Chasing the Dragon: a story of love, redemption and the Chinese triads (Opium Book 2)

by Colin Falconer

  “Tell your crew to start loading the number four into our boat,” the man said to Li in Cantonese.

  “We're just poor fishermen,” Li said, reciting the speech he had rehearsed many times. “I don't know what you mean.” Li looked at his brother-in-law. He was unconscious and there was a froth of bloody bubbles coming out of his nose. Barbarians!

  The gunman switched the assault rifle to single fire and placed the muzzle against Li's right knee. “Tell your crew to load the number four now, or I will start shooting pieces of you into the water. I'm going to start with your right kneecap.”

  ***

  There were six drums in the hold, covered with a tarpaulin. The plaster of Paris casing was split open with an axe, the lids prized open with crowbars. The contents, hundreds of sealed packets of Double U-O globe number four heroin, still wrapped in waterproof polythene, were thrown down to the lighter. The two gunmen found another drum; inside, instead of neat packets of heroin, were a number of white morphine bricks, wrapped in heavy plastic. These too were transferred to the lighter.

  The operation took less than thirty minutes.

  When the loading was finished Li and his crew were herded into the wheelhouse. The torch flicked off. There was a single gunshot, deafening in the cramped confines of the cabin, and an explosion of glass. They had shot out the pressure lamp.

  Li expected to die.

  “Tell Eddie Lau that The Ox says thank you!” one of the gunmen shouted.

  A few moments later Li heard a roar as the massive bank of outboards on the back of the lighter churned to life. He ran to the port side, saw the boat's silhouette bounce away through the chop.

  He had just lost two hundred kilos of refined heroin. What was he going to tell the Company?

  Chapter 3

  It was a warm afternoon in April. At this time of year in Hong Kong the warm southern monsoon meets the cooler winter monsoon and the air becomes thick and damp, settling over the peninsula like a suffocating blanket and shrouding Victoria Peak in thick cloud.

  Sian Lacey was trapped in the traffic on Lockhart Road. Ahead of her the towering edifice of the Bank of China disappeared into the mist, obscuring the two 'chopsticks' on its roof. A bad luck sign, the local Chinese said. Like incense in an urn, the Taoist death sign. Even more sinister since Tiananmen.

  Beside her in the front seat detective sergeant Brian Kwok cleaned his teeth with a toothpick, holding the sliver of wood with his left hand and covering his mouth with his right.

  They were headed back to Wanchai from the Causeway Bay apartment of a waiter who had been attacked while leaving his workplace on Jardine's Crescent. He had been slashed with choppers, in the middle of the day, in front of scores of witnesses. The man had suffered terrible injuries; his attackers had severed almost every muscle in his back. But he had refused to identify his assailants, or even offer a description, and a week later he had discharged himself from hospital.

  They had interviewed him in his tiny flat, as he lay on his bed, still unable to move his arms. He would spend the rest of his life as a partial cripple, yet still he refused to talk.

  The phone under the dashboard rang. Brian Kwok snatched it off its cradle and passed it to her. It was their boss, Tyler.

  “Lace? Are you still out at Causeway Bay?”

  “At the lights on Percival Street.”

  “We've got a dispatch for a chopping on Hennessey Road. Wanchai Mah-jongg Club. Know it?”

  “We'll head straight over.”

  “Peter Ong's on his way with David Poon right now.” He hung up.

  Lacey turned on her headlights and as the lights changed she jammed her fist on the horn and swerved hard left onto Percival. She weaved through the snarl of taxis and trucks, battling to make headway. Everyone in Hong Kong drove as if they were trying to escape the Apocalypse.

  ***

  The ambulance had blocked a lane on Hennessey Road and nothing was moving. Lacey and Brian Kwok left the car four hundred meters back, still sandwiched between a taxi and a delivery truck, and ran the rest of the way. When they reached the scene two Chinese constables in orange and yellow flash jackets were trying to hold back onlookers. There were two tourists with cameras.

