Текст книги "The Survivor"
Автор книги: Sean Slater
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 29 страниц)
Eighty-Three
The memories of being Child 157 settled in Shen Sun’s brain like cold fall mists in the Danum Valley. They left him fragmented and drained. As they always did. Amidst the fading recollections, a light clicked on and stole him from the stupor. He focused left. There, in the first ground-window of a nearby house, an old white woman was having tea.
For a moment, Shen Sun almost ignored her. He was tired and felt weak – as thin as rice paper. But something in her living room caught his eye. The television screen. The news was on, with a blonde woman reviewing the high-school massacre. Behind her pale face flashed the image of the gwailo.
Detective Jacob Striker, the headline read. Hero cop.
The image twisted Shen Sun’s guts. He turned his whole body away, and the bundle of papers Sheung Fa had given him fell from his pocket.
Information on Detective Jacob Striker.
Shen Sun picked the paperwork up, stared at it with bad thoughts. As he flipped through the pages, the last one – the photocopy of Jacob Striker’s picture – unexpectedly broke into two, and Shen Sun realised there were actually two pictures stuck together. He separated them and studied the photograph he had not seen.
The image was that of a young girl. About sixteen, with long, curly, reddish-brown hair, milky skin and light freckles. Her eyes were a soft, sad blue.
The image filled him with excitement and renewed vigour. And he laughed out loud, silently praising Sheung Fa for protecting him still. It all made sense to him now. He had found The Way.
He would kill the Man with the Bamboo Spine, saving Father. And then he would repay Detective Striker for all that the man had stolen from him – Sheung Fa, Tran, his future with the Triads, his entire life. Shen Sun stared at the picture of the young girl and felt everything fall into place.
A daughter for a brother. It was more than fitting.
It was karma.
Eighty-Four
Striker watched Felicia drive away, south towards Hastings Street. When the roar of the Crown Vic faded, the sound of the wind became more prominent, howling between the burned framing of the house.
Striker spotted the old woman peering out between the drapes again. She pretended not to see him, then slowly backed away from the window. This time, Striker knew he had something. He used his cell to call Info, queried the address, and discovered there were numerous calls to her residence – all of them labelled as EDP.
An Emotionally Disturbed Person.
Commonplace for this area.
He headed up the block. By the time he had crossed the street and made it to her lot, the curtains were pulled shut and the interior and exterior lights were turned off. From here, the house looked empty, abandoned. And it gave him the creeps.
He took the stairs two at a time until he came flush with an old screen door. It let loose a creaky protest as he swung it open and knocked three times. He’d barely finished the knock when the door opened and a tiny old woman stood in the doorway.
She was an even five foot and about one hundred pounds. Her rail-thin body had a look that suggested she was either on the way out of this world, or suffering from crack addiction, and her face was deeply lined with wrinkles. The three coats of make-up that plastered her skin were thick and oily.
‘Hello,’ Striker said.
‘Hello, Officer,’ she replied, her voice smoker-rough. ‘I’m Phyllis. I’ve been expecting you.’
Five minutes later, Striker stood inside a crowded living room that stank of decade-old cigarette smoke and mustiness. The walls were now smoker’s-teeth yellow, and everywhere he looked, ashtrays full of cigarette butts covered the tables.
He tried to ignore them and looked around the room. Old newspapers were piled up high in every corner, as were mountains of rocks and artistic stacks of Diet Pepsi cans. The sofas were brown, sat in an L-formation, and were covered in a clear plastic so old it was cracked and discoloured. When Phyllis offered him a seat, Striker politely declined and remained standing. He moved left, nearer the window, and knocked over another stack of Diet Pepsi cans.
He looked up at Phyllis, forced an embarrassed smile. ‘I’m sorry.’
Phyllis picked up the cans, restacked them. ‘Diet Pepsi, kid. Nectar of the fucking gods.’
‘Not a Coke fan?’
She humphed. ‘Coke? That stuff is shit. Know why? It’s not the original – all they did was steal the Diet Pepsi formula, ’cause they knew it was better than the poison they were selling. They stole it and they renamed it Coke Zero. Read that in one of those supermarket papers.’
