by Lee Lamothe
“They did this?”
“I’m thinking, yeah.” He looked at the old woman on her knees. “Billy, that guy, there, laughing? Mr. Tattoo? Him, hardest.”
“No problem.” The charger turned his back to the corner and called his pals over into a huddle. “Those white assholes, T-shirts over my shoulder? We’re working. Pile on, take ’em rough. Special attention Mr. Tattoo.”
One charger, a young guy, said, “We don’t got cause. What’s the authority?”
“Him, Gerry, Ray Tate. He’s a sergeant, this is his hoedown.” He made a wide canine smile. “Okay, sack sack the quarterback. Hu-ah.”
The men in the T-shirts saw them spread out and circle toward them, and tried to ease out of the crowd of frantic Chinese.
The chargers were on them and there was blood.
“Ray, Ray, hey.”
Ray Tate turned. Martinique Frost and Brian Comartin were walking fast up the block, Comartin waving. Neither wore a raid jacket but both had their pieces visible in belt holsters, their handcuffs prominent and their badges swinging around their necks. White smoke from the soaked storefronts swirled around them. The infinitesimal water droplets in the air formed fine-meshed silver halos.
“We’re running this. There’s no white shirts here, there’s no supervision. It’s fucking chaos.” Ray Tate looked at firefighters carrying limp bodies from the buildings, slapping oxygen masks on them and doing compressions and screaming for medics. Paramedics ran along the block with their bulky boxes, stopping, crouching and assessing. From deeper in East Chinatown, two ambulances sped down toward them, heading for the gates, and they jumped aside as a street-side open door of the ghost car was ripped off with a clang and sent spinning down the road.
An auxiliary firefighter on his knees gave up on a young girl on the sidewalk. He pulled her nightgown modestly down over her legs to cover her, then sat back on his heels, folding forward to pound the sidewalk with his fists.
“This is a murder stage. We have to get it right, until Homicide shows up and takes it over. Grab a charger or anyone else with any badge and assign him to a victim. They ask about authority, you tell them you’re the chief’s special task force and put ’em to work. Note their badge number. If there’s a confirmed dead, assign one cop to the victim. He stays on it from here to morgue.
“Djuna, that fire guy over there, beating up the sidewalk? His victim is yours until you hand her off. Marty, Brian, you run it here, I’m going up the street.”
A smoking body fell or jumped from the third floor above a restaurant and landed with the head making a dull thonk. “Brian, that’s yours.”
Comartin stared. “Uh, uh.”
“Brian, take it. It’s yours, man.”
He didn’t move. Martinique Frost put her hand on his shoulder. “Brian, c’mon, look after her.”
Comartin nodded. His eyes were wide and he was hyperventilating.
“Brian, just go.” Marty Frost started him with a gentle shove. “Go, man.” He crossed to the smoking body and stood there, not knowing what to do.
“Marty, keep an eye on him, okay? Get a uniform to take it off him soon as you can.” Sirens were building in the distance. He looked around. “When you guys get someone on all the victims, come on up the road. It looks worse up there.”
A man in undershorts broke from the crowd across the street and toward a flaming restaurant, running over the shattered glass in his bare feet. A firefighter tried for him but the man darted around him and inside, screaming for someone. There was the creaking rumble of the ceiling coming down and the screams stopped.
“Marty, we need perimeter right here. Grab who you can and do what you can about crowd control.”
He wondered who the man was screaming for.
It was worse up California Street. Four bodies lay in a line on the sidewalk in front of a karaoke bar. Two were burned past recognition of gender and looked like they’d been bubbled in boiling fat. The other two, young women, looked as if in peaceful sleep and seemed to be smiling up in fond remembrance at the reluctant yellow dawn. The smell of gasoline was sharp, the fire alarms had melted, and the block was quiet except for the rush and splash of dripping water out of the black maw of the building, the shouting of the workers, and the running of feet. The huge truck generators with their endless insect hum became part of his ears and he didn’t consciously hear them. Everyone who was going to get out alive was out. A pumper poured water into the first and second floors of the karaoke. An aerial was extended over the building, and a hatless fireman in baggy shorts, no shirt, and rubber boots poured water down with precision as though he were strafing a hostile jungle from a helicopter. In the rising sun there was a glimpse of a rainbow over the building as the aerial shooter caught the light just right.
