Текст книги "Death Money "

Автор книги: Henry Chang

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

Occasionally he’d jerk his eyes up abruptly, flash scanning the tables to see if anyone was paying any particular attention to him. No one seemed to care.

Deciding to see if any persons of interest were up in Half-Ass, he headed back to the courtyard. He grunted toward the old man on the way out, who seemed pleased that he was leaving.

He crossed the cement courtyard, back into the grimy building corridor leading out to Pell, when the first blow came over his left shoulder. It struck him hard across the back of his head, sent him reeling forward into the wall of the narrow hall. Something metal.

The second and third blows came in rapid hits on his neck and shoulders as he threw up a blocking arm and fought for balance. A jackhammer knee drove him to the dirty linoleum floor.

He yelled and started to draw his Colt, his head spinning. Twisting away from the direction of the attack, he caught the flash of a man in dark clothes darting out to Pell Street.

He struggled to his feet, the Colt in hand now, trigger finger ready.

When he staggered out of the building the street was empty, the neon colors of the restaurant and bar signs swimming in his head. He took a few cold shaolin breaths, stabilizing, but it wasn’t until a few minutes later, when he’d regained his equilibrium, that he realized the black see gay was no longer parked in front of 36 Pell.

The cold night air had revived him a bit, and he went directly to Grampa’s, three blocks away.

In the blue darkness of one of the booths, the barmaid gave him half a bag of ice, which he used as cold compress to his head, shoulders, and neck. It was a warning, he knew. He’d been hit hard enough to stun but not to kill. Besides a few lumps, he couldn’t find any blood on himself. If they’d wanted him dead, they’d have snuffed him.

The ice dulled the pain, and Grampa himself sent a boilermaker over to his solitary booth. Jack dropped the shot glass into the beer mug, chugged half of it back. He could feel the alcohol flowing to his brain and cooling down the pain inside him.

The warning only strengthened his resolve. He knew he had to be close to something if they’d felt the need to attack him. And they didn’t care if he was a cop.

He threw back the rest of the boilermaker, pulled out his cell phone, and called for a radio car back to Sunset Park. First thing in the morning, he determined, he’d run the license-plate number he’d scrawled on his wrist on the DMV and the Traffic Division databases.

Night Rider 2

ONE IN THE morning and he was restless, his last night in the Edgewater house. He poured some XO into a tumbler, gulped a hit, and took his last look around the dark kitchen, the curtained living room.

It isn’t the fifty thousand cash they’ve stolen, Bossy thought—he’d make that back in a month. Nor the three Rolex watches, which were payment swag from a Chinatown jewelry-store owner who’d gambled and lost down number 15 basement. He didn’t care about all that, almost as if the money lost were something he’d kept handy, for ransom, for just the circumstances that occurred. All part of the deadly circle of money, he thought. No big loss.

But what did matter was his father’s death. He could never forgive that. The great Duck Hong dying like that, with a whimper. He knew nothing would bring his father back, but the face of it was unforgivable. They’d stolen what amounted to death money.

The Hok Nam Moon Triad elders would also certainly retaliate for the death of a senior brother, especially against the On Yee and the Red Circle member Fay Lo. It was more than the Hip Chings could handle, but the Hok Triad could carry the fight from Hong Kong through its many members in the overseas cities and communities to wherever the On Yee had a presence. They’d already battled in Chinatowns in Boston, Montreal, Toronto, and San Francisco, but vengeance would be paid out over the seasons, measured but forceful and significant. Some of it was payback for feuds dating back a hundred years.

Bossy poured some more XO, tossed it back. Just lay low, he was told. Don’t draw attention to the Triad.

This wasn’t only a little turf battle between the earners on the street anymore. Of course, the fighting between the Dragons and Ghosts would continue until their dailo were replaced, but the Triad took over, advised Bossy to stay out of it. The less he knew, the better.

Bossy disagreed. “He’s my father, my family. I deserve a say in it.” With regard to the On Yees and Fay Lo, he’d deferred to the Hok Nam Moon: let the Triads battle it out and wash the fat troublemaker. He agreed to keep a low profile and was determined to keep his enthusiastic son Franky out of it. The idiot was an easy target—everyone knew he was Bossy’s son—careless and reckless, wanting to descend into the pit of America as fast as his hero older brother, Gary, had wanted to ascend.

Let the street gangs do their work.

Let the Triad big boys do their work.

But regarding the matter of the takeout deliveryman who’d betrayed them, he’d wanted a personal touch, not some psycho hit man from Hong Kong intruding into his family affairs.

He preferred someone he could trust, someone who was familiar with the days and nights of his life. Someone who knew his family’s background and had exhibited loyalty.

