Sang Pham’s first words as he crawled out from under the house in South San Francisco were, “Oh shit.”
Gage reached down and grabbed Sang’s arm before he could slither back under, then yanked him out onto the grass. Sang rose to his feet and glanced around. His eyes hesitated when they found his stepside van, but his dejected expression seemed to be saying there was no point in running because he’d have to come back for it and Gage would be waiting.
“It’s called the statue of limitations.” Sang’s Vietnamese accent had faded a bit since they last met. “My lawyer told me about it.”
“ Statute of limitations,” Gage said.
“Yeah. Statute.”
Two generations of police detectives in San Francisco knew Sang, his grandfather, his father, his five brothers, and their sister-and the Phams made sure they knew each of their enemies. The family was a form of organized crime: gambling, extortion, fraud, prostitution. Gage’s last contact with them was ten years earlier, in connection with a year-long series of Silicon Valley high-tech burglaries in which Sang’s role was to deliver the stolen microprocessors to off-brand server manufacturers.
Sang was the youngest and the lightweight among the siblings, less a danger to society than a burden on it.
“What exactly did you do?” Gage asked.
Sang stared at Gage, then smiled the subservient grin Gage suspected he reserved for white people to whom he was giving plumbing estimates.
“Oops.”
Gage pulled the Sang Ngoc Pham Plumbing and Rooting business card out of his shirt pocket.
“How’d you get a plumbing license?” Gage asked.
“Felonies okay. Really.” He shrugged “Bonding, maybe not.”
“The card says licensed and bonded.”
“Good intentions.”
Gage pointed toward the concrete front steps of the lime green stucco house. They walked over and sat down.
Sang spread his hands, grinning. “What do you think? Really.”
“About what?”
“My rental house.”
“Who chose the color?”
“Nobody. It was on sale. It’s good in Vietnam.” Sang surveyed the earth-toned houses bracketing his. “Here, maybe not.” He lowered his hands and let his grin fade. “But you didn’t come to talk real estate investment.”
“I wanted to ask you about Charlie Palmer.”
“Who?”
Gage cast him a sour look.
“I don’t know a Charlie Palmer, really. He deal in computer chips? I’ve been out of that business a long time, since I got out of prison. Really.”
Sang seemed convincing. With or without all the “reallys.”
Sang cocked his head and squinted toward the sky.
“Palmer… Palmer. I did a Palmer.” He looked at Gage. “A woman with a Mexican name. Senora or something.”
“Socorro.”
“That’s it. She had a clogged drain in the kitchen. And I cleaned out some roots in the line near the street.”
Gage gave him another sour look.
“She needed it. Really. I didn’t cheat her.”
“Did anyone come to the house while you were there? Maybe an older guy, heavyset?”
Sang scrunched up his face in thought, and then shook his head and said, “There was just a young guy in a golf shirt who came down from upstairs. I remember because he wanted to use the sink to get a drink of water. I don’t know if he was still there when I left.”
“What was he like?”
Sang gave a limp wrist wave, then grinned.
“Like that.”