Wu Long was due back any moment.

Mercedes stood and stretched, reaching for her cigarette case and lighter more out of boredom than any real need for a butt. Boredom was the curse and the bane of her family, made the finely balanced inner workings of her mind want to run cannibal and start to feed on one another. There just weren't enough truly interesting puzzles in this city to keep her challenged -- debunking phony mediums and fortune tellers wasn't much of a life's work. She liked to tell herself it was just a start.

The Hughes case had been over for two days; the Hughes' payment had covered the month's rent on the office and a carton of Kools. And now Mercedes Moriarty stood at the dingy window of their small office and waited on Dr. Chow Wu Long to return from the medical emergency to which he'd been summoned. Probably another slug to the gut some torpedo doesn't want to have reported to the cops, she thought wearily, pale blue eyes watching the street below for her colleague's return. They'd hand him a ten-spot for his trouble, they always did. He would accept it with a bow and a smile. He always did.

There was a tentative rap on the door, followed by an entrance. Mercedes turned, getting her first look at the man who stood on the creaky wood floor of the office of the Moore detective agency. He was small, almost shrunken. His shoulders stooped and his face bore so many wrinkles that he looked like a windfallen apple left in the sun to dry, and his eyes bore the permanent squint of life on the range. His skin was tanned and spotted from a lifetime in the sun, and his hairline had receded to reveal a long, tan forehead. His face wore a mustache that was thin, wispy and grey, but extended past his upper lip to droop down, depending towards his chin. He wore a plaid shirt and denim pants, both sunfaded, threadbare, and sandblasted with age and use, like their owner. His boots were clean and polished, and looked like they had been purchased at a dry goods and maintained scrupulously to get every nickel's worth of value from them. The only incongruity of his appearance was his hat, which he held in his hands in front of him. It was a straw coolie hat, almost white and perfectly out of place in Arizona.

"Excuse me please," he said softly. "I am told I can find Detective Moore here."

Second generation.... Chinaman, looks to be. English is too good to be first generation. Neat of hand, meticulous of habit, and that hat is so incongruous it begs its own series of questions. "I'm Moore," she agreed, boredom still clinging to her like the odor of cigarette smoke. "What brings you off the mesa and into my office, Mr....?"

"Weh?" He said quickly, surprise falling out of his mouth in his mother tongue. "Very good, sorry, very good," he shifted nervously from foot to foot, while the board beneath him sang like a cricket in love. "I need help to find my daughter." He looked at the floor at the foot of Moriarty's desk, gripping his hat hard enough that it rustled quietly under his fingers. Humility, desperation, and preconceptions about women and detectives all did war between his eyebrows, smooth on top and furry beneath and the color of ashes. "I have heard Dr. Chow says Detective Moore - you - can be relied on."

He composed himself enough in that instant to remember the question on Mercedes' crimson lips and added "I am Gai Chen."

"Please be seated, Mr. Gai." Mercedes sat too, using the first name as the family name, as is Chinese tradition. This permitted her to avoid the inevitable discussions about her sex, which had grown tedious some time ago. "Dr. Chow honors me with his praise. Tell me about your daughter." A slight smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. "Just the facts, if you please."

Chen nodded his thanks, and sat in the wooden chair that reminded clients why brevity was the soul of wit. He still looked a little nervous, but clients who were not worried did not generally need the services a gumshoe had to offer. "Thank you, ma'am," he began, his voice rough from too much dry air and tobacco smoke, and quiet from a life without much to say. "You honor me by trying to fix my name, but I tried to fix it for you long ago - my family name is Chen. We try to change to fit America and we try to hang on to what makes us Chinese, and it doesn't always work."

"Your pardon then. The slight was unintentional."

"We named my daughter Arizona, Ma'am, to connect her to the land, to make her more than a Chinaman's daughter, to give her luck in our dry land. Still, I am Chinese, I want what is best for her." The implicit condemnation of all of western culture was lost on Chen. "I saved money for her marriage, I found her a good husband in San Francisco, a man who owns a hotel there. I named her too well: she would not leave Arizona, not even for a husband. I told her she had to go, and she left, but she did not go to San Francisco."

