by Chan Ho-Kei
‘Sonny! We’re police officers! Protecting civilians has to come before taking care of our colleagues!’ Sonny had never heard his commander in such a rage.
‘But... but...’
‘Leave Sharpie for the rescue team!’
‘No.’ Sonny stayed put.
‘Sonny! This is an order! Let go!’
‘No! I refuse!’ Sonny screamed hoarsely. He’d never imagined he’d dare disobey a direct instruction from his commander.
‘Fuck you!’ screamed TT, grabbing the revolver by Sonny’s side, quickly counting the ammo, then bursting through the bullet-riddled wooden door in a half crouch.
3
WHEN THE FIRST gunshot sounded outside, Edgar Ko felt a chill down his spine.
Something had gone wrong.
The officers in the ‘Barn’ all knew gunfire when they heard it, even muffled like this. Especially when it was followed immediately by a louder stream of shots.
Passers-by outside seemed to sense something was wrong, some looking up for the source of the noise, others cautiously ducking beneath an awning or into a shop. It sounded like fireworks, burst after burst echoing through that vast concrete building, though no one could have said which floor or apartment it was coming from.
Edgar Ko didn’t know the location either, but he could guess who was responsible. TT had radioed ‘Now moving in via staircase’, and not responded to any further messages.
That bastard – Ko cursed him several dozen times in the space of a few minutes.
When the sentry post had reported that Jaguar and Mad Dog Biu had gone back in with their lunch, everyone had let out a sigh of relief. Keith Tso and Kwan Chun-dok had been about to say goodbye. Then word arrived that all three men were armed and on the move.
‘Are they preparing for a heist? Moving to a rendezvous with Shek Boon-tim? Did they receive any orders?’ the officer in charge of comms had asked Ko.
‘No new messages to the known pagers,’ another officer reported.
‘Maybe Shek Boon-tim’s using a different pager? Our guys in the south and main lobbies haven’t seen anything unusual. We shouldn’t assume they’re withdrawing just yet,’ said Ko suspiciously.
‘No, they’re escaping,’ Kwan interrupted. ‘Even if they don’t know about the ambush, they must have detected something, so they’re withdrawing in haste.’
‘How do you know?’
‘If they were going to meet Shek Boon-tim, it wouldn’t be that urgent. They could finish their lunch first. But for them to buy some food so casually, then dash out with their weapons just a minute later, not even taking the elevator, what else could that be but a retreat?’
Ko froze, then sent out the order to seal all exits and prepare to apprehend suspects. At this point, expecting Shek Boon-tim to walk into their trap was a fantasy, but if they could nab Shek Boon-sing, that’d still be half the battle. Knowing he didn’t have the manpower to surround a rabbit warren like Ka Fai Mansions, Ko summoned the SDU and asked the station for back-up. Even if patrolmen or Emergency Unit officers couldn’t match the Sheks’ firepower, each additional officer meant one more handgun and a little more protection.
Just after TT had reported he was ‘moving in’, two Emergency Unit vehicles and three traffic cops on motorbikes had arrived at the scene, providing at least enough officers for them to surround the building. Still, Shek Boon-sing had heavy weaponry, and Ko was worried that he could easily overwhelm the police, not to mention taking hostages or hurting civilians. He could only hope the SDU would arrive as quickly as possible.
Those gunshots told him matters were only going to get worse.
The officers on the ground floor had all heard the sound and rushed to radio the Command Centre for guidance.
‘Millhouse calling Barn, gunfire from upstairs, please instruct. Over.’
‘Cowshed calling Barn, shots not coming from our direction. Over.’
Unable to verify the location, Ko could only instruct them to seal the elevators and take the stairs to investigate.
Less than half a minute later, Karl Fung’s voice came over the radio. ‘Team A Roger, elevators locked, now leaving Cowshed and beginning search. Over.’
The officer in charge of the main exit spoke next: ‘Team B leaving Millhouse, now heading up.’
While uniforms were replacing TT’s team in the north wing, the Crime Unit officers from the south and central wings moved in by two separate staircases, handing the ground floor over to the new arrivals. With gunshots echoing through the corridors and staircases, they didn’t dare let down their guard – after all, even though the shots were far off, that didn’t mean all the bad guys were in one place. What if Shek Boon-sing and Mad Dog had separated as they fled? An armed thug could be about to appear round every corner.
