THE trip out to Zhang’s apartment building was a bust. Doug Zhang’s life was a bleak trail of blood and sorrow through the San Francisco foster system. Removed and returned to his parents more than a dozen times, he was in and out of temporary homes, a typical statistic made more depressing by the abuses he suffered under Carl Vega’s hands. According to his file, Doug was a simple but quiet child, unperturbed at living with strangers and obedient to a fault. The perfect gift for a man like Carl Vega.
Before his death, Zhang lived in a run-down cinder block former motel. Scraggly clumps of weeds filled most of the thin scrap of landscaping in front of the structure, and the building’s white walls were grayed from dust and peeling at the foundation. It was a depressing, lackluster place to live.
And surrounded by an elementary school and two day cares.
After nearly two hours of pounding the sidewalks, they found no one who’d cared enough about Zhang to pay attention to who visited him. Kane thought it was a sad commentary about the man’s life. Sanchez grunted in sympathy, then complained his stomach was empty.
Inching the unmarked sedan into a parking space in front of a taco shop, they both sighed with relief that the car made it back to the City. They’d secured the black Crown Vic from Motor Pool with a stern admonishment from the administrator to return the car in pristine shape. Kel grumbled they’d have to get someone to do body work on the Ford before they came back, and Kane resigned himself to a lifetime of motor pool rejects following the sour look they got.
The sedan wasn’t going to win any prizes. The backseat’s vinyl was cracked and smelled, strangely enough, of lavender and burnt chicken feathers, but the radio worked, and up until Sanchez took a bump in the road too fast, the onboard computer linking them to the SFPD database responded smoothly. After their reenactment of an old Starsky and Hutch car jump shot, the Crown Vic rattled back onto its tires and the computer screen turned blue, leaving a few lines of squiggling white code behind. It also hesitated a second when Sanchez hit the gas, as if it needed to contemplate going another foot forward.
“Odd place for someone like Zhang to live.” Kel slid a tray of chips and salsa onto a bright orange picnic table. Passing a carnitas burrito over to his partner, he opened up his Styrofoam container and inhaled the aroma coming from his carne asada fries. “Single guy. Place is crawling with kids. It was creepy.”
There’d been piles of toys in front of many of the apartments’ doors, and Zhang’s old place on the first floor faced the street. Anyone sitting in the living room would have a clear view of the schools’ playgrounds and the children who frolicked there.
“Just because he was molested doesn’t mean he passed it on down the line.” They both knew the stats and the high likelihood of Zhang reaching out to normalize his shattered world in the only way he knew how, but Kane wasn’t ready to hang Vega’s crimes on one of his victims. “Maybe he liked listening to kids laugh. Doesn’t sound like he had much of it when he was young. Neighbors said he was nice. Didn’t bug anyone.”
“Makes me want to shoot every single asshole who’s ever touched a kid, you know?” Sanchez’s voice was soft but hot with emotion. “Someone pull that kind of shit with my sisters, I’d kill him. I know it’s the job, man, and if this asshole wasn’t fucking with St. John, it’d be hard to hate this guy.”
“That asshole gutted a man just for smoking outside. Get some food in you so we can find Beanie Boy.” Kane bit into his burrito, sucking at the juices filling the wrapped tortilla before the liquid dripped down his hand. “Maybe we’ll be lucky and get someone who recognizes him from Vega’s neighborhood. We just need a damned name. Shit, anything. I just want Miki safe.”
“Have you thought about what you and him are going to do when this is all over?” Kel sprinkled spicy red sauce on his fries, not meeting his partner’s quizzical glance. “You know, when you go back to being a cop and he goes back to being a rock star.”
“We never stopped being those things,” Kane replied. “I figure we’ll eat together, have sex, and argue about him getting some physical therapy for that leg of his.”
“So you really think this….” The man waved his hand around in the air. “This thing between the two of you is going to last after this?”
“Yeah, Kel. I do.” Kane put down his food and leaned his elbows on the table. “See, I get it now. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out how my dad and mom stayed together. They’re too different. They like different things. Hell, they can’t even agree on what kind of Christmas tree to get, so it never made sense that they were… inseparable.”