Striker nodded. ‘There sure is a lot of information out there nowadays, isn’t there?’
Phyllis lit up a smoke, inhaled deeply. ‘Coke fuckin’ Zero. Pfft! Know why they call it Coke Zero? ’Cause only a zero would drink it!’
‘Hey, I hate the shit.’
Phyllis gave him a queer look, as if trying to either believe or disbelieve his words. Finally, she shrugged like she didn’t care one way or the other and brushed her skin-and-bones fingers through her long, yellow-grey hair.
‘So I know why you’re here, Sugar. Came ’bout that fire, I betcha.’
Striker’s interest piqued. ‘Bang on, Phyllis. You see it?’
‘Damn right I saw it. Big production. All them firemen runnin’ round with their big hoses and their big red machine. Smoke was so bad it turned the entire neighbourhood into a black cloud. Stunk up the place worse than the chicken choppers down the street. Then the cops came and they tried to make me leave, but I wouldn’t go. Said I was the last house on this block, I did, and I’d be keeping it that way till the day I die.’
‘Well, hopefully that won’t be any time soon.’
She took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘Soon enough, Chuckles. Know how old I am? Ninety-two. Ninety-two goddam years old, and I been smoking Camels for seventy years and using aspartame for forty. Been drinking Diet Pepsi! Tell that to those organic-loving granolas!’
‘Drinking Diet Pepsi, not that Coke Zero shit.’
She nodded. ‘Fuckin’ Coke Zero. Always trying to make it look like their recipe is such a big secret when all it is is fuckin’ caramel and water! Everyone knows that. Except in the old days when they tried to hook everyone with the cocaine they put in it.’ She snorted once, dropped her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray, then took out a bright pink plastic tube. ‘Damn cigarettes always wipe off my lipstick.’ She put on another smear, lit up another cigarette, then took a long drag.
Striker looked at the ashtray full of pink goo and cigarette butts, and shuddered. ‘So about the fire . . . can you tell me if there was anything unusual about it?’
‘Everything down here’s unusual. Makes the unusual look usual, know what I mean?’
‘Sadly, yes I do. Did you know your neighbours before the fire?’
‘Neighbours? Ha! If you can call them that. Never saw them, not once. They always came in the back lane. I heard them though. Always coming in with those big delivery trucks. Sometimes twice a day.’
‘Twice a day?’ Striker tried to sound casual. ‘You ever see what they dropped off?’
‘Who knows? Shoulda been fire extinguishers. Ha!’
Striker grinned. ‘For sure. Not that it would’ve done a whole lot of good. That was a pretty bad fire.’
‘The second one was.’
Striker gave her a hard look. ‘Second one?’
‘Yeah. The second fire. There were two, you know. First one happened earlier in the night – five, maybe six hours earlier – just a little bit of smoke coming out the window, the front one there. But they got it under control. Police came anyway, and the next thing you know, people are being taken out and the entire place is roped off.’
‘Roped off?’
‘Yeah, yellow tape everywhere.’
‘Crime scene.’
‘Sure, whatever. The whole place shuts down, and you think the show is over. But naaaw-aaahh. Suddenly, the cops’re back, hauling shit outta there. Then there’s another fire – the real one this time – and the whole place goes up. Fuckin’ whooosh!’ Phyllis let out a loud phlegmy cough, took another drag on her smoke, then reached for more lipstick. After smearing it on, she continued, ‘All I know is, someone musta fucked something up real bad, because soon after that, we got the City out here and the entire place is condemned.’
Striker let her finish talking, and he was glad when she reached for another cigarette. The momentary silence gave him a chance to think things over. So he had been right. There had been two fires, hence the two calls. But the two calls had been written up under one file number, then linked. Interesting, but just that. It still left too many unanswered questions. He looked out the window at the blackened shell just down the road.
‘You ever wonder what they were bringing out of there, Phyllis?’
