by Henry Chang
Down the corridor, what sounded like a commotion made him pause, brush back his hand against the Colt on his hip, before turning that corner. He heard, “It was Lucky. That motherfucker!” in angry Toishanese. “Put yit mon ten thousand on his head!”
“Shut the fuck up!” a second voice yelled. Something overturned and a crash thumped. He thought he’d heard those voices before. At the hospital.
“And that faggot Jojo too! Yit mon each!”
“Dew nei louh mouh motherfucker, where’s that idiot from downstairs?”
Before Jack could move, a handyman rushed past him carrying a big bolt cutter. Jack turned the corner behind him and watched him go into No. 808.
Charley Joe was barking “Lun yeung idiot! Who asked you to call 911?”
“Duey m’jee!” Ah Fai kowtowed. “Sorry, but I saw all the blood, and he was moaning.”
“Cut the cuffs off! Hurry!”
Jack stepped into the doorway, saw Dup Choy on the couch, just a beaten bloody face. To his right, the handyman chopping off the handcuffs chaining Charley Joe to the overturned table. There was a safe that was partly open.
He pushed aside the man and used his own handcuff key to free Dup Choy, who fell silent.
“You were saying?” Jack smiled.
“Fuck you,” Charley Joe said, cuing Dup Choy. “We got nothing to say. He slipped and fell.” Choy angrily spat out a bloody clot.
“Lucky and Jojo?” Jack pressed.
“Shut the fuck up,” Charley warned Dup Choy as he slammed his chopped handcuffs to the floor. “And you get the fuck out of my office before I call the real cops.”
EMS techs appeared in the doorway, saw bloody Choy.
“He had an accident,” Charley Joe said in his good Chinatown English. “Could use some cleaning up.”
The emergency techs prepped some first aid and the handyman gladly left the office. Jack thought about surveillance tapes and eye-fucked Charley on the way out.
“Ha chi la,” warned Jack. “Next time.”
“I’ll be waiting, lun yeung,” Charley spat, “cop prick.”
The closed-circuit system ended in the management office, where they reused and reloaded the videotapes.
The building manager’s office was on the seventeenth floor, which was really the sixteenth floor, Jack knew, because Chinese high-rises didn’t designate the fourteenth floors. The Chinese numbers for 14, yat say, were synonymous with certain death, so no Chinese would ever lease on that floor.
Just below the roof, the manager’s corner office had floor-to-ceiling windows, a great view of lower Manhattan spreading out from Chatham Square and the Chinatown rooftops below. For a moment, Jack imagined neighborhood teenagers running across those rooftops.
The building manager was absent, but his assistant seemed concerned at the sight of Jack’s badge and was happy to cooperate. He rewound all the tapes back a half hour as Jack instructed. The incident was fresh and Jack wanted to see how two assailants had gotten access to Charley Joe’s office.
The assistant left him at the TV monitors and Jack reviewed the grainy black-and-white videotape. From the lobby view he saw how lax security was, people coming and going without any restriction. Typical for commercial buildings in Chinatown.
He saw the handyman who’d rushed to the office. Ah Fai, they’d called him. There was a group going by, mostly women, pausing for the elevators.
He was looking for two men, Lucky and another man named Jojo. A woman entered, stumbled, and spilled her handbag. She stooped to the floor, and Ah Fai assists her as two workmen pass them by.
He rewound the lobby view, watched it again.
The group goes by, followed by a lone woman.
The woman stumbles.
Ah Fai helps her pick up items from the floor.
Two workmen in hard hats pass by, heading for the elevators. The lone woman scoops up her belongings and leaves the building. She exits to the left, toward Chatham Square. Ah Fai is alone in the lobby.
He cued the elevator tapes for the time stamp. There were three elevators, designated by numbers 1, 2, 3. The group of travelers entered No. 1. Door closes, and floor indicator shows sixth-floor destination.
Several office workers ride down No. 2 and exit to the street-level lobby.
The two workmen take No. 3, exit onto the eighth floor.
