Riding the Snake (1998) (40 page)

The SWAT raid started at quarter to eleven. Al Katsukura, carrying a pizza box, knocked on the door of the Chin Lo headquarters. The door was opened by a Chinese youth dressed in black, who looked at the pizza in confusion. Without warning, Team One rushed into the headquarters, knocking the youth down, then cuffing him to an old iron heater. "Police! Everybody on the floor!" the squad leader shrieked at half-a-dozen startled Bamboo Dragons. Several Chinese youths pulled handguns and started firing.

Willy heard gunshots and yelling. He came out of the room where he'd been going over an operation plan with the White Fan. Gunfire now erupted everywhere around him in the small wooden building. Bamboo Dragons, screaming in anger and for courage, had grabbed up Russian automatic weapons and were now shooting at the SWAT team. Willie was quickly surrounded by four Bamboo Dragons, all of them armed and firing wildly at anything that moved. They pumped out copper-jacketed lead as they tried to hustle him out the back door of Triad headquarters.

The front hallway was suddenly full of SWAT. The young gangsters who were escorting Willy sprayed more copper-jackets at the swarming police, hitting two officers in the face, blowing them back in a blood mist, killing them instantly.

The back door of the Chin Lo headquarters was thrown open and Willy and his escorts ran down the steps. Unit Two was shoulder-ready. They opened up with automatic weapons. The deadly muzzles of the second SWAT team sprayed 9mm death. Bamboo dragons with no fear for their own lives shielded the most powerful Hong Kong Shan Chu with their bodies. They scrambled back into the house under a rain of gunfire, stumbling as bullets tore into them. All but one was killed before Willy, miraculously still unhurt, was back inside the building with no place to escape.

Two SWAT officers, their guns in firing position, sprang around the corner into the hall where Willy was standing.

"Freeze, motherfucker!" one shouted.

"On your face, asshole!" The other screamed.

Willy had risked his life countless times in his rise to power, but he was always one to quickly and carefully calculate his chances of survival. Not anxious to join his Cloud ancestors, the Smart Monkey put his hands in the air and waited as the SWAT members quickly surrounded and cuffed him.

It had happened so quickly and brutally that Wheeler and Tanisha had not been ready for it. The entire adventure, along with their trip to Hong Kong, had been a quest for validation, and now after all the death and destruction, Willy Wo Lap was in custody. It was almost impossible to grasp. They looked at each other outside the mobile command center, unable to put their feelings into words.

An hour later, Willy Wo Lap Ling was in Parker Center, which he knew was the main police building in Los Angeles. He was in a windowless holding cell. Nobody had spoken to him since he had been delivered there in handcuffs almost forty minutes before. Willy had a good understanding of American law. He knew that he was allowed one phone call and had the right to an attorney. He knew that he had not yet been charged, as his Miranda rights had not been read to him. He would demand his phone call as soon as possible. But Willy didn't need a lawyer. He knew that two SWAT members had been killed in the foolish shootout at the Chin Lo headquarters. He assumed that he was going to be eventually charged as an accessory to second degree murder. Worse still, he had failed in his mission in the United States. He had not retrieved the precious document, and he was now a terrible threat to Beijing. He could only expect the worst from Chen Boda.

There was only one person who could save him.

Chapter
36.

Reflections

The reflections streaked across the windshield from the overhead freeway lights. Wheeler pushed the Jag up past sixty-five. His jaw was locked, but his thoughts were whirling. Next to him, sharing similar but separate feelings, was Tanisha. She had her eyes pinned on the road ahead.

Somehow they had drifted into a new zone. They were now physically aware of one another in a way much different from before. Wheeler remembered the moment in the Pen Hotel when he had lain next to her on the bed and looked into her eyes, wondering if he could ever match her courage or deserve her respect. They had both known it was better not to pursue a physical relationship, and they had abruptly swerved back to structure. Now, their thoughts were exploring a new list of "maybes."

"You've gotta watch for Manchester, it comes up fast. You've gotta get over to the right," she said.

