Year of the Dog (3 page)

This sad day reminded Jack that he, too, though only twenty-seven, was at the end of his bloodline, a solitary remnant of the Yu clan, whose ancestry retreated back through the generations.

Eighty-eighth cop of Chinese-American descent. A lucky number,
he’d thought. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

He could still hear the old man’s words. “
Chaai lo ah?
Now you’re a cop?” Pa had said with derision when Jack first put on the blue uniform. “Chinese don’t become policemen. They’re worse than the crooks. Everyone knows they take money.
Nei cheega,
you’re crazy. You have lost your
jook-sing
— American-born—mind. I didn’t raise you to be a
kai dai
—punk idiot—so they can use you against your own people.”

I never took any money,
Jack hadn’t found the chance to say to his father.

Jack bowed three times before the shrine, then quickly found the Johnnie Walker Black and poured a tumbler full, cracking open a can of beer to chase it.

The whiskey had only coated his throat with fire. He told himself that the beer would chill him out, would let him sleep better, as he drained the can. He’d lost any appetite he’d had at the crime scene. Now he sat on the edge of his convertible couch nestled in the far corner of the studio. He kicked off his shoes, trying to focus, to make some sense of the days and weeks gone by since Pa’s death.

Four months earlier, what began as a hardship transfer to Chinatown’s Fifth Precinct to be closer to his dying father, had ended up with a promotion. Then he’d been transferred to the Ninth.

Bad memories from the period in between twisted together as the alcohol reached his brain. He drew the blinds against the afternoon light.

When he closed his eyes, his mind drifted. He fell asleep on the couch.

His sleep was pervaded by a restless disconnected feeling, fitful, punctuated by dreams.

He was seventeen again,
running across rooftops at twilight, with Tat Louie, and Wing Lee. Three bloodbrothers,
hingdaai.
Tat was throwing pebbles at the tenement windows and they were shrieking with juvenile laughter as they ran; three Chinatown boys, mad with mischief, having the time of their young lives. Then suddenly, there were the ugly, sneering faces of Wah Ying street-gang members, wielding nasty 007 knives. A swirl of images: Tat, fighting, and Wing, being stabbed. For himself, a quick blackness as he was smashed across his forehead, blood running into his eyes. Then the scene faded to a Chinatown funeral parlor. Wing in a casket, his face dead white, and Tat running out, past the pallbearers, followed by the wailing of Wing’s mother. The incense smell of death.

He was watching his youth flash by, viewing it like a camcorder tape, the pictures harsh, unforgiving. Suddenly, Chinese cursing from somewhere, a sound he’s heard before. Pa’s voice.

Jack felt his body quake uncontrollably. The images flashed in his brain like sparks from a live wire. Japanese soldiers charging forward, samurai swords raised, hacking at Chinese babies, lunging at Chinese women with their bayonets, raping them. The flag with the red Rising Sun fluttering violently in the gale. Butchery. A thousand Chinese heads bouncing and rolling down a blood-slicked slope. And he is sliding, falling.

But this is
Pa’s
nightmare.

There is nonstop screaming and yelling,
Say yup poon jai!
Pa cursing,
Jap bastards!
Jack is at Pa’s side then, punching away at the bayonets and swords, until he bolts upright on the couch, nearly kicking over the boom-box radio, slowly realizing that it’s his own voice barking into the shadowy dark of the small room.

He sat up for a while, caught his breath, and after downing another shot of Johnnie Walker Black, gradually fell back to sleep.

The final dream was short, a twisted vision of Tat, a Chinatown gangster in a black leather trench. Tat “Lucky” Louie, offering him a big bag of money which he didn’t accept. Tat, who’d become an ugly liability.

The sound of wind chimes.

Tat has a nine-millimeter strapped to his hip, with sneering street punks spread out behind him. Jack sees his gold police shield dangling from a 007 knife.

He’s reaching to block the blade, to retrieve his shield, when darkness finally puts him down for the count.

Dog Eat Dog

Lucky gave the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson a quick wipe along his shirt sleeve, slipped the clip back in, and chambered a hollow-point round. He flicked down the safety with his thumb and put the spare clip into the side pocket of his black leather blazer, which was draped over the recliner. His attention locked onto the television where Fukienese Chinese demonstrators marched across the big color screen, yelling and carrying signs as they surrounded One Police Plaza.

