Lau accelerated, turned, and soon they had the square orange car in view. “Stay back,” Leung ordered. “I don’t want them to see us. That’s good, let a car get between us. They are heading for the shops. Good, they’re slowing, they’re turning into that parking lot. Follow them! No, no, not right next to their car! Idiot! Park over there, right next to the exit. Good.”
They parked. The lot was crowded with shoppers and their cars, as were the narrow sidewalks of the shopping strip, which was anchored by the Beach Bazaar and a large Grand Union super-market. Those in the back crowded forward so they could see out the windshield, from which they had an excellent view of the Volvo. As they watched, its passengers left, the two girls running into the Beach Bazaar, a substantial emporium whose striped steel awnings dripped with beach chairs, inflated animal-shaped swimming toys, large beach balls, air mattresses.
“Who is that black woman?” Vo asked.
“A nursemaid, no doubt,” said Leung. “She is not significant. Our luck has changed, it appears. I am going to examine the situation in the store. All of you, wait here and do nothing!”
He was gone ten minutes. When he returned, he was carrying two yellow smock shirts, embroidered with the logo of the Beach Bazaar and the names of two employees. Back in his seat, he said, “It is perfect. They are scattered throughout the store, and the girls are isolated in the swimming costume area. This is what we will do. Lau and Eng will stay with the car. I and Vo and Cowboy will enter the store. Cowboy and I will wear these shirts. Cai and Yang will take up a position outside the store. The girl knows Cowboy; that will put her off her guard. He will lead her to the back of the store. I will join him there, and together we will take her through the stockroom, to the rear exit. There is an alley there, and a loading dock. When Vo has seen us enter, he will signal to Lau, and he will take the car around to the alley, get us and the girl, and then come around and pick up the three others.”
“What about the other girl?” asked Vo.
“If she sees anything, we will take her, too,” said Leung. “Does everyone understand what he is to do? Cowboy?”
The youth nodded sullenly. Leung asked each of the others and, where there was doubt or confusion, gave crisp instruction. They were nothing like a Hong Kong triad team, he thought, but far better than Red Guards, and it should be a simple operation. In and out.
There was an odd smell in the store, an old-fashioned place with circulating ceiling fans, wooden floor, a high, stamped tin ceiling, long counters, and bins. Cowboy thought it must be some sort of confection; it was sweet and heavy, and to him as exotic as five-spice powder would have been to nearly all of the store’s clientele. It was crowded with these, and getting more crowded as people came in to pick up the various necessities they had forgotten to pack in their rush to leave the heat of the city for the big weekend.
Cowboy walked quickly to the place Leung had indicated, where swimsuits hung on chromed racks and headless, armless models showed them off. He could not see Lucy, and felt a sudden and surprising sense of relief. Perhaps they had suspected something and fled. But no, he now saw a short Asian girl selecting suits with intense concentration, reading the price tags and the labels as if they were oracles. She did not notice Cowboy.
Then the curtain that led to the changing room was thrust briskly aside, and there she was right in front of him, swimsuits draped over her arm. She saw him.
“Cowboy? What are you doing here?” she asked in Vietnamese, looking curiously at his shirt, which bore the name iris embroidered in red thread.
“I have to see, I mean, to talk to you. It’s very important.”
Lucy looked over at Mary, who was utterly absorbed in the mathematics of assessing clothing value, and nodded to Cowboy. She tossed her suits over the top of a rack and followed Cowboy toward the back of the store.
“In here,” said Cowboy, pushing open the swinging door to the stockroom. Lucy went through, and Leung grabbed her, clapping his hand over her mouth and pressing a pistol muzzle into her back. He pulled her into a dark alcove formed by large cardbord crates containing plastic swimming pools. In Cantonese he said, “Is it true that you can speak Cantonese?”
She nodded. He said, “Are you going to scream or do anything foolish?”
She shook her head, and he removed his hand from her mouth. She looked at Cowboy and said, in Vietnamese, “With Heaven rest all matters here below: harm people and they’ll harm you in their turn. Perfidious humans who do fiendish deeds shall suffer, and cry mercy in vain.” Cowboy reacted as if slapped. He looked away from her, his jaw quivering. Every Vietnamese knows the scene where Kieu and her lover, Tu, the rebel chieftain, take revenge on all who have abused her.