An auxiliary firefighter, a police cadet in his brown uniform shirt, and a security guard stood with two spectators and watched the arcing water make steam.
Ray Tate came up on them. “What the fuck are you guys doing?”
The cadet, who looked barely out of his teens, turned angrily. He was crying, snot running down his lip. “Fuck you. Fuck you, man.”
“Sure. But fuck me later, okay? Right now you have to secure the evidence. Those bodies are the evidence. You don’t have to look at them, you don’t have to feel for them. But you have to be with them.” He touched the boy cadet on the shoulder urgently. “Don’t leave them alone, man, they’re gone, but don’t let them be gone alone, for nothing. Not here, like fucking garbage on the road. You have to protect them. I’ll get someone to take transfer of evidence for you soon as I can. If I can’t, when they go out of here make sure someone goes with them until the detectives get to the hospital or the morgue.” He felt a hundred years old. He’d killed two men and a woman in the line and it had all been for this, to stand in a street of fire comforting a kiddie cop. “What’s your name, cadet?”
“Jimmy Stiles. I’m at the academy. We were having a stag in the karaoke. My brother’s on the job.”
“Stiles? Yeah, Billy. Billy Stiles, right? In Sector Eight? A charger?”
“You know him? You know Billy?”
“Yeah, he’s up the road, doing the work. Can you do the work, too, Jimmy?” He waited a beat, then nodded as if Jimmy Stiles answered positive. “Good.” Above East Chinatown a helicopter appeared and hovered. “Anybody asks, you’re with the chief’s special task force. Take charge of this. These guys are your crew, you tell ’em what you want. Right now, you want one of these guys to go into those apartments across the road. You want him to get some sheets. You want to take them from him, shake them out as best you can, and you cover these souls. That’s media fuckers up there in the chopper, looking for breakfast.” Jimmy Stiles stood frozen. The other men watched. Ray Tate softly said, “Deploy them, Jimmy. Do what Billy would do.”
Across from the karaoke fire a blocky Chinese man in a black suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie with a sparkling stickpin smoked a cigarette in a dim doorway, watching the wind-down of the fire.
Ray Tate saw only the glow of the cigarette and the reflection of the white shirt. He took his gun from his ankle and crossed the street, peering into the shadows. “Mr. Wong?” The Mayor of Chinatown, the Wrong Wong, Mr. Presto. Every cop knew Willard Wong.
“Sergeant Tate.” Willard Wong prided himself on being in the know about the cops. “Or is it Detective Tate?”
“Same rank, different clothes. Same pay.” He holstered his gun. The doorway vibrated slightly from the rumbling of the engines of the big emergency vehicles.
Willard Wong was known on wiretaps as Six Fingers. Three on each hand, straight up. W and W; no one had to say his name aloud. He carried a block of mayoralty votes in his pocket and ran the rackets. He’d come up in the X-men case but left no fingerprints behind.
“You got another one of those?” Ray Tate’s nose was full of burnt meat and his mouth was arid and he kept dry-spitting. Before he could accept one of Willy Wong’s cigarettes, he t
urned, lurched away, and vomited champagne and cognac and bits of tenderloin against a wall. It all tasted like smoke. He pulled up his shirt-tail and dragged it across his mouth, and, as if nothing had happened, accepted the cigarette and stuck the tip into the flame from Willy Wong’s lighter. He French-inhaled smoke out of his mouth and up into his nose and back out his mouth. It helped.
“It pains me, Sergeant, to see the sun come up on this. This tragedy.” Willard Wong shook his head slowly then made a sad smile. “But, did you see the rainbow?”
“A lot of dead at the end of that rainbow, Mr. Wong.”
“Yes, many I fear.”
“Probably, Mr. Wong, if they weren’t sleeping eight to a room in a building without working alarms, there’d be a lot less. Are we going to be able to find families to notify? In China? We’re going to need a list.”
