Los Angeles Noir by Denise Hamilton Page B

seat and his lips parted in a ghastly smile. Then he made a new call and repeated the sequence of numbers into the phone. In the chip factory, with its modest gray carpet, black lacquer furniture, and framed invoices for ever larger orders, Chen knew that someone was giddily twirling the dial.
    He closed his eyes again. Soon they’d have what they wanted and they’d let him go and his family would be safe. He could always start over. What did it matter, balanced against their well-being? These were white-collar criminals. They didn’t like leaving behind bodies, messes.
    With a sudden jerk, the car wheeled off the freeway and sped north along Rosemead Boulevard. Up they went, past Bahooka’s, the faux-Polynesian restaurant with the shellacked swordfish on the walls and the sticky red-syrup sauces. He had taken Yashi there, a place few Chinese immigrants were likely to go. Unlike San Marino, which was more than half Chinese now and a village when it came to gossip. They hit the 210 freeway and drove west.
    Chen felt a spike of fear. “But you promised,” he said.
    “Shut up,” the boss grunted.
    “Where are you taking me?” he gasped some time later, as the car swung off the freeway and wound up Angeles Crest Highway into the San Gabriel Mountains. This was where criminals dumped bodies. He read the Los Angeles Times enough to know that. It had always given him a broody comfort to know he lived in a hushed and leafy suburb with the lowest crime rate and highest school test scores in all California. He led an orderly, honest life. He took precautions, paid for armed guards, assiduously wooed the big companies like Intel and Pentium. And each time he opened the Wall Street Journal and read another headline that said, Chip Demand Continues to Outpace Supply , his heart swelled with pride and satisfaction at how he provided for his family. At Yashi, now the mother of his son. A prickle of unease filled him then, something he’d have struggled to put into words in a calm setting, much less now. He recalled Yashi throwing plates, demanding that he divorce his wife. Young passionate Yashi. She’d been acting strange lately, and he’d put it down to the new baby. Cooped up by herself all day in the townhouse. Really, he would have to mollify her with a gift. He thought of his favorite jeweler in the San Gabriel Village Square on Valley and Del Mar, the heart of suburban Chinese immigration. The tiny proprietor, Overseas Chinese from Burma, with his wizened face and appraising eyes. A bracelet of imperial jade, perhaps to mark the birth of a son.
    It was dusk when they pushed him out of the car on the mountain road, hands still lassoed together by his designer tie. They pulled his shoes off and hurled them down a ravine, startling some unseen animal that crashed through the undergrowth and was gone.
    “We’re sorry, uncle, we need time to get away,” one of the underlings said. Chen sensed a curious undertow to the honorific and wondered if they regretted their mistreatment of him, now that he had given them what they wanted.
    Yes, he thought, almost approvingly. They couldn’t have him sounding the alarm too soon. They were smart, meticulous people. They thought of everything.
    From the side of the road, he watched the car pull forward, then turn and head back down. It slowed as it drew near him, mute and penitent in the gloaming, his wrists tied before him, hands curved into a begging bowl.
    “In the name of God, at least untie me!” he shouted. “I’m no threat to you anymore!”
    The car stopped. “He wants us to untie his hands,” came a lazy voice from inside the car.
    A pause then, as though the matter was under consideration.
    “Stop toying with him and do as he asks,” said the boss, sounding weary. “She was very insistent.”
    The first bullet shot through his knotted tie, shredding it into charred fibers that soared upward, then drifted down to the pine-needled ground long after Mr. Chen himself had