She shook her head. “They’re not part of the movement. Just friends.”
He eased the car left and got on the Eisenhower heading east. A low bank of clouds cut the skyline in half, the lights on the tallest buildings bright as a fairytale against indigo skies. The Jaguar’s tires hummed on the pavement. There were moments driving when he felt a perfect calm, as though he were the car, skimming above the road, power and control and distance. But tonight it felt off. The distance part, maybe. The last six months seemed like they had been all about distance: from his children, from Natalie, from the world he had so carefully built and the sensible position he occupied in it. Though he was a man who enjoyed his own company, talking to Shannon, having a partner, it made him realize he’d been lonely, too. It sounded nice to be around people.
Besides. Getting closer to her is getting closer to John Smith.
“Okay. Where to?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Chinatown had given the DAR headaches since the beginning.
Not just in Chicago, and frankly, not just the DAR. Whatever the city, law enforcement always had trouble with Chinatown. The places were closed systems, insular worlds that existed within cities, traded with them, drew tourists from them, but nonetheless were never really of them. Police working Chinatown carried a bubble around, a small radius of American rule that extended only as far as they could see, that moved with them and left the place unchanged in their wake.
Which made law enforcement difficult. There weren’t very many Chinese cops, and the other races stood out like they were backlit. It wasn’t just a matter of not speaking the language; they didn’t even know how to ask the questions, which questions to ask. And in a world that existed within itself, a tight-knit community with its own leaders and factions, its own sense of and system for justice, what good could an outsider cop do? And all of that was before the gifted came along and complicated the picture.
Shortly after midnight, and the river was a ribbon of black. Light industry and warehouses gave way to dense clusters of brick buildings decorated with green awnings and pagodas, up-down shops with a riot of colorful signs, the characters meaningless as a paint squiggle to him. A handful had English subtitles with awkward phrasing: EAT OR TAKE WITH, THE ALL-BEST CAMERAS, NOODLE FRESH SHOP. Overlapping neon lit the night with science fiction colors.
“Where’s your friend’s place?”
“An alley off Wentworth. Park wherever you can, we’ll walk.”
He found a pay lot on Archer. He was about to get out of the Jag when she said, “Leave the gun.”
“Huh?”
“These are my friends. I’m not bringing a gun into their house.”
Cooper looked at her for a moment, wishing he had the call girl Samantha’s gift, that he could read Shannon, see the real her, understand her intentions. Was this some sort of a trick? Get him unarmed and outnumbered? She stared back. Cooper shrugged, unclipped the holster from his belt, slipped the rig under the front seat.
“Thank you.”
Shannon walked half a step in front of him. The windows of shops held a riotous array of crap—waving cats and colorful fans and plastic ninja swords. Tourist junk, but the tourists had gone for the night. Everyone on the sidewalk was a local, and many seemed to know each other. They passed the window of a butcher where the plucked carcasses of birds dangled by their feet. “So how do you know these people?”
“Lee Chen and I have been friends for a long time. He runs a business here.”
“Yeah, but how? How did you meet?”
“Oh, you know, in our mutual abnorm hatred of the world we recognized each other as kindred souls in a long battle.”
“Right.”
She grinned. “We went to high school.”
His gift followed the chain back—school together, but her friend is established here, odds are she grew up in Chicago, a good starting point if he ever needed to track her down. “Funny to think of you in high school.”