Henry Chang - Year of the Dog

Lefty saw Young Jung staring at Kongo, astonishment on his face, momentarily frozen. Each of them instinctively reached for his gun.

Lucky recoiled at the sound of the deafening blast from behind him, his gun hand automatically going inside his blazer. He glanced back to see Kongo loose another blast into the ringing air and Lefty aiming his Nine. When he swung his eyes back to Koo Jai, both he and Shorty were taking aim at him. One of the Jungs was rising up from the snow, emptying his pistol at them in a spraying arc.

Lucky drew a gun from his inside pocket as Lefty fired mechanically, methodically, ahead.

Kongo dropped the sawed-off, drew his pistol, and tried to aim at Koo Jai, but the dailo’ s back blocked his shot. He saw the short guy, the little guy, jamming off little firecracker shots at them.

Lucky felt the impact like a punch in the head, his body staggering backward. Suddenly, hot metal was tearing into him, twisting through him. Fuck! he heard himself yell, as his thoughts ceased.

Sai Go had crossed Doyers, was halfway down the alley shortcut when he heard the barrage of fireworks up ahead, somewhere on the Bowery. Probably some fools celebrating the Year of the Pig much too early. Two thunderous booms had made him recoil, the shock waves, he was sure, from China-made M-80s.

He kept his eyes on the icy furrows as he took the shortcut again.

Suddenly he saw Koo Jai, gun in hand, dashing at him, running through the alley like a madman, followed by a short kid who was equally bug-eyed.

Sai Go’s breath caught in his throat as he flattened himself against the wall, his gun hand sliding down to his coat pocket. Koo Jai raced by just as Sai Go got his fingers around the Vigilante.

Sai Go watched the short kid pass him, and was drawing the gun from his pocket when he heard the first shot. He felt an explosion inside his chest, sucking the breath out of him.

Several more gunshots rang out.

Then there was only abrupt silence, and the whiteness of the snow in the alley, drifting gently all around him.

Having covered for others during the holidays, Jack had returned to the day shift, feeling the bustle of the tour’s activity juicing him through the storm’s chaos into the afternoon hours. Outside the stationhouse, Sanitation part-timers cleared away the snow so the police vehicles could park. Jack took a late lunch, chowing down on a sandwich and chowder from Kim’s Produce. In the last hour of his shift, the phone rang. An urgent voice from Manhattan South put Jack on edge.

“We got a hot shoot, in Chinatown. Multiple vics, near the OTB. See the CO of the 0-Five.”

OTB? The Fifth Precinct?

The 0-Five, Chinatown, was pulling him back, back into the gutter.

Jack badged a southbound M103 at St. Mark’s, scanning the distant stretch of the Bowery, seeing in his mind where it turned into Chatham Square, before becoming Park Row. He got to the scene in less than ten minutes, the bus driver skipping the stops after Delancey, until Jack pointed at the green facade of OTB.

From the bus he could see EMS techs in the drifts, lifting someone dressed in a black leather blazer and steel-toe boots. The way Tat dressed, he thought. When he got closer he realized it was Tat, bleeding from a head wound. The tech was palm-pumping Tat’s chest as they snap-slid his gurney into the ambulance. Slush sprayed up from the spinning wheels, leaving a trail behind the lights and sirens speeding south toward Downtown Emergency.

Jack surveyed the bloody scene as the uniforms kept back the crowd that had gathered. Two more patrol cars arrived, blocking off the crime scene from traffic.

There was an odd symmetry to how the bodies lay: two on one side of OTB, two on the other, about fifteen, maybe twenty, feet apart. He started taking pictures with the throwaway plastic camera he always carried, locking in fresh images while waiting for Crime Scene to arrive. The big Malaysian on his back, a pair of startled eyes, was bleeding out under the sheet. The punk with the gel haircut, spread akimbo on a hump of snow, next to a mailbox, was Lucky boy’s wheelman, the one who drove the black car. Looked like he had a chest wound. A fatal one.

The scene made Jack angry and sad at the same time. Though he tried to keep his feelings out of it, he couldn’t help feeling sad for Tat-not Lucky anymore-and angry at the gangboy’s hair-trigger disregard for life.

A dozen paces across from them there were two other bodies, face up at the curb. From their profiles, Jack noticed a familial resemblance between them. Both had multiple gunshot wounds, including head shots. The wind kept blowing aside the sheets that covered them so he placed dirty chunks of ice at the corners to keep them down.

He picked up a blood trail near the entrance of the alley shortcut to Doyers.

The first body in the alley was that of an old man, slumped down on the sidewalk against the side of a restaurant kitchen. His right shoulder leaned against the wall at an awkward angle, his head drooped to his chest. His left hand rested on the sidewalk in front of him, like he’d been trying to balance himself. His right hand was in his coat pocket, which was twisted behind him near the small of his back. Jack patted down the pocket and felt the outline of a gun.

There were no discernible wounds.

He snapped more pictures, wondering how the old man had tied into Lucky’s scene.

The second victim was farther down the alley, past where it angled off toward Doyers Street. It struck Jack as odd. A younger man, late twenties. He’d fallen forward, crawled, and finally died. His down jacket was unzipped, with an inside pocket yanked out. His right pants pocket was torn, a couple of loose dollar bills flapping out. Nearby, some coins were scattered in the snow, leading in the direction of Doyers.

The setup made Jack think robbery was involved somehow. Knowing Lucky and the gang world, he felt the shoot-out had to be part of a Ghost Legion power struggle, over money, or face . But nobody plans an ambush in broad daylight on a busy street, during a blizzard. Something unexpected must have happened, provoked by fear, or anger. Someone got nervous, and the situation exploded. They were all Ghosts. Or were they just Ghosts in name, gang unity giving way to greed and jealousy, the usual.

Doyers Street was empty, the icy slush offering no clues. He crossed over to May May’s convenience store, bought a box of ziplock bags and a fat black permanent marker.

He was bagging the different guns when CSU arrived. They proceeded to work the scene for evidence such as blood samples, laying down markers near the ejected shell casings, snapping pictures with their big wide-lens cameras.

Jack stepped back as the Medical Examiner’s team showed up and started pronouncing the bodies. When they zippered up the black body bags, placing them into the morgue’s minivan, Jack remembered that the commanding officer of the Fifth Precinct was expecting him.

He pictured the old run-down stationhouse on Elizabeth, three blocks north, and headed in that direction.

He hadn’t seen the captain in more than a month, since his promotion to Detective Second Grade, during the award ceremony at One Police Plaza, well after the captain had quashed the IA investigation, and before his transfer out to the 0-Nine.

When Jack entered the big office Captain Marino’s expression revealed that he was about to do something he didn’t agree with. He extended his hand.

“Welcome back, Jack,” he said as they shook. “I have to say, it’s not sitting right with me, to have to bring you back this way. Hernandez and Donelly caught the case, and rightfully, it’s theirs.”