Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  "What the hell is this?" she said, looking at it closer. "What's it mean?"

  "Fourteen K is a Tong," Ray said as he examined it.

  "I know," she said. "It was formed in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek, as an anti-Japanese political organization. Later, they became a secret brotherhood called Hung Fat Shan. Ten years after that, they moved to Hong Kong and switched to heroin, gun smuggling, and extortion. It was nicknamed 14K because 14 was the street address of the Tong's headquarters in Canton. K stood for Karat, the common measure of fineness for gold." She was showing off again, trying to prove to Ray Fong that she knew her stuff and deserved to be with him, even though she suspected she was a far superior detective. She silently cursed herself for this need to impress. Why did she always have to over-perform to just be allowed in the game? She had never been taken seriously, until she had killed the two O. G. B. S.

  They'd been Original Ghetto Bloods, off-brand G-sters from Hawaiian Gardens, which was known among gang-bangers as the Jungle because the developers had over-planted the crummy boxlike ghetto apartments with ferns to disguise the tasteless architecture. She'd only been sixteen when she'd done the two Bloods. It was just two months after Kenetta was killed. She'd been buying groceries for her mother at the 7-Eleven. Without warning, the two smoked-out, chained, and federated ghetto stars rolled on the market. Both decked out in gold jewelry and the Bloods' "federated color" red. They were waving banana-clipped AKs and Trey-five-sevens, and immediately started splashing on everything, first killing the cashier, then two other shoppers. One hapless victim was Miss Bradley, her third-grade gym teacher. When they were through hosing down the market, they saw Tanisha. They pulled her into the back room and started ripping at her clothes.

  "C'mon, sweet meat," one hissed at her, "we gonna do some bone dancin'." They were both tugging at their zippers and not paying close enough attention to her.

  Anger over Kenetta's death fueled her attack.

  She got the nearer one with a shiv she'd been packing since fourth grade. She shoved it into his stomach, right through his leather jacket, and he fell to his knees. His road dog stopped fumbling with his pants and grabbed for her as the first G-ster yelled for help. She slashed the road dog, opening his throat up ear to ear, cutting his jugular. Then, as the first Blood grabbed for her again, she slashed him the same way. Both G-sters fell right there in the back room of the market and were bled out and ash-gray when the police arrived ten minutes later. Tanisha was long gone. She had run through the carnage, out of the 7-Eleven into the night. She had been seen in the market and was later picked up and questioned, but no arrest was ever made.

  To this day, she had nightmares about it. She could feel the narrow blade in her hand, feel the soft rending of flesh as she ended the count for the two dope-sprung dust-bunnies who had actually tried to rape her in the middle of a robbery where they had already killed three people. She hated the memory, but in her neighborhood, she had finally been made by that horrible act of violence. Monster C. said she had "come from the shoulder on the Blood stripers." The ultimate compliment. Li'l Evil said that she'd "ring around the collared" the "off-brand" motherfuckers.

  From that day, she'd been "Rings." It was seventeen years ago and she was still uneasy every time she thought of it.

  As Tanisha looked down at the three dead Bamboo Dragons, she wondered how Wheeler Cassidy felt about the two he'd dropped. She wondered if he felt devalued; wondered if it would stay with him the rest of his life as it had with her.

  "I don't think 1414 stands for the 14K Triad. I never heard of that before," Ray Fong said, changing his mind and interrupting her thoughts.

  "Well, we've gotta find out what it means," she said. "It meant enough to him so he carved it into his arm with a knife, and if these are the guys who killed Angie Wong, they put it on her forehead. I'll get it up to Symbols and Hieroglyphics."

  There was one other tattoo that looked promising in terms of getting an identification. On the right biceps of one of the Bamboo Dragons was the name "China Boy."

  When they got back to the Asian Crimes Task Force, Captain Rick Verba was waiting for them.

  "What the fuck's going on with you?" he said, looking at Ray but not Tanisha.

  "Whatta you mean?" Ray asked.

  Then Verba motioned for them to follow him. They moved through the squad room, past the questioning looks of the on-duty Asian detectives. The Captain's office was at the end of the room. They entered and Rick Verba closed the door. There was a glass window that looked out at the squad room. Verba pulled a curtain, shutting his office from view.