‘You mean, the people that used to live there before the fire? Or the cops after the fire?’
Striker frowned. ‘Both.’
‘No, and I don’t rightfully care.’ She downed her Diet Pepsi, pulled another one from the mini-fridge beside her chair, then cracked open the tab. ‘But one guy did.’
Striker blinked. ‘One guy?’
‘Yeah. The one guy who kept coming round here. Chinaman. Hard face. Real thin.’
‘When did he first come around?’
‘Oh . . . right after the first fire. And he waited for a long time, just over there.’ She pointed her knobby finger out the window, to a small patch of bushes that ran between two auto-body shops. ‘Stood there in the shadows for hours, just watching everything.’
Striker thought this over. ‘So to clarify, he got there after the first fire had started, and watched it burn?’
‘Yes. Well, it was already going when I saw him.’
Striker nodded. ‘And he stayed long afterwards, till after the second fire?’
‘Yeah. In fact, he stayed there till after the place had burned down. Just watching. Always watching.’
Striker absently rubbed the skin of his left hand, where the acid had splashed him. The skin around his fingers was raw, swollen. ‘You ever tell the cops about this guy?’
‘Nope.’
‘Why not?’
‘No one asked.’
Striker let this go without comment. ‘And then what? He just leave?’
‘Yup.’
‘You ever see him again?’
‘Sure. He come right back the next day. Musta spent, oh, two, three hours in the house there, just lookin’ at things.’
‘Things?’
‘Yeah, you know, in the house. Lookin’ at the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Seemed like he was lookin’ for something real specific, trying to figure things out. Like a Chinese fuckin’ Matlock.’ She sipped her Diet Pepsi and shook her head. ‘I dunno, I’m just an old woman, what do I know?’
Striker felt a twitter in his chest. Nervousness. Excitement. Hard to define. He took out his BlackBerry and brought up the images of Tran Sang Soone and Shen Sun Soone he’d downloaded from Ibarra back at the Strike Force HQ. When the images were completed, he held the phone up for Phyllis to see the screen.
‘Look familiar?’
She put on her glasses, pointed at the second image – the one of Shen Sun Soone. ‘Yep, that’s him.’
Striker put the BlackBerry away. ‘Thanks, Phyllis, really, you’ve been a great help.’ He headed for the door, stopped, handed her a business card. ‘You mind if I come back if I have any more questions?’
‘Come anytime, darlin’.’
Striker gave her the thumbs-up. ‘Fuck Coke,’ he said.
‘Amen to that, Chuckles.’
He left Phyllis alone in the room with her pink lipstick and Diet Pepsi, and closed the door behind him.
Eighty-Five
The muscles of Shen Sun’s legs were cramping when he spotted the first sign of movement. It was subtle, almost indiscernible.
But he did see it.
A man, clad in black clothing, combat vest and long gun, changed his position from the parking lot near the boarded-up warehouse to the bushes down by the train tracks. The darkness was heavier now, and Shen Sun wondered if the man thought he was concealed.
Shen Sun watched him hightail it across the road, with surprising stealth for someone so large. Soon, a second man followed, much smaller. The two paired off on either side of the bushes.
Police, he knew. Emergency Response Team. Which meant there were at least eight more here somewhere in the darkness.
Shen Sun felt nothing at the sighting. No fear, no anger. It was expected. Just one more of the reasons why he could not go home.
Inside Father’s apartment, nothing had changed. The interior remained quiet and still and shrouded by dimness. Only one lamp was on. In the living room.
Everything appeared ordinary.
And then there was movement inside. It was fast – just a blur in front of the lamp – and then gone.
Shen Sun twitched. He leaned forward, extending beyond the bushes. The only door to Father’s town home was at the front on Raymur Street. If someone was inside, they had been in there for forty minutes.
The thought was unnerving. Shen Sun watched the window, waiting for another sighting. When the image came, he flinched. A man lumbered across the room, his walk rigid and uneven, as if all the joints of his long legs were fused.
The Man with the Bamboo Spine had beaten him here.
