Year of the Dog (5 page)

On the Edge

Out at the end of East Broadway, past the lumberyard and the old synagogue, where it crossed Essex Street, stood the 1-6-8 Bar, formerly called the Mickey Rose, a one-time Irish whiskey joint that was supposedly affiliated with the Campisi crew from the Knickerbocker Houses. It was two blocks from the Rutgers Projects, and a block east of Saint Teresa’s Church, more than a half mile from Mott Street.

The big white fluorescent sign above the bar was the only light around the dark deserted intersection. The design on the sign spelled out BAR with the numbers one, six, and eight crowding a cocktail glass tilted at an angle.

Inside, the room was long and narrow, dimly lit by a row of blue lights suspended from the ceiling. There was a twenty-foot wooden bar counter on the left, with a dozen bar stools, and a few small tables in the back. On the right side were red plastic booths that ran toward a pool table in the rear.

The customers had changed through the years, and were now mostly people from the housing projects, the Seward Park area, and Chinese gangbangers working the Chinatown fringe. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Chinese mixing tenuously together.

It was almost midnight and the only noise came from the crew of Ghosts drinking in the back area by the pool table.

Koo Jai, or Kid Koo, sat in the last booth and took a swig from his Heineken bottle, watching the homey Jung twins and Shorty Ng chase a rack of nine-ball around the table. He was reminiscing about the time back in the old days, when these streets belonged to the Red Stars, long before the Ghost Legion took over, and way before the waves of Fukienese snakeheads that had followed. Now the Fuks,
fucks,
as he called them, were buying up property on the Chinatown frontier, and were running their own rackets, like the mahjong room on Henry Street that in better days would have coughed up a piece of the action to the Stars. Now, everyone who paid protection out here paid to the old Chinatown Cantonese, or to the new Fukienese snakehead organizations. And the Dragons were also claiming disputed territory.

Shorty bopped to the far end of the table, tapping the butt end of his cue stick against the wood floor, sizing up the game-winning shot. Considerably shorter than five feet, he’d need to get on his toes, stretching long across the table, to hit the nine ball right, and not scratch.

An awkward shot no matter.

One of the Jungs cleared his phlegmy throat.

Shorty missed the nine ball, left it as an easy kiss in the corner, a hanger.

The Jungs snickered, snorted.

“Dew gow keuih!”
Shorty cursed “Fuckin’ ball shit,” slapping his palm against the side rail.

Koo Jai smirked, took another swallow of the beer.

“Fuck,” Shorty said again, jerking his head as he circled away from the table. Koo Jai threw him a disapproving shake of the head, thinking,
Shorty,
the smallest guy in the gang, but with the biggest attitude.
Superstitious guy.
Wouldn’t pull a job on a rainy day, or on any date that had a four in it. Refused to enter a place if it were on the fourth floor, or fourteenth, and so on. Afraid of
death,
which sounded like four in Chinese.

Young Jung pocketed the nine ball hanger, a toothy grin across his face. He sauntered off as Shorty reluctantly stooped to rack up a new game.

Koo Jai closed his eyes a few seconds and suddenly felt a gust of cold wind, looking up to see the dark bulk of Kongo by the open door at the front of the bar. He was even more surprised to see the
dailo
Lucky step through the door, coming toward the pool table.

The banter around the table went quiet.

Outside, a car’s horn beeped once. He saw headlight shadows against the door wall flashing to black.

In the next instant, Lucky was in front of him.

“Yo, what the fuck, man?” Lucky said in a steely voice. “I paged you almost an hour ago.”

Koo Jai lowered his head slightly, said sheepishly, “Sorry, Boss, the battery must’ve died.”

“Your fuckin’ brain must’ve died.” Lucky took the Smith &Wesson out for emphasis, laid it on the rail of the pool table. “What the fuck is going on out here?”

Koo Jai knew this wasn’t a social visit, but he seemed genuinely puzzled, trading glances with Shorty and the Jung brothers in the sudden hush. Lucky sneered, turning his hard face toward Koo Jai.

“How come you got nobody on the street? Do you know what’s going on out there?” Lucky paused a moment for effect. “KJ, you’re the senior brother. Tell me what’s going on?” He let his fingers drift over the pistol, waited.

“We’re out here watching out for the neighborhood,” Koo Jai said evenly, “like we
been
doing, making sure the
hok-kwee
and the
loy sung
don’t fuck over the Chinese.”

