riot. And I’m putting aside Shelly Chan’s disappearance, but she was looking for a token at a temple vendor when she disappeared, so I’m not willing to take her off the board yet.”
“Could the netsuke and the god be unrelated? I don’t know the lay of the land here. How many object animations do you get in a week? One? Five hundred?” His focus snapped to me, a pale wolfish gleam in his eyes. There was something primal there, lurking beneath the hard surface, and it burned as hot as the noodle factory’s remains. “Give me a good idea on what I’m looking at, Roku.”
“If we got one a month, it’d be a lot. But that’s just here in C-Town. Some of the other districts might have more. That was something Records was chasing down for us. I’d have to tap someone there to see if they came up with something.” I dug through what I remembered about any past cases, but it wasn’t much. Animations were mostly a nuisance, not deadly. “What bothers me is the style of this magic. It’s too… much. Too controlled. Too powerful. Most of the animations I’ve run up against are jerky when they move, and the caster usually can’t force the magic into the vessel for that long. That’s why I wonder where the caster is getting this much juice. The netsuke hit pretty much within a two-hour period and went straight for their targets.”
“Maybe,” Trent pointed out. “We don’t know if there were actual targets or if these people just checked off all the boxes for the kill.”
“Okay, fair point. We’ve only got one witness with a maybe this thing was looking for Wong in the noodle factory. The rest were found dead. No one saw the attack.” The pills were beginning to affect me, and the world bent around me, sheets of cement and fire wrapping around my head. I blinked hard, forcing everything back into perspective, but what I really needed was something stronger than a cup of beetle-brewed tea. “Let’s start eliminating the one possibility I can get a handle on: whether or not someone’s paying a caster to do this.”
“How do you suppose we do that?” Skepticism weighed down his words. “Round up all the usual suspects?”
“No, just go to someone who talks to them all the time,” I murmured and made the mistake of looking at my buzzing phone again. “And we’ll do just that, right after I tell the Captain I’ve got all my fingers and you go get the tea out of the squad car they just hooked up to that tow truck.”
IT TOOK us a good forty-five minutes to get where we needed to go. Chinatown’s late-afternoon traffic was shitty during the best of days, but in the midst of closed-off streets, a thunderous rainstorm, and pedestrians wandering into the road to take pictures of the district’s beast-infested buildings, it would have been faster if we’d walked the ten blocks to Kingfisher’s.
We were on the far outskirts of Chinatown, skirting the edge of the bridge and the adobe mission-style homes set on the hills above the trolley lines. A few generations ago, the neighborhood ran more to Russian and Italian immigrants, but Chinatown was relentless, a pervasive root system hungry for ground to grow into. While the hillside houses ran to nosebleed selling prices, down below was a different story. The scatter of warehouses built up to provide storage for the countless cargo ships coming into the Bay boasted a glut of gōngyù with connective strands so thick and shack heavy, most of the side streets and alleys never saw the light of day.
I let Trent drive again, mostly because I was still fuzzy around the edges, and I needed both hands to sip at the stygian espresso soup I’d bought from a Death Pegasus coffee kiosk around the corner from the fire. It’d been too long since I’d eaten, and from the looks of things, it was going to be some time before I got some food in me. The oil from the coffee slickened my stomach, and I ignored the rumbles coming from my gut. Trent, however, didn’t and pointedly glanced at my belly after a round of gurgles.
“You’re going to tear up your insides if you drink that shit without having some food in you.” Glancing down the street I directed him to turn into, he frowned. “Or were you intending on dying with an empty stomach? As a special thank-you to the morgue? Because this down here? This looks… bad.”