City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) (14 page)

Susan froze her features so the boy wouldn’t see how far they’d fallen. Esmeralda had thought to keep her son safe from her father but not from herself. She’d had no idea she was sick. It was potentially devastating news.

“Thank you, Federico,” Susan said, moving away from the exam table. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to go talk to your dad now. We’ll be right back in.”

Susan led the boy’s father, Pablo Ochoa, into her office.

“Is he sick?” Pablo asked.

“He’s definitely been exposed,” Susan said. “You need to leave here and go immediately to Good Samaritan.”

“I can’t do that,” Pablo protested. “The whole reason we come to you is because we can’t go to a regular doctor.”

“Sir, you’ve probably been exposed, too. If you can’t think of your son, maybe think of yourself.”

Pablo blanched. Susan hoped this would be enough, and to her relief Pablo softened and nodded. She gave him a detailed list of further instructions, then sent him to retrieve his son. When she went back in to see Federico, she almost thought she’d gone to the wrong room. He seemed to have aged several years in the few minutes she was away.

He knows,
she realized.

Luis watched Pablo and Federico exit an unmarked door at the rear of the shopping plaza. The boy was the spitting image of his mother. He eyed the pair closely, looking for any sign that they might be infected with the virus that had killed Esmeralda. To his relief, he saw none, but he knew that meant little.

Climbing out of his car, he hurried over to the door but found no handle.

Huh.

Moving around the side of the building, he found a handful of other businesses, including a florist, a doughnut shop/deli, and a pet store that primarily focused on exotic fish. There was no sign of how to enter the doctor’s office. That is, until he went down a side hallway and found another unmarked door by restrooms. He took the handle, found it locked, but then looked up and saw a security camera lens staring back down at him.

A small voice box came to life beside the door. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Dr. Auyong.”

The door buzzed and Luis entered. The waiting room on the other side was about the same as any other doctor’s office he’d been to. Four people were waiting, including a mother and her young daughter. There were two televisions on, a number of magazines laid out, and a large kid-friendly fish tank in one corner with an advertisement at the bottom revealing that it and its contents were purchased from the store around the corner.

“Sir? Are you a new patient?” the receptionist asked.

“I am. But I just need to see her. I’m a friend.”

The receptionist eyed Luis’s collar and she nodded. Luis wondered if Father Chang had ever been here. When Susan appeared a moment later, several boxes in both hands, she looked at him with surprise. Then it seemed to dawn on her.

“You were the priest at Good Samaritan, weren’t you?” she asked over the receptionist’s desk. “With Esmeralda Carreño?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I should thank you,” she said.

“I think we can skip that,” Luis replied. “I’m afraid I need to talk to you for a moment.”

“I’m just on my way out,” she said, opening the door from the waiting room. “So you’ll have to make it quick.”

They filed back to Susan’s office. She loaded bags with boxes of drug samples and vitamins.

“I found out a few things about Father Chang’s death,” Luis said. “I thought you’d want to hear them.”

“I don’t know if I do,” she admitted, piling the bags on a chair. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty to say at the trial, but I have time to get ready for that.”

“You don’t know?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Yamazoe’s dead. He died sometime last night. They think it was poison.”

Susan went very still. Then she smacked her desk and looked back up at Luis. “Good. Who did it?”

“Depends on who you ask. A lot of the foreign papers that ran it already say it was suicide. Guilt over Father Chang’s death.”

“And now the truth?” she asked.

“I think he was killed by the LA triad.”

Luis explained about everything he’d learned in the past forty-eight hours. Susan’s jaw dropped lower and lower. When he got to the part about Michael Story, Susan stopped him.

“You’re friends with some kind of prosecutor?” she asked.

“‘Friends’ isn’t the right word. Collaborators, I suppose.”

“I hope you didn’t say anything about me.”

“Not a word,” he assured her, glancing around. “Did Father Chang know about this place?”

“He did.”

“Was he your patient?”

“No, we actually met off-site. One of the ways we get the state medical board to look the other way is through charitable work. We hit the streets, look for people in need of care, and take care of them. I ran into Father Chang when he was doing the same thing.”

“Where exactly?”

Susan considered her response for a moment, then nodded to the door. “I’m heading there right now. You want to ride along?”

“César Carreño was a drug dealer?” Michael asked the assistant, one of the newer young women whose name he’d actually made the effort to remember—Naomi Okpewho—who’d come in with the news. “I thought he was some kind of construction worker.”

