THIRTEEN

John looked around at the room he’d been given at the Emperor Norton Lodge on Ellis Street. It had probably been a nice hotel once, but the décor looked like it was straight out of the 1960s. Were John still a teenager, that would have been fine, but times had changed, and the flower-power wallpaper and garish carpet just didn’t feel right.

The place even had a rotary phone; John hadn’t realized there were any of those left.

Still, it was cheap, and that was what really mattered.

It had been all right at first. He and Mary had saved plenty of money—okay, so it was originally earmarked for Dean and Sammy’s college funds, but that was less of a priority now—so after she died, he’d been able to finance his hunt for vengeance.

But he’d had no idea it would take this long. A year or two, maybe, but not the six years he’d already spent. And there was no end in sight.

Which meant he’d been progressively downgrading the type of hotel he was willing to stay in. Besides, cheap places like this were less intrusive, and the staff asked fewer questions.

The money he saved on lodging went to weapons and ammo and other equipment. Not to mention food, gas for the Impala, and paying for that storage unit in upstate New York.

Sooner or later, the bank account was going to run dry. But John was already practicing a few tricks that would enable him to keep going....

One advantage to this particular dump was its proximity to Chinatown, where the three murders he knew of had taken place.

As promised, Bobby’s package was waiting for him upon arrival, and he set it down on the rickety desk that stood against one wall of the room.

Just a day earlier, Dean had helped him put the package together. Dean tended to wield Bobby’s tape gun like it was a weapon, which John had found at once charming and unfortunate. He knew that the boys needed to know how to defend themselves. Even if they found the thing that killed Mary, he doubted it would end there.

John knew too much about how the world really worked, Dean was starting to learn, as well—and it wouldn’t be long before Sammy would find out, though John still held out some hope that his six year-old might have something resembling a normal life.

If he could find Mary’s killer soon.

Yet as he brought the heavy package into the hotel room, he wondered if the quest would ever end.

He thought about the Heart of the Dragon as he ripped the box open, and the fact that the hunter who had stopped it before—this Bartow guy—had died. John would never be able to find out what he knew. And that raised a disturbing possibility that he tried not to think about too much.

What if some other hunter had come along and killed the thing that took Mary away? John would never even know. It wasn’t as if there was a hunter’s newsletter or anything, and the folks at places like the Roadhouse weren’t exactly forthcoming with details of their hunts. Boasts, yes, tall tales, certainly, but actual solid information was hard to come by.

So someone might have killed the thing that took Mary, and no one would ever know. Monsters didn’t generally provide resumés of their previous kills.

There was a very real chance that John’s hunt was entirely pointless.

But it didn’t matter. Because he couldn’t stop on the basis of a random possibility. He needed to find what had killed Mary, and destroy it. Until that day, there would be no respite.

One of the most important lessons Daniel Elkins had taught him was that the first step of any hunt was to gather information. It was something of a miracle that John hadn’t gotten himself killed in his first few months of hunting, because what he hadn’t known back then could fill volumes.

So his next step was to visit the San Francisco Public Library’s main branch at the Civic Center. He took the bus there, since his car was back in South Dakota, and that gave him the opportunity to see the City by the Bay.

Unfortunately, most of what he saw was construction— right up to and including the Main Library itself. The Bay Area had been hit by a brutal earthquake in October— ironically right in the midst of the first World Series between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants. While nowhere near as devastating as the famous 1906 quake, there had been a lot of damage, and the city was still in the process of rebuilding.

When the quake hit, John had actually been at the Roadhouse watching what was supposed to be the third game of the Series with some fellow hunters. The Roadhouse owners, Ellen and Bill Harvelle, had planned it all out: for the duration of the ’89 Series, the place would—for once—be run like a normal sports bar, with guys drinking beer and talking about Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, and about Will Clark and Rick Reuschel, and about the death of the commissioner, and all sorts of other things that hunters normally didn’t have the time or energy to think about.

But then while the players warmed up for the third game, the earth shook. Al Michaels, Jim Palmer, and Tim McCarver turned from sports announcers to newscasters.

Immediately the patrons of the Roadhouse tried to figure out what kind of omen this might be, what the signs were, and what they might have missed. But it soon became apparent that no mystic forces were involved—it was just the San Andreas Fault with a case of the hiccups.

Now, as he got off the bus, John realized that he had no idea who actually won that Series.

To his relief, the section of the Main Library that included recent newspapers was still open to the public, and wasn’t among the areas closed off for post-quake repairs. He immediately started digging through all the local papers, trying to find out everything he could about the three murders.

But the stories themselves didn’t offer much, although the Chronicle had managed to locate pictures of the victims from before their deaths. They were all Chinese-Americans, they were all employed by the Shin’s Delight restaurant— and they all had tattoos on their forearms.

While the quality of the black-and-white photos was sufficiently poor that John couldn’t make out what the tattoos depicted, he could tell that they were of the same design—whatever it might be—and in the same place. These days, ornate tattoos were mostly the purview of bikers, Marines, and gangsters—John had the same tattoo on his forearm that all the members of Echo 2/1 boasted.

Chinese-American biker gangs weren’t really the norm.

He also checked the sports sections from late October. The A’s had swept the Series in four games.

Go team.

When he got back to the hotel, John made a phone call to Lucas Jackson, a fellow Marine who’d gone to work for the VA after serving his tour. He left a message asking if there were any Marine veterans named Jack Teng, Michael Li, or Johnny Lao.

While waiting for that phone call to come back, John went to the hotel gym. It was a pitiful affair, with only a few weights and one of those stairmaster things, but it would do.

One of the great vampire hunters Daniel Elkins had been an invaluable storehouse of information about the supernatural. He had urged John to follow his example and keep a journal, so that if he died, it would provide Sam and Dean with a roadmap on how to continue his work.

It was astonishing how little John knew of those who had come before him. Bobby had reinforced that need with his own account of how he got into hunting. Like John, Bobby had lost his wife. And like John, Bobby had no idea who or what it was that had taken her from him.

But where John’s first instinct was to fight—no doubt born of his Marine training—Bobby’s was to learn. He had sworn that he would never fail someone due to ignorance.

John had taken both men’s lessons to heart.

He had also embraced the lessons the Marines had taught him, which included the idea that it was never good to be idle. As Sergeant Lorenzo had always said, “You’re only as strong as the last guy who kicked your ass.”

So he worked out with the weights while he waited for Lucas to call back.

By the time he returned to the room, sweaty and sore—but the good kind of sweaty and sore—the message light was blinking on the room’s rotary phone. Picking it up, he dialed zero.

“Front desk.”

“This is Room 220. There’s a message for me?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” John heard the man shuffle through some papers. “It’s from Lucas Jackson. The message is, ‘no soap.’”

John smiled.

Back in country, Lucas had never gotten tired of telling the awful, ‘No soap, radio’ joke, mostly to new recruits who didn’t get it—because, of course, there was nothing to get. That proved to John that it was really Lucas returning the call, and also that he hadn’t found any records for the three dead men.

Which wasn’t a surprise. Still, he’d needed to be sure.

So they were gangsters.

Stripping off the t-shirt and shorts he’d worn to the gym, he took a quick shower, then changed into the warmer clothes he’d need to go outside in San Francisco in December.

Time, he thought, for a nice dinner at Shin’s Delight.