Henry Chang - Year of the Dog

Koo Jai lowered his head slightly, said sheepishly, “Sorry, Boss, the battery must’ve died.”

“Your fuckin’ brain must’ve died.” Lucky took the Smith amp;Wesson out for emphasis, laid it on the rail of the pool table. “What the fuck is going on out here?”

Koo Jai knew this wasn’t a social visit, but he seemed genuinely puzzled, trading glances with Shorty and the Jung brothers in the sudden hush. Lucky sneered, turning his hard face toward Koo Jai.

“How come you got nobody on the street? Do you know what’s going on out there?” Lucky paused a moment for effect. “KJ, you’re the senior brother. Tell me what’s going on?” He let his fingers drift over the pistol, waited.

“We’re out here watching out for the neighborhood,” Koo Jai said evenly, “like we been doing, making sure the hok-kwee and the loy sung don’t fuck over the Chinese.”

Lucky picked up the gun and said, “You’re doing all that by being here in this bar? You’re really keeping an eye on things, right? And now you’re only pretending to be drinking and shooting pool, right?”

“Check the streets,” Koo Jai said quickly to Shorty and the Jungs.

“Hell, it’s freezing out there!” groused Shorty as they went toward the front door.

“We were out earlier,” explained Koo Jai. “And the streets were empty. It’s too fuckin’ cold. We only came in to warm up.”

Lucky went behind Koo Jai and stood there with the gun.

“I’m telling you,” he said, “someone’s ripping off company business out here, and it’s fuckin’ bad for our business, ’cause it makes us look bad. I want your guys on the street, their eyes peeping for hijacks, their ears open.”

Koo Jai nodded in agreement with the dailo, but also said, “It’s hard to understand the Fuks. When they talk, it sounds like they’re spitting or shitting.”

“Whatever,” Lucky warned, facing Koo now. “You better get a grip on out here. Because I’m telling you, boy, if there’s another rip-off, it’s gonna be on you.”

“Okay, Boss,” said Koo Jai quietly, trying to save face. “But I have a question.”

Lucky nodded at him. “Speak.”

Koo Jai’s voice was firmer now. “You know we’re out here dealing with the junkie hok-kwees, the niggers, and the PRs, and now, not only do we have to watch out for the Dragons, we got those fuckin’ Fuk Ching assholes picking at us, too.”

Lucky’s eyes narrowed, “What about it?”

“Tell me again,” Koo Jai asked, keeping a tone of respect in his voice, “why we’re holding back, why we don’t just sot fuckin’ crush them all?”

“Everyone was told to cool it. There are some arrangements being worked on, upstairs, with the old men.”

Koo Jai understood that to mean the tongs were dealing. He knew better than to question the dailo, or the uncles. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “but the Fuks spit on Shorty, and Dragons pissed all over Jung’s car.”

Lucky raised the pistol past Koo Jai’s eye level.

“Don’t worry about them. When the time’s right, we’ll clean it all up.” Lucky put the pistol back into his gun pocket, clenched his jaw, and checked his Rolex. “Right now, I wanna know who’s pulling off these jobs.”

“Okay, Boss,” Koo Jai said as Lucky headed for the door, with Kongo taking his back.

“Sure thing,” he said to himself, as he watched the Mott Street dailo exit the seedy East Broadway bar.

When Jack woke again, it was pitch black in the studio apartment, the only light a faint glow of digital numbers on the face of the boom-box radio. It was after 10 PM.

He decided to get dressed, walked down to Eighth Avenue, and wolfed down some Shanghai dumplings with hot sauce at one of the all-night soup shacks. When he was done, it was eleven-thirty and he got into the first Chinese radio car lined up on the street outside, quickly rolling toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

The see gay car descended to the Manhattan side, went north on the Bowery heading out of the Fifth and toward the Ninth.

On his desk were the crime-scene photos of the Chinese family, the Kungs, a file folder, and a note from P.O. Wong. As Jack had requested, Wong had arranged for a Chinatown car service to drive the grandmother home, and in a follow-up phone call, had learned that the family had made burial arrangements with the Heaven Grace Funeral Home in Flushing. The death certificates would be available there.

The next of kin, their worst fears realized, were en route to New York.

The photos brought it back to him, the idea that suicide was not uncommon, but that this case was different. The demise of entire families, especially involving young children, was particularly tragic.

The folders contained the reports from One Astor Plaza. The building manager’s narrative was just as Jack had remembered, straightforward, and practically mirroring the security officer’s report. They’d all gone up together and discovered the horror at the scene. The reports were standard TPO format: time, place, occurrence.

The Medical Examiner’s report on the dead family cited chemical asphyxiation as the cause of death. If the body doesn’t receive oxygen, it leads to collapse, coma, and death. Suffocation by carbon monoxide. All four bodies showed lethal levels of the invisible odorless poison. The mother and the children also showed large doses of sleep medication, the NyQuil, more than enough to have made them drowsy. The father had no trace of it. His job was to keep the briquettes burning, to keep the carbon monoxide flowing. He’d gotten sick during the killing and dying, maybe realizing in his daze the enormity of what he and his wife were doing, frantically knowing it was much too late to turn back.

Jack remembered the photos of the big red dragon bowls. Those bowls had held more charcoal and ashes than the saucepans and pots in the kitchen area.

He closed the file and placed it, along with the photos, back into the wire basket. He remembered Pa’s passing and thought about the cycle of events that the survivors would soon have to endure: the funeral home, the wake, the burial, and the church or temple. Later, the return to the cemetery, closure a long way off, if ever.

He began to wrap up the paperwork, drawing together the official loose ends of the case.

P.O. Wong had also left Jack a Post-it note, an unofficial comment at the margin of the reports; Wong intended to go to the Kung family wake, which was in Flushing’s Chinatown. Closure for him, thought Jack, a good thing. Having been touched by death, superstitious Chinese believed paying last respects was a way to close off the bad luck.

The shift dragged on.

Jack checked the blotter, the patrol reports, and the updates on the computer.

In Brooklyn’s Seven-Two Precinct a jewelry-store robbery had turned into a wild chase and a carjacking. Four of the seven armed robbers of the Galleria Gems Center got away. Three perps being held.

In Queens, a fight over a young beauty exploded violently when a teen slashed his roommate and was captured an hour later. The woman involved had no comment.

In the 0-Five, the Chinatown precinct, two gang members had been arrested while awaiting a ransom payment for a kidnapped and tortured Chinese immigrant.

Jack wondered if Tat’s Ghosts might be involved, but figured that it was more likely to be a Fukienese setup. The victim and the perps all had mainland Mandarin-sounding names, Zhang instead of Chang, Qiu instead of Chu. In a second Chinatown incident, an unidentified Chinese man had been ambushed by at least two assailants as he left a restaurant and shot numerous times, but was in stable condition at Downtown Hospital. Uniforms from the 0-Five had responded but were unable to get cooperation from area residents or merchants. No surprise there, Jack thought. What caught his attention was the unusual heavy-duty firepower involved, rounds not typical of Chinatown violence:.45 caliber, and.223 rifles, hitters strapping AK-47s, Colt.45, and 9mm Parabellums. The victim had apparently shot back with a.38 revolver, a pea shooter by comparison.