“Yeah, they think even the daughter didn’t know,” Naomi replied. “LAPD has him selling drugs on work sites all around East LA and the San Gabriel Valley for the past three or four years. Sold to a lot of people on the street.”

Michael nodded. Since the SARS announcement that morning, the day had become a flurry of paperwork. There were extrajudicial health screenings of prisoners to be done, warrants for welfare checks to be brought to the right judges to sign, and now this—raids on places César Carreño’s customers might frequent. As a possible patient zero, every detail of Carreño’s life had been scrutinized. He hadn’t traveled recently anywhere there had been an outbreak, he hadn’t visited any farms or slaughterhouses, so the belief had quickly crystalized that he must’ve been infected by someone else.

Finding that someone else and quarantining them, if they were still alive, and anyone else they’d come in contact with was the city’s top priority. Keeping the suddenly terrified populace from boiling over into outright paranoia and flight was a close second.

“So, are we talking raids? Or just hitting the shelters and asking if anyone’s had a bad cough?”

“Raids. I think the city knows it doesn’t have the time to be polite,” Naomi replied. “No one wants to be the bureaucrat who put up red tape as more people got infected.”

Michael felt the memory of Jeff Lambert’s grip on his bicep and the crush of his handshake. He put his laptop bag back down on his desk and took off his suit jacket.

“Good point,” he said. “Put the word out. Anybody who needs anything smoothed through the DA’s office can find me—me, personally—right here on this desk. Let’s get out in front of this. You game?”

“Are you asking me as someone you hope organizes your campaign staff, or somebody in an actual position of power once you win the election?”

Michael looked at Naomi with new eyes. “Both.”

Naomi nodded. “Let me get back to my desk.”

As she left, Michael considered that his steadfast refusal to leave his post might be seen as a cynical play for attention and possible advancement. But if there was even the slightest chance that it could work in his favor, he knew it’d be worth it.

And no one’s expecting you to actually hit the streets, so it’s all phones and e-mail.

Michael sank back into his chair. Naomi had left his door slightly ajar, and he could just see Deborah Rebenold’s office in the corner on the opposite side of the floor. It had never seemed so close.

XIV

“How did it happen that you were at Good Samaritan?” Susan asked as she drove Luis deep into the San Gabriel Valley.

“My pastor is sick,” Luis said, realizing this was the first time he’d actually said as much aloud. “He gets his chemo there.”

“How bad is it?”

“Stage Four. They don’t think he has much longer.”

“Is he fighting it?” she asked.

“That’s a good question. I think he is because of his friends. But I think his beliefs make it easier for him.”

“Ah,” Susan said, tapping the steering wheel. “He believes he’ll be on the right hand of God five minutes later.”

“If not the right hand, then he’ll at least have a few answers,” Luis allowed before changing the subject. “Have you been in touch with the CDC about the Carreños?”

“I relayed all of the relevant information anonymously,” Susan said. “But don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of getting arrested. That’s no problem. If we get raided and our records seized, however, the confidentiality of my patients could be compromised. I’m not going to inflict that on people who may already be in tricky situations.”

Luis nodded. “What about other patients the Carreños could’ve infected in your clinic?”

Susan scowled. “Wow, I’d never thought of that,” she shot back sarcastically. “Maybe we should assemble a list of at-risk patients and schedule in-home visits with them. Wait, maybe we should do the same for nurses and staff!”

“Point taken,” Luis replied sheepishly.

“Just because we’re unlicensed doesn’t mean we don’t care really, really deeply for our patients,” Susan explained. “The good news is, contrary to its popular conception, SARS is actually rather difficult to pass from person to person. If it wasn’t, the entire human race might’ve been wiped out years ago.”

“But they’re sure this is SARS? It couldn’t be something else?”

“Without question. The signature of SARS-CoV—coronavirus—is as distinctive as the Taj Mahal. This is SARS.” Susan looked Luis over for a moment, then shook her head. “The collar is too much. We’re going to have to do something about that.”

She turned around and dug through the backseat, though she was still hauling down the block at almost fifty miles per hour. Luis stared through the windshield in terror, but she was back a moment later holding a UCSF sweatshirt. She thrust it at him.

“This’ll have to do,” she said.

“Did you go here?” Luis asked as he pulled it over his head.

“For my residency,” she said. “I did my undergrad at UHK in Hong Kong and med school at Peking University Health.”

“How did you end up in California?”

“Would you believe I followed a guy? Met him as a resident, came over after I finished in Beijing, thought I was going to marry him. Turned out he already had a fiancée. I couldn’t face the shame of going home, so I stuck around.”