  "What's going on, Skipper?" Ray asked.

  "You fucking amaze me. I get a complaint from some Beverly Hills grande dame named Katherine Cassidy who says you two are out at Cedars together, kicking dirt on the memory of her dead son, Prescott. Making it worse, the complaint is personally delivered by Deputy Chief Matson. Then I find out it's her other son, Wheeler Cassidy, who shot the three home invaders, and he's the same guy who found Angie Wong's body yesterday. These two cases are somehow connected. You two didn't put up a flag. You outta your minds?"

  "We didn't want Major Crimes to jump it. We've got a much better chance of clearing it. It's an Asian situation," Ray said, but he was back on his heels again. "Deputy Chief Matson?" he added in awe. "I never heard of a Deputy Chief delivering a field complaint."

  "Wait outside, will you?" Verba asked Fong. "Don't drift. I'll need you back in here in a minute."

  Ray left the office while Captain Verba glared at Tanisha. He was a middle-aged, heavyset man with gray eyes and a bad case of pattern baldness. The Ab-Roller he got for Christmas wasn't helping. His stomach was mushrooming over his belt. Still, he was not a guy Tanisha wanted to screw around with, especially since Internal Affairs was all over her anyway. It was noteworthy that the two of them were the only non-Asians in Asian Crimes.

  "I'm putting you on a desk, Tisha. I gotta take you outta the field."

  "Why? Because we hooked up on these two cases? We thought if we put 'em together, we'd--"

  "I know what you thought," he interrupted, "and you're right. I probably won't give it to the Major Crimes Cap Unit at Parker Center either ... but you've got Internal Affairs scoping you, Detective. They don't want you in the field. If you were smart, you'd cool off. Instead, you're scrambling after corpses. I got a call this morning. I. A.'s getting set to file on you. I think you need to go talk to your Police Association rep, get some legal advice."

  "Captain, this is all bullshit."

  "The I. A. dicks say you hang out in the hood on weekends. That you go to your grandmother's, which is a known drug house, and you also go to some other house south of Crenshaw every damn Saturday."

  It was true. Her nephew had started dealing, but Tanisha had run him off. She also had a standing appointment at Zadell's every Saturday. Zadell's was a two-chair unlicensed beauty parlor in the back of Zadell Falk's garage south of Manchester. It would do her no good to try and explain to Captain Verba that African-American women can't get their hair done by White hairdressers. Working on Black hair was an artform. Most of the African-American women she knew, from prosecutors to judges, had Black hairdressers. Some still went to hot-comb parlors in the ghetto to get their trims. Before she was a cop, she would wait with the hoochie mamas, who sat on metal chairs in open-toed shoes and talked about babies they'd had with three or four different neighborhood rock stars. Rock stars, south of Manchester, weren't singers--they were boned-out, jive-ass turf-ballers who dealt smack or rock and looked at you with dusty eyes. Tanisha had slowly become a cultural alien in her own neighborhood. It had started when she wouldn't join the Crips, and talked about her middle-class dreams. She made no sense to her friends. They said she was uppity and full of herself. Then after Kenetta died and she started getting A's in school she became more of an outcast. Joining the LAPD was the final defection. She had emigrated to Baldwin Park, but she had a standing weekly appointment at Zadell's. She didn'
t know why she kept going there. Pride, she guessed. She wasn't about to be run off. Conversation between the hoochies kicking there always stopped abruptly while Tanisha was in the chair, her head drenched with hair relaxer to loosen her Afro curls. The hoochies put out a kill-vibe as they painted their nails or looked at their feet until she was gone. Tisha was "the Man," the "PO-lice." She'd been coming to Zadell's since she was sixteen, but now she felt uncomfortable and couldn't get out fast enough.

  Captain Verba looked down at a pad where he had written some notes. "This gang killer, Parnell Davis, called Li'l Evil. I. A. thinks you gave up a Crash case to him. When they rolled on Parnell's crack house, the place was clean as Crisco."

  "Captain, that was a very sloppy bust. Crash was working half-a-dozen zooted-up informants for info. Any one of them could've given up the operation. I admit, I've known Parnell since I was ten. We went to junior high together. My baby sister died in his arms, but I didn't give up any case to him. This isn't about that anyway."

