Riding the Snake (1998) (13 page)

Fu Hai waited fearfully inside his crate as the boxcar door was opened. He listened as a man counted the crates of batteries, out loud, tapping on them to make sure they sounded full. Another man came into the car, and Fu Hai heard him say that they should hurry, the celebration for the New Year had already started. Both men left, and Fu Hai guessed that because the car only contained batteries, they didn't relock it. He got out of the crate, slid the boxcar door open, and jumped down onto the gravel between the tracks. He needed to find a car that would take him to Guangzhou. He knew he couldn't walk around out in the open. His shabby dress and cloth shoes would give him away. He had no money; no way to bribe anybody if he was caught. Then he saw a car he could climb into. On the door was a slip of paper, a waybill, saying the car was destined for Guangdong Province. Close enough. The load inside was angle-iron rods, too heavy for anybody to steal, so the door was loosely chained. He pulled it as wide as it would go and slithered up into the boxcar.

At ten o'clock that night, the boxcar he was in was connected to a tug engine, pulled out of the yard, then slammed into the back of another car and hooked up. At a little past midnight, Fu Hai was again headed south, away from the fireworks that lit the Shanghai sky.

The angle-iron rods had stickers on them that said they had been forged at Shanghai's Baoshan (Treasure Mountain) Steel Mill. The metal beams would undoubtedly be used for construction and were twenty feet long. It was impossible to find a comfortable place to lie down. Fu Hai was accustomed to misery and he made the best of it, often being forced to balance on his feet for hours, rocking unsteadily on the long grooved steel angles. The train shook and creaked and lumbered on.

They moved through dimly lit stations. Fu Hai could barely read the signs through the slats. The next morning, they passed the beautiful willow-clad city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where, it was said, Mao Zedong spent his summers in splendor. Zhejiang Province was the Chinese land of fish and rice (milk and honey). While Fu Hai's father's hands had been broken for the glory of the Revolution, Mao and his concubines were quartered not half a mile from where the train was now passing, on a willow
-
fringed lake in a green-roofed villa cooled by powerful Russian
-
made air conditioners.

Mother is dear, Father is dear, but Chairman Mao is dearest of all

The next morning, the train pulled into Guangdong. Fu Hai cowered in fear as People's Armed Police (P
. A. P
.) guards moved through the yard banging on the wood doors of the cars with their trenchant sticks. "Open up, we know you're in there," they shouted at each car.

Fu Hai had no place to hide in the car full of angle irons. He huddled in the corner, trying to stay out of the sunlight that was streaming through the slits. He heard the door being opened; then someone was climbing in. Suddenly he was face to face with a man who was wearing a uniform of the People's Armed Police. As Fu Hai looked closer, he saw that the soldier wasn't much older than eighteen. The guard reached for his electric baton, and Fu Hai launched himself across the opening, diving at the young man and knocking him out of the car. The two of them rolled on the ground as the soldier began yelling in terror for his comrades. Fu Hai grabbed the electric baton away from him and jabbed the young guard in the head, neck, and privates. The baton arced blue agony from its power source. The boy whimpered and curled up into a ball, stunned but not unconscious.

"You be quiet," Fu Hai hissed at him, not wanting to sting him again, but also not wanting his own soft heart to cost him a life in prison. Then Fu Hai threw down the baton and started running. He didn't know where he was headed. He didn't have any plan of escape or even know what direction he was going. He ran blindly on the loose gravel, his chest heaving with the effort, his cheap, rubber
-
soled cloth shoes barely supporting his swollen, aching feet.

He finally found two wood buildings split by a narrow road. He ran between them and miraculously was out of the train yard, running along a small, dusty street lined with brick walls. Barbed wire was strung on top.

He saw a small smelting house made of concrete and old bricks. It was one of the "backyard steel furnaces" left over from the disastrous "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-1960. Another lunatic fantasy of Mao Zedong, who wanted to industrialize China overnight. Instead, thirty million people starved to death.

Out of breath and unable to go on, he crawled inside the smelting house. His heart was pounding. He could taste the blood in his mouth from pulling out nails with his teeth--teeth that stung as he inhaled cold air over exposed nerves. He could still feel the shape of the electric baton in his hand. He could remember Xiao Jie's whisper with the pounding heartbeat in his ears. "You must go. They will come for you," she had said as he looked at his beloved little sister who had aged to twice her years.

