The Trail to Buddha's Mirror Read Online Free PDF Page A

the end of the game, so it just wouldn’t do to let Benchpress here make that next move.
    Neal looked off to his left as soon as he cleared the doorway, held up his hand, and yelled, “Taxi!”
    The front cab in line started to edge forward on the curb as a bellhop hustled over to open the cab door.
    “No, no, no,” Benchpress said, waving his arms as he quick-shuffled between Neal and the cab.
    This was okay with Neal, who didn’t want to take a cab anyway. He wanted to take a nice long walk up a long, steep hill to see just how badly Benchpress wanted to carry all those big muscles and that belly up a pitch to talk. With Benchpress off to his left, Neal had his whole right side open to move, and he knew where a right turn would take him: through North Beach and then up Telegraph Hill, which was plenty long and steep enough for what he had in mind. He took a hard right and headed out.
    Benchpress wasted two seconds standing by the cab wondering how embarrassed he should be, and then another second trying to decide if the chase was going to be worth it.
    He decided it was.
    Neal wasn’t happy to look over his shoulder and see Benchpress coming after him, but he wasn’t too worried either. The guy wasn’t going to cause a scene—not near his hotel, anyway—and he wasn’t going to call the city police over this kind of crap. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure this thing became real personal, so Neal wasted a second of his own to turn on his heels and grin at Benchpress. Then he inserted his middle finger in his mouth, twisted it around, popped it out, and displayed it to Benchpress.
    Benchpress took it personally. He nodded, put his head down, and started forward.
    Okay, Neal thought, come on. I’ve spent six months hiking up and down a steep Yorkshire moor carrying packs of supplies. No overweight, pumped-up rent-a-cop can catch me on a hill.
    Neal led him up Kearny and took another right on Broadway, which was a little flatter then he remembered. He picked up the pace past the strip joints and sex shops that were just opening to catch the early trade. Benchpress wasn’t distracted by the tired barkers who were sipping on Styrofoam cups of coffee, or by the sleepy dancers who were just arriving with their dancing togs in gym bags slung over their shoulders. He didn’t trip over any of the empty beer or wine bottles, or slip on any of the wax-paper sandwich wrappers or any of the trash that littered the North Beach strip. A sharp, cool wind was blowing off the Bay and into their faces, but that didn’t slow Benchpress down much either.
    Reduced to cheap tricks, Neal crossed Broadway in mid-traffic, inspiring some aggravated honking but no apparent concern in Benchpress, who swatted a Renault out of his way and kept coming.
    Jesus, Neal thought, what a day. First I screw up and let Pendleton take off, next I find the only house detective in America with an overdeveloped sense of duty.
    He swung a left onto Sansome Street, which gave him the incline he was looking for. Like a sparkling brook that flows into a polluted river, Sansome Street seemed a world apart from Broadway. Its street-level garages led up to white and pastel apartments and houses that featured large sun rooms overlooking the Bay. A lot of their windows had those security-service decals plastered on them, the kind that let prospective burglars know that they shouldn’t mess around here unless they wanted police academy dropouts with nightsticks, rottweilers, and inferiority complexes coming down on their sorry asses.
    Sansome Street was pretty, trendy, and expensive looking, and Neal wondered where the money came from. Maybe it came from streets like Broadway, money that slipped through the fingers of the strippers and the whores, money that got away from the junkies and the porn addicts, from the sad drunks who paid six bucks a shot to peek over their grimy glasses of cheap bourbon at the bitter shake-and-jiggle of somebody’s baby