The Final Twist

20

One question was answered.

Maria Vasquez, mother of the missing woman, lived in the heart of the TL.

This explained the low sum she was offering for information about her daughter. Very few residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin would be able to come up with a big enough reward to snag anyone’s attention.

The neighborhood, in the central part of the city, was infamous. Seedy, dilapidated, graffitied, marred by trash-filled streets and sidewalks, the TL was home to street people, those working in the sex trade — traffickers among them — gangs and those involved in all phases of drug enterprises: manufacturers, transporters, sellers and, of course, consumers. The SFPD has defined more than six hundred “plots,” small geographic areas of the city, for the purpose of analyzing crime stats. Seven of the ten most dangerous plots in San Francisco were in the TL.

Shaw hadn’t been here for years. Back then the place was filled with single-room occupancy hotels and small shabby apartments, adult bookshops, massage parlors, bodegas, Asian and Filipino grocery stores, tobacco/vaping places, cell phone card and wig shops and nail salons.

Much of that atmosphere persisted to this day but Shaw now saw a few nods toward improvement. Outreach programs operated out of storefronts, helping runaways, trafficking victims, addicts. There was even some gentrification, albeit modest. Across the street from Maria Vasquez’s walk-up was a ten-story apartment building that offered studio and one-bedroom units, which the poster described, with an inexplicable hyphen, as de-luxe. There was a Starbucks wannabe on the ground floor, along with an art gallery and a wine bar. Changing... but not changed: the windows on the first two floors of most buildings along this block were covered with thick iron security bars.

He chained his bike and helmet to a lamppost then walked to the door of the apartment building. He pressed the intercom and, when a woman answered, he said, “I called earlier. About the reward you posted.”

“You’re—”

“Colter.”

The door buzzer sounded and he stepped inside and climbed to the third floor, smelling fresh paint, garlic and pot. He knocked on the door of 3C. He heard the creak of footsteps and she answered.

Maria Vasquez looked him over cautiously, eyeing the leather jacket and jeans and boots.

In most assignments, when meeting with offerors he wanted them to see him as a professional — part lawyer, part detective, part psychologist. His garb would be sport coat, laundered jeans, polished shoes, dress shirt in dark shades. Not an option now, not with the Yamaha.

She’d have to deal with the reward-seeker as biker.

Something about his face, perhaps, put her at ease, though. “Come in. Please, come in.”

Vasquez, in her forties, was about five eight or nine, a pretty face and trim figure. Her dark features suggested blood from Mexico.

The one-bedroom apartment was nicer than he’d expected. The furniture was cheap but the walls had been painted recently — and were hung with bold floral posters and a half-dozen fine-arts photographs, reminiscent of the work of the famous West Coast photographers of the mid-twentieth century: Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham.