It isn’t the fifty thousand cash they’ve stolen, Bossy thought—he’d make that back in a month. Nor the three Rolex watches, which were payment swag from a Chinatown jewelry-store owner who’d gambled and lost down number 15 basement. He didn’t care about all that, almost as if the money lost were something he’d kept handy, for ransom, for just the circumstances that occurred. All part of the deadly circle of money, he thought. No big loss.
But what did matter was his father’s death. He could never forgive that. The great Duck Hong dying like that, with a whimper. He knew nothing would bring his father back, but the face of it was unforgivable. They’d stolen what amounted to death money.
The Hok Nam Moon Triad elders would also certainly retaliate for the death of a senior brother, especially against the On Yee and the Red Circle member Fay Lo. It was more than the Hip Chings could handle, but the Hok Triad could carry the fight from Hong Kong through its many members in the overseas cities and communities to wherever the On Yee had a presence. They’d already battled in Chinatowns in Boston, Montreal, Toronto, and San Francisco, but vengeance would be paid out over the seasons, measured but forceful and significant. Some of it was payback for feuds dating back a hundred years.
Bossy poured some more XO, tossed it back. Just lay low, he was told. Don’t draw attention to the Triad.
This wasn’t only a little turf battle between the earners on the street anymore. Of course, the fighting between the Dragons and Ghosts would continue until their dailo were replaced, but the Triad took over, advised Bossy to stay out of it. The less he knew, the better.
Bossy disagreed. “He’s my father, my family. I deserve a say in it.” With regard to the On Yees and Fay Lo, he’d deferred to the Hok Nam Moon: let the Triads battle it out and wash the fat troublemaker. He agreed to keep a low profile and was determined to keep his enthusiastic son Franky out of it. The idiot was an easy target—everyone knew he was Bossy’s son—careless and reckless, wanting to descend into the pit of America as fast as his hero older brother, Gary, had wanted to ascend.
Let the street gangs do their work.
Let the Triad big boys do their work.
But regarding the matter of the takeout deliveryman who’d betrayed them, he’d wanted a personal touch, not some psycho hit man from Hong Kong intruding into his family affairs.
He preferred someone he could trust, someone who was familiar with the days and nights of his life. Someone who knew his family’s background and had exhibited loyalty.
The Hok Nam Moon relented, and they’d quickly come to an agreement on who would begin the retributions.
No one was surprised, not even the killer.
But Bossy was surprised, though not shocked, at the jook sing Chinese cop showing up so quickly at his doorstep and office. He had hoped that the matter would have simply disappeared, washed away forever.
The chaai lo annoyed him more than unnerved him.
It had caused him to make a few phone calls.
He finished the XO as a white wash of car headlights swept across the kitchen walls. He lit a Marlboro and watched the walls dim and then fade to dark again. After a minute he could hear tires crunching gravel, then the purring engine of the black car outside. He checked his Rolex. Right on time. The headlights flashed off. He imagined the driver, Mon Gor, waiting patiently, but always ready to go on a moment’s notice.
The XO and the nicotine leveled the tension, refocused him on more immediate, primal needs. He’d considered a quick trip to one of the strip clubs. The roomy black car always reminded him of the sex jaunts to Booty’s, which had always provided a secluded spot for blow jobs from the dancers. Mon Gor knew the drill and always exited the car for a cigarette walk, far enough for a ten-minute BJ on the backseat.
Bossy rejected the thought of Fat Lily’s; too many Chinatown johns knew him there, and the whores weren’t as pretty. Instead he imagined himself at Chao’s, on the edge of Chinatown, picking the youngest-looking siu jeer out of the lineup.
The alcohol rushed through his blood and made his balls tingle.
Finishing the cigarette, he tossed a last angry look toward the dark living room and headed for the waiting car.
Transporter 1
IT WAS SNOWING lightly the next morning as Jack zipped back to Chinatown in a see gay out of Sunset Park.
The Chinese driver maintained a running dialogue with his radio dispatcher, injecting a few murmured expletives between the static lines.
Jack scanned the dark sky above the slick highway, shook his head. Of course, he didn’t think Bossy himself stabbed Sing through the heart, hauled him through the freezing water, and shoved him off into the Harlem River. He didn’t do the dirty work; he hired people for that. Contracted it out. Or the tong arranged it, and they were all complicit.
“Fuck your mother!” the driver hissed. “Dew nei lo may,” to his dispatcher. It broke Jack’s focus as the driver swerved to exit off the BQE and back onto the streets.
“Jong che,” dispatch squawked. “Accident on the Brooklyn Bridge! Avoid!”
The driver turned the black car around toward the Manhattan Bridge, the next-nearest Chinatown crossing.
Jack noticed the driver’s knowledge of the routes, figured it was part of the business of transporting people from one place to another destination. Those destinations could be airports, train and bus terminals, and the city had many other points of interest. But if you drove the overnight shift, it was a different clientele. Sure, the airports and terminals were still there, but so were the nightclubs, the gambling joints, the motels, and the whorehouses. All the all-night dives like Half-Ass and Grampa’s and Lucy Jung’s.
The interior of the car was gray, dark as the sky outside, but clean, without magazines or personal items, unlike the cars of some of the drivers who used their own family vehicles to make extra money.
Always on call, Jack thought, real Chinese cowboys. Saddle up, ride out. A lot of single or divorced men. The lifestyle didn’t help family life. These were the men who disdained the obsequious restaurant work of their peers, the back-breaking labor of the Chinatown coolie construction gangs, the grinding days of the street vendors in the heat and freeze and rain and snow.
No, they preferred to mount their leased, air-conditioned Town Cars to ferry others to destinations sometimes deemed illegal, but where the tips were better than good and where one could do well in the gwai lo city.
There were no other clues in the see gay car. No family photographs or Chinese saints on the dashboard. No faux-Chinese firecrackers hanging off the rearview mirror. No takeout containers or water bottles or Chinese newspapers.
Just another hustling guy trying to make a few extra bucks.
But of course he didn’t think Bossy himself did the killing. Franky Noodles, either: Too obvious, and he doesn’t fit the profile. They’d kept him out of it, had protected the wannabe golden boy.
The radio car crossed the Manhattan Bridge before Jack knew it and was rolling into Chinatown. The driver drifted his car right, down through Fukienese East Broadway and around to Confucius Towers, a block’s walk to the Fifth Precinct.
If it wasn’t Bossy, it’s someone he trusted.
He paid the driver an extra five and crossed Bowery from Confucius Towers toward the Fifth Precinct.
Run DMV
THE KNOTS AT the back of his head, neck, and shoulders grabbed at him, but Jack had spread on the mon gum yow, Tiger Balm, let it do its mentholated relief work for him. The shift cops wrinkled up their noses as he passed. He went to the second floor of the Fifth Precinct, to the main computer, and logged in.