"She has been gone for ten days, Mrs. Moore. I have a good daughter - if she will come home I will not send her to San Francisco."

Mercedes drew on her cigarette, privately wondering at humanity's congenital inability to separate opinion from fact. "Arizona Chen," she said, exhaling the words in smoke. "How very American. What happened ten days ago?" She asked.

"We argued in the morning, before sunrise. I would never have argued with my parents - I raised her with too much Arizona, not enough Chen. I went out for two days to help the Bar K get ready for the fall drive. She has been gone since." Chen looked at the ground, to dry and hard a man to cry, but still surveying a land of despair.

"She works at the tack shop in Wickenberg," he said. "A hand's life is all long hours, Mrs. Moore. I should know more about my own daughter."

It wasn't that Mercedes Moriarty had no emotions. She was human (despite contrary opinions in other quarters), and she was a woman, after all. It was simply that emotional displays were neither seen nor encouraged, when she was young, a history that left her somewhat bereft when it came to showing simple human compassion.

In lieu of all that, there were always the facts. "Had you already sent her bride price to her fiance in San Francisco, Mr. Chen?"

"No ..." Chen sounded confused. "Of course ..." Resigned. "I saved that money for her happiness, and it will still be used for that." He looked Moriarty in the eye. "How much of it do you require?"

She exhaled a cloud smoke to hover above the desk for a deliberate moment before answering. "I haven't said I'll take your case yet, Mr. Chen. As of right now, I'm still attempting to separate fact from opinion." Something white hot blazed behind those pale eyes for a fractional moment, then disappeared just as quickly. "You said you don't know your daughter well. Does that include friends, co-workers, regular customers at the tack shop? I would need to know who she came into contact with on a regular basis."

"She worked with a woman named Maria at the tack shop. Almost every man in the county goes to the tack shop at some time or other. She did not mention any of them to me, but she was not blind. She may have spared my feelings then and not told me. If she left for some cowboy, she would have left a note, or sent a cable, or a friend to tell me. She would have told Maria, and Maria would have told me. Yes?"

The front door opened without sound as Wu Long noiselessly entered the office. Noting that Mercedes was in discussion with Gai Chen, he mentally relaxed and allowed his next footsteps to fall on the more noisy floorboards on his way deeper into the office. A quick meeting of their eyes was enough to reassure him that everything was still secure. Their time traveling together had created a secret language between them, one born of necessity and familiarity. He stood beside Gai Chen and addressed them both.

"Mrs. Moore, I see that Mr. Chen has arrived. I hope that you will assist him with the search for his precious daughter. Of course, I will be most pleased to aid you both in any way that I can."

"Dr. Chow," Mercedes agreed, stubbing out the last of her smoke in an otherwise clean ashtray. "Mr. Chen and I were just discussing his daughter's friends and acquaintances and were moving on to her personal habits and routine. It would seem he suspects foul play. If he's right, I'll take the case."

Chen stood and offered a quick formal bow from the waist to Dr. Chow. "Dr. Chow, I am glad you are here," he said in Mandarin. "You did not mention that Detective Moore was a woman." He said this without condemnation.

Wu Long returned the bow. "And if I had? Mrs Moore is a excellent detective. There are places that a woman can go that a man cannot without bringing attention to his presence. Then there are those places no man should go. Detective Moore may need to go to such places to find your daughter," he replied calmly in Mandarin.

He remained on his feet in deference to Dr. Chow, and turned back to Moriarty, whose gaze he could not seem to meet, looking instead at the floor in front of her desk. "Personal habits and routine... She worked six days a week at the tack shop, tooling leather. She was very good at it," he motioned to his own belt, with the head of an ox in brass for a buckle, and the eleven other members of the Chinese zodiac engraved in lovig detail into the leather of the belt.

"She had much work to do at our house, tending our garden, and chickens, and cleaning," Chen continued. "Sometimes I would bring her gear from the ranch to repair, she was good with leather. Is." That last word got his eyes to finally connect with Mercedes' own.

She kept his gaze with cool nerve. It wasn't American nerve, she didn't have an American bone in her body -- it was rather the nerve of a finely-honed mind at work, at last. Wu Long recognized it, he'd seen it in her before. Her mind engaged the puzzle before it, supplanting emotional concerns entirely (and physical concerns, largely).

