by Blake Banner
I squinted at the house. I wasn’t sure. “The damn door is still open…”
There was a bleep. The courier was walking quickly around the hood of his van. Suddenly, Dehan moved like somebody had put a Carolina reaper up her ass. She was as fast and silent as a viper. I scrambled after her and came around the back of the Transit just as he was reaching for the door. Dehan had her weapon in her hands and shouted, “Freeze!”
He didn’t. He was fast. He jumped and lashed out and knocked the .38 from her hand with a kick. As he landed, he reached for the door again, but she kicked it shut and he turned and made off down the road. She sprinted after him, and I went after her. They were both getting away from me, so I went back and got the Jag, which was faster than both of them.
I hit the gas hard. As I approached, I saw him turn and pull a gun. It had a silencer attached. I felt my heart pound once. I screamed, “Duck!” even though nobody could hear me and floored the pedal. He turned the gun on me, took aim, but I was approaching too fast. His gun wavered and he leaped aside.
I slammed on the brakes and jumped out. Dehan was on him as he got to his feet. He delivered a volley of punches and kicks, and I gaped as she blocked and ducked all of them. Then suddenly she rammed her elbow in his face, and he was staggering back. She didn’t falter. She was after him. Two pile drivers to his floating ribs and a knee to his face should have laid him out. But he was tough. He fell to the ground and rolled. Then he was on his feet and coming back for more.
One of his punches would have spoiled her looks for life, and I was wincing as he laid into her. She weaved and dodged like a professional boxer. Next thing she looked like she was folding his arms in on each other, so he was blocking himself. She smashed him in the nose, smacked him on his ears with her cupped hands, and kicked him in the nuts for good measure. He was down and out.
I walked up as she knelt on his chest and pulled out her cuffs. I said to him, “What’s your name?” She was wrestling to get the cuff on him. He ignored me. “Do you understand that you are under arrest?”
He was still wriggling his arm, and Dehan was beginning to swear under her breath. I went around and grabbed his wrist. She slipped the cuff on and turned to take his other arm. His hand was up by his mouth, and he was looking sidelong at us. He swallowed. Dehan muttered, “Mother…!” She stood. “Get him up! Make him vomit!”
But it was too late. He was already frothing at the mouth. The last thing he did before he died was to sneer at us and say what sounded like, “Womeng wefobu zaya landa yinchin tsi shuchen poo shedze hersaw shund atanya!”
And he died.
I left Dehan to call the local PD and walked back to the house. Kirk was lying sprawled in the doorway with the parcel sitting on his belly. He had a neat hole in his forehead and a big pool of blood and gore as a pillow. I figured the hole in the back of his head was not so neat or small.
We sat on the steps of his porch and waited for the cops to show up. “You handled yourself pretty good back there.”
She shrugged. “You want to survive, you have to learn to fight. If you’re a girl, you need technique. Brute force and weight ain’t going to cut it.”
I smiled. “You have a nihilistic, existential, depressing theory for everything?”
“Most things, yeah. I can get pretty intense about steak and fries. Rain. Puddles. The smell of grass. These are all very important things. I’m Jewish. We’re intense. I can also be intensely fun.”
“I believe you.”
I flatter myself most people would have missed the smile she was hiding. I didn’t. I saw it.
The cops arrived and we spoke to Detective Stuyvesant. We exchanged numbers and he agreed to send us a copy of the ME’s reports and the crime scene investigators’ report. I knew what they’d say, but it pays to be thorough.
As we walked back to my car, the first drops of rain were beginning to fall. A couple of uniforms were setting up a marquee around the Chinese guy. It was growing dark, and the streetlights were starting to come on. We climbed in and I fired her up. I felt suddenly very tired and hungry. I looked at my watch. It was almost six.
I pulled away and said, “Comments, observations, questions…”
“Why did the Triads send a hit man today, of all days, after ten years?”
“Put another way, how did they know we were coming?” I frowned. “Carmen, did you get his address from an official database?”