The Hok Nam Moon relented, and they’d quickly come to an agreement on who would begin the retributions.

No one was surprised, not even the killer.

But Bossy was surprised, though not shocked, at the jook sing Chinese cop showing up so quickly at his doorstep and office. He had hoped that the matter would have simply disappeared, washed away forever.

The chaai lo annoyed him more than unnerved him.

It had caused him to make a few phone calls.

He finished the XO as a white wash of car headlights swept across the kitchen walls. He lit a Marlboro and watched the walls dim and then fade to dark again. After a minute he could hear tires crunching gravel, then the purring engine of the black car outside. He checked his Rolex. Right on time. The headlights flashed off. He imagined the driver, Mon Gor, waiting patiently, but always ready to go on a moment’s notice.

The XO and the nicotine leveled the tension, refocused him on more immediate, primal needs. He’d considered a quick trip to one of the strip clubs. The roomy black car always reminded him of the sex jaunts to Booty’s, which had always provided a secluded spot for blow jobs from the dancers. Mon Gor knew the drill and always exited the car for a cigarette walk, far enough for a ten-minute BJ on the backseat.

Bossy rejected the thought of Fat Lily’s; too many Chinatown johns knew him there, and the whores weren’t as pretty. Instead he imagined himself at Chao’s, on the edge of Chinatown, picking the youngest-looking siu jeer out of the lineup.

The alcohol rushed through his blood and made his balls tingle.

Finishing the cigarette, he tossed a last angry look toward the dark living room and headed for the waiting car.

Transporter 1

IT WAS SNOWING lightly the next morning as Jack zipped back to Chinatown in a see gay out of Sunset Park.

The Chinese driver maintained a running dialogue with his radio dispatcher, injecting a few murmured expletives between the static lines.

Jack scanned the dark sky above the slick highway, shook his head. Of course, he didn’t think Bossy himself stabbed Sing through the heart, hauled him through the freezing water, and shoved him off into the Harlem River. He didn’t do the dirty work; he hired people for that. Contracted it out. Or the tong arranged it, and they were all complicit.

“Fuck your mother!” the driver hissed. “Dew nei lo may,” to his dispatcher. It broke Jack’s focus as the driver swerved to exit off the BQE and back onto the streets.

“Jong che,” dispatch squawked. “Accident on the Brooklyn Bridge! Avoid!”

The driver turned the black car around toward the Manhattan Bridge, the next-nearest Chinatown crossing.

Jack noticed the driver’s knowledge of the routes, figured it was part of the business of transporting people from one place to another destination. Those destinations could be airports, train and bus terminals, and the city had many other points of interest. But if you drove the overnight shift, it was a different clientele. Sure, the airports and terminals were still there, but so were the nightclubs, the gambling joints, the motels, and the whorehouses. All the all-night dives like Half-Ass and Grampa’s and Lucy Jung’s.

The interior of the car was gray, dark as the sky outside, but clean, without magazines or personal items, unlike the cars of some of the drivers who used their own family vehicles to make extra money.

Always on call, Jack thought, real Chinese cowboys. Saddle up, ride out. A lot of single or divorced men. The lifestyle didn’t help family life. These were the men who disdained the obsequious restaurant work of their peers, the back-breaking labor of the Chinatown coolie construction gangs, the grinding days of the street vendors in the heat and freeze and rain and snow.

No, they preferred to mount their leased, air-conditioned Town Cars to ferry others to destinations sometimes deemed illegal, but where the tips were better than good and where one could do well in the gwai lo city.

There were no other clues in the see gay car. No family photographs or Chinese saints on the dashboard. No faux-Chinese firecrackers hanging off the rearview mirror. No takeout containers or water bottles or Chinese newspapers.

Just another hustling guy trying to make a few extra bucks.

But of course he didn’t think Bossy himself did the killing. Franky Noodles, either: Too obvious, and he doesn’t fit the profile. They’d kept him out of it, had protected the wannabe golden boy.

The radio car crossed the Manhattan Bridge before Jack knew it and was rolling into Chinatown. The driver drifted his car right, down through Fukienese East Broadway and around to Confucius Towers, a block’s walk to the Fifth Precinct.

If it wasn’t Bossy, it’s someone he trusted.

He paid the driver an extra five and crossed Bowery from Confucius Towers toward the Fifth Precinct.

Run DMV

THE KNOTS AT the back of his head, neck, and shoulders grabbed at him, but Jack had spread on the mon gum yow, Tiger Balm, let it do its mentholated relief work for him. The shift cops wrinkled up their noses as he passed. He went to the second floor of the Fifth Precinct, to the main computer, and logged in.

