Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Three years, three years, two years, three Blood stains a river, bones cover the hill White flower open, red flower blooming Three, three makes nine, eighteen years Master and servant stop shedding tears Brightness regained, eyes wiped dry Blood stains a river, red flower and sky."

  Then Fu Hai crossed the two-plank bridge, walking slowly, with more pride in his heart than he had felt in his entire life. At the other side of the bridge, he was kissed on the cheek by both the White Fan and the Incense Master. Then Wo Lap Ling embraced him and welcomed him to the Family. The Shan Chu thanked him for his incredible bravery.

  Fu Hai had never felt more alive.

  Tradition said that after the initiation, there was to be a three-day feast, but Fu Hai had been singled out for a great honor. As a new member of the Triad who had requested passage to America, he would now be in charge of 180 Snake Riders. He would be an honored Snakehead who would travel with them, supervising their journey and finally delivering them to the Bamboo Dragons in Los Angeles.

  Fu Hai's dreams were all finally coming true.

  An hour after they left Macao, one of Willy's vanguards finally got around to checking the Macao airport. Using his Guan-Xi, he got into the American Airlines computer manifest. On the passenger list of flight 821 to Los Angeles, he saw the two names he was looking for: Wheeler Cassidy and Tanisha Williams. He called Willy Wo Lap from the airport and told him of the discovery.

  Before American flight 821 had even cleared the Pacific Rim, Willy was already making arrangements for his enemies' arrival in Los Angeles.

  *

  PART THREE

  THE SMART M0NEY

  Chapter 29.

  Dry Dragon

  Lo Sing's favorite Zodiac animal was the Dragon. Dragons were said to be strong and commanding. Lo Sing felt he was also very strong and commanding. Dragons were supposed to be leaders, and Lo Sing headed up a fighting section of the L. A. Bamboo gang, which was one of the largest and most vicious street gangs or Tongs in Southern California.

  Because he admired the qualities of the Dragon, Lo Sing chose Dragon as his gang name. He had been Dragon until somebody in his L. A. Tong found out that he couldn't swim and was desperately afraid of the water. Magically, after that, he had become Dry Dragon, which was a name that pleased him not at all. However, it had stuck, and now Dry Dragon and two of his enforcers waited outside the Customs area of American Airlines in Los Angeles. All were armed with 9mm Berettas and physical descriptions of the two Americans they were to "capture, search, and then kill without mercy," although Dry Dragon intended to change that sequence.

  Lo Sing looked over at his best enforcer, White Wolf. White Wolf was Tsang Lo Jin and, like Dry Dragon, was originally from Fukien Province in China. He was tall, with long, stringy muscles which made him lightning-quick. White Wolf would kill on command for Dry Dragon. He had proved this already, several times.

  Over at the terminal gate, scanning the first passengers coming off American flight 821, was Lo Sing's cousin, Luck Wu, whose gang name was Blue Dog. Dogs were supposed to be watchful and alert, responsible and patient, all qualities that Luck Wu lacked in startling proportions. He was distracted, dull-witted, irresponsible, and barely alert. He did share one characteristic with the Zodiac symbol he had chosen for his gang name. He was defensive. Never would Luck Wu stand still for any criticism, always blaming others for his failures.

  Dry Dragon would have preferred to leave his shirking cousin home, but had promised himself to try and teach Luck Wu the art of street warfare.

  There were three other Bamboo Dragons in cars at the airport parking lot. Dry Dragon would contact them by walkie-talkie the minute he spotted the handsome, dark-haired man and the Black woman. He had decided not to try anything at the airport. There were several reasons for this decision. First: There were new Snake Riders coming in on phony passports from Hong Kong one terminal over on Singapore Air, and he didn't want to chance a shootout that would close down the airport and make it harder for those immigrants to post entry. Second: There was always a large police presence at the airport, and he didn't want to run that risk. Third: There were too many witnesses and too many cameras. And last: The airport traffic was accessed by one road, and they could too easily get trapped on the premises. So they had chosen another way. Dry Dragon and his two enforcers stood near the Customs area and waited with relatives of passengers from Macao.

  It was unseasonably hot in Los Angeles. He could feel the desert heat in the wind as it blew across the loading zones from the parking lot, scattering leaves and scantily dressed L. A. women.

