Dim Sum Asylum(49)

Kingfisher’s was in an uproar when I went by, and no amount of pleading could get me past Yamada, who’d seen me coming and leaned on my car door to stop me from getting out.

“I’ve got to see….” I slammed my fist against the steering wheel, leaving a small dent in one of its curves. The hollowed-out cavity in my stomach ached, filling with a pain I’d grown too accustomed to over the past few years. I was sick of people dying around me and being helpless to stop it. “Yamada, she was my friend.”

“I know, man, but Gaines’d have my ass if I even let you get near the door. That’s the first thing he told me.” His hangdog face melted into a deep sorrowful frown. “I’m sorry, MacCormick, but he was firm about this. You go inside and he’ll peel what little hair I have on my nut sack off with a jar of hot wax. You’ve got to walk away, man. Go find someone—anyone—and hang with them until you’ve got your head on straight. Do you need me to call someone to come get you?”

Jie was more than a friend. More a sort-of cousin I’d snuck into Chinese school with me so we could both sit at the back of the class and make fun of the teacher, who looked more frog than human. I’d shared lunches with her when she’d been hungry and got angry when she’d refused to show me where she lived. I’d known nothing about her family, and she’d refused to come into my house, pointing out my mother was a cop and she pretty much spent most of her time breaking one law or another.

We’d grown apart only when we drifted onto our separate paths, but she’d been there, or at least around, for me during some of the shittiest times in my life. Around was enough for me, and now, when I walked into Kingfisher’s, I wouldn’t see the girl I’d spent afternoons with stealing fresh oranges from graves or eating ourselves sick on the Dungeness we’d fished out of the murky Bay waters. Now she was dead, and I’d probably brought her killer right to her front door.

“No, I’m… where’d they find her?” I pressed Yamada. “Tell me that at least. And where’s Yokugawa?”

“He’d stepped away. A couple of guys were shooting at each other near the end of the street. That drew him and the dogs off the door, and one of the other guys stepped in to cover.” Yamada glanced over his shoulder when a uniformed cop called out his name. “We found him dead against the wall. Same kind of thing, ceramic statue, but this time, one of those long-legged crabs they use in front of restaurants. We found the damned thing hugging his face. Killed him by driving its limbs into his head, then just stayed there.”

“I need to—”

“You need to get out of here, MacCormick.” He patted my arm. “Go get drunk. Go get laid. Just… don’t be here.”




AT SOME point I ended up holding a whiskey glass with a hole in it, because no matter how much booze the bartender poured into it, it always seemed to be empty when I picked it up.

The dive was a place I’d come to on and off over the years, a tiny street stall set up for business a little ways away from Woo Fat’s Hong Kong Style Noodles. Woo Fat’s didn’t sell noodles, and he’d never been outside of the city, much less to Hong Kong. Instead, Woo Fat was actually a man named William Fong who bought and sold stolen electronics out of a fried bread restaurant no one ate at. Business for Fong was brisk, and he could dance around a police investigation like he’d been born to waltz.

As a result, undercover cops began spending a lot of time behind Woo Fat’s, hoping to shake him loose for an arrest. Food and coffee options were slim in the lower reaches of the street since most of the businesses in the area were warehouse storage and sweatshops, so there’d been a lot of hungry, grumpy cops needing something to sustain them on their long, futile stakeouts.

Which led to Sailor Jim’s opening up and becoming possibly the only street stall bar catering practically only to cops and the occasional fireman.

They also always served a mean shot of whiskey.

Chinatown stayed in the shadows, a rollick of murmured voices and blazing lights muted by the overhangs crowding the rooftops above the stall. I wasn’t the only one drinking away the stars. There was a ruddy-faced fae on the other side of the rectangular booth, his brown tweed jacket badly cut around his short, dark wings. From his grizzled face and deadpan expression, I made him for another cop, a supposition confirmed when he reached for his wallet to pay for a beer and I caught a wink of a badge hanging from his jacket’s inside pocket.

I knew the proto-goblin slinging drinks on sight, mostly because it was hard to forget a six-foot-plus muscled gray mass with sawed-off gold-tipped tusks jutting up over his fleshy upper lip. The covered stall was a cramped, narrow space built up against Woo Fat’s back wall with only a tiny swing door on the side for access to the inner well, and I watched with a hushed awe as he nimbly moved about the glass bottles without knocking anything over. He’d lost a fight or two in his lifetime, his bulbous nose and drooping jowls thick with old scars, and I never could tell if he just had heavy eyebrow ridges or if his frown was simply a permanent expression he’d adopted over the years.

A snorfling sound by my foot was a bit alarming, but not as startling as the squat magenta reptilian licking my shoe. More of a dappled snakeskin ottoman with short fat legs and a slash of a mouth filled with broad triangular teeth, snorklewhackers were mostly doglike irascible pets, and this one apparently had a fondness for leather boots.