Frost handed the man his card. “If you see or hear from Mr. Jin, tell him to call me immediately. It’s extremely important. Understand? No delay.”
“Immediately,” the man repeated.
Frost headed out of the dining room. He stopped in the foyer to examine several framed magazine reviews that were hung on the wall. Most of the articles included photographs of Mr. Jin, and Frost realized he’d never seen a picture of the man before. The photos had all been taken at different times, but Mr. Jin’s expression was identical in each one. He wore no smile or frown, just seriousness on his face. He wasn’t old, probably no more than forty, and he was lean, which made sense for someone who spent his days hiking the San Francisco hills. His eyes were dark, and his black hair was shaved to stubble on his skull. Despite reviews calling him one of the city’s top chefs, he looked unimpressed by all the fuss.
Outside, the sidewalk was busy, and the night air was fragrant with flowers. Cars jammed the street like a backed-up pipe, and pedestrians jaywalked between the bumpers. He headed downhill toward his Suburban but stopped when he felt the buzz of a text arriving on his phone. He checked it and saw a single-line message from a blocked number:
Meet me in the alley.
Frost turned around. He studied the Chinese faces coming and going on the street. No one in the crowd seemed interested in him. He turned the corner into the alley and waited for his eyes to adjust. The lone streetlight was broken, making the walkway darker than the bright neon of Washington Street. It smelled of burnt oil from the restaurant kitchens. The same homeless man who’d haunted the alley three nights earlier was still there, eyeing him from under his wool blanket. People came and went like ghosts in the wisps of fog. Overhead, clotheslines stretched between the windows and the fire escapes.
Not far away, a silhouette in black stood with one foot propped against the redbrick wall. It was Fox, grinning at him.
“Hey, Copper. You find Lombard yet?”
Frost didn’t like hearing Lombard’s name shouted out loud. He checked the alley in both directions and then walked up to Fox. The boy was a foot shorter than he was, and half his weight, but Frost had learned the hard way not to treat him as harmless. “Hello, Fox.”
“I got your message. Here I am.”
“I’m glad you came, but you should stay away from this area,” Frost warned him. “Don’t go back to your father’s apartment. If people aren’t looking for you right now, they will be soon.”
Fox shrugged. “If they see me, they have to catch me. Nobody catches Fox.”
“Don’t underestimate these people,” Frost said. “Have you heard anything from Mr. Jin?”
“Not a word. You know where he is yet?”
“No, but the good news is, he’s alive.”
“Yeah? How can you be sure?”
“Because Lombard’s still looking for him,” Frost said. “That’s also the bad news. Your father’s not safe.”
“Is this about Denny and the boat?”
“Yes.”
Fox frowned. “Word on the street is that the guy who killed Denny ate a train. So why is Lombard still after Mr. Jin?”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about that cruise last Tuesday,” Frost said. “Mr. Jin may be the only one who has the answers. That’s why Lombard wants to keep him quiet. If you see your father or he contacts you, make sure he does not go home. Got it? Call me, and I’ll meet the two of you wherever you are.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“I wish you’d let me find you a safe place to stay until we locate him,” Frost said. “I can protect you.”
Fox laughed at the suggestion. “Protect me? You seen a mirror lately? You don’t look so good. Maybe I should be protecting you.”
Frost laughed, too. “Well, I could do a lot worse than you for a bodyguard, that’s for sure. But you said yourself that everybody sees everything around here. If you hang out in Chinatown, Lombard will know it, and sooner or later your luck is going to run out.”
The boy winked. “It’s not luck, man.”
“Don’t get cocky, Fox. You’re good, but Lombard has a lot of people working for him.”
“So do I. Around here, people have my back.”
“Oh?”
“See for yourself,” Fox said.
The boy snapped his fingers.
A moment later, a sharp crack like the explosion of a bullet erupted behind Frost. He ducked and spun around and yanked his gun into his hand. The acrid smell of black powder filled his nose. He looked for a shooter but saw no one, and then he focused on the homeless man crouched against the opposite wall. The old man’s eyes glittered with amusement in the reflections from the street. He flicked something from his fingers, sending a ribbon of sparks through the air. A firecracker hit the ground, sizzled, and then exploded with a bang.
The homeless man laughed so hard he began to hack into his blanket.
Frost turned around again. Fox was already gone. No more than a few seconds had passed; there simply hadn’t been time for him to disappear entirely. He squinted down the alley, but the boy wasn’t there. Then he heard more laughter, directly over his head this time. Frost looked up.
Fox stood six feet over the alley, balanced on a metal strip of pipe bracketed to the brick wall. He had barely an inch on which to stand. As Frost watched, the boy sidestepped along the pipe like a ballet dancer and launched himself across the open space to the nearest fire escape, which seemed like an impossibly long jump. He grabbed it, dangled, and then swung his leg over his head in a way that made it look as if he had no bones in his body.
In the next second, he was standing on the platform of the fire escape.
“Don’t you worry about Fox,” he called as he began to climb the building with the grace of Spider-Man. “You just find Mr. Jin for me.”
35
When Frost got back to his Suburban in front of the Chinese restaurant, his phone rang as he climbed inside the truck.
“I’ve been looking for you, Inspector,” Cyril Timko told him. “The captain wants a face-to-face right away.”
Frost didn’t bother asking what the meeting was about. “Okay, I’ll get back to headquarters now.”
“Don’t bother. Hayden wants to do this outside the office.”
“Where?”
“Follow me,” Cyril said. “And turn off your phone.”
Frost spotted a flash in his rearview mirror as the high beams of the car behind him switched on and off. The car pulled from the curb onto Washington, and as it passed Frost’s SUV, Cyril waved through the open window of a black Accord. Frost clicked off his phone, then got into traffic and stayed on the sedan’s bumper. Cyril headed west through Chinatown but soon made a series of turns to dodge the one-way streets and cable car tracks. Eventually, he took Hyde south to Market, where he crossed into the SoMa neighborhood.
Even at night, traffic made it a slow crawl. The farther Cyril went, the closer he got to the street park where Duane had his food truck, and Frost began to wonder if the captain planned to meet him there. But no. Two blocks from the park, Cyril turned onto a one-way street that led under an elevated off-ramp from 101. There, he bumped onto the sidewalk next to a barbed wire fence and stopped. Frost parked behind him.
They both got out.
Frost took a wary look at the area below the overpass, which was an urban jungle of homeless tents and graffiti.
“This is where Hayden wants to meet?” Frost asked.
“The captain wants this under the radar,” Cyril replied.
They walked under the freeway’s rusting I beams, and Cyril flicked his finger toward the black loading door of a warehouse. Someone had spray-painted a caricature of the 1970s stripper Carol Doda on the outside. At the steel door, Cyril pulled out a key and unlocked it and slid the door up on tracks. The inside was cool and pitch-black. Cyril waved Frost ahead of him and then followed him inside and shut the door again. Frost was blind in the darkness, and his unease made him slip his hand inside his jacket close to the butt of his gun.