Lucky sucked back the last of the sensimilla joint, held the smoke a moment, hissed it all out. Then he closed his eyes and thought about
face,
and the future. As
dailo
—boss—of the powerful Ghost Legion gang, he knew that without face
,
there was no future. He knew intuitively that changes were occurring in his piece of the underworld, especially since the murder of Chinatown’s Hip Ching tong godfather, Uncle Four. For the younger Hip Chings, the subsequent death of Golo, Uncle Four’s dreaded enforcer, signaled a movement in the ranks. Ambitious heads hinted that the old leadership was ineffectual, and that the organization should be looking toward China-based alliances with outside forces like the triad
Hung Huen,
the Red Circle, alliances with triad paramilitary connections in the south of China. These alliances would bring them AK-47s and grenades. But with a hundred thousand Fukienese on the other side of East Broadway, Lucky felt this might not be a good thing. It might upset the balance of power.

On the TV, the five thousand Fukienese demonstrators were screaming for justice, protesting the shooting death of a Fukienese woman by a gang of teenaged thugs.

A trio of black and Latino teenagers had shot and killed a Chinese
woman in a botched robbery of a 99-cent store.

Lucky thumbed down the volume and slipped the Smith &Wesson into a large gun pocket that Ah Wong the tailor had sewn inside his leather jacket. The newcomers to Chinatown, the Fukienese, were trying to gain control, to take over from the established tongs, the On Yee and the Hip Ching. Everyone was looking toward China now and the Fukienese—the Fuk Chings—were leading the way.

The earlier wave of immigrants had come from Canton, now known as Guangzhou, and had spoken Cantonese, as did their brethren from Hong Kong. They couldn’t understand the dialect of the recent Fukienese arrivals, who formed their own gangs—the Fuk Chow and Fuk Ching—that respected no one. They recruited only from the desperate dregs of their community.

Power was shifting. On
his
turf, the main strongholds of Chinatown, Fat Lily’s massage joint, and Number Seventeen card house, had both been raided in the same week. The cops had come from outside the precinct, in blue windbreakers, under the direction of some unknown Major-Case task force
.
Someone was feeding them information, directing
gwailo
white cops toward Ghost Legion operations. Could be the Fuks, or maybe double-dealing by one of the other tongs. And his informants in the Fifth Precinct were all gone now. Lucky thought instantly of Jack Yu,
Jacky Boy,
the Chinese cop, the hero cop, his Chinatown homeboy from back in the day. Then he slowly shook his head, with a smile that mixed disdain and annoyance.
Jacky Boy’s
not in the Fifth, anymore; gone fishing somewhere else in cop world.

Lucky saw other ominous signs on the horizon. The incoming mayor was a law-and-order guy, an ex-DA who’d already stated publicly that he was going to crack down on organized crime. In the past that had meant the Mafia, Sicilian guys, but now included the Russian
mafiya,
the Mexicans, the city’s drug gangs, and the Chinese tongs as well.

Lucky knew to go with the flow, to roll with the blow, but he’d have to be nimble, and make the secret deals that would protect and expand his empire. He’d work out whisper deals with pro-China groups, and even with gangbangers like the Fuk Chings. The Red Circle triad, which partnered with the On Yee and had historical underworld connections to that tong, couldn’t be trusted. They were masters of the double-cross. Keep it all close to the vest, he figured, because if the other Ghost factions found out, they might think he was selling them out, getting ready to bail.

One thing was clear: it was all over for the On Yee. Their ties were mostly with Hong Kong and Taiwan. China itself was a whole different ballgame and the Fukienese already had tight connections with corrupt mainland government officials and were rumored to have deserters from the People’s Liberation Army on their payroll.

The television news program segued from Fukienese protest to Thanksgiving pageantry. Seeing the Macy’s Parade roll across the screen reminded Lucky of his father, Thanksgiving Day being the birthday of the old abusive drunk whom he hadn’t seen in five years, the last time being a chance encounter on a Flushing Chinatown street when the sad loser shamelessly asked for a handout.
The fuckin’ bum,
thought Lucky, the reason why his mother had run out on them before his teenage years. He wondered if the son of a bitch was still alive, then decided he didn’t care.

Disgusted, he punched off the TV.

When Lucky appraised himself in the mirror he still saw a street warrior, but too much Chinatown fast food, beer, and brandy had turned his gut to flab, made him appear bearlike and lumbering.

He checked his Oyster Rolex. It was 9 PM. He glanced toward the darkness of the November night outside his Bayard Street condominium. The wind gusted and banged against the windows. It was freezing outside and he knew most of the Ghost Legion streetboys would be wearing their dark down-filled jackets, puffy enough to hide their guns. He himself, as
dailo,
would only wear the black leather blazer, which made him appear oblivious to the cold, more macho than the others.

Condensation formed at the bottom of the metal window frame, and the spoon-sized thermometer outside the glass read nine degrees. It was almost time to cruise through his rounds, to check on his empire.