  "What's it about then?" he said softly.

  "Lieutenant Hawley in the Crash Unit couldn't get in my pants, so he sold me off to the Shooflies."

  "If that's true, I'm sorry. It's also not my problem. I. A. wanted you out of commission 'till they could get enough on you to bring a hearing. They finally think they have enough. You need to get the police union into this. Either way, you're off the Wong killing."

  "Who's going to work it?"

  "Turn everything you have over to Ray Fong."

  The LAPD had targeted her for extinction.

  Tisha and Ray went to lunch. It was an awkward meal where not much was said. Ray told her he thought she'd been handed a raw deal. Then he followed her over to her house and she gave him the rat, which was still in her freezer.

  "Really sucks. I'm sure you'll win the I. A. review," Ray said without much conviction.

  "I have a girlfriend who's a homicide lieutenant. She's married to a patrol officer who beats her up. One night, a month ago, he's feeling particularly frisky, she's finally had enough so she calls the cops. They live in Santa Monica, so naturally the Santa Monica P. D. gets the squeal. When the responding unit found out her husband was in L. A. Patrol, they didn't arrest him, even though she's an LAPD loot, and she's standing right in front of them bleeding like a club fighter. The next morning, she got pulled in front of an Internal Affairs review board and chastised for calling the Santa Monica cops and bringing disgrace on the L. A. Department. This bullshit that's going on with me is just more dog pound protocol," she said.

  "Y'know, from time to time, I'd like to swing by," Ray said unexpectedly. "Maybe we could go over the case. I could sorta keep you involved, so once you get through this I. A. thing, you'll still be up to speed."

  "Who's gonna buy the wine?" she said sarcastically.

  "Look, Tisha ... it wouldn't be so bad."

  "You're a good guy, Ray. Let's not spoil it."

  Finally he just smiled and shook her hand. "Good luck," he said and left her there. He moved down the walk, got in his car, and drove away.

  That night, at a little past two A. M., Tanisha's phone rang. She rolled over and fumbled it out of the cradle.

  "You okay?" It was Rick Verba calling.

  "Yeah, Captain, why?"

  "Just checking ... Go back to sleep."

  "Captain . . ." But he was gone. She lay in bed trying to get her mind to work. A Division Commander didn't call you at two A. M. just to see if you were sleeping soundly. She rolled up and sat on the side of the bed. Then she called the office.

  "Asian Crimes Task Force," the operator said.

  "This is Tanisha, who's this?" she asked.

  "Ellen," the operator said. Ellen was one of four Asian operators that worked the phones at ACTF. She was a civilian employee who spoke seven different Oriental languages, including the three most common Chinese dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fukienese.

  "Is everything okay down there?" Tanisha asked.

  "Not exactly . . ."

  "What's up?"

  "Somebody got Ray Fong. . . . He's dead. Shot in the head!"

  "Goddamn," she said. A sickening feeling swept over her.

  "I gotta go, Tisha. This place is going nuts."

  Tanisha dressed without even looking at what she pulled out of the closet. Twenty minutes later, she was in the squad room getting the gory details.

  Ray's car had been found on Hill Street, one block away from Chinatown, by a cruising patrol car. Ray had been slumped over, his face on the wheel. When the officer tipped him back, he had seen that the detective's forehead was missing.

  A1 Katsukura had the case. He didn't have much time to talk to Tanisha, saying only that the shot appeared to have come through the driver's side window. Ray had apparently rolled down the glass to talk to his killer and had been shot in the face. She told A1 that Ray had been working a trace on one of the dead Bamboo Dragons. His possible street name was "China Boy." A1 nodded, made a note, and hurried out the door. That was it. Ray Fong was E. O. W.--End of Watch.

  She stood in the squad room while detectives streamed in with their hair badly combed. It was three-fifteen A. M., but they stood around in the corridor and leaned on the walls. She'd seen this kind of thing before when cops were shot. Everybody came to work and just hung there, hoping somebody would get lucky and bring the killer in. All of them stifling fantasies of being allowed to walk into a holding cell while the rest of the watch was magically off getting coffee, then slowly and efficiently kick the doer's nuts up between his eyes. It was powerful hatred.