According to the Department of Motor Vehicles database, the black Lincoln Town Car was five years old, a 1990 model that was leased by and registered to Golden Mountain Realty. Bossy’s company.

When he ran the plate numbers through the Traffic Division site, the connection became even clearer. Over the past two years, the Town Car had received four traffic violations: one for running a red light near Chinatown, issued to Francis Gee, Bossy’s bad seed, aka Franky Noodles. The fine was paid by Golden Mountain Realty.

Two tickets were for daytime standing in a no standing zone. From the addresses on the tickets, Jack remembered the locations of the Lucky Dragon and China Village, two of Bossy’s Bronx restaurants. The last violation was for an illegal U-turn in the South Bronx six months earlier, on a street not far from Booty’s, or Chino’s, strip club. Late at night.

Those three tickets were issued to driver Mak Mon Gaw and were paid off by Lucky Food Enterprises. Another of Bossy’s companies, figured Jack. The NYS driver’s license for Mak identified him as male, with brown eyes, his height five feet eleven inches. His photo face was the every face of a middle-aged Chinatown man. Black hair, dark eyes giving a Long March stare. An expressionless face, unremarkable, inscrutable. Waiter, accountant, laborer, entrepreneur, everyman. Nothing to indicate he was a cabbie or chauffeur or radio driver. His date of birth was February 2, 1951, which made him forty-four years old. Forty-four, mused Jack, an unlucky Chinese number that sounds like “double-death” in Cantonese. Born in the Year of the Tiger. Mak had a Chinatown address: 8 Pell Street, apartment 3A. A Hip Ching apartment on a Hip Ching street, Jack figured, diagonally across from Half-Ass.

He ran Mak Mon Gaw for priors or warrants, but the man had no criminal history. The way the name was romanized indicated he was from Hong Kong, or China, originally. Jack reconsidered him as a person of interest and was about to access the Immigration Department’s database when his cell phone buzzed.

The female dispatcher’s voice asked, “What’s your twenty, Detective Yu?”

“Fifth Precinct,” he answered. “Computer room.”

“Stand by,” she instructed.

He was puzzled by the call, proceeded to print out the information he’d accessed. He was folding the copies into his pocket when footsteps thumped up to the second floor, coming in his direction.

Two hulky shadows appeared in the doorway. Their faces looked familiar, and no introductions were necessary. Internal Affairs. Hogan and DiMizzio, big white cops with neat haircuts and eyes like steel rivets. They’d investigated Jack previously, after the murder of Uncle Four in Chinatown.

Jack had been wondering when it would come, the IA inquiries, popping open the case like a poison pus pimple, with their innuendoes, their boldfaced lies, the tough-cop-and-honest-cop routines. It hadn’t taken long this time, less than two days after he’d picked up Bossy’s trail. A day after interviewing him in his office.

It was clear Bossy was sending a message, saying who he was by siccing the IA cops on him.

They stepped into the room with the same contemptuous attitudes on their faces.

But it didn’t surprise Jack this time, and the pressure only confirmed that he was pushing in the right direction.

Hogan kicked it off. “Up to old tricks, huh, Yu? Harassment?”

“Setting up a shakedown, huh?” DiMizzio taunted. Jack shook his head, didn’t dignify the insults with a response.

“Detective Yu,” Hogan said, “can you explain why you were in the South Bronx on Thursday night, February fifteenth?”

“Where you encountered a plainclothes detail from the Four-One?” DiMizzio said.

It was the same quick questioning, eye-swiveling routine, meant to keep the subject off balance. It didn’t faze Jack this time.

“I was off duty,” Jack said. “Me and a friend went for a drive. We took the east side, the FDR, to the Bronx. We were crossing over for the West Side Highway back to Manhattan when we ran into the plainclothes guys.”

The answer seemed to satisfy them; if they’d had more, they’d play it out. But Jack knew they were working him, just warming up.

“Why did you interview James Gee?” asked Hogan.

“Normal course of investigation,” answered Jack. “Just due diligence.”

“And questioning his son?” asked DiMizzio.

“The guy had priors.” Jack shrugged. “He was a natural suspect.”

“Enough for you to visit his house in New Jersey?”

“Normal course of investigation,” repeated Jack.

“So what led you to Mr. Gee’s doorstep?” Hogan asked.

Jack gave them an abbreviated account of his investigation. He couldn’t tell them about Ah Por’s yellow witchcraft, the assistance from his incipient alcoholic Chinatown pal Billy Bow, nor about the illegal Chinese gambling and drug-dealing places he’d visited or the criminal element he’d been around.

“That’s it?” DiMizzio cracked.