  She held up her ID and she and Kwok pushed their way through.

  The ambulance crew were at work on their patient in the back of the ambulance. They had stripped off his shirt and put pressure dressings on his wounds. There was a compression bandage high on the left arm, the time of its application, '13.32', written on the man's forehead in black grease pencil. His head and torso were slick with blood, and more was smeared over the floors and sides of the ambulance. Six liters in the average human body, she had read, she could repaint her apartment with two coats and still have some left over for the front door.

  Her man was shivering on the gurney, as if he was freezing. Not a good sign.

  Lacey held out her badge. “How is he doing?” she said through the back door.

  “Running on empty.”

  Lacey looked around at one of the uniformed policeman still trying to protect the crime scene outside the club. He was young, and wore thick black-rimmed spectacles.

  “Were you first here?” she asked him, in Cantonese.

  “Yes, inspector.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  The policeman shook his head.

  “Is that where you found him?” She pointed to the puddle of blood on the pavement where their man had bled away two or three pints of his life. “Any ID on him?”

  The policeman handed her the man's identity card. Li kam-chuen. G160616. Seventy three years old.

  “I also found this in his pocket.”

  It was a small slip of paper with Chinese characters written in black ink. Lacey handed it to Brian Kwok for a translation.

  “It's a chim reading from a geomancer at one of the temples.”

  “What does it say?”

  “You will have double good luck and live to see grey hairs in your beard.”

  “Well he got the second part right.”

  Lacey saw the flashing lights of another two police cars further up the street, their back-up. They would need help to protect the scene. To her dismay she could see a footprint in one of the blood pools. Assailant or spectator?

  She turned to Brian Kwok. “Go with him,” she said. “Record everything he says. Bag his clothes.”

  Kwok jumped in the back of the ambulance, and it pulled away, sirens wailing. Lacey shook her head. So much easier when people were murdered indoors. She looked up at the grey, clinging sky. It had started to rain. Oh, great.

  Chapter 4

  There was no shortage of bleeding bodies at the casualty department of the Hong Kong Adventist Hospital that afternoon. There had been a motor vehicle accident in the Aberdeen Tunnel and a man had been stabbed in an argument in the kitchen of a dim sum restaurant in Happy Valley.

  When Lacey got to the hospital she found a doctor and two nurses in a curtained-off cubicle working over the supine body of her victim. His body was streaked with dried blood; black gobs of it had congealed in his hair. The numbers the ambulance crew had written on his forehead were stark against his white skin. There were wires and tubes everywhere, and they intubated and a nurse stood by his head ventilating him. Brian Kwok stood to one side holding a plastic bag with the man's blood stained clothes.

  Please don't die, Lacey thought. The thunderstorm that broke over the city five minutes after the ambulance had left had eradicated any hope of physical evidence, and of course, there were no witnesses. Unlikely that the man would talk, but it looked like their only hope.

  Brian Kwok handed her his notebook. He had drawn a quick sketch of the man's wounds, more than two dozen, front and back.

  The doctor was trying to clamp arterial forceps over the gaping wound in the man's upper arm. She knew him from previous, similar scenes. He looked up at her.

  “Is he going to make it?” she said.

  He shrugg
ed. “If he was running at Happy Valley, I wouldn't even back him with your money.”

  ***

  But five hours later the bet was still good.

  Lacey went back to Wanchai police station to write up her report and when she got back to the hospital Li kam-chuen was still hanging on. Emergency surgery had taken almost two hours and the surgeons had put one hundred and forty two stitches in the wounds to his head, neck and back. He would almost certainly lose his arm. He had been transferred to the ICU and Brian Kwok had posted two armed policeman on duty outside.

  “He's still heavily sedated,” the resident told her. “I'll let you have two minutes, Inspector.”

  Li lay on his side, his back and head swathed in dressings, his left arm suspended in a splint. He seemed dwarfed by the battery of blinking machines all around him. There were tubes and wires up his nose, his groin, his chest, and in every vein.