He rewound the tapes and refocused. The group of ladies exits onto the sixth floor. Elevator No. 2 sits empty in the lobby on call. The two hard hats in No. 3, keeping their heads low, huddle over a tool bag. Their bodies block the view as they transfer something into their coveralls. They exit on eight, going left in the direction of Room 808.
The elevator views showed nothing unusual for the next ten minutes. Office workers heading down to lunch, slowing the elevators as they stopped on almost every floor. The two workmen never reappeared on any of the elevators.
He realized it clearly then. If they were fleeing a crime scene, would they wait for an elevator during the lunch-hour rush? There were no cameras in the stairway, just the one view on the roof door and another where the stairs exited out to the lobby.
No one exited to the roof. On the second tape he saw people, mostly impatient workers from the lower floors, exiting into the lobby. Several minutes into the tape, he saw them, the two hard hats going through the stairwell door into the lobby. He checked the time stamp and synced the lobby tape to it. The view showed the two men exiting the building, turning left toward Chatham Square. 12:03 p.m. He never got a good look at their faces, just the tops of their hard hats.
He narrowed his eyes and focused on the time line.
At 11:46 a.m. a group of travelers enters the lobby. Followed by a lone woman a few steps behind. At 11:49 two workmen enter the lobby, take elevator No. 3 to the eighth floor. At 12:02 p.m. the call comes in to 911—a woman from one of the eighth-floor offices. Reported that she heard yelling. At 12:03 a call from the maintenance-room extension. A garbled report in broken English, presumably Ah Fai. At 12:03 the two hard hats exit from the stairwell through the lobby.
At 12:05 he’d gotten the patch-through message from the Fifth Precinct to respond to 2 Mott. He saw himself enter the lobby at 12:07, take Elevator No. 1 to the eighth floor.
Figuring for the time line and reviewing the tapes, they’d already had a half-hour head start on him.
Looking out the tall windows, he appreciated this piece of lower Manhattan. Two streets to the right of Chatham Square sat the hulking block of police headquarters, One Police Plaza. Not the direction in which two guys who’d just committed a crime would go. He began to see Lucky’s scheme more clearly than any videotape could show.
Two blocks to the north, the Manhattan Bridge led the way to Brooklyn or Queens. Park a car outside Confucius Towers. Or take one of the see gays who hang out near there. Or even a minivan sai ba to Flushing.
No videotape was going to show them dropping their hard hats into the corner garbage at Catherine Street, or chucking the clipboard and the coil of cable on the other side of Division. But he saw it all with a wicked clarity, knowing Lucky as he did.
He also wondered how the call had come his way.
If Captain Marino wanted a report, he wasn’t going to like the one he was going to get. Officially, he’d responded to the 2 Mott location to find one injured man bleeding about the head and face and another man apparently unhurt. They declined help from NYPD, stating that the injured party had fallen and would be treated by local doctor(s). They declined EMS aid beyond First Aid, and claimed that the 911 Emergency calls were inadvertent and incorrect.
The woman in the adjacent office who called 911 stated that she heard angry yelling but couldn’t make out the context because of the different dialects. She had feared a fight was occurring.
The janitor offered conflicting statements and then refused to co
mment further.
The EMS report would indicate lacerations to the head, a broken nose, and broken teeth. All of which could have occurred as a result of a fall. Patient aided and EMS departed as TPO.
He didn’t have any proof that an assault occurred and only knew of Lucky’s involvement through what he overheard in the corridor outside the office. If Charley Joe and Dup Choy weren’t going to press charges, intending to take matters into their own hands, then there was no crime to report. Just another Chinatown dodge.
The answers to the questions he had for Lucky weren’t in Manhattan, he knew. He left 2 Mott for Confucius Towers Parking. With the Mustang gunning through Queens, he’d arrive in Flushing Chinatown in twenty minutes.
The One-O-Nine
Thousands of Chinese, Koreans, Indians and Pakistanis passing by as he parked the Mustang. Main Street looking like a foreign port.
The 109th Precinct covered all of Flushing Chinatown, including Main Street, Lucky’s last known destination. He was also looking for an accomplice named Jojo.