Outside the window the streets of the Bowery were empty. At the street corner six flights below, the traffic light, swaying and swinging at the end of the long metal arm that hung over the intersection, was frozen on red. A bus proceeded cautiously through the intersection, rolling north along the Bowery. There was not one person on the frigid streets beneath the dim yellow street lamps.

He could see the Manhattan Bridge, in the darkness looking like a black ribbon suspended from two parallel strands of pearls, arching across the East River toward the Brooklyn waterfront, the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Two car-horn blasts from directly below broke his reverie. A black car pulled smoothly up to the curb, its white headlights momentarily lighting up the front of the Rickshaw Brother’s garage. He pictured Lefty behind the wheel, all spiky haircut and gel, with Kongo, the big dark Malay, riding shotgun by his side. The headlights went to black and the Buick sat like a water bug squatting beside the curb.

Lucky crushed the burnt marijuana roach into a glass dish. He lifted the leather blazer off the recliner, and felt its heft as he slipped it on. Normally, he would not carry the Smith &Wesson, but tonight, going out to the Chinatown fringe at East Broadway, he followed his instincts, and assured himself he was not being paranoid.
Better strapped than sorry.
He turned off the lights and the TV and closed the red door of his condo, took the stairs down, and felt the weight of the pistol in his jacket pocket. Thinking about Fukienese East Broadway, and about how easily power could shift, he went down toward the dark Chinatown street, and the black Buick at the curb.

Black Car, Black Night

The black Buick was a 1988 Riviera, a beefed-up muscle car straight out of Detroit, a wide-body chassis fitted with a thick set of Pirelli tires, and dark-tinted windows. The Riviera had 44,000 miles on it when the Ghosts took it as payment from a gambler who’d lost it in a fan-tan game down one of the basements. Its finish was fading but underneath the hood, a 3600 V6 engine was still capable of churning out a catlike acceleration. The wide tires made it a perfect car for narrow Chinatown streets with corners that were tight and uneven. With Lefty driving, the black car rolled low to the ground and bit into the curves even at a high speed. The car had four-wheel independent suspension and traction control. It sprinted from zero to sixty in six seconds and it could cruise at eighty, and still have enough horsepower for passing in heavy traffic. In the inner city the car was good to go for getaways and drive-bys. It could leap into a sprint and cornered better than the Firebirds and Camaros. Nothing the cops drove could touch it, their standard Dodge cars, running on the cheap gas of a tightfisted city budget, were too weak.

Lucky had had steel diamond-plate sheets inserted into the door panels, courtesy of Chin Ho Auto Body Repair, in exchange for not making the monthly “contribution” payment. Lefty’s cousin Hom Mo, the mechanic at Victor’s Fix-Rite garage, kept the engine purring and made sure the oil was fresh.

It was nine after nine when Lucky slid into the backseat of the Riviera.

Lefty fired up the headlights and urged the car away from the curb. They took the backstreets out to Centre Street, then rolled north toward Walker. Lucky never said a word, watching the night go by behind the shadowy mass of Kongo. Lefty knew the first stop was always at Willie Eyeballs, to pick up cash and cigarettes. Willie Wong had eyeballs that bulged, a condition that made him look like a bugged-out horny lecher. An On Yee henchman, he ran a warehouse on Walker Street that stored a thousand cartons of counterfeit cigarettes. Fake Marlboros and Camels, made in China, became part of the flood of untaxed cigarettes into the city that occurred after state taxes went up. The fakes were half the price, and the real butts from out of state were even cheaper. One container load of fakes, fifty thousand cartons, arrived on the docks every month, and two truckloads of tax-frees from down south arrived every other day. The operation sucked in a hundred thousand a week.

The cigarettes went from a container port in Queens to places like Eyeballs’s warehouse, out to stores on Canal Street, and in Chinatown, spreading through the Lower East Side and out to the five boroughs and into New Jersey. It was a multimillion-dollar operation run by south China elements of the Red Circle triad partnered with the On Yee tong in New York City.

The Ghosts provided protection for the warehouse and received cash and cases of knock-off smokes in return.

Willie came up to the car shivering, careful to let Kongo see his hands at all times. He handed over an envelope with the five hundred weekly, and a large plastic bag full of cartons of fake Marlboros, complimentary cigarettes for the high rollers in the Ghosts’ gambling basements along Mott Street.

The frigid air streaked in as Lucky powered shut the window, watching Eyeballs scurry back into the warehouse.

“Stop by Mimi’s,” he told Lefty.