Willy Wong made a little smile and patted Ray Tate on the forearm. “You should enjoy your cigarette, Sergeant. Everything will be taken care of. Have a rest break. Don’t work so hard. There’s always more work for a sergeant.” He chuckled. “Better a bad sergeant than a good general, eh? Sergeants carry the gun in one direction, generals carry the gold in the other.” He shrugged. “As it always is.”
“And criminals carry the generals?”
“Of course, but not criminals, not always. Maybe once, long ago, in wild youth mistakes were made. But now, facilitators, guiding hands of the community.” He softened his voice. “I heard you over there, speaking to that boy. The sheets. The souls. Why is it that in America they care more for the dead than for the living? If you passed them begging in the street or serving you in a restaurant, in life, you wouldn’t even notice them. Coolies. Now because they’re dead they get your compassion?” He stared at Ray Tate and asked, as if he really wanted to know, “If you weren’t getting paid, how much would you care?”
Ray Tate knew there was nothing he could say to that. It was true and shameful.
They smoked their cigarettes.
Across the street order was being imposed on the stage. Detectives in suits and plainclothesmen in windbreakers were striding up the block and setting up perimeters. Chargers were directed to stretch yellow crime-stage tape. Men in shiny grey jackets with ARSON UNIT stencilled in yellow fluorescent on the back arrived and paced with clipboards and consulted with fire chiefs. The media helicopter noisily chopped up the pure blue sky. The fires were down but the firefighters stayed on the stage in case spot flare-ups broke out. The firefighter at the top of the aerial pressed his hand to the speaker on his ear, then swivelled his hose and aimed a hard flow of water. White smoke rose. Another brief rainbow. A dozen people wrapped in blankets or coats sat in a row on the curb across from the burnt-out karaoke, one of them a woman with wet hair holding a cat to her cheek and kissing it, another an old woman speaking to a framed picture of an older man. There was no breeze. Under the white sheets the bodies were motionless.
Ray Tate turned to Willard Wong and thought for a wild second about pulling his piece and shooting him a couple of times in the stickpin, both for being what he was and for being right. “Maybe. Maybe, Mr. Wong. But you carry a lot of the weight for this. You could take your thumb off their windpipes, even for a second. Let them breathe.”
“You do care,” Willard Wong chuckled. He took a tiny cellphone from his belt. “You care. What a crazy sergeant you are. I must tell a friend about you.”
The morning sun was out and hot and it turned the puddles into low steam. Like someone walking through romantic mist, Martinique Frost came up the street, carefully avoiding puddles.
Ray Tate thanked Willard Wong for the cigarette and said, “I hope you fucking die,” and stepped out of the doorway.
Willard Wong made a small dismissive gesture with his hand. “You’ll get those who did this, Sergeant? It’s important, yes. Chinese people didn’t do this. Chinese people only died. As always.” He made his small smile and tilted his head a little to the right. “A sergeant should be an example to the generals.” He turned away, punching numbers into his cellphone. “I must tell my friend about you.”
Brian Comartin was unlocking geometric gridlock at the gates of Chinatown, whistling sharply through his teeth and waving his hands to move ghosters and marked cruisers away from one another and out of the stage. Four coroner’s catering trucks were idling patiently in a line outside the gates, waiting to get at the bodies. Comartin looked like he was in his element with cars and angles instead of bodies and blood. When he saw Martinique Frost and Ray Tate coming down the block, he trotted heavily over, trying not to gasp with the effort. They met in the middle of the street, greeting each other as if they’d lost each other for a long time, had lost each other in the chaos of a battle.
“Where’s Djuna?”
Comartin pointed to a Chinese-American restaurant with its door open. “Some road sergeant came up and said to break it off, have some breakfast. He put his stick through the door window, opened it for business. The white shirts and the suits got the rest of it under control.”
They walked across the road, Martinique Frost and Ray Tate a little ahead.
Ray Tate murmured, “How’s Brian? He do okay?”
She nodded. “He settled down. He was a little shaky. I don’t think he ever saw a body before. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“You guys arrived together. You good?”
She gave him a smile. “I think you and Djuna did, too.”
