Jillian Chantal

This week, the word for Tuesday Tales is box. I am still in the new story with no name. The hero is looking for a missing child and he has one lead. A man named Charlie.  This is a part of the scene where the hero is in Chinatown to meet Charlie.

Be sure to check out the other tales here.  

After a car ride and another subway trip—this one thankfully uneventful—I made my way down the dirty street near the smelly fish market and toward Chinatown. When I was a police officer, I avoided this area of town. Not because I was afraid but because I got annoyed at all the store owners hawking their wares. Trying to lure people inside to the back rooms to buy fake merchandise. You’d think they’d leave a man alone about handbags but they didn’t. If I’d bought a handbag for every girlfriend/wife/lover they thought I had, I’d either be broke, exhausted or have some type of venereal disease.

I strode with purpose, eyes forward, trying to get through the gauntlet and to the back of one of those very places I’d tried so hard to avoid.

Eventually, I arrived at the right address, took a deep breath and went inside.

Milling around, pretending to look at the items for sale, I hoped my contact would come along soon before I had to buy some silly cat waving its paw. Why were there so many of those things? What was the attraction?

In what seemed like an hour—God, how I hate to shop—but was more like ten minutes, a tiny woman came to stand beside me. “You here to see Charlie?”

I nodded.

“Then come.” She pivoted on her toes and made her way down the crowded aisle as if it were a slalom ski slope and she was taking the gates like an Olympic champion.

I staggered behind her, knocking into several displays. Praying this wasn’t a you break you buy place, I tried to settle everything back into place as I went.

Eventually we reached the rear of the shop. The woman opened a heavy-looking metal door and ushered me in. “Charlie come in minute.”

She left me there. I glanced around at my surroundings. The room was dim, lit only by what looked to be a forty watt bulb. There were a number of metal shelves covering two walls, floor to ceiling. They had stacks and stacks of boxes on them. Probably filled with those cats.

The thing that caused me consternation was the two massive hooks in the ceiling and the drainage hole in the concrete floor. I’d seen too many horrors in my time not to imagine the most sordid things happening in that room.

None of the cardboard boxes were on the floor so if anyone was tortured here and their blood washed away down the drain, those souvenirs wouldn’t get ruined at all.