In the midst of all this, Edgar Ko snuck a glance at Keith Tso. Ko saw Kwan Chun-dok as a peer, even though Kwan had a higher rank. But Tso was undoubtedly a superior, the Deputy Director of HQ Intelligence, soon to be a major figure leading the unit. Who could say ‘Superintendent Tso’ wouldn’t be ‘Assistant Commissioner Tso’ in a matter of days? If Ko looked bad in front of him, he’d be cutting off his own career. And even if Tso remained at CIB, Ko would still find it hard to explain matters to his own superiors and the Regional Director of West Kowloon.
He’d thoroughly messed this one up.
As the gunfire continued, an update suddenly came over their earpieces.
‘Officer down. North wing, ninth floor. Send assistance! Over!’
The voice was TT’s. Immediately after he spoke, a new volley of shots started up.
‘TT! Report your location!’ shouted Ko, grabbing the mic.
‘Ninth floor, Unit 30 – Ocean Hotel. At the entrance. Jaguar and Mad Dog Biu are dead. Only Shek Boon-sing left. But he has an AK, there are hostages inside—’ TT gabbled, panting hard, interrupted by yet more gunfire.
‘TT, stay where you are! Back-up arriving soon!’
‘No! That bas... bastard is killing people!’ TT’s voice was virtually obscured by gunfire.
‘Don’t do anything stupid! Back-up will be there in less than a minute!’ screamed Ko.
‘They’re about to die! Fuck!’ The speakers relayed TT’s slurring words, and then silence. Meanwhile, loud shots continued to come from across the road.
‘Attention all units, head immediately to north wing, ninth floor, Unit 30, Ocean Hotel,’ Ko ordered.
‘Team B Roger, presently at seventh floor. Over.’
‘Team A Roger. Over.’ Karl Fung’s voice.
Ko leaned on the desk with both hands, clenching his teeth. The situation was now irretrievable.
After the teams reported back, more shots ripped through Ka Fai Mansions, but ten seconds later there was silence. Everyone braced themselves for the next round, but there was nothing. Through the windows of the command centre they heard only police sirens and traffic noise, roadworks and the normal babble of pedestrians. The piercing bangs of a moment ago could easily have been illusions.
Ko could only pray this wasn’t the calm before the storm.
‘Team B arrived at ninth floor, outside Unit 25. Ocean Hotel around the corner. Now moving in. Over.’ This team was the four officers from ‘Millhouse’: two of them from Kowloon West, the other two TT’s subordinates.
‘Roger.’ Ko waited for Team B to report further, but they transmitted nothing, and there was no more shooting.
After a while, the speakers came back to life. The officer sounded hoarse, his voice unsteady.
‘Team B reporting... Request ambulance urgently. The scene... scene is clear, suspect is dead. But officer is down, many casualties. Over.’
Everything went black in front of Ko’s eyes.
‘Eddie, take over,’ he said to the officer in charge of comms. ‘I’m going to the scene.’
Looking back, he saw Kwan’s brows knitted and Tso stony-faced.
‘I’ll head back to HQ now,’ said Tso.
‘You’re not going to the scene?’ asked Kwan.
‘I’m not directing this op.’ Tso couldn’t stop himself glancing at Edgar Ko as he spoke. ‘A situation like this, the higher-ups aren’t going to be happy. I’ll go back and work on a strategy. If Shek Boon-sing really is dead, O-Crime will want to take over pursuing Shek Boon-tim, and CIB will have to hand over huge stacks of paperwork.’
This was obviously aimed at Ko, the unspoken message being that he was dead meat. He took it in silence.
‘I’ll stay a bit longer. The scene might tell us something about Shek Boon-tim,’ replied Kwan.
‘Boys, please excuse me. I’ll pass any information on to Superintendent Kwan.’ Escaping the awkward atmosphere, Ko called an investigator to go with him and they left the command centre. Tso departed shortly after, leaving Kwan behind in the tiny room with a couple of the Kowloon West officers.
Edgar Ko crossed the road, his mind uneasy. Hurrying along, he passed the traffic police keeping order, went straight into the north wing lobby and ordered management to start the elevator again. Arriving at the ninth floor, he saw a scene of unparalleled carnage.