  He inched closer as he watched the passengers coming up the ramp from Customs and Immigration: Chinese businessmen carrying their computers and overnight bags; old Chinese ladies pulling airport luggage carts stacked with suitcases and taped-up boxes. And then he saw them.

  The man was larger than he had expected, over six feet. He moved with athletic grace, and Dry Dragon promised himself to take no chances with him. The woman was a beautiful, light-skinned Negro. She walked with a purposeful stride, her eyes scanning the waiting crowd as if she expected trouble. Dry Dragon looked over at the vigilant White Wolf, who had also made the identification.

  Over at the far gate, his cousin, Blue Dog, was leaning on the rail, paying no attention, looking at a girl standing by the magazine stand. Dry Dragon quickly moved to his cousin and punched him on the back. Luck Wu snapped his head around, glaring with mean, violent eyes. Blue Dog may have been shifty and irresponsible, but he was also homicidal and prone to violence.

  "They have arrived," he said in his native Fukienese. As they moved toward the curb outside, Dry Dragon pulled out his walkie-talkie and told his soldiers in the parking lot to pull up. He watched with interest as the two targets moved out of the terminal and across the airport center island, heading back toward the parking lot for the domestic terminal. Dry Dragon, White Wolf, and Blue Dog followed, twenty yards back, not sure where they were headed. Then the handsome man and Black woman entered the United Airlines parking lot and approached a red Jag XK8. It was covered with dust and looked like it had been there for at least a week.

  "United parking lot, red Jag, move up now," Dry Dragon said in Fukienese into his walkie-talkie. He had never been able to learn Mandarin, finding the new mandated language of his homeland impossible to grasp.

  They followed at a distance as the two Americans got into the dust-covered Jag, backed up, and pulled out of the lot.

  The Tong members separated now. Blue Dog and White Wolf got in a green Ford with another Tong gangster. Blue Dog took over behind the wheel. Dry Dragon joined two more teen-aged shooters in a white Pinto. They followed the red Jag out of the airport and up onto the 405 Freeway toward San Diego. They had two Russian assault rifles in each car, and each Bamboo Dragon wore a bulletproof vest.

  They had practiced all afternoon and knew exactly what they planned to do. Once they were out of the airport, Dry Dragon would pick a spot and give the signal on the walkie-talkie. The white Pinto in the lead would then scream up and head the Jag into the curb. The green Ford would lock it there from behind. They would surround the targets, killing them with a blast of withering automatic gunfire. Then Dry Dragon himself would get behind the Jag's wheel, and in seconds they would be headed back to a waiting garage next door to the Chin Lo headquarters in Chinatown. Dry Dragon had been told what he was looking for-- a document written on rice paper in Mandarin Chinese. Since he could not read Mandarin, the document had been carefully described to him. It was two pages long, with a seal that looked like a brilliant red square with a maze of characters inside its border. Once within the safety of the garage, they would search the bodies and the car and take back what the Americans had stolen from the Triad's Red Flower Pavilion in Hong Kong. Dry Dragon would be honored for his bravery. He would be rewarded and gain much Guan-Xi. . . .

  It didn't happen exactly the way he'd planned.

  Tanisha checked the Glock, chambered a round, and tu
rned to look again out the back window. She could see the white Pinto following behind them on the freeway, then saw a green Ford changing lanes, hurrying to catch up. She reached into her purse for her cellphone, turned it on, and got nothing. In the six days since she'd charged it, the battery had died. "Where's the car phone?" she asked.

  "In the trunk. I always lock it in there when I leave my car at the airport."

  She watched as both cars changed lanes to stay behind them.

  "How did I miss these guys at the airport?" she said. "We're being followed. Two carloads. At the interchange, take the One-ten south. Get off on Manchester. It's about two miles."

  "You're gonna take these guys into Watts?"

  "Three good things happen when we get into South Central."

  "I gotta hear this."

