The Chinese Beverly Hills by John Shannon Read Free Book Online Page A

Thai pasta we like,” Jack Liffey said. “Or I could thaw a couple of Nachita’s big tamales.”
    Gloria looked up and stared at him distractedly for a few moments. “What became of my happiness, Jackie?”
    Which happiness was that ? he thought. “I’ll make love to you gently, later, if you can stay awake.”
    “You mean, no more booze for poor Gloria?”
    “Yes.”
    “I been wasting the best years of my life,” Gloria said.
    “On me?”
    “I don’t mean that. On the department. On pushing punks around.
    On going in doors where I’m not wanted and stopping family fights that ought to go on ‘till some pendejo gets stabbed in his sleep. I try hard to stop cruelty every day, but there’s an endless supply. You come into the Rancho with me—” The federal housing project in San Pedro. “—and tell me there’s any end to drugs and beatings and blaming everybody else for it. I’m very far from God right now.”
    She seemed to be on the edge of sheer drunk fury. He sat beside her and rested his hand softly against her damp cheek. She closed her eyes and heaved a little.
    “Nap,” he said. “I’ll cook something and surprise you.”
    “If I could make a whole new world, Jackie, I’d have you in it, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have no me in it.”
    *
    Monica Flagg leaned in hard to the binocular eyepieces of her Celestron microscope in the county forensic lab. As with most evidence, you didn’t learn much more with a scope than you did with the naked eye. The charred glob just became a bigger charred glob. She poked it gently with a sterile dental pick to bring another part to bear.
    Her poking caused a section of grit to fall away suddenly. “Terry, c’mere! Check this out.”
    “On point, homes.”
    “I think it’s some kind of bling.” Down at the core of the melted mass, she could just see a single pair of interconnected wire loops, like an ornamental chain for beads.
    She slid off her stool to give him room and he leaned in, resting fists on the counter as he got interested. “You’d better call the big Rosk. I bet you got a melted rosary.”
    *
    Ed Zukovich and Marly Tom kept well away from the crowd that was rubbernecking on Garfield. On the far side of Monterey Park’s main business artery a dozen cops were taping off the mini-mall with its vandalized signage and combing the ground nearby. A cherry picker was going up to the tall sign. There was even a TV truck for a local cable news outfit, Channel 18-Asian T V, swinging up a microwave antenna. Zook was running on dex to keep awake.
    “Who’d’a thunk they’d take it so seriously?” Tom said.
    “Probably calling it a hate crime.” Zukovich shot him a glare to shut up.
    “I got tons of hate.”
    At least two-thirds of the gawkers were Chinese, puffy moms with strollers, overdressed businessmen, lots of tidy young men in bright pant and polos looking like escapees from a golf magazine. Plus a few Americans and Mexicans. Zook recalled the days when he’d ridden his banana bike downtown to the hobby shop and seen nothing but Americans.
    “Remember the big D-D?” Marly Tom said.
    “‘Course. Right there.” Dixie’s Diner, the best burgers in town.
    “I met Tiffany there,” Marly Tom said, and then sighed. “I miss her boobies.”
    “Dude, there’s little kids here.” You could count on Chink kids speaking good American.
    “Who cares?”
    There was a stir across the street. A uniformed cop trotted back toward what had to be the bigshot command center—a beige trailer where heavyset men in dark suits were standing around trying to look important. The trotting cop carried a baggie in one hand, and Zook could just make out what was in it. An unburst paintball.
    Shit, he thought. Might still be fingerprints. It might even be Beef’s. Their weakest link. Get him in a room with some tough cop clownin’ on him, and in ten minutes they’d all be in county jail.
    “Yeah, let’s hope it’s not his,” Marly Tom said,