“Soon as you can, querido,” she said with a ghastly giggle.
“Bryant and Twenty-second? In ten minutes?” That was two blocks from Morales’s apartment, only three blocks from S.F. General Hospital’s Emergency and Trauma Center.
“I can hardly wait,” said Milagrita faintly.
Where was Morales? If he was out in the field, and went home to his apartment, he’d run right into the ambush. If he was here, it would be all right.
Morales was lying on the cot in the personal property room in his underwear, reading a Spanish language newspaper. When Giselle stuck her head in, he started up in alarm. She waved him back to his place.
“I know you’ve been sleeping here, it’s okay. I was just looking for Mr. K—”
“Like hell.” Morales swung his stockinged feet to the floor. “I heard you tell him good night half an hour ago.” He grabbed her arm with shocking speed and strength at odds with his almost feminine intuition of her distress. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Milagrita?”
She shook him off. “Never mind that. Just don’t go home, all right? They’re waiting there for you.”
“Jorge done something to her,” Trin said with certainty.
She didn’t reply, just ran out, leaving him fumbling under the cot for his shoes. She clattered down the stairs. Ballard, coming in the back door, stopped dead at sight of her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“A little Spanish girl has been raped. I’ve got to—”
“Need help?”
“No.” She paused. “Yes. She’s the sister of the guy who beat up Morales.” She jerked her head at the stairs. “Keep him here, Larry. He wants to face those thugs all alone.”
Ballard’s face went dead. “He can fight his own fights.”
She ran out the door for her Alfa. Too many minutes had passed already. As she left the garage, Ballard was unconcernedly strolling back across the street to his truck.
She yelled out of her window, “You’re a real turd, Larry!”
Ballard watched her roar away down Eleventh Street. She was wrong, dammit. Fucker deserved all things bad. Didn’t he?
He got into his truck, turned on his C/B radio.
Jorge waited just inside Trin’s front door, watching the street through the filmy curtain. Esteban was parked in front of the apartment, Manuel was hidden in a recessed entry a few houses to the south, Pedro hidden in a similar recess to the north. No car passed. No window curtain twitched. No one walked the street. These four were known and dreaded in the neighborhood.
And here came stupid Morales, parking and walking across Florida Street right into the trap. Jorge swaggered down the steps of the apartment, baseball bat in hand. Morales stopped, looking up. Esteban, unseen, silently got out of his car right behind Morales. Like last time — only now Esteban had a knife.
Morales told Jorge, “Your mother gives blow-jobs to dogs.”
Esteban, grinning, knife in hand, said to Trin’s back, “And you are a pig to be butchered, maricón.”
Trin whirled around. Manuel and Pedro were moving in from the sides. Morales was boxed in and all alone. He put his back to a wrought-iron railing flanking the sidewalk.
“Come and get it,” he said to them all, fists clenched.
They came. They got it.
Because three other men materialized out of the night behind them as Trin gaped in surprise. One was tall and blond and muscular. One was shorter and black and wide as a door. One was huge and quick and hard-faced. None of them was shy.
Ken Warren grabbed Manuel by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, ran him out into the middle of Florida Street, and spun like a shot-putter to hurl him bodily against the side of a parked car. Manuel’s face broke the car’s window. The car’s window returned the favor.
Bart Heslip had already driven a tremendous kidney punch into Esteban’s unprotected back. Esteban screamed and dropped his knife and would have fallen down except Heslip slapped him up against his own car and began pumping combinations into him.
Meanwhile, Larry Ballard’s yawara stick, the medieval Buddhist monks’ lightning bolt of Siva, flicked the bat out of Jorge’s hand. “Take him, Morales!” Larry shouted, and sent the yawara stick spinning after Pedro. It swept the fleeing man’s legs out from under him. Then Ballard was on him.
No science, no finesse to Trin’s attack on Jorge: head-butts, elbow smashes, steel-toed work boots. Jorge’s nose went from shapely to mushroom in one awful instant. Blood and teeth flew in several directions at once. Trin only stopped kicking the inert mass on the sidewalk so he could crouch down and bring his face close to what had been Jorge’s face. It was crying.
“You ever touch Milagrita, you will eat your own cojones,” said Morales. “You believe what I say to you, man?”
The crying mess somehow was able to mouth, “Sí.”
Trin stood up. He met Ballard’s gaze. Ballard must have called the others on the C/B radio from his truck. And they had come. The two men nodded almost formally to each other.
Manuel was unconscious in the middle of the street.
Pedro was unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk.
Esteban was erect against the side of his own car, but only because Bart was holding him up so he could deliver his line.
“We know where you live, pal,” he said in soft menace.
And let go. Esteban could finally fall down. He did.
For the first time in his life, Trinidad Morales had his own band of amigos, his own posse. From somewhere not too far off came the sound of police sirens. Ken Warren spoke.
“Hngleth nyetta hehl hnougtta hneer!”
So they got to hell out of there.
Just before the sedatives put her under, Milagrita managed to mumble to the S.F. General Emergency Room doctor that she didn’t know who had done it. Just... someone in an alley...
Giselle was equally vague. Never saw her before in my life. Good Samaritan, that’s all. Found her, brought her in.
Forty-two
The Colonial Hotel, a three-story mellow red-brick building at 550 Washington Street, was built in 1911 to furnish rooms and meals for workers at the nearby Standard Oil facility. After declining for decades and finally being gutted by fire, in 1978 it was renamed, restored, renovated, and reborn along with the rest of Point Richmond.
Now it had a huge sign on top spelling out HOTEL MAC. The double front doors had a canopy over them bearing the same name in bold white letters. Through big flanking leaded windows that looked out on Washington Street could be seen drinkers at the bar on one side, loungers in the lounge on the other.
Johanna Knudsen and Alberto Angelini went up to the second-floor dining room. A burly maître d’ in a flowery sport shirt seated them at a choice table under one of the carefully restored stained glass windows. By that time, Johanna had waved or exchanged a word with no fewer than seven of her clients.
She was pleased to be lunching with such a remarkably handsome man. Who insisted she throw her diet to the winds and order the most expensive dishes on the menu — with dessert.
She groaned, “You’re going to ruin my figure.”
“It will take a great deal more than honey garlic lamb chops to do that, cara mia,” grinned Angelini. What an utterly charming man he was! “And the salmon is from your native Norway, it must be good for you, no?” It wasn’t until they were drinking coffee and feasting on rich gooey slices of Snickers pie that he laid a hand on his chest and said, “Johanna, in my heart I have every belief that you have solved my travel problems.”