  Lacey leaned over, and whispered, close to his ear, in Cantonese: “Can you hear me, grandfather?”

  His eyes flickered open.

  “My name is Detective Inspector Sian Lacey. Can you tell me who did this to you?”

  The man mumbled something but she could not make it out.

  “Who did this to you?” she repeated.

  “Crazy Eddie,” the man said. “Three men ... but I ... only know ... Crazy Eddie.”

  A name! “Why?”

  His eyes were glassy.

  “Why did Crazy Eddie do this to you?”

  A slow blink.

  She tried again. “Why did Crazy Eddie do this to you, grandfather?”

  “Pirates ... the fragrant harbours ... night.”

  “What?”

  “Guns ... in the dark.”

  The doctor tapped her on the shoulder. Time was up.

  “Try and keep him alive,” Lacey said.

  He gave her a diffident smile. “We do our best.”

  ***

  Lacey would tell anyone who asked her; police work was a straight nine to five job. Nine am to five am.

  It was almost eleven that night when she got back to Wanchai police headquarters on Gloucester Road. Tyler, who ran the squad, was still in his office, peering suspiciously at the words he had punched out on his electric typewriter. He distrusted machines and hated paperwork.

  There was a large take-away Pizza Hut box on the desk. Tyler's Chinese nickname could be roughly translated to ‘Harbour Dredger’, a reference to his eating habits.

  “Back on the health food again,” Lacey said, leaning on the door jamb.

  Tyler could not answer because his mouth was full. He waved her to a chair. Tyler chewed fast and swallowed. “You got the chopping on Hennessey Road?”

  “Yep.”

  “How did it go?”

  “I just wrote out an arrest warrant,” she said, trying to sound as casual as she could.

  Tyler threw another slice of pizza in his mouth and kept typing.

  “Just one?” he said, taking elaborate care over the letter Q.

  “Martin, I have no witnesses and no physical evidence. What do you want?”

  “Blood,” he said.

  “Well there was plenty of that.”

  Tyler looked at his watch, and turned around, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “This warrant. Anyone I know?”

  Lacey made a play of checking her notebook. “Lau Hsu-shui. Ring any bells with you.”

  “Crazy Eddie?”

  Lau Hsu Shui - Eddie Lau or more commonly, Crazy Eddie - had achieved an absolute notoriety in the colony in his twenty nine years of life. He appeared to be a successful, if flamboyant, businessman; he owned five restaurants in Kowloon and Victoria and a penthouse apartment in the Mid-levels.

  But inside the OCTB he had a dossier two inches thick. His name was repeatedly linked with gambling, extortion and narcotics rackets in Wanchai and Mongkok, and he was believed to have attained the rank of 426 Red Pole in the Wo Sing Wo triad, one of Hong Kong's largest criminal fraternities. Until now there had never been any evidence against him that could be used in a court of law.

  “What have you got, Lace?”

  “The victim gave him up in the hospital.”

  Tyler looked doubtful. “Did he die?”

  Lacey shook her head. “He was still alive when I left.”

  Tyler selected a piece of ham off the crust of his pizza and examined it carefully, as if inspecting a gemstone for flaws. “Good luck.”

  “I know what you're thinking.”

  Tyler swallowed the morsel of ham and returned to his typing. He peered at the keyboard, looking for the letter U. “Then I won't say it,” he said.

  Lacey went out.

  “He'll recant!” Tyler shouted after her.

  Chapter 5

  So, some new guy, standing in her office, staring at a link analysis chart. His suit hung on him like a sack. And he was smoking. In her office. Right next to the red lettered sign she had tacked onto the wall that said “No Smoking'.

  “Can you read?” she said.

  He looked around at her and through her. She had seen eyes like that before, but they were the eyes of sixteen-year-old triads, hard and empty. “Sure,” he said. “Something you want me to help you with?” He had an American accent.

  Lacey pointed to the sign.

  “So that's why there aren't ashtrays?”