They continued north, the streets still empty except for a few factory ladies shivering and sloshing their way down into the subway entrance. Lucky leaned back, watched the nighttime neon colors blur by and considered the rash of robberies of On Yee businesses at the far fringe of Chinatown. Out there at Pike, Allen, other streets adjoining East Broadway. Complaints had been coming in from On Yee merchants. After all, they paid for the protection already,
what the fuck was going on?

Lee Watch Distribution, a local supplier with a shop on Orchard Street, was part of Skinny Chin’s operation that brought in high-end Hong Kong watches bypassing customs. Someone had gotten in and out and took a hundred thousand worth of Rados, Movados, Cartiers, and Rolexes. Skinny was crazed because there was no forced entry, no way in or out except for a tiny bathroom window, too small for anyone to get through.

What am I, a fuckin’ detective?
Lucky thought, sardonically. But he knew his face, his honor, was at stake.

Since he was a relative of the On Yee treasurer, Skinny’s pitching a bitch was sure to make Lucky lose face.

Fuck
that,
and fuck
him,
too, thought Lucky.

The next robbery hit had been at the Jung Wah warehouse on Allen Street, cleaned out of a hundred cases of canned abalone
bao yee,
and a half ton of dried bird’s nest, expensive delicacies all.
Who cuts out with a hundred cases and no one sees or
hears anything?
Another hundred thousand ripoff. Once again, no forced entry.
Inside job, yo?

Nothing made sense.

Broome Street came up and they rolled to a stop in front of a shuttered storefront with an awning that read Wholesale Fashions Inc. Lucky knew the basement contained a quarter-million worth of fake designer handbags, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel. Knock-off Nike sweatsuits and bogus Tiffany jewelry. All made in China. Thousand-dollar handbags selling for eighty-eight bucks.

Lefty punched the horn twice and the front door cracked open. A girl with a rice-bowl haircut peeked out, then stepped toward them carrying a shopping bag in each hand. Some kind of Asian, Lucky couldn’t tell which, she was petite and wrapped in an oversized down coat. She smiled and handed over the bags through his window. He returned her smile and checked the items as she went back inside. There were three each of the Vuitton and the Prada bags, gifts for his favorite whores at Fat Lily’s and Flavio’s. And three fake Tiffany tennis bracelets; more gifts to express his extravagance when Christmas rolled around.
Trademark, what fuckin’ trademark?

“Kenmare, then Chrystie,” he said to Lefty
.

The black car came to a garage and pulled in. The garage was on the block of Kenmare before the street changed to Delancey. It was a half-mile walk from the heart of Chinatown at Mott and Bayard. Kongo stepped out and stood away from the car, let the scattergun slide down into his right hand. Lefty tapped the horn once, and killed the headlights.

A side door of the garage opened and a short Chinese man came out with a sack in his hand. He took one look at Kongo with the scattergun, and slowly placed the sack on the hood of the Riviera before turning and stepping back inside the garage. Kongo took the sack as Lefty backed the car out, and swung it wide, then Kongo climbed in. They drove toward Chrystie.

There were a thousand Ecstasy tablets in the sack, Lucky knew, and the count was sure to be good. The pills were the result of a handshake deal between the Montreal Ghosts and the Vietnamese crew that manufactured the “club drugs” in Canada. The Vietnamese got the raw materials from The Netherlands and operated several Ecstasy mills in Montreal, Toronto, and Edmonton. The Ghost Legion handled the mules and a million pills a month were smuggled south across the border into the states, winding up in nightclubs and dance-halls across the country. Kongo stashed the sack inside a hidden compartment behind the stick-shift panel. The thousand tablets wouldn’t last two weekends in NYC.

They came to a red light and a police cruiser passed in the opposite direction. Lucky felt for the butt of his pistol, but as the police car faded in the rearview mirror, he turned his thoughts back to the robberies out past East Broadway. The USA Garments factory had had its payroll ripped off by armed masked intruders who never uttered a word but instead, communicated with hand signals and signs. Fifty gees
cash.

Fuk Ching gangbangers? The Dragons again?
It didn’t seem like their style, and Lucky didn’t think they were smart enough anyway.
More than one crew working no-man’s-land?
He thought about Koo Jai and the Ghost Legion crew out on East Broadway, farthest from the center. It was Koo Jai’s responsibility to control things out there, even though they’d banged up against some Fuk Ching lowboys and were now operating on disputed turf under an unspoken, unofficial truce.
Koo Jai, the
pretty-boy hustler with the short pal, Eddie Ng, the stupid Jung brothers,
and a few other kids who used to be called the Stars, or something corny
like that.

Lucky would need to call in Koo Jai for a sit-down after the transfers at the gambling basements, and after the whorehouse on Chrystie, toward which Lefty was now turning the dark car.