“No.” I glanced at her. “Like Mick, he wasn’t on any official database.”
“How did you get it?”
“Don’t ask me, John, because I am not going to tell you. Not today. Maybe some other day. It wasn’t illegal.”
“That’s good enough for me. For now.”
“So the Triads followed us here to kill Kirk. Why not abduct him and torture him to find out where Mick is?”
“Because they already knew that he didn’t know.”
She frowned. “They were listening to us?”
I shook my head. “Whoever told them we were coming also knew that Kirk had no information about Mick’s whereabouts. The Triads just wanted their revenge. At least it confirms the theory that Mick had agreed to set Nelson up for the Triads as well as the Mob.”
“How can you be so sure it was a revenge killing?”
I said blandly, “His dying words, roughly, ‘We will have vengeance on the Irish penis whose ancestors were not human and also were born from big eggs.’ As last words go, they have a certain je ne sais quoi.”
She shook her head and sat a while staring out of the window at the darkness of the vast river. Eventually she said, “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Am I incredulous because you can do Wing Chun? I developed an interest in the I Ching as a youth and decided it would be better to read it in the original Mandarin. So I studied Chinese.”
“The Irish Penis? Whose parents were not human…?”
“And also were born from big eggs. That’s pretty offensive.”
Suddenly she was laughing out loud, leaning back in her seat and wiping her eyes. It was a good thing to see. It made me smile.
Acting on an impulse, I turned left onto Ashburn Avenue and headed toward Southeast Yonkers. There was a huge shopping mall out there with a Longhorn steakhouse. And right then I was in need of a steak and a beer.
It was dark and raining heavily by the time we arrived. There were only a few cars in the lot, reflecting wet light and making the place look desolate. I parked right outside, and we sprinted for the door. The place was practically empty. We sat by the window and ordered a couple of Outlaw Ribeyes and a couple of beers.
She spoke suddenly.
“It doesn’t follow absolutely categorically, but it is a probability that if the Triads want to kill Mick, it’s because they did not kill Nelson. Because the reason they want to kill Mick is because he did not facilitate the hit on Nelson, as he had promised to do.”
“That makes sense. So what we’re saying is that right now our prime suspect is Mick?”
Our orders arrived with the beers, and we were both silent while we cut into the steaks and took our first bite. They were tender, succulent, and delicious. She said, “See? This is something I could get intense about.” She took another bite and leaned back in her chair. “Mick or the Sureños. But we shouldn’t discount the Chinese yet. Or the Mob for that matter. Pro is a subtle son of a bitch, and he could be playing us. And as for the Triads, Mick could have played them and they still managed to kill Nelson. They are very good at what they do.”
“Agreed.”
We ate in silence for a little longer. Then she asked, “Where do we go from here?”
“Ten years ago the Triad’s top hit man was Chen ‘Ivories’ Zhu. We need to know where he is now. We need to talk to him. We also need to talk to the first responders at the scene that night. Also…” I sank back in my chair. “It’s going to be hard going, but we need to talk to Nelson’s family, his cousins’ families. We need some background.
We could be barking entirely up the wrong tree.”
“They won’t talk to us.”
“We have to try. His mother, his sisters, aunts and uncles. There will be hostility, but these are the people who know the most. Did he have a girlfriend? Did he confide in her? We have to get in there.”
She watched me a while. “What about the captain, Stone? She’s supposed to be a friend of Mick’s.”
I didn’t say anything. I just shook my head.
The rain had eased. We made our way out to the car through the dark drizzle, over the liquid light of the puddles. Half an hour later, I dropped her at her apartment. Before she got out, I said, “In the morning I’ll try to track down Chen Zhu. You draw up a list of Nelson’s immediate family.”
She gave a funny smile and said, “You got it, partner.”
Six
Not much happened the next day. Dehan was busy compiling a list of Nelson’s family and close friends, and I found out that Chen Zhu was doing twenty to life in Attica. I made the call to arrange to visit him in a couple of days and then sat chewing my lip and thinking about some gossip I’d heard from some of the guys a few years back.
