Free Black Dove by Steve Hockensmith Page A

get around him again. He was a big fellow, tall as me and almost as broad, but he could move fast. We bumped together this time, the big brass buttons of his frock coat gouging into my chest.
    “Look, I know Dr. Chan,” I said. “He’s a—”
    I almost made the mistake of saying “friend of mine,” which would’ve
guaranteed we d
never get through that door. Fortunately, Diana closed my mouth before I could put my foot in it.
    “Officer,” she said, snaking through the crowd with Gustav behind her, “we need to speak with whoever’s in charge here.”
    She plunged a hand into her drawstring purse, fished out a smallish, golden-brown doodad, and pushed it up under the copper’s bulbous nose.
    His eyes bulged.
    Old Red’s eyes bulged.
    My
eyes bulged.
    The doohickey was a Southern Pacific Railroad Police badge.
    “We’re here to consult with Dr. Chan on important S.P. business,” Diana said. “If something’s wrong, we need to know what. Our superiors will expect a full explanation.”
    The big copper’s eyelids went droopy with disdain. “Oh, they will, will they? And they’d be expecting it
horn you
, little missy?”
    “Indeed, they would.”
    The policeman shook his head and snorted out a grunt of a laugh.
    His condescension was all for show, though. In California, the Southern Pacific gets what the Southern Pacific wants, from the governor’s mansion all the way down to the harness bull in Chinatown.
    “Hey, Sarge!” the cop shouted over his shoulder. When he didn’t get a response, he took a step backward into Chan’s shop and tried again at twice the volume. “
Sarge
!”
    Toward the back of the store was a narrow, doorless pass-through, and the sound of footsteps thumped out from somewhere beyond it.
    “What?”
    A head poked out—bald, blocky, sharp-edged. Paint it red and it could’ve passed for a stack of bricks.
    “Got some S.P. pussyfooters out here, Sarge. Say they had business with the Chink. Now they wanna
see you
.”
    “Sarge” craned his thick neck to peer at us around the bull’s bulk. The sight of Diana, so fetching in her white summer dress, and Old Red, so outlandish in his white Boss of the Plains, slapped surprise across the man’s slab of a face. He recovered quick, though.
    “Let ’em through.”
    And he disappeared with another
clomp-clomp-clomp
.
    The big copper stepped from our path and waved us past.
    “S.P. or not, hayseed,” he hissed as I followed Diana and Gustav inside, “next time, you
ask
.”
    “
Hayseed?
” I thought.
But I’m wearing a boater
.
    As we hurried up the center aisle of the store past bins and baskets ofroots, pods, and mysterious blobs, Old Red glanced back at me. He gave his head a little jerk forward, toward Diana, his eyebrows up high.
    See?
he was saying.
    I replied with a coy shrug.
    See what?
    My brother shook his head and looked away.
    I knew exactly what he was “talking” about, though. If the Southern Pacific had canned Diana, why was she still running around with an S.P. badge?
    It was a question I preferred to put off . . . partially because I wasn’t sure I’d like the answer.
    As we neared the back of the store, I noticed a pungent odor—a reek that, at first, I assumed was the product of the foulest flatulence my brother had ever unleashed when not on the cattle trail. (Feed a fellow nothing but beans for a few weeks, and eventually he gets to out-odoring the cows.) Yet as the smell grew stronger, I realized that even with a bellyful of beans, beer, and jalapeno peppers, no mere man could produce such a smell.
    Not alive, anyway.
    Beyond the pass-through was a box-packed storage room and, to the right, a narrow, steep stairwell leading to the second floor.
    “Come on up . . . if you really want,” Sarge said, leaning out around the corner at the top of the stairs. “I’m warning you, though. It stinks even worse up here.”
    Then he was gone.
    Of course, this warning didn’t slow Diana and Gustav. And