The assassin walked into the living room. Stopped at the kitchen sink. Turned on the water. Washed his arms and face.
Shen Sun felt the last traces of his world slip away. He could not see it – he did not have to see it – but he knew what the Man with the Bamboo Spine was doing. He was washing away the blood.
Father was dead.
Shen Sun closed off any emotions he might have felt, and watched the town home – not as a son, but as a soldier, for it was all he could do now.
The Man with the Bamboo Spine finished wiping himself off on Father’s quilt, then threw it in the corner. He walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside.
Shen Sun gripped the Glock with care. This was a hundred meter shot. Extremely difficult with a pistol. Even more so with only one good hand. He brought up his left hand and tried a two-handed grip on the Glock, but the pain of his shoulder was too much to bear. His left arm fell away.
‘POLICE! Don’t move!’ someone cried out.
Shen Sun looked down below and spotted the two Emergency Response Team members leaving concealment. Both had machine guns out – MP5s, by the look of it – and were fast crossing the train tracks.
The Man with the Bamboo Spine was quick, so quick he astonished Shen Sun. In one fluid motion, he turned away from the police as if he had not heard them, and drew his pistol. He left it hanging by his side, partly hidden by the long tails of his trench coat.
One of the cops gave the order: ‘Put your hands in the air where I can see them!’
The Man with the Bamboo Spine did nothing at first; he only stood still and assessed the two men who had him lined up in their sights. The calm he displayed was amazing. And Shen Sun realised the assassin was lulling the cops in.
Preparing to shoot it out.
But then more cops appeared; they exploded from the shadows, every bit as deftly as the spirits that plagued Shen Sun’s life. They came in pairs, long guns out, a semi-circle of warriors. And in the blink of an eye there were twelve.
Big Circle Boy or not, the Man with the Bamboo Spine was hopelessly outgunned.
Shen Sun saw the expression on the assassin’s face turn from hard preparation to logical surrender. He was going to give up. Turn himself in.
And Shen Sun would not allow it.
He raised his Glock. Lined up the assassin. Opened fire.
The silencer was long burned out, but still managed to stifle the first two shots, allowing only a soft thunder to emit from the barrel. But the third and fourth shots were full bore. They sounded every bit their 40 calibre, and the entire valley below the overpass resonated with gunfire.
‘Gun! Gun! GUN!’ one of the cops screamed.
Shen Sun fired again. That first shot went high and wide, the second and third ones went too low, slamming into the earth at the assassin’s feet. The Man with the Bamboo Spine reacted the only way he could. He raised his own gun.
And an eruption of gunfire filled the night.
It was over in seconds. The police carbines and MP5s shredded the Man with the Bamboo Spine, waking the neighbourhood and filling the night with brilliant flashes. The assassin jerked, spun left, and fell backward.
Shen Sun could not tell where the assassin had been hit, or how many times, but he was dead. Over ten cops had been shooting, and with high-powered assault rifles. No one could survive that.
Not even the Man with the Bamboo Spine.
Eighty-Six
Striker was standing in the centre of the burned-out framework of the house when Felicia finally returned. He checked his watch. It was seven now, and it felt even later. The sun was lost to them, and the coal-coloured clouds, which blocked the incoming stars and moon, killed any natural light that was left.
The wheels of the cruiser crunched loudly as they slid on the gravelly road and came to a stop. Felicia climbed out, leaving the engine running and the headlights on. In the aura of the beams, her face looked like a compilation of satisfaction and exhaustion. The shirt she wore was looser now, partly untucked on the left side of her hip, giving her an almost slutty look. It stirred something in Striker he hadn’t had the time or energy to feel in days, and despite the weariness he suffered from and the shit they were dealing with, he couldn’t help but notice – she looked sexy.
‘You get the report?’ he asked.
She held up the electric company’s folder, a dark manila one with BC Hydro written across the top. ‘Take a gander.’
Striker took it from her and glanced at the tab, where only the date was written and a BC Hydro case number. ‘Have you read it yet?’
‘I’ve perused it.’
