Murder on Bamboo Lane Read Online Free Page A

anyway?”
    “The 180, and then I walked and caught the 81.”
    “Not too smart.” Bus riding in the city of Los Angeles after dark can be treacherous for a teenage boy who looks like he has money but doesn’t.
    I pull the car keys out of my pocket and gesture for him to get up.
    “What?”
    “I’m going to drive you home.”
    “No, no. I’m sorry, okay? I just need a break from Mom. She’s driving me crazy. Let me sleep over tonight. She already thinks I’m over at Simon’s anyway.”
    “Nu-ah.”
    “You’re partially to blame, you know. Since you went blue collar with the LAPD, all this pressure is on me to make it academically. Mom keeps saying that she didn’t send you to private school to ride a bike at work.”
    “What else does she say?”
    “That it’s all Aunt Cheryl’s fault.”
    That argument again?
It’s getting old, Mom
, I say to myself
.
But Noah certainly knows what he is doing, because I relent. “Okay, but I have to get up early to go work the Chinatown parade. When I leave, you leave,” I tell him.
    • • •
    When I wake up at 4:30 a.m., the living room couch is empty. There’s only a note, scribbled on the back of a cigarette rolling paper in felt tip pen:
WENT HOME
.
    I feel a little bad not being more hospitable to my younger brother, but then again, not that bad. My father says that, based on neurological studies, the brain of a teenage boy is not fully developed, and my brother is a perfect example of that. Half human, half swamp creature. I don’t know if he understands that I was one finger pull from blowing his head off.
    I go to replenish Shippo’s dog food bowl, but it’s already full. So is his water bowl. I find another note on cigarette rolling paper on the counter:
WALKED THE DOG & FIXED YOUR CURTAIN
. Just when I’m ready to give up on my brother, he completely surprises me.
    I put on my contacts and quickly change into a clean uniform—a black shirt that clearly reads POLICE in the back, and shorts, because even though it’s cold for LA, about fifty degrees, the cycling will soon warm my legs. I slather moisturizer on my freshly shaven calves. My skin tends to be on the dry side, especially during the winter months. Shippo watches me this whole time. He knows the routine. Luckily, I have a small backyard and doggy door, so at least he has squirrels to bark at when I’m not around.
    I drive to work this time. The best time to drive in Los Angeles is early morning on the weekends around five a.m. It’s late enough that even the drunken partiers have gone home and early enough that most people—from suburbanites to gangbangers—are still in bed. Right now I’m working a compressed schedule, four ten-hour days, but being a P2, I realize that things can change for me at any time.
    I collect my bike at Central Division and ten of us set off in groups for Chinatown. Blocked-off streets are no problem for us, and we’ve been trained to navigate bikes in tight quarters. I purposely stay away from Mac, and he stays away from me.
    The city has already set out orange cones and wooden street barriers to control traffic, but only a few Chinese grandmas, their hands behind their backs, walk the cleaned-up streets this early. I’ve never actually watched the Chinatown parade, though I’ve participated in some of the Chinese New Year weekend events. My dad and I have run the Firecracker 5K Run a few times and have the faded T-shirts to prove it.
    I circle North Broadway, pedaling past Chinese churches, and Vietnamese sandwich shops. There’s also an Italian American museum hidden away, along with an aging Italian church that feeds hungry Chinese immigrants every Thanksgiving.
    Of course, these days Chinatown doesn’t come close to containing all of the recent Chinese immigrants. New Chinatowns have emerged east of Downtown Los Angeles in the hilly suburbs of Monterey Park, Rowland Heights and Diamond Bar. As Chinese from Hong Kong and mainland China leave downtown,