"Don't worry, little sister, I will get to America and I will send for you. I will get us a new life there," he had promised her.

Chapter
11.

China Boy

They were face up on steel trays, laid out like patrons at a Beverly Hills tanning salon, stripped naked but cold as marble. Next door, the decomp room in the morgue leaked unsavory odors. The three young Chinese corpses stared up vacantly as Ray Fong and Tanisha Williams examined the graphic, colorful tattoos of snakes, dragons, and Chinese symbols which adorned their young, bloodless bodies. Then Tanisha noticed a homemade tattoo on the right arm of the oldest boy. A faded "1414." It was exactly like the one that was on Angie Wong's forehead in Magic Marker.

"What the hell is this?" she said, looking at it closer. "What's it mean?"

"Fourteen K is a Tong," Ray said as he examined it.

"I know," she said. "It was formed in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek, as an anti-Japanese political organization. Later, they became a secret brotherhood called Hung Fat Shan. Ten years after that, they moved to Hong Kong and switched to heroin, gun smuggling, and extortion. It was nicknamed 14K because 14 was the street address of the Tong's headquarters in Canton. K stood for Karat, the common measure of fineness for gold." She was showing off again, trying to prove to Ray Fong that she knew her stuff and deserved to be with him, even though she suspected she was a far superior detective. She silently cursed herself for this need to impress. Why did she always have to over-perform to just be allowed in the game? She had never been taken seriously, until she had killed the two O
. G. B. S
.

They'd been Original Ghetto Bloods, off-brand G-sters from Hawaiian Gardens, which was known among gang-bangers as the Jungle because the developers had over-planted the crummy boxlike ghetto apartments with ferns to disguise the tasteless architecture. She'd only been sixteen when she'd done the two Bloods. It was just two months after Kenetta was killed. She'd been buying groceries for her mother at the 7-Eleven. Without warning, the two smoked-out, chained, and federated ghetto stars rolled on the market. Both decked out in gold jewelry and the Bloods' "federated color" red. They were waving banana-clipped AKs and Trey
-
five-sevens, and immediately started splashing on everything, first killing the cashier, then two other shoppers. One hapless victim was Miss Bradley, her third-grade gym teacher. When they were through hosing down the market, they saw Tanisha. They pulled her into the back room and started ripping at her clothes.

"C'mon, sweet meat," one hissed at her, "we gonna do some bone dancin'." They were both tugging at their zippers and not paying close enough attention to her.

Anger over Kenetta's death fueled her attack.

She got the nearer one with a shiv she'd been packing since fourth grade. She shoved it into his stomach, right through his leather jacket, and he fell to his knees. His road dog stopped fumbling with his pants and grabbed for her as the first G-ster yelled for help. She slashed the road dog, opening his throat up ear to ear, cutting his jugular. Then, as the first Blood grabbed for her again, she slashed him the same way. Both G-sters fell right there in the back room of the market and were bled out and ash-gray when the police arrived ten minutes later. Tanisha was long gone. She had run through the carnage, out of the 7-Eleven into the night. She had been seen in the market and was later picked up and questioned, but no arrest was ever made.

To this day, she had nightmares about it. She could feel the narrow blade in her hand, feel the soft rending of flesh as she ended the count for the two dope-sprung dust-bunnies who had actually tried to rape her in the middle of a robbery where they had already killed three people. She hated the memory, but in her neighborhood, she had finally been made by that horrible act of violence. Monster C. said she had "come from the shoulder on the Blood stripers." The ultimate compliment. Li'l Evil said that she'd "ring around the collared" the "off-brand" motherfuckers.

From that day, she'd been "Rings." It was seventeen years ago and she was still uneasy every time she thought of it.

As Tanisha looked down at the three dead Bamboo Dragons, she wondered how Wheeler Cassidy felt about the two he'd dropped. She wondered if he felt devalued; wondered if it would stay with him the rest of his life as it had with her.

"I don't think 1414 stands for the 14K Triad. I never heard of that before," Ray Fong said, changing his mind and interrupting her thoughts.

"Well, we've gotta find out what it means," she said. "It meant enough to him so he carved it into his arm with a knife, and if these are the guys who killed Angie Wong, they put it on her forehead. I'll get it up to Symbols and Hieroglyphics."