“So,” Hogan added, “you’re going by the words of disgruntled co-workers, illegal wetbacks, some gossip from old men, and the convenient bullshit from an ex-con Chinatown gangbanger trying to save his own ass?”

“Yeah, if that’s how you want to put it,” Jack said with a mock grin.

“Mr. Gee gives you an alibi,” DiMizzio said with a frown, “but you choose to ignore that.”

“The man practically offered me a bribe,” Jack said, “a security job. Is that what he promised you for dogging me off the case?”

“You got something against rich people?” DiMizzio asked.

“You wouldn’t. That’s because you get off on catching cops, not criminals.”

“What’s with the smart mouth, Yu?” snapped Hogan.

“Just taking a page from IA,” Jack said. “It fits the tone of your question, right?”

“Yeah, well, we’ll be watching you, smart ass,” said DiMizzio.

“Look,” Hogan said, “just stay the fuck away from James Gee, got it?”

Jack bit his tongue and cursed silently as the two IA bulls turned and stomped out. He waited until their footsteps receded before following the trail back to Pell Street.

Golden City

BOSSY WATCHED FROM the backseat of the Town Car as Mon Gor loaded a case of Remy from the Golden City basement into the trunk. Bossy hadn’t told Mon Gor about the visit from the Chinese cop. What the Triad had advised him held true for Mon Gor also: the less he knew, the better. The chaai lo would drop the case soon anyway, he thought. Bossy leaned back and recollected what he knew about his longtime driver, who’d driven him to and from all the places of his overnight debauchery: whorehouses like Chao’s, Fat Lily’s, and Booty’s, where he liked his young, dark-skinned see yow gay, soy sauce pussy.

Mon Gor was rangy, almost as tall as Bossy himself. He’d arrived in Chinatown in the 1970s and, as an accommodation to the Hok Nam Moon Triad, Duck Hong hired him as a truck driver for the noodle company. He was around twenty years old then, around forty now.

All the trips to the racetracks—Aqueduct, Belmont, Roosevelt, and Yonkers.

All the bars and clubs, like Lucy Jung’s, Grampa’s, Yooks, Wisemen, Macao, China Chalet, or the Chinese Quarter. All driven to by Mon Gor.

All the hot sheets joints and happy-ending massage parlors on the outskirts of Chinatown.

His father, Duck Hong, had told Bossy that Mon Gor was once one of the top kung fu students in Hong Kong, a wing chun man. There were stories about his heroics in Chinatown bar brawls. Soon after, he became Duck Hong’s personal driver, also reluctantly driving the Gee women to facials and massages, to mah-jongg games and yum cha. Driving his son Francis wherever until he happily got his own license at the age of seventeen.

Now the women were gone, and so was his father. And Francis had his own car, the obnoxious red one.

Now it was just him and Mon Gor. Bossy and driver.

MON GOR HEADED back to the kitchen entrance for another box. Provisions for the condo Bossy’d agreed to try out, on the edge of Sunset Park. A two-week free trial run, fully furnished. The two weeks allowed him to scout the rest of waterfront Brooklyn, near the East River bridges. Extra time to consider other condominium developments, funded by Triad money behind barely legit front corporations.

He was relieved not to go back to Edgewater. And happy to be so close to Manhattan.

Mon Gor waited by the doorway for one of the da jop from the kitchen. His friends and associates had twisted his name Mak Mon Gaw into Mon Gor, a nickname, which in Cantonese sounded like “night brother.”

Because he usually worked at night, driving the denizens of the dark hours.

Nobody ever saw him in daylight, except Bossy and occasionally the family. It was like he was invisible in daylight, this barroom avenger, who was rumored to be a Triad man himself. He’d supposedly intervened in three near fights in the Hip Ching gambling basements, resulting beneficially to the Pell Street tong.

But in daylight he was invisible.

MON GOR TOOK a box from the puzzled kitchen worker and came back to the car trunk. A big box of roast duck and for yook and see yow gay. Fast food snacks would suffice until he had a chance to check out the takeout counters in Sunset Park Chinatown. Bossy straightened as Mon Gor slammed the trunk shut.

“Gau dim,” Mon Gor said in his slang Cantonese, “all done.” It was the same answer he’d given the Triad elders when asked if he’d washed the first matter, of the traitorous deliveryman. All done.

Snow flurries began falling from the slate Bronx sky.

“Gau dim,” Mon Gor repeated almost to himself as he slid behind the wheel and glanced at the rearview mirror.

“Good,” Bossy said. “Now drop me off in Brooklyn and you’re done.”

“Mo mun tay, Bossee,” Mon Gor answered. “No problem.” He fired up the engine and pulled the car away from the curb, turning for the FDR drive south.

Sunset Park and then home to Pell Street.

Mo mun tay at all.