"No. I have a ferret. I'm afraid she'd eat them.”
"Oh, yes. Curious and hungry. That's the ferret." He started to walk deeper into the narrow little shop, into a half-gloom lit by the glow of the fish tank lights.
I followed him.
"How long has this shop been here?" I asked. "Looks like it's been here forever.”
"Oh. . almost thirty years. Fish and birds are good pets for apartments. Fish are very beautiful." He stopped beside a tank full of brilliantly spotted fish with bulbous bodies and bulging eyes, trailing long fins that floated in the water like the garments of drowned women.
I stopped to admire them. Or try to. They floated, serene, then swam in sudden, wiggling bursts: startled fishy geishas flouncing their kimonos. The sign beside them read veiltail demekin. They were very expensive.
I looked up and caught the man studying me.
I smiled. "What's in the shop next door?”
His eyes narrowed and his expression went cold. "Nothing.”
"What used to be there, then?”
He drew back from me, stiff and disapproving. "That was the Wah Mee. A very bad thing happened there.”
"I'm sorry. I didn't know. What bad thing?”
He sighed, shaking his head. "You should let it alone—people here still hurt over it. You should go now—go on. Get out of my shop." He advanced on me, picking up a mop from a nearby bucket.
I hurried out and stopped against the wall farther down the alley. The shopkeeper stood in his doorway and glared at me for a while, then went back inside, closing the door. Now I really wanted to know what had happened behind those padlocked doors. The entity was in there, which meant Ian was in there. I didn't dare walk past the row of glass brick again. If Ian could see out of the scratched, pitted glass, he might recognize me and bolt before I could return with Carlos. I studied the indentation in the wall that formed the recessed doorway. There was another narrow door between it and the aquarium shop-perhaps the back door to the import shop or to the mysterious space itself. I drifted away down the alley to Weller, thinking how I could find out more about the padlocked shop.
I headed toward Sixth on Weller, thinking. The mysterious doors were almost in a straight line with the back of Ana's building, a mere block and a half from the front door. The shop, Ana's home, and my truck's parking spot to the north on Jackson made a near-perfect equilateral triangle. As I walked, distracted with geometry, something crept into my mind.
I'd seen two more patrol cars pass by—one on Maynard, another on Sixth—and been passed by a duo of foot patrolmen. I went into a tea shop on the corner of Sixth and Weller and ordered a cup of bubble tea. Sitting at the bar, facing Sixth, I lingered over the thick, sweet concoction and gazed out the window.
I could see the front of Ana's building from my seat. Another customer—a Filipino man with neatly trimmed hair—read a newspaper and nursed a pot of tea. I took my cup and slipped back outside.
I strolled, looking in shop windows, gazing around like a tourist. I didn't spot Solis, but I guessed he or his partner was nearby. Halloween and Sunday shoppers notwithstanding, there were too many cops and too many people with time to kill loitering near the Fujisaka condominiums. I kept walking and checking for another hour. I stopped in a bakery called Cake House My Favorite and glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows before I moved on to the hobby shop next to Pink Godzilla to watch the street through the displays of Japanese collectible toys and video game posters. Then I looped back down past Union Station, the Metro stop, and the Asian Antique Emporium on Fifth, back across through the new Uwajimaya Village, and past the Nisei apartments.
The patrols were loose, but the clutches of loiterers were concentrated within a block of the Fujisaka. I suspected there were cameras and telescopes trained on the front door from one of the empty shop spaces in the old Uwajimaya building and from one of the buildings on Maynard. That's what I would have done if I'd been Solis—guard the doors at front and back, put patrols on the street and outlying watchers on the corners, if I could get them. If there had been no other major crimes this week, the detective pool would be available to assist him for a while. Ian's threats against Ana and Ken were only twenty-four hours old and serious enough to warrant attention for a few days. At some point Sous would have to drop the assistants and maintain the surveillance himself, but not yet.
And Ian wasn't likely to wait very long. He had the entity back now, and his fury was still hot enough to make him impetuous. I only hoped he'd wait until after dark to attack. It seemed likely, since the entity was weakened and it made sense to let it recharge a bit. Also, the confusion of costumed children and party-seeking teens would cover any sally Ian might make to view the results. He could sneak out into the open end of the alley and see the back of the Fujisaka building, hear the sirens on Sixth, watch the confounded police emerge from their useless ambush. No one would look his way for a few minutes and he could slip away into one of the half-empty buildings or under the freeway to Little Saigon, a few blocks farther to Rainier Valley or up to First Hill by routes no car could take. If the cops didn't spot him at once, he'd ease into the mess of Seattle's jumbled downtown neighborhoods and vanish.
My knee ached with a low throb, demanding rest and ice. I headed back to my truck.
I looked up the Wah Mee when I got back to my office—I had several hours to kill until dark—and recoiled from the information.
There was a lot of history to the Wah Mee. It had started out as a speakeasy, then been a swanky nightspot when the International District swung all night and hosted some of the biggest names in jazz. By 1983 it had become a little seedier, and was then a private gambling club for local Chinese business owners. The night of February 18, 1983, three young Chinese men had taken fourteen of their neighbors prisoner in the club and robbed and shot them all. Only one survived. "The Wah Mee Massacre" remained the worst mass murder in Washington history. But most people didn't remember it had happened and some, like the pet shop owner, didn't want to be reminded of the community's betrayal by three of its own.
"The bottle is broken and the genie is loosed," Carlos rumbled. His disquiet was infectious, hitting me in cold, black waves. "Unfortunate." Id brought him up to speed as I drove toward Chinatown.
"Yes, it is," I agreed, refusing to apologize. "We'll have to adapt. The good news is that I found Ian—or at least where he's holed up. He's just outside the police surveillance zone, but there are patrols both on foot and in cars. We'll have to move in from the east with care and get through the door fast. There are two doors on the alley. Both are padlocked, but Ian must have gotten through one of them. There used to be a door on King Street, but that area's an import shop now and cut off from the old club. I think I could make my way in, but it's not a route you can take and I'd rather stick together, if we can.”
He continued to growl in the back of his throat for a few moments. "All right. Since you cannot simply decant the entity onto your trap, you'll have to lay the trap and lure it in.”
"This isn't going to be easy, is it?”
"It never was. But this will be riskier initially and our time will be shorter. The police will be curious if we give them cause.”
"Yeah. And the detective in charge knows me on sight.”
"Complicated.”
"We'll just stay out of his sight until we're done. Then you leave and I'll take the fall for the break-in.”
Carlos fell silent for the rest of the drive.
I parked the Rover under the freeway and stopped Carlos before he got out. I handed him a package I'd picked up.
"It's a cape," I said.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
"We have about three blocks to go down a major street with cops patrolling it," I explained. "It's Halloween, so we're going in costume—no one will notice—so I figured, why not dress the part?" I was going out on a rickety limb, but it had seemed like good camouflage at the time.