There was one other tattoo that looked promising in terms of getting an identification. On the right biceps of one of the Bamboo Dragons was the name "China Boy."

When they got back to the Asian Crimes Task Force, Captain Rick Verba was waiting for them.

"What the fuck's going on with you?" he said, looking at Ray but not Tanisha.

"Whatta you mean?" Ray asked.

Then Verba motioned for them to follow him. They moved through the squad room, past the questioning looks of the on-duty Asian detectives. The Captain's office was at the end of the room. They entered and Rick Verba closed the door. There was a glass window that looked out at the squad room. Verba pulled a curtain, shutting his office from view.

"What's going on, Skipper?" Ray asked.

"You fucking amaze me. I get a complaint from some Beverly Hills grande dame named Katherine Cassidy who says you two are out at Cedars together, kicking dirt on the memory of her dead son, Prescott. Making it worse, the complaint is personally delivered by Deputy Chief Matson. Then I find out it's her other son, Wheeler Cassidy, who shot the three home invaders, and he's the same guy who found Angie Wong's body yesterday. These two cases are somehow connected. You two didn't put up a flag. You outta your minds?"

"We didn't want Major Crimes to jump it. We've got a much better chance of clearing it. It's an Asian situation," Ray said, but he was back on his heels again. "Deputy Chief Matson?" he added in awe. "I never heard of a Deputy Chief delivering a field complaint."

"Wait outside, will you?" Verba asked Fong. "Don't drift. I'll need you back in here in a minute."

Ray left the office while Captain Verba glared at Tanisha. He was a middle-aged, heavyset man with gray eyes and a bad case of pattern baldness. The Ab-Roller he got for Christmas wasn't helping. His stomach was mushrooming over his belt. Still, he was not a guy Tanisha wanted to screw around with, especially since Internal Affairs was all over her anyway. It was noteworthy that the two of them were the only non-Asians in Asian Crimes.

"I'm putting you on a desk, Tisha. I gotta take you outta the field."

"Why? Because we hooked up on these two cases? We thought if we put 'em together, we'd--"

"I know what you thought," he interrupted, "and you're right. I probably won't give it to the Major Crimes Cap Unit at Parker Center either ... but you've got Internal Affairs scoping you, Detective. They don't want you in the field. If you were smart, you'd cool off. Instead, you're scrambling after corpses. I got a call this morning. I
. A
.'s getting set to file on you. I think you need to go talk to your Police Association rep, get some legal advice."

"Captain, this is all bullshit."

"The I
. A
. dicks say you hang out in the hood on weekends. That you go to your grandmother's, which is a known drug house, and you also go to some other house south of Crenshaw every damn Saturday."

It was true. Her nephew had started dealing, but Tanisha had run him off. She also had a standing appointment at Zadell's every Saturday. Zadell's was a two-chair unlicensed beauty parlor in the back of Zadell Falk's garage south of Manchester. It would do her no good to try and explain to Captain Verba that African
-
American women can't get their hair done by White hairdressers. Working on Black hair was an artform. Most of the African
-
American women she knew, from prosecutors to judges, had Black hairdressers. Some still went to hot-comb parlors in the ghetto to get their trims. Before she was a cop, she would wait with the hoochie mamas, who sat on metal chairs in open-toed shoes and talked about babies they'd had with three or four different neighborhood rock stars. Rock stars, south of Manchester, weren't singers--they were boned-out, jive-ass turf-ballers who dealt smack or rock and looked at you with dusty eyes. Tanisha had slowly become a cultural alien in her own neighborhood. It had started when she wouldn't join the Crips, and talked about her middle-class dreams. She made no sense to her friends. They said she was uppity and full of herself. Then after Kenetta died and she started getting A's in school she became more of an outcast. Joining the LAPD was the final defection. She had emigrated to Baldwin Park, but she had a standing weekly appointment at Zadell's. She didn't know why she kept going there. Pride, she guessed. She wasn't about to be run off. Conversation between the hoochies kicking there always stopped abruptly while Tanisha was in the chair, her head drenched with hair relaxer to loosen her Afro curls. The hoochies put out a kill-vibe as they painted their nails or looked at their feet until she was gone. Tisha was "the Man," the "PO-lice." She'd been coming to Zadell's since she was sixteen, but now she felt uncomfortable and couldn't get out fast enough.