  "One: There are more cops to the mile down there than in all the other police divisions in the city, so we've got a much better chance of backup and capture. I want to jack these guys. Two: I know the terrain and I can even the odds down there. And three: These G-sters are gonna be in unfriendly territory. If they get caught out of their cars in my hood, they're gonna be fighting to save their own wallets, watches, and balls. The homies don't give a damn, 'cause everybody's strapped down here. Once we're off on Manchester, turn left on Broadway, one block east of the freeway--we'll make a run for the South Division Station. It's on Seventy-seventh Street. It's a fortress. We get there, we're safe."

  They took the 110 Harbor Freeway and headed south, toward the most dangerous ten square miles in L. A.

  Dry Dragon was surprised when the red Jag transitioned onto the Harbor Freeway, heading south. He was surprised again when the car took the Manchester Avenue off-ramp. He pressed the key on his walkie-talkie. "Move up," he instructed.

  Now both pursuing cars pulled into the slow lane and took the Manchester turn-off. Manchester was in the D. M. Z. between L. A. and Watts. Like most border areas, it had taken on the protective coloring of its rougher neighbor: Steel grates were pulled down in front of bulletproof windows; graffiti-scarred liquor stores seemed to dot every street corner; motels and tire stores sat side by side.

  "We're going to do it now," Dry Dragon said nervously over his walkie-talkie.

  The Pinto, with Dry Dragon inside, squealed up to overtake the red Jag. Two of the four Bamboo Dragon gangsters in the Pinto leaned out of the windows, waving assault rifles, as the Pinto attempted to run the Jag to the curb. But Wheeler saw it coming and immediately turned right on Broadway. The Pinto missed the turn and went shooting off, down Manchester.

  "Turn left!" Tanisha shouted, her voice shrill in the closed plush interior. "There's a narrow alley ahead, goes for six blocks. Go right at the alley," she yelled.

  Wheeler found it and started to speed along, hitting the rain run-offs that transected the alley at every block corner. Only the green Ford was behind them now, trying desperately to stay up with the faster Jag.

  Inside the Ford, Blue Dog cursed in anger as he fought the wheel. He had never been down here before. He didn't know his way around; worse still, as he glanced out the window, he thought this might be L. A.'s Black ghetto. White Wolf, sitting beside him, triggered the walkie-talkie and started screaming out street names to Dry Dragon, hoping the leader in the lost white Pinto would intersect and get back in the game, but that wasn't going to happen, because the white Pinto had already crashed into a chain-link fence that surrounded an outdoor basketball court on the corner of Manchester and Elm, knocking down the backboard.

  Dry Dragon and his two accomplices got out to check the damage and found themselves staring at ten angry Black basketball players.

  "Hey, chump! You fuckin' with our B-ball. We gonna break on yer Chink bullshit asses."

  "Huh?" Dry Dragon said. What happened next was painful and not easy to watch. The three Bamboo Dragons were surrounded and punched into unconsciousness.

  In the alley a few blocks away the Jag miraculously slowed, allowing the green Ford to get closer.

  "Pull up, get alongside," White Wolf said, not seeing the trap. Blue Dog pulled the green Ford up, and White Wolf leaned out the passenger window, firing a long stream of bullets at the foreign car. His aim was badly skewed as the Ford hit one of the rain runoffs, bouncing hard on its shocks. Most of the rounds either chipped off the pavement or went wild into the air. White Wolf yelled at Blue Dog to pull back up alongside. Then, unexpectedly, the Jag swerved left and Blue Dog saw a chance to pull even by passing on the right. He shoved the accelerator down and sped up next to the XK8.

  "No ... no, not this side!" White Wolf screamed, but it was already too late. White Wolf, holding his smoking Russian machine gun, was trapped on the wrong side of the car. Blue Dog found himself looking down the barrel of Tanisha's plastic Glock, which was pointed out the passenger window, only inches from his nose. His Chinese features contorted in distress. He finally achieved two of the mythic characteristics of his Zodiac animal: In the brief seconds before Tanisha pulled the trigger, Blue Dog finally became watchful and alert. As the gun fired, he swung the wheel and skidded the green Ford sideways. The bullet missed. The Ford swerved out of control, and as the Jag sped away out of danger, the Ford hit a telephone pole. The explosive impact stood the car up on its nose. All three Kevlar-vested Bamboo Dragons flew head first out the front windshield and bounced on the rough asphalt. None of them survived.