‘And?’
‘Well, you were right about this place being a grow-op. In this report there’s a list of all the supplies found: soil and seeds, lamps and fans, ozonators and filters – you name it.’
The confirmation gave Striker more confidence. He opened the folder, but it was too dark outside to read. He pulled out his flashlight, turned it on, and scanned the light across the pages.
The report was detailed, listing where the power had been bypassed and where the fire was believed to have started. The source was exactly as Striker had suspected – some kind of electrical problem in the fuse box, most likely caused by the increased power consumption of the lamps.
‘There’s our file number for the Arson,’ he said to Felicia, pointing to the top of the page, ‘and here’s one that isn’t linked in our system. Run this incident number, and I bet you find the grow-op report.’
Felicia returned to the car, then came back with the laptop and they went inside the burned-out house. Striker took the laptop from her and set it down on a small portion of kitchen counter that had not been completely burned away. On the counter, next to the laptop, he opened up the Fire Department’s folder, and next to that, the BC Hydro file.
He pointed to the CAD call on the computer screen. ‘So this is the first call Dispatch gets of someone yelling and smoke coming out the window. It comes in anonymous as a Suspicious Circumstance and turns out to be a fire from a grow-op.’ Striker ran his finger down the page. ‘Police attend and call in Grow-busters.’
‘And then they call for the City and the electric company.’
‘Right. But only after the fire is dealt with.’
Felicia nodded. ‘And then six hours later, we have the big fire – the arson. A coincidence?’
He gave her a sideways look. ‘There are no coincidences. And here’s the real connection – look at the name of the engineer who attended for the electric company.’ He turned the page and pointed to the author’s name. ‘Stanley Chow.’
‘Tina’s father?’ Felicia asked.
‘None other.’ Striker picked up the Fire Department’s report, then jabbed at the author’s name. ‘And look who wrote this one.’
Felicia read the last line. ‘Archibald MacMillan – Conrad’s father.’
‘And who was here for our file number?’
‘Patricia Kwan,’ Felicia said. She scanned through the Fire Department’s report, frowned. ‘That still leaves one name missing – O’Riley. I’ve run Chantelle through the system ten times. No one in her family shows up for anything.’
Striker smiled. ‘Look at the Fire Department’s report. See the structural engineer who attended for the City.’
Felicia skimmed down the page, found the name. ‘Pevorski. Polish person.’
‘Stefana Pevorski,’ Striker said. ‘Now run her in PRIME.’
Felicia did. When the name returned, she made a surprised sound. ‘It’s a perfect hit,’ she said, meaning all the details matched.
‘That’s because Pevorski is Stefana’s maiden name. She’s been married twice and she’s never corrected it on the work system. Her current married name is O’Riley.’
Felicia looked up from the report, an excited look covering her face. ‘They’re all there then. We got Kwan—’
‘Vancouver Police.’
‘And Chow—’
‘Structural Engineer for the City.’
‘And O’Riley—’
‘Electrical Engineer for Hydro.’
‘And MacMillan.’
Striker tapped on the Fire Department’s folder. ‘Our HAZMAT guy for grow-ops.’
Felicia looked up from the file folders and smiled. ‘That’s a parent for every kid targeted. All four names. Connected.’
‘Plus it explains why Doris Chow and Margaret MacMillan would never have made the link – they probably never even knew.’ Striker bit his lip. ‘We’ve been looking at this the wrong way ever since this nightmare began. The kids aren’t the problem here, Feleesh, they never were. They’re simply pawns in it all.’
Felicia shook her head absently. ‘But why? For a friggin’ grow-op? That doesn’t make sense. We close down pot palaces all the time, so what was different here? What could these people have done that would warrant such a horrific response from any gang?’
Striker led her into the other room, where a large part of the wall was still intact. He pointed at the grey insulation lining all the walls.
‘This is it here, the key to all this.’
‘The stasis-foam?’
‘You bet. The report says it’s more than just a fire-retardant, it’s impossible to X-ray through. And drug dogs can’t detect smells through it. These pockets in the insulation aren’t areas that the fire burned away – look at the ridges, they’re completely uniform.’
