Chapter 602 | The Girl Under the Umbrella [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 602: 602 | The Girl Under the Umbrella [CASTLE BONUS]

Route 31 picked me up at Central twenty minutes later, and the Eastside Express turned out to be the same bus as Route 14 except fewer of the windows opened. The driver on this one didn’t recognize me at all. I took that as a personal insult for four blocks before I remembered I’d begged for anonymity at least twice this month.

The city changed on the far side of the river bridge. The glass towers dropped away and the buildings got shorter, and the storefronts grew iron bars over their windows. Somebody had painted a mural of Radiant across the side of a tire shop, thirty feet tall and grinning, and somebody else had spray-painted LATE across his forehead in red letters. I didn’t laugh at that. I wanted to, and the joke was right there, but my chest had other plans.

I got off at Halverson and Ninth because the placement card told me to. The address on the back read 1147 Halverson Avenue, Suite 2, and my phone swore it was a four-minute walk.

It was a lie. My phone had never been to the Eastside either.

The sidewalk had cracks you could lose a shoe in. A bodega on the corner played old salsa through a blown speaker, and three kids on bikes circled me twice to get a look at the Halloran crest before pedaling off. An old man on a milk crate outside a barbershop pointed at my jacket and said something in Spanish that made the barber laugh hard enough to nick a customer.

I found 1147 on the first pass. It was a laundromat with its windows soaped over and a padlock on the door, and a sheet of printer paper was taped to the glass at eye level. Somebody had written on it in thick black marker, the same blocky hand from my sticky note.

MOVED. LIN’S. UPSTAIRS. DON’T KNOCK HERE.

I looked left down the block and then right, and there was no Lin’s anywhere. There was a check-cashing place, a botánica with saints in the window, and a storefront selling phone cases that also sold what the sign called GOOD CHICKEN.

[INTERFACE: Host has walked past the objective three times. The interface is not permitted to give directions. The interface would like the Host to know it is enjoying this.]

"You’re a real one, you know that," I muttered, and a woman pushing a stroller gave me a wide berth.

On the fourth pass I finally looked up. Above the phone case store, a vertical neon sign hung off the brick, half its tubes dead. It read LIN S GR ND CHIN SE FOO in flickering red, and the missing letters had apparently been missing since before I was born. Underneath it, wedged between the phone store and the check-cashing place, a narrow door with steamed-up glass led into a restaurant the width of a hallway.

I had walked past it three times. In my defense, it was built to be walked past.

Inside, the air hit me like a wet towel soaked in garlic oil and star anise. There were four tables, a counter, and a wall of laminated menu photos faded to the color of old teeth. Behind the counter stood the smallest woman I had ever seen holding a cleaver bigger than her forearm. She had white hair in a tight bun and a green cardigan buttoned to the throat, and she was taking apart a whole duck without looking at it.

She looked at me instead. Her eyes went from my crest to my face and back again, and the cleaver came down on the duck with a crack that made me flinch.

"You the gold boy," she said.

"I’m looking for Eastside Protective Services, ma’am."

"Same thing. You eat?"

"I had a protein bar on the bus."

She said something in Cantonese that I didn’t need translated. Then she wiped her hand on a towel, reached into a bamboo steamer, and pulled out a pork bun the size of my fist. She held it across the counter until I took it. It was hot enough to hurt, and it smelled like somebody’s grandmother had loved me once.

"Through kitchen, up stairs. He is up there being grumpy," she said, and pointed the cleaver at a swinging door. "Don’t touch my woks."

I didn’t touch her woks. The kitchen was a furnace with two cooks who didn’t look up, a radio playing Cantonese opera, and a back hallway stacked with cases of soy sauce. At the end of the hall, a staircase climbed steep and narrow toward a door that had been painted black. Somebody had stenciled EASTSIDE PROTECTIVE SERVICES across it in white. Under that, in pink glitter gel pen, someone else had added a little bat.

I ate half the pork bun on the stairs because I’m not an idiot, and then I opened the door.

The office had been a storage room once. It still had the bones of one, with a pressed-tin ceiling and a radiator clanking under the window and old shelving bolted to the brick. Somebody had turned the space into an agency on a Rank C paycheck. There were two desks, a coffee maker with a crack in the carafe, and a wall map of the Eastside with more red pins than streets. A police scanner muttered on a filing cabinet.

On top of the nearest desk sat a girl under an umbrella.

It was an indoor parasol, black lace with a ruffled edge, and she held it over her shoulder while she scrolled through her phone. She wore a gothic lolita dress in black and deep plum, with a corset bodice laced so tight up the front it had turned her waist into a rumor. The bodice was losing a war against her chest, and the neckline ended in a spill of black lace that did absolutely nothing to hide the fact. Puffed sleeves sat off her shoulders, which left her collarbones bare and very pale.

Her hair was pastel pink and done up in two long drill curls that bounced every time she moved her head. Her eyeliner could have been drawn with a ruler. Below the ruffled hem of her skirt, striped black and white stockings ran up her legs and vanished under the frills, held up by garters I could see because she was sitting cross-legged on a desk in a skirt. Her platform Mary Janes had little skull buckles. A stuffed bear sat in her lap, and it had stitched X’s for eyes and one arm hanging by a thread.

She didn’t look up. "You’re late."