S Rozan - Trail of Blood

“What, that the cops were watching us?” He gave a shrug of modest pride. “Your cousin’s a good kid. Dumb as a box of rocks, but loyal. He said you were onto us. He said there was no way to scare you off or buy you off, but he asked me not to kill you.” He shook his head. “I tried to help the guy out, dammit. Didn’t I?” He looked to one of his lieutenants, who nodded seriously, backing up the boss’s story. “But you had to show up here. Now I gotta do what I gotta do. Well, he’s a good kid. He’ll understand.” Fishface turned to Bill. With no change of tone, he said, “If you don’t put down that fucking piece, these guys will blow you away, and her, too.”

Wordlessly, Bill laid his Colt on the table. In view of Fishface having said he was gonna do what he hadda do, there might not have been much point in Bill’s relinquishing the gun. Except that as far as getting blown away, later was better than sooner. Every moment you were intact was a moment you could be thinking your way out of your situation, which Bill was obviously already doing and I was going to start doing as soon as I got my adrenaline tsunami under control.

“Lydia?” Fishface said almost solicitously. “Are you carrying, too?”

I lifted my shirt to show him the.25 clipped to my waistband. He relieved me of the gun and its holster, too. I couldn’t blame him; the gun would probably sell for more on the street with a nice leather rig.

The dai lo turned his attention to the men at the table. They were taking this hijacking in different ways. C. D. Zhang wore a stricken look. Fishface offered him a smile of recognition, and I guessed I knew now who got C. D. Zhang’s red envelopes at New Year’s. Wong Pan still smirked. I wondered if that was shock, or if he thought he could tell all these guns to go away, too.

Just sit there, I thought at them both. Don’t make a move until us professionals come up with something.

I glanced at Bill. His nerves might have been riding as high as mine, but he stood completely still, except for his eyes. They methodically searched the room and the people in it, looking for our opening, our chance.

And suddenly, as a solemn White Eagle was reaching for Bill’s gun, as Fishface was pocketing the cardboard box and leaning toward the briefcase, leaving stone-faced Wong Pan and pale C. D. Zhang with nothing, nothing, nothing at all, a bullhorn blared.

“Wong Pan! C. D. Zhang! White Eagles!” It was Mary, a commanding cop thunder. “This is the police! Come out slowly! One by one, hands up and empty. You’re surrounded.”

Fishface’s bulging eyes flew to the rusty back door. He nodded. One of his boys edged it open enough to peek into the alley and then slammed it shut. “Fuck!”

Now Fishface pulled out his gun, too, a big Glock. “You bitch! You called the cops!” He said this as though he couldn’t believe it, as though he’d caught me cheating at a friendly game of cards.

“Not on you,” I pointed out. “On those two.”

The distinction didn’t impress him. He looked from the back door to the kitchen one. “Well, so, a change of plans. Take them.” He waved the Glock at Wong Pan, C. D. Zhang, and Bill. He grabbed my elbow, to escort me personally.

“What are you talk about, Deng dai lo?” Wong Pan sputtered. “I don’t going!”

“Oh, you do so going, old man.” Fishface changed his grip on me to a choke hold and pressed the gun to my temple. I heard chairs scrape and had to assume similar things were going on behind me. As he steered me to the kitchen door, my brain juggled three thoughts.

I hope the NYPD has better control of its adrenaline than I do.

Old man? Fishface, you punk, Wong Pan’s not even sixty.

And How does Wong Pan, fugitive from Shanghai, know a Chinatown gangbanger’s title and name?

I had to stop thinking for a minute as Fishface barked in my ear, “Open the door.”

In the vacated kitchen a cauldron steamed and greens sat in a wok getting soggy. Congealing chow fun, scattered chopsticks, and pots of tea dotted the empty dining room tables. New Day Noodle looked like a restaurant that had just sailed into the Bermuda Triangle.

Outside, things were different. Red and white lights flashed. Traffic on Canal was blocked by cop cars parked at all kinds of angles. Behind the cars, cops in blue and cops in streetclothes wore Kevlar, held guns, shouldered rifles. I thought about the overtime and almost laughed. Through the window I spotted Inspector Wei, wearing an NYPD vest and the rapt glow of a runner at the starting line. Next to her crouched the Fifth’s big, mustached captain, Dick Mentzinger. Beside him I saw Mary, and caught the dismay in her eyes when the first person to lurch out of the restaurant, with Fishface Deng’s arm wrapped around my neck, was me.

“We’re leaving,” Fishface shouted. “We have four people. Let us through or we’ll shoot them right here.”

Mentzinger took the bullhorn. “I can’t do that.”

“Do it!”

“If this ends here it’s not so bad. No one’s hurt. You and your boys can-”

“Shut the fuck up! I don’t want to hear any bullshit cop promises.” Or more likely, I thought, you don’t want your boys to hear them. He squashed the muzzle harder against my head. “Put down your fucking guns!”

Mentzinger, after a moment, gestured to his cops. Rifles lowered slowly.

“Now back off. Back off! First shot we hear, or if anyone follows us, we’re gonna make a bloody mess of all these people. This cute one first.”

Mary took the horn. “You have no place to go, Deng dai lo,” she said in Cantonese.

Fishface laughed. In English he answered, “Lady, in case you haven’t heard, there’s Chinese people in every country on the fucking earth! An hour from now you’ll never find me.” He tightened his arm against my windpipe. It’s getting near time to do something, my pounding heart suggested to my brain. It would be good to make a move before these gangsters started hustling us through Chinatown and realized what trouble we were to hold on to, and how we’d messed up their lives.

So a few steps down the sidewalk, between the empty storefronts and abandoned vendor’s trays, I stumbled. Fishface yanked me up with the arm around my neck. Expecting that, I went with it, throwing my weight back into him. After an eternal thrashing moment he thudded heavily down, extra heavily because I landed on top of him. I dove for the gun. We writhed, scraping flesh on concrete. He punched me in the head. I saw blinding colors but by then I had hold of the pinkie on his gun hand. His adrenaline might be high enough to mask the pain but he couldn’t pull the trigger with his finger bent to his wrist. He yanked at my shirt, my hair. When I felt his finger snap, I almost lost my grip. He yowled. I yanked at the gun; it skidded along the sidewalk. I rolled, grabbed it, and heard the roar of a gunshot. More roars, and the whine of bullets. I flattened and looked around. And was once again reminded I wasn’t the center of the universe.

The sidewalk churned with cops, White Eagles, guns, and silver handcuffs. Two uniforms had slammed onto Fishface as soon as I’d rolled away. Shouts and grunts punctuated the honking of traffic probably backed up to New Jersey. A White Eagle made a break, dashing halfway across Canal before he was downed by a flying tackle so long and accurate it would be cop legend before the cop who made it got back to the precinct. Two more White Eagles lay on the sidewalk, hands on their heads, faces pressed into a glittering scatter of Rolex knockoffs. Straddling a third, yanking his hands behind to snap on cuffs, was a flushed and glowing Inspector Wei. Just beyond her, Mary had Wong Pan bent over the hood of a car. I hoped it had been parked in the sun all day and was damn hot.