‘Then what are they?
‘They’re prebuilt vaults. For cash. We’re standing in the middle of a huge underworld bank, Feleesh. Even this one room alone could hold millions – and we have no idea how many other vaults were burned away in the other rooms. For all we know, the whole house could’ve been built this way. The money stolen could be in the tens of millions.’
‘But why would a gang use a grow-op for a bank when there’s such a high risk of fire?’
‘That’s the key – there’s not. The stasis foam should have prevented that, but this place wasn’t designed for being doused with white gas.’
Felicia ran her finger down the supple edges of the stasis-foam. ‘So you’re saying that Kwan and Chow and MacMillan and O’Riley are . . .’
‘Thieves. Nothing more.’
Felicia thought it through silently, while Striker went on: ‘They found the grow-op, did their due diligence, and later, after the drug teams left and everything was evacuated, they somehow discovered this.’ He pointed to the series of vaults in the walls. ‘A payday beyond what any of them could fathom. More money than they could ever have dreamed about, even collectively. So they took it – maybe as much as thirty million dollars – and then used accelerants to set the house on fire. They thought the place would burn to the ground and cover up their trail. Then they’d lay low for a few years before taking off somewhere else. They thought the gang and the police would never know better.’
‘But they hadn’t counted on the stasis-foam,’ Felicia said. ‘It slowed down the fire and gave the next Fire crew enough time to put out the blaze.’
‘Exactly. And they hadn’t counted on Shen Sun watching from the shadows. My witness, Phyllis, saw him there. Monitoring what they were doing. He knew something was up. Later, he did a thorough investigation of the house, figured out their plan and reported it to his bosses.’
‘The Shadow Dragons?’
Striker shook his head. ‘First off, don’t confuse the gangs. The Shadow Dragons are nothing but a feeder gang for the real baddies – the Triads. More specifically, the 14K Triads – the strongest faction of the worldwide gang. They’re the one every East Asian criminal wants to be a part of. They have all the power, all the history, all the respect. In Canada, their main liaison officer is Sheung Fa, who acts as kind of a bridge between the Shadow Dragons of Vancouver and his boss in Macau – the guy everyone calls Shan Chu. The Dragon Head.’
Felicia made a lost sound. ‘My head is spinning. When did you work all this out?’
‘When I finished talking to Phyllis and was waiting for you. It came together slowly, when I realised what the stasis-foam was being used for – and when Phyllis told me about the Asian guy watching the police from the bushes. That was Shen Sun Soone. So when Pevorski’s married name came up as O’Riley, all the connections were there. Kwan, Chow, MacMillan and O’Riley were stealing from the Triads, and Shen Sun Soon and his Shadow Dragons were sent to deal with it.’
‘So this was all just one big payback? Nothing more?’
‘Oh, it was payback,’ Striker said grimly, ‘but that and a whole lot more. This is the Triads we’re talking about. The 14K. Follow them back throughout their history and they have one main rule: disrespect the gang in any way and you will lose what is most precious to you.’
‘Your children?’
‘Your firstborn,’ Striker said. ‘It was a message being sent – to those who were guilty, and to the rest of the criminal underworld: steal from us – disrespect us – and this is what it will cost you.’ He let out a sour laugh. ‘Jesus, we thought Kwan was delirious back at the hospital, yammering on and on about the house being on fire, and dragons rising up all around her.’
‘She was telling us exactly what we needed to know.’
‘It also makes sense why some of the parents weren’t too willing to meet us. They were afraid. Of us and the gangs. Some of them still have other children to lose.’
Felicia looked ready to say more, but Striker’s cell went off. He snatched it from his belt and stuck it to his ear. ‘Detective Striker, Homicide.’
‘Shipwreck, it’s me.’
‘Meathead?’
‘Yeah. We’re at Shen Sun’s father’s place, down here on Raymur.’
‘And?’
‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘We got the fucker. He’s dead.’