  “Let me guess. The Marlboro Man?”

  He flicked his cigarette into the waste basket. He held out a hand. “Keelan, John Keelan. Fire Prevention Officer.”

  They stared at each other.

  Dave McReadie walked through the door holding two polystyrene cups of coffee. He looked at Keelan, then at her. “I see you've met John,” he said.

  McReadie was a Chief Superintendent with the Narcotics Bureau. His presence confirmed her first guess about Keelan. “DEA?” she said.

  “We're liaising.”

  Lacey threw herself into her chair. The room stank of tobacco smoke, who did he think he was? “Is he buying up duty free Winstons or does he have business here?”

  Keelan took the coffee from McReadie and sat down. “I didn't mean to offend you, Detective Lacey. I didn't see the sign.”

  “Really? Don't offer to do any surveillance jobs for us.”

  “I haven't made a good first impression, have I?” He smiled apologetically at McReadie, and then at her.

  She turned to McReadie. “How can I help you, Mac?”

  “John is interested in your fisherman.”

  “What fisherman?”

  “The gentleman who was attacked in Hennessey Road this morning.”

  “What's your interest?”

  “Our Bangkok office passed his name to us two days ago,” Keelan said. “We have information linking him to a narcotics ring shipping number four heroin into the United States.”

  Lacey studied him more carefully. If he paid a little more attention to shaving, and if he ironed his shirt in the mornings, he might look a little more like a policeman and less like an encyclopedia salesman down on his luck.

  “Can I ask about the source of your information?”

  “Bangkok won't identify their CI. Standard practice. They just gave us your Mister Li's name, said he was the go-to man for Thai trawlers bringing in Double UO Globe heroin. They said the junk was being transferred to other junks ...” He smiled at his little joke. “ ... just outside Hong Kong waters. This network is run by a man named Edward Lau.”

  Lacey stared at him. “Edward Lau?”

  “You know him?”

  Lacey leaned forward. “Do you have anything else?”

  Keelan shook his head.

  “You mean that's it?”

  McReadie saw what was coming. “Lace ...” he began, but she cut him off with a look.

  “Can you write it down for me?” she said to Keelan.

  “Write it down?”

  “The name of this man you're looking for.”

  “Mister Lau?”

  She nodded.<
br />
  Keelan wrote Edward Lau on a piece of paper and handed it to her. She screwed it up and threw it in the waste bin without looking at it.

  “Yeah, is there a point?” Keelan said.

  “Do you know how many Chinese surnames there are in circulation?”

  “I don't have a phone book with me right now, inspector but ...”

  “In Chinese it is known as lao pai hsing, the Old Hundred Names. But there's not a hundred surnames. In fact there's four hundred and seventy two. Out of a world population of approximately one billion Chinese. A quarter of the world's population with under five hundred surnames between them and you come in here and ask me to find someone called Lau.”

  “I didn't ask if you knew him personally.”

  Lacey let that one pass. “You see, Mister Keelan, in anglicizing a Chinese name you make it unintelligible. For example, someone with the surname Ng could spell it Eng or Ong or even Ing. And that's just part of the problem. Although the written language is the same, the spoken language varies from region to region. For example, our same Mister Ng can go to Peking and become Mister Wu.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “That's not the picture, that's just the frame. Every Chinese has five or six names; the milk name from babyhood, his proper name in childhood, his school name, his business name, his marriage name, his nickname. And if he's a criminal, he may also have a number of aliases as well. That is why it is law in Hong Kong that every resident over the age of sixteen has to carry an identity card bearing their photograph and triple C number.”

  “Triple C?”

  “Chinese Commercial Code. Written Chinese represents an image rather than a sound, unlike the western alphabet. The triple C number comes from the Chinese characters and is almost as unique as a fingerprint. So, if you want our help, we need the name written in Chinese. Otherwise, if you insist, I shall round up everyone called Lau in Hong Kong and transport them to the United States for you, at your own cost, on an armada of perhaps one thousand cruise liners.”