When he punched up the precinct’s CompStat reports the number of incidents followed the categories of homicide, assaults, robbery, vice, gang-related and other bullets. When he narrowed it to Asian businesses and organizations the numbers shrank. No killings recently but robbery and assaults rising, probably aided by a gang-related upsurge. He didn’t see anything with Lucky’s footprints.
He ran the aka for “Jojo” and found none.
The Organized Crime Control Bureau, OCCB, listed some familiar names under Asian organized crime groups: Hip Ching Benevolent Association, On Yee Merchants Association, Fook Hing Benevolent Society, Taiwanese Big Bamboo, even the Mumbai Mafia. Their street soldiers wearing the tags of the Black Dragons, Ghost Legion, Fuk Ching Boys, Seoul Power, Mumbai Mob, and Bamboo Circle.
He knew Lucky was in a hotbed, but when he ran Jojo’s tag he again came up empty.
Plenty of yellow crime, though.
There were a lot of Chinese nearby in Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, mostly those Chinatown families who could afford to or had saved enough money, following the subway lines out to Queens in the exodus that began in the 1970s. The formerly white communities welcomed, absorbed them. Out of the Chinatown tenements at last, and only a dozen stops, a half hour on the subway back for bok choy, fresh fish, and flank steak.
Nowadays Chinese supermarkets and shopping malls had made everything available in those communities. The only reason to take the subway back was to visit those they’d left behind, and for the crowds on Chinese New Year’s Day.
He ran CompStat for the Heights and Elmhurst, the 110th Precinct, as well.
Familiar names again, the Hip Ching and the On Yee Associations, both old-school and old-line Chinatown organized crime following the expansion of their turf into Queens. Any of Lucky’s connections could help him here also. Mostly incidences of illegal mah-jongg parlors and high-stakes poker games, casino nights at karaoke clubs. ATF violations for untaxed cigarettes and alcohol. Interesting crimes but no Jojo.
When he stroked the OCCB database for JOJO, he hit a trifecta; there were three aka JoJos. One African-American, Joe “JoJo” Johnson; one Hispanic, Johnny “Jojo” Cespedes; and one Chinese, Man Tit Yang aka “JoJo” or “Jojo Yang.”
Two years earlier, the OCCB raided an On Yee massage parlor in Elmhurst, in the course of which they arrested one Man Tit Yang aka Jojo, for pandering, possession of forged instruments (credit cards), and resisting arrest.
From his NYS driver’s license, a picture of him emerged. A handsome guy with an edgy face, he was thirty-six years old. A low-level playa, a wannabe mack. From the name, Jack knew he was Chiu Chao, probably a member of the Fook Hing, a smaller subset of the On Yee tong.
According to the listings in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce there were twelve massage parlors within the confines of the 109th Precinct and another twelve in the adjacent 110th. Many of them were listed as spas. He knew he wouldn’t have the time to check them all out. He could catch a call from Manhattan South and didn’t want to get caught out too long on a no-case. But at least he had a picture now.
Jojo had pleaded out to the pandering, paid a fine. The bogus credit cards were tossed because a judge saw illegal search and seizure. The charge of resisting arrest was dropped.
Arrested along with him was one Jadine Jung, a Canadian Chinese former runaway from Vancouver. She was twenty-six years old, her mug shot, otherwise a naturally pretty face, almost a scowl.
The driver’s license had an Elmhurst address for Jojo, ten minutes back down the highway toward Manhattan.
If he could find Jojo, he’d find Lucky.
When he got back to the car his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The number looked vaguely familiar but he let it go to message. Schedule an appointment? It was May McCann.
Oh, hell no, he was thinking, as he fired up the Mustang.
Crib
The studio was a far cry from the hooker hostel in New Hyde Park. A mini loft with wood floors, a stainless steel kitchen wall, a bathroom with stone vanity and tub. He sat on a luxe armchair in the middle of the big room, opposite a media wall of flat-screen TV and CD stereo.
Images danced across the muted TV screen. He had a CD playing low key, a sax medley.