Lucky picked up the gun and said, “You’re doing all that by being here in this bar? You’re really keeping an eye on things, right? And now you’re only pretending to be drinking and shooting pool, right?”

“Check the streets,” Koo Jai said quickly to Shorty and the Jungs.

“Hell, it’s freezing out there!” groused Shorty as they went toward the front door.

“We were out earlier,” explained Koo Jai. “And the streets were empty. It’s too fuckin’ cold. We only came in to warm up.”

Lucky went behind Koo Jai and stood there with the gun.

“I’m telling you,” he said, “someone’s ripping off company business out here, and it’s fuckin’ bad for
our
business, ’cause it makes us look bad. I want your guys on the street, their eyes peeping for hijacks, their ears open.”

Koo Jai nodded in agreement with the
dailo,
but also said, “It’s hard to understand the Fuks. When they talk, it sounds like they’re spitting or shitting.”

“Whatever,” Lucky warned, facing Koo now. “You better get a grip on out here. Because I’m telling you, boy, if there’s another rip-off, it’s gonna be on you.”

“Okay, Boss,” said Koo Jai quietly, trying to save face. “But I have a question.”

Lucky nodded at him. “Speak.”

Koo Jai’s voice was firmer now. “You know we’re out here dealing with the junkie
hok-kwees,
the niggers, and the PRs, and now, not only do we have to watch out for the Dragons, we got those fuckin’ Fuk Ching assholes picking at us, too.”

Lucky’s eyes narrowed, “What about it?”

“Tell me again,” Koo Jai asked, keeping a tone of respect in his voice, “why we’re holding back, why we don’t just
sot
fuckin’ crush them all?”

“Everyone was told to cool it. There are some
arrangements
being worked on, upstairs, with the old men.”

Koo Jai understood that to mean the tongs were dealing. He knew better than to question the
dailo,
or the uncles. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “but the Fuks spit on Shorty, and Dragons pissed all over Jung’s car.”

Lucky raised the pistol past Koo Jai’s eye level.

“Don’t worry about them. When the time’s right, we’ll clean it all up.” Lucky put the pistol back into his gun pocket, clenched his jaw, and checked his Rolex. “Right now, I wanna know who’s pulling off these jobs.”

“Okay, Boss,” Koo Jai said as Lucky headed for the door, with Kongo taking his back.

“Sure thing,” he said to himself, as he watched the Mott Street
dailo
exit the seedy East Broadway bar.

Night Without End

When Jack woke again, it was pitch black in the studio apartment, the only light a faint glow of digital numbers on the face of the boom-box radio. It was after 10 PM.

He decided to get dressed, walked down to Eighth Avenue, and wolfed down some Shanghai dumplings with hot sauce at one of the all-night soup shacks. When he was done, it was eleven-thirty and he got into the first Chinese radio car lined up on the street outside, quickly rolling toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

The
see gay
car descended to the Manhattan side, went north on the Bowery heading out of the Fifth and toward the Ninth.

Ninth and Midnight

On his desk were the crime-scene photos of the Chinese family, the Kungs, a file folder, and a note from P.O. Wong. As Jack had requested, Wong had arranged for a Chinatown car service to drive the grandmother home, and in a follow-up phone call, had learned that the family had made burial arrangements with the Heaven Grace Funeral Home in Flushing. The death certificates would be available there.

The next of kin, their worst fears realized, were en route to New York.

The photos brought it back to him, the idea that suicide was not uncommon, but that this case was different. The demise of entire families, especially involving young children, was particularly tragic.

The folders contained the reports from One Astor Plaza. The building manager’s narrative was just as Jack had remembered, straightforward, and practically mirroring the security officer’s report. They’d all gone up together and discovered the horror at the scene. The reports were standard TPO format: time, place, occurrence.

The Medical Examiner’s report on the dead family cited chemical asphyxiation as the cause of death. If the body doesn’t receive oxygen, it leads to collapse, coma, and death.
Suffocation
by carbon monoxide.
All four bodies showed lethal levels of the invisible odorless poison. The mother and the children also showed large doses of sleep medication, the NyQuil, more than enough to have made them drowsy. The father had no trace of it.
His job was to keep the briquettes burning, to keep the carbon
monoxide flowing.
He’d gotten sick during the killing and dying, maybe realizing in his daze the enormity of what he and his wife were doing, frantically knowing it was much too late to turn back.