“What did she say?” Leung demanded.
“Nothing,” Cowboy mumbled. “Just some poetry.”
Leung snapped, “Go out to the loading dock and see if they are there.” Cowboy trotted off.
Leung turned Lucy around and gave her an appraising look. He shook his head. “Incredible! So you speak Vietnamese, too, even poetry. You know the saying, cai tai, cai tai, and so on?”
“Yes, because of the rhyme. Talent and disaster are twins.”
“Particularly true, it seems, in your case. You have caused me an enormous amount of trouble, little girl.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I suppose I will have to, although it seems a shame. There is a white-girl brothel in Macao that would pay nearly anything for someone like you. Perhaps I will pump you full of heroin and pack you in an air-freight container. How would you like that?”
“I think it would be wisest to kill me. If you did that other thing, I would escape and find you, wherever you were, and eat your heart.”
To Lucy’s vast surprise, Leung replied in English with a decided New York accent, “Oh, don’t be a schmuck!” He looked at his watch and said, in the same voice, “Where the fuck is that goddamn kid? What is he, jerking off out there?”
Lucy’s linguistic curiosity overwhelmed her fear and burst forth. In English, she asked, “Where did you learn to talk like that?”
Leung switched back to Cantonese. “You are impressed. To confess the truth, I have only a few phrases like that. I learned my English from an American, a native of this city, in Macao. I was escaping from the Cultural Revolution, and I had a septic wound in my leg. It was from being beaten with chains and thrown into a vat of pig manure. He took me in and taught me a great deal about your wonderful country before-”
Cowboy came running then, a worried look on his face.
“They are not there,” he blurted.
Kenny Vo was pacing to and fro in the front aisle of the Beach Bazaar, where they kept the shopping carts and the soda machines. He kept looking out of the window, expecting the gray van to pull up with Leung and Cowboy and the girl. But the van did not come. The parking lot was growing more crowded.
It was not hard for Tran and his associates to overpower Lau and Eng. They simply worked their way crouching through the parked cars, appeared at the unlocked side door of the gray van, jumped in, and stuck pistols in the faces of the amazed White Dragons. Nor was it difficult to get the details of Leung’s plan from Eng, who was, in fact, one of the two ma jai Tran had snatched earlier, and he required no additional demonstration of what lengths Tran would go to in order to extract information.
Tran snapped out directions for the counterattack and left Freddie Phat and one of his men in the van, while he walked out into the parking lot with the two others. They spread out, winding through the cars, stepping lightly around the clusters of harried parents and their children, the clumps of teens in bright beach wear, the occasional slow-moving elderly couple. Each of the Vietnamese carried a long beach bag tucked under his right arm.
Vo looked through the plate glass and saw them coming. He let out a curious high-pitched cry. The checkout ladies and their customers looked up. They saw a stocky Asian man in a sports jacket, dark trousers, and black loafers-n
ot dressed for the beach. The man let out another sound, this one a combination groan and hiss, as if from a pressure vessel about to pop its safety valve. The nearest checkout lady raised her hand to attract the attention of a manager.
Vo saw the man who had ruined his life walking toward him; the rage burned away the last of his modest store of rationality. He yanked the machine pistol from his waistband and directed a stream of automatic fire at his enemy. He fired one-handed in his zeal and the weapon flew upward, blowing out the plate-glass window in a hail of shards before directing bullets at the parking lot and the sky. He heard something snap-snap-snap past his head. He dropped to the floor. Someone was shooting a Kalashnikov at him, disciplined fire in three-round bursts, the habit of the thrifty little army he knew so well. On his knees, sheltered by the bulk of a Pepsi machine, he fired the rest of the magazine blindly out the vacant window, and fumbled to replace it with a fresh one.