He finished the little pipe bowl of sinsemilla and let it play out to ashes. The potent weed calmed him, brought his thoughts around to Sun Tzu’s greatest hits. All warfare is deception. He knew to plan ahead. Stay on the move. A small force can defeat a large force. Taking another swallow from the tumbler of XO, he scanned the room.
At the far end was a sleeping area, a full futon mattress screened off behind black wood Chinese panels. There was a picture window there, overlooking the low-rise rooftops of Main Street across the expressway.
He kept the rubber duffel of weapons there.
The model studio apartment at Asia Manor was the perfect hideaway for him, tucked away at the edge of Flushing but close enough to strike anywhere in the city. He’d dropped five thousand cash on the sales manager’s desk for a one-month lease. He didn’t think he’d need it longer than that.
Asia Manor, a twenty-one-story condominium development, was funded by investment from China and South Asia. It had recently opened with only a third of the condos sold, mostly on the upper levels. In a partially occupied building, there’d be less chance of anyone recognizing him.
He avoided the eighth floor, which he knew would be full of nosy Chinese. The less anyone saw of his comings and goings the better.
There was a parking area behind the building, where he kept the ’88 Buick Regal that he bought off a used lot on the island. Cash. Hit da road, no questions asked. Put ya money on the table an’ drive it off the lot. The salesman was happy to get rid of the gas guzzler, but Lucky knew the car had power to spare, and he wasn’t concerned about the cost of gas. Cruising was like sitting in a lounge chair driving a battering ram. Better than any lightweight speedster. It reminded him of the black Sabre and how Lefty—he still couldn’t believe that Lefty was dead, gone, not remembering any of it—how he used to muscle that car through Chinatown, scattering the tourists who clogged the streets. Or when they had to shoot drive-bys against the Fukienese, with Kongo, the big Malay, riding shotgun. Also dead.
He had a war wagon now, just in need of another driver, another shooter in the scattergun seat. He’d find them soon enough.
He swallowed a tab of ecstasy and washed it down with a gulp of XO. The speed helped him refocus, brought a dark energy back into his blood. He killed the TV and opened the tool bag they’d used for the 2 Mott job. Inside was what was left of the thirty-two thousand he took from Charley Joe’s safe. Counting the leftovers, he felt like calling Charley to let him know he was short twenty thousand, and there’d be no fuhgeddaboudit. Come back and bust your head open like I did Dup Choy.
Out of the dirty cas
h, he’d given five thousand to Jojo, not bad for twenty minutes’ sidekick work, and two thousand to Jadine, easy pay for two minutes of stumbling and flashing her tits. Better than sucking and fucking four fat hom sup los at five hundred a pop.
He gave five hundred each to Bettie, Marisol, and Ah Won jeer, the hos in the hostel, for bringing him back to life. They were sad to see him go.
Where you gonna go, honey?
Don’t worry about it. I’ll be in touch.
Promise, baby?
Bet on it.
He didn’t go far, just to the edge of Flushing. And the eighteen thousand he had left was enough for the roundup posse he had in mind. He closed the tool bag and stashed it under the futon mattress. From the window he could see the lights in the distance, coming alive in the sunset.
He finished the last of the XO and chambered a round in the Beretta. Accustomed to rolling half-cocked, he headed for the Regal, and the night lights calling.
The meet with Loo Ga, first up, took him south. On the side streets of Rego Park, he passed a Hasidic seminary, some Hasids on civilian patrol, and came to the avenue. Parking across from the Canton Gourmet, he was twenty minutes early.
The Canton Gourmet had a long red wall that reflected off the mirrored wall opposite. A giant lacquered Chinese fan adorned the wall, and a row of blacktop tables led to the spot he chose in the back, where he could watch the door.
During the dead hours before the dinner rush, the place was empty.
“Dung yun,” he advised. “I’m waiting for someone.”
The waiter brought a cup of tea and a menu and left him alone. He observed how the restaurant operated. The Canton Gourmet was one of eight Chinese restaurants run citywide by the “Canton Group” of the On Yee Merchants Association. The Group was protected by the Ghost Legion in this part of Queens, under a lesser dailo, probably Kid Taiwan, or Spanish Loy Sung.
