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Fox still possessed an almost phobic hatred of cults.  Numerous therapists, attempting to recover his memory of the event, had encouraged him to revisit the scene of the crime and confront his fears but he had always refused, rationalizing that sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.  The simple memory of arguing with his sister before she was murdered still had the power to upset him.  Recalling the moment of her death and that of his parents would surely be intolerable.
    Deep down, however, he knew he’d never be at peace until he recovered those lost minutes.  That was why the yellow sign had shocked him.  It announced that the Chevron petrol station and many of the surrounding buildings would soon be pulled down to make way for a new shopping mall.  For reasons he couldn’t explain, he feared that once the petrol station disappeared all hope of ever remembering what had happened on that night would disappear with it.

 
    Chapter 6
     
    Across town, a stranger entered the Shanghai, a seamy bar hidden among the run-down hotels, strip joints, whorehouses and derelict warehouses that lined the Willamette River.  Vince Vega and other hardcore regulars looked up from their lunchtime beers to glare at the intruder who dared trespass in their domain.  Vega, sitting alone in the corner, shook his head in disgust.  Even the police knew to stay out of the Shanghai.  This rube had to be from out of town, too stupid to know better.
    Portland’s Old Town, home of the original skid row, had a notorious and sordid past.  Not so long ago, men who drank in its numerous bars could have found themselves drugged and dragged through the infamous Shanghai tunnels which ran under much of the neighborhood, waking to find themselves on a ship in the middle of the ocean, forced to work for food and drink.  Young women faced an ever bleaker fate as white slaves sold into prostitution in some far-flung land.
    Today, it was still one of the more dangerous parts of the city, edgier than its fashionable neighbor the Pearl District, and this suited Vince Vega just fine.  Over the years he had clawed his way to a position of power and now regarded Old Town, in all its seedy glory, as his fiefdom.  Most of the whores who walked its streets or operated out of the low-rent flophouses came under his control.  Many of the crack dealers who plied their trade in the district paid him a cut.
    As Vega sipped his beer, his weasel eyes watched the stranger approach the bar and study the extensive array of Oregon beers chalked on the large blackboard.  The man wore a collarless white shirt but everything else was plain black:  trousers, long jacket, boots, the broad-rimmed hat that concealed his face, even the large bag he carried in his right hand.  His pale skin and lips added to the monochrome look.  The stranger was large, with a laborer’s build, but size had never intimidated Vega, who was a wiry ferret of a man.  In his experience bigger men were invariably slow and overconfident.  And this guy looked like one of those Amish pussies who wouldn’t step on a bug.  Some discarded marker pens lay scattered on the bar and the man picked them up, obsessively arranging the colors in a particular order before replacing them in their carton.
    What an asshole .
    He listened to the rumbling growl of the man’s voice as he ordered a beer, and watched the way he inclined his head like a dog, to stare at the screen above the bar.  The guy seemed mesmerized by the TV, like he’d never seen one before in his life.
    “Fucking retard,” Vega muttered into his beer.  Suddenly the man straightened and stepped away from the bar, literally taken aback by what he was seeing on the screen:  a news feature on the mystery Jane Doe.  Did the retard know her?  The man watched the screen intently, apparently in awe of how Jane Doe had gone into a dark basement armed only with an axe and single-handedly rescued eleven girls from the Russian