Dehan joined me at lunchtime and dropped into the chair opposite.
“I got a list. It’s pretty comprehensive. His mother. His dad was killed in a drive-by when he was a baby. He was pretty much raised by two uncles and his mom. The uncles were both in a local gang affiliated to the Ángeles. His male cousins, all sons of the two uncles, were the ones who were killed that night. Mother has two sisters, both married but with daughters or baby sons.”
“How did you get this?”
“I said I was a reporter for the Voz de Chihuahua, a Marxist paper reporting on how Latinos are exploited and denigrated in the imperialist USA.”
I nodded. “I could never do that.”
“Look at you. You’re an Anglo-Saxon. You have gringo written all over you.”
“No, I mean my conscience would not allow me.”
“Yeah? I used to have one of them. It got mugged.”
“Girlfriends?”
“There was talk of a wife. Others said a girlfriend. Others said it was several girlfriends. Either way they seem to have been putillas and just passing through. There was also talk that he kept Mick supplied with young Latina girls. It seems he had a liking for them.”
“That’s good. In fact it is so good I am going to take you out tonight.”
“Dancing?”
“Why not. First we’ll have some dinner, and then we’ll go dancing.”
“Why do I get the feeling this is a stakeout?”
I laughed and pointed at her. “You are good! You are very good!”
We were at the corner of Central Park West and Ninety-Seventh. It was eleven thirty at night, and the dim light from the streetlights was mottled and filtered through the leaves of the plane trees. Or maybe they were chestnuts. We were a short way from the Crenshaw Church. It had a sinister, gothic look silhouetted against the burnt-orange glow of the clouds. An occasional raindrop would splat liquid amber light on the windshield. There was something sudden yet indecisive about it, like a drunk who makes up his mind to leave and then falls asleep at the bar.
The wipers squeaked and removed the latest drop.
To our right was a private parking lot fringed by gardens that formed a kind of courtyard outside the apartment block we were watching. It was still and quiet. Dehan had her window open a few inches.
“This is a pretty long shot, Stone.”
“You saw what the guy in Yonkers was prepared to do. If we’re going to get Zhu to open up, we need more than a smile and ‘please.’”
“What if he doesn’t show?”
“If what I was told is true, he’ll show.”
“How—”
I cut her off. “How reliable? Pretty reliable. If I didn’t think it was worth it, we wouldn’t be here.”
She eyed me curiously. “I guess that’s true at that.”
Voices made her turn and look. They were men’s voices, young, laughing, speaking Chinese. They came walking along a concrete pathway among the trees, from the entrance to the block. Their clothes had the vulgar elegance of Italian designers. A Lexus parked across from us flashed and bleeped as they approached it. They stepped into the glow of a streetlight, and I recognized one of them as Zak Zhu, Chen’s younger brother. They all climbed into the car and took off. I let them get ahead of us a way and followed. I had a pretty good idea where they were going, so I could afford to give them space.
They turned right onto West Ninety-Seventh and then left at the end of the block onto Columbus. I settled back and said, “If I’m right, it’ll now be a straight line all the way to West Fifth-Second.”
I was. We cruised for five or ten minutes along Columbus and onto Ninth. On Ninth I turned right into West Fifty-Third and parked. Then we walked through the drizzle to West Fifty-Second and found the Therapy Bar, a well-known gay nightclub. I’d been told it was a regular hangout for him and, as I’d expected, he was there. The Lexus was parked with its hazards flashing, and he was leaning in through the driver’s window. I figured his friend was going to find somewhere to park. I smiled at Dehan and said, “Come on, darling, let me get a picture of you.”
She struck a pose, and I took a picture of Zak.
It was midweek, so it wasn’t very crowded, and we pushed inside. Red and blue flashing lights made the visibility poor, but I figured it would be good enough. We made our way to the bar and ordered two beers. I stood with my back to the door, and Dehan kept a watch on who came in. The thumping was so loud, conversation and thought were practically impossible. But this wasn’t a place you came to think or talk. After a moment, she leaned into me and said, “He’s just come in.”