Jack remembered the photos of the big red dragon bowls. Those bowls had held more charcoal and ashes than the saucepans and pots in the kitchen area.

He closed the file and placed it, along with the photos, back into the wire basket. He remembered Pa’s passing and thought about the cycle of events that the survivors would soon have to endure: the funeral home, the wake, the burial, and the church or temple. Later, the return to the cemetery, closure a long way off, if ever.

He began to wrap up the paperwork, drawing together the official loose ends of the case.

P.O. Wong had also left Jack a Post-it note, an unofficial comment at the margin of the reports; Wong intended to go to the Kung family wake, which was in Flushing’s Chinatown.
Closure for him,
thought Jack,
a good thing.
Having been touched by death, superstitious Chinese believed paying last respects was a way to close off the bad luck.

The shift dragged on.

Jack checked the blotter, the patrol reports, and the updates on the computer.

In Brooklyn’s Seven-Two Precinct a jewelry-store robbery had turned into a wild chase and a carjacking. Four of the seven armed robbers of the Galleria Gems Center got away. Three perps being held.

In Queens, a fight over a young beauty exploded violently when a teen slashed his roommate and was captured an hour later. The woman involved had no comment.

In the 0-Five, the Chinatown precinct, two gang members had been arrested while awaiting a ransom payment for a kidnapped and tortured Chinese immigrant.

Jack wondered if Tat’s Ghosts might be involved, but figured that it was more likely to be a Fukienese setup. The victim and the perps all had mainland Mandarin-sounding names, Zhang instead of Chang, Qiu instead of Chu. In a second Chinatown incident, an unidentified Chinese man had been ambushed by at least two assailants as he left a restaurant and shot numerous times, but was in stable condition at Downtown Hospital. Uniforms from the 0-Five had responded but were unable to get cooperation from area residents or merchants.
No surprise there,
Jack thought. What caught his attention was the unusual heavy-duty firepower involved, rounds not typical of Chinatown violence: .45 caliber, and .223 rifles, hitters strapping AK-47s, Colt .45, and 9mm Parabellums. The victim had apparently shot back with a .38 revolver, a pea shooter by comparison.

Power struggle,
mused Jack,
or someone had a nasty beef to settle.

Out on the edge of the Ninth, the reports had arrived early. Toys “R” Us had held a 7 AM sale where two shoppers were arrested for bashing each other over a ten-dollar talking Spider-Man doll. At Kmart, a riot had broken out, with aggressive shoppers trampling each other to get to a fifty-dollar color TV.

For Giving,
thanks . . .

P.O.s and cars to the scene.

From Black Friday to the days before Christmas, businesses were marching from loss to profitability. Ads for sales and discounts lured shoppers into the stores and malls, feeding the frenzy of shopping that overwhelmed the moral and spiritual message of the holidays. The thought brought back to Jack one of Ma’s Buddhist sayings:
To attain nothingness is true happiness.
The saying flew in the face of capitalism and did not work well in this city, this country, this modern world of money and machines. A belief better left to monks on high mountain steppes, away from the din and roar of industrialized civilizations everywhere.

The way that things flowed, the
tao,
kept him on call, on edge, but even then the Chinatown things crowded back into his head.
The killing of the Ping lady, which had provoked the
Fukienese demonstrations, the burglaries, the gang crime and brazen
gunplay,
events outside his jurisdiction pecking at his sense of duty.

Old Chinese grandmothers get run over by trucks all the time on Canal Street. They walk too slowly and seem to believe no driver will dare run them down. They are at fault yet these are tragedies nonetheless.

Who really cares?

In a cop’s life, the more he touched upon tragedy, the more it rubbed off on him, became part of him. Too much tragedy drove some cops to eating their guns.

Trying to clear the black kharma from his mind, his thoughts came to Alexandra Lee,
activista
lawyer and friend. He remembered that he needed to thank her for her help in arranging his recent Hawaiian vacation. He decided to visit her NoHo office after the shift, but he’d go down to Chinatown first, drop by on Billy Bow,
homeboy,
at the tofu factory.

Approaching meal break, Jack ordered take-out sushi from Avenue B, a trendy joint where you could still get raw fish at 3 AM. Four blocks from the stationhouse, he considered the quick jog to Avenue B and back as exercise, movement of the blood.