Shek Boon-sing was dead. He’d taken shots to the torso and head, and was lying in the middle of the hotel’s reception area. And the person who had shot him was slumped by the counter, his face the picture of despair, his left wrist torn open by a rifle bullet: TT.
As for the civilians in the hotel, not one of them had survived.
The Ocean Hotel was an independent business, a small and seedy budget establishment. There were only four rooms, some occupied by guests in straitened circumstances or from irregular backgrounds. Mostly, though, it was prostitutes and their customers, taking advantage of rooms that rented by the hour.
The reception area was only seventy square feet. Apart from Shek Boon-sing, still clutching his AK-47, there were two other corpses, an elderly man who’d fallen in a corner and a middle-aged woman on a sofa. The lower half of the old guy’s face had been completely smashed by a bullet, so his chin was hanging loose, his neck and chest nothing but gore. The woman was half leaning against the sofa, her eyes bulging, two bullet holes in her chest like crimson peonies embroidered on her white blouse.
On the threshold of the corridor leading to the bedrooms was a man whose skull had been pierced so brain matter spilled out onto the floor. Most of the bullets had gone in the back of his head and come out the front. He’d been shot in the back as well.
There were three other bodies in the hotel. At the end of the corridor, in Room 4, was a woman in her twenties, shot through the head. Diagonally opposite, in Room 1, was a young couple, the woman naked, lying across the bed, covered only by a white sheet, now mottled with red. The man was lying by the door, wearing only boxer shorts, two bullet holes in his bare chest. It was a scene from hell.
‘The civilians are all dead,’ reported Karl Fung, who’d arrived before Ko. ‘Jaguar and Mad Dog Biu’s bodies are by the stairwell. Two of the Mong Kok guys are there, one of them seriously wounded.’
‘I... I missed... I didn’t hit him...’ TT seemed to realize Ko was standing next to him, lifting his head a little and speaking with difficulty. ‘That woman... I could have saved her... I thought I could save at least one of them...’
Ko looked around, dizzy. This was too awful for words. Although TT had disposed of all three criminals, innocent citizens’ lives had been lost too – and so many of them. This was the worst possible outcome. If Shek Boon-sing had survived, he could still have been interrogated and his evidence used to track down his brother. Now the trail had come to an end, and Shek Boon-tim might well be planning an even more horrendous crime to avenge Boon-sing.
An investigator burst in, yelling, ‘Inspector Ko, sir, the paramedics are here.’ Ko pulled himself together.
‘Karl, bring a couple of paramedics to attend to the Mong Kok guy. I’ll take charge here.’ Ko turned to another subordinate. ‘Go tell the uniforms to evacuate all residents above the eighth floor, and send someone to investigate Floor 16, Unit 7. I’m afraid Shek Boon-sing might have left a booby trap.’
Fung and the other officers rushed off to execute these orders, while Ko and the other paramedics examined the corpses, hoping for a miracle. But there were no signs of life. The police could only preserve the scene as far as possible and begin collecting evidence.
As he faced the bullet-riddled walls and furniture, the bloodstained floorboards, the wood fragments and bullet casings that littered every surface, Edgar Ko had a sense that none of this was real. TT and Sharpie were carried away by the paramedics, and his colleagues from the Identification Bureau arrived, and still Ko felt there was no point in his being at the scene. Anything they did now would just be official procedure, far too late to do anyone any good. Guilt and regret tore at his heart, and he kept asking himself what had gone wrong.
Was it TT?
He’d love to push the blame for this tragedy onto TT and his refusal to obey orders, but that would just be an excuse. Shek Boon-sing was a psychopath who could kill a person without blinking, and if he had got out into the street, there would quite possibly have been even more casualties. The moment Shek and his henchmen left the apartment was the moment the whole operation failed.
Rationally, Ko knew that he bore a far greater responsibility than TT. When TT reported that Shek was starting to kill people in the hotel, Ko had responded by the book, instructing him to wait for back-up. If he’d authorized TT to go in a few seconds earlier, would that short span of time have been enough to save one life? By not trusting his subordinate, he’d made the situation worse.