I threw back my head and laughed like she’d said something hilarious. She laughed too and picked up her cell. I struck a pose, and she took another picture of Zak. I turned and surveyed the scene. Zak and his pals were sitting at a corner table. Since they’d walked through the door, their gestures and mannerisms had become exaggerated. They managed to be more effeminate than any woman I had ever seen. They left their things at the table and ran with little steps to the dance floor. Zak was wearing torn jeans and a string vest, which he removed while he danced. After that he and his friends proceeded to display their sexual proclivities in an unequivocal and unabashed fashion, while Dehan and I made a video record of their unrestrained social statements.
So far the evening had gone without a hitch, exactly as I had hoped. It was as I was paying and we were about to head for the door that things started to turn problematic. I noticed a large presence at my elbow. I looked and the guy must have been six foot seven if he was an inch. He had a bald head and a Freddy Mercury moustache. To complete the stereotype, he had chosen a T-shirt with black-and-white horizontal stripes. His voice was big enough to drown out the thumping of the music. Oddly, his accent was South African.
“You bin filming a lot, mate.”
I gave him a friendly grin and said, “Yuh, ve are from Nor-vey. Ve loff de crazy New York scene.” I held out my hand. “I am Rune, and zis is my vife, Inga.”
His face said he thought I was a clown and not a very funny one. He ignored my hand and nodded at my cell. “All your pictures and movies are of the sem guy.”
“Yuh! He is vild, yuh?”
“Your exent is not Norwegian… Who are you? Why are you stalking Zek?”
I nodded vigorously like I hadn’t heard him, but I was being polite, and I took Dehan’s hand in mine and began to push past him.
“Yah, yah! Vee moost goink now!”
He put a hand like a small cow on my chest and said, “Why heff you bin filming Zek?”
Dehan came in real close to him and crooked her finger. He bent down to listen to her, and I saw his eyes bulge. I heard her shout in his ear. “Zis is fot vee are callingk zee Norwegian nut cruncher. Sit down unt drinking zee visky or vee are blowingk you fuckingk hea
d off. Vee are makingk ourselves understood, yuh?”
I smiled at the barkeep while Dehan eased our Seth Efrikan friend onto a stool. I pointed at him, mouthed, “Double Scotch,” and showed with my fingers it should be a big one. I put ten bucks on the bar. Least I could do was pay for his drink. We moved toward the door while the Veldt Wonder wept into his whiskey. As we pushed out, we heard a shout and made off at a run toward Ninth Avenue. I glanced back as we dodged through the traffic and saw a small plume of angry, half-dressed young men explode into the street.
We made it to Fifty-Third and climbed into my car. Nobody was following us, but I didn’t waste time. I fired up the engine and turned onto Tenth Avenue, and headed north toward the Bronx and the 43rd precinct.
“I’m going to download the pictures onto my laptop and print them,” I said. “You want me to drop you at your apartment?”
She shrugged. “I could crash on your couch and we could make an early start in the morning.”
I didn’t answer for a moment, like her suggestion was inconvenient for some reason. I bit back the smile and said, “I can let you have a bedroom. If you promise not to make the sheets dirty, I can let you have a bed too.”
She looked out of the window, away from me. The rain had suddenly grown heavy, and the wipers were squeaking a sleepy rhythm. Red, amber, and green lights splashed in squalls across the windshield. She said, “Whatever.”
Seven
My appointment with Chen Zhu was at one in the afternoon. It was a five-or six-hour drive, so we got four hours’ sleep and were up and out by six a.m. Attica the prison is just outside Attica the town, and about the same size. It’s about a mile in length and about a quarter of a mile across at its widest point. There is a strange, eerie feel about the place, like it belongs in one of those late ’60s dystopian sci-fi movies, where the setting and the system are idyllic, it’s just the people that are wrong.