Sounds of firing came from outside as the two White Dragons blasted away; then that firing ceased. More bullets came flying into the store, in the same precise rhythm. An overhead fixture shattered, raining glass onto customers and staff cowering in the aisles. People were screaming, shouting. Vo couldn’t think in all the noise. He wanted to shoot the screaming people. When the new magazine finally clicked in, he cautiously peeked around the Pepsi machine to find a target.
“Drop the gun! Now!” It was a woman’s voice, and American, behind him. Behind him? Vo spun on his knees. It was the nursemaid, crouching low, pointing a gun at him. The nursemaid? He raised his weapon, and Detective Bryan shot him through the chest four times with her service revolver.
Around this scene, chaos. A hundred or so screaming people were attempting to leave by the two exit doors, parents were crying for their children, children were howling their heads off, several brave souls leaped through the broken window, a couple of men knocked Detective Bryan down as they rushed by. One person, however, brooked the human tide and walked calmly through the one-way entrance door.
Leung heard the automatic fire from the front of the store and realized that something had gone badly wrong. The plan was therefore finished. A shame, but he had already accomplished much. He would have to escape and attempt, somehow, to recoup. But first.
Cowboy saw the Chinese point his pistol at Lucy’s head. Without a thought his arm shot out and struck Leung’s elbow. The gun exploded. Lucy reeled backward, tripped on a low carton, and fell sprawling to the floor. Leung stared for a moment at Cowboy, unbelievingly, and then shot the boy twice in the chest. The youth fell, grasping at Leung, hooking his hand on Leung’s trouser pocket, ripping the fabric and tearing the pocket out as he collapsed. Coins jingled and scraps of paper flew to the floor. Leung cursed, ignored the coins, scrabbled for the small papers.
Leung heard a voice shout in a language he did not understand. It sounded a little like the Portuguese he had picked up in Macao, and he recognized the name, Lucy. He had to kill the girl quickly and get away. But where was the girl? He saw the gap in the pile of cartons. She had wriggled into some crevice. The shout again. Steps, coming closer. Leung fired some shots blindly at the cartons and took off, dodging down the narrow aisles. He saw the daylight of the loading dock and ran toward it. There were pursuing steps. He ignored them and raced on, out onto the loading dock and down into the service alley.
“Fireworks must be starting early,” observed Karp as they rolled down Park Street in Long Beach.
Ed Morris frowned. “That’s not fireworks, Butch. Somebody’s shooting auto.”
Then they heard the sirens. “What should we do?” Morris asked.
It did not take Karp long to decide. The possibility that someone was firing an automatic weapon in a beachside community in which his wife was resident and that the discharge did not in some manner involve his wife was too remote to be credible.
“Follow the sirens,” he said, his heart bouncing yet again into his throat.
“Lucy, are you there? He is gone. You may emerge now.”
Hearing Tran’s voice, Lucy crawled on hands and knees from her hiding place. She crawled backward, for the space in which she had wedged herself was barely eighteen inches wide. She felt wetness on her bare knees, and then on her hands. When she was free of the tunnel, she turned and saw Tran and saw that the wetness was Cowboy’s blood, spreading out from his body, looking black in the dim fluorescent light, like the blood in the Asia Mall stockroom, from the men Leung and. .
“Is he going to die?” she asked. There was a piece of white paper stuck to her knee in blood. She pulled it off and crumpled it in her fist.
“I think so,” said Tran. “He is shot through the lung and blowing bright blood.”
“Did you kill Leung?”
“No, I didn’t see him. I heard someone running away, but I first wanted to see that you were safe.” He paused. “I must go now. Some of the Chinese have been shot, and I do not wish for my friends and I to be imprisoned.” He shook his beach bag, which made a Kalashnikovish noise against the floor.
“I’ll see you,” said Lucy.
“See you later, crocodile,” said Tran in English, and left.
Lucy crouched over the Vietmanese and took his hand. He opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am ashamed, but they made. . I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “All this is my fault.”
Then, as if magically, as if in a dream, the alcove was full of people. Her mother, her father (her father?), Detective Bryan, Mary Ma, two paramedics, several policemen.
“Lucy, come away, honey,” her father said. “Let these guys get to him.” He knelt down and placed his arm around her.