He changed lanes, and quiet again filled the car. Wheeler was reviewing, with shame, old White boy fantasies. He remembered tales told by fraternity brothers, their minds dulled by all-nigh
t k
eggers. Doug Pooley had said Black pussy was ten degrees hotter than White pussy. "No shit," Doug had insisted, to the room full of half-drunk Sigma Chis. "You put your hand down there and I swear you can feel it. Black pussy radiates heat." They laughed, hooted him down, but wondered if it was true. For them, interracial sex was raw sex. It was sex without commitment, tenderness, or love. Pooley called it the ultimate jungle-fuck. Wheeler knew this was racist horseshit, but it wasn't something any of them challenged outwardly, only inwardly. He knew it was damaging because it reinforced racial barriers by creating mythic differences. Tanisha had once told him, "The first thing Whites always see is color. African-Americans are Black before they're people." That difference fed the imagination and spawned the frat-house sexual fantasies. Tanisha had also said, "Color is the most basic thing defining them, and Whites either feel superior or guilty. Very few buy into the concept of racial equality."

Wheeler remembered once fifteen years ago going to a performance of The Wiz, a Black musical, which was good, but not spectacular. He had gone with some buddies from U
. S. C
. and was sitting next to a Black friend, a drama student, named Clarence Simmons. When the curtain came down the entire audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion sprang to its feet in a standing ovation. He looked down at Clarence, who had not risen. "What are you doing down there?" Wheeler asked.

"The show is good, but come on, man, it's not great. This standing ovation is horseshit. White guilt," Clarence had correctly pointed out.

Wheeler thought he was immune to racial hypocrisy, but now wondered if he could trust his emotions. Were his feelings for Tanisha real, or was this just White guilt, another standing ovation?

If he made love with Tanisha, he wanted it to be much more than sex. He wanted it to be the consummate coming together of souls, not bodies. He questioned whether the pool of his emotions wlas deep enough to accommodate her.

Amidst these uplifting worthwhile thoughts, the jungle-fuck still haunted him.

Tanisha sat watching the traffic, but not seeing it. She vaguely saw them turn off onto Manchester and head across Baldwin Park toward her grandmother's house, where they were hiding. How could it be that she was falling in love with the great-grandson of a Confederate general?

Her life growing up had failed all the traditional social tests for normalcy, but in her neighborhood it had been the norm. Her early gang life had been centered around the concept of loyalty. Loyalty to a drug culture, and friends who shattered rules with violence. She had lived a nickel-slick existence that ended with the death of the two off-brand gangsters in the back of a 7-Eleven, and finally with Kenetta's murder. From that freewheeling, gang
-
banging life, she had rebounded in the exact opposite direction. No time for anything but the books.

Since birth, White people had been the enemy. They were the big white wall holding her back.

Wheeler was everything she had been taught to despise. The stereotype for honky hatred: a country club cocksman; a privileged drunk who lived off family money, with absolutely no direction in life unless he was following his own tee shots.

But it was Wheeler who had struggled to get mortally wounded Julian Winslow up on his shoulder. With tracers zipping the air all around them, only Wheeler went back for the wounded detective.

It was Wheeler who, back in the Walled City, treated her with more honesty and respect than any other man she had ever known.

To him, she wasn't homeboy property; and she wasn't a racial trophy, a hip way of flipping off his country club friends. She was a valuable, cherished entity. She could see it in his eyes. She had never been respected like that before, not by her homies or her teachers, not by the LAPD or even her family. She could see and feel his respect, tangible and sweet as a lover's touch.

But she worried about her responsibility to herself as a Black woman. She had pledged her life to a goal after Kenetta's death. To do any good for her people, she needed their respect. The hoochie mamas at Zadell's would write her off. They'd say, "She was jus' climbin' White rope."

But she knew that she was in love with Wheeler. She didn't know if it was a lasting love, but for now at least, it was an important one. She wanted to feel him and touch him. She wanted to feel his tenderness around her and his hardness inside her. She was shamelessly ready for him. All he had to do was make the first move, and she could sense it was coming.

