Death Money (19 page)

The gambling basements swallowed everything.

At the rear of the floor, the gang kids who had any money left had pooled their dollars and were betting together, cussing as their collective
bao
slowly disappeared.

Jack didn’t see anyone his own height, mostly five-eight and under. Excluding the gang kids, nobody looked very suspicious, just another gathering of hard-luck stories, damaged people, and lonely lives.

He dropped ten bucks on top of one of the bet boxes drawn on the brown butcher paper covering the
sup som jeung
table. He lost that promptly, the dealer sweeping his money off the table with a grin.

He went to another table and peeled off a couple of Lincolns. He hadn’t noticed any obvious left-handers slapping down money or cards on any of the tables. Dropping a Lincoln onto one of the end boxes, he won ten bucks.
Pure luck
.

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

O
NE 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

I
T 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

T
HE 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
.