"Come on, Tat, let's deal."

"Deal? You got nothing I want."

"They say he had a girlfriend, brought her gambling."

"You're wasting my time, Jacky boy."

"Now she's disappeared too."

"Don't know nothing about it."

"Hong Kong type. A karaoke singer?"

"Can't help you, man."

Jack took a breath, hadn't expected to last this long and knew he was on a roll.

"Yeah," he said, "but I can help you. I can make it tough for the Fuk Ching. I can have their cars towed."

Lucky wasn't impressed, blew smoke from his nose.

"I can put heat on their gambling joints," Jack pushed on. "I can roust the Namese boys, shake them up a little."

Lucky seemed vaguely interested now. "Keep talking," he said.

"I need a face, a name." Jack was fishing deeper water now. "I can access the department's computers, find out where all your enemies are."

"And you don't care one bit if we whack them all," Lucky spit out contemptuously.

"I do not give a fuck," Jack said. "I wish you all would whack each other out the same day. Make my job a lot easier."

"Bring me some information," Lucky said, snuffing the cigarette.

"I need a face, a name."

"You're chasing shadows, man. It's smoke."

"So we dealing or what?"

Lucky was intrigued now, though he couldn't show it in front of the Ghosts. He said, "Give me a sign, Jacky. I'll be listening."

The darkshirts whisked Jack through the courtyard, through a hallway leading to a side street. Lucky held up Jack's chain, let the badge dangle before he tucked it into Jack's pocket.

"You got some fuckin' balls coming down here, boy," he said, suddenly snapping an uppercut into Jack's gut, a sucker punch driving Jack to his knees. As the Ghosts moved off laughing, Jack gasped for air and heard Lucky grinning words through his teeth.

"That's for old times," he snapped.

Busted

When dawn faded in, an FBI/DEA task force took down the Fuk Chou Association leadership, arresting nineteen illegals in connection with the murders in Teaneck and the grounding of the Golden Venture.

Public Morals Division came and shut down the Twenty-Eight after complaints surfaced from gamblers who'd been robbed there.

At noon, Jack watched as the Department of Transportation brownshirts hitched up a line of parked cars, saw the scowls on young Fuk Ching faces as municipal tow trucks hauled away their Firebirds/Trans Ams/Camaros. The trucks lurched off Lafayette, then headed west toward the piers as Jack turned in the direction of Mott Street.

Things were getting stirred up on East Broadway, and Jack was happy to take credit for it.

Send a message to Lucky, he was thinking.

Ghost Brother

The gray nimbostratus sky of October floated in from the Atlantic, dropped over Chinatown in an uncertain change of seasons, from a summer that had been boiling hot to a lifeless autumn that muted the changing of colors.

Gray clouds drifted past the red pagoda motif of the On Yee building, down the ceramic tilework, the wind whipping up the Association's red, white, and black banner, the cloth cut jagged along its perimeter so that it appeared to be a dragon's tail.

Lucky stood beneath the banner, plugged into a Walkman, and lit up. K -Rock on the airwaves.

From the rooftop he could see all of Chinatown, from the river to the east, and west as far as the unending line of tractor trailers dodging into the Holland Tunnel.

He looked north, seeing past Little Italy as far as Soho. South, he saw the Jersey shoreline where it crept behind the torch of Lib- erty,just barely visible above the city skyline.

He could see across the Manhattan Bridge running east west to Brooklyn, a new frontier of opportunities. The streets below filled up with tourists, and he turned up the Walkman, sucking on the stick of smoke that came up sickly sweet into his nostrils. The Chiba smoke relaxed him and he thought about Jack. The truce was on hold. If the cops could find the Big Uncle's girlfriend that would take suspicion off of him.

But Lucky wasn't surprised. He heard it on the grapevine, about Jack stirring up shit on the streets, rousting the Fuk Chings, busting the Yee Bot. Eventually, Lucky wanted pictures of the undercovers from the Asian Squad but figured it was too soon to play that card. He decided to toss Jack a bone, something to keep him busy, out of the way.

Revelations

Things picked up, but not the way Jack expected.

There was a sniper on the roof of the Smith Houses, which scrambled the SWAT boys out of Headquarters, shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, sucked uniforms out of patrol.

A demonstration at City Hall.

A Terrorist Alert at the Stock Exchange.

Jack was the next man up when the B amp;E report came into the squadroom, a breaking and entering into a Henry Street apartment, called in by the night janitor.

Apartment 8H was empty, dead air sitting on top of the silk covered bed. Clothes in the closet, Dior, Versace, Tahari, expensive petites left behind. Designer shoes stacked below. Vuitton bags in every configuration.

It wasn't a burglary, more like someone looking for someone, with a vengeance.

The kitchenette was neat, except for the splash of mahjong tiles on the countertop. The refrigerator empty. No garbage in the covered bin.

No personal papers, no pictures. Nothing to put a face to the tenant of the apartment. Nothing to indicate anyone had lived there the last few days.

Jack envisioned a young woman, someone who'd gone on vacation. He went down to the management office, requested the apartment lease.

When Wah Yee Tom turned up on the ownership document, Jack knew for sure that the Uncle Four deal had a woman in it, the woman who had the answers he needed.

He snatched up one of the mahjong tiles, the bak baan, a white board, a clear slate. He pressed the ivory block inside his fist, squeezing it as if it might yield a clue. He thought of Ah Por again, knew if she could channel anything, the bak baan was the cleanest choice, unencumbered by numbers, characters, or symbols. Then he remembered the keys, and started to see how things were coming together. One of the keys fit the apartment lock, but the mechanism was too mashed up for it to turn. When he got down to the lobby, the other two keys worked perfectly. One for the front door, one for the mailbox. He went back in the direction of Mott Street, thinking of Ah Por and Lucky, fearing that time was running out.

Heaven Over Earth

Now she saw rolling hills and fields in broad open valleys, uplands bisected by steep slopes and wretched soils, an unbroken ridge of shale, limestone. The train climbed up from the plateau toward the Alleghenies. Mona closed the blinds and placed the plastic bag on the table, emptied it out.

There were packets of money bundled inside brown laundry paper, a plastic box with columns of gold Chinese Pandas, a small black velveteen pouch.

She took a breath, unzipped the pouch, turned it so that diamonds tumbled into her cupped palm, their brilliance pulsing even in the shadowy daylight behind the blinds, the sight of there freezing her eyes.

Maybe two dozen there, she thought. She poured them back into the pouch, gathered up the rest of the payback from the table. Count it later. Everything fit perfectly into the empty mahjong case she'd carried the gun in. The case slipped into a neoprene knapsack, all stashed inside the Samsonite. The gun came out of the garment bag, the silencer unscrewed, the magazine ejected. She wrapped all of it in a hand towel, stuffed it into the side compartment of the Rollmaster, and let the light back into the room.