“I’m sorry,” Luis said.

“I’m not! I love California. Hong Kong’s expensive. Beijing’s overpopulated and way overpolluted, like, ‘if your lungs aren’t accustomed to it, you’re sick for a week after you leave’ overpolluted. But here in LA I’ve got my apartment, I’ve got my job, I’ve got my friends. It’s perfect.”

“So, you’re legal?” Luis ventured.

“Uh,
technically
no?” Susan said. “I was on a student visa and then an H-1B visa after that. But that one means you have to leave and reenter the country every couple of years. The last time I did it they were real dicks about it and said they wouldn’t renew it the next time. So I just stayed. That was four years ago.”

“You haven’t been home since?”

“Nope. And I don’t miss it,” Susan admitted. “It took me a while to get used to American life. Now it’d be hard to go back to China. It’d be like reverse culture shock.”

“How did you end up at the clinic?” Luis asked.

“I had the medical education but not the license, so I couldn’t work at a regular hospital. I was going to try and start the process when I heard about all the ‘medical repatriation’ that happens in California. Say you’re an illegal immigrant and you get in a car wreck and go to a hospital. There’s a chance you’d wake up back wherever you came from, with none of your money, possessions, or even family members. Happened just last year to two comatose patients in San Francisco. They were put on a medical plane and shipped. I think it discourages people from getting help when they need it, and that makes everything worse. When I heard about these clinics, I hunted one down through a friend of a friend and got a job.”

Luis didn’t know how to tell her that he admired this a great deal without sounding like a sap, so he kept his mouth shut.

“What about you?” she asked. “How did you become a priest? Were you like the third son in some landed aristocracy?”

Luis laughed, then sobered a little as he recalled the real reason.

“It was my mother’s doing. My brother was the religious one and had been training to go into the priesthood. He was killed in a random shooting near our house. Our mother went a little nuts fearing I’d be next and convinced the local bishop to let me take my brother’s place. She was just trying to keep me safe.”

“Wow. And I thought you guys were called by a higher power.”

“We are. I just didn’t recognize mine until later. Once I began learning, God’s plan, which had always been there, finally made itself known to me.”

“A miracle,” Susan pronounced.

Luis shrugged. “Are you religious?”

“It’s so, so different in China,” Susan said. “I’m into Buddhism and Taoism—which I still believe in—but it’s more tradition than a faith-based religion like you guys have. You guys go to extremes with fantasy land crap—no offense.”

“‘Fantasy land crap’?” Luis asked with a grin.

“You know, infinite fish and water into wine,” Susan said with a shrug. “Dead men returning to life. Carpenters walking on water. People turning to salt.”

“Yeah, and Taoism has
yāoguài
.”

“You get that from a Wu-Tang album or watching kung fu movies growing up? That’s folklore stuff.”

Luis laughed. “Didn’t Father Chang grow up in China?”

“Yeah, but whenever he talks about it—sorry,
talked
—he described it as he was just looking for something to convert to. When the missionaries got to him in his teenage years, it was a way of getting out from under all the Communist Party nonsense keeping him back. I kind of think he converted as a screw-you to everyone around him.”

“How so?” Luis asked.

“Christians in China are such a strange group. For a long time they were viewed almost like a kind of cult. ‘Why would you want to be Western?’ was the question, rather than ‘Why would you believe in the Bible?’ Still, Christians never rode in on horseback trying to conquer us as they did everywhere else, so maybe the modern Chinese are able to have a more prosaic, live-and-let-live view. Just in recent years Christianity’s exploded to the point that the government started to remove crosses from the tops of buildings and arrest priests. But even then, when people arrive here it’s one of the few symbols everyone recognizes.”

“That’s how we get you,” Luis explained. “We’re like the McDonald’s arches. You know what you’re going to get when you walk in our doors.”

Susan giggled so hard it almost sounded like she was crying.

“You sound like Benny,” she finally said. “He loved God, saw him as a friend, somebody to communicate with, and so on. But he thought the whole evangelizing bit was a crock. He was terrible at it. He just tried to lead by example. The idea was that if people saw how much joy he got out of being a Christian, they might follow.”

Susan’s cell phone rang. “That’ll be Nan,” she said. “I’ll call him back. He’s having a hard time with Benny’s death. He doesn’t have many friends. Father Chang was his whole life.”

“They were that close?” Luis asked.

“Oh yeah,” Susan said. “They were together what? Three years? Four? Nan’s family practically disowned him when he came out. Father Chang and I were his new family.”