A half-hour later they were sitting in the living room in the empty house on Bronson Street. Nadine wasn't upstairs. She had somehow left, which Tanisha thought strange, because her grandmother had such difficulty moving. Somebody must have helped her downstairs. Breezy was also gone, and the lights were off in the front room. They stood in the quiet house. Suddenly, they were in a new emotional arena.

Wheeler took her hand and pulled her down onto the sofa. He gently brushed his lips against hers. They kissed for a moment, first tentatively, then with deep, unrestrained passion. His hand was on the side of her face, touching her softly.

"I ... I ... I don't . . ." he stuttered.

"Shhhh," she said and slowly unbuttoned her blouse and put his hand on her breast, his fingers touching her hardening nipple. He caressed her while he unzipped her skirt. She undid his belt, and together they found all of each other's snaps and zippers. Then they were on the sofa, naked. He let his hand wander and found the delicacy of her stomach, her thighs, and then her center. Slowly, they kissed, exchanging moans and whispers of pleasure and intimacy. They came closer. It seemed more meaningful to both of them than any act of love had ever been. Wheeler was a good lover, with too much practice; but his need to possess her in an emotional way, now for the first time in his life, matched his physical need. As he entered her they both felt excruciating joy in the gentleness of human coupling, unplanned and without masks or artifice. Slowly and with great tenderness they made love. Finally, the moment for them had come. It was both hypnotizing and delirious, ending in a climax that shook them to the center of their souls. They were kissing deeply at the moment of release.

Wheeler had never felt such glorious completion, because he had never made love before with such unselfishness.

After it was over they lay still. Both breathing hard. Both afraid to speak ... not wanting to change the magic of the moment.

Outside the house, LaFrance pointed at the red Jag's bumper, which was sticking out around the corner from the backyard. "Dat be d' gray cat's ride," he said to the four 103rd Street Crip gangsters from Tanisha's old set. "Dey inside. All you gotta do is walk in an' serve d' motherfucker.".

The four Crip gangsters got out of the car and silently closed the door. They left LaFrance at the wheel, telling him to be ready to bone out after he heard the gunfire. Two of them shouldered Russian automatic assault rifles that they got out of the trunk. The guns had been bought for top dollar from the Chin Lo several months ago. The other two grabbed cut-down shotguns known as "street sweepers."

All four killers moved silently toward Nadine's darkened house.

Chapter
37.

Irish Charlie

It was a complicated string of events that had put "Irish Charlie" McGuire aboard the Hornblower charter boat on Thursday night. The deal had started two days before, when a barely understandable skinny Chinese teenager named Lo Sing had booked a charter for Friday night. He wanted to rent a seventy-foot, triple-deck party boat. The youth had put down nine hundred dollars in cash to secure the deal, and had said in horrible broken English that he wanted enough fuel to go at least thirty miles out. The suspicious charter boat company called the LAPD. The call had been kicked over to Asian Crimes and had landed on Al Katsukura's desk. Al called Parker Center to get help on the surveillance, and that's how Irish Charlie McGuire, the Major Crimes detective with the most boat-handling experience, got tapped to stand in for the Hornblower charter boat captain.

At a few minutes past eleven on Thursday night, the same skinny Chinese asshole had reappeared with a handwritten note, demanding that the time of the charter be changed. The note said he wanted to move it up twenty-four hours, to just before midnight, which was a bitch, because Charlie was at home sound asleep when the boat company called and told him the Hornblower was out on the bay with a load of Orange County insurance salesmen, celebrating their annual bonuses.

"Then get the fucking boat back to the slip. I don't give a shit about the insurance guys," Charlie had told the booking agent.

The rest of it had been your standard slide-for-life last-minute police bullshit. Charlie McGuire had called the three other under
-
covers he'd already recruited from Major Crimes, waking them up, listening to them bitch and moan before telling them to shut up and haul ass. Then he dug around in his wallet for the phone number of the owl-eyed Jap who had tapped him for this shit detail in the first place.