Trin’s choice was simple: flight or fight.
If he fled, they would own him forever.
If he fought, he would be smashed up again. Maybe killed.
Nine months ago, fuck ’em, he would have fought.
But now... Now, he ran for his life in blind panic, away from his car — they would drag him down on busy Mission Street before he could even get the door open. Instead, he sprinted left and around the corner and three doors down to the fleabag hotel where he’d been a bellhop when he was 18. He remembered that in recent years it had become a sort of residence hotel for old geezers on Social Security.
He jammed an elbow through the glass of the door, twisted the knob to open it, and flung himself into the dust-shrouded and night-deserted lobby. The shoes of his pursuers thudded on the sidewalk. He skittered around the corner beside the deserted check-in desk. If the utility room was unlocked as it used to be... Yes!
Trin slammed shut the heavy old hardwood door, rammed home the deadbolt. That would hold them only until they realized the hinges were on the outside of the door.
Each breath was like a razor blade in his chest, not from exertion but from terror. Sweat stung his eyes. During his bellhop days, the room was crammed with maids’ carts, the shelves stacked with linens and towels. Now, crammed with old suitcases, dusty boxes of abandoned belongings, broken TV sets, three-legged chairs, bureaus without drawers, cracked mirrors...
He fought his way around, through, under, over, and between the obstacles to the back wall. Behind him were excited hunting cries, the thud of shoulders against the door.
Then a shout, “Los goznes! The hinges! Get out the pins!”
At eighteen, Trin often escaped the house dick’s wrath by throwing himself headfirst down the laundry chute to land in the dirty sheets piled in the basement laundry room below. Twenty years later, he gingerly levered himself into the chute feet-first — if he got stuck, they would carve him out of it like corned beef from the tin. Hell with it. He let go, slid down into darkness. The lost forty pounds was just enough. He landed on water-puddled concrete, somehow retained his footing. From the storage room above came the crashing of boxes being hurled aside.
Trin dragged a wooden crate under one of the high narrow windows, smashed loose the wire mesh with the butt of his hand. Seeing blood on his knuckles, feeling nothing, he rolled out into the alley that would take him around the block to his car.
Couldn’t go back to his apartment. Not now, not in any future he could foresee. His desperate mind leaped to DKA.
That was it. Hide his car in the fenced storage area they couldn’t get into, sleep in the personal property storage room on the second floor with a lot of locked and burglar-alarmed doors between him and them. Let nobody at DKA know he was sleeping there. Safety. For the moment.
To a despairing, self-adjudged coward like Trin Morales, safety for the moment was enough.
Thirty-three
It was a bright, cool May Monday. At California-Citizens Bank’s outdoor lot below Telegraph Hill, gulls swooped and squawked, unseen traffic rumbled on the nearby Embarcadero. Stan Groner, president of the bank’s Consumer Loan Division, was holding the classic-car auction now, at the beginning of the week, because on a weekend the place would be jammed with the kind of old-car buffs who kicked tires and never tired of telling each other about the beauty they’d picked up for a bag of peanuts — and never bid on anything.
Today it was serious classic-car dealers, with a sprinkling of 20-something execs from Silicon Valley, kids with money to spend and nostalgia for a past they’d never known.
Dan Kearny watched as Groner, a pleasant-faced man of 42 with warm brown eyes, wearing a three-piece banker-conservative suit, worked the crowd before the auction started. The banker had learned some tricks a few months back, during the day they’d spent playing private eye together. For one thing, just how damned tough it was to get information out of people who didn’t want to give it to you. Obviously wanting something from DKA, he was trying to not be too obvious about it.
“Mr. K!” Stan exclaimed, pumping Dan’s hand with half-real, half-synthetic enthusiasm. “Lots of Wiley’s competitors here today looking for bargains.”
“Ex-competitors,” said Kearny. “Wiley’s out of business.”
Stan chuckled. “Giselle was around at the crack of dawn to grab that little red Alfa for herself.”
“I hope you gave her a good deal on it.” Then, since Giselle’s love affair with the red Alfa obviously wasn’t why Stan had asked him to come around today, he got his face close to Stan’s ear and spoke in his best sotto voce tough guy growl. “Who you want bumped off?”
“Bumped off?” exclaimed Stan in alarm. Then he got it, and actually started to blush. “Okay, so I... well, I want you to meet one of the bank’s overseas customers who has a problem I thought you could help with. He’s a baron. You’ll find out all about it at lunch.”
Ladies who lunch, thought Giselle rather giddily. She slid the gleaming red low-slung Alfa Quadrifoglio Spider to the curb in front of the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, just as Sofia Ciccone came trotting down the broad front steps. Sofia was out of her SFPD uniform and into civvies for the occasion. Oh, let the printouts be in that white handbag slung over her shoulder!
Sofia stopped amid the river of fellow cops, lawyers, civilians, accused felons, and weepy relatives that flowed up and down the wide steps. Giselle touched the Alfa’s horn. Sofia’s mouth fell open in surprise at the sight of the sleek red car.
She got in with fluid grace, glittery earrings swinging, essentially unchanged by the years since they’d been dormmates at S.F. State. Her dark Italian eyes were round with wonder.
“I thought Kearny never let you guys drive repos.”
“No repo, Sofia. It’s mine!” Giselle checked her rearview and zipped the Alfa away from the curb with a throaty chuckle of engine, adding the classic, “And the bank’s.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“No way!”
“Way. So today it’s the Bocce Café to celebrate.”
Sofia squirmed her tidy bottom around in the pale leather bucket seat, sighed luxuriously, then looked over at Giselle with sudden suspicion. “Is it still the Bocce even if I wasn’t able to Xerox those records you wanted?”
“Hey, we’re celebrating my new car, remember?”
“Just testing,” Sofia grinned. “I got what you asked for.”
“But did you get what I need?”
“I don’t know what you need.”
Giselle stopped for the light at Sixth and Howard. A short dumpy Asian woman in cast-off clothes was taking a long, oblivious time to cross while deep in discussion with a tall thin black man.
“Some of those MamaSans make ten thousand dollars a day at the illegal food stamp trade,” Giselle observed. “The guy with her is obviously one of her runners. Where’s a cop when you need one?”
Sofia tossed her dark, shoulder-length hair back out of her eyes. “Be polite or I won’t tell you what I found.”
“Oh come on! Did you get anything salient?”
“After lunch,” said Sofia firmly. “If I lose my civil service pension ’cause I stole worthless records for you, I want to go down full of good Italian cooking.”
The three men were having lunch at the shining chromium-and-glass Fog City Diner on the waterfront. Baron Herbert Von Knottnerus-Meyer had thinning too-black hair combed across his scalp, muttonchop whiskers, a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, and a monocle on a black woven silk cord strung through his lapel buttonhole, a monocle that kept falling out of his right eye as he talked. He kept replacing it as he held forth, in a Prussian accent, about a certain class of animals descended from arboreal phalanger stock.