"Thanks."

The downtown San Francisco Police Department station house was a large brick job on Williams Street. By a stroke of good fortune-or karma, or dumb luck-a branch of his bank, Wells Fargo, was conveniently located just across the street.

He parked in the pay lot, fed the meter (another buck twenty-five on the expense sheet), and they walked inside the cop shop.

Now that he'd been paid, the next big problem was to make sure he avoided Eleanor Drake at all costs. Jack was going to have to find another way to get what Susan wanted. Since Juvie wasn't officed here, but over on Mission Street, at least he was confident he was not going to run into Eleanor. He walked up to the desk sergeant and opened his P.I. identification, laying it on the counter.

"Wow," the sergeant said. "Like Magnum or something?"

"I'm looking for Eleanor Drake," he said.

"Sergeant Drake-third floor-Special Crimes. Check with the desk sergeant up there.

"I thought she was in Juvie," he said, surprised.

"You haven't been reading the department newsletter. She's in Special Crimes now. You want her, she's upstairs." Already bored with him.

Susan led the way toward the stairs. Jack hurried to stop her.

"Listen, Ms. Strockmire." Jack reached out and took her arm.

"You can call me Susan."

"Right. Okay… look, Susan, this is one of those deals where, because I'm going to be asking her to give us access to a sealed department record, it might be better if I do it without witnesses-kinda cop to cop."

"Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I should get lost, then."

"Right." Uniformed police officers were streaming past them while they stood at the foot of the stairs. Jack was starting to feel very vulnerable and exposed. It was just noon, and any moment Eleanor Drake could come down on her way to lunch. Most cops were extremely punctual when it came to eating.

"Should I wait outside?" she asked.

"Yeah, maybe outside would be best." His plan was to go upstairs and hide in the men's room for a while, then come out, claiming she'd been sent to Oxnard on a case, something like that, and try to figure out an alternative plan.

"Wirta!" a woman's voice rang in the stairwell.

Jack spun around and there she was, standing on the landing not ten feet away with three uniformed cops. "What the fuck are you doing here?" Eleanor Drake demanded, glaring down at him. Like most female cops, Eleanor had a mouth on her.

Jack gave her his best smile. It had no effect. Zero. "I came to talk to you. My god, Eleanor, you look marvelous." Now he sounded like Fernando Lamas.

"You prick," Eleanor said. "You've got your full ration of nerve coming here." She was wearing a tailored suit with a short skirt. It was her legs that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.

"Is that her?" Susan asked, almost whispering.

"Uh… uh… yeah. Gimme a minute, here."

"Get outta my sight, you asshole. I'm not kidding. You'd better get the fuck outta my precinct house."

"One doesn't have to use foul language to make one's point." Stealing Miro's lines.

"I'm not fooling, Jack."

"Right. Let's go." He turned and grabbed Susan's arm and led her out of the building. He could feel Eleanor's eyes tracking him like gunsights until he was out the door and on the street. It had stopped raining, but his lower back was still a fire zone, his emotions in turmoil, his honor in question.

"I thought she was supposed to be a close friend-that you had an outstanding working relationship," Susan said angrily. "What kinda liar are you? She looked like she wanted to kill you." His karma with women hovered near zero.

Time to come clean. "Look, Susan, you're right. I lied, okay? I wasn't planning on running into her. She hates me. We used to date. I cheated on her and she damn near shot it out with me in a. motel room in Monterey. It ended about as badly as possible and I…" He paused. "Look, I needed the work, so I fudged a little."

"Fudged!"

"Yeah, but I still have a way to get what we need. Actually, this new way is smarter than asking sworn personnel to steal confidential records. That probably would have backfired. This idea is much safer, okay?"

She was really pissed. "What kind of an asshole are you?"

Some questions are better left unanswered. "How much cash do you have in your wallet?"

"I don't carry cash. I told you, we're a nonprofit institute. I need checks as receipts for our tax-exempt status."

"A check won't do it. Okay, in the spirit of cooperation, and because I see how upset you are, I'll front the Institute a couple'a hundred dollars. Deal?" She was calming down, he thought… hoped.

"Why? What are we doing?"

"We're gonna find a Chinese lab attendant and bribe him. The Chinese are easy marks."

"I'm really not much on racial slurs," she said, looking daggers at him now.

"It's not a racial slur. It's a cultural reality. I happen to know that a lot of Chinese people end up working in the police lab up here. They're good technicians and they work at minimum wage. Most are immigrants with big debts to the triads for getting them or their families over here from mainland China. Two hundred bucks will buy a lot of cooperation if I can find the right guy. We go downstairs in the ME's building on Turpin Street. It's not a secure location. We go to the cafeteria, do a little eavesdropping, pick somebody with a thick accent. Believe me, it works. I've done this before."

It pissed her off that he'd lied to her. But then, she reasoned, she'd lied to him, too. He'd be in for a big surprise when he tried to cash her check, so she figured they were even… more or less.

Before they got back in the car she watched him with concern as he sprinted across the street to the Wells Fargo Bank to deposit her bad check in the ATM.

His name was Shing Nam Shan, but he went by "Danny." He was twenty years old and weighed only one hundred and fifteen pounds all in, canvas shoes included. He had short, bristly hair and eyeglasses thick enough to start a fire. Danny snatched the cash out of Jack's hand like a lizard snapping up a fruit fly. After Jack explained that they wanted a copy of Roland Minton's crime scene and ME reports, Danny smiled and said in broken English, struggling with each sentence: "I know where keep. Make some… same kind… copies. You rait here." He turned and left them standing in the maze of hallways in the basement of the Medical Examiner's building.

The smells were putrid. A mixture of odors so dense and complicated that it was hard to separate them-except to say that the brutal tinge of Lysol enveloped everything.

"You were right," she said, feeling slightly better about him.

He smiled, then added a few slices of baloney to the sandwich. "When you hire the Wirta Agency, you get all the Bs of police science: basic brilliance and boundless bullshit."

She cocked her head at him as if she didn't quite know what to make of that. So he added, "But I don't charge for the bullshit. It's an agency extra."

Twenty minutes later Danny returned and handed them a light Xerox still warm from the machine. "It faded. We outta toner," he said. "You not say Danny get, hokay?"

"Don't worry, we're leaving town in two hours. Now all I need to know is how do we get outta here? This is a maze down here." That brought Danny's worst sentence to date.

"Go light, den reft… den up stair to erevator."

"Why don't you go ahead and pay for lunch. You can just put it on your expense sheet," Susan suggested.

They were at Fisherman's Wharf sitting in Alioto's Fish House. The windows overlooked a picturesque little tuna fleet adorned with outriggers, high bows, and women's names. He counted four Marias, a few Magdalenas, and a Madonna (probably not the one in the leather concert bra). The food was great and the bill was reasonable. Jack peeled off some twenties thinking he hadn't been a private detective for that long but that he was pretty sure this wasn't the way it was supposed to work.