The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan Read Free Book Online Page B

Willis Street, Los Angeles. Now it's China. Something Chinese happened here. Whatever happens next will be Chinese, too.”
    I looked at her with longing. “You're as Chinese as I am.”
    “Three or four hours ago, that was true. Now it isn't.”
    I sat there, trying to control my giveaway Occidental face and waiting for all my immediate responses to line up in an orderly fashion. Then I eliminated all of them and said something else, something that might let me into the game.
    “Chinese or not Chinese, maybe I can help you without doing anything.”
    “Yeah?” Horace asked skeptically.
    “I know how to ask questions. I can ask you questions. Only you and Horace. And maybe those questions will help you get a better picture of whatever the hell is going on. I won't act on the answers, I promise. But maybe they'll help you when it's time for you to stop holding still and make decisions.”
    “Decisions,” Horace said vaguely.
    “What do you do when the phone rings?” I asked. “Let's say it's Uncle Lo, and he's got a deal. You've got to know as much as you can. I don't know anything, which makes me the perfect person to ask the questions. I promise, I swear on whatever you want, that I won't do anything with the answers. They're for you. They're to help you think of things you might not think of otherwise, because otherwise will be too late. And you know how Edmund Burke defined Hell? It's the truth, recognized too late.” Well, maybe it hadn't been Edmund Burke.
    They looked at each other again, brother and sister united against a world that included me. It was a new wrinkle in our relationships. I sat there feeling like a visitor from Internal Revenue. I wanted to hug them both and then knock their heads together.
    “Go,” Horace said when they'd finished their silent conference.
    I went, taking refuge in reason. “Hypothesis one: Uncle Lo came here from Hong Kong. Did you pick him up at the airport?”
    “No.” Horace looked surprised by the question.
    “Did anyone you know pick him up?”
    “No.” That was Eleanor.
    “Did he phone first?”
    “He knocked on the door,” she said.
    “When?”
    She glanced at Horace, who had gone very still. “About nine on Friday. Nine at night, I mean.” She looked at me, and faltered, then swallowed and went on. “I'm always here for dinner on Friday, you know.”
    I had a question ready, but her words choked it off. Friday was Eleanor's happiest night, the night Horace and Pansy shared the twins with her, and she'd arranged her working schedule to accommodate it, and also—I privately believed—to make it more difficult for them to cancel. Six days a week she wrote at home in Venice; on Fridays, she drove early in the morning to the big downtown library and did research there until it was time for her to drive to Willis Street for dinner. No one could call her to change the plan. Once, when we were both drunk, Horace had suggested that Eleanor loved the twins as much as she did because she and I had never had any. I'd pushed the idea away in self-defense.
    “So you were eating,” I finally suggested.
    “We'd just finished,” Eleanor said. “You know Pansy, she was in the kitchen slogging around in soapy water. Horace was introducing himself to his fourth beer, and Bravo and I were carrying the twins around on our backs.” Bravo, curled beneath the uprighted dining-room table, thumped his tail at the sound of his name.
    “Bravo and you?” I asked, seeing the picture.
    “He can't carry them both,” she said defensively. I ached to hold her.
    “So the doorbell rang.”
    “He knocked,” she said. She saw the look in my eyes and almost smiled. “He was at the back door.”
    “How'd he get the address?”
    “He had a letter Mom wrote him six or seven years ago. He showed it to me. There was an address, but we'd changed our phone number.”
    “Did you see his airline ticket?”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “But he told you he'd just landed from Hong