EIGHT I tried. You can believe it or not as you like, but I did try. Still, the devil-may-care grin that cracked my mug would not be suppressed. This was a gift, exactly the kind of lucky break in the case any gumshoe prayed for. I didn’t dare let it get away while I took care of little things like recovering from criminal assault and a night in the drunk tank. If the warehouse had burned then I was out of leads. I needed this tail to show me another angle on the case, and that meant letting it follow me for a while. Then again, I didn’t exactly want them knowing where I lived, either. Where could I go? “Change of plans,” I told the cabbie, an Irishman to judge from the carrot-orange hair below his seen-better-days bowler. “Head down to Dearborn and make a left. I need to get to the Mikado.” A true son of Erin, he grunted eloquently and shifted the pipe to the other side of his mouth without using his hands. He looked sour, but a fare was a fare. He probably shared the prevailing local attitude on the denizens of Chinatown, a part of the city better known as the Mikado.
