Monsters of the Week

No Sanctuary

From another perspective, it might be a waste to spend the cool of the morning just lying here, snoozing in the green-filtered half-light as the sun was coming up, but Johnson had always liked this time, and the freedom to not have to be doing anything in it was a bonus. And then there was the circumstance: Johnson had been born here in KWC, in a two-room flat over an unlicensed dentists', with a sweatshop making ripoff Calvin Kleins down the hall and prostitutes on the next floor up whose pimps would stab the johns on the landing if they had any trouble, but in all honesty he was pretty glad that the British had taken a bulldozer to it when they left. The park was a definite improvement over that concrete warren of vice and disease, and having actually lived there, he wasn't too hung up on the "history" being gone. That was a history that was better off erased, that everyone would have been better off if it hadn't happened in the first place.

His shirt pocket buzzed. Johnson ignored it; there were better things to do on a Sunday morning than bother about who might be texting him. He draped an arm over his eyes and tried to tune out the kids arguing on the basketball court about if somebody had checked all the way back out or not. His pocket buzzed again, and he dragged himself up, sitting up on the bench. One text he could ignore: two meant Felix had something, and would be mad if he didn't come in and get to work on it. He pulled the phone out to confirm. Yup:

> johnson come in i have a job
> seriously johnson wake up already

He texted back a reply, then turned the phone off. He could walk back down to the office before Felix got antsy, and there wasn't anything he might send that would prevent Johnson from having to come in.

He walked slowly south through the park, crossed the street to buy a sausage roll and a can-coffee from one of the markets stirring itself awake, then thought better of the idea of going over to the office on foot. It was starting to warm up into another scorcher, the kind of day where you fell asleep in the afternoon with the air conditioner on, and whatever Felix had might be urgent, or at least urgent enough that doing it in the middle of the day would be a pain. He crossed back over and walked along the perimeter of the park around, then back north to pick up the subway at Lok Fu. This early on a Sunday, this far out, you could still get a seat, and Johnson bailed out at Mong Kok just as the train was starting to fill up, the usual drain southward to get things ready before the people on the mid-levels of the island came awake.

It was a couple blocks on foot still through the net of densely-packed streets off the Nathan from the subway exit to the office, and then a couple more minutes up in the elevator through the rotting concrete of the unimproved building to their floor, but the buildings were still casting shadows, keeping the temperature down a little, and even on the worst days their neighborhood was all right. This part of the city from MK to Olympic down to the Jordan always gave Johnson an extra jolt: something of the close vitality of the old Walled City without the filth or the danger of getting stabbed. Even though you had to watch yourself in some parts to make sure you weren't going to get a chunk of rebar coming down on your head from someone's balcony thirty stories up, and the signs advertising "free samples" of girls from thirty countries in front of some places on the Portland always gave him the creepy-crawlies, he was glad this part hadn't gentrified yet – for the atmosphere and also for the bare fact that they wouldn't be able to afford the rent otherwise.

Johnson stepped around the construction sign that someone had put on top of the missing floor tiles coming out of the elevator and went a couple doors down to their office. There was a floor polisher running, it sounded like somewhere downstairs, so it wasn't out of the question that the tiles might get fixed today. He didn't plan on hanging around long enough to find out if that would happen, or if the cleaning company would just move the sign to run the polisher and tear up the hall tile even worse than it already was. Whatever Felix had, they would either get moving on it immediately, or he would go home and take a nap in the AC. He pushed the door open; the corridor might be in tough shape, but Felix had recently touched up the "Wong & Tsoi, Investigators" on the door, in both English and Chinese. Even working out of a building like this – or especially if you were working out of a building like this and still got walk-up clients now and again – you had to look pro in this town.