  The South Division Station was heavily guarded. There were parking lot details that worked a constant beat; there were also police marksmen on the roof. The division was in the worst crime area in the city and the station had been bombed more than once, so it was protected like a fortress. The parking lot guards, armed with M-16s, looked up in surprise as the red Jag screamed down Broadway toward them, the horn honking, the high beams flashing. The guards brought their weapons up to firing position and sighted on the Jag.

  "Is this one of our undercovers?" one of the guards screamed.

  "An XK8? You fuckin' nuts?" the second guard answered.

  They were getting set to fire when the Jag turned left on 77th Street and crashed through the fence and barricade, shuddering to a stop inside the parking lot.

  The two parking lot guards ran toward the red Jag, weapons cocked and ready.

  "Out of the car, hands in the air!" they shouted.

  "Detective Williams," Tanisha shouted back. "Asian Crimes. I'm a cop." She had her badge in her hand, out the window.

  "You fuckin' nuts? You don't come roarin' in here unannounced like that," the parking lot guard said, his heart pumping adrenaline, his finger tightly wrapped around the trigger. Then both guards stepped back, and still pointing their assault rifles, ordered them out of the car.

  Chapter 30.

  If It Has Four Legs and Is Not a Table, Then Eat It.

  Ellen Ming sat in the small room that housed the switchboard at Asian Crimes and listened in on the phone call she had just patched through to Captain Verba at his home. The call had come in from Tanisha Williams. It was two in the morning. Ellen had made the connection, waking the grumpy Captain, telling him that Tanisha had an urgent situation, and then she stayed on the line, undetected, and listened as the Black detective gave a brief description of what had happened on her way in from the airport. Tanisha told Captain Verba that she was still at the new South Division Station in South Central and needed to see him right away.

  "Jesus, Tanisha, it's the fucking middle of the night," Captain Verba said, his voice filled with sleep and anger at being awakened. "That could have just been an attempted car-jack. You say you were in a new XK8?"

  Ellen listened as Tanisha spoke slowly for emphasis. "Captain, it wasn't a car-jack. This is big. Bigger than anything we've ever worked on down there. Wait till you read this document we got out of Triad headquarters in Hong Kong."

  The Captain agreed to get up, but he didn't want to drive all the way to South Division in the middle of the night. "I'll meet you in the coffee shop at the Westin in half an hour," he said
, the Westin being a fifteen-story hotel on Hill Street that catered mostly to Asian businessmen. It was familiar ground, an Asian Crimes after-work watering hole.

  "Captain, I don't think--"

  "Listen, Detective, you got a pile of trouble right now." Verba's voice was gaining strength as he woke up. "I. A. went into your Police Academy ap. You told me you had family problems in Cleveland. According to them, you don't have any relatives in Cleveland. They think you're ducking them 'cause you're guilty, and frankly, so do I. I'll see you at the Westin in half an hour," and he hung up.

  Ellen Ming disconnected the phone patch and sat very still in the Dispatch Center. She was thirty-six and delicate, with exotic Asian features. She had been in America for only four years, having grown up in Shanghai. She had gotten married at fifteen and had two children there. Her husband had died of dysentery, and her children had left China in their mid-teens, Riding the Snake to America. In order to secure their passage, she had personally guaranteed the huge cost demanded by the Chin Lo Triad. She had been a schoolteacher in Shanghai, but had lost her job. In order to pay for her children's voyage, she had finally been forced to dance at Triad nightclubs in Hong Kong. After three years of nude dancing and prostitution, she had finally gained favor with a powerful Triad enforcer who eventually arranged for her to join her son and daughter in L. A.

  She managed to avoid dancing in Triad clubs in L. A.'s Chinatown by getting another job teaching school. She was extremely quick with language and soon mastered English. But her family still owed large sums of money to the Chin Lo, and they lived in squalor as she and her son and daughter all struggled to pay back what they owed. The Bamboo street gangs took everything her children made working in a Chinatown restaurant, plus what she made teaching school. They ate only what they could steal. Since she was a child in the streets of Shanghai, hunger had pursued her like a ravenous dog, growling in the pit of her stomach. There was a Cantonese joke about hunger: "If it flies in the air and is not an airplane, if it swims in the sea and is not a submarine, if it has four legs and is not a table, then eat it."