Cowboy said, “No!” with such vehemence that he coughed up a froth of blood. He gripped Lucy’s wrist so hard her tanned skin turned white around his bloody fingers. He began to speak rapidly in Vietnamese, interrupted by spells of coughing. Lucy answered softly in the same fluting language. Tears were pouring from her eyes. Karp held his daughter tightly, and in his other hand a Sony soundlessly rotated, recording the best possible exception to the hearsay rule, a dying declaration.
Chapter 19
“You don’t have to do this now,” Karp said. “You don’t have to do it at all. I can get a Vietnamese translator tomorrow-”
“No,” said Lucy firmly. “You said the faster we can get this done, the faster the cops can start looking for Leung. And I want to do it. He was my friend. It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“Lucy, now stop it! It’s not your fault.” She shriveled and started to weep again, a slow snuffling drip, almost soundless, that had been going on almost without break from the time the dying boy had grasped her hand. They were in the Karps’ bedroom at Aunt Sophie’s house, where they had returned late, after endless exhausting interviews with the local cops and then the homicide cops from county and state police, and a couple of well-dressed gents from the FBI. In fairness, it was a complex story and the telling took some time, how a Chinatown double murder and a Mafia assassination had led to a machine-gun shoot-out in a beachside shopping center, and how Lucy Karp fit into all of it. Karp had been by his daughter’s side throughout, and thought she had handled herself well. Leung was the man she and Mary and Janet had seen at the murder-there was no point in hiding that any longer, and Mary confirmed it. But the locals and the staties were interested in the four corpses on their patch. Miraculously, no one else had been killed, although there were numerous injuries among the bystanders, some grave. Of the dead, two were simply explained: Leung had killed Nguyen Van Minh, aka Cowboy, and an NYPD police officer had killed Vo Van Hai, aka Kenny Vo. There were two other Asian corpses outside the Beach Bazaar, Cai Wenshi and Yang Wo-ming from their ID, and no one knew who had shot them, or whom Kenny Vo had been shooting at, or why.
Lucy professed ignorance of these details. Karp was not so sure. The list of people who could both mount a disciplined assault with automatic weapons and who were pals with his daughter was a very shor
t one; perhaps it had only one member. Despite this, he did not press her on it. The other great mystery of the day was what had become of Mr. Leung. By four that afternoon several hundred officers from a half dozen police agencies had searched the area of the shopping strip and beyond, stopping cars, peering into crannies under the boardwalk, and questioning people, but with no success. Leung had vanished, and Karp believed that Cowboy’s last words might hold a clue to his plans. He prepared pad and pencil and pushed the recorder switch. The sound of coughing and then the boy’s voice.
Lucy said, “He says, ‘I am sorry. He is a bad person, my cousin, he. . does not know how to live as a human being. I am bad, too, although I did not want it to. . listen, it was Leung’s plan, all of it. First, we captured the Italian man, Catalano. .’ ”
Karp heard his own voice saying, “Did you kill Catalano?” and then Lucy’s translation and Cowboy, again. Lucy translated: “No, I drove one of the cars. Kenny killed Catalano. Leung was there. He looked at the clock and said when to fire. They fired through the man’s head. I was sick. Kenny laughed and he said, ‘Next time, you will do it yourself, it’s about time,’ and other things. They all laughed at me. I wanted them to stop laughing, so I did it. I came in through the back door and I shot them both, as Leung had ordered, in the body and in the head. I went on home invasions, too. In one place we raped a woman, and I pretended to also, but I was too ashamed. I did not want this kind of life in America. He knew you were the one, that day, you saw everything. He found out from the Chen. You called, they got the address where you were. She asked you. I should have shouted out or warned, but I was afraid. We came out here. I didn’t want to, but. . Lucy, do you think. . Lucy, do you think. . Lucy. .” And the sound of crying. Karp flicked off the machine.
She was sobbing now, and she brought forth from the pocket of her cutoffs a wad of tissues the size of a softball, bits flying everywhere, and dabbed her eyes with it and blew her nose. Karp tossed his pad away and hugged Lucy to him, making comforting sounds without meaning, until the whooping sobs stopped and she relaxed against him, snuffling and exhausted.
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