  Tanisha was one of them, but then again, she was not. She felt like she did at Zadell's every Saturday. So after about a half-hour of playing eye-tag with the complement of Asian cops, she went down and got in her car and drove over to Hill Street. She knew she'd have no trouble finding the crime scene. It would be taped off and guarded. There would probably be half-a-dozen lab techs and some TV news crews hovering.

  She drove past the spot where Ray Fong had gone E. O. W. As she imagined, there was a lot of police and news activity, despite the hour. She cruised on by and rolled slowly into Chinatown. The neon was off, the streets eerie and quiet. She wondered what Ray had been doing down here.

  Two blocks from where he was killed, she saw something that made her put on her brakes and pull to the curb.

  It was a Chinese "social club," local headquarters of the Chin Lo Triad in Los Angeles. It was an unimpressive stucco building with a red door. The shabby, plain architecture revealed little about the activities inside, but Tanisha had done her research. She knew it housed the L. A. branch of a huge international criminal Triad, also known in Chinatown as the "Neighborhood Welfare Society." A misnomer if ever there was one. The Chin Lo certainly didn't have neighborhood welfare as a goal. Again, as she'd been taught to do at the Academy, she tried to arrange the facts to construct the story.

  Known facts: The three men whom Wheeler Cassidy surprised in his brother's house were undoubtedly Snake Riders, illegal Chinese immigrants. The Chin Lo Triad was one of the largest smugglers of immigrants from China to Hong Kong to America. They also used their influence over frightened Chinese businesses in Chinatown, forcing them to employ the Snake Riders. Then the Triad would collect the immigrants' wages as payment for travel services rendered. The one clue Ray had was "China Boy" tattooed on the dead boy's arm.

  Now some suppositions: She wondered if Ray had gone to the name file database. In the Crash Unit, cops would enter gang-bangers' street names into the system so they could pull up a real identity from the colorful gang handles. ACTF also had a street name database. Questions boiled in her mind. She wondered if Ray had found out who China Boy was. She wondered if the Chin Lo Triad had brought China Boy to America and if China Boy had figured out that he would never pay off his Triad Snake Rider loan working in a restaurant. All his earnings there would barely keep him even with the vigorish. She wondered if, like so many before him, China Boy had joined the Bamboo Dragons and
had begun committing more dangerous crimes to pay off his debt. She questioned if that was why he might have been in Angie Wong's basement and Prescott Cassidy's bedroom and then finally had become a guest of honor in Dr. Death's canoe factory. Lastly, she wondered if Ray had come here to ask questions, parking a block and a half up the street, and if he'd come away with something--something big enough and scary enough that somebody inside had followed him back to his car and pulled the trigger, sending the Asian cop off to be with his sacred ancestors.

  She wondered all of this and more as she sat there looking at the unimpressive front door of the Los Angeles branch of the most dangerous criminal organization in the world.

  Chapter 12.

  Tape

  When he was released from the hospital the next morning, Wheeler went directly from Cedars-Sinai to the W. C. C. grill. Two reasons: First, he needed a drink and some company to calm his nerves, which were pretty damn jangled; and second, he had made all of the network news feeds, often being referred to as a neighborhood hero. He didn't think it would hurt his precarious situation at the club to make a show and "aw shucks" his way through a few hours of complimentary bullshit. Shallow reason, but there you have it.

  He hobbled in there on crutches at around ten-thirty, his left leg bandaged like a mummy's, waving and smiling at people who hated him. He eased himself down on Home Plate, leaned his crutches in the corner, and told Ramon to "hit the gas."

  An hour later, he was still accepting compliments.

  Dr. Clay "Rusty" Collins and Luther Harrison were his current hero worshipers, sipping beer and commiserating enthusiastically.

  "I tell you, Wheeler, the way things are going in L. A., you can't drive your car without some asshole trying to take it away from you at gunpoint, or make a freeway lane change without dodging gunfire. Our wives and daughters aren't safe. The cops are so compromised they don't even try and catch the criminals anymore. The courts are a joke, the prisons overflowing. The whole L. A. basin's a war zone." This paralyzing social complaint from Dr. Rusty Collins, a plastic surgeon whose own hold-up weapon was a number ten scalpel, which he wielded maniacally, doing nose, tit, and tummy-tucks on Beverly Hills housewives who didn't need them.