Luis didn’t know how to react to this. He hadn’t even remotely considered that Father Chang was a homosexual. Not once. When he looked over at Susan, he saw that she was scrutinizing his reaction.

“So that’s how you knew he didn’t molest Yamazoe’s daughter,” Luis said finally.

Susan’s face clouded with anger. She jammed on the brakes and spun the wheel, sending the car to the side of the road. She looked Luis right in the face, and he thought she might hit him.

“No, I knew he didn’t molest Yamazoe’s daughter because I knew Father Chang. His being gay has nothing to do with that.”

“Why didn’t you just tell the police?” Luis asked.

“You don’t think it would just make things worse? I’m not going to use something that’s none of anybody’s business to defend a man who shouldn’t need defending. Also, he’s dead. I’m not going to use that as an excuse to say anything he didn’t want said. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Susan scanned Luis’s face for a moment longer as if to assure herself he really did. Then she put on her left blinker and moved back into traffic.

Luis fell silent in the passenger seat. He now knew exactly what Father Chang had seen in Dr. Susan Auyong.

Tony arrived at Wanquan Yang’s house just after dark. He parked a couple of blocks away and walked over, always reluctant to add to the number of vehicles around a Dragon Head’s home. Billy Daai was waiting for him on the driveway, a cigarette in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

“There’s been another death,” he said. “This one all the way out in Sierra Madre. Just heard it from our contact in the sheriff’s department there.”

“Sierra Madre?” Tony asked, surprised. “That’s miles from the other cases. How on earth did it get all the way out there?”

“No one knows,” Billy said, pocketing the phone, then immediately pulling it back out to check something else. “But now the whole city’s panicked. Before, people were writing off three of the cases as being in East LA, and the little girl was some kind of anomaly or accident. But when they announce Sierra Madre in a couple of hours, people are going to know that nobody’s safe from this.”

“You’re right,” Tony agreed. “There’s going to be mass panic.”

Billy leaned in close to Tony. “You were right, by the way. The Sierra Madre case is this little old man who never left the house. Had his groceries delivered; postman and neighbors say they never saw him leave. He hadn’t taken his car out for months. Said he’d called 911. The paramedics got there and put on their masks, knowing immediately what they were dealing with.”

“How was I right?”

“The media showed up and started looking around once they realized how far he was from the other cases. You know what they settled on? There’s a Sunrise Asian Market directly behind his place. A bunch of people they talked to said it must’ve come from there. Infected food, rats, mosquitos. They told the news crews they’d call the police and ask for it to be temporarily shut down.”

“But those are just local crazies,” Tony said, lowering his voice as he nodded to a couple of his other triad brethren walking up the driveway for the meeting. “That doesn’t mean a thing.”

“It means something that the news crews put them on the air. They knew it would keep folks at home glued to their sets. They love whackjobs. It’s going to air and re-air all night.”

“They have no idea how SARS is spread,” Tony pointed out.

“Since when does that matter?” Billy asked ruefully. “But you said you might have a way to fix this.”

“I do. At least, I have begun moving us toward a solution. I am anxious to hear what our brethren think.”

“I’m sure they can’t wait to hear it.”

The pair entered the house together, old men already lining the ornate sofas in the house’s large living room. A handful of wives moved from room to room, passing out drinks and hors d’oeuvres. There was only one woman sitting with the men: Jing Saifai. Tony considered introducing himself to her but thought it would appear nakedly ambitious and refrained.

From the outset the rhetoric was all fear, particularly of harsher inspections of Asia-originating ships hurting their bottom line. Everyone’s concerns were self-centered and self-interested. Everyone thought they were the right one to deliver their grievances and fears to the mayor’s office. Everyone believed they had the right plan to see them through this or even improve their standing. Why not use this moment to get the unions to help roll a few of the tougher regulations back even? But no one had any plan that took the needs of their brethren into consideration.

Tony stood aside and let these windbags air their grievances and then deflate. He, like Beaumarchais’s Figaro, would need only to wait for his cue to save the day.

“Zhelin Qi has a suggestion.”

It was Billy who’d stepped forward. Though he was far younger than everyone else who’d spoken and only two days before made a Blue Lantern, he wasn’t ignored, out of deference to his father. Eyes turned to Tony, and he was glad he’d worn his one bespoke suit to the meeting. He looked like one of them and hoped he sounded like one.

“I have consulted with a partner of ours in the tourist business about—”

“Who?” demanded an older deputy. “Who did you consult?”