Ko told his team to record the evidence, and listened to their reports about evacuating the residents. He didn’t even register when Kwan Chun-dok showed up. Apparently Kwan had learned of the tragedy from the other officers, and had seen TT.
‘Inspector Ko, sir, the SDU wants to know if the op is cancelled,’ an officer said from behind him.
‘Yes, cancel it... cancel it...’ He’d been about to add that they were far too late to do any good, but bit off the words. As the director of this operation, he had to maintain dignity even with the situation crumbling around him.
It had only been twenty-odd minutes since the gunfight, but Ko felt as though several hours had passed. The report came in that the hideout on the sixteenth floor contained no booby traps or hazardous items, so he sent investigators in. Officers came and went, while reporters began to gather, huddling round the various entrances to Ka Fai Mansions and snapping the police as they went about their work.
‘Inspector Ko, I’m leaving now.’ Kwan had stayed quite a while, walking around the scene and inspecting the environment, but it was only when he spoke that Ko remembered he was there.
‘All right. If I find any leads on Shek Boon-tim, I’ll pass them on to CIB,’ said Ko with a forced smile. ‘I’m sorry you had to see this, Superintendent Kwan.’
‘This wasn’t your fault. We’ll always encounter situations like this, and there’s no help for it.’
‘Thank you. Take care.’
‘Goodbye.’
As Kwan Chun-dok left Ka Fai Mansions, the journalists descended on him in a swarm. Surely the famous Superintendent Kwan was in charge of this case? But he only smiled grimly and shook his head, departing without answering a single question.
That day, the TV and radio news led with ‘Most Wanted Criminal Shek Boon-sing Killed in Shoot-Out’, describing the massacre of the residents and the haplessness of the police. The following day, newspapers printed more details, along with op-eds blaming the police for these civilian deaths.
On the surface of it, while Shek Boon-tim was still at large, the Shek Boon-sing case was now closed. No one knew yet that a new wave of trouble was just about to start.
Trouble that started with an internal investigation.
4
FOR THE NEXT few days, the media indulged in blanket coverage of the Ka Fai Mansions massacre. The headlines remained fo
cused on the police killing of most wanted career criminal Shek Boon-sing, but the public were more concerned with details about the civilian casualties. For those interested in blood, gore and sex, the local news during this period was more enticing than the gossip rags. ‘Innocent bystanders slaughtered by felon’ was eye-catching enough, and the fact that most of the deceased were living on the fringes of society was exactly the sort of spice these ghouls sought out.
The man and woman who died in the hotel reception were the fifty-seven-year-old owner, Chiu Ping, and a cleaner, Lee Wan. Public sympathy was generally on their side, although some pointed out that by running such an establishment, Chiu was encouraging the sex trade. The other four victims were looked on less kindly.
The couple in Room 1 were a pimp and a teenage runaway prostitute. The man was Yau Choi-hung, aged twenty-two, a notorious figure of the red light district of Portland Street, Mong Kok, where his nickname was Well-hung. His handsome face and smooth tongue induced any number of naive young girls to start selling their bodies, one of whom was the naked girl in the bed. Fifteen-year-old Bunny Chin had left her home three months previously and met Well-hung while wandering the streets. He persuaded her into becoming one of the working girls under his control. A reporter sought out a fellow pimp who said Well-hung had told him he’d be meeting ‘a new horse’ to ‘put her through her paces’ – little knowing these would be his last words.
Room 4 held a woman in a similar situation, twenty-three-year-old Lam Fong-wai, a ‘PR manager’ – in other words, an escort – at the New Metropolis Nightclub in Tsim Sha Tsui, where she was known as Mandy. The nightclub madam guessed she’d had an appointment at the hotel before work – but ended up getting killed before the customer even showed up. Mandy’s colleagues said she’d been telling everyone she’d found a good man, claiming she’d soon say goodbye to the seamy side of life and settle down to be a respectable housewife. She probably hadn’t imagined this would be the manner of her leaving it.
These latter three victims were quickly turned into cautionary tales for teachers and parents to warn children about. Rationally, they must have been aware that these deaths had nothing to do with the deceased’s professions, but the Chinese love stories of retribution. ‘Dishonourable deeds destroy the doer,’ the saying went, so they must have deserved their grisly fate. Like executed corpses displayed before the public, the bodies were now fuel for tabloid moralizing.
