Only Child
A Burke Novel
Chapter One
I'd been gone for years. Dead and gone, the whisper-stream said. But that stream always carries more than one current.
Just past midnight, I slipped back over the border, moving downwind out of the darkness. Because Hollywood's got one part right-the dirty, scheming, heartless bitch never does sleep.
Especially now.
The alley behind Mama's restaurant was as immune to time as the chamber of a pharaoh's vault. A pair of dull-orange oil drums stood sentinel. I nosed the Subaru's dechromed black snout carefully into the opening between them, over to an empty patch of oil-stained asphalt. On the filthy wall above it, a square of pure-white paint. Inside the square, Chinese characters, in perfect, fluted-edge calligraphy. It was signed with the chop of Max the Silent, the Chinatown equivalent of a skull-and-crossbones on an unmarked bottle.
I slid the Subaru against the wall, not bothering to lock it. Directly across from my spot was a rust-colored steel door with no handle. I slapped my hand against it three times, hard, and stepped back, slitting my eyes against what I ... read full excerpt from: Only Child ebook
