Neon Dragon by John Dobbyn

a pause, it was a fraction of a second to reorder his schedule.
    â€œYou name the place, Mike.”
    I looked around. “I’m in Chinatown, corner of Beach and Harrison. There’s some kind of a coffee shop behind me. I don’t see a name. Can you meet me here?”
    His voice picked up tension. “No, I can’t, Mike. Listen to me. Don’t hang around there. Hang up the phone and just get the hell out of there.”
    â€œWhy? What is this place?”
    â€œLet’s not discuss it at the moment. Walk to the right up Harrison. I’ll meet you in the bar at the China Sea.”
    I wanted to tell him he sounded like a character out of an old Fu Manchu movie, but he was gone.
    I was the only one at the China Sea bar, sipping Tsing Tao beer until Harry slid onto the next bar stool.
    â€œHappy Thanksgiving, Michael.”
    â€œHappy New Year, Harry.”
    I reached in my pocket and handed him the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. He lit a cigarette lighter and held it up to scan the symbols.
    â€œYou want a beer, Harry?”
    He waved off the suggestion. “Where’d you get this?”
    â€œIn a fortune cookie.”
    He gave me a look. “Fortune cookies are to make you Caucasians feel good about leaving a tip. Is this note serious?”
    â€œI suspect it is. Could we share the contents?”
    He relit the lighter for another look.
    â€œIt’s a girl’s name. Ku Mei-Li. And an address on Beach Street. You know her?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œThere’s more. It says literally, ‘You help her, I help you.’”
    Harry looked at me in the mirror over the bar. “Help you what?”
    I took another sip of beer to sort out my own questions before answering Harry’s. It was an attractive quid pro quo. The
quid
was whatever in the world I could do for someone named Ku Mei-Li. The
quo
was particularly inviting if it meant that my little Red Shoes would give us a counter to Mrs. Lee’s damning identification.
    I took Harry by the arm and escorted him out the door and down Harrison. I’d given him a brief replay of the day’s events by the time we reached the corner of Beach Street.
    â€œSo it comes down to this, Harry old pal. We find the address on Beach Street, and either I go in by myself with nothing but hand signals to communicate with heaven-knows-who, or you come with me, and we make sense of this little game.”
    We stopped. He pulled me into a doorway. I thought at the time he was taking us out of the cold, but he could have been avoiding the eyes of those who were standing in the window of the coffee shop across the street.
    â€œMichael, you have no conception of what goes on in Chinatown. You’re like everyone else who comes down here. You have dinner, buy some noodles, whatever, and breeze right back out to Caucasianville. You can’t see it, because you don’t know what to look for.”
    â€œSee what, Harry? I’m willing to look. Tell me.”
    He looked at me and just shook his head.
    â€œIt’s too much to tell, and too cold to do it here. What can I say, Mike? You want me to wade into a net of organized crime so effective that it has this community almost paralyzed with fear. It’s so effective that you don’t even know it exists.”
    I pulled the collar of my coat up around the back of my neck.
    â€œSuppose it exists, Harry …”
    â€œIt exists.”
    â€œLike I said. Suppose it exists. I don’t have a lot of choice. I got a name, I got an address. That’s a hell of lot more than I had going for me before I came down here. I’ve got to follow it up. I don’t think time is on my side. The question is, do you go with me?”
    â€œThis place you’re going is a brothel, Mike. For Chinese. Not outsiders. It’s protected by a youth gang that could write the book on violence. You could at least pick a better time than