"It is for the best to assume she is still alive at this point," Mercedes finally allowed, letting the matter of their rudeness pass by for her own reasons. "In the past, however -- was she an otherwise biddable girl, this marriage business aside?"

"Yes, I have been very lucky," Chen said. "I have a good daughter."

"Thank you, Mr. Chen. And her mother?" Mercedes pressed. "Were they close, mother and daughter?"

"They are so much alike Arizona is a window to when my wife was young, and they were close," Chen's lips curled at their corners to a small smile for an instant, but his brow remained knit. "My wife took ill and died almost ten years ago. This winter will be ten years. I think they would be close today, but sometimes women struggle from being too much alike."

Mother dead, father gone for days at a time... "Mr. Chen, surely you do not leave your unmarried daughter alone when you have to spend days away? With whom did she stay, when you had to be gone?"

"No, of course, she stays with Maria Stockton and her family when I am away. Maria works in the tack shop - her husband owns it. Since he married a Mexican they do not mind if we are Chinese." Chen said this with sincerity and open ignorance that it was not necessarily so, and that it was certainly an insult to everyone who had not married a Mexican. "She sometimes stays at their house, next to the shop, for a week at a time."

facts Facts FACTS! The single word rang like a frustrated echo in her mind, though none of it was revealed in either voice or cool demeanor. "Did Arizona show up for work that day? and how did you discover that she did not arrive in San Francisco?"

Chen looked at Moriarty, his leathered face creased with pain. "I was going to take her to San Francisco myself when I returned from the range. She disappeared before she ever got to the Stockton's house. I don't know where she went, but the police can not be bothered to look for a Chinaman's daughter. The things they said..." He looked down and shook his head, shamed that such things were even thought about his daughter.

"Idiots," Mercedes breathed. "Do not allow yourself to be shamed by the congenitally stupid, Mr. Chen. Very well. I'll take the case. My rate is $X a day plus expenses. I'll need two days' worth in advance. If this is a straightforward case, the total won't be much more than that. If it's not..." Her eyes glittered slightly as she pulled her Colt pistol out of a drawer and checked the rounds, "I'll let you know."

Gai Chen left a photograph of his pretty daughter on top of the money there on the desk. Mercedes glanced at it after the older Chinaman left, then handed it to Wu Long between two long, pale fingers. "We'll need to go to Wickenburg and talk to the Stocktons. I'll also need to talk to Six-Toes, which means I'd better buy a bottle of hooch for a bribe. Any other observations before we go?"

"Mr. Chen is almost as concerned about his daughter's honor as he is her safety. He fears that he has spoiled her. I suspect the idea of his daughter being American was much more his wife's idea more than his own. I believe that she has developed relationships with people completely unknown to her father, given his long periods of absence from her life." Wu Long paused and looked into Mercedes' eyes, "Yet, she is the only family he has and it would crush what is left of his spirit if she were to remain lost."

Mercedes gazed at him for a moment, face completely devoid of expression. In truth most of what he'd said was completely irrelevant to the matter at hand, and what was relevant she'd already deduced for herself. But then, Wu Long's more human side was one of the traits she valued about him. Occasionally, it was useful.

"Let's go then. In Wickenburg we'll talk to the Stocktons. On our way out of town I'll put out a call for Six-Toes. He should be here when we get back." She donned her trenchcoat, inserting money, smokes, lighter and gun in the appropriate pockets. "Bring the photo. We may need it."

Sometimes Wu Long found himself at a loss as to what to say to Mercedes. While his own intellect was far from lacking, the well honed instrument that was her mind usually uncovered the facts of a situation, leaving only opinions. Yet it was occasionally necessary to remind her that those opinions and their emotional roots influence the actions of others which in turn, affected the facts that she so highly treasured.

Picking up the photograph he looked at it briefly and smiled, reminded of his niece and her mother in China. "My younger sister's daughter would be about this age now. Knowing her mother, I think my niece will be looking forward to her wedding." Carrying the phonograph in his left hand, he followed Mercedes out of their office.

OOC: Wu Long's response here of course but then -- fade to new scene?

OOC:Absolutely, lets get moving.