CHAPTER SIX
“Well, at least this isn’t as ugly as that asshole-of-the-universe part of LA,” Tom Christiansen muttered, looking at the shuttered windows and locked doors of the building across the street. “Crowded, but the crowds are friendlier. And it isn’t so hot.”
Mark Twain had once said that the coldest winter he ever lived through was a summer in San Francisco. This June day was a little on the cool side of warm, with the sun high and bright in a sky that was clear but slightly hazy. It might have been March or November just as easily as June. There was a strong wind from the Pacific, too.
“Yeah, and we fit in so fucking well,” Roy Tully replied. “Or at least you do, Kemosabe.”
Not here in the Mission district, I don’t, Tom thought.
Of course, six-foot-three blonds with shoulders a yard across weren’t exactly inconspicuous most other places, unless he wanted to confine his career to the upper Midwest and/or Scandinavia. They stood out even more in the heart of San Francisco’s traditional Latino district. It could have been worse, though. The action could have been in Chinatown.
Tully’s shorter and dark, but he’s not stylish enough to be a real San Franciscan, I suppose.
They weren’t really on a stakeout; they were just checking that nobody was at the other location owned by the people who were supposed to be at the first location… and he felt even more useless than that suggested. This operation was FBI, with the SFPD handling backup and supplying manpower. The Fish and Game men were embarrassingly superfluous. If Special Operations had gotten any sort of a handle on where the local varieties of contraband were coming from, they might be contributing something valuable to the investigation. As it was they were tagalongs, and if this went on they were also going to look like completely incompetent tagalongs.
And I know things about RM&M and the Oakland angle, the problem is, so far they’ve been completely useless.
“Well, let’s be good little tagalongs,” he said. “Obviously, nobody’s here. Plan B—we go play with the big boys and girls.”
He pulled out his phone and keyed Sarah Perkins’s number. “Yo,” he said. “Minding the store? This one’s definitely not open for business.”
“This one is. We’re going shopping in twenty minutes,” she replied. “You’re welcome to come along. This time it’s tasteful merchandise, not that garish LA stuff.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Tom replied. To his partner, he went on: “They’re going in—discreetly, not with a SWAT team.”
Tully nodded. “Well, this is the town of refinement, not LA Brutal. I’m surprised they don’t send a scented notification card, so nobody’s feelings will be hurt when they bust ’em.”
They turned up Twenty-fourth and onto a side street near Balmy Alley, past bakeries with mouthwatering scents, little produce stores spilling over with vegetables and fruits—some of them he couldn’t recognize—and butcher shops and thrift stores…. Salsa poured out of music stores and slow-moving cars, and the crowds surged around him, past an amazing variety of colorful murals and more taquerías than he could count.
It occurred to him that if he’d really been sight-seeing here, it would be quite enjoyable—for a day or two. If he had to live here, he’d soon run screaming for Golden Gate Park and dash around waving his arms in the air and babbling for a while before he went over a cliff and into the ocean. Where the waves would burst into steam as they touched his brain. It was just too completely, classically urban for him to tolerate for long.
The taquerías prompted a thought: “Let’s at least look like tourists and not cops trying to blend in and failing,” he said, looking at his watch. It was 10:10 exactly, and time to be moving.
Plus the Mission district has the best burritos in the world, he added to himself. All others are a pale imitation. And one of their burritos makes a pretty good lunch.
They stopped and bought two: rice, beans, strips of grilled beef, salsa, guacamole and sour cream wrapped in a flour tortilla, and that in aluminum foil, which kept it warm and less messy. He chatted with the server in Spanish—although the Tejano accent he’d picked up from a girlfriend during his first year in the army struck the Guatemalan lady serving the takeout as hilarious—and then they strolled along taking in the sights as they ate. Two friends eating burritos were a lot less suspicious than two empty-handed Fish and Game agents. He took his first bite with real enjoyment; the rice was flavorful and not mushy, the beans had a hint of a tang to them, and the salsa was appropriately nuclear, soothed by the richness of the meat and the soft coolness of the sour cream. There was nothing like the competition in the burrito capital of the world to keep the vendors honest.
“Who do you figure blew up the warehouse in LA?” Tully said around a mouthful of his own.
“I think the Viets had it right,” Tom replied after a swallow. “Some sort of internal power struggle going on in the Russian Mafia. Maybe a policy disagreement; say some of them want to get into the endangered-animal smuggling, and some think it’s too dangerous and want to stick with nose candy, horse, selling girls and generalized racketeering… or even going respectable, the way the Italians eventually did. That’s pretty standard gang stuff; you always get a conservative faction squabbling with a fangs-out-and-hair-on-fire bunch. The wild men are the ones who probably linked up with the dirty group among RM and M’s employees.”
“Pretty skanky that their ‘conservative’ bunch got to the warehouse just when we did,” Tully observed. “Of course, once is coincidence.”
“Twice is happenstance, and the third time proves it was enemy action all along and you were a dummy for not seeing it the first time,” Tom said. “Yup, there’s a leak somewhere from police sources. Probably more than one. There’s serious money involved.”
“The sort that could get Spider-man to smuggle shit across the border,” Roy said as they wadded up the foil wrappers of the burritos and threw them into a waste container along with the napkins they used to wipe their mouths. “And here we are.”
Indrasul Pan-Pacific Exports occupied a tiny storefront in a twenties-vintage three-story building, flanked on one side by a recycled-clothing store and on the other by a dusty-looking shop window filled with an amazing mixture of junky used furniture and real curios—everything from glass net-floaters to flamboyantly colored Balinese dancers’ masks. If he’d been on his own time, he could have spent a couple of enjoyable hours there, and he made a note to come back.
Hell, I could come here with Adrienne, he thought, and then shoved it aside—a nice notion, but too distracting right now.
Sarah Perkins was across the street from it, leaning her butt against a car and reading a paper with her face away from the target; she was also wearing glasses to conceal an ear mike for feed from various survelliance cameras.
Tom and his partner walked across the street and looked in the shopfront.