They stepped around the shattered glass on the doorstep. Inside the restaurant a television set showed live helicopter footage from above Chinatown. The road sergeant who had the beast’s back, 667, was behind a flat grill with a stogie screwed into his face. A white apron was tied around his waist and he was frying toast and busting eggs. It was unthinkable to sizzle bacon or ham or any meat with the smell of the air outside. In spite of his girth, the Road moved like a ballet dancer, pivoting en point in his boots, his T-shirt stretched over his paunch, his suspenders hanging loose. A dozen chargers and firefighters sat on stools at the counter and more were in the booths along the wall. Rovers crackled questions and instructions and periodically a charger would mutter back a response into his shoulder microphone.
Djuna Brown sat with two young uniformed policewomen, chargettes, at the end of the counter, drinking coffee. She looked up when Ray Tate, Marty Frost, and Brian Comartin came in. By the look of soft relief on her face, Ray Tate could tell she’d been worried about him. He felt a little guilty: he hadn’t thought about her at all.
As he approached, he heard her merrily say, “Yep, batiks and slippers. State Police issue. They’re giving us motor scooters next year, Italian ones with sidecars, so we can interact with the community, taken ’em for rides in the countryside.” Her little even teeth grinned when the chargettes laughed. “We’re learning to hug people, make them feel we’re on their side, that we care.” She stood up in the drapery of the raid jacket with the sleeves rolled back to the elbows. “Check this, let me show you, on, hmm, let’s say, this random bearded guy here.” She wrapped her arms around Ray Tate and put the top of her head under his chin and sagged a little. They stood for a moment, then she turned to the chargettes. “I don’t even know this guy. But he smells like a beatnik, you ask me.”
The chargers in the booths hooted.
He sat beside her on a vacant stool. “How’d you make out, Djuna?”
“It was bad, Ray. We had six dead at our end so far. You?”
“Six at least. There’s going to be more inside when they can go in.”
The Road came down the counter with platters of egg sandwiches up his arm and dealt them out. “This’ll be a little better than the stuff at the Mex joint, Ray.” He turned to Djuna Brown. “He tell you guys about the guy we were at that got shot yesterday morning? I asked the guy, ‘Who shot you?’ And the guy said, ‘Depends what you mean by shot.’” He went back up the boards and came back with coffee cups and a pot and repeated, “Depends what you mean by shot. Lovin’ it.�
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Ray Tate nodded. “John Smith. Citizen. Connoisseur of the pork chop. Fuckhead.” He was ravenous. He felt Djuna Brown’s hand on his thigh. As he chewed, he nodded up the counter where Martinique Frost and Brian Comartin were sitting quietly. “How’d they do, those two?”
“They’re cool, Ray. They’re okay. Brian was good until he looked at the woman who came off the third floor and landed on her head. He blew his dinner. But I think those two are working something out.” She moved her hand in a small circle. “Like us, huh?”
Before he could answer, a charger in a wall booth called over. “Tate? Is a Tate here? Sergeant?”
Ray Tate twisted on his stool. “Yo, here, Tate.”
“Just got some voice out on the air, Sergeant. Hambone Hogarth from Homicide is at the gates, wants to see you. You want me to ten-four you? Or wink you off?” WNK. Whereabouts not known, a.k.a. a fugitive.
“Yeah, show me rolling.” He gathered his sandwich on his palm and stood up and yawned and almost sat back down again. He told Djuna Brown he’d see her at the briefing.
As he walked away he heard one of the chargettes say, “Is that the Ray Tate, the gunner? He looks pretty cool.”
And he heard Djuna Brown answer proudly, “Yep, and you keep your horny city hands off my beatnik, city girl.”
He felt pretty good about that.
Chapter 12
A Homicide crew was clustered just outside the gates to East Chinatown with their heads together and three chargers nearby to protect them from information pollution. They wouldn’t let anyone approach to talk to them. The hammers from Homicide wanted to know what was up there inside the gates, but they wanted to know for themselves. Ray Tate had seen it before at murder stages. They wanted to go onto the crime stage with a fresh mind, with no knowledge that might taint their observations. If they went in with, say, an obvious detail told to them, they might look to confirm the expectation and miss the importantly obscure. They wanted to work pristine, without assumptions, and count their own bodies, draw their own conclusions. Some teams worked that way. All they had to know was that they’d